Free Something to Be Desired by Thomas Mcguane

already dead horse, seizing the shaft of the arrow that pierced his tunic, suggesting that the last man still left alive in the world was the bowman. Wick liked to point out that the chap would have had to be standing somewhere right close to his secretary’s desk when he got the trooper.Since Emily’s departure Wick and Lucien had become friends.
    The secretary winked up from her new data processor, then rolled fresh boilerplate onto the screen. This machine had made Wick a man of leisure: Wick now weighed two hundred forty pounds. He smiled all the time, and his smile said, This better be funny.
    “Lucien, come in here and close the door. I don’t want anyone to see you. Your hat, give me your hat.”
    Lucien reached his Stetson to Wick, who hung it on a trophy for the champion mare at the Golden Spike show in Utah.
    “Herbert Lawlor informs me that you have threatened him with a letter.”
    “I did not. I wrote him a letter.”
    “I’ve seen the letter.”
    “So you know that Herbert Lawlor is hysterical.”
    “The letter has threatening overtones. It is a pissing fight with a skunk. It is the very thing you are not to do. You’re having fun out on that crummy cow camp, aren’t you?”
    “I’m making repairs.”
    “And you are floating on the river?”
    “Almost every day.”
    “I think that’s grand. Especially if you let me do the communicating with Mr. Lawlor. It’s demeaning for you to take these things into your own hands. I am paid to demean myself, though I dream of glory as well as weight loss and sex miracles with strangers.”
    “I’ll do better at everything if I can see my boy.”
    “You will see him at Christmas, and you’re going to have to get used to that.”
    “Christmas.”
    “That’s the
next
time, not the
last
time.”
    “How do you know when the last time is?”
    Wick Tompkins drew on his cigarette, made a tentative gesture to stub it out, decided that too much of it remained and said, “I think that is a disastrous remark.”
    “It’s not a remark. It’s what I think.”
    “It’s a disaster.”
    When young girls learn the new dances, thought Lucien, it is the last time the new dances are interesting. I am in town, thought Lucien, why not make the most of it?
    He sat down at the counter at DeWayne’s Place, a hangout for people dramatically younger than himself, and drank coffee, the fastest beverage in the house. DeWayne’s was an old soda fountain, in the same family since Eisenhower. Grandpa, Dad, Edd, Edd Junior, still there: a dynasty of soda jerks. He drank as much coffee as fast as he could and watched a two-by-four opening at the end of the room where the young girls danced together to a jukebox. Their movements were strange and formal, glassy and distant; and everything wonderful about their bodies was under twenty-four months old. They moved toward the bellowing music, then moved away, gazes crisscrossing. They arced toward the surrounding columnar tables and quick-swigged pop without losing the beat. Though much of this struck a deep chill in Lucien, part of him desired to be a shallow boy with a sports car. Anything he’d ever done seemed like old tickertape.
    Lucien knew that he had to practice an upright existence. He was being watched, not by everyone as he imagined, but fairly closely watched. People seemed to think he was waiting for Emily.
    When he emerged from DeWayne’s, he felt as though his trousers were undone, or that his face and neck were a mass of hickeys. He saw two people he knew. One was the messianic Century 21 realtor, H. A. “Bob” Roberts. Bob cried out a greeting. He coasted past Lucien with a marathoner’s stride, but kept his face locked in Lucien’s direction.
    The other was Mrs. Hunt, Lucien’s mathematics teacher of years back. She had been retired for a long time and now stalked Main Street reproaching former students, some of whom were grandparents and had had quite enough of this from her over the years.
    “Aren’t