I Cannot Get You Close Enough Read Free Page B

wants him.”
    We were sitting on the porch watching them. Daniel was shooting baskets. Sheila was sitting in a wicker chair in that red-and-yellow dress, watching him shoot. She never said, that’s wonderful, never clapped, never applauded. She just sat there in that sundress with a tie on one shoulder and the other shoulder bare and watched. He had been shooting for half an hour without pausing or seeming to come up for breath, only glancing her way if a shot went in or one went seriously awry.
    â€œHow could she have anyone?” Phelan said. “I can smell her from here. There’s a smell they have, the real bitches. Like the smell of something about to die or give you leprosy. Pussy smell. Uncle Dudley said he smelled it once on a whore in Memphis and that once you smell it you can never forget it.”
    I guess I blushed. Phelan Manning was the only boy in the world who would talk like that to a girl from Charlotte. He pretended not to notice my blushes and went right on. Got up and put his foot on the porch rail. Phelan and I were in college. I guess Daniel and Sheila were about fourteen. Maybe it was the summer I ran away and married Walker.
    Phelan went on. “Uncle Dudley was sucking a whore’s cunt on the table in Matamoros while we watched. Then he gave her a hundred dollars for letting him do it. He said it was to teach us not to be afraid of anything. He said the thing to fear is not doing anything you want to do before you die.”
    â€œI don’t want to hear about it,” I said. “I’ve heard all I can stand about that trip to Mexico. That’s all you’ve talked about all summer.” It was true. His Uncle Dudley and his cousin Charles Dunbar had taken them parrot hunting. A Mexican general who owns orange groves had them down to shoot the parrots that eat the oranges. The parrots come in flocks up out of the swamps and eat all the oranges and ruin the harvest and they shoot them from the roll-back top of Mercedes touring cars. Driving around in groups of three. One to drive, one to shoot, one to load. Driving around in between the orange trees shooting parrots as fast as they can shoot. On the way to the orange groves they had stopped in Matamoros to fuck whores, and Phelan’s uncle had been bitten by a dog in the street and wouldn’t even get the rabies shots. “He’s still alive,” Phelan kept saying, when he told the Mexican stories that summer. “I guess he just can’t die.”
    â€œAnyway,” Phelan concluded. “That’s who this little girl reminds me of.”
    â€œOf what? The whore or your Uncle Dudley?”
    â€œOf the way that smelled. Maybe it’s for sale, maybe that’s what I’m smelling. We ought to get Daniel away from that before he gets any older. They get their hooks in you and every time you see them you want to lay them down. You can’t forget the first one.”
    I sighed. This was going to go on all summer. If I hung out with Phelan, I had to hear about his sexual conquests. Phelan was ahead of his time in the sexual revolution. He had leaped over his pale generation in the South. “Okay, Phelan,” I said. “Who got their hooks in you? Who was the first girl you did it to?”
    â€œI guess I can tell.” He leaned down across his propped-up knee, seemed to contemplate a pressing moral dilemma. “She doesn’t live here anymore so you will never meet her.”
    â€œYou aren’t supposed to tell even if they live in Alaska,” I answered. I got up from my chair, moved closer to him. He turned and faced me, that wonderful soft look on his face. It was before I ran away and married Walker or I would have known what all that meant. I didn’t know. We didn’t know anything back then. We talked about it but we didn’t know. Anyway, I never fell in love with Phelan. We were too right for each other, distant cousins, such good friends. It