Austin and Emily Read online

  From the backseat there was the sound of pills shaken in a pill bottle. Kenneth said, “Tomorrow’s the Fourth of July. We’ve got to stop and get some fireworks.”

  Emily bounced up and down in her seat like a schoolgirl.

  “Can we? Can we? I’ve never shot fireworks before.”

  “I thought everybody shot fireworks,” Kenneth said.

  “I haven’t,” Austin admitted, and he looked at Emily, both of them happy to accidentally stumble across another thing they had in common.

  Emily looked in the backseat to see Kenneth pop a yellow pill into his dry mouth.

  “Hey, what was that?” she asked.

  “Heart medication.” He held up the prescription bottle for her to see.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

  “I’ve got a bad ticker. Born with it. Crazy. A guy like Austin there, probably three hundred and fifty pounds, out of shape, probably got a perfect heart. Me, thin, don’t eat red meat, a believer in God, and I never know whether the damn thing might just stop in the middle of a tick. Just give up. It’s hard to plan for an uncertain future, so I never do.”

  The butt whistle went off, and Austin realized he heard it a few minutes earlier, but with the wind from an open window, and the sound of the engine, he hadn’t paid much attention to the noise.

  “What was that sound?” Emily asked.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Kenneth said. “How much you weigh, Austin?”

  Austin squeezed up his face in dissatisfaction. “I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

  Kenneth said, “If you weigh three hundred and fifty pounds or more you can qualify for government obesity assistance. You can sit back on your couch, eat Oreos all day, watch Oprah, and wait for the mailman to bring your check to pay for more Oreos, a bigger couch, and a fancy new TV.”

  “I don’t weigh three hundred and fifty pounds,” Austin said.

  “Well, you’re close,” Kenneth continued. “It would be worth it to pack on five or ten extra pounds for the check. How much you weigh, Emily?”

  “I’m not tellin’.”

  Kenneth said, “I’m guessin’ one hundred and ten. Austin, I’m guessin’ three hundred and forty-seven pounds, easy.”

  Austin was flabbergasted. He weighed exactly three hundred and forty-seven pounds. For a moment, more like a full minute, Austin considered the possibility of adding three extra pounds to his frame to qualify for the government obesity assistance.

  Emily said, “Look! There’s a fireworks stand.”

  Garrett and Katrina Boyle sat behind the counter. A box fan, secured in the window of the trailer with duct tape, blew a hot Texas breeze over the fireworks display. Emily, Austin, and Kenneth stood in front of the colorful table of cherry bombs, black cats, and crimson bottle rockets. As a child Emily never stepped foot in a fireworks stand, much less lit a fuse. Garrett Boyle had great difficulty removing his eyes from Emily’s candy apple miniskirt. His wife noticed and laid a backhand hard against Garrett’s big forehead, knocking his baseball cap to the floor.

  “Shit, Katrina, what you do that for?” But he knew what it was for, and didn’t care anyhow, and leaned down to pick up the baseball cap, already planning to sneak another peek in the wide open daylight. It was worth it.

  “These are good,” Kenneth said. “These are real good. They spin around in circles on the sidewalk and then take off like flying saucers, all gold sparks and stuff.”

  He showed a pack to Emily.

  “Do you have any money?” Austin asked with a purposeful pointed tone.

  Before Kenneth could answer, two county sheriff’s deputies stepped up into the trailer. Austin and Kenneth turned to see them at the same time, and then Kenneth said, still holding the pack of flying saucers in his hand, “What did you say?”

  Austin felt the breath catch in his lungs. His meaty knees locked, and Austin felt a wave of lightness. He teetered slightly, blinked his eyes twice, and then fell headlong across the fireworks table, snapping the spindly wooden table legs beneath, crashing to the floor like a sack of sand dropped from a high roof.

  “Holy crap,” Garrett Boyle yelled.

  Katrina fell over backwards in her chair. Kenneth let out an involuntary short burst of laughter and then stopped himself. Only Emily sprung to Austin’s aid. She crawled across his massive back to the head area.

  “Honey, honey,” Emily first said, and then she wheeled around to the deputies and yelled with great force, “Do something.”

  The deputies, trained at the police academy to respond to orders, responded as ordered. One called an ambulance on his shoulder radio and the other prepared himself mentally for the possibility of giving the large victim mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Before any such resuscitation efforts could commence, Austin awoke.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d fainted.

  Austin said in a woozy voice, “It’s the heat… need air…need clean air.”

  Garrett Boyle hadn’t failed to seize the opportunity to look up Emily’s skirt as she squatted over the semiconscious giant. His wife picked herself up off the floor and again belted her husband, this time in the belly, causing Garrett to bend over at the waist. In the commotion, Kenneth stuck a package of bottle rockets under his shirt along with two other choice packages of unique explosives. He backpedaled out the door to the car where he hid his stash under the coat of hair.

  The deputies lifted Austin to his unsteady feet. Emily held him like a child wrapping her arms around the trunk of a tree. They helped Austin walk outside where it was equally hot but less stuffy.

  Austin McAdoo insisted he was all right and pleaded to be led to the vehicle. After he was assisted into a seated position on the passenger side, Emily, who’d failed her driving test twice, took the driver’s position.

  Emily said, “Thank you, officers. I’ll take care of him. We’ll open the windows and get some air on him. You’ll be O.K., Austin.”

  Kenneth just gave a smile and a wave, pulling Glenn into position on top of the hair coat.

  Garrett Boyle, after he recovered from the belly blow, said, “Hey, what about my table?” but it was too late. The red car was already on the road.

  Emily hunched against the leather steering wheel and concentrated. Austin took three long, deep breaths in a row, regaining his faculties.

  Kenneth said, “Wow, that was a close one.”

  Emily didn’t hear what he said, and Austin ignored it.

  “I got us some pretty good fireworks for tonight. We’ll have our own little Fourth of July show,” Kenneth said, and then Austin heard the whistling sound again. The thought made him nauseous and brought a sour taste into the back of his mouth.

  Emily kept the speedometer on forty-five as cars flew around her as if she were sitting still. They drove to Lubbock on Highway 82 and switched to Highway 84, driving through the afternoon to a motel outside of Littlefield, Texas near the New Mexico border. Emily put a cool rag on Austin’s forehead, and he took a two-hour nap in the air-conditioned room. At nightfall, the three sat out by the small pool and ate canned ham. They drank cold Cokes, and the cats laid around licking themselves like cats do. Austin bought a new map and studied the route.

  He said, “Did you know there’s a Las Vegas in New Mexico?”

  Emily asked, “Is New Mexico part of the United States?”

  “Yes,” Austin answered quickly, not looking up from the map.

  “What’s new about it?” Emily innocently asked, chewing a nice bite of ham.

  Austin wasn’t sure how to answer. Instead, he said, “My father is buried in Las Vegas, but I’m not sure if it’s Las Vegas, Nevada, or Las Vegas, New Mexico. I’ll have to call my mother in the morning. I’d like to stop by and see his grave. I’ve never seen it.”

  “That’s sweet,” Emily said, and she looked at Austin with special eyes.

  Kenneth turned off all the lights around the pool. In the darkness, he set up at the far end of the pool for his fir
eworks display. He decided to use the empty Coke bottle as a launcher for the rockets. Emily couldn’t wait to begin.

  “Can I light the first one? Can I light it?” she begged.

  Kenneth placed the red-sticked rocket in the bottle and pulled the fuse outward for easy access. He handed the green cigarette lighter to Emily. She knelt down carefully, glanced back at Austin sitting at the table, and flicked the lighter. In the glow, Emily leaned over to touch the flame to the fuse. The fuse ignited and Emily backed away, wide-eyed, like a child.

  The flame shot from the end of the rocket, rose slightly, and then flew into the starry Texas sky with a screech, exploding high above.

  Emily squealed, and Austin couldn’t help but smile at her excitement.

  “Come on, Austin, you do the next one,” she said.

  Normally, Austin McAdoo would have said, “No.” He would have said it quickly and refused to consider changing his mind. But now, on the Fourth of July, outside of Littlefield, Texas, next to a motel pool, he got up from the white metal chair and went to light his first bottle rocket.

  Austin got down on one knee next to Emily. Kenneth inserted the rocket in the launcher. Austin held the lighter near the fuse. He could feel his hand shake, and the others could see it in the glow of the green lighter.

  Like the one before, the fuse ignited, the rocket spiraled into the sky, and the explosion drifted away.

  Later, with Kenneth orchestrating the pyrotechnic display, Austin and Emily sat at the table side by side. They watched the spinning golden flying saucers and bottle rockets sent upward two at a time. They followed the small flames from the poolside into the air and waited for the pop at the end.

  Emily leaned her head on Austin’s shoulder. She lifted her face up to his, stretched, and touched her warm, soft lips to his cheek. Austin’s heart rushed with the touch, and he became conscious of the dryness in his mouth. Emily felt flush with a warmth like her entire body was submerged in a bath. And then they kissed, a brush of her lips on his, and then a full kiss, gentle and remarkable. Much better than even their hopes or imaginations. Their lips parted, and both of them were left with the wonderful knowledge they would be allowed to do it again soon, and then again.

  “Happy Fourth of July,” Austin said.

  “Happy Fourth of July,” she answered.

  They sat around the pool until deep into the night. Austin was tired, but he was anxious at the prospect of going back to the motel room and being alone with Emily. Both were virgins, for very different reasons, and yet both assumed, also for very different reasons, the other to be more experienced in the ways of sex.

  Kenneth told a story. “Do you remember, in Miss Perkins’ class, the first day of school, do you remember what she did?”

  “No,” Austin answered.

  “She leaned down and whispered in the ear of the first kid on the first row. She told him a secret, and then she told him to turn around and whisper the secret in the ear of the kid behind him, and so on and so on. The secret traveled up the row, and then down the next, from one kid’s mouth to the next kid’s ear.

  “And you know what? When it got to the last girl, a girl named Lois, Miss Perkins asked her to stand up and tell the secret. And then the first kid who heard the secret was asked to stand up and tell us what he was told by the teacher at the beginning.

  “It was completely different. The secret was a completely different secret. It made me wonder where it had all gone wrong. Did one stupid kid mess up the whole thing? Or did the words and the message slowly deteriorate along the way and slowly become something altogether different?

  “I think that’s what happened with the Bible. So many millions upon millions of people, telling and retelling the same stories, tweaking the messages with their own personal tweaks, until it’s impossible to ever know what the original authors meant, or expected, without going back to the original authors themselves. But we can’t, they’re all dead, so I guess we’re stuck with the secret of Lois.

  “I remember she was embarrassed for some reason. She was embarrassed because the kids laughed at her, but in the end, nobody could figure out who was to blame.”

  Austin and Emily listened to the whole story. Austin remembered Lois. She lived down the block from him, and everybody said she didn’t wear underwear.

  “Have you always been like this?” Emily asked Kenneth.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have you always ridden around in people’s backseats and told stories and slept in cars with hair coats, like now? I’m not trying to be mean. I was just wonderin’.”

  It was quiet outside. July fourth had become July fifth. The blanket of stars stretched from one horizon to the next. Kenneth dissected the question.

  “No. I was married. Had a house. Twenty-seven hundred square feet. And a job at Blackwell Computer. I kept my clothes in drawers and wore uncomfortable shoes like everybody else.”

  “What happened?” Emily asked. “Did you have a nervous breakdown?”

  Kenneth’s hands fidgeted on the white tabletop. He told the usual semi-lie. “I guess you can call it whatever you want. Basically, I got tired of a lot of different things at the same time, instead of spread out over years.

  “Like some people, I worked real hard to establish a daily, weekly, routine. And then I woke up one day in the middle of the routine, and I couldn’t figure out anything. I couldn’t figure out my wife, or my job, or the mortgage payment, or the phone bill, or why my insurance kept going up, or why I had to see the dentist every six months for the rest of my life when nothing was wrong with my teeth, or why the dog looked at me like he did. And even worse than not being able to figure out all those things, I really didn’t give a shit anymore. It reached a certain point, I can’t tell you exactly when, but after that point it was just too late.

  “So they told me I was crazy, and I’d always been crazy, and I just needed a little medicine to balance everything.”

  While Kenneth spoke, Emily came up with a plan. She decided to act like she needed to go to the room to use the bathroom. Then she planned to get under the covers and fall asleep before Austin came up. Austin had already formulated the reverse plan, but he refused to leave Emily alone with Kenneth. Kenneth wished they both would go away so he could skinny dip in the cool motel pool.

  According to schedule, Emily excused herself, and according to Kenneth’s schedule, he waited for the motel room door to close, stood up in front of Austin and began to disrobe until the tall white bird-like man stood naked and glorious.

  Kenneth then said, “Are you stupid, Austin McAdoo?”

  “I beg your pardon. You’re the naked one.”

  “Emily, man, Emily. She didn’t go up to the room to use the bathroom, you goofball. She’s waitin’ for you. She’s hot for you. Probably sittin’ up there right now in one of those little black lace things, and you’re down here watchin’ me swim naked.”

  With that, Kenneth dove elegantly into the crystal pool, the water sparkling in the moonlight. Austin was scared to leave, and scared to stay, but he couldn’t endure more of Kenneth’s sex talk, so he stood and walked up the steps to the room on the second floor. Austin hesitated at the door and looked down at the pool, but he couldn’t see Kenneth in the darkness. A voice rose up from below. “Hey, throw me down a bar of soap, would you?”

  Austin pictured the man washing himself in the pool like it was his own private bathtub.

  Inside, Austin was both relieved and disappointed at seeing Emily curled up in her bed, eyes closed. He was scared, but at the same time he was a man, and the internal animal instinct to spread the seed was strong and stubborn, capable of outlasting fear or trepidation, and kept Austin awake playing games with his overactive imagination. And then the snoring began.

  As before, it started as a wheeze. The wheeze progressed to a cute snort. And then the snort exploded in size and volume until the room was filled with the vibrations of a small water buffalo.

  The phone rang
. Austin grabbed it quickly.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Mr. McAdoo, this is Victor at the desk. We’ve received a noise complaint. I thought maybe you’d left your television on when you fell asleep.”

  The background noise made it difficult for Austin to hear what the man said.

  “There’s nothing wrong with my television,” he growled. As Austin struggled to listen, he watched Glenn hop down from Emily’s bed and walk casually into the light from the bathroom. Austin’s suitcase was on the floor, open, next to the bathroom sink. Amazed, Austin watched Glenn step into the suitcase, squat, and piss a thin stream into his folded clothes.

  “Ahh,” Austin yelled out.

  Emily jumped up.

  The man on the phone said, “What’s the matter, Mr. McAdoo?”

  Austin yelled, “There’s nothing wrong with our TV,” and slammed the phone down. He set his sights on the demon cat.

  Glenn, nobody’s fool, took a beeline under Emily’s bed, careful to select a place with numerous exit choices.

  “What’s the matter?” Emily asked sleepily.

  “Glenn, the cat, Beelzebub, lord of the flies, has chosen my open suitcase to do his business. Cat urine ranks ahead of toxic waste in almost every category.”

  “Who was that on the telephone?” she asked.

  “Victor, the man at the front desk, he wanted to know if there was something wrong with our television.”

  “Is there?”

  “No, there isn’t.”

  Emily pondered. “That’s weird.”

  Austin said, “Yes, it’s weird. It’s all weird. There’s a naked man bathing in the swimming pool downstairs. There’s a cat using my suitcase for a toilet. And I haven’t slept all night.”

  Before Austin could finish his rant, Emily fell peacefully back to sleep. Austin looked at her a few minutes. He stretched the telephone line into the bathroom, closed the door, sat on the commode, and called his mother. He knew she’d be awake at 2:30.

  “Mom.”

  “Austin? What’s the matter? Is this one of those late-night phone calls a mother dreads? You’re in jail, or maybe lost in the desert, or you’ve gotten some pesky venereal disease and need me to wire money to a Mexican clinic.”