There are two other people out there. They’re in lounge chairs, one on either side of the pool. One of them is Irving Cobb, a cook at Denny’s. He calls himself Spuds. People have taken to calling him that, Spuds, instead of Irv or some other nickname. Spuds is fifty-five and bald. He already looks like beef jerky, but he wants more sun.
One of the guys here is a guy who travels. He goes to Europe and places. That’s what he says, anyway. Business, he says. He also says he has his drinking under control and he doesn’t have any idea why he’s here at Frank Martin’s. But he doesn’t remember getting here. He laughs about it, about his not remembering. “Anyone can have a blackout,” he says. “That doesn’t prove a thing.” He’s not a drunk—he tells us this and we listen. “That’s a serious charge to make,” he says. “That kind of talk can ruin a good man’s prospects.” He says that if he’d only stick to whiskey and water, no ice, he’d never have these blackouts. It’s the ice they put into your drink that does it. “Who do you know in Egypt?” he asks me. “I can use a few names over there.”
Those times together in the evening she’d brush her hair and we’d wish out loud for things we didn’t have. We wished for a new car, that’s one of the things we wished for. And we wished we could spend a couple of weeks in Canada. But one thing we didn’t wish for was kids. The reason we didn’t have kids was that we didn’t want kids.
The baby stood in Olla’s lap, looking around the table at us. Olla had moved her hands down to its middle so that the baby could rock back and forth on its fat legs. Bar none, it was the ugliest baby I’d ever seen. It was so ugly I couldn’t say anything. No words would come out of my mouth. I don’t mean it was diseased or disfigured. Nothing like that. It was just ugly. It had a big red face, pop eyes, a broad forehead, and these big fat lips. It had no neck to speak of, and it had three or four fat chins. Its chins rolled right up under its ears, and its ears stuck out from its bald head. Fat hung over its wrists. Its arms and fingers were fat. Even calling it ugly does it credit.
Benny stuck out his hand for a brother handshake. Benny and I had talked. He knew I liked the music, and he used to come over to talk whenever we were both in the place. He liked to talk about Johnny Hodges, how he’d played sax backup for Johnny. He’d say things like, “When Johnny and me had this gig in Mason City.”
“No big deal,” Bud said. We were in the lunchroom drinking coffee. “Just the four of us. You and your missus, and me and Olla. Nothing fancy. Come around seven. She feeds the baby at six. She’ll put him down after that, and then we’ll eat. Our place isn’t hard to find. But here’s a map.” He gave me a sheet of paper with all kinds of lines indicating major and minor roads, lanes and such, with arrows pointing to the four poles of the compass. A large X marked the location of his house. I said, “We’re looking forward to it.” But Fran wasn’t too thrilled.
SATURDAY afternoon she drove to the bakery in the shopping center. After looking through a loose-leaf binder with photographs of cakes taped onto the pages, she ordered chocolate, the child’s favorite. The cake she chose was decorated with a space ship and launching pad under a sprinkling of white stars, and a planet made of red frosting at the other end. His name, SCOTTY, would be in green letters beneath the planet. The baker, who was an older man with a thick neck, listened without saying anything when she told him the child would be eight years old next Monday.
