Action Picture (Part One)

Fettig is walking home from supper, mulling problems at his store, when he spots a large white cow on Thrall. A cow in the street on a Tuesday evening in the spring of 2002: This is where the story might begin. 

Fettig’s first thought is to take a shot at her—pop one off in her direction, just to see that sudden bewildering velocity large beasts can muster. But even as his fingers twitch and his right elbow hitches, he knows he isn’t carrying, hasn’t carried to supper for a while now. He has enough trouble sitting upright in the diner’s cushiony booths without a holster poking at his side. If the cow keeps dawdling like she is, he might get up to his second-floor apartment—a hundred yards ahead—might angle his Browning A-Bolt out the window. He’d have a mess of steaks to share with his fish camp buddies. All of this is pure nonsense, though, and Fettig knows it. Even if he did shoot the bovine, that meat was bought and paid for. 

Watching the cow nibbling on the grassy berm, he thinks with increasing certainty of Apogee Meats—one of the few packers left in the small city of Pentauk, Virginia, a good three miles away. Meaning: she’s crossed the Parkway. Have to give the critter some credit for that. 

The cow snaps her head to the side and takes Fettig in. Seeing no threat, apparently, she chaws up another mouthful and ambles on. The tension in Fettig’s body does not release, however. He is now primed for the hunt. If he can’t shoot her, he might at least track her. Corral her somehow. Call in her whereabouts from the cell he keeps clipped to his belt. A yarn he would relish recounting: That’s right, a goddamn cow in the middle of the street!

Assuming the stealthy crouch of the seasoned hunter he is, Fettig, 4’9” in shoes, comes about even with the bikes on kickstands in his neighbor’s yard. Though fifty-two, he might be mistaken for the mischievous boy he once was. 

He catches a whiff of grassy ferment, recalls a warm swallow straight from his cousin’s milking pail. 

The cow snaps her head again and picks up her pace. So does Fettig. She’s nearing the end of Thrall when headlights come up Middleton. 

She shies, takes off. Cuts across two yards, corners a hedge, trots the length of a driveway. 

Fettig stays the course. Stumbling down the drive, he regains his footing. Skirts the hedge, orbits an above-ground pool. Dogs her across three patios. 

She leads him next through a series of sloping yards, dressed with chain link and rock walls. Terrain, Fettig believes, that will only improve his chances of wedging her against a barrier, fencing her in. 

He is gaining on her until she jumps a low wall. And another. He scrambles over the first and hurdles the second only to ram his knee into a raised flowerbed. He’s skidding over spalled pavers when some kid hollers, “Hey, little man! Where you going?” 

She disappears behind a garage. He loses her. Tries one direction, then another. He’s in a warren of backstreets, disoriented. He cuts through a few backyards, climbs atop a wobbly picnic table. 

There she is. In the near-dark, ruminating another mouthful. Somehow, she’s gotten to the other side of a retaining wall that looks to be nearly four feet high. He can’t see a break in the brick, can’t find an opening. 

He goes to the wall and cranks a knee. No way he can clear it. He might hoist himself up and over. It would be quite a hoist. But he might just get over.

He hikes the belt of his khakis, zips up his bomber jacket, steps back. With a running start, he springs off the balls of his small feet. He just reaches the top. The ripping in his crotch hardly registers as his leg goes up, around, over the wall. 

“Who’s out there?” A bright light shines on him, mid-mount. The beam swings across him, kills his momentum. 

“Who’s out there?” A woman’s voice. “Who are you?” She sounds fearful. 

He doesn’t want to be taken for a prowler. Even more concerning: being caught doing this klutzy move. Ridiculous squirt trying to climb a wall. Midget man.

He gets a last glimpse of the cow before dropping to the ground—with another rip.  

“Speak up or I’ll call the police!” The woman’s voice again. 

He can make out the corner of a single-story house. A carport. The flashlight is still moving when he steps onto a paved driveway. 

He approaches the carport, begrudgingly. The beam passes over him again. Shines briefly, blindingly, into his eyes. He throws up his arm to block the light, speaks from under his elbow. “Nothing to be concerned about. I was only chasing a–”

Dog. He will say dog. Cow raises more questions than it answers.

“Oscar? Oscar! Is that you?” 

Fettig squints. He’s out of breath. “Who’s that?” The beam crosses his face again. He walks toward the woman.

“It’s Libba. Libba Pritchett.”

Libba? 

His raised hand might be taken for a wave, but he really means, hold on, hold on. Dear God. Libba. 

She lowers the light, and he sees her clearly. Sees her standing, some eight feet away on a stoop before an open doorway. Sees right through the backlit, lowcut, knee-length, blousy green thing she’s wearing. 

“I saw something go by the kitchen window. Got out my heavy-duty.” She turns off the long flashlight. “Thank goodness, it’s just you!”

“Just me.”

“What on earth’re you doing down here?” The fat orange clip holding Libba’s long silvery hair back from her face reminds Fettig of a farm implement.

“I am, I was, looking for a—” He’s still catching his breath. “Dog got loose. I was, ah, looking for it. Didn’t mean to frighten anybody.”

Paraiba tourmaline is how he thinks of the faint blue-green light cast over Libba’s slim legs, her narrow hips, those large breasts puddling over her ribcage. In the single downward glance he allows himself, he sees no panty line. Before he can double check, she starts down the steps. 

“Oh, well—I’m not modest! Never was! But you know that. I was just getting ready for rehearsal.” She comes to stand on the blacktop a few paces from him. She has a wooly white thing over her arm.

“It’s been, what? Fifteen––no, Lord—more like twenty. Jesus. Is it twenty years?” Libba makes a sound between a burp and a chuckle. “Oops.” 

Twenty-one, Fettig thinks as she puts down the flashlight, twenty-one since he’s been this close to her. She slips her arms into the wool, and it becomes a long stretchy sweater. Same bump in her nose, same droopy blue eyes. 

“So chilly. And almost April.” Libba is co-owner of So Much More, a floral gift shop on Laurel Avenue some four miles away. This fact Fettig had gleaned a decade earlier from The Chamber of Commerce newsletter. Driving by, he glances over and sees her sometimes, poking in pots out front. He has, however, studiously avoided going into the place or any adjacent shops for that matter. 

Fettig looks away, his neck goes hot. “I, I, I didn’t know this was your—didn’t know exactly where I was, I mean. I was chasing that cow and I just—”

“Cow? I thought you said dog.”

“Right.” How stupid. “Dog. I meant dog.” 

“Cow. Dog.” Libba laughs and lifts her hand in a dismissive gesture. And Fettig sees the small pillows of flesh above her knuckles. He remembers them well. 

“I’ll be getting on home then.” 

But Libba keeps right on talking. “I hardly ever get to Acorn Hill. Well, I mean, Enzo’s sometimes—his mozzarella’s hard to beat–”

But he keeps watching her hands, long puffy fingers sloping to a point. Her polished nails like lozenges of pink topaz.

“But Fettig’s—the store, I mean. Still open, right?” With this, her waving hand comes very near his arm. 

Fettig rocks back on his heels, putting his hand in his pocket and his sleeve out of Libba’s reach. “Business as usual,” he says, though business at Fettig’s Fine Jewelry is not usual in any sense that Libba might recognize. Even so, he refuses to give it away. 

“I ran into Joyce in the drugstore couple weeks ago. Hadn’t seen her in ages.” 

Fettig’s sister Joyce used to be in a choir with Libba and he thinks to ask her, “You still singing in that choir?” 

“No, no—I’m into acting now.”

With Libba so close—her chin jutting toward him—Fettig gets that prickly vibe he used to have while waiting next to her in the box-office line at the Royale, eye-level with her full endowment in that tight, slouchy-necked bodysuit contraption that her mother called a scandal. (She wasn’t entirely wrong.) 

Libba’s moving lips are the color of a wet peach. Fettig has to look away from the peach and into her eyes to make out what she’s saying.

She’s 5’7,” he remembers. Give or take ten pounds, she’s the same size as the last time he saw her up close. But her face looks longer somehow. Slimmer cheeks. Pointier chin. The change is to her advantage, he thinks, as he hears a voice, saying, pretty enough. It’s his mother’s voice. He has to get going.

“The Pentauk Players—” Libba is saying, “that little theater out Wentworth? It’s a black comedy.” 

Libba left town for a while. Married a car salesman in southside Virginia, so Joyce said. It didn’t last long. She came back to Pentauk to live with her mother in what Joyce called a small house near the University. Hearing that, Fettig had looked up the address in the phone book, but the street name wasn’t familiar. He hadn’t given it too much thought. Or he’d tried not to. When Libba’s mother died, seven, eight years ago now, Joyce mentioned dropping a casserole off, saying Libba wasn’t too far from him. But this only made him more determined to remain ignorant of exactly where “not too far” might be. The last time he got anywhere near this close to her was a few years ago in the grocery. He never shopped the big markets, always grabbed what little he needed at the deli near his store, but he’d run into the Food Lion on the way to a potluck and seen Libba down the end of the aisle. He wasn’t sure she’d seen him. He checked out through the express line, right quick, and sat in his car. He hadn’t meant to wait for her to come out. He just hadn’t felt like going to the party. Not yet. Next thing he knew, she was pushing her cart into the lot. He slipped the cushion out from under him. Without this prop to keep his head above the steering wheel, he was low enough that she wasn’t likely to see him even if she looked. Which she didn’t. So he watched her: load her groceries into her trunk, tuck her shirt into her pants, rub her shoulder like it might be sore, and drive away.

Libba is still talking about the play, making a joke, apparently. “Ha, ha!” she says. 

“I’ll let you get back to it then.” Mindful of his crotch, Fettig backs up a few paces. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Well, you did! But it wouldn’t be the first time.”

Fettig isn’t sure he’s hearing correctly. 

“You were a real creep, you know.”

“I, I, I–” He can’t form the words. He might apologize, he should apologize, but Libba starts to hum and make a chewing motion with her mouth. 

She picks up the flashlight and turns it on under her chin. Her pale face becomes citrine. Her droopy eyes lift and widen as she runs up the scale—la, la, la, la, la, la-laaaa! Holding the last note, she reminds Fettig of the operas his grandmother used to play on Sundays.

Fettig might smile, thinking of his grandmother. Libba might take this for encouragement. She runs another scale. Then she cuts off the light and takes a small bow. “I’ve got a great part this time. We’re having so much fun.”

“Well, good. Good for you,” Fettig says, backing up her steep drive. Libba keeps making those humming sounds as she steps up to her door. He appreciates the elevation, the chance to look down over her. He watches her torso move beneath the sweater. She waves and her long puffy fingers hover for a second under the porch light before she goes inside.

~

Returning by way of the streets, lanes and drives he’s never walked before, he glances about, thinking of the cow, but the urge to pursue her is gone. He gets turned around, doubles back twice, all the while hearing Libba’s voice. I’m not modest. La, la, la. 

Finally, he’s on Thrall again. But his street seems to have narrowed somehow. The houses on either side feel as though they’re closing in. Becoming walls. Walls dotted with lit windows, framing his neighbors’ dinner hour. Rather than their usual homey feel, the glowing yellow squares taunt him, altogether fouling up his mood.  

Fettig usually feels at ease this time of evening. Returned, most nights, from an early supper, he sits on the shallow balcony off his small living room and smokes one of his two daily cigarettes, appreciating the interlude when the irksome mouths of children are blessedly silenced by food. 

Not so tonight. As he lets himself into his apartment, he takes a keen dislike of the silence and the threat of suffocation he feels within it. This brings him to a rash decision. He will create a disturbance. Draw them away from their dinner tables. Let them come to stand in the lonely street at night. This he effects by a call to his neighborhood precinct.

“That’s right,” he says, “a cow on Thrall. Oh, bout, oh, five minutes ago. White, that’s right.” In a matter of moments, it is done. 

And very successfully at that. Soon not one but three patrol cars come rolling up Thrall.  Lights whirling, sirens bleating until the fool cops must realize their commotion will only scare off the creature they’ve come to find. (Which of course they won’t do here since the cow must be miles away by now). It does the trick with the neighbors, though. They come darting out of doors, kids peering around fathers, mothers in those snug jeans with the half-inch zippers they all wear now.

He watches from the window as the Law explains what the trouble is. All heads turn. Up and down the street. White faces most of them, though one mother looks to be from India. Another has a big Afro. She’s married to a guy who might be an Arab. Being so close to the University, Fettig see all kinds. Not that he’s inclined to get to know his neighbors. But he believes, at least, in equal treatment. He’s equally grouchy with all. 

Undressing, he examines the tear across the seat of his khakis. A nice pair, ruined, for Christ’s sake. It takes an entire day to buy clothes. He drives all the way to Lynchburg to avoid being seen in the boys’ department. 

He walks in pajamas through his dark living room, gives it the once-over. In the corner, mid-wall, beyond the sofa, his Royal elk mounted against a mahogany plaque claims a sizable portion of the room. The antlers barely clear the nine-foot ceiling—a requirement when he went apartment-hunting twenty-one years ago. Since then, he’s added a citation striper and a Bahamian bonefish to his gallery, hung between his front windows. His only décor, the sofa pillows Joyce quilted in browns and blues to match the rug she’d picked out when he moved in. On the table by the door, his keys, wallet, bills, including one from the water department—the sight of which causes a momentary spike in blood pressure. Otherwise, everything is as usual, all part of his seamless routine: dinner at the diner four nights a week. Pizza and a TV movie on Friday. Weekdays, the store. Saturdays, an early close. Sundays off, down to the river or up to the mountains.

Now there is interference. Nagging interference. And it sounds like Libba saying Oscar over and over. 

Joyce is the only one who ever uses his first name anymore. His buddies, his customers, everybody who doesn’t call him Mr. Fettig calls him Fettig. He dropped Oscar years ago. Twenty-one to be exact.

Oscar. Oscar. He surfs channels to drown her out, ends up half watching a Bond flick, which only makes it worse.

~

Throughout high school, Fettig worked afternoons in the family store. He put in more hours during his three college semesters, then went full-time for a few years until his father, Sid, thinking they needed a better handle on newer models, got him a position at a watch company in Baltimore. He was there five years before returning to Pentauk, to the store. 

In the meantime, Sid developed a solid trade with Ike Pritchett. A traveling businessman with a sharp eye, Ike both collected vintage timepieces and acted as middleman, bringing some doozies to Sid to repair and sell. On occasion, Ike brought his daughter Libba with him. Fettig met her during his first winter back home. Sid suggested his son amuse Libba while he and Ike finalized their deals. Fettig let the lank giggly girl try on her pick of the inventory. He noticed right off how she had an eye for the finer estate pieces. 

“Ike might talk a tight game, but he’s got plenty of dough,” Sid said then. “He’ll up and buy Libba something real nice once day. Eighteenth birthday. Graduation. Mark my words.” 

But Ike ran off with another woman just before Libba graduated high school. Took a job in Jersey. An acrimonious divorce ensued, forcing the sale of Ike’s precious timepieces at auction. The loss of Ike and his steady supply of top-notch merchandise caused Sid much grief, which showed up, like most of his complaints, in the form of stomach ulcers. 

Whenever Sid talked about the Pritchett divorce, he found a way to blame Ike’s wife, Helen. But Fettig’s mother, Arlene, objected. 

Arlene reminded Sid, who didn’t need reminding, that they had known Helen from childhood. All their parents had come up together, part of Pentauk’s erstwhile German neighborhood. Throughout Fettig’s childhood, the disappearance of the city’s ten-block-long Germantown had loomed large in his imagination. It was a place his mother had barely known herself, but that didn’t stop her from calling upon the abuse the Germans suffered there during the “Great War” as a regular cautionary tale. “Treat folks fair and square, no matter who they are,” she’d say. If Sid made an unkind remark about a person’s race or creed, Arlene was on the case. “Don’t be ugly. They forced my grandfather to shut his brauhaus. Don’t think it can’t happen to you.”

In the wake of the Pritchett divorce, Arlene invited Helen to join her bridge group. A couple years on, Fettig came in one Sunday evening to find a shapely young woman curled at the end of the couch, nose in a mystery novel.

“You remember Libba? Just got a job at a branch bank!” his mother called from the dining room where the game was underway. 

Libba sat up. “What you got in there?” 

“Trout,” Fettig said. She followed him into the kitchen where he pulled two rainbows from his cooler. “Have a seat,” he said, feeling better when she did. He’d forgotten how tall she was. While he cleaned the fish, she leaned across the counter, asking about the store. He told her about a recent estate sale, mentioned some rose-cut diamonds. “Victorian. Earbobs—or so they called them,” he said. 

“Earbobs!” She almost shrieked. “I love the old pieces. I like to think about all the people who wore them.” Then she sort of whispered. “I can feel their energy—can’t you?”

“Never thought about it,” Fettig said, stuffing the guts in a baggie so his mother wouldn’t complain of the smell. 

“Oh, yeah! I used to love to look at Daddy’s watches and think of all the time that had ticked through them. Asshole,” she snorted.

“Huh?” 

“Oh. Sorry. But what a shithead. Didn’t give me a dime for college. Got my Associates at least.”

Libba’s salty language made Fettig think of tough guys in the movies. She wasn’t like other women he knew, not that he knew many very well. He’d only had a few awkward dates in Baltimore and a few more since. He had only ever dared ask short girls out. And even they gave him the look he often saw on women’s faces, a mix of curiosity and pity, betraying their conclusion (or so he believed) that his deficiency in height signaled other shortcomings. Libba was by far the tallest woman he had ever considered a possible date, but with the kitchen counter between them, he found the courage to ask if she liked action pictures. 

“Action pictures—huh!” Her eyebrows lifted and the corners of her smokey blue eyes unfolded.  

“That’s what Sid calls them,” he said, suddenly conscious of how square he must sound. 

Libba wasn’t deterred. “I love movies. Any kind. But going to the pictures sounds even better—more old-fashioned.” She flashed a toothy grin. He wouldn’t call her front teeth bucked, but they were right prominent. 

For a couple months, they arranged to meet at the movies about once a week—Fettig preferred the Royale, the restored cinema by the University. He agreed with Libba: the vintage look of the place was appealing. He also enjoyed a deep sense of comfort at the Royale, a feeling connected to the matinees he saw there as a kid when he was still the same size as everybody else—before high school when the hazing began. Itty-bitty Ozzie, midget man. 

Though he begged his mother not to, she finally called the bullies’ parents—and the principal. (“Don’t think it can’t happen to you.”)

Libba talked enough for two people, which put him at ease. Leaving the movies one night, he suggested picking her up next time. That meant driving her home as well—to the two-story shingled house her mother had won in the divorce. One night, not long after they began riding together, as she was releasing her seat belt, he reached across to help it over her shoulder. His hand slipped accidentally on purpose and grazed one of her breasts. 

Expecting a slap, he received instead a kiss on the mouth. Just to be sure, he kissed her again and put his hand between her thighs. She raised no objection. 

The next week, Fettig blushed a little when they filed in to see For Your Eyes Only. He didn’t have the nerve to hold her hand during the picture—as suspenseful as it was sexy—but on the way home, he pulled over and the necking got heavy. Before they were through, her long puffy fingers took down his zipper and went exploring. 

“Tell you what,” he said between heated breaths of pleasure, “why don’t you come by the store after work on Wednesday. Come about six.” By then, Sid would be long gone. “There’s a side entrance. Knock three times on that door.” 

“This sounds mysterious, Oscar.” She giggled. “I like a good mystery.” For the first time that night, he walked her to the door. 

Fettig closed up Wednesdays, his father’s Lion’s Club night, and Saturdays, when Sid got a haircut and took Arlene out for a steak. That Wednesday, when Libba knocked on the side door, he had already removed the merch from the display cases, locked the safe, and dimmed the store lights. He led her down a short hall and into the back room where his father did repairs. 

Facing her, he wished for the leveling effect of the car seat and cursed his idea to invite her there. His mouth came below her collar bone. He might have chickened out if Libba hadn’t pulled the chair from underneath the workbench and sat down to work on his zipper. Standing over her, he fumbled with the buttons on her blouse until Libba took over, peeling down her pants and the bodysuit thingamajig, too. Then came the panties with which he was happy to assist. Though she said it was her first time, she wasn’t shy. It was Fettig’s debut, too, though he didn’t say a word as he applied the rubber. (He had gone through an entire box in his room the evening prior, hoping to perfect the application.)  

Once they had staggered through the preliminaries, Fettig pulled Libba to her feet and turned her around. He did this with some insistence, but not roughly. With her bent over a low filing cabinet, he put his hands around her rump, unremarkable compared with her breasts, but plump enough to get a grip on. He proceeded then to poke from below, a position which, for once, rendered his height advantageous. This arrangement also shielded him from any look of disappointment that might cross her face. If her reciprocal thrusts and groans were any indication, however, she was anything but disappointed. And since there was nothing but an industrial mat on the floor and little space to lie down in any case, Fettig persisted in this method twice a week for months. 

Of course, Fettig made no mention of their in-store rendezvous, but between her son’s comings and goings and the scuttlebutt at the bridge table, Arlene gleaned that he saw Libba regularly for what she thought was dinner and a movie. And Arlene grew curious, asking indirect questions to which her son replied with indirect answers. 

One evening, though, his mother pressed the issue. The very evening, in fact, when Libba had reached around and steered his member up a nether region about which Fettig had only ever dared imagine—a bold move that brought orgiastic delights of mind and body such that he didn’t realize how loudly Libba was enjoying herself. Shush. Shush, he finally said, placing a gentle hand over her mouth for fear someone would hear her on the street.

For a while afterward, they lay pressed together on the floor. He even drifted into a light sleep with his hand around her sloping breast until she stirred and woke him. “Oscar? Oscar? Maybe we should get going?”

Later, as he was coming in, heading down to his basement room, he met his mother at the bottom of the stairs with a laundry basket under her arm. Arlene never did wash at night. Her high ginger bun was cocked like it always was when she had her pointy nose in somebody’s business. 

“So nice that you and Libba are getting to know each other.”

“She’s a fri-friendly girl.” (He’d almost said, frisky.) 

“But, now, Ozzie–”

“I hate that name and you know it.”

“Don’t be silly. You’ll always be Ozzie to me. But, now, Libba, she’s young and, well, inexperienced, I would imagine.”

“She’s twenty-two, Mother. Hardly a child.”

“She might not realize what she’s getting into. Until it’s too late.”

Fettig hadn’t meant to kick the wall as hard as he did. What was he supposed to say? The machinery is fully operational? We’re fucking just fine? He slammed the door to his room.

“Temper! Temper! Ozzie!” From the other side of his door, his mother persisted. “I’m just trying to prepare you. I don’t want you to get your feelings hurt. It’s just that…it’s just… Come on out now and have a slice of cake? I got ice cream. Butterscotch!”

“Mother! For Christ’s sake. I’m a grown man.” He switched on the radio, tuned to the country station playing a twangy yodel that brought to mind Libba’s delighted cries.  

And he was. He was grown, over thirty. And yet with Libba he felt for the first time what it must be like to be a regular teenager. He hadn’t thought much about sex in his teens. Which is what he told the doctor who diagnosed him with a gland problem at fifteen.

He had been considered small as a child, though not abnormally so. At twelve, he began wondering aloud about his height. “You’ll shoot up, just watch,” said his mother. Only he was watching, and he was scarcely taller at fourteen than the pencil mark he’d made on the doorjamb at eleven. Most of his friends were already standing eye-to-eye with his grandmother–who at 5’7” was two inches taller than her daughter Arlene. The only eyes he met were those of the fox biting its tail on her stole.

He was fifteen by the time they went to a doctor who said he lacked a pituitary gland. A year later, a specialist amended that diagnosis, saying he had a hormone deficiency. All the same, he should not expect to gain height or develop “normal sexual function.” 

The sex part wasn’t so concerning at the time. He had been crushed, though, to learn he wasn’t likely to reach the 60-inch height requirement for the military. He wasn’t thinking of Vietnam—though he’d later appreciate his luck—so much as Sid’s war stories. In sparse yet evocative terms, Sid had recounted some of the action he’d seen as a radio man in a B-17 over the Pacific. For years, young Fettig had pored over photographs of the Flying Fortress, imagining himself as a tail-gunner. 

Arlene reported on the specialist’s visit over dinner. She said just enough that Sid got the picture: his son would not be enlisting. Fettig, at the stove for a second helping, saw the look that passed between his parents, the look they didn’t know he saw. And the disappointment on his father’s glum face. 

By the time he was in his twenties, Fettig had begun to accept his stature, but he had come to resist the notion that he was neutered, that he was and would forever remain disinterested in women. The vague longing he experienced in the presence of shapely female bodies—in person and on the screen—told him the doctors were wrong.  

And they were. In his mid-twenties, things started changing. He grew another inch after he moved to Baltimore. Pubic hair sprouted, so did a little fuzz on his chin. He began having the wet dreams he’d heard his high-school classmates talking about. His voice deepened a notch, too. He could make sales calls without customers addressing him as “ma’am.” A great relief. 

When he returned to Pentauk, neither of his parents appeared to notice any change in him. At first, he resented their failure of attention, but there was some small power in keeping this victory to himself. Besides, how ridiculous to announce his sex drive—all 4’8” of him, just raring to go? 

Content to tinker with watches all day while listening to the radio, Sid was not one for gossip. He might have suspected his son entertained Libba in the store, though he’d never have dreamed what went on there. He did ask about Libba a couple of times. And Fettig allowed as to how he found her easy to be around. “Good company, then, good,” Sid said. 

In late spring that year, Sid, banking on Mother’s Day and June weddings, splurged at an estate sale. The loot included some nice-looking earrings. The oldest, a pair of carnelian drops—early 20s probably—were not of any great value. They had an elegance nonetheless on account of the marcasite chips around the stone. 

Cleaning and logging the pieces, Fettig made a snap decision. When he saw what Sid wanted for them, he had second thoughts. It nearly killed him to pay retail. Better the dough stay in the family, though, than go to the joker with the chain store at the mall. 

He waited till Sid stepped out for his daily walk. Then he sucked the air between his teeth and slid each bill from his wallet. He got a kick out of describing the phantom buyer. “One of those insurance folks from around the block, maybe, or a salesman,” he ventured. “Tall red-headed fellow. Present for his sweetheart.” 

He chuckled later, thinking of Sid’s boastful reply: “Haven’t lost my knack. Leave it to me to find pieces that’ll run right out the door.”

Libba had mentioned—in passing the week before—that her birthday was approaching. He hadn’t asked her for a date expressly on her birthday because he couldn’t assume she wanted to celebrate with him. Then she let them both off the hook by saying she would spend it with her mother. 

At the store a few nights before the birthday, while Libba was getting dressed, he took the earrings from their hiding place in the file drawer. She was sitting on an office stool, slipping on her shoes. As she wheeled around, she found him holding out the surprise he’d wrapped himself. Her face burst open. Her eyes shone with what might have been tears. 

“I love them!” She took out her hoops and dashed into the washroom to look in Sid’s shaving mirror. “How old-fashioned! So pretty. Thank you!” She tossed her head. “Earbobs!” 

He laughed with her. “That’s right.”

“Don’t they catch the light!” 

For a moment, Fettig saw the two of them in an old-movie vignette. She wore a long gown. He, a tuxedo. He was one of those odd little fellows you saw in the early talkies, the hunchback, the gimp whose kindness gets the girl’s attention. 

~