Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel (22 page)

J.J. smirked. “Giving what?”

“Oh, God.” Bob Wier put his face in his hands.

“Did you say
suck?”
said J.J.

“Young J.J.’s mind is in the gutter, Professor, but then his mind is
supposed
to be in the gutter. He’s
supposed
to be thinking about spreading his genes to every young woman in this room, thus maximizing his genetic legacy. It’s certainly not love. It’s not even lust. It’s the selfish gene guaranteeing its own survival, like salmon swimming upstream to spawn, mindless and shrewd, all at once.”

“You know,” said Paul at last, lowering his beer, “a little Discovery channel is a dangerous thing.” It was like being trapped in hell with E. O. Wilson.

The Colonel manufactured a hearty laugh and rocked back from the table. “Very droll,” he said.

Stony arrived and squared her shoulders. “How ’bout it, guys? What’s your pleasure?”

The men fell silent in the presence of tawny Stony. Paul found himself wondering what to do with his eyes and his hands, and at last he folded his fingers together on the cool tabletop and glanced sidelong at the fulsome curve of her breasts. Then he lifted his eyes to the yellow button at her shoulder, which read
ASK ME ABOUT OUR TENDER CHICKEN STRIPS!

“I’ll have the chicken strips,” said Paul.

“I believe I’ll have them, too,” said the Colonel.

“So,” said J.J., leaning in, “is that breast meat?”

“It’s not just breast meat, hon,” said Stony, a little more cannily than was attractive. “It’s tender,
juicy
breast meat.”

“Sounds fingers-lickin’ good,” said J.J., leaning closer.

“Oh, they are! Especially if you dip them in our own special dippin’ sauce!”

“Wow, dippin’ sauce.” J.J. was hanging off his stool. “What’s in that?”

Bob Wier hyperventilated speechlessly, his eyes wide as coffee cups.

“He’ll have the same, my dear,” said the Colonel. “Chicken strips all round.”

“Outstanding!” Stony reached along the table again to collect their menus; J.J. settled back on his stool and theatrically fanned himself. She swung away, and all four men sagged a little
in their seats, unaware until that moment that they’d all been sitting a little straighter.

“No doubt you’ve noted Stony’s professional detachment,” the Colonel said, watching Paul. “She smiles and thrusts her bosom at us, but she keeps that certain distance.”

“Fucking cocktease,” muttered J.J., half turned around on his stool.

“A professional necessity,” Paul heard himself say, “in a place like this.” Paul knew he shouldn’t argue with this blowhard, but it was such a relief to be asked his opinion on something and to have his opinion listened to. After all, didn’t he have eight years of graduate school training in talking about gender? “It’s what this place is
engineered
for, isn’t it?” Paul went on. “The tease. The slap and tickle.”

“No fucking shit. They’re all fucking teases.” J.J.’s restless gaze bounced from one waitress to another. “None of these bitches would give a guy like me the time of day.”

“That’s one way to put it, my hormonal young friend,” said the Colonel over his beer. “But look at it from her point of view. Hers is a finely calibrated performance, and I don’t just mean her professional restauranteur’s hospitality. It’s
her
genes speaking.” He sipped and smacked his lips. “Young Stony wants to attract a robust fellow like you, or the professor here or even an old buck like myself, but she’s prepared to make us
work
for it. While it’s in the male’s interest to spread his seed as widely as possible, it’s in Stony’s interest to find a potent, yet reliable fellow who will participate in the raising of her offspring. Given the investment of time involved, Stony can only yield to a man who she can be certain will feed and protect her offspring. To oversimplify, young J.J. here is interested in the
quantity
of partners, while the discriminating Stony is interested in the
quality
of
one
partner.”

“What’s he saying?” J.J. narrowed his gaze at Paul.

“That you’d like to fuck them all,” Paul said.

“Fucking A.” J.J. sat up straight and took a manful drink of beer. “Fucking bitches.”

Propped against the window, desperately watching the traffic
outside, miserable Bob Wier was repeating scripture to himself under his breath.

“Do you think I’m wrong, Professor?” said the Colonel.

Paul hesitated. Did he really want to argue the construction of gender with this jerk? His ex-wife Elizabeth, the theorist of gender, would have handed this loser his genitalia about twenty minutes ago. But then Lizzie wouldn’t have been sitting in a Headlights to begin with, would she? She wouldn’t know what it was like to be a man surrounded by other men, waited upon by half-dressed young women, sitting here half aroused, with his hormones singing in his blood. She couldn’t possibly get what it was like to stew in your own humidity, heat prickling the backs of your eyeballs, sweat coming out on the palms of your hands. Dear God, he thought, what if the Colonel is
right?

“Do you know what ‘essentialism’ means?” Paul heard the condescension in his own voice.

“No,” laughed the Colonel, “but I can guess. All your fancy literary jargon doesn’t hold any water any longer, Professor. I’m talking science, son,
science
. Philosophy is over. There is no more philosophy.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” said Paul.

“The world’s turned upside down, Paul,” said the Colonel fiercely, leaning across the table. “Suddenly they don’t
need
men any more. Single mothers.
Lesbian
mothers. Or they forgo motherhood altogether and compete directly with us in the marketplace. Why maximize their genetic legacy, why pick a mate, why have children at all, when they can
take our jobs
. Look at all the childless women in our office: Olivia, Renee, Nolene.”

Paul remembered the three child-safety seats in the back of Nolene’s van. “I think Nolene has kids,” he said.

“She might as well not have them,” spat the Colonel. “Is she home with them? Ensuring their safety and survival? Hell no, she’s at work, raising them by proxy. It’s not
natural
, Paul. Don’t you get it?” He clasped Paul’s forearm in a painful grip.

“Easy,” Paul said, but he couldn’t pull free.

“Look across the length and breadth of our office, Paul. What do you see? Cube after cube of women working at jobs
that men used to have. Cube after cube of
women not raising children.”

There was a breathless silence at the table. Even Bob Wier stopped praying and turned away from the window. J.J. gripped his beer with both hands and shifted his gaze from the Colonel to Paul and back again. Paul tensed his arm under the Colonel’s grip. The Colonel fixed Paul with a furious, penetrating gaze.

“Here we go, fellas, get ’em while they’re hot.” Stony swung her tray close to the end of the table, extending her long arm to place a large plate in front of each man. On each plate was a heap of chicken strips on one side and a heap of seasoned fries on the other, surrounding a little dish of pinkish dippin’ sauce. “Can I get you boys anything else?”

The Colonel released Paul and sat back; he drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. Paul leaned back, too, and rubbed his arm where the Colonel had grasped him.

“I think we’re fine,” said J.J., and Stony winked at them and went away.

“I got a little heated there, son,” said the Colonel. “I apologize.”

“No harm done,” said Paul. In the silence that followed, he lifted a chicken strip and dangled it over the pink sauce. J.J. picked one up, too, and plunged it into the sauce.

“It’s just,” the Colonel went on, “we used to be competing
for
women. Now we’re competing
with
women.” They all watched the Colonel as his forehead knotted and unknotted. He gazed at his plate of chicken strips as if he’d never seen anything like it before in his entire life.

“What does a man do to ensure his survival now?” He looked up at Paul meaningfully. “What do men do, gentlemen, working together, as
men
, to ensure
our
survival?”

Before anyone else could answer, Bob Wier groaned, and the other three men looked down the table at him.

“Not here okay?” he said. “Not now. Can we just eat?”

A
FTER LUNCH
, in the skin-loosening heat of the parking lot, the Colonel clapped J.J. on the shoulder and said, “You got shotgun on the way back, son.” He turned to Paul and raised his eyebrows over the lenses of his sunglasses. “You don’t mind sitting in the back on the way home, do you, Professor?”

Squinting against the glare off the pickups and SUVs all around, his gullet burning from the unsubtle spicing of Headlights’s dippin’ sauce, Paul shrugged. J.J. beamed victoriously and hoisted himself up into the front passenger seat of the SUV. At the rear of the vehicle, out of sight of the Colonel as he heaved himself up into the driver’s seat, Bob Wier touched Paul on the elbow.

“It’s not too late for you,” Bob whispered tremulously. His eyes were wide and beyond mournful.

“What?” said Paul.

Bob Wier glanced forward, through the dusky tinting of the SUV’s rear window. “You can still walk away,” he whispered.

This was different from Preston’s offer of sympathy and self-pity
earlier that morning; Bob Wier looked desperate, as if he were pleading with Paul for something. But before Bob or Paul could speak again, the basso beep of the SUV’s horn made them both jump. “C’mon, girls,” shouted the Colonel out his window, “let’s shake a tail feather.”

By the time Paul climbed into the backseat next to Bob Wier, Bob was smiling. After forty minutes in the unshaded parking lot, the enormous vehicle was full of a baking heat, but as soon as the Colonel started the engine, frigid air began to pour from the AC vents.

“If you want to make your pitch, Reverend,” said the Colonel over his shoulder, “now’s the time. You got a captive audience for five minutes. The professor here is full of beer and chicken strips.”

“Tender
chicken strips,” said J.J.

The SUV lumbered out of the parking lot and into the lunchtime traffic. Next to Paul in the backseat, Bob Wier adjusted himself sideways, pulling a knee up on the seat. He broadened his smile, but his eyes still pleaded silently with Paul. “Tell me, Paul,” Bob Wier said, “what do you know about distributed sales?”

Up front the Colonel and J.J were snorting with repressed mirth.

“Sorry?” Paul said. “What are ‘distributed sales’?”

“I’m glad you asked!” chorused the Colonel and J.J. and they burst out laughing.

“Guys, come on,” said Bob Wier, with manly cheerfulness. In the back he gave Paul a meaningful look. “Maybe Paul’s not as cynical as you two reprobates.” He licked his lips and said, “I’m glad you asked, Paul. Distributed sales are—”

“The opportunity of a lifetime!” cried the two men in the front.

“Come on, now!” protested Bob Wier. “I put up with y’all during lunch.”

The Colonel, still chortling, lifted a conciliatory hand from the wheel. “Let him talk.” J.J. continued to hiss with laughter.

“These fellas can joke all they want,” Bob Wier said, “but
I’ll tell you, Paul, this really is the opportunity of a lifetime.” He glanced nervously up front, then slowly shook his head. “You’ve heard of Amway, right?”

What on earth are you getting at? Paul wanted to say, but he simply turned away and stared out the window. Bob Wier’s pitch was for something called TexGro, a world-class line of lawn care products developed by an internationally recognized team of agricultural research scientists at Texas A&M, right here in Texas! Paul tuned him out. They were rolling across the Travis Street Bridge already, and Paul gazed down from the SUV’s improbable height at the river below and wondered what it would be like to plunge from the bridge into the sluggish water. Would it be thrillingly cold, like the bracing midwestern streams of his youth? Or would it be tepid, like the tap water here in Texas? He felt a touch on the back of his hand, and he turned to Bob Wier.

“And here’s the great thing, Paul,” Bob Wier said, “this requires only a
small initial investment
on your part.” He shook his head even more vehemently.

“I don’t think the professor’s buying it, Bob,” said the Colonel. He was watching them in the rearview mirror. Bob Wier’s face folded shut, and he retreated to the corner of the seat.

Paul glanced past J.J. and out the windshield at the General Services Division Building at the far end of the bridge. His cube, nestled in the building like the cell of a worker bee, had never seemed so inviting. He was about to turn to his own window again when J.J. pointed across the dashboard towards the left side of the bridge. The Colonel turned to look, and Paul idly followed his gaze.

He caught his breath. Standing against the parapet of the bridge, each with his shoes together and his hands hanging straight at his sides, were three pale men. Boy G stood in the middle, the man from the library stood to his right, and a man Paul had never seen before stood to his left. All three wore white, short-sleeved shirts, thin neckties, and buzz cuts. They stood preternaturally still in the noonday heat and the reek off the river, and all three watched the Colonel’s SUV across five
empty lanes, their heads swiveling to follow its progress. At the SUV’s closest approach, the Colonel gave the men by the parapet a quick thumbs-up. Paul twisted in his seat, and even from a distance, as the homeless men glided by, he thought he saw all three men smile jaggedly. Paul tried to twist around the other way to look out the rear window of the SUV, but Bob Wier grabbed his arm.

“Wouldn’t you like to be
your own boss?”
Bob Wier was nearly in tears. “No one to tell you what to do?” Bob shot a glance at the Colonel and smiled. “You sell these products at your own pace, out of your own home!”

Paul pulled his arm free. He leaned forward between the two front seats and said, “Can you stop the car?” But the Colonel was already guiding his vehicle into the TxDoGS parking lot, spinning the steering wheel one-handed. As soon as the SUV was berthed against the building, Paul jumped out, leaving Bob Wier smiling speechlessly in the backseat. Paul jogged quickly between the gleaming vehicles in the parking lot and up the embankment alongside the river. At the top, panting and sweaty in the heat, he shaded his eyes with his palm and peered through the glare off the river, trying to make out the silhouettes of the three homeless guys on the bridge. But all he saw were the boxy outlines of vehicles gliding above the parapet.