Gene Wolfe: Free Live Free

He chuckled. “How’d I know that?”

“If you want to try, just ask me. When I’m not so wasted, okay? If you can’t, don’t worry about it. I’ve seen it happen with a lot of younger guys.”

“You’re a kind-hearted woman, Miz Garth.”

The waitress refilled the fat girl’s cup and dropped a fresh handful of sugar packets on the table. They bore the likenesses of poets: Byron, Shelley, Keats.

“I’m a sick one,” Candy said. “My head hurts me like you wouldn’t believe.” Her plump fingers trepanned the poets.

“Wish I knew something to help you.”

“I know already. I took four aspirins before I came downstairs the first time, and I drank about a quart of water. Now just give me six or eight cups of coffee and I’ll be fine.”

“Used to know a man that breathed steam. Him and me had a pot we’d make stew in and suchlike, and he’d fill her with water and set her on the fire till she boiled. Then he’d take her off and put his head down and pull a blanket over him.”

“That was a different kind of headache,” the fat girl told Free. “Or maybe not.” She had drunk half her coffee while he spoke. “See, what I’m doing is maybe the same thing, only on the inside. Your buddy put his water in his pot and I put mine in mine.” She patted her belly. “Now I’m boiling it. When we get back to your house, I’ll pull the blanket up for three or four hours.”

“You might not get your sleep out,” the old man said. “They’re comin’ today.”

“Who’s coming?”

“Them that’ll wreck my house.”

“They tell you that?” the fat girl asked.

Free did not reply.

“Just a hunch, huh? Mr. Free, you know I’ll do anything I can. But hunches don’t always work out.”

“Mine do, Miz Garth.”

The waitress brought Free’s eggs and ham, and more coffee for the fat girl.

“Listen, I used to have a boyfriend who was a hunch player. Like, he’d look over his form and see a horse called Try Me, and it would hit him. That was his horse. ‘Guilty,’ I’d tell him, but he’d go nuts unless he had something down on Try Me. Or he’d see a robin fighting a glass door, and then there’d be this horse Gallant Portal. Sometimes they paid, but he never had any cash, and he took mine.”

The old man looked up, interested. “Gallant Portal win?”

The fat girl shook her head, then looked as if she was sorry she had. “Finished three or four places out of the money. Andy—his name was Andy—was always after me to lose some weight. I was always after him to quit the horses. It got to where we made each other feel awful all the time.”

She stirred in sugar. “One time I was in this hotel, and I met this really nice, kind of elderly dentist. Some girls will meet a john like that and say a hundred bucks and if he says no they’ll say seventy-five and so on depending on how low they’re willing to go, and sometimes I do that too, only it depends on the john, what I think he’s like. This time what I said was listen, I’m starving, you take me to dinner and we’ll go up to your room and it’ll be great. So we went down the street and I had a lobster and maybe a dozen oysters, plus the baked potato and that junk.

“About an hour after that I was going uptown and I went past a pizza joint. The dentist had slipped me fifty and I was feeling flush. With a certain type, mostly your older johns, you can let them feed you and then give them a good time and act like you like them, and they’re liable to give you damn near anything. Anyway, I went into the pizza joint and got a large with everything, and I was sitting there in the booth with a bottle of Diet Pepsi and it came to me that Andy was like me and I was like Andy. I could have walked right past that pizza joint, but if I had there would have been another one down the street, and I would have gone in because I passed up the first one. And if I couldn’t, I’d just as soon die.”

“Ain’t you never wished you didn’t want to eat so much?” the old man asked.

The fat girl was waving at the waitress. “More coffee, and a pecan waffle with sausage on the side.”

“Not that it’s my business,” the old man said.

“I never have,” the fat girl told him. “Only I wish sometimes I wasn’t so—you know—obese. Once I roomed with a girl that would go out and eat a big meal and come back to our place and stick her finger down her throat. Puking so she’d look good to the johns. She cut her wrist once in the tub. It didn’t kill her, but various things went on after that, and I don’t think I ever saw her again.”

“Miz Garth, don’t you do that.”

“Not to worry. What were we talking about? I forgot.”

The waitress called to the cook, “Step on the nuts. Pigs.”

“Headaches,” the old man said.

“Yeah, only I wish you hadn’t reminded me. I got a winner.” The fat girl ripped a paper napkin from the dispenser at the back of the table, dipped it into her water glass, and pressed it to her forehead. “My brain hurts. Why don’t they ever have contests for stuff I can do? If they gave cups for headaches like they do for bowling, I could take a bath in mine. We got any hot water?”

The old man lifted the lid of the tin pot.

“I mean back at your house. I could use a nice bath—just lie in the tub and soak. That might make me feel better than anything.”

“The heater went when they cut off our gas, but I got a little bottle-gas job set inside the furnace to keep the pipes from freezing. I’ll have to keep a eye on that anyway so’s it don’t blow up the place ’fore the wreckers come. Maybe I could pipe some bottle gas over to the water heater for you.”

“Thanks,” the fat girl said. “I mean that. You really think they’re coming today, huh?” Without removing the napkin from her forehead, she emptied her cup and put it down.

“About them prizes,” the old man said. “They don’t amount to a spot on a hog. You take bowlin’, you mentioned that yourself. What matters is that a certain feller can get down all the pins about any time his turn comes up. The cup just tells that. It ain’t the shingle makes a doctor.”

“Liquor makes you sleep too hard,” the fat girl murmured. She had shut her eyes, and was leaning her head against the padded backrest. “Last night you couldn’t have got me up with a gun.”

“You got things you could win prizes for, if they gave them. Maybe they don’t, but you’ve got them things, and that’s what counts.”

“With you,” the fat girl said.

“With me, yes. What counts, period.”

“You’re a gentleman, Mr. Free. They’re damn near all dead.”

“There’ll be gents when Ben Free is gone and forgot, Miz Garth.”

The fat girl opened her eyes; they were large, bloodshot, and startlingly blue. “I think it’s going away. I feel a little better.”

“I figured you did when you asked for that waffle.”

“That was just a habit,” the fat girl told him. “If you’re like me, you eat when you feel good because you feel good, and you eat when you don’t because you don’t.” She dropped the damp napkin on the floor and rummaged in her purse for a cigarette. “You smoke, don’t you, Mr. Free?”

“Sometimes.”

“Here, have one of mine.” She braced her wrists on the edge of the table to strike the match, and when the waitress brought their food she asked for a pack of Viceroys.

“This here is a good cigarette,” Free told her. “Usually when I smoke, it’s a pipe, or maybe the doc will give me a cigar.”

“I thought blind people didn’t,” the fat girl said. With her own cigarette between her lips, she was cutting up her waffle.

“I ain’t blind! I can see smoke , for Pete’s sake.”