Volume 8
An Online Literary Magazine
December 16, 2013

 

Samson

Fiction

Dennis Vannatta

 


Yul Brynner, Telly Savalas, Michael Jordan—put hair on them and they’re a bunch of clowns, but bald? Stay back, ladies. One at a time, please. Telly Savalas as Kojak.

 

A
ll the men on the Mitchell side of the family eventually developed a widow’s peak. Gil’s began to present itself when he was in college. He didn’t like it, but what can you do? By the time he was in his mid-thirties, though, the widow’s peak itself was receding. That bare patch on the crown of his head expanded until it threatened to meet up with the shrinking widow’s peak, leaving hair only over his ears and the back of his head and a wispy band across the top of his head. Hideous. His self-esteem would have been in jeopardy, but he’d never had much of that particular quality to start with. He stuck it out until he was forty but then one day lathered up his whole damn skull and shaved it clean.

 

He stared in the mirror trying to decide, was this or was it not the dumbest thing he’d ever done? But then suddenly he was staggered by a shocking realization: he looked good.

 

“Whoa, Gil, you da man.”

 

Why should he be surprised? Yul Brynner, Telly Savalas, Michael Jordan—put hair on them and they’re a bunch of clowns, but bald? Stay back, ladies. One at a time, please.

 

Not that Gil was suddenly on the hunt for women. He was happily married, or if not happily at least contentedly. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that he’d reached an accommodation with life. He didn’t expect much, and life was happy to provide him with every bit of that, and he accepted it with a resignation that sometimes passes for contentment. But never happiness. Happiness! Are you kidding me?

 

Still, he couldn’t help noticing that women would now give him a second look, not appreciative so much as speculative, as if in the presence of that gleaming virility—yes, virility, that’s exactly what it was—they were asking themselves, What would that be like?

 

He began to be more conscious of how he dressed, bought shirts in pastels because the girl at Dillard’s told him that with his pale complexion that’s what he should wear. He wore the new sky-blue polo shirt, khaki chinos, and his new canvas deck shoes to the annual company “picnic” on the party barge where—oh, magic moment—a cute blond, hot, couldn’t keep her eyes off him.

 

Or was it that he couldn’t take his eyes off her? It was hard not to look at her because she was sitting almost directly across from him. Two long rows of tables had been set up on the lower deck of the party barge with folding chairs on either side, the food buffet at the end of the long room. Most people congregated on the top deck where the DJ, beer, and boxes of wine were, coming down only to eat. Carrie, Gil’s wife, was still up there yakety yakking with her friends. It was Carrie’s company throwing the party. Gil taught math at the local community college. They didn’t like each other well enough in the math department to have a party.

 

Halfway through his barbecue, baked beans, and soggy corn on the cob, Gil realized he couldn’t stop looking at the woman not because she was good looking—which she was but also, he decided, a little long in the tooth—but because he knew her. Where from, though? He had a feeling it was a long time ago.

 

He hadn’t intended to say anything to her. (He’d always been very shy with women; the process by which he’d courted and then proposed to Carrie was still something of a mystery to him.) But the woman caught him looking at her one too many times, so he cleared his throat and said, “I think we know each other. Or knew each other at some point. Maybe some time ago?”

 

“What’s your name?” the man sitting beside the woman asked.

 

Gil hadn’t even been aware of him. He couldn’t recall the two of them exchanging a word, but now he decided they must be man and wife. “Gil Mitchell.”

 

The woman tilted her head and looked at him quizzically. “Your name doesn’t ring a bell, but then I’m not very good with names. I’m Dixie Coan.”

 

“Dixie Coan. No, I don’t think. . . .”

 

“Hi, Gil. I’m Dave Coan,” the husband said, extending his hand across the table. “C-o-a-n, not C-o-n-e, not like Dave Cone, the pitcher,” he said, grinning. He really boomed it out, like a used car salesman.

 

He was a real glad-hander, a real go-getter, Gil could tell. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. And what was this pitcher stuff? Some reference to sports, no doubt. Gil hated sports. Being knock-kneed and pudgy and wearing glasses from age four can do that to you. This Dave-Coan-not-the-pitcher looked like the type who would have been a jock in high school, probably played on the golf team in college, was in a fraternity, and—

 

Good God, Gil remembered her! He stabbed a forefinger at her: “You’re Dixie Llewellyn! I knew you in college.”

 

Dixie did an exaggerated double take and slapped the table with both hands. “Get out of town!”

 

“You went to Germantown State?” Dave said.

 

“Yep. Go, Minutemen.”

 

“Minutemen! Get out of town,” Dixie said again.

 

“Small world,” Gil muttered. It was coming back to him now. He felt himself blushing. Why the hell had he said anything?

 

Dave leaned slightly toward him and lowered his throat as if he were now getting to the important stuff. “So, Gil, what fraternity were you in?”

 

Damn it all. Why hadn’t he kept his mouth shut? There wasn’t a single thing about his days at GSC that Gil wanted to remember, much less talk about. He didn’t recall this Dave guy, but he’d no doubt been a BMOC. Dixie Llewellyn. He could almost see her big glossy picture in the college yearbook. Gil had roomed in the dorm with Reed Ireland, a guy he’d known in high school. If there was a bigger dork than Gil, it was Reed. Both poor as church mice, they’d worked in the dorm cafeteria, Reed behind the food line and Gil washing dishes.

 

“I wasn’t in a fraternity,” Gil said. Why did he have to hang his head and say it like a confession, though? Jesus.

 

“Oh,” Dave said. He seemed taken aback. “Well. How did you two know each other, then?”

 

Gil felt himself blushing hot enough to set his hair on fire—if he’d had any. He had the pasty, freckled complexion of the redheads in his family. Kids used to tease him just to see him turn bright red. “Lobster,” they’d call him. Sometimes he’d cry. He felt like crying now.

 

The truth was he didn’t “know” Dixie Coan née Llewellyn at all. Best he could remember, they’d never exchanged a single word. On weekends, when they had a little time off from studying and working in the cafeteria, he and Reed would walk around campus staring at girls but never having the courage to do more. In their dorm room, they’d get out the college yearbook and look at the pictures of the coeds, especially the sorority girls because they’d be dressed in gowns or whatever that showed their bare shoulders. They’d rate the prettiest of them, arguing over whether this one deserved a nine or merely an eight, if that one was truly the near-mythic ten. Dixie had had a big, glossy picture in the yearbook, like a homecoming queen maybe, but she hadn’t been a ten, of which there were only three in the entire school. She’d been “cute” rather than stunning. Gil hadn’t fantasized “rogering” her—a term Reed, an English major, introduced him to—but, well, holding her hand, being seen on campus with her. Maybe marrying her. He remembered all that now. It embarrassed him how much of those days, that bad time, he could remember. The “Reed phase” lasted two years, then they’d had a falling out, Reed declaring he wasn’t a big enough loser to room with Gil another year. The next year Gil roomed with Luis from Bolivia, with whom he exchanged about six words, and the year after that he met Carrie, a plain girl who worked behind the cash register in the cafeteria.

 

Gil couldn’t get a word out, couldn’t stop blushing. Everything about those days embarrassed him. No, that wasn’t a strong enough word. Everything about those days filled him with such self-loathing he could hardly breathe.

 

Dixie saved him, saying, “We must have had classes together.”

 

“Yes,” Gil managed to say.

 

“What classes? What was your major?” Dave asked.

 

“Math.”

 

“Math! It took me three times to pass bonehead math,” Dixie laughed. “I was an elementary ed major. Maybe we had some education classes together.”

 

“No,” Gil said. “I wasn’t in education.”

 

“Well, what classes did you have together, then?” Dave said, like a prosecuting attorney with a hostile witness on the stand.

 

Gil hated every suntanned molecule of the man.

 

“Well, goddamn it, Dave. It could have been any class, any general ed requirement. An English class, a history class, whatever,” Dixie said.

 

Dave kept looking at Gil. “Why would he remember you after all these years just from a fucking English class?”

 

Gil stood up. “I must just have one of those faces you can’t forget,” he said, painfully aware he’d made no sense, but all he cared about was getting out of there. “Excuse me. My wife must be wondering where I am. Nice seeing you again, Dixie.”

 

Dixie tried to smile. Dave stared at her, squeezing a plastic serrated knife in his hand as if preparing to plunge it into her neck.

 

 

O
n each side of the barge was a set of stairs leading to the upper deck. Gil chose the one on the right, but when he got almost to the top, he saw Carrie standing right there with a group of women—in fact, exactly where he’d left her when he went down to eat. He wasn’t ready to face Carrie, so he went back down, crossed over to the opposite stairs, and climbed to the upper deck.

 

He’d had iced tea with his barbecue, but now he felt like something stronger. Not beer, though. He’d never developed a taste for the stuff. He thought, in fact, that his zero social life in college was at least partly due to his aversion to beer.

 

He examined the boxes of Franzia, shook the white zinfandel, but it was empty. Just as well. Although blush wines were his favorite, he avoided drinking them in public because wine snobs considered them a “woman’s drink.” He poured a plastic glass half full of cabernet, tasted it, resisted making a face. Bitter. He didn’t like reds, but the white Chablis was warm, and he wasn’t goober enough to put ice in it. Carrie would without batting an eye. She was still a small-town girl with small-town tastes.

 

He wandered down to the far end of the deck, the rear, the “stern,” he supposed it was called even on a clunky old barge like this. He had it to himself, everyone else congregating on the other end with the DJ and booze.

 

He stood looking at the barge’s wake. Some might call it pretty, the way it caught the moonlight, but not Gil, for whom it was somehow disturbing, almost frightening, some mindless thing, a long thick glistening muscle just beneath the water, twisting, pulsing, flexing.

 

He heard someone coming up behind him, expected it to be Carrie but turned to find Dave glaring down at him from his six-four, six-five frame. Basketball. He would have played basketball in college, not golf. Gil had never gone to a single game.

 

“Well, hi, Dave,” Gil said.

 

Dave just continued to glare at him. He was breathing heavily, the collar of his navy blue polo shirt straining in and out as if trying to unbutton itself. Then he pointed an index finger right at the end of Gil’s nose. The finger was trembling, and so was the voice as Dave said, “I just don’t want you to imagine that I don’t know, and I don’t want you to think you were the only one.”

 

“What are—”

 

“Shut up! You think you were the only one? Hell, she was banging my whole goddamn fraternity back then. You’d think a brother would let his brother in on a thing like that before I married the whore, but I didn’t find out about it until later. I guess I was just one naïve SOB. But now I know, so if you want to laugh, you can do it to my face and not behind my back.”

 

“I—”

 

“The only thing I can’t understand is her banging a pathetic little goddamn GDI independent like you. I guess she didn’t even have enough self respect to keep it in the fraternities.”

 

“Wait, I—”

 

“You say one word to me, one more goddamn word and I’ll throw your scrawny ass overboard.”

 

He stared at Gil, waiting for that one more word, but Gil, an old veteran with bullies, knew better than to say it. Dave turned and stalked off.

 

Gil stood there a long time trying to get himself under control. He was shaking so much that he was afraid to raise his glass to his lips for fear he might slosh wine onto his new shirt. Finally he managed a couple of sips, then drained it. The wine calmed him. He decided he actually liked it, might have to try more cabernet.

 

He walked up toward the partygoers crowded around the coolers and table with the boxed wine. He’d just started to refill his glass when out of the corner of his eye he saw a tall figure edge through the crowd. Dave? He didn’t want to find out but turned the opposite direction and worked his way back toward the stairs, then down.

 

He met Dixie coming up. He’d intended to simply nod and go on, but she stopped him. Her face was blotchy red. Her eyes were red and wet.

 

“Did you have to tell him?” she said.

 

“What?”

 

“Did you have to tell him, you son of a bitch?” she said, voice rising. “You men, you men. You get what you want, you get your jollies, but that’s not enough for you. You have to go bellowing it out all over the place like a goddamn bull. Jesus, that was twenty years ago! And you still couldn’t wait to go bragging and bragging and—”

 

But she was crying too hard to go on. She turned and stumbled back down the stairs. Gil gazed after her. He shook his head. Crazy woman. Crazy! He wasn’t going down there, that was for sure. He turned and started back up.

 

Waiting for him at the top of the stairs was Carrie. She looked like... he’d never seen such a look on her face before.

 

“Carrie, what…”

 

She turned and rushed off toward the stern of the barge. He followed her. She looked like she was crying.

 

He caught up to her and took her by the arm, but she jerked free and at the same time whirled and backed away from him.

 

“Don’t lie to me now. Don’t lie to me. Just tell me how long it’s been going on.”

 

“How long has what been going on?”

 

“Don’t lie to me! I saw you with that woman. I saw the two of you. You sure as hell weren’t talking about the weather. Just tell me how long. I have a right to know that much.”

 

More than anything, Gil just wanted to laugh. What a joke! Better not, though, he told himself, better not laugh. Let’s see, how far back into the events of the evening would he have to go to explain this to her. Should he even try? Maybe just get himself in deeper.

 

He was standing there trying to decide what to say when Carrie suddenly almost spat at him. “I was never more than a default option to you. Never.”

 

Carrie had been a math major at GSC, too, but then she’d gone into computers while Gil stayed with pure math. He’d fantasize sipping cocktails and playing math games with von Neumann, Nash, and Fermat. What he really wished, though, was that he’d gone into physics. The physicists were the real rock stars of the intellectual community. Computer geeks were just mechanics.

 

“‘Default option,’” he snorted. “You know I hate that computer jargon bullshit, Carrie.”

 

They stood there another moment, Carrie obviously trying to find words, until Gil sighed and said, “Is it my fault if women find me attractive? A man has needs, Carrie. A man has needs.”

 

He left her there and walked back to the wine table, elbowed his way through the crowd and filled his glass to the brim. Took a drink. Damn, but he liked that cabernet.

 

He made his way to the front railing, edged in, watched the barge plow slowly and silently but relentlessly through the black water. It was a beautiful evening. He felt damn good. He felt that now he was capable of anything. Why had he waited so long to shave his head?

 

Dennis Vannatta has published stories in many magazines and anthologies, including Chariton Review, Boulevard, Antioch Review, Pushcart XV, and four collections: This Time, This Place and Prayers for the Dead, both by White Pine Press, Lives of the Artists by Livingston Press, and Rockaway Children: Stories, by Rising Star Press. His first novel, Around Centralia Square, was recently published by Cave Hollow Press.

 

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