-- He thought: I am unformed. You've un'd what form I have; scoop me up, lay me under your chin, I'll have your name the password to my e-mail; I'll have your eighth grade portrait hidden in my trapper-keeper; I'll steal toy jewelry from that Walmart and leave it on your windowsill, all of this while waiting for you to rebuild me!
-- Even as Lee was ready to hit himself with the same old line: Slow down, Lee, don’t goo-goo eye so fast, another woman did it for him. A squat girl with a pained look as if their laughing was something she had caught them doing, and here she was, designated by what God girls of clamdiggers believe in, to scold them before their sinning was irreparable. The poor smurf signaled Anne with shaky eyebrows. In himself, Lee named this interloper Smurf-Brow.
-- Smurf-Brow had to just say it, Anne not under the spell of her rising and half-penciled brows:
-- You wanna go in for a refresh, Annie? A'refresh our drinks? People are wondering where you are. Let's go in and refresh.
-- Smurf looked at Lee like she wanted to whack him with a newspaper, (German shepherd after all). Anne got embarrassed, and quickly she got inside without a goodbye. Lee played cool, finished his cigarette, and it wasn’t cool at all.
-- Anne was gone from the party soon after. And later when he walked the gauntlet with the money, the wives and the girlfriends re-sniffed Lee Hunnewell on his way out. Yes, he was a card-huck, a bar-hang who delivered pizza to their kids, his existence not worth half a minute of consideration; but now, here, months before the relationship was consummated, women of fishing folk wolfed his measure. This was Joe Shippey's girlfriend flirted on by the Pizza Boy - notice was taken; noted was the time, date, noted was the sea and moon; facial expressions were chiaroscuro'd on brain stems.
-- You know how people hate to leave juice on their ladder rung? Smurf-brow left the card game asking her man, Steve-something-or-other, what he thought about the thing that happened - Anne and the rendezvous on the porch.
-- Steve said, It's the Pizza Boy, to him, answer enough.
-- Smurf was nodding her head like there was a Clash concert going on in her head, Anne knows this happens to her, she said.
-- When this Steve said, Maybe Joe doesn't worry about Anne, Smurf snapped, I would'a got'a beat'n for what she was doin.
-- And he couldn't argue: he had socked her in the nose the weekend before for looking at an actor on TV.
-- Steve-or-Other had pleaded one last time against going down to the Toddy, making the mistake of saying to Smurf that Dickie would knock the Pizza Boy's teeth out - as in: it would not get to Joe, and Anne wouldn't catch any Hell; and her reply was: Why do you - You! - care about the Pizza Boy?
-- And she was smiling her smile that did not so much defy logic as prove that, with him, she could edit reality, and he would do what she said no matter if she changed her reasons twenty more times. But he was sober: this was the same smile that could get her hit the other way. Her smile showed she knew all this. And Steve thought, Did she want that Pizza Boy to look her way?, and a curdled jealousy was in him again. Fuel enough.
-- To the Toddy he went, and the truth: he was scared of Dickie LeDeau. Dick to rat out Anne? Over the Pizza Boy? Dick was known from Belfast to Warren for laying hands on people. Dickie LeDeau went two-forty. Dickie knocked out a Canadian one night at the Clambox with an open hand. Dickie beat up Spilly and two of Spilly's cousins at the same time. Dickie punched Brat Donnal in the stomach at some party and Brat shit his britches from the impact.
-- Steve walked in to the quiet afternoon hideout of the Toddy, bought two beers, went to Dickie's table in the back, where the man was alone, reading a book. Steve apologized for bothering him, asked how was the reading going, giggled in terror, and remained standing.
-- It's a good book, Steve. I'm real into it.
-- Dickie LeDeau was a good listener; he would closely listen against the speaker’s body language asking him not to; you learn, listening to mutterers intently. It took awhile but Dick sifted Steve’s story and he knew the house where the poker game took place, and imagined up Anne, and orbited all of what he knew her to be, and he knew her. He was back with the girl she used to be, daydreaming I guess you’d call it, when he heard Steve-or-Other apologizing for bothering him over something so stupid, and Dickie thought: She’s there. It’s a few minutes of conversation on a porch at a poker game, but it was snapping neatly into place under this portrait of Anne the platelet engraved: Unhappy Girl Wants a Push.
-- These digger-hicks saw something. Opportunity.
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