I feel my resolution, my respect for myself, draining into an erection. I begin to touch her everywhere.
“Don’t, Marcel.”
My hands turn to wood.
“It came early this month,” she says.
I don’t believe you. You got it on with Klaus this afternoon.
“What?” she says. She flips her head when she starts brushing again.
“We could see a marriage counselor,” I say. “Lots of people do it. You talk it out with a third person there.”
“I think behavior like that is silly.”
Her accent changes. Her daddy was a gyppo logger, and she grew up from Montana to Maine in the back of a rig. She once belonged to a fundamentalist religious cult in Florida, but when I met her she was waiting tables in a Galveston bar that was one cut above a hot-pillow joint.
“You think maybe I ought to boogie on down the road and find a sweet young rock-and-roller?” I say.
“It’s not your style, Marcel.” She bites off a hangnail and examines it.
“You’re right.” But at one time our style was to fly out over the Gulf in my pontoon plane, set down on a patch of floating blue ink, and drink Cold Duck and fish out the doors for gaff-top and speckled trout. Then when the sun boiled like a red planet into the watery horizon, I would inflate the air mattress and make love to her on the cabin floor, rocking in her embrace, which was deeper and more encompassing than the sea.
“I’m going up to the colored beer joint and listen to some zydeco,” I say. Then I grin at her. “But I’ll leave you with a thought.”
“What’s that?”
“If I catch you with him, I’ll ice the pair of you.”
Her face freezes in the mirror and her eyes look at me like blue marbles.
I started my own national beautification project the next morning: KEEP AMERICA CLEAN, DEPORT YOUR LOCAL NAZI GEEK AND GRIME BAG TODAY. But the man I talked with on the phone at the Immigration Department thought I was drunk, and the wire service in New Orleans told me they’d already done a sto
ry on Klaus—about his collection of South American Indian art.
“Lampshades?” I asked.
“What?” the wire reporter said.
“He was one of the Katzenjammer kids that threw them through the oven doors.”
The reporter hung up on me.
But the FBI man I called was a good listener. So I unloaded on him, told him everything, even about flying illegally into Guatemala. I felt as if a fish bone had been cleaned out of my throat.
He paused when I finished, then said, “What do you want us to do?”
“Arrest him. Pack him in a Wiener schnitzel can and ship him to Nuremberg.”
“What for?”
“He was SS. I’ve seen the lightning bolts tattooed in his armpit.”
“It’s not against the law to wear a tattoo, pal. Bring us something else. In the meantime spell your name for me and tell me a little more about this fun-in-the-sun trip you took to Guatemala.”
“Adios, amigo,” I said, and looked with a beating heart at my sweaty handprint on the dead phone receiver.
. . .