in Beaumont. The little brother had barely registered in Waylon’s consciousness, or in the world at large, as far as he knew. He tried to remember his face, but all he could call up of the young Popp was a blond flat-top haircut and a continual whine as the older brother worked various torments on him.
Little Popp is probably a stockbroker in Houston by now, Waylon thought, making a million bucks a year and whining into portable telephones all day while big Donald is teasing love knots into women’s hair in a beauty parlor somewhere on Calder Street.
Waylon let his eyes drift left, past the door frame and the light switch, onto the left wall all the way to its center where the outline of the Jimi Hendrix poster had left a pale rectangle still visible the last time he had moved back home to the house on Helena. Not this time, though. Covered up by a new coat of flat white paint the old man had laid down sometime in the last few years.
Charlie had done the ceiling, too, Waylon noticed as he looked directly above the bed where he lay, obliterating the discolored stain that had always looked to him like the outline of a duck riding a motorcycle those long afternoons he had studied it for meaning, watching the shadows change as the sun sank steadily behind the house full of Popps to the west. Now there was nothing above his head but a perfect blankness, not a hint of texture or variety in its surface, no more message to it than the endless rows of waves marching toward the beach from the Gulf of Mexico twenty miles south of where he lay.
Closing his eyes, Waylon tried to remember how Paula Popp looked in the face during the time she lived next door, but all he could bring to mind was a sort of oblong with a lot of teeth in it. He knew she had a nose and eyes and hair and the rest of it, but that part of her was not what people wanted to see during her days in the Helena Street subdivision. And it sure wasn’t the part Donald Popp had sold him a glimpse of one afternoon when Waylon was a tenth grader in Thomas Jefferson High School.
“She’ll be in the family room,” Donald had told him, whispering out of the side of his mouth as they sat together in last period study hall, the gaze of Mrs. Garner sweeping over their table as it moved steadily from one side of the room to the other like the searchlight from a watchtower. “At four o’clock, I tell you. On the dot.”
“Yeah,” Waylon whispered back, his eyes fixed on a stated problem in his Algebra 1 book, something about two trains leaving from Chicago and New York headed toward each other at different rates of speed and stopping along the way for an hour here and there, for what purpose it didn’t say. “At four o’clock, all right, but with the curtains closed up.”
“Not if you got the five dollars.”
“I got the five dollars.”
“You be there in the side yard of your house, then,” Donald had said, and Waylon had tried to turn his attention to the x’s and y’s and speeds and stoppages of the trains so concerning the inventor of the stated problem in the algebra book.
He had two one-dollar bills and the rest in dimes and quarters and the odd nickel or two, and as he stood in the open space between the neighboring houses he could feel his hand sweating on the coins as he held them in a clump in his pants pocket. He had imagined Paula Popp in the family room of the house next door, sitting down, maybe, in a chair as she waited for her brother to complete the financial arrangements, or better yet standing with her arms crossed under the two stars of the show to come, as she waited for curtain time.
Waylon had sensed a queasy feeling beginning to move hotly up from somewhere in his lower belly toward the center of his chest, and he was turning to walk back to the rear of his house when he heard footsteps behind him.
“Hey, McPhee,” Donald Popp had said, “you got the money?”
“I told you I did, but I don’t know if it’s worth it.”
“It’s worth it, all right. I can tell you that. You just scared to look.”
“Bullshit,” Waylon said. “I bet she won’t do it. That’s all I’m worried about. Afraid I’ll lose my money without getting the good out of it.”
“Give me the five bucks, and I tell you what. If you ain’t satisfied, I’ll give you a dollar of it back.”
“Nuh uh. All of it. Every cent, or I’m going in the house.”
“Two bucks back, then.”
“All right,” Waylon had said, pulling the handful of quarters and dimes and the crumpled bills out of his pocket. “Here it is. You can count it.”
“I will,” Donald had said, cupping both hands for the transfer. “Inside the house. When you hear me rattle the wind chimes, come on around the back and look in through the crack in the curtains.”
Waylon had stood near the rear of the Popp’s house for what seemed an hour, suddenly desperate to empty his bladder before the wind chimes signaled Paula was ready for viewing. When the metallic tinkle sounded, it seemed to come from somewhere inside his head and he jumped as though someone had jammed a cube of ice into his ribs up near his right armpit.
The sun was brightly shining in the Popp’s backyard, and for a few seconds Waylon could make out nothing as he peered through the slit between the curtains behind the sliding glass door of his neighbor’s family room. It wasn’t until he jammed his nose into the glass and shielded his eyes with both hands that he could begin to pick out details in the darkened interior.
Paula Popp, a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School and a member of the Rangerettes Drill Team, stood in the middle of the room just in front of a Barcalounger easy chair, dressed in a white brassiere and a long skirt decorated with the outline of a pink poodle. The felt dog had buttons for eyes, Waylon noticed, and a little chain of real metal sewn to its neck. Paula seemed to be looking toward the corner of the room, where Waylon knew the Popp family television sat on a black metal frame, and she had no more expression on her face than as if she were watching the afternoon “Three Stooges” show on KFDM.
Later, her total lack of expression and the fact that she might have been watching the Stooges or maybe a local dance show called “Jive at Five” would be what Waylon remembered as most exciting about the moment.
At the time, though, he had rapidly fixed his gaze on the area between Paula’s collarbone and waistline as she reached behind her back with both hands, much like somebody imitating a bird about to flap its wings, and did something to the mechanism holding her bra together. The ends of it suddenly came into view as the fabric in front loosened and moved away from Paula’s chest, and she moved her hands to the cups of the garment and lifted them free of what they had been hiding.
Still regarding the area of the room where the television set was located, Paula drew the white bra up to her chin level, revealing both breasts, startling white against the tan of her arms and hands, and held it there for a count of four or five and then let it fall, beginning to lift her breasts one at the time with her right hand and replacing them in their cups as though they were separate things with a life of their own, quiet little animals waiting to be put back to sleep in their dark burrows, their vague eyes shut against the harsh light of the outside world.
“Jesus,” Waylon groaned aloud, remembering how he had crept back to the bed on which he now again lay, the sight of those fingers handling those breasts with such a careful nonchalance burned into his brainpan for all time. “And now,” he announced to the dead air above his resting place, “now they tell me she’s counseling drug addicts at a rehab center.”
It was, he thought later outside as he unloaded the rest of his
