Coasters. Gerald Duff

had two one-dollar bills and the rest in dimes and quarters and the odd nickel or two, and as he stood in the open space between the neighboring houses he could feel his hand sweating on the coins as he held them in a clump in his pants pocket. He had imagined Paula Popp in the family room of the house next door, sitting down, maybe, in a chair as she waited for her brother to complete the financial arrangements, or better yet standing with her arms crossed under the two stars of the show to come, as she waited for curtain time.

      Waylon had sensed a queasy feeling beginning to move hotly up from somewhere in his lower belly toward the center of his chest, and he was turning to walk back to the rear of his house when he heard footsteps behind him.

      “Hey, McPhee,” Donald Popp had said, “you got the money?”

      “I told you I did, but I don’t know if it’s worth it.”

      “It’s worth it, all right. I can tell you that. You just scared to look.”

      “Bullshit,” Waylon said. “I bet she won’t do it. That’s all I’m worried about. Afraid I’ll lose my money without getting the good out of it.”

      “Give me the five bucks, and I tell you what. If you ain’t satisfied, I’ll give you a dollar of it back.”

      “Nuh uh. All of it. Every cent, or I’m going in the house.”

      “Two bucks back, then.”

      “All right,” Waylon had said, pulling the handful of quarters and dimes and the crumpled bills out of his pocket. “Here it is. You can count it.”

      “I will,” Donald had said, cupping both hands for the transfer. “Inside the house. When you hear me rattle the wind chimes, come on around the back and look in through the crack in the curtains.”

      Waylon had stood near the rear of the Popp’s house for what seemed an hour, suddenly desperate to empty his bladder before the wind chimes signaled Paula was ready for viewing. When the metallic tinkle sounded, it seemed to come from somewhere inside his head and he jumped as though someone had jammed a cube of ice into his ribs up near his right armpit.

      The sun was brightly shining in the Popp’s backyard, and for a few seconds Waylon could make out nothing as he peered through the slit between the curtains behind the sliding glass door of his neighbor’s family room. It wasn’t until he jammed his nose into the glass and shielded his eyes with both hands that he could begin to pick out details in the darkened interior.

      Paula Popp, a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School and a member of the Rangerettes Drill Team, stood in the middle of the room just in front of a Barcalounger easy chair, dressed in a white brassiere and a long skirt decorated with the outline of a pink poodle. The felt dog had buttons for eyes, Waylon noticed, and a little chain of real metal sewn to its neck. Paula seemed to be looking toward the corner of the room, where Waylon knew the Popp family television sat on a black metal frame, and she had no more expression on her face than as if she were watching the afternoon “Three Stooges” show on KFDM.

      Later, her total lack of expression and the fact that she might have been watching the Stooges or maybe a local dance show called “Jive at Five” would be what Waylon remembered as most exciting about the moment.

      At the time, though, he had rapidly fixed his gaze on the area between Paula’s collarbone and waistline as she reached behind her back with both hands, much like somebody imitating a bird about to flap its wings, and did something to the mechanism holding her bra together. The ends of it suddenly came into view as the fabric in front loosened and moved away from Paula’s chest, and she moved her hands to the cups of the garment and lifted them free of what they had been hiding.

      Still regarding the area of the room where the television set was located, Paula drew the white bra up to her chin level, revealing both breasts, startling white against the tan of her arms and hands, and held it there for a count of four or five and then let it fall, beginning to lift her breasts one at the time with her right hand and replacing them in their cups as though they were separate things with a life of their own, quiet little animals waiting to be put back to sleep in their dark burrows, their vague eyes shut against the harsh light of the outside world.

      “Jesus,” Waylon groaned aloud, remembering how he had crept back to the bed on which he now again lay, the sight of those fingers handling those breasts with such a careful nonchalance burned into his brainpan for all time. “And now,” he announced to the dead air above his resting place, “now they tell me she’s counseling drug addicts at a rehab center.”

      It was, he thought later outside as he unloaded the rest of his stuff from his car after the hottest part of the day had passed, the best five dollars he had ever spent.

2

      There was nothing to eat in the refrigerator except a plastic bowl of a concoction his father called patio beans, one of the three or four one-dish meals he had cooked off and on for the last forty years. “It starts,” Waylon remembered his father always announcing at the onset of one of his culinary fits, “with one ordinary dead chicken.” Charlie would then always wait for Waylon and his two sisters to groan in disgust before he went on to name the other ingredients, and if they didn’t respond, he’d begin describing the cooking process all over again until they did.

      Waylon shook the container back and forth, but the brown foodstuff had seized up during its time in the cold on the second shelf and would not move, not even when tilted at a ninety-degree angle. He pushed it away, drank a glass of water at the sink and headed for the door.

      The sun had sunk below the horizon, and the sky was dark enough for Waylon to see the glow of the burning flares at the Arco refinery as he drove down Proctor Street toward the Nederland Club. A bank of clouds rolling in from the Gulf picked up the reflection of the light and gave it back to all those who cared to look, pinks and roses and oranges that would deepen to a steady red when full darkness settled over the Golden Triangle of Texas. It had been that way since the first excess gases were lit to burn off when the petrochemical plants went into operation, and it would continue as long as people used fossil fuels in their internal combustion engines.

      Waylon sniffed at the air pouring into his Chevrolet through its vents and smelled the tang of esters, congruents, reagents and ozone working together in the thin soup of the atmosphere, and signaling a turn, pulled into the parking lot behind the Nederland Club, comforted.

      The domino tables were filled with retirees from Gulf, Pure, Exxon, Arco, and Texaco, slapping their dotted counters down briskly in the unending bouts of Forty-Two, one foursome over in a corner doing additions in their heads at the site reserved for straight domino, while in the back part of the building two younger men were studying what the break had left them on one of the four pool tables.

      “Five,” one of them said to the other, “side pocket,” as Waylon made his way behind them toward the bar. He heard the click of the cue and the shooter’s curse as the five ball lipped the hole and skittered away.

      “You still make hamburgers?” Waylon asked the man behind the counter watching him sit down on a stool a little too high for comfortable mounting.

      “Up to seven o’clock. No fries. Potato chips.”

      “All right. That and a Regal,” Waylon said and turned to look back at the pool shooters, again silent as they considered the possibilities on the green field before them.

      “Woo!” one of the retirees at the closest Forty-Two table yelled. “Shoot the moon.”

      “Don’t you bust another domino in two, Arleigh,” the bartender said in a voice so low even Waylon could hardly hear it, as near as he was. “I’ll make you buy your own.”

      “These old boys are rough on the bones, huh?” Waylon said, but the bartender had stepped away to speak to somebody through the pass-through cut into the wall to the kitchen and didn’t answer.

      “Yes, they are,” Waylon said