The Thomas Berryman Number

Because the old penny loafers he was wearing slipped on the roof slates, he had to ride the apex horseback style. The danger of possibly slipping off the three-story roof—missing the sun porch—hitting patio furniture that looked the size of pocket change—was part of the job and part of its pleasure.

He placed his face inside the musky hole and in the light of a match saw that the chimney screen was clogged closed with soot. With sooty sand. With sooty seagull feathers and a child’s deflated balloon.

The white Ford sports car passed down on the road again. He flicked his cigarette butt at it, then yanked up the chimney debris with both hands on the inky screen.

He and Oona ate a good dinner of white spaghetti and red wine. He drew on a stogie joint and passed it to her across their dinner table on the front lawn. They were both dressed rather hautily, in white, and together looked like a page out of a fashion magazine.

On closer examination, he was wearing red, white, and blue track shoes. Oona was wearing no makeup. She had promised to chase his blues away that night.

“Oh,” she said before beginning her exorcism, “Ben Toy called.” Her lips were slightly blistered from sunbathing. She drew daintily on the fat joint.

Tom Berryman held smoke in as he spoke. “While I was on the roof?”

“Didn’t believe me when I told him … that you were on the roof. Sounded weird.”

Berryman continued to hold the smoke in.

“All he said was, something about, he read about the Horns. What good people the Horns are. Who are the Horns?”

Berryman blew out smoke and talked to himself.

“… Ben’s flipping out on me.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Oona passed the cigarette and cocked her head like a pretty bird. “So who are the Horns?”

“They ‘re nobody,” Berryman said. He took up the joint. His eyes twinkled with dope dust. “Really they’re twins,” he smiled. “We used to go out with them in Amarillo. Patsy and Darlene, High Plains High,” He started to laugh. “Darlene had a pretty little red mustache. Nice personality, too.” He laughed some more. “Great little talker, that girl.”

Oona got the giggles, and then they both forgot about Ben Toy. He forgot his blues. They indulged in a freak rift that would have put good southern writers to shame. Berryman told a story in which a family’s grandmother dies on a long car trip, and the father puts her in the trunk so that the kids won’t know, and the car gets stolen at Hojo’s with grandma in the trunk. He said it was true.

Hours later, Oona Quinn sat stoned, looking at his face. Berryman held both her breasts in his hands, feeling them through her blouse, testing their weight.

A burning oak log gave the bedroom a smell like backwoods. The curtains on the open windows ballooned in the night breeze.

She stared at cool, splintering blue eyes.

A thick bushy mustache that wasn’t well groomed.

A flickering, pearly smile that caused her to smile back.

She imagined Thomas Berryman as one of Clark Gable’s sons. And she imagined, or remembered, a strange man who kept caged crickets to simulate the backwoods in his bedroom.

“Bugfucker,” Berryman commented when she told him. She sucked and ate crickets like the French candies with hard shells and gooey centers. She thought there was nothing she wouldn’t like to try.

“Ever been married?” he asked her in response to that.

“No. You?”

“I guess,” Berryman smiled up with his eyes closed. “For about seventeen days in high school. It wasn’t religious or legal bound. Lived in a treehouse if I remember right. Say,” he went on, “you said that Benboy called before? You said that, right? You said that?”

The bedroom where he and Oona Quinn were lying was the plainest space in the house. It was a wide place with a low, wood-beamed ceiling, a small fieldstone fireplace, and white rows of library shelves stacked with bound-up

National Geographies

and

American Scholars

(from a past owner).

The one small window (it is clouded with salt) looked out on the ocean, while a big bay window faced up the long narrow highway. Berryman said that the house had been spun assbackward in a hurricane and/or it had been built by assholes. Take your pick.

Oona slipped an expensive peasant’s blouse up over her hair, and her tiny breasts popped out of the folds one at a time. They were white and startling.

“Do you like my boobs tanned or white?” the twenty-year-old in her asked. She was both self-conscious and serious.

Thomas Berryman pinched one nipple and held it up near his chin. He examined it like a grocer with an apple by its stem. “Yes,” he said. “Very, very much.”

He pulled his own shirt over his head. He was lobster pink from the roofing job. “How do you like my little titties?”

She wrinkled her nose. “You’ll look like a black man in a week or so. Except your nose is so waspy.”

“I have to kill a blackman.”

She laughed. “That gardener. Good, he’s a snot.”

Berryman knelt in the middle of the bed and kissed her, without touching his pink chest against her.