Welcome to Fred (The Fred Books) (13 page)

Originality B+
Typing F–
________________
Grade D–

I abandoned it as a lost cause and merged with the crowd.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
But I was not the only one destined to be among the walking wounded in the war between the sexes. There were others who walked willingly into the incoming mortars at the front lines.

Ralph, Bubba, and I were hanging out in the pool hall in Fred, wasting quarters. Or more specifically, wasting
my
quarters. Ralph looked up at the sign next to the jukebox, which offered the observation: “Good kissin’ don’t last. Good cookin’ do.”

“You know,” he said as he chalked his cue, “speakin’ of kissin’, I have a feelin’ Jolene could finish in the top three.” I looked around to see if Bubba was back with the ice cream. After all, it isn’t exactly the best form to discuss a girl’s kissing skills with her brother. One would hope he wouldn’t be able to offer much firsthand advice.

“I wouldn’t know, personally.” I completely missed one of my balls and knocked in two of Ralph’s.

“Thanks.” He lined up his next shot. “Well, I aim ta find out.” He made a nice bank shot.

“Find out what?” Bubba walked up with a handful of ice-cream cones.

“Ralph here has decided to try to kiss your sister.”

“Good luck,” Bubba replied and handed out the cones. Perhaps a surprising sentiment from a brother, but Bubba had his reasons for thinking that the only way Ralph would discover the flavor of Jolene’s lipstick would be by stealing her purse.

I couldn’t blame Ralph, even if I did think he was insane to attempt it. Jolene had turned from gawky to cute in junior high. But when she returned from summer to start high school, the world discovered that she had upped the ante considerably. She was just the right height to fit comfortably under an embracing arm and had a figure that was eminently embraceable. Wavy locks of raven hair surrounded a complexion as fresh and smooth as a glass of milk. Her eyebrows, which she had the good sense not to pluck, were thick and full. They accented eyes that seemed all pupils they were so dark. She was such a study in contrasts, you might have thought you were looking at a black-and-white picture had it not been for a hint of strawberry highlights on the cheeks and full, red lips with a slight pout.

Yes, Jolene was a first-rate candidate for kisser of the year, and lots of guys were hankering to help her win the contest. However, few got the chance because the contrasts weren’t limited to her looks; they extended to her personality as well. A guy might take her out expecting a dream date but was more likely to have a nightmare.

Jolene had never lost her penchant for practical jokes. When the lights went down and the mood music came up, Jolene and her date started getting ideas, but the two sets of ideas bore no resemblance to each other except for the cast of characters who would be featured in the coming attractions. Inevitably, a conflict of ideas would arise before the night was through. A conflict in which Jolene would prevail.

Practically every guy in Tyler County tried to woo her. Each in turn took her to football games, dances, and movies—even gushy movies like
Love Story
. The most astute planners included a romantic dinner at Pizza Inn, where the lights were low and, if you asked him, the waiter would light the candle in the red tea glass with his Bic turned up to high. The jukebox even had Johnny Mathis tunes.

Toward the end of the evening, the most persistent would creep his pickup under a secluded oil rig romantically nestled in a wilderness of pines, kill the engine, and roll down the window to better hear the pulsing descant of crickets and frogs calling to their mates mixed with the seductive throb of the oil pump. Then he would turn expectantly for a kiss. Unfortunately, he was likely as not to be greeted by a pair of Groucho glasses. Or maybe a set of Dracula fangs. Either way, whatever he saw was guaranteed to cool the ardor of any would-be Don Juan.

Actually, Jolene may have liked kissing. All that anyone knew for sure was that she liked practical jokes more.

Even Old MacDonald noticed Jolene’s transformation. He brought it up one day when we were out on the river annoying the loggerhead turtles by drowning worms in front of their noses. Fishing was not my leisure activity of choice, but as a member of the Sunday school class, I found myself obliged to submit to a gamut of tortures in the name of social conformity. On this particular outing I found myself marooned on a rowboat in the middle of the Neches River under the unblinking gaze of the Texas sun. Gnats swarmed around my head like my personal asteroid belt; horseflies slammed into me like meteors; mosquitoes touched down like a lunar lander taking core samples. It looked like things had gone from bad to worse for the center of my universe. The rest of the class was scattered at other fishing holes, probably all in the shade.

Behind me Old MacDonald was contentedly extracting another
Ictalurus punctatus
from its natural habitat. All the fish seemed to prefer his end of the boat. “So, Mark, don’t Jolene have a steady boyfriend?” He tossed the fish into the wire-mesh basket hanging from the side of the boat.

“Uh, I don’t think so.” I terminated the short life of another mosquito, wiping the blood on my jeans.

“You should ask her out. You’d make a nice pair, you two.”

“Me?” I considered the suggestion infinitely more ludicrous than an invitation to go fishing.

“Sure, why not?” His line plunked back into the water.

“You want a summary or a detailed list?”

“Might as well make it the detailed list. We got plenty of time.”

That was not a pleasant thought. I was hoping for an early reprieve and a swim. “Well, for starters, I’m not suicidal.”

Mac twisted around to look at me. “What?”

I glanced at him over my shoulder. “Asking Jolene out on a date is like walking across the highway dressed as an armadillo.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, and Jolene is the log truck.”

Mac turned back to his fishing. “I see,” he said, and then under his breath, “I think.” He didn’t talk again until he was pulling up another fish and I was killing another mosquito. It wasn’t a long wait. “So, where’s the detailed list?”

I was mystified by his persistence. How could he not see that Jolene was pitching a no-hitter in the majors, and I was water boy for the farm team. I searched for a choice of words that wasn’t completely self-demeaning. “Well, she’s probably half a foot taller than I am.”

“And . . .”

“Well, you know, that would look kind of funny.”

“But I see you two together all the time, and it don’t look funny.”

“Well, that’s different. We’re just friends.”

“Back when I was in high school, Peggy was the head cheerleader. Best lookin’ girl in school.”

I twisted around to look at him. Perhaps the heat was getting to him. I was on the verge of offering to row us ashore when he continued.

“I didn’t think there would be any reason she would take notice of me. Too small to play football, not very popular. Not long after I broke up with another girl, there was a Sadie Hawkins dance. Peggy asked me to it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He set his pole down. “You ready to head back in?”

The boat was too small for an ecstatic dance of celebration, so I just said, “Sure,” and grabbed the oars.

“So, just think: what if Peggy had never asked me? I wouldn’t have known how wrong I was about her not noticin’ me. Think about it.”

I thought about it. And about Becky. Mac looked back at me. “Now, what exactly did you mean with that part about the log truck?”

The next week, evidently acting on subliminal communications from the Old MacDonald Psychic Friends Network, Ralph asked Jolene out. To his great satisfaction, she accepted immediately. I awaited the event with as much expectation as he did. Perhaps more. The day after the date, I cornered him between Sunday school and church.

Ralph spat on the ground and said, “Shucks,” or something to that effect.

“Is that all you have to say?” I demanded. “You took the hottest fox in Fred to a drive-in last night, for Pete’s sake!”

Ralph snorted.

“What? Tell me what happened.”

“I took her all the way down ta Beaumont and the drive-in. She made me get her a corny dog and mustard.” He looked at me with the deadliest expression I had seen since
Billy Jack
. “You’ll never guess what she did with it.”

“What?”

“When she tried ta squirt mustard on it, she soaked my jeans.” I suppressed a chuckle. I remembered the old mustard trick. It was one of her best because she seemed to be genuinely sorry after she did it. “So,” Ralph continued, “I went ta the bathroom ta wash it off, and when I got back, the car was gone.”

That was too much for me. I let a laugh slip out.

Ralph squelched it with a burning glare. “Yeah, go ahead, laugh. I hunted all over that dang drive-in before I found the car behind the concession stand.” He spat on the ground again. “Then it wouldn’t start. Took me thirty minutes ta find out she had pulled out the distributor cap and another thirty minutes ta find it in the glove compartment. The whole time she was sittin’ in another car with Squeaky, watching the whole thang and laughin’. That’s the last time I waste any money on her.”

Ralph didn’t know how easy he had gotten off. After all, he took her to a drive-in.

A drive-in has certain connotations to the typical teenage guy, who is usually nothing more than a seething mass of hormones precariously packaged in a container with the approximate shape of a human body. When Jolene suggested they go to the drive-in, Ralph had his expectations raised to critical levels. Visions of sugarplums danced in his head. The winged shaft of Cupid, or at least Eros, was lodged in his heart. So it was from a lofty height that she sent his hopes tumbling down into the ruins of his ego.

The truth was that, in spite of the East Texas macho facade, the self-image of these cowboys was as delicately balanced as my own. They needed a girl with an equally fragile self-image to accommodate them. Dating was little more than a group-therapy session of two (and sometimes grope-therapy as well) where the patients mutually validated each other’s identities.

Ralph focused his attentions elsewhere, and before I knew it, he had a girlfriend. Ralph Mull, for crying out loud! Granted, the girlfriend was Squeaky, but still, a main squeeze is a main squeeze, and he had one. I pondered asking him for advice.

Darnell Ray had a girlfriend, but there was no use asking him how they hooked up. Everybody knew she had asked him. They were a matched set, anyway, both with greasy, Coke-bottle glasses and stringy hair. I didn’t figure any of Darnell’s advice for the lovelorn would apply to Becky.

My opportunity to pump Ralph for advice came when he was helping me build a fence for my pigs, an unfortunate side effect of having signed up for Ag. Unsurprisingly, even in Ag I found myself diverging from the norm. Everyone else made gun cases; I made a bookcase. But, then reality set in—I discovered a requirement of the class was to raise some type of farm animal, ostensibly with the purpose of making a profit. I took the cheapest and most unusual route—raising pigs.

While Ralph and I were building the pigpen, he handed me an eight-track tape. “Here. Put this on while we work.”

I popped it in the tape deck and was immediately assaulted with a nasal female voice whining through the speaker. “Whoa.” I hit the eject button. “What’s that?”

Ralph eyed me with suspicion. “You never heard Tammy Wynette?”

“Thankfully, no.”

“What tapes do you have?”

I opened my tape box. “How about Alice Cooper?”

“Never heard of her.”

“Him.”

“Oh, I thought you said Alice.”

“I did. How about Steely Dan?”

“Never heard of him either.”

“Them.”

We finally compromised on Creedence Clearwater Revival. When I accidentally hit Ralph’s left foot with a hammer, I figured the time was ripe for a change of subject.

“Say, Ralph.”

“Yeah.”

“How did you and Squeaky get together anyway?”

A pause followed of such duration that I began to wonder if he had forgotten the question. As I was about to ask again, he cleared his throat. “You remember that coon dog that used ta sleep on the yellow stripe on the Warren highway?”

“Yeah.”

“That was her dog.”

I waited for awhile, but that was all he said. It may have explained all as far as he was concerned, but I was shaky on the details. “Yeah, so?”

“So, it bit me.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Another spell of silence left me wondering. Was a coon-dog bite some kind of aphrodisiac? I gave up and asked again, “Yeah, so?”

“So, I came limpin’ up ta her house, and Squeaky felt sorry for me and doctored my leg, and then she started lookin’ at me like, well, you know, and then I was lookin’ at her the same way, and the next thang I knowed she was wearin’ my rang.”

He paused his hammering for a moment and looked off. “It just sorta happened. I wasn’t aimin’ ta get a girl, but all of a sudden I had one.” He glanced at me, spat in the mud, and went back to hammering.

It didn’t sound like much of a plan to me. I didn’t even know if Becky had a dog. If she did, with my luck it would be a Doberman.