In the Course of Human Events. Mike Harvkey

they’d bowed out. When Jay asked Clyde if he could stay for supper, he didn’t hesitate. In the kitchen, Jan and Tina were at the table. Tina smiled at Clyde. He ran a forearm across his face and felt sweat pooling around his bare, dirty feet on the linoleum floor. “Tina,” Jay said, slipping a cigarette out of his pack of Winstons on the counter, “Get Clyde a towel and show him where he can shower.”

      Tina jumped up and pulled Clyde by the sleeve of his gi. In the bathroom she kissed him and wiped her nose. “Sweat much, buddy?”

      Clyde had made the drawstring of his gi pants so tight he thought he was going to have to cut it to get them off. Finally he worked some give into it. Just as he was reaching into the shower, Jay yelled, “Tina Louise,” and Tina squealed right outside the door.

      Before supper, Jay read Clyde the letter he’d written for him to the IRS.

       I have received your angry notice informing me of a debt you claim I owe for mistakes which originated in your own office. As a law-abiding, tax-paying, hardworking citizen of these United States, I have chosen to execute my inalienable right to liberty—in this case financial liberty—by refusing to pay you another red cent. In fact, you should pay me $862 for the emotional distress and turmoil your letter has created in me and my family, which is sizeable and could be documented through the proper medical and legal channels. Furthermore, you should be ashamed of yourselves for pursuing honest, hardworking tax payers to cover clerical errors built on government corruption and inefficiency. I for one refuse to take part in your many global wars and other criminal efforts being perpetrated by the New World Order AKA the United States of America AKA the plaything of the Fed. Feel free to do your evil work, go ahead and send a collection agency to seize my assets; they are few, and easy to defend, as I am legally armed and will act in a manner accorded by law when an unlawful person trespasses and attempts to steal that which is mine.

       Sincerely,

       Clyde Eugene Twitty, citizen

      Jay dropped the paper, a big grin on his face. “Pretty good, huh?”

      Clyde had no idea what to say. Part of him would have loved to send a letter like that to the goddamn IRS. But he worried that if he did he’d get in trouble. He didn’t think he was prepared, as Jay seemed to think he was, to enter into a shootout over his truck.

      “Dad!” Tina said. “Clyde ain’t ready for your craziness.”

      “Daughter-san,” Jay said, holding up a finger of warning. “You ready for my quote-unquote craziness, Clyde, or aren’t ya?”

      “Well, that’s not the way I’d put it . . . ”

      “See?” Tina said. “He ain’t ready.”

      “Let poor Clyde fight his own battles, Jay,” Jan said.

      Jay balled up the letter and said, “All right, mama.” He lit a cigarette and chucked the pack at Clyde who took one out and lit it with Jay’s lighter. Jay pointed the cigarette at Clyde then. “Write your own letter.”

      Clyde huffed.

      “I mean it,” Jay said. “This part of training. Write your own letter, and let me see it ’fore you mail it.”

      “Osu,” Clyde said.

      During supper Jay opened the first bottle of Rebel Yell. In the front room an hour later he opened the second. Pouring from that bottle, he raised his glass and said, “To the new couple!” Everyone but Tina shot the whiskey down. Tina sipped hers, making a face and giggling. It seemed that the Smalls didn’t give two shits about laws of any kind. Tina, at sixteen, drank alcohol every single night. By ten o’clock, the whole family was sharing cigarettes and telling jokes, their shoes upturned on the carpet. A little later they split into two couples, Tina and Clyde in the front room by the wall of bookshelves stuffed with decades of National Geographic, Playboy, Penthouse, and Black Belt magazines, Jay and Jan in the TV room, kissing so wetly that they sounded like two dogs licking themselves clean.

      Pressing Clyde into the floor, Tina whispered for him to keep his eyes open while she touched them with her tongue. She filled his ears with slobber and sucked it out in loud snaps that made him flinch, ground her pubic bone into his sore pecker and freed her bra with a springy snap beneath her sweatshirt. She lifted the shirt to her neck, grabbed one of her boobs, and shoved it into his mouth. Clyde had never had a girl’s tongue in his ear, and he’d sucked on some titties only once before, the night with that married woman, who’d fucked Clyde again and again on his bed, her pale pink nipples swinging just above his nose.

      Just then Jan hollered up the stairs, “Y’all keepin it clean, ain’t ya?”

      Tina giggled. “Yep,” she said.

      “Clyde?” Jan said.

      “Uh, yes ma’am,” he said, Tina’s cold, wet nipple against his temple.

      “Clyde-san?” Jay said.

      “Yes, sir, absolutely.”

      “Better be.”

      Tina stared at the top of the stairs. Without turning to Clyde, she smashed her enormous bare breast into his face. For a moment, he was drowning in tit.

      Sometime later she jumped up and released a sob that sounded like she’d been punched in the neck. She ran out of the house. Clyde had no idea what had happened.

      “Tina?” Jan said from downstairs.

      “Uh,” Clyde said, wiping his mouth and trying to hide the erection pressing tight and hot against his zipper. “She, uh,” he said, as Jan climbed the stairs.

      She came into the room dragging her sweatshirt over her naked breasts. “What happened?”

      “She just,” Clyde said, getting unsteadily to his feet. The bottle of Rebel Yell lay on its side, a stain on the carpet around it. “Uh, jumped up.”

      Jan looked out the screen at the yard. “Tina?” she called. Tina didn’t respond. Clyde could hear her sobbing out there somewhere. “Here we go,” Jan said.

      For the two hours that followed, Clyde sat with Jay on the frozen cement step with an afghan over their legs. Whiskey, cigarettes. Clyde worried about what the Smalls would think had happened, what Clyde had done to upset their only daughter, but there seemed to be no judgment at all. He got the feeling that he could have gone to his truck and driven off without Jay or Jan thinking it was a bad move. Twice in that first hour, Jan returned to the porch for a drink and a smoke. “She’s never had a boyfriend before, Clyde,” Jan said. “She’s afraid you’re gonna hurt her.” Jan smiled sweetly, smoking her cigarette, and went back out. The next time she returned she said, “Clyde, you are either the loyalest son of a bitch the world’s ever seen, or the dumbest!” Drunk, exhausted, blue-balled, and confused, he didn’t know what he was.

      “He in too deep to git out now, mama,” Jay said. “Way too deep.”

      Jan looked at Clyde in a way that he would come to learn only she ever did. “I think you’re right,” she said. “Clyde is here to stay.”

      That night Jay told Clyde about how the Smalls had ended up alone in Liberty Ridge. Technically the house belonged to Jay’s parents. What had happened was, after laying the macadam grid, lighting every damn street, and punching half the basements, the developers had tilled up relics from Civil War times. A whole mess of important shit, some lawyer said. At that point, they’d finished and sold exactly one address, the model house, bought by one Curtis Duane Smalls of Grandview, Missouri. The Liberty Ridge Development Corp. had tried to buy it back, but Jay, acting on his father’s behalf, said no, thank you. Since then the whole thing had been stuck in the courts. According to Jay, it was typical government bullshit and made as much sense as a dog in a whorehouse. The developers had even threatened to sue, backed by the city council, and Jay had written a letter to the council quoting Patrick Henry and citing the ever-increasing power grab of the United States government. Fifty open basements had since