All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel (2 page)

Sally looked annoyed. “He wanted me to give him a blow job,” she said. “I didn’t feel like it. Then he said I was frigid.”

“Let me drive you to Lake Charles,” I said. “I’ve never been in Louisiana.”

She looked at me for several seconds. She looked so vulnerable that I felt I had to try very hard to be trustworthy. “Okay,” she said. We kissed again and she was more interested. I felt very shy. Then an old lady and a basset came walking along and we got off the car and went on to Godwin’s. He was sitting on the front steps, wearing red Bermuda shorts and no shirt. He was rubbing some kind of salve onto his chest, and he didn’t look very dapper.

“I’m glad you’re back,” he said to Sally. “Awful pain. I was looking for you in the garden and a bee stung me. Never even saw the little bugger. I’m all swollen. First bee sting of my life.”

Sally looked remote. “Danny’s going to take me to Lake Charles,” she said. “I just want to get my dresses and my radio.”

She walked up the steps and into the house. Godwin put the lid on the bottle of salve he was using. “This bloody stuff doesn’t work,” he said.

“Wet baking soda’s supposed to be good,” I said.

Godwin sighed. “I love her and you’re taking her away,” he said. “Not ethical. You were my guest—now you’re robbing me. No ethical code advocates robbing one’s host.”

I was embarrassed. I hadn’t expected him to say he loved her.

“You have some grace,” he said. “You know it’s wrong, what you’re doing. Go away before she comes out and I shall always respect you.”

“I don’t think she loves you,” I said.

“A fact that alters nothing,” Godwin said. “I love her. Please leave. You’re obviously a promising young man. I’ve heard you’re the best young writer in the state. A theft of this nature will only drag you down. Go away and write. I need Sally.”

I felt very defensive. “You don’t treat her well,” I said.

It made him furious. “Oh, bugger you!” he said. “Pretentious young bastard. How could you write? What do you know? I
don’t
treat her well, as it happens, but it’s fucking none of your business. I love her, however I treat her. Losing her will cost me a bloody whole year of pain. Bugger you! You’ll treat her too bloody well and make her miserable too. Fucking little thief! Please. Don’t do it. Go away before she comes out.”

“Look,” I said. “She doesn’t want to stay here. If I don’t steal her somebody else will.”

The temper went out of him. “You admit it’s a crime, but you’re still going to do it,” he said. “There’s no salvation for you. Only a bloody writer would be that unscrupulous.”

“I’ve only published two stories,” I said. “What does my being a writer have to do with it?”

“I do not propose to explain it,” he said. “My bee sting hurts. Take Sally then. You shan’t have her long. Robbery breeds robbery. Somebody will take her from you as easily as you’re taking her from me. I might have held her, given a bloody break or two, but you’ll make her fucking unhold-able forever. Then I suppose you’ll go away and write about it.”

“Do you dislike all writers?”

“Every bloody one,” he said. “They ought to be imprisoned. They’re all thieves.”

“I didn’t plan this,” I said.

That made him mad again. “Oh, fuck off, for God’s sake,” he said. “Who cares what you didn’t plan?”

Sally came out then. She had her clothes in a blue suitcase and carried a radio under one arm. She sat them down on the steps a minute, to readjust her hold. Godwin took a can of beer from between his ankles and sipped it.

“Love, don’t leave me,” he said. “He’s utterly bloody wrong for you. I know I was a brute last night, but I was really quite drunk. Can’t I be forgiven? I’m only that awful when I’m drunk.”

“I forgive you,” Sally said. “That wasn’t even it. I just don’t want to stay.”

“What was
it
?” Godwin asked.

“Geoffrey told me he went to bed with you,” Sally said. “He said you wanted him to move in and stay in the room next to mine. I guess I’m just too simple a girl for that.”

“Oh, bugger!” Godwin said, leaping to his feet. He grabbed Sally’s radio and threw it all the way out into the middle of the street—it busted to smithereens when it hit the pavement. He kicked her suitcase down the steps but I caught it and it wasn’t hurt. Sally ran down where I was. Godwin was purple in the face he was so mad.

“Get out of here!” he yelled. “Go have a simple straight-A fuck somewhere, that’s what you need. You goddamn well don’t need an odd fucker like me in your life!”

“I just said I was simple,” Sally said.

“And so you are, my dear,” he yelled. “A simple, stupid, frigid young bitch! God spare me from your kind! God spare me! I’d rather fuck turtles, if turtles can be fucked, than to touch you again! Get away from my house. I’m sorry I
ever knew you.” He was trembling like he was about to collapse.

“You shut up!” Sally said. “What’s so bad about being simple?”

“
I’m
not simple,” Godwin said. “God spare me from simple little American beauties like you. Your simpleness is the bloody most destructive force on the fucking planet! I hope I never meet anyone under forty again.”

Then he sat down on the steps and began to sob. We didn’t know what to say. Finally I picked up Sally’s suitcase and we walked away, leaving the busted radio in the street. Before we got half a block Godwin began to follow us, waving his beer can and crying for Sally to come back. He followed us all the way to my car and stood on the sidewalk crying. His chest was white with salve and his tears were making it messy.

“Love, don’t leave me,” he said. “Geoffrey meant nothing to me. I would never have let him move in. You know I love you most dearly.”

Sally looked exasperated. “Oh, Godwin, go wash off your bee sting,” she said.

It switched him once more from tears to anger. He flung his beer can at us but it missed the car and landed in the street. It was almost empty anyway. Godwin suddenly rushed at the car and began to shove it, trying as hard as he could to turn it over.

“Cunt!” he yelled. “Selfish young cunt! Cunt! Cunt!”

He was really yelling and the Chevy was really rocking. Sally scooted over next to me.

“Let’s go,” she said.

Just as I was about to start the car Godwin quit shoving and rushed around to the front end. Suddenly he disappeared from view. He was obviously doing something in front of the car, but we couldn’t see what.

“What now?” I asked. Sally looked disgusted. I left my motor running and got out to look. Godwin had his arms wrapped around the front bumper and his feet braced against the car in front of me. He looked grimly determined.

“You shan’t take her,” he said. “I shall hang on till death. You’ll have to crush me.”

I checked the rear and saw I could back out with no trouble. Godwin’s jaw was set and his feet still braced. He had a death grip on the bumper.

“Look,” I said. “We really are leaving. It’s just inevitable.”

“I’ve challenged the inevitable before and beaten it,” he said. “We have nothing to discuss.”

I got in next to Sally. “We can back out,” I said. “How long do you think he’ll hang on?”

“Not long,” she said. “He’s not very stubborn.”

I backed out quite slowly and without speeding up much eased backward down the street. It was a wide, quiet residential street near the university. Sally was right. After I had backed past two houses Godwin appeared in front of us, sitting in the road.

“See,” she said.

I drove up beside him, but kept far enough away that he couldn’t rush us. He stood up just as I pulled beside him and actually grinned at me. Somehow he had become composed and dapper again.

“Well, fun and games,” he said. “It’s not worth the skin off my ass. You’re bloody gutsy. I could have scared most kids off. Merry fucking and may you rot in hell.”

He bent and looked in the window at Sally. “Bye, love,” he said, his voice dropping. He thrust his head in, past me, and kissed her cheek.

“Bye, Godwin,” she said. “You better not let Geoffrey in or you’ll really be screwed.”

Godwin shrugged, as if it were a matter of no moment.
He smiled a dapper smile, but only with his mouth. His eyes were wet. He strolled to the sidewalk and we drove on, past the university, out 19th Street, out of Austin. It was mid-July and the highway shimmered with heat.

“I have to admire his temper,” I said.

Sally sniffed. “I don’t,” she said. “He yells a lot, but he sure can’t fuck very well.”

FORTUNATELY
discontentment doesn’t affect my appetite. Sally had just walked out the door, mad, which made me very discontent, but just before she left she had fried a whole chicken and I sat at the ironing board and ate the half of it that was rightfully mine. The ironing board was what we were using for a kitchen table.

Sally hadn’t really wanted to go to Lake Charles, when she left Godwin. I was completely in love with her, so I took her to Houston with me and a week later we got married. I wouldn’t have minded living in sin for a while, but Sally was scared of her parents. Lake Charles wasn’t very far away and she was afraid they would get wind of things, in which case her father would come up and kill us. I was just as glad to get married, but I was surprised at how often Sally got mad at me, afterward. We had only been married three weeks and she had already walked out in high dudgeon five or six times. I could never understand what I did to put her in high dudgeon, but whatever it was I always felt utterly to blame.

It was a hot, muggy Houston dusk, and big Gulf Coast mosquitoes flitted against the window screen while I ate
my chicken. The fact that Sally had gone away mad preyed on my mind and made me indecisive. It took me five minutes to decide whether to put her half of the chicken in the oven or in the icebox. Finally I put it in the oven, and just as I did someone knocked at the door. My immediate thought was that it must be Mrs. Salomea, a formidable lady whose backyard we walked through in order to get to our apartment. Just that morning I had done something absolutely inexcusable and I was sure Mrs. Salomea was coming to accost me about it.

I think having Sally to sleep with had given me the confidence to do what I did. I had been wanting to for months, before she came, and hadn’t had the nerve. Mrs. Salomea had a terrific old tree in her backyard. Its top branches must have been two hundred feet above the ground, and it was always full of squirrels. I had a little single-shot .22—it had been the only gun I could afford all through my childhood, when hunting had been an obsession with me. I thought I had outgrown the obsession, but Mrs. Salomea’s tree full of squirrels made it come back on me. All the time I was writing my novel I could see the squirrels out the window and I kept wanting to go out and shoot one. Sometimes in the morning, before I started writing, I would sit with the .22 and shoot eight or ten squirrels in my imagination, always aiming at the ones on the highest branches. That morning, in a moment of complete happiness, I had actually shot one.

Sally was the reason I was so happy. We meant to make love when we went to bed, but for some reason I got to talking and we didn’t. I guess we slept all night feeling sexy, because about dawn we woke up doing it. We had just sort of rolled together. I went right back to sleep and when I woke up again, about seven, I felt wonderful. Sally was still asleep. A crease in the sheet had made a crease on one side of her face. I felt clear and dry and hungry, and extremely
like working. Out the window I could see the squirrels in Mrs. Salomea’s tree. I felt that I had lived a routine life long enough. I would have taken a parachute jump, if one had been offered me just then. It was obvious to me that I could do much more than I had been doing. I put on some Levi’s and got my .22 and one shell and went outside. The thick St. Augustine grass in the Salomeas’ yard was wet with dew. Pale-yellow shafts of sunlight slanted down through the leaves of the great tree. I was only going to shoot a running squirrel, not one that was sitting. Finally a brown squirrel ran along a branch very high up, eighty-five feet I’m sure, maybe a hundred, just a movement on the branch with the sun flickering through the leaves right above him. I swung and shot and he dropped straight down all those feet of air, as if a string had been stretched from where I hit him straight to the ground. It was a perfect shot. He was dead before he left the branch. His beautiful brown coat had beads of dew on it when I picked him up. I know I should have left him alive, but I couldn’t have, not that morning. I’m afraid I was his fate—otherwise I couldn’t have hit him at that distance, with him running and the sun in my eyes. I hadn’t shot a gun in seven or eight years, either; but that is not to say it was a lucky shot. It was perfect, not lucky. I was frying him when Sally woke up.

“What have you done now?” she said. She was standing in the kitchen doorway, holding her clothes over her arm.

“I can still shoot,” I said.

Sally was horrified. “We have cereal we can eat!” she said, pointing at it. “Wheat germ is perfectly healthy. I wouldn’t have married you if I’d known you were going to kill animals.”

She wouldn’t touch the squirrel—I had to eat it all myself. “Squirrels are in no danger of extinction,” I said. “Animals
would drive us off the earth if a few weren’t killed now and then.”

My reasonableness didn’t placate her. I apologized several times during the day, but it did no good. There was no knowing if she would ever forgive me for killing the squirrel—or for anything else I did that she didn’t like. Forgiveness was not the kind of act Sally was prone to. By her own admission she had never been heartbroken in her life.

She liked to eat meat, too. It just never occurs to her while she’s eating it that an animal has been killed. She looked at me all morning like I was the Butcher of Dachau. Finally it bugged me.

“People with appetites like yours shouldn’t be so idealistic,” I said. “How would you like to live on kelp for the rest of your life?”

Maybe my saying that was why she walked off mad, six hours later. She has delayed reactions. Sure enough, it was Mrs. Salomea who had knocked at the door.