Your Body is Changing Read online

  The phone rang. Dud kicked around in the papers and junk on his floor, looking for it. Finally it stopped ringing.

  About twenty minutes later, as darkness fell, Dud was still sitting there and a car pulled up outside. Dud’s scalp vibrated. He puked up a little something but swallowed it down before it could get out of his mouth. Who was it? A maniac come to kill him? It was the only scenario he could imagine. Dud reached over and turned off the lamp.

  Three knocked on his door, yelling, “Come on, Dud, I just saw you turn off the lights.” Dud opened up, just a crack.

  “Can I come in?” said Three. “What stinks?”

  “Earlier I was cooking some exotic cuisine,” said Dud. “You’re probably picking up on the unusual spices.”

  “Are you going to let me in?”

  “I’m not prepared for visitations. I’m busy working on my novel about the tragic suicides of famous people.”

  “Well, just put on some pants and come on out, then. I swore to Farrah I’d take you with me on this fucking stakeout, okay? Look, I’ll put an extra two hundred in the kitty next week, how does that grab you?”

  Dud squeezed out and shut the door quickly behind him. “These are my pants, by the way,” he said. “The official short hiking pants of a Scoutmaster.”

  Three laughed. “You’re no fucking Scoutmaster,” he said.

  “No, I happened to buy these at an estate sale, during a visit my late wife and I made to the Bluegrass State, Kentucky, shortly before her demise.”

  “Well, they look good on you,” said Three. “Do you mind if I smoke part of a joint before we get started?” He leaned on one of the two white plaster pillars that seemed to be supporting Dud’s sagging porch. The pillar fell over and rolled into the yard, and Three nearly fell with it. When he straightened himself, his downy yellow bangs were hanging in his eyes.

  “Whoa!” he said.

  “Don’t worry, that hasn’t been attached in years,” said Dud. “I backed the car into it. For reasons that are too complicated to relate, it was my late wife’s fault.”

  “Maybe I should save this for later, huh? A reward for a job well done.” Three carefully wrapped his joint in a piece of tin foil and restored it to the inner pocket of his light linen jacket. “I’ve got all my life to smoke this joint. So let’s make it happen. We’re taking your car.”

  “Why don’t we take your car? It’s much nicer.”

  “Exactly. Somebody’s bound to notice a sweet fucking ride like that, am I right? We need a piece of crap that won’t attract attention.”

  “I hasten to state that my decrepit Escort will certainly attract attention, albeit in an obverse way,” said Dud.

  “I have no fucking idea what you just said.”

  “Anyway, a car like yours would be equipped with GPS, wouldn’t it?” said Dud. “That would come in handy in a following situation.”

  “Hey, why don’t you be the goon and I’ll be the detective? Let’s go, let’s go.” Three snapped his fingers.

  “I don’t have my keys,” said Dud. “They’re inside.”

  “Well, let’s go inside and get them. We’re on a fucking schedule, laddie.”

  “Why don’t you wait out here and I’ll go get them?”

  “I need to tinkle,” said Three.

  “I’d prefer you to do your business outside while I run in and get the keys,” said Dud.

  “Oh well,” said Three. He opened the door and went in ahead of Dud, tripping over some of the collectibles on the floor. “It’s as dark as a fucking tomb in here,” he said.

  “I live artistically. Sometimes people find it unconventional.”

  “Where’s the toilet? Or let me guess. You pee in a Maxwell House can and leave it in the corner. Is that the way the artists do it? Jesus! How many cats do you have?”

  “None,” said Dud.

  “Well your house smells like a million fucking cats, so that’s weird.”

  While Three was in the bathroom Dud rummaged around for his car keys and thought about all the things Three was sure to notice, like the squeezed-out toothpaste tube so old that the petrified gunk leaking out of the cracks was gray, and the permanent stains in the toilet, and the hissing roaches that lived behind the mirror, and the black stuff growing along the rim of the air vent, and the basket of rotting pecans in the bathtub.

  3

  The subject was a Frenchman, age 32. Thin and given to wheezing. Brown hair, usually oiled. Moustache. Ornithologist. In the USA on a work visa. Distinguishing physical characteristic: a strange concavity in the middle of his chest, like a hole smoothly covered by skin, for he had been born with his heart too far to the left, nearly under his arm. His telephone voice was odd; it frequently made people ask if he was crying. Subject believed that some acoustical property, caused by the unfortunate displacement of his heart, contributed in some manner to this aural illusion.

  The Frenchman’s American fiancée suspected him of messing around, and furthermore of merely using her for a green card.

  Three had given Dud the whole rundown while they sat in the dark outside the Hank Williams Museum in Georgiana, waiting for the subject to emerge, Three behind the steering wheel because he had insisted upon driving Dud’s car.

  “Keep your eyes peeled for a minute,” said Three. “I’m going to knit for a while.” He reached around to the back floorboard and got his knitting basket, but found it impossible to maneuver in the Escort.

  “I’m not a good person,” said Dud.

  “What?” said Three.

  “I think I’m starting to turn obsessive-compulsive. Every time I pass gas I say, ‘I’m not a good person.’”

  “Jesus! Crack a window.”

  “I told you, we can’t roll the windows down. You’re the one that picked this car! If I roll down the window it won’t roll back up. My other compulsion is I keep refining what I would say as a guest on the television program Inside the Actor’s Studio.”

  “You’re no fucking actor.”

  “Exactly. If I were an actor, it would not be a compulsion, but mere common sense.”

  “So what would you say?”

  “On the show? When they asked me my favorite sound, I would say, ‘A barber’s clippers.’”

  Three thought for a minute. “You mean those electric things?” he said.

  “Precisely.”

  Three thought for another minute. “Huh, that’s pretty fucking good,” he said.

  “These french fries taste like fish,” said Dud.

  “Mine tasted like french fries.”

  “There’s blood in the straw! Look!”

  Sure enough, a thin band of red was visible through the grayish transparency of Dud’s plastic straw.

  “What the fuck happened?”

  “This milkshake is too thick. I had to suck on it so hard it made my mouth bleed.”

  “You could’ve waited for it to thaw out a little bit.”

  “There’s your Alabama milkshake. Too thick to drink. I read in a travel magazine about a milkshake you can get in the Caribbean. Just the right temperature. Neither too thick nor too flaccid. A delight. And scented with just a touch of tropical coconut. I ought to have known nobody would know how to make a milkshake around this hellhole.”

  “God, Dud, you are such a pill. I thought this was going to be fun. Some people like their milkshakes thick. Some people think it indicates the use of real ice cream. Some people, I’d say most people, believe that the thicker the milkshake the higher the quality. Most people have the patience to wait for it to fucking thaw!”

  “You drank your whole drink and I haven’t even drunk anything yet,” said Dud.

  “God, do you do anything but whine? I had a Coke, okay? If you ordered a Coke you’d be done right now too. Fuck!”

  “I believe cursing to be an affectation of the elite.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “It’s one of my columns for ‘Lumberin’ Around!’”


  “For what the fuck?”

  “I knew Farrah never mentioned it to you. It’s a column I want to do for the paper, ‘Lumberin’ Around!’ Actually, I’m glad this came up. It gives me an opportunity to pitch you. As I express it in my column, let’s see. I point out that in so-called sophisticated films and videos, it is always the poor who use the fuck word constantly, gangsters and thugs and hoodlums and people of various ethnical derelictions and such. Whereas in real life I grew up poor and among ruffians of all varieties, and I found them to be a reticent and indeed a prudish lot.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “My father never had any money, but I recall him going over to a table of young men who were engaging in some banter—harmless banter by today’s standards—because his wife and his son were in earshot. That would be myself and my mother. These were clean-cut young men who probably attended a private university from the looks of them. I remarked at the time on the niceness of their sweaters…a precocious predilection! As I put it in the column. I believe the ribaldry involved a young woman bending over and giving one and all a view of her underpants. And their description of this momentous event in their lives was so abstract and oblique that to be honest it was only about a year ago that I figured out what they were talking about. One of them said something like ‘rat-a-tat-tat’ and pointed his fingers like the barrels of two pistols, trying to show the urgency, I believe, with which, upon the prior occasion under discussion, his eyes had gone to the suddenly visible sliver of the young lady’s underpants. You can imagine how delighted his comrades became at the randy recollection of the rowdy ruffian. That’s another direct quote. But those young men obeyed my father’s wishes for decorum at once, and with respect. They shushed their mouths, and shushed them tight. Whereas today one can’t wander out of doors without hearing the fuck word at every public location. If a Frankenstein-like doctor were able to revive him—as I postulate happening in ‘Lumberin’ Around!’—my late father would no doubt have another stroke within five minutes of his resurrection, very like the one that killed him in the first place. My observation is that those using the fuck word are well-to-do whites of the educated class—stockbrokers, professors of sociology, landed gentry, people with cell phones. Using it loudly, and with a casual pride. They’ve watched so many movies about the poor, they’ve adopted this street patois. This elite Hollywood idea of a street patois.”

  “Hey, Dud, get the fucking stick out of your ass, man.”

  “Ah, yes. Well, I suppose that’s the reason I haven’t succeeded in the publishing world. If I had a filthy mouth like a gutter and included numerous detailed descriptions of disembowelments littered with the most vulgar profanities imaginable I guess then I would be a best-selling author.”

  “Yeah, uh-huh, that’s probably it.”

  “The day Miss Tina Brown took over The New Yorker magazine I knew in my heart that the fuck word would writhe on its pages like a plague of locusts. These editors, they take one look and say, ‘Oh, this fellow is from old working-class Alabama stock. He can’t possibly use the fuck word enough to meet our quota of fuck words in this modern publishing world. Let’s throw his manuscript directly in the trash can and use his return postage to mail off our water bill.’ And then I suppose they have a good laugh at my expense. The Alabama rube!”

  “Subject sighted! Subject sighted!”

  4

  “Gig Young. The guy who created Plastic Man. The actress who drowned in the toilet,” said Dud.

  “What the fuck are you babbling about?”

  “The three persons I just named all have something very specific in common. They killed themselves. But something’s bothering me. I can’t recall if Spade Cooley was a murder/suicide or merely a murder.”

  “I’ve never heard of a single fucking person you’re talking about,” said Three.

  “That’ll all change when my novel comes out,” said Dud.

  The Frenchman had left the city and driven deep into the country, with Dud and Three following. The highway was still a highway, but it had shrunk to two narrow lanes and there were no streetlights, almost no houses. Stands of trees, broken by an occasional field or orchard.

  “Did I tell you about the strange mole on my neck?” said Dud.

  “Probably.”

  “It was just on the spot that my collar rubbed against.”

  “Your collarbone?”

  “Why, yes. Isn’t that peculiar? I never in my life, until now, realized why they call it a collarbone. It just never occurred to me to consider the derivation. Certainly it is because that bone is located in such a position as one’s collar would rub against. I don’t know why I never thought of it before. I truly do learn something new every day.”

  Three grunted.

  “Anyway,” said Dud, “I suppose my collar just rubbed on this strange mole every day and eventually it fell off from the sheer friction. The mole did. I got it and put it in an envelope and sealed it up. I was going to bring it to the doctor for a biopsy. But don’t you know, I misplaced that envelope. Can’t you just imagine when someone finds it one day? They’re going to get some kind of surprise. Delightful. Anyway, I don’t suppose it was cancer, knock wood, because I’m not dead yet. I don’t recall what I wrote on the front of the envelope. Hey, you passed him!”

  The Frenchman had turned and Three had kept going down the highway.

  “Of course I passed him,” said Three. “We’ve been the only car behind him for at least thirty minutes. If he’s not suspicious yet, he will be if he sees us following him down that red dirt road. We need some tactical distance.”

  It was a while before they found a place to turn around. When they got back to the dirt road they saw the broken gate at its entrance, the rusty, buckshot-riddled NO TRESPASSING sign. Three switched off the headlights and started down the road, which was wide enough to accommodate no more than one car.

  It had rained a few days before, and huge ruts had dried everywhere. The Escort’s shocks were completely shot. The men bit their tongues, clashed their teeth, hit their heads on the roof of the car, and they were blind.

  “This is the real Alabama,” said Dud.

  “I hate to do this,” Three said. He switched on the headlights. “I’m a fucking shitty detective.”

  Something with flashing yellow eyes ran out in front of the car and bounded into the thicket.

  “That GPS sure would come in handy about now.”

  “How, Dud? How the fuck would it? We don’t know where the fuck we’re going.”

  Dud shrugged. “I’m just saying,” he said.

  “I’m cracking this fucking window,” said Three.

  “Don’t you dare!” said Dud.

  “I’m fucking claustrophobic, okay? It smells like shit in here. I feel like I’m breathing your skin. God, why do you sweat so much?”

  “Metabolism,” said Dud.

  Three cracked the window and made a big show of gasping for air. “God, it stinks worse out there than it does in here,” he said.

  “Alabama. Should have thought of that before you rolled down the window,” said Dud. “Now it’ll never go back up.”

  “Bullshit.” Three tried to roll up the window, but was unsuccessful.

  Twenty minutes later they reached the end of the road, and there was literally nothing there. The crickets, locusts, and tree frogs were deafening.

  “Huh,” said Three. “Where the fuck did he go?”

  “He vanished,” said Dud.

  “Yeah, that’s helpful. Well, maybe there was a turnoff somewhere.”

  They backtracked, and indeed came upon a crossroad they had missed before.

  “Which way do we go?” said Dud.

  “Well, first we go one way and then we go the other way,” said Three.

  Taking a right, they almost immediately came to another crossroad. Three put on the brakes.

  “Shit,” he said. “I can see I’m going to need some inspiration.”

&n
bsp; He lit his joint and began to smoke it. Once he held it out for Dud, who declined. “Suit yourself, hotshot,” said Three. The car filled with moths, horseflies, gnats, junebugs. Three sat there and smoked his joint until it was nothing but a wet little dot that hardly existed.

  After that they drove for a long time, over roads of dirt, roads of oyster shell, roads of gravel, turning whenever Three got a hunch, until they ended up on a road almost too narrow for the Escort, where shrubs and stickers clawed at the doors, branches came in the window and scratched Three’s face, and they saw, just up ahead of them, the Frenchman’s car parked next to a stream that intersected the path. Three snapped off the lights at once and stopped the car.

  “Shit,” he said softly.

  “Do you think he saw us?”

  “I don’t the fuck know, Dud. I don’t even know where he is.”

  “It’s a good thing his car was there. We could have driven right into that stream.”

  “I have to admit I’m kind of fucking scared,” said Three in a whisper. “Maybe it’s the pot.”

  “Maybe he’s sitting up there in that dark car just waiting for us with a tire iron,” said Dud.

  “Stop making me paranoid. Come on, let’s investigate. That’s what we’re here for, right? There’s nothing to be scared of. I have a flashlight with me that costs four hundred dollars. I bet you anything he headed downstream. That’s what people do. Go with the flow.” Three paused, as if stunned. “Wow. I just realized that’s where that expression comes from. I am so stoned!”

  “I need you to get out of the car, please. It’s going to take me about forty minutes to get your window rolled up. In fact, why don’t you go without me? You probably don’t want to waste any time, and you have your special flashlight…”

  “Leave the window down and let’s go. You’re my goon. This is your time to shine, brother, when fucking danger strikes.”