The Up-Down by Barry Gifford Read Free Book Online Page A

me,” said Bitsy.
    After she left, Pace looked at his interrupted sentence. “Men got a kind of automatic shutoff valve” Lula was telling Sailor. Pace wrote: “in their head? Like, you’re talkin’ to one and just gettin’ to the part where you’re gonna say what you really been wantin’ to say, and then you say it and you look at him and he ain’t even heard it. Not like it’s too complicated or somethin’, just he ain’t about to really listen.”
    Pace stopped writing and looked out the window in front of his desk. A large crow landed in the yard and stared so hard and fixedly at him that Pace turned away. When he looked again, the crow had gone and a little rain was falling.

 
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    15
    In the fifth month of Bitsy’s pregnancy, her sister, Rapunzelina Cruz, came to stay with Bitsy and Del. Rapunzelina was twelve years younger than Bitsy, the baby of the family. She had been living in Mexico City for the past two and a half years where she’d married a much older man named Abstemio Cruz, a cocktail lounge singer and piano player who specialized in harmlessly crooning the songs of Águstin Lara, Johnny Mathis, Dean Martin and Fred Buscaglioni. Rapunzelina was finished, she told Del and Bitsy, with her husband and Mexico, both of which had lost their charm: the city because of its impossible traffic, smog and all too common physical dangers such as rape, robbery and kidnapping for ransom; and Señor Cruz, who turned out to be an insufferable and abusive drunk. Rapunzelina intended to stay in North Carolina and go back to college, which she had dropped out of after her sophomore year. In Mexico she tried to convince herself she was a painter, having fallen under the spell of the myth of Frida Kahlo, whom she now considered to be vastly overrated as an artist. Rapunzelina admitted to herself that she possessed no real talent and planned to go to nursing school and devote herself to helping people. She had not, however, told her husband that she had no intention of going back to Mexico City or to him and feared that might become a problem if he decided to come after her. When she met Pace and mentioned this, Pace asked, “What are the chances of that?” “We’ll see,” was all Rapunzelina said.
    Rapunzelina did not know when she arrived that it most probably was Pace who was the father of her sister’s child. Her predilection for men considerably older than herself had not abated and soon after moving into Dalceda Delahoussaye’s house she set about advertising her availability to Pace. Not only was Rapunzelina twelve years younger than Bitsy but she was even more attractive and not shy about wearing skimpy outfits that showcased her hourglass figure and amply complemented her abundant ash-blonde hair and green cat’s eyes. She took to visiting Pace in his cottage at late hours and for the first few weeks of her residence he resisted her obvious advances. He feared straining his relations with Bitsy, who gave clear indications to Pace of wanting to resume a sexual component to their friendship. This, too, Pace avoided. He had no exaggerated belief in his own attractiveness and had never thought of himself as an exceptional ladies man, even less so now that he was nearing sixty years old. It was a mystery to him why this was happening.
    Then one night Rapunzelina—whom Del and Bitsy and now Pace called Punzy, her childhood nickname—knocked on Pace’s door and when he answered asked him, “Is it true, Pace? Are you the one knocked up Bitsy?”
    â€œDid Bitsy tell you that?”
    â€œWho else could have? She spilled the beans after I told her I had a crush on you. Here I’ve been tryin’ to get you to screw me and all the time you’re my big sister’s man.”
    Pace winced. “I’m not Bitsy’s or anyone else’s man,” he said. “And the child could be Del’s.