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  Cowboy-and-Indian fiction used to be good versus evil, until public perception of who were the real-life good guys in that one switched. Real life has nothing to do with good versus evil.

  I opened my top drawer and pulled out the manuscript I’d been working on for over two years. Bucky on Half Dome. In the first draft of Bucky Climbs the Matterhorn, Bucky had been Becky. Becky wore braces on her teeth and had a will of iron. She could hang off the rock by the fingers of one hand and live on bushes and berries for a week. Becky was the stuff of legends.

  The sex change was performed at my editor’s insistence. She said Young Adults would not accept a female lead, except in the genre of horse books. Teenage girls eat up bonding-with-animals stories, but I refuse to write horse books.

  She did allow me to give the boy Bucky a female sidekick, as long as things stayed just pals—non-romantic and for God’s sake, nonsexual. So, I created Samantha Lindell. Bucky and Sam’s relationship is modeled on what I have with Maurey Pierce. It’s not in the books, and none of my teen fans know, but the reason the need for physical release doesn’t cause Bucky and Sam tension is the kids got that one out of the way years ago, before puberty.

  ***

  “Life is much like the self-locking carabiner,” Bucky Brooks said as he fit himself into his harness and prepared to rappel off the Blacktail Butte shield.

  Samantha Lindell’s blue eyes sparkled in the mountain sunlight. “Bucky, you pick the oddest moments to turn philosophical.”

  “Think about it,” Bucky said, then he took the two loops of rope in his rough, yet sensitive, hands, leaned back over two hundred feet of air, and jumped.

  ***

  Not the first lines of Tale of Two Cities, I admit, but books have been opened on less. Somewhere around page ten, I met Wanda, and now, a year later, Bucky and Sam were mired on page sixty-four, still nowhere near base camp, much less the mountain. Bucky had been asked to guide the President’s spoiled-rotten son on a five-day climb up Half Dome in Yosemite Park, and one of the three bodyguards who were supposed to accompany the party had been revealed to the readers as a KGB agent with assassination on his mind. The President’s son had been rude to Sam—called her a “chick,” said “Chicks can’t climb with men”—and that was as far as I got.

  The five years before I met Wanda I produced five books; one was even mentioned in the New York Times Book Review’s annual juvenile fiction roundup. Then, fifty pages in a year. Nothing in the last four months. Some would take this as a sign I was better off without her, but I don’t know. There had been no way to maintain writing momentum and hold my marriage together at the same time.

  Wanda had crises. I’d put out two pages, then she’d have an anxiety attack over personal fulfillment or President Reagan or something. Kafka himself couldn’t have written the week before Wanda started her period.

  Maybe it’s better to work on a marriage than write sports books for teenagers. People say, “Gee, weren’t Dostoevsky and van Gogh admirable for all the sacrifices they made to create their masterpieces,” but I say the true artistic hero is the guy who gives up everything to produce something crappy. Anybody can lose a wife to win a Nobel Prize. Try losing a wife for Bucky on Half Dome.

  I flipped through the manuscript, finding a phrase I liked here and there, sometimes an entire sentence. The scenes had been written weeks or even months apart, so the thing lacked consistency. The President’s son had red hair on one page and blond hair three pages later.

  It wasn’t all tripe. A paragraph on page thirty-five gave me an idea for later in the book—Bucky could save the KGB agent’s life, even knowing he meant to kill the President’s son. I got to thinking about the President’s son and what it would feel like to be constantly coddled and resented. Would the boy stay a jerk or grow to learn tolerance of others and respect for nature?

  This was interesting. For the first time in months I looked at my own writing as a source of potential. Maybe the book could be saved and I would be more than a bank account for one group of women and a climax-producing object for another group. Living your dreams through what you can do for women isn’t truly satisfying. Not like creating a novel.

  I finished the last page and turned it over onto the pile. The question was: Carry on or trash it? Would a teenager someday pick up my book and be improved by it? Most teenagers are so unhappy, a book doesn’t have to change their life, just help them forget it for a few hours.

  Wanda said my Bucky stories would inspire some pimply bookworm to take up mountain climbing and he’d fall off a cliff and get killed and it would be my fault. She first slept with me because I was a writer, but she couldn’t stand me when I actually wrote.

  ***

  After six rings I decided the company had no one in charge of answering phones. Maybe she was at lunch, or maybe she didn’t exist. I pictured women all over the building muttering to themselves. “Not in my job description.”

  “I need some money.”

  “Wanda, how did you know where to find me?”

  “That Nazi maid of yours told me where you were.”

  “Her name is Gus.” Gus must have told her the place I’d least likely be and accidentally gotten it right.

  “This separation isn’t working out,” Wanda said.

  “Does that mean you want to come home?”

  Her laugh dripped with derision. “I need some of our money. Paul says his needs are not being met.”

  Paul? “You left me for a kid named Manny.”

  “Okay, Manny, then. Have it your way. I don’t want to argue, I just want cash. I held your sensitive little psyche together for a full year. Believe me, I earned my half.”

  I wondered if Shirley was listening in. “Nobody’s disputing that you earned your half, Wanda. I only want you to come home. I love you.”

  Her sigh winged across the telephone lines. “I know you do, Sam. Don’t grovel.”

  “I didn’t mean to grovel.”

  “I must face the fact that I don’t love you and I never loved you. Can’t you understand how humiliating this is for me. I gave my marriage everything and now I must admit defeat.”

  “You don’t sound humiliated.”

  “I am truly devastated by your failure as a husband, Sam.”

  I stood up behind my desk. “I’m not the one who humped the pool man.”

  “How dare you throw that in my face. Your neediness made me hump the pool man and all the others. I didn’t want to cheapen myself but you forced me to and I will never forgive you.”

  All the others? The conversation led where it had to from the start. “I’m sorry, Wanda.”

  “Just send me the money. Twenty thousand for the first payment.” Wanda gave me an address in High Point. She ended with, “You should prepare yourself. Paul and I are thinking of moving back into the house.”

  “But it’s my house.”

  “I have as much right to live there as you.”

  ***

  I chose to flush the manuscript down the toilet, but anyone who has faced an open commode with sixty-four pages in hand knows the futility of that idea. No symbolic act should require a plumber. Instead, I closed both lids and removed the top of the tank. Then I slid Bucky and Sam into the tank water and carefully set the top back into position.

  13

  Katrina Prescott’s health club had once been an office building for upscale orthodontists and Realtors and such, but the owners went Chapter Eleven and the new people kicked the young professionals out, tore down most of the internal walls, and hired a bunch of personal trainers from California. I’d been offered a piece of the club, but investments have never been my thing. I’m loyal to golf carts.

  The extremely healthy-looking surfer at the front desk seemed to know who I was. She said, “You’re late.”

  “I’m not supposed to be here.”

  “Mrs. Prescott is waiting in the private sauna. Just follow the hall to the end and turn left.”

  I found Katrina Pre
scott sitting on a wooden bench in a very hot room. She had one towel wrapped around her head and another towel around her body.

  She said, “You’re late.”

  “Couldn’t we go somewhere where it’s not so hot?”

  “Take off your clothes, darlin’, you’ll be fine.”

  “I’d rather not do that, Mrs. Prescott.” I looked for a place to sit, but the only choice was a wooden bench lower than the one Katrina sat on, which would afford me an uncluttered view up her towel. Better to remain standing.

  Katrina’s skin sparkled from a film of perspiration. She said, “You really stuck a bee in Skip’s jockey shorts.”

  “Can’t we go somewhere else? I don’t enjoy hot, confining spaces.”

  Katrina lowered her body towel. “Do you like my breasts?”

  I was afraid this would happen. “The nipples are cantaloupe colored.”

  “They cost Skip six grand apiece. How about my stomach. Do you like my stomach?”

  “Don’t go any lower.”

  Katrina unwrapped her head towel and handed it to me. She shook out her hair while I blotted my wet face and wondered what she used to hold the false eyelashes in place. Leaning to one side, she regarded me as an object of curiosity.

  “Skip learned a lot about you last night, and there’s more coming in today.”

  “The hairs in my nose are scorched.”

  “Mostly money matters which bore me to death, but some of the information was interesting.”

  Sweat dripped off my earlobes. That had never happened before.

  “You’re thirty-three but you have a daughter who is nineteen,” Katrina said.

  “Leave my daughter out of this.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “Your wife of eleven months left you recently. Before her you had a checkered personal life of short-term relationships—including one former marriage—going back about twelve years. Before that you couldn’t get a woman with a stick.”

  “Who did this detective talk to?”

  “How many women have you slept with?”

  I couldn’t see a breast enhancement line, but maybe it was hidden in the fold.

  “That depends on your definition of ‘slept with.’”

  “Had sex with.”

  “I’m not clear on that definition either.”

  Katrina made a sound of impatience. “How many women have you stuck your pistol in?”

  “Not that many. I generally keep my pistol out of sex.”

  She frowned. “A hundred.”

  “I don’t think so, I’m not that kind of boy.”

  “If you got laid every other month for a dozen years, you’d have had seventy women.”

  “Gentlemen don’t keep score, Mrs. Prescott. And I object to the word had when it comes to this subject.”

  “You prefer diddled?”

  “I prefer we talk about what you asked me to come here and talk about—my mother’s rape.”

  Katrina continued to study me. Sweat trickled down my rib cage and the inside of my thighs. I wanted to take off my shirt but felt she might misinterpret my actions.

  “How does my body compare to the average woman?”

  Her legs beneath the towel were quite tight, for an older, short woman, and her stomach muscles were good. The shoulders rode higher on the neck than I generally liked. “You have a very compact body, but there’s no such thing as an average woman.”

  “I want you to make love to me now.”

  Okay, perverts, I admit it. The thought had crossed my mind. “The temperature’s a hundred and fifty degrees in here, Mrs. Prescott. We can’t make love.”

  She threw aside her body towel. “Skip is afraid of you. I can’t begin to say how excited that makes me.”

  “Would you like me if Skip didn’t hate me?”

  “Of course not, you dress like domestic help.”

  “Then it’s not me you want, but a way to hurt Skip.”

  Katrina stood up. “What’s wrong with that, darlin’, do you want me or not?” Drops of sweat clung to the ends of her pubic hair. From deep in the forest, a clitoris called my name.

  S a m.

  “Yes, I want you. I want every woman, but I only want them for the right reasons, and hurting my father is not an appropriate reason to have sex.”

  She touched my cheek with pampered fingernails, then ran her hand down my neck to my chest. “Any reason for doing it is the right reason.”

  “I disagree with that attitude, Mrs. Prescott.”

  Fingers fluttered across my stomach. “You’re trying to tell me you loved all seventy women you screwed.”

  “I never said seventy, but however many it was, yes, I wanted to be closer to each one as an individual. I wanted to bring them joy.”

  Her eyes snapped. “Bring me joy, Goddammit.”

  I yelped. “You don’t want joy, you want revenge.”

  “Revenge would bring me great joy.”

  “It’s not the same thing. Let go of my crotch, Mrs. Prescott.”

  She kneaded. “What’s my name?”

  “Katrina.”

  “I want to see it.” With her free hand she started digging at my jeans’ button and zipper.

  “No. I don’t want to have sex with you.”

  Suddenly, the fire left her. Katrina released me and slumped back onto the bench. She sniffled. “Why do you hate me so?”

  “I don’t hate you, Katrina.”

  “You’ve slept with seventy floozies in Carolina and you won’t sleep with me.”

  “Some of them weren’t floozies.”

  “Am I that ugly?”

  I stepped toward her. “You aren’t ugly at all, you’re compact and pert, but the truth is I look at you as something of a mother figure. After all, you are married to my possible father.”

  She was probably faking, but what with all the sweat, I couldn’t tell real tears from manipulation. “Skip will be so happy when he finds out you rejected me.”

  “He doesn’t have to find out.”

  “Skippy finds out everything. I’ll never matter to him because no one will ever again want me.”

  She was a lot more appealing pretending to be vulnerable than she had been pretending to be invulnerable. The poor woman was one artificial layer over another all the way down to the core, where I imagined a little lost fetus the shape of that rubber thing in the center of a golf ball.

  “Tell you what, Katrina. I really don’t want traditional sex with you, but maybe there’s another way to bring you joy.”

  Her face lit. “How, honey?”

  “Lean back against the wall.”

  Katrina fingered the bumps on my head while I went to work. First impressions had been right; she talked through the entire orgasm.

  ***

  After Katrina’s final yelp I drove down to the interstate and checked into the Ramada Inn to take a shower. Signed myself in as F. S. Fitzgerald. When you carry cash you can do that kind of stuff. I stretched my shirt, jeans, and boxers on the air-conditioning/heating vents and turned the fan to high. My clothes might smell, but at least they’d be dry and that was the best I could do. Shannon and Gus would notice if I bought a shirt and came home wearing something I didn’t go out in. The instinct to notice changes gives women a tremendous advantage over men.

  After the shower I lay on the bed and watched Phil Donahue interview a Type A personality in a suit. Even with the sound off, I didn’t like the man. I rolled onto my back, covered my face with a pillow, and considered Katrina. Like most fireballs, she was insecure, and what she wanted wasn’t that hard to give—in fact, it was fun to give—but the relationship was deeply flawed: She didn’t like me and I didn’t particularly like her. So why should I go crawling around between her thighs when only yesterday I’d met someone good who could make a difference?

  I’m sorry to say, Katrina wasn’t the first married woman who’d asked me to save her. My one God-given talent, besides Young Adult sports novels, is that I can meet any woman
and tell precisely what she needs—lover, listener, friend, father, mentor, a lifelong commitment, a servant, meaningless orgasms, a confidante, or nothing whatsoever—but my God-given weakness is I feel a compulsion to fill needs wherever I find them, regardless of consequences.

  Filling each need you come upon causes conflict. You can’t commit for life to every woman who needs a lifelong commitment in order to be whole. There’s too many of them; besides, when I tried with Wanda, it didn’t work. And you sure as hell shouldn’t give meaningless orgasms to one woman while hoping to be all of the above with another.

  So—bottom line—Katrina had to go. No more sauna sex. She could cry about her low self-image till doomsday, I wasn’t going to build her up at the risk of losing something I wanted. For a change.

  I checked out two hours after checking in. The desk clerk gave me a look, but I didn’t care. I had resolve.

  14

  A yellow Ford EXP with District of Columbia plates was parked next to the garage. It was probably Eugene the balding boy’s and I hadn’t noticed it when I left that morning. Sometimes I notice everything and other times I notice nothing at all. Lately the notice-nothing periods had been throwing off my balance.

  Shannon, Eugene, and Gilia were sprawled in various postures around the parlor, hacking at the pumpkin mountain. Everyone seemed so cheerful and comfortable that at first I didn’t realize what was wrong with the picture.

  I said, “Gilia.”

  She looked up from carving molars in a jack-o’-lantern. “Hi, Sam.” She’d done the nose sidesaddle to look like Richard Nixon, or maybe it was the orange jowls. Something made the pumpkin a spitting image.

  “Grab a knife and dig in,” Shannon said.

  I dropped next to Gilia on a couch cushion they’d pulled onto the floor. Gilia smiled and handed me a pencil-thin X-Acto knife. “I like your family.”