Something to Be Desired by Thomas Mcguane Read Free Book Online

angry.
    “There,” she said, “I feel much better.” She had her off-center smile, and the distant cast of her eyes which was not romantic or faraway but otherwise occupied. The smile brightened and the eyes focused on Lucien with a sexual glaze.
    “You’re still carrying that old torch for me, aren’t you?” she asked with some pride.
    “Yes.”
    “Why, how nice for you,” she said. “To have a life’s theme. An old flame. An old flame that never dies is like those overbuilt goddamn English shoes rich ladies used to wear. The illusion of everlasting life. That’s what came with them. You buy a pair of those beauties when you get out of Miss Whozit’s, and forty years later they haul you to the boneyard in the same brown shoes with the shiny eyelets. That’s about how much the old-flame number is doing for me.”
    “May I have a blow job?”
    “Pure poetry, Lucien.… I met a couple at Alabama Jack’s restaurant in Florida who said they ran into you in South America. They said you had a wonderful wife, a beautiful girl, but you were inattentive to her and looked like you wanted to join the space program.”
    “I joined the USIA. Wasn’t that enough for them?”
    “Apparently not. They were absolutely sober.”
    Lucien scratched at the dial of his watch with a fingernail. “Look,” he said, “is it all that terrible that I’ve gone on having these feelings? Not everyone has such a happy view of his own past.”
    “Was I the first girl you ever slept with?” she asked with terrific glee.
    “Pretty darn close.”
    “ ‘Pretty darn close’!” She was put out. “How far did I miss by?”
    “There was a real sweet Assiniboin girl at Plentywood when I was on the baseball team.”
    “It seems you have an array of genuinely happy memories,” Emily said with unconcealed indignation.
    Lucien raised a cautioning finger. “Remember, now, you were sleeping with the doctor. My dear.”
    “That guy,” said Emily. “Don’t worry about that bastard. I shot him dead.”

4
     
 
    The saw-whet owl, an occasional predator of the river lowlands, burned through Lucien’s view and got something past the granary. There was a small cry, and it wasn’t the owl’s. Lucien walked and puffed on a bait-shack-style corncob pipe, a Missouri meerschaum he’d bought on a stateside trip with his aunt. He had been away from the area for years, some years in which English was his second language. He was an iron man of information, but just maybe what passed for strength of character was nothing more than a low resting pulse rate.
    Using the corncob pipe as a prop, Lucien imagined himself old and alone on the ranch. In front of the frame house a piebald domestic duck cruised by itself on the green pond. Inside, an old man (the Lucien of the future) felt himself cooling, felt the heat of the light bulb on his hands as he turned the pages of his book.
    Lucien started to get nervous.
    That night the hired man had him down for ice cream and checkers. Though he scarcely knew him, Lucien played as though his life depended on it. Lucien knew W.T. took his frenzy for the creaking of a harsh and unremitting soul, but he played on.
    Twice Lucien got up and stared at the lights of the main house. The third time W. T. Austinberry said, “Jump, and king me.”
    Lucien sat down and pressed three fingers on a checker he wasn’t sure he’d play. He was suddenly afraid of something. Maybe he was just tired.
    “Let’s finish this game.”
    “Not till she’s over,” said W.T.
    Lucien floundered onto his elbows. “Can’t play any more.” He was drunk.
    “You gettin’ you a little up to the big house?”
    “Don’t start that.”
    W.T. threw his head back. “Lord!” he bayed. “It’s a little bitty world.”
    They fought bitterly but briefly, bloodying each other’s faces on the floor, then refilled their drinks and resumed the checker game. The checkers were all over the board.
    “You with the FBI?” asked