Read Online The Mortal Nuts by Pete Hautman - Free Book Online Page B

lens.
    â€œOkay. Okay. Give me a minute, okay?” One night, and already he needed a nurse. She looked down at her uniform and grimaced. The crisp whiteness had given way to the look of a well-used flour-sack dish towel. Carmen unzipped and unbuttoned, let the dress fall to the floor, then kicked it aside. Her mouth tasted awful. She could smell herself. She needed a hot shower, bad.
    â€œIt’s open!” Axel shouted.
    Carmen opened the door, stepped into room 3 and was instantly transported back in time. The smell of Mennen Skin Bracer. The bed made military style. The first time Carmen had visited Axel’s room, he had tried to bounce a quarter off the taut bedspread to show her how tight it was. The quarter hadn’t bounced very high. Actually, it hadn’t bounced at all.
    â€œHow come you make your own bed?” she’d asked.
    â€œI don’t like the maids in here messing with my stuff,” Axel had replied.
    Axel’s big thirty-one-inch TV dominated the wall opposite the bed. It was turned on to a fishing show, the sound off. The rest of his possessions—his “stuff”—were still neatly arranged in red plastic Coca-Cola crates stacked nine across and six high against the wall. Back in the sixties, he claimed, he had been able to make do with three crates: one for shirts and underwear, one for pants and shoes, and one for miscellaneous.
    Miscellaneous, Carmen knew, included ten- and twenty-dollar bills, neatly rolled, held tight with wide rubber bands, nestled together in red Folgers coffee cans.
    She made it a point to avert her eyes from the crates. It felt like bad luck. She remembered the last time she had been there. One year ago, on the third day of the fair, Axel’s contacts had turned on him; he needed his eyeglasses and eyedrops, and he’d sent Carmen back to the motel with the key to room 3. It was during that visit that she had discovered the rolls of bills packed in a two-pound coffee can in one of the bottom crates. Shaking with excitement, she had pulled one bill from each of the eighteen fat, solid rolls that filled the can. It had been the single most exciting moment of her life. She wished she’d had the guts to take more. There had been at least seven other Folgers cans, which she had been too excited, too scared to open.
    Just thinking about it now sent her pulse climbing. Her eyes shifted toward the Coca-Cola crates; she jerked them back.
    Axel sat perched on a chair in front of the dressing mirror. His right eye was red and tearing. The end table at his elbow was covered with plastic squeeze bottles of lens cleaners, lubricants, and rinses. Several different brands were represented. Axel was looking at her in the mirror.
    â€œYou took your time.”
    â€œI took a shower. Give me a break. What’s your problem?”
    â€œI got one in, but this son-of-a-bitch won’t sit right.” He pointed at the contact lens, tinted blue, resting on a folded piece of toilet paper.
    Carmen sat on the taut bedspread, forcing him to turn and look at her directly. She was wearing jeans and an oversize white V-neck T-shirt. No bra. She leaned forward. Axel stared into her shirt, letting his teary eyes rest on the cleavage, freckled and tanned. It was impossible to focus with only one eye working. Carmen shifted her shoulders, causing her breasts to swing to the left. Axel followed the path of her large nipples across the white cotton fabric. “I can’t see for shit.”
    She leaned back and brought her legs up. Over a year he had been putting his contacts in all by himself; now suddenly he needs help. She wrapped her arms around her shins and rocked back and forth. If he wanted her to install his contact lenses, she wasn’t going to make it easy for him. She did not want this to become a daily chore.
    â€œHow come you can’t get it in yourself?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œHow come you don’t just