Barefoot to Avalon by David Payne

Author:David Payne
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2015-07-24T13:32:30+00:00

7

Hey, boys . . .

And here, in the nick of time, is Imogen our sister not-so-sister to break the impasse.

–What’s up with you two? Am I interrupting?

–Interrupt us.

–Please.

–Take my wife.

Im tilts her head and grins at us with Jack’s grin, one eye squinted.

–I was going to offer you a bit of this—a joint appears—but it looks like I’m too late.

–It’s never too late!

–Until it is, says George A.

–Until it is, I agree, continuing our routine.

Im supplies the relief, we supply—such as it is—the comedy. Like the Marx Brothers before us, like Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Cheech and Chong—like them, only not so funny.

George A. takes the joint, cups it, fires up. His big hand now is steady as a rock. He rears away and flicks the lighter shut decisively. From the Titanic lifeboats and Gatsby shivering at the grotesqueness of roses, he’s gone to the Marlboro Man in ten or fifteen seconds.

–Should you be doing that? I ask him mildly.

–Probably not, he answers on the inhale, through clinched teeth, and in his black eyes there’s a trace of defiance, even glee.

A hand in her back pocket, Im gives us that head-tilted grin again, the one she gave me that first night at Four Roses when Alvin offered to forgo the tater, a look of skeptical amusement like she was up for trouble and curious if I had any on the docket.

After several gin and tonics, wine at dinner and a joint or two of California sensimilla, which she smuggled on the plane ride in her undies, so she told me, she and I decided to go swimming and since we didn’t have our suits we what-the-fucked it and hauled it up the dune and down the back side to the lightless beach, where we went skinny-dipping. Im, more comfortable in her skin than I was, stood up in the wash and slicked her hair back, giving me a frontal shot more stoning than the sensi, and I, trotting out my not-so-true and still not even very tried seduction playbook, swirled my hands in the chilly ocean and told her that phytoplankton caused the bioluminescence we were seeing and that the particular phytoplankton in this case were those called Noctiluca—“Night-lights, from the Latin.” And Im, appearing to be interested or just pretending like so many summer girls to follow, listened to my shy and nerdy and not entirely unstrategic explanation and I cupped my hand and made a fist and let the water drizzle down the front of her no longer masked by sheer white cotton, let the water and the moonlight and my eyes run all over Imogen. And when the waves broke, or when they break now in my memory, they lit up like George A.’s teeth in that grin of happy illegality, which shows up on my face, too, and Bill’s, from whom we got it. And before long Im and I were downstairs in the lair in my twin bed going at it.

That first wild

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