The Rothman Scandal (49 page)

“What do you do, Mr. Purdy?”

“Call me Skipper, everybody does. I ride the circuit.”

“The circuit?”

“The rodeo circuit. Bareback bronco busting, calf roping, steer wrestling—that sort of thing.”

“You do all those things?”

“Well, not all at once,” he said with a laugh. “But I can do all that stuff. What you do each night depends on the draw.”

“The draw?”

“For each act, we draw out of the hat. It's all in the draw, what each guy gets to do each night, and the draw's important because some stunts pay better than others—the more dangerous ones. So you hope to get a good draw, but you never know until the draw.”

“It sounds exciting.”

“Exciting? Well, it's hard work, but the pay is good. It better be, because by the time you're forty you're a has-been. You ever been to the rodeo?”

“Never.”

“Want to come tonight? Bring a friend? I get two free tickets for every show.”

“I'm expected home for dinner tonight,” she said.

“Well, if you can ever get your mom, the playwright in Paradise, to let you stay in town late, just call the arena and ask for Skipper Purdy, and I'll arrange it. We're here until the fourteenth. Then it's Wichita.”

“Thank you—Skipper,” she said. And then, “How did you get the name Skipper?”

He chuckled. “You really want to know?”

She nodded.

“Well, back in 'fifty-six, I was in Pueblo, Colorado, and that night my draw was to wrassle this big old Brahma bull. It was a real good draw, and I'm real happy. So—big bull comes roarin' out of the gate, see, and he's already fightin' mad because they'd gave him a little flick of the switch, see, just to spice things up for the customers. So big bull heads straight for me, see, and I grab him by the horns, see, to try to force his head down between his legs, like I always do. But all at once that big bull brings his head up—hard—under my chest, and that bull tosses me—up—up into the air—and I did a double somersault. Later, a buddy of mine said, ‘That bull skipped you around the arena like he was skippin' a pebble across a pond.' That's where the name came from, and it sort of stuck.”

“Goodness,” she said. “Were you hurt?”

“Naw. Couple of busted ribs. Not enough to make me miss the next night's show, and of course the customers loved it.”

As they entered the outskirts of the city, he said, “Let me know where you want me to drop you off.”

“Oh—anywhere.”

He gave her a quizzical look. “Anywhere?”

“Yes. It doesn't matter. I like to walk around. Sometimes I look at the stores. Sometimes I like to walk up on the bluff and look at the place where the two rivers meet.”

They stopped for a traffic light, and she felt his blue eyes studying her intently, while she kept her gaze straight forward at the road ahead.

“Don't you ever get nervous, thumbing rides like this?” he said. “There's some dangerous characters on the road out here. Dangerous character could pick you up.”

“Oh, there're no dangerous characters around here,” she said, even though she knew this was not entirely true. And she did not tell him that she kept an eight-inch hatpin in her purse.

The car moved forward again. “You don't look to me like the kind of girl who should be thumbing rides,” he said. And then, “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

“That would be very nice.”

Presently he pulled off the road into the parking lot of a Dairy Queen.

Inside, he ordered a black coffee, and she ordered a Coca-Cola. They sat opposite each other at one of the little tables, and she could still feel the blue eyes studying her over the rim of his coffee cup. “Funny,” he said at last, “but you strike me as a young lady without a plan.”

“Oh, I have a plan,” she said, though she could not at that point have told him what it was.

“I have a theory about you,” he said.

“Oh? What's that?”

“I have a theory that something big is on your mind. Something's holding you down, but you don't want to be held down. I think you could do with a bit of foxing up.”

“Foxing up? What does that mean?”

“It's an expression we use on the circuit. You know what a mope is? You know what a kneeler is?”

“No.”

“Well, a mope is mostly a bronco, and a kneeler is mostly a steer, but a mope can be either a bronco or a steer that won't perform for you. You know, when a cowboy jumps up on a bronco bareback, you expect him to give you a little action. That's what the crowd came to see, right—a little action? You may think the crowd's cheerin' for the cowboy, but they're also cheerin' for that bronco, hopin' to see that bronco knock that cowboy on his ass, pardon my French. Crowd came to see that bronco give your cowboy a good hard ride. But sometimes that bronco'll just stand there. We call him a mope. Same thing with a steer. When you're wrassling a steer, the crowd wants that steer to wrassle you back. When he won't, he's a mope, too. Or sometimes the old steer'll just kneel down in front of you, meek as a lamb. That's what we call a kneeler. When you've got an animal that won't give the crowd a good show for its money, when he's a mope or a kneeler, the guy like me has got to do something to give him some get up and go—fox him up, we call it.”

“How do you do that, Skipper?”

“Well, with a mopey pony you can use your spurs. That'll usually get him going. With a mopey steer—well, that's a little different story.”

“What do you do with a steer?”

He grinned and lowered his eyes. “Well, it's not exactly the sort of thing I'd tell a nice, well-brought-up young lady,” he said.

“Tell me anyway.”

“Well, if you think you got a steer who's gonna be a mope or a kneeler, there's a thing you can do just before he leaves the holding pen to fox him up. What you do is—” And his look now was humorous, but also sly. “Look,” he said, “there's only one way to put it. What you do is, just before he leaves the holding pen, you lift up that steer's tail, and rub his ass with a little turpentine. That makes that steer go just about crazy. That really foxes him up. It's like a fox bit that old steer in the rear end. Back in the corral, we call a can of turpentine a can of fox. Now tell old Skipper what he can do to fox you up.”

There was no particular innuendo in that unexpected invitation, and yet, in a way, there was, and she felt her cheeks grow hot and there was a ringing in her ears, and a sudden tingle of apprehension traveled from the back of her throat to the pit of her stomach. It was not quite a thrill of fear, though fear was a part of it. It was also a thrill of excitement, of danger, of somehow entering some new and unmapped territory of the unknown and perhaps unknowable. What does the paddler feel when he hears, just ahead of his kayak on the unexplored river, the first rumble of the approaching rapids? It was like that feeling, or as though she had all at once become lost in a field of tall corn, and must quickly decide which row to follow to find her way out. She took a deep breath, but no words would come out.

He tilted himself back in his tippy Dairy Queen chair, spread his legs, clasped his hands behind his head, and flexed his muscles, smiling at her in a lazy way through half-closed eyes. She stared at him, dumbstruck. He was not handsome in a conventional, movie-star sense, but his face had a kind of rugged, muscular beauty. Tilted back in his chair like that, he was all untamed muscle. His arm muscles swelled the light fabric of his checked cowboy shirt, and his leg muscles stretched the taut denim of his tight Levi's, and she was acutely aware of the bulge between his legs. Suddenly she was certain she could actually smell his sex—a hot, milky odor—though, looking back, it was probably just the normal odor of the Dairy Queen. Even to this day she could not pass a Dairy Queen without remembering that wild smell, that moment of violent confusion, and the inner shudder of animal arousal. Wasn't it strange, she sometimes thought, that a whole area of one's life could be polarized around some small, mundane image. Her first experience with sex would always be connected with that afternoon at the Dairy Queen, where everything seemed to happen at once, though nothing actually happened at all.

She began talking very rapidly, as though talking could cure the sudden dizziness she felt. She began talking about everything. She told him about Paradise, and the Ladies' Benevolent Society, and about Annie Merritt and her mother's sewing machine, and the clothes she designed and that they had made together, and she told him the little rhyme she had composed about Annie's backwardness. She told him about her father and his zoysia lawn, and about her mother running for the school board and losing, and about the man they had seen at Mr. Standish's store years ago, who looked in many ways like Skipper himself, though not really, and about her mother and her plays, and about how difficult it had been to find an agent, and about the Lunts of Genesee Depot, Wisconsin, who had returned her mother's playscript, unopened, just yesterday, with a stamp that said
UNSOLICITED MERCHANDISE.
She told him about her parents' quarrels over housekeeping, the play, and money. She told him about everything except the episode with Dale Smith and the hog-pile on the school playground, and the fact that her mother had been taken to a mental hospital in Topeka. And when she had told him everything but those two things, she stopped, out of breath.

He was still tilted back in his chair, smiling at her lazily through half-closed eyelids. “Yeah, I'd really like to fox you up,” he said, and now there was no mistaking what he meant.

He leaned forward in his chair now, and touched the back of her hand with his fingertip and drew a careless zigzag pattern there, and Alex thought for a moment that she was going to faint.

“What are you doing?” she gasped.

“I'm putting my brand on you,” he said. “That's an
S
, for Skipper. Now my brand's on you.”

She looked at the back of her hand and, for an instant, saw, or thought she saw, the letter
S
rising from her skin as a great red welt and, even more terrifying, she felt a sudden wetness between her legs, and she heard herself utter a little cry.

“Look,” he said easily, “it's almost five o'clock.” She hadn't realized that they had been talking for nearly two hours. “My gig starts at eight, but I'm not going to have you standing out there on that highway with your thumb up after dark. I'll drive you back to that little town where you live—”

“Paradise!” It came out as a gasp.

“I'll drive you back to Paradise. I've got time to do that, and still get back in time for my gig. C'mon.”

They drove home in silence, but she seemed to hear a kind of whirring, almost like an electric current, passing between them.

As he pulled up in front of her parents' house, he said, “Tomorrow. I could pick you up at the same time, same place. We'll go for a drive. I want you to show me that place where the two rivers meet.”

“All right,” she said.

He whistled softly. “Nice place you got here.”

“That's our zoysia lawn,” she said. “It's the only one in town.” And she was grateful that it was getting dark, and he could not see the angry blotches that had turned from yellow, to brown, to dead white.

As she reached for the handle to the door, he suddenly seized her left hand, pressed the back of it hard against his mouth, and licked it with his tongue, and she thought she was going to faint again. “Gotta lick my brand,” he said. “To make it heal real good.” Then he said, “Tomorrow.”

She stepped out of the car, and started up the front walk.

He leaned out the window. “Hey!” he called. “You didn't tell me your name.”

She turned. “It's Alexandra,” she said, and raised her hand.

He answered with a little jaunty wave that was almost a salute, and drove away.

She turned toward the house again, walked up the front steps, and let herself in the front door. She knew her father would be sitting alone in the kitchen, with an open bottle of beer, deep in the fathomless well of his own regrets. She went straight to her room, and lay down flat across her bed.

She knew what had happened. She had fallen in love. But she had never suspected that love would come with such thundering suddenness and terrifying force. It was more than the sudden spasm she had felt in her groin, sitting there in the Dairy Queen. Other parts of her body were involved as well. It came as that whirring in her eardrums, and a dull ache at the base of her skull. It came from the back of her throat, too, with a feeling of heaviness of her tongue, and a dryness at the roof of her mouth. But mostly it was a feeling deep behind her eyes, from wherever it was that tears sprang, and it blurred her vision. The lungs also seemed to be involved in the feeling too, for her breathing was rapid, and if she had tried to speak just then she could not have done so. Why had no one ever told her that this was what falling in love was like, that love made you feel so bruised and beaten? With her fingers she tried touching the parts of her body that hurt with love, thinking: I hurt here, and here. And here.

It was a feeling she had never had before or since. Wasn't it strange, she often thought, that a love so intense and raging, so violent and noisy and passionate as that first love had been, could have turned to hate?

“This is just great,” Mel was saying, as he paced her library, a Scotch-and-water in his hand. “What an opportunity for you, Alex! What a way to tell that Rothman outfit to sweet fuckoff! McCulloch really
does
have all the money in the world. Just think—a whole new magazine that will be yours and yours alone!”

“Well, I don't know,” she said from where she sat. “A whole new magazine sounds great, but you don't start a magazine by saying presto-chango, here's a whole new magazine. A magazine requires a
concept
, and I don't really have a new magazine concept.”