Kim Ono rolled her eyes and said, Kid, her name’s Fatback for a reason, okay? Arching one penciled-in eyebrow at him higher than seemed humanly possible, she ashed her cigarette into a mailbox. Federal crime, she said, grinning.
When he found Fatback, a self-assured, meticulously put-together lady who had more of a landscape than a body sitting on top of her legs, like chocolate soft-serve, she claimed with utter certainty that she’d seen Darlene before, but only a few times, and not for a couple of months. Despite this ambiguous news, it seemed to Eddie that the Southwest area might prove fruitful. He visited the surrounding neighborhoods for the next three nights, but nothing happened. He started to ask himself, Why can’t I find another family that won’t disappear?
Fatback kept an eye out for him, or so she said, and after another two months, in October, he visited the same area again, having no better ideas, his hopes nearly extinguished.
But then he ran into Giggles in his neighborhood, and she could always spare the time for him because she didn’t get a lot of business. All the johns found her inappropriate laughter off-putting. Just picture it, she said, every time a guy takes down his pants, I laugh. It’s a nervous habit, I can’t control it. She chuckled as if to demonstrate. I laugh like that all the time, but most guys don’t like it none when it look like you laughing at they business. If I turn away to do it, it’s worse. Mens really insecure. Present company excluded, I’m sure.
She passed her long-nailed hand over his head, and he wondered if she would have sex with him for free, but he couldn’t form the right question to pursue the idea and he dropped it.
Except my regular guys, she went on. They like it a little too much. But every time a new guy stops I need to give him a damn disclaimer. Whoops, I cursed in front of a child. And I shouldn’t be telling you this. You’re, like, a baby! You remind me of my li’l cousin!
They spent a long time chatting in front of a chain-link fence that surrounded the parking lot of a nautical store out by I-45, standing under a banner that read 50% OFF ALL BOATS. The sign, strung up on the side of a parked semitrailer without a truck tractor, flapped in the wind stirred by speeding vehicles. It wasn’t completely impossible that a driver going by might think that she sold boats. Intermittently, Giggles would make a desultory attempt to attract someone passing by. He liked that she couldn’t get anyone to stop because the thought of other men with her made him jealous. Eddie wanted her to babysit him, or be his girlfriend, or do something that combined the two but didn’t have a name.
Only when she spotted a car she recognized, a shiny Trans Am yellow as an egg yolk, did she perk up, and she hopped over to the side of the road, shouting, Hey, Danny! What up, Dan-Dan? Yo!
Eddie clenched his jaw and kicked the pavement as he watched them negotiate; he figured she’d forgotten him and he began to turn away, thinking of the next place he might go, but Giggles called out and wiggled her fingers at him just before closing the door and speeding away with Dan-Dan, and he forgave everything. He yawned—he had stayed out until nearly two a.m. again. The company of his night friends had started to seem safer than the empty apartment.
Eddie walked seven times in a circle around the poles holding up the front end of the semitrailer, precisely, heel to toe, sometimes underneath the truck—halfway hoping to produce some magical effect that would bring Giggles back. He began saying things to hear what they sounded like in that metallic, echoing space, nonsense about how he wanted Giggles to come back so he might fuck her, that he felt left out because he was the only one she wouldn’t do it with even if he had the money, and then idly he sang out his mother’s name. He threatened to become a pimp if Darlene didn’t come back, thinking that would surely get her attention, even if she’d become a ghost. After he strained his vocal cords, he started whistling instead, and then finally quieted down.
A disembodied voice exploded the silence, startling Eddie. An older man’s raspy baritone seemed to hover somewhere near the truck, maybe underneath, perhaps inside. Phlegmy coughing sessions interrupted his speech—you couldn’t call them fits; fits didn’t last that long.
Eddie traveled around the truck again, thinking that he might discover someone under it who had a weapon and might steal from him one of the last two valuables he still owned—his five-dollar bill or his life. Instead, as he investigated, he eventually made out the shape of a bum lying against a dumpster a few yards beyond the semi. As he approached, Eddie saw that the man had planted himself in a nest of empty, capless bottles of Four Roses and Thunderbird and crushed red-and-white-striped boxes from fast-food joints whose thin, oily sheets of wax paper escaped from him and skittered across the abandoned lot, their journey interrupted occasionally by long grass that punctured the snaky black cracks in the asphalt.
When the man spoke, the underside of the semi and the boats on the other side of the fence caused his voice to bounce and carry, giving it an almost supernatural authority. Lookin’ for Mama, the man announced almost tauntingly, like the title of a film he was about to screen.
Eddie stopped and scowled in the direction of the voice. This man had overheard information he had shared in private. As if he hadn’t offended Eddie enough, the homeless dude then improvised an almost incoherent, mocking blues song around the statement. I know where yo’ mama at. Drunken Bum know where yo’ mama at. Eddie stood stewing, full of stranger-hate. Whatcha gonna do for Drunken Bum before Drunken Bum tell you where yo’ mama gone? Despite the taunt, Eddie noticed that although the man had so much trouble speaking, he was actually a very good singer. A few times he repeated a line that might have come from another song: I ain’t got no mama now. Then he stopped singing.
Yeah? Where you think she at? Eddie spat.
You go buy me some drinkahol, son, before I tell you nothing.
The fuck I will.