Fire Ants and Other Stories. Gerald Duff

each part joining up with the one next to it as though machined and polished by a master tool pusher in a Texaco lab.

      There was a lesson in it for the thoughtful man, and Bobby promised himself there in the fish cabin where Celia Mae Adcock herself lay dreaming in the full costume of maroon and gold that at a later time when he was calm and unflustered and conditions were right he would figure on this conjunction of events and puzzle out what the larger meaning might be. He owed it to himself to understand. Never before had the details of an event in his life seemed to speak to him in one voice, and he would be a fool not to listen. Maybe if he could comprehend this one thing and how it came to be, he could know how to do next time, get a streak going, find a pattern that worked and just lay it over the rest of his life like a template.

      Why, for example, had it come to him that very morning to take apart the blue and yellow capsules in Myrlie’s medicine cabinet, pour their granulated contents into a plastic baggie and stick it in his shirt pocket? He hadn’t planned that. It just announced itself to him when he saw the label on the bottle picturing a woman sleeping on a cloud bank with a big smile on her face.

      Then, after his shift ended at the refinery and he had gotten in his forty hours for the week, and was off for seventy-two, Bobby had decided to choose that afternoon to pick up the Beauty Rest and transport it to Smith’s Point. That very afternoon. A real hot day, such a scorcher he had felt like he needed to stop by Drake’s Drive Inn on the way out of town for a big cup of root beer slush, which he could have just as well picked up at some place on the coast highway itself, and not had to go out of the way to Drake’s to get it. But he hadn’t done that, even though he had been afraid somebody might have seen him parked at Drake’s with the mattress tied to the roof of the Thunderbird and started giving him shit about it. Jess Hardy, maybe, or Toppy LeBlanc, stopping by for a shrimp burger or ice cream cone after their shifts and catching him looking like a Mexican on moving day with furniture tied to his car top.

      But Bobby had chanced it, run the risk of being hoorawed by dumbshits, all because of his loyalty to Drake’s, the watering hole of his youth and the hangout of Thomas Jefferson High kids for over forty years, and it had paid off, just as though another of the smoothly polished parts of the machine under construction had clicked snugly into place as he drove up, thirsty for his root beer slush.

      Because there she was, in full costume. Her lower lip was stuck out, she was jiggling a set of keys in her hand as though she was trying to decide whether or not to throw them up against some wall, and her mass of black curls was floating above her head with a life of its own.

      Bobby Shepard felt a sudden jump in the middle of his chest like a small thing afraid, but he pulled the Thunderbird in beside the Buick anyway, marveling at how his hands knew to kill the engine, put the transmission into Park and engage the emergency brake all on their own without his having to tell them a single step in the operation. “Hello there,” he heard himself saying out the driver’s window. “Where’s the rest of your outfit?”

      Still jiggling her keys, Celia Mae Adcock turned her head slowly and looked at Bobby as though she had just been spoken to by one of the two-by-fours supporting the roof overhang of Drake’s Drive Inn or by a double order of fried onion rings.

      “You’re looking at it, mister,” she said deliberately. “That’s all there is.”

      “No, no,” Bobby said, shocked and apologizing, “I didn’t mean what you’re wearing, your cheering outfit you got on. I was talking about the other girls, the rest of the TJ cheerleaders. Them other ones.”

      He stopped talking, but his lips continued to move in a series of dry clicks as he tried desperately to think of another way to identify the people he meant by the use of spoken language. “The ones,” he said, “the ones you got to tell how to do when y’all are out there on the field.”

      “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Celia Mae Adcock said, shifting her clump of keys to the other hand. “They knew to meet me at Drake’s, but you can see they’re not here.”

      “No,” Bobby said, carefully looking up and down the whole range of the front structure of the building as though the seven missing girls in the maroon and gold of TJ High might have managed to conceal themselves successfully on the premises, maybe behind the menu board, and were about to jump out and yell surprise at him. “I sure don’t see a one of them.”

      “And this old car of Daddy’s won’t start back up,” Celia Mae said, “because the battery’s dead or something, and I haven’t got a cent of money with me to call him, and Heather’s supposed to have brought me my purse.”

      “Huh,” Bobby said, thinking to himself that the madder Celia Mae got the more her hair seemed to want to puff up and swell over her forehead. It looked to him two inches higher than when he’d first pulled the Thunderbird up under the Drake’s Drive Inn service shed.

      “Listen,” he said, wondering what he was about to say to the head cheerleader, “I’ll loan you a quarter to call your daddy, and while you’re doing that I’ll buy you a root beer. I’ll be glad to.”

      “Make it a diet Sprite,” Celia Mae said, sticking out her hand toward the window of the Thunderbird, “with extra ice. Large.”

      As Bobby stood by the serving window of Drake’s and watched Celia Mae Adcock work the pay phone at the far corner of the parking lot, the gold satin of her cheerleader’s underpants softly shining beneath the maroon of her skirt as it broke over her high-set behind, he could feel the plastic baggie full of dope for sleeping give a little jerk in his shirt pocket. Moving in tiny fits and starts from one side of its enclosure to the other, the baggie rubbed against his chest hairs hard enough to make them tickle as though a drop of sweat was rolling down from his collarbone toward his left nipple.

      “Which one of these drinks,” he said hoarsely to the woman waiting on the other side of the counter for her money, “is the diet Sprite?”

      “Why, what do you think?” she said in a cross voice. “The clear-looking one, of course. The one that ain’t root beer.”

      “Thank you,” Bobby Shepard had breathed, turning reverently toward the car with the plastic-wrapped Beauty Rest mattress tied to it, the drink cups held before him like chalices and the plastic baggie moving in a slow squirm in the pocket above his heart. “Oh, thank you.”

      He had thought the worst time would be when she first came to, there on the Beauty Rest covered with the floral sheets, and that if she was going to lose it completely it would be then and there at that first moment she opened her eyes and saw where she was. Not riding along in a vintage Thunderbird sipping at a large diet Sprite and ice and starting to feel so sleepy she couldn’t hold her head up, but lying on her back in a one-room fish cabin looking up at the ceiling where dirt-dauber wasps had put mud nests in every corner and along the sills of each window right up to the edge of where the wood ran out.

      Bobby Shepard hadn’t even noticed the clumps of gray mud hardened into a material as tough as concrete until he was sitting in the plastic chair worked with a sea horse and crab design waiting for Celia Mae Adcock to rouse from her nap, and he would have sworn he had cleaned every surface of the cabin thoroughly. That’s what comes of just looking down at the floor and worrying about mopping it, he had thought to himself, instead of lifting up your eyes once in a while to see what might be above head-level. Too late to do anything about it now, he had concluded, but one thing was comfortingly for sure: Celia Mae Adcock wouldn’t get her feet dirty from walking on the floor, wood or linoleum part either. Bobby had scrubbed it to a state of sterility.

      But he had been mistaken in his dread of the instant when the head cheerleader of Thomas Jefferson High would wake from her doze and realize the strangeness of where she was and undoubtedly start screaming and crying in stark terror, convinced that great harm was about to come to her from the man sitting in the light blue high-impact plastic chair with the sea creature motif worked all through its surface.

      He had anticipated the look Celia Mae would have on her face. Horror, fear, unreason, all mixed up into a compound announcing her intention to break from the hold of the Beauty