Макс Коллинз - Shoot the Moon (and more)

“Is he old enough to be semi-retired?”

“Not really, but what with his heart condition and all, he doesn’t have much choice.”

“Heart condition?”

“Yes. He had a lot of stress in his work in Cedar Rapids, and the doctor told him to slow down, so he quit his president job and took this little branch office thing here in Wynning, four years ago.”

“How... how bad is his heart condition?”

“Why, Fred! You seem really upset. I think you’re trembling! What’s the matter?”

“Uh, it’s just, uh, there’s been some heart trouble in my family, too, and it’s something you really have to watch.”

And then she looked at me like she had never seen such compassion before, like I was a saint. “Fred, I feel like I’ve known you for years,” she said, breathlessly. Lips moist. Eyes hooded. “I feel I want to know you for years.”

I wondered how she’d feel if she knew she was entertaining Charles Manson, which is who I might as well have been. It would make a good headline for the cheap tabloids: SHE FELL IN LOVE WITH HER FATHER’S MURDERER! I pictured myself walking down that long corridor to the little room where the electric chair would be waiting, my Methodist minister father walking alongside me, Bible in his hands, asking me why I took off my clothes and streaked through the DeKalb Holiday Inn.

“How about a tour?” she asked.

“Tour?”

“Of the house, silly. Fred, you don’t take drugs, do you?”

“Uh, no. Of course not.”

“Because I’m a firm believer in maintaining a healthy body.”

“I can see that.”

“And well, I couldn’t go for a boy who took drugs. I like a good time like anybody else, but I’m anti-drug as heck.”

“Me too.”

“Then how come you look so strung out?”

“Oh. Do I? Well. I’m just, uh...”

“I know,” she said with a Mona Lisa smile. “I understand. Really I do.”

I was glad somebody did.

“You’re surprised,” she continued, coming over and sitting in my lap.

“I... I sure am.”

“I mean you’re surprised to find that I feel the same way about you as you do about me. You met me just for a moment, and yet I stayed in your thoughts. No, now don’t be shy. Don’t be modest. That’s how it was. Just like in the song.”

“The song?”

“‘Some Enchanted Evening’.”

She sang a few bars. She was a soprano.

“We did South Pacific in high school,” she explained. “I had the lead.”

“You really ought to go out for Founder’s Day Queen. You’d be a snap to win talent.”

“Don’t be so silly. That rinky-dink thing! Did you see that bunch of dogs they had this year? It’s a joke. Besides, I couldn’t be in it because I was already committed to be band majorette.”

“I see.”

“Where was I, Fred?”

“You were singing ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ in my lap.”

“Oh. Yes. Anyway, you saw me for just a moment, but that moment meant something to you. You remembered me. You came looking for me, like a detective or something. And you didn’t know it, but I felt the same way about you. Especially when I saw that picture of you in all the papers and everything. Did you know you were on the NBC news?”

“No I didn’t.”

“John Chancellor told about you streaking, and that you got thirty days for it. He smiled when he told about the streaking, and frowned when he told about the thirty days.”

“No kidding?”

“Now do you see why I felt famous just bumping into you that fateful night?” And she grinned and giggled after saying the phrase “fateful night” and then leaned up and gave me a big, wet, soulful kiss.

And hot. I left that out: hot. Maybe that was implied in soulful, but I want to get across to you just how powerful a kisser this girl was. She really put herself into it, and I appreciated the effort.

She kissed me a few more times, and when she was done, she said, “How about it?”

“How... how about what?” I said, drunkenly. Hopefully.

“How about that tour I promised you?” she said, hopping out of my lap, giving me a teasing grin, and then taking me by the hand again, hauling me out of the chair and leading me around the house.

I could tell her family had indeed lived in a bigger, older home at one time, as the place was filled to overflowing with early American antiques. With the open-beam wood ceilings and all, the antiques looked great, and I would have moved into that house in a second. It was the sort of home I might have one day owned myself, if I hadn’t gotten into this mess.

The house had a strongly masculine look to it, with wood dominating both in the open ceilings and paneled walls. Even the master bedroom shared by man and wife had a dark, manly look to it. But the final room she took me to was so different in appearance it almost belonged in another house.

The only wood in the room was the open-beam ceiling, and the sliding doors of the closet, and this wood was that same dark masculine stuff prevalent through the rest of the house. But there was no wood paneling in here. In its place was ultra-feminine blue and white flowery wallpaper, with dark blue curtains on the windows and a matching blue, ruffly-skirted bedspread. The blue in the room was approximately the same color as Sue Ann’s eyes. The furniture was antiqued white wood: a dresser with oversize mirror; a chest of drawers; and a canopy bed. Double bed. The floor was carpeted in fluffy stuff that looked like whipped egg whites. It was a large room, as large as the master bedroom; an only child’s room. Very tidy, almost fussily so, except for a big bulletin board on one wall, haphazardly covered with withered corsages, buttons with funny sayings and/or school-related club names, and a lot of photographs of Sue Ann, as a cheerleader, majorette and in school plays, several apparently from that high school production of South Pacific she’d mentioned.

“This is your bedroom,” I said. (I catch onto things quick, as you may have noticed.)

“I said I saved the best for last, silly,” she said. She turned around. “Unsnap me.”

“Unwhat you?”

“Unsnap me. And then unzip me, too.”

She shimmied out of the sparkly majorette uniform. It lay in a patriotic puddle at her feet. She was wearing sheer panties under the uniform, but not for long.

She stood with her hands on her hips and let me take a long, lustful look at a perfect young female body, which she apparently was very proud of. And rightly so. Her skin was pale, but in a healthy way, and she was lean and shapely and smooth looking.

“Now don’t get any ideas,” she said.

I stood there for a moment and thought about what to make of a girl who takes off her clothes and says don’t get any ideas.

“I just thought that since I saw you naked, you ought to get to see me naked.”

“That seems fair.”

“But I think we ought to get to know each other a little better before it goes any farther than just looking. Don’t you, Fred?”

“I’m enjoying just looking. I’ll settle for looking.”

She came up and pressed herself against me and put her arms around my neck and gave me a kiss that would’ve melted a statue.

“Well,” she said, nibbling my ear, “I guess we could sort of get in bed and just neck a little. That wouldn’t hurt. But nothing else. Just neck a little.”

“That would be nice,” I said.

“Why don’t you just go ahead and take your clothes off, too. I think that would make the necking more pleasant, don’t you? But we’ll have to be good.”

“I think we could be good,” I said.

“At least,” she agreed.

I took off my clothes.

She got in bed and so did I and we necked. Nothing else. Just necked.