Baby Geisha Read Free

Iggy asked rhetorically. He admired the stalwart way Jody held her cigarette, between her forefinger and thumb as if in some survivalist militia.
    â€œAll I know is that once I got that body cast sliced off with the doc’s pizza cutter, I wanted to find a man to settle down and have a kid with. Life’s too short,” Jody said.
    â€œI hear that,” Iggy said. “The only way I can slow it down is to hijack myself to random places like this.”
    â€œThis place is random!” Jody laughed. “I saw you, almost speeding off in your car, bored stiff. So, you managed to slow it down after all, good for you.”
    Another wave of despondence about the turtle, in the form of nausea, rushed Iggy. Maybe batting that creature back and forth had been Jody’s way of slowing a moment down. It had operated as a slow-motion nightmare. Iggy couldn’t help but mentally replay the event. He had burned through quite a few horror films in his time, and it crossed his mind that maybe that’s what he had liked about them—the way time suspended in nascent cataclysm followed by the predicted trauma. Hell, even his past drug use was likely tied to this.
    Kitty marched in to wash his charcoal-blackened fingers in the sink.
    â€œWhat are you two lovebirds up to?” Kitty asked. “You missed a fine finale. Five Black Diamonds in a row. I wore sunglasses.”
    â€œWe traumatized Ig with our turtle rugby,” Jody said. “And I think we owe him an apology.”
    A sobering shock circulated through Iggy like hot coffee.

    â€œSorry, Miss Sensitive,” Kitty said. “But you have us to thank for saving your big toe, which that turtle might have snapped clean off.”
    â€œThanks, but I can care for my own toes,” Iggy said, looking down at them, snug in hiking boots. “I’d better head out.”
    â€œNice to meet you,” Kitty said, followed by Jody. There had been no expectation to hook up, which also made Iggy feel better, as Jody was not the most attractive girl he’d ever seen. The siblings waved Iggy off, and shot one last spray up in the air to light his path down the obscure, rocky driveway to pavement.
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    The next day was sunny on the Meramec, and Iggy had a hangover. He decided to float. He pulled on his trunks, rented a tube, and headed out, wading off shore into deeper water flow and getting snagged along the way on Missouri’s thorny equivalent to asparagus fern, the nasty plant that used to plague his childhood home’s yard. Iggy wondered if his mother had named him in honor of that irritating plant, because Iggy rhymed with spriggy and that sounded a lot like prickly . Iggy’s mom loved singing and rhyming like that—always the poet. Iggy then flashed back to his ex-girlfriend, Finnegan, who had claimed his name reminded her of an opera-singing bear bathing under a misty waterfall. Iggy liked that idea better, having no idea what it meant but missing Finnegan, who had left him for a woman. What could he have done about that? All the women I fall for are lesbians, he mused, wondering why. In fact, the very idea of lesbians aroused him on the spot, and he got a pup tent in his trunks despite the cold water as he plunged in. Too bad there were no women to be seen for miles, and that he was a total chicken when it came to propositioning them. He spinned his tube around to catch sun sparkles on the innocuous rapids. He would float all day down to another tube rental place, and shuttle back to his camp where he could jostle his pup tent in the privacy of his own larger shelter.

    Iggy drifted alone for the first hour, contemplating the night before: his fury inflamed by savagery only to be tamed by a glimpse of authentic human decency, the unexpected sincerity of Jody’s confession. Then, he came upon a group of people whose tubes were tied together with ropes, and who had also tied nets to their tubes as makeshift beer