The Cadence of Grass Read Free Page B

liked it down there because it was so blue and futuristic and you’re walking around with thirty-five SPF sunblock all over you just checking everything out. It was way different than prison, I can tell you, with these creeps that look like they fell out of a bad dream.” Paul remembered when those creeps had suddenly become his friends, once he’d turned on the snitches and they’d invented a board game they’d named Where the Fuck Is Carmen Santiago. He’d never achieved such popularity anywhere.
    “You want to lock the door and get it on?” he inquired.
    “No, Paul, there’s a time and a place for that.”
    He couldn’t imagine what he would’ve done had she said yes. But she sure knew how to turn a guy off.
There’s a time and a place
. Obviously, once you’re a bureaucrat you start losing all your vital juices and you turn into a
cactus
. “Would you say that you’ve behaved like a professional in handling my case?”
    “Paul, I must have said something to offend you.” She smiled a little and raised her eyebrows.
    He chuckled. “I’ve got to go,” he said, “but please don’t torment yourself that I haven’t enjoyed myself here. I know I’m not the easiest case you’ve got. I’ve mired myself in the Seven Deadly Sins.” He got up and Geraldine too thought she would rise and see him off. It was clear now that she had made a big mistake with Paul, and in admitting to herself that she’d been had, she remembered how something about him had captivated her against all her best judgment, not just his very good looks, his compact physique and fine features, the particular way his black hair was combed in a kind of 1930s look, and his quickness of mind. There was really something infernal about Paul, but it was only this very sulfurousness that made her act so out of character and believe that they were entitled to a harmless good time together. The last time they’d made love and she’d asked him if she was “good,” he’d replied that it was the thought that counted, adding, as he finished dressing, “Feets, don’t fail me now.” It was clear to her that Paul’s contempt for her was based on his belief that she had fallen from grace and was now somehow on his level. He was wrong about that.
    Following their appointment, Paul drove no more than five blocks and stopped to buy an ice cream. Across the street, a Little League game spun along, two squads of uniformed children and a small group of towering grown-ups, strangely inconsequential looking against the small squads of activists. Paul licked his cone avidly and watched each successive batter, dense with sporting affectations, swing at the ball with surprising vehemence. One angel-faced boy hit a stand-up double, and Paul observed both the pitcher’s nearly operatic despair and the disgusted whirl of his coach. The hitter stood on second base with the detachment of a broadly successful person, doing a few stretches, presumably for the final sprint to home plate, but generally taking in the benevolence of Indian summer in the mountains. This was so much like the baseball-stopped time of his own childhood, when he had been such an utterly different human being that he could, tongue against the ice cream, ponder this in curious stupefaction.
    Paul did not want to eat the remainder of the dry cone now, but since two little athletes were watching him, he couldn’t very well throw it on the ground and was forced to cram it into his mouth.
    Crossing a country road, Paul saw numerous nearly identical new homes gnawed through old grain fields toward the Bridger Mountains, one after the other like a caterpillar. A combine made its way while holding up homebound suburban traffic, exasperation in every direction, the guilt of the farmer evident in his slouch and his avoidance of all eye contact, his deafness to horns and abrupt passings. The sign in front of a new subdivision invited the buyer to “select from over eighteen models.”
    Paul