• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1343 0

Grand Canyon or San Francisco or down into Mexico. There were a few Stay Morons in Anaheim who went back for a visit, and returned to report that Stay More was dying and just about gone, and this saddened John Henry and Sonora, who told themselves and each other that this was the reason they didn’t want to go back, but they both knew, without telling each other, that the real reason was that if they ever did go back to Stay More they would not be able to leave it. Few if any of the Stay Morons in Anaheim remembered the curse that Jacob Ingledew had placed on any Stay Moron who would leave it to go west, but one by one the Stay Morons in Anaheim began to experience calamities and misfortunes: one was killed in a freeway crash, one died of lung cancer, one was wiped out at a Las Vegas crap table, one was mangled in the machinery of a factory, one drowned in the surf of the Pacific, one was murdered by a jealous husband, one choked to death on an orange, and so on. Nothing ever happened to John Henry, but he kept wondering if something would.

During her fifth pregnancy, Sonora put on an exceptional amount of extra weight, so that toward the end of the pregnancy she felt that she was fat and gross and ugly and could not understand why John Henry would want to keep making love to her, so she stopped him from it. It was a bad time to do such a thing, because there was a girl, one of the secretaries at the factory where John Henry worked, who had been flirting with John Henry for a long time although she too was married. They sometimes had a cocktail together after work at a lounge near the factory, and during one of these meetings he revealed to the secretary that his wife was no longer permitting him to have relations with her. “Call her and tell her you have to work late,” the secretary suggested. He did, and the secretary likewise called her husband and told him the boss was keeping her overtime, and then they got into the secretary’s convertible and drove up into the hills, and walked into a dense grove of orange trees and lay down on the ground and spent an hour doing it and redoing it with variations, and that was the beginning of their affair.

The secretary told John Henry that he had shown her what sex could really be like. She was always flattering him. Sometimes they would lie around tired after doing it and she would take his part in her hands and admire it, making original complimentary remarks about it. On weekends, the secretary’s husband, who was an ardent sports fan, often went off to a ball game, leaving his wife alone, or, now, alone with John Henry, so that they did not have to lie upon the hard ground but on a soft bed, soft rug, soft sofa, or standing up together in the shower.

It was on one of these Saturdays that Sonora went into labor. She didn’t know how to find John Henry; he had told her he was going to some ball game. She phoned for a taxicab to take her to the hospital, and decided that her oldest girl, Latha, who was nearly ten, could baby-sit. John Henry came home from his tryst to find Latha trying to break up a fight among her younger sisters, who were wrecking the house. He found a teenaged baby-sitter for the four of them, and went off to the hospital, where Sonora was in her room napping after the delivery. He did not wake her, but went to the glass wall to view the baby. There were many of them. He asked a passing nurse, “Which’un’s mine? Ingledew’s the name.” The nurse pointed, to the second row. John Henry couldn’t see the baby very clearly, but he noticed that each bassinet had a card affixed to it, some of the cards were trimmed in blue and some in pink, and the bassinet the nurse was pointing at had a pink-edged card on it. “Shit,” said John Henry. “Oh, shit.” The nurse gave him a distasteful look and walked away. He found another nurse and told her that when his wife woke up to tell her that he had come and seen the baby and would come back tomorrow. Then he telephoned the secretary’s house, but her husband answered, so he hung up, and went out to a cocktail lounge and got drunk, and