The Cookout

(Governor Tom's Note: I wrote this short story in November of 1998. I was in my first semester of USC's creative writing program. This was for the same class for which I wrote "Where Nothing Lives." Only, Professor Saroyan actually liked this one. I just dug out the hard copy with his comments from my files. At the end he wrote, "This is well-done and interesting - full of suggestive colors and details - with a nice rhythm to it." I hope you feel the same.)
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He tripped on the sliding door frame and nearly fell onto the burgundy patio that was slowly becoming less and less influenced by the red liquid disk in the west. In one hand he clutched the necks of three beers, his fingers numb against the icy brown glass. With the other he balanced a tray of cheese and crackers. “Here we go, folks!” He set the tray down on the round table where his wife and the couple from next door sat. They each took a beer while he furtively listened to the chicken crackling beneath the grill lid. They still sounded too calm to turn over. The swans curved and bulged across Janice’s T-shirt.

“Thanks, Lucian,” said Janice’s husband Bruce. He raced his fingers through the bit of graying hair on the sides. “What about you?”

“Back in a sec.” Lucian disappeared into the house to the sounds of his growling stomach.

Janice turned to Lucian’s wife Erin, sitting placidly on the other side of the table, legs crossed, bathing in the sun’s scarlet that bestowed her sandy blonde hair with an orange tone to match her tank top. The knee peaked above the table. “So how are things at the store?” Janice asked, shooting a sidelong glance to see if her husband was looking at Erin. His bald pate gleamed while he considered which kind of cheese to pair with his cracker.

Erin kept her eyes focused beyond Bruce and Janice on the bloody disk and the pink-fringed clouds. “Summer’s always a sucky time for the store. It isn’t until fall when things get hectic, ya know? What with the Labor Day sales, and Halloween and Thanksgiving which can also be crazy. And I don’t even want to think about Christmas.” She really didn’t want to think about anything. She had told Lucian she didn’t want to have this fucking barbecue, but he had insisted. Bruce and Janice invited them over for dinner last fall and they had yet to return the favor. Erin had nothing against them. She just didn’t want to do it tonight. For the last few weeks she’d been feeling down but didn’t know why. At first she thought it had been the slow business at the department store, but when there were busy moments, the feeling didn’t abate.

She lowered her eyes so she could see Janice but still maintain the appearance of gazing into the sky. Janice was much more attractive than she was: Higher cheeks, fuller breasts, better toned legs. They weren’t longer, though. Length was the only factor on Erin’s side. Still, Janice had three kids but didn’t physically betray it. Erin looked higher into the sky where the clouds gave up their territory to the darkening blue. “Yeah it’s just been real slow.”

“It’ll get busier,” Bruce said with his mouth full. He took a swig of his beer and scooted closer to his wife. His watch read half past six. Plenty of time before the game started. Bruce checked his watch again and kept his eyes on it a bit longer to make sure his wife noticed him doing so. In the corner of his eye he could see Lucian coming out with a beer and a bowl of something. Was he checking out Janice?

Lucian placed the corn chips and salsa next to the cheese and crackers and was just sitting down with his beer when he noticed the more frequent crackling and spitting inside the grill. A wave of heat and the smell of browning poultry swept over him when he lifted the lid. He used the tongs to turn over the twelve pieces. His stomach grew more indignant. Looking at Janice only made it worse. Thank God Erin had relented to having them over. He was losing Janice’s image in his mind and needed a refresher. When shooting another glance at Janice he observed Erin in the corner of his eye. Her eyes were glued to the sun dipping behind the houses. “All right, folks. Drumsticks. Breasts. And wings. You guys aren’t drumstick freaks like me, right? I don’t have to worry about you, sweetie. Wings!”

“Uh huh.”

“Just show me the titties,” Bruce said with a mouthful of corn chips.

Janice studied Lucian’s impeccably combed black hair. His five o’clock shadow accentuated the squareness of his jaw. His belt buckle had his initials in gold. “Don’t be a pervert, Bruce.”

Bruce dipped another chip into the salsa and watched Lucian’s eyes. “I was on the Internet last night, right? You know just browsing and stuff. I wanted to order a couple of the Boss’s CDs, but you know how you just start browsing, right? So I get to this one site that’s talking about how you can see nude pics of these female celebrities. Totally a gimmick. But I went just out of curiosity and wound up on this one page with these, I don’t know, eighteen-, nineteen-year-old girls, like three of them, screwing this one older guy.”

“Really?”

“Oh God.” Janice shot another glance at Lucian’s belt. “Do you have to tell us about your late-night escapades?”

“Don’t act like I didn’t tell you about it.”

“God.”

“I’ll bet you they’ve seen the same thing.”

“Well Erin and I were browsing one night and just out of curiosity decided to check out one of those smut sites. Amazing, the amount of garbage online these days.”

“Funny,” Erin said. “Imagine the parents of kids who stumble onto it so easily.”

“I don’t even want to go into some of the other stuff we found.” Bruce patted his wife on the thigh and brushed the smooth skin with his fingertips. “We’ll leave that unsaid.”

Lucian grabbed the baster and squirted the chicken. “Disgusting. They should ban all that garbage, create a law or something.”

“I hear ya.”

Erin sat up and took a swig of her beer, her leg bobbing up and down. “You know what’s really neat, though?” The sun was almost gone. “I mean I don’t know if it’s neat, but.....I mean it’s just......you can practically look up anything on the Internet these days. I mean everyone can access whatever they want. You can do research. Get a bachelor’s without leaving your desk. Anything.” She knew if she kept talking, it would become obvious she wasn’t into this shindig. She sat back and dropped her gaze to the floorboards, filthy and cracked and fading, tracing them with her eyes until she reached her husband’s black forest legs, toned by his daily pre-dawn jogging. Her own leg stopped bobbing.

“Yeah it’s cool,” Bruce said. “Janice and I have been watching a lot less TV and doing a lot more browsing lately.” He patted her on the inner thigh. “But that won’t deter me from Sunday gameday, right, hon?” He took a sip of his beer and turned to his wife while peripherally watching Lucian looking at his hand. Bruce quickly withdrew it but didn’t know why.

“Honey, I don’t think anything in the world could get in the way of you and your football,” Janice said. Lucian smiled. She smiled back and offered more teeth than he did.

“It’s impossible to pull Lucian away from the TV on Sundays.”

“Not true,” Lucian said. He had a fleeting wish to become Bruce’s hand. “I give up a lot of Sundays to do things with you.”

“I just said sometimes.”

“Bullshit.” He shot another look at Bruce’s hand before grabbing the pieces of chicken off the grill with his hand and dropping them on a large plate.

“Honey.” Erin recrossed her legs and turned back to the sky. All that was left of the disk was its very peak. She hugged herself and rubbed her arms at the approaching chill. All this Internet talk put her in the mood to revisit that site from the other night.

“What’s so funny?” Lucian set the plate in the middle of the table with a thud. “All right, folks, dig in. Whoops let me go get the potato salad and some napkins.” He ran inside.

“Alrighty!” Bruce said. He removed his hand from his wife’s thigh and picked a breast off the plate. “Babe?”

“Just a drumstick.”

“Don’t know if Lucian’ll like that.”

Erin picked off a couple of wings. The sun was out of sight but still pinkened the clouds. In the semi-gloom her plate seemed to smile at her with its purple rose motif. It was a ridiculing smile.

Lucian came back out with the potato salad and a pile of napkins and crammed them on the already crowded table. He plopped down in the chair with a heavy sigh. “Don’t be shy, folks.”

“Yeah-heah, hoss.” Bruce scooped out a pile of potato salad before passing it to his wife.

Lucian picked off two drumsticks while keeping his eyes on Janice, who was taking her time with the potato salad, her deliberate motions accentuating the wet sticky sound of the excess mayo. “Well how about that?” he said. “I finally get to sit down.”

Erin patted him on the knee. He jerked his chair in.

“Here you go, sweetie.” Janice passed the bowl to Erin and glanced at the horseback rider on Lucian’s shirt.

After Erin served herself, she offered the bowl to her husband. “Maybe later,” he said.

Not even the clouds could see the sun now. An abrupt chill hit the patio. They all stopped chewing for a moment, although none of them were aware they had. The darkness and chill increased commensurate with their dwindling conversation. Four indistinct shapes sat around the worn out table, eating and peeking and playing off the shivering.

“So what made you trip?”