Free Postcards by Annie Proulx Page B

the smell of cigarette smoke and dimestore ‘Evening in Paris’ perfume from tiny blue bottles. When someone came in from the street a broadsword of frigid air cut the smoke.
    Loyal pressed up to the bar with Elton and Foote, ordered beer. Elton, a lean hillbilly with crooked arms and a weak bladder was spit drunk in half an hour. Foote nursed a whiskey, staring straight ahead. Loyal found himself between Foote and a woman with a red patent leather belt cinching in her black dress. Her hair was a mass of black-purple curls heaped on her head. The neckline of the dress, shaped like the top of a knight’s shield, presented the tops of her powdered breasts. She smoked Camels, one after another, gradually turning awayfrom Loyal toward an unseen man on her left. Her back pressed against Loyal’s arm. Gradually she shifted her hot taut buttocks until they came up against his thigh. He felt his prick hardening, bulging the front of his good trousers. It had been a long time. Slowly he began to maneuver his hand until it cupped her firm behind and she pressed it against his palm, wriggling until his index finger fitted the gully between her buttocks. Heat came off the sleek rayon. He slid his hand up and down and, with the suddenness of a falling beam, the choking spasm gripped him with terrible strength. He could not breathe. He threw himself backward into the wall of drinkers, bucking and tearing at his throat as if the hangman’s rope cinched his neck. He smelted the char of a burning cigarette against cloth, the pressed tin ceiling with its remorseless design heaved, then fed on him.
    When he came out of it he was on a table with a ring of faces staring down at him. The thinnest man pressed bony fingers on Loyal’s wrist. The skeleton’s hair, parted in the middle, was scraped back like a metallic cap. His teeth and eyes were rimmed with gold and there were gold rings on his fingers, a wedding ring and a signet ring on the little finger of the right hand. Loyal felt himself shaking and trembling with a thunderous heartbeat.
    ‘You’re lucky I was here. They’d have stacked you in the corner with the other drunks. Would have put your light out for good.’
    Loyal could not speak his jaw was trembling so hard. His arms shook, but he could breathe. He sat up, and the crowd, disappointed he was still alive, turned back to their glasses.
    ‘It’s Adrenalin that’s making you shake. I gave you a shot of Adrenalin. You’ll calm down in half an hour or so. You’ve had these attacks before, I take it.’
    ‘Not like this.’
    ‘Allergic reaction. Probably something you ate or drank. Tell you what. Make up a list of everything you’ve had to eat or drink in the last day and come see me the day after tomorrow.’
    But Loyal knew it wasn’t anything he’d swallowed. It was the touching. Touching the woman. If it wasn’t Billy it wouldn’t be anyone else. The price for getting away. No wife, no family, no children, no human comfort in the quotidian unfolding of his life; for him,restless shifting from one town to another, the narrow fences of solitary thought, the pitiful easement of masturbation, lopsided ideas and soliloquies so easily transmuted to crazy mouthings. Up there beside the wall some kind of black mucky channel that ran from his genitals to his soul had begun to erode.
    A soft day, warm enough to grind down the window and get the smell of the country. The black fields stretched for miles, the furrows rising and falling like a calm sea. He thought about pulling into a place and asking if they needed a hand, but didn’t think he could work on another man’s farm, stand there with his hat in his hands asking to be a hired man. He passed a sawmill, tasting the spicy odor of new-sawn wood mixed with the musty smell of old sawdust piles. He smelled his own body on his clothes, even through the laundry soap and a day on the line, not rank, but familiar, the smell of tangled sheets on the bed at home, of his