The Half-Mammals of Dixie by George Singleton

Author:George Singleton [Singleton, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2002-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

I WASN’T THE ONLY man in the tree house to’ve had an affair with Dean’s wife. Her name was Ursula. All of us took to her, before and after she married Dean. Ursula was from Woodfall, too, a year behind us in school. She went to four junior colleges before graduating with a degree in communication, which gave her enough background to either work in a record store or, evidently, marry a banker. I’m not proud of this, even the “before she married Dean” part. It’s one of those things. You walk into the house, Dean’s not home, and the next thing you know Ursula’s either on her knees, stomach, or back, right there on the kitchen floor. I’m no expert on mesmerism, but I’ve come to believe that somewhere along the line she went to a hypnotist and that guy had told her that whenever she heard the words “Hey, where’s your husband?” she would turn horny. To be honest, I’d not fallen victim since marrying my wife. When Dean wasn’t around, I just shut their kitchen door and ran like hell back to the car.

But seeing as men will be men, whenever Dean paddled out somewhere for high ground to take a crap, the rest of us would sit in the tree house looking at each other like fools. It took about a nanosecond before one of us would say, “Ursula, Ursula, Ursula” in time with the cicadas, and then go into minor details about the last time he’d seen her.

“I’m sure Dean knows all about it,” I said one time. “I can’t believe she wouldn’t say anything. Maybe they’re swingers.”

“She keeps sending me pictures of herself naked,” Russell said. “I disagree. I think she likes knowing that she’s putting one over on Dean. And I think she loves making us scared to be around him a couple times a year. It’s a power trip, man.”

Dean yelled out from the swamp, “Hey, fuckface, it means something if your cork zigzags down on the bottom of the swamp, doesn’t it?”

I looked at Russell and Evan. “It’s pretty weird that we’ve all ended up in these different professions, but I think old Dean’s finally seeing himself as something different than us.”

Evan said, “Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we should tell him all about how we screw his wife whenever we can. That’ll put him back in his place. That’ll bring him back down to our level. Hey, maybe one of us should get the clap, you know. Then we can all be part of a losers’ club.”

I reached in my pack and pulled out a half gallon of bourbon and four Ninja Turtle shot glasses I found down at South of the Border. I poured three, we lifted them, and all of us said “Ursula” after looking to make sure Dean still squatted far away.

Evan said, “He’s going to find out and two things’ll happen. First off he’ll kill us. Then he’ll start robbing his own bank. Mark my words. Write it down somewhere.

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