Vital Parts Read Free Page A

date and thoroughly contrary to Reinhart’s soul—his best friend in the Army had been an Italian-American, and as irony would have it, Reinhart had once joined him in beating up a guy who called him a guinea—the epithet was chosen with a sense of what would wound Gino most to find on his own toilet wall, revenge being futile unless it strikes bone.
    Just as Reinhart finished, another customer checked into the stall next door and, reading “Chuck’s” message, stared at Reinhart’s disappearing ball-pen and assumed, you could tell from his steely irises, that Reinhart was the Phantom Faggot.
    It would have been useless to explain. Reinhart joined Sweet on the square mile of asphalt outside, the apron of a gigantic shopping center which trapped and intensified, by solar reflection off the white and pastel-colored façades, the tropical heat of July in southern Ohio, to which was added the thermal exhausts of a thousand cars as well as the steamy exhalations of countless cooked consumers.
    Sweet glanced at his black-faced Omega, of which Reinhart wore a fifteen-dollar plagiarism. “The work on my aircraft should be finished by now, so I’ll go straight out to the hangars.” He wore a beautiful pearl-gray suit of some zephyrweight material, with working buttonholes at the wrists, which Reinhart had read, in the woman’s-mag reminiscences of a former flunky in the grande luxe hotels of Switzerland, was the true test of a tailor-made garment.
    The encounter with Gino and the suffocating heat of outdoors had begun to sweat Reinhart towards sobriety. Already there were blackened areas of damp beneath his armpits, which cooled briefly, nastily, if he lifted his upper extremities. Therefore he put his hand out to Sweet, while keeping the elbow close in.
    â€œBob, I can’t say how much I have enjoyed this. Let’s do it again soon.”
    Sweet’s hand was forceful yet fleeting. He was clearly a man who could not waste time on nugatory routine.
    â€œIt’s a pity we were only getting around to the core of things when that phone call pulled you away,” said he. “Carl, I have my sentimental side too. This shopping center depresses me when I think of the fields that were here when we were kids. But things change every sixty seconds in life. I am myself no longer the little mess I was, so if the landscape is lost, the gain is mine. You have to think of things that way or you’ll be drowned by the changes of time. Someone’s always losing, and someone else is winning. There is no standing still for anybody.”
    Sobering, Reinhart wished again he had not been so candid. He said: “I’ve had my ups and downs. There’s a kind of rhythm to that too. I drink too much once in a while and lose my sense of proportion. Thanks again, Bob, and I’ll see you around.” If he had had an automobile, he would have jumped in it and gunned off. But his own vehicle had been repossessed and Genevieve used the other one.
    â€œWait a minute,” said Sweet. “Let’s exchange cards. I’d drop you someplace but you obviously didn’t walk here—”
    But he had, at least from the bus stop. “As it happens, my Cad is in the shop. An associate dropped me off here. I was going to catch a cab back.”
    â€œThen that settles it,” Sweet stated. “We’ll have a few minutes more together.” He stared at his watch again and then across the vast parking lot towards the roaring highway.
    Reinhart wondered why the tycoon tarried. He asked: “Where is your wagon?” Amid the multicolored hundreds ranked on the plain, through the aisles between which women pushed steel-mesh shopping carts, followed by sturdy, tanned children sucking on Good Humors or chewing wilted pizza slices of flecked yellow on blood-red. Men trundled power mowers, aluminum wheelbarrows, golf carts, and miniature snowplows on which there was a