Read Online The Up-Down by Barry Gifford - Free Book Online

you?”
    â€œHere.”
    â€œWhere’s ‘here’?”
    â€œBay St. Clement. I’m gettin’ gas at Oscarito’s fillin’ station. I still got Bitsy’s Subaru. Poor Bitsy. Can I come see you?”
    When Pace did not respond immediately, Punzy said, “Please? I won’t stay if you think it’s a bad idea. We need to talk, I think. I mean, I do. To explain. I miss bein’ with you.”
    â€œOkay.”
    Pace thought about leaving before Punzy got there, but before he could even move she was standing in front of him.
    â€œYou cut your hair,” he said.
    â€œJoan of Arc,” said Punzy, caressing the back of her neck with her right hand. “Do you like it?”

 
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    20
    â€œI hid out in a cheap motel, Moke’s, on Reno Street near the C-stock track where the kids I hung out with in high school would go to rent a room for seven bucks and get loaded. I was there for a week, then drove down to Savannah to bunk with an old beau of mine named Travis Chavis, who’s turned gay now. His daddy owned the Kickin’ Chicken chain of restaurants. Travis inherited a ton of money when he turned twenty-one and bought himself a mansion in the best part of town. Lives with his boyfriend, a black man named Devondre Williams-Williams used to be a star runnin’ back at Georgia Tech until he got thrown off the team for detrimental behavior—Devondre told me he wore dresses and women’s undergarments in the locker room—and lost his scholarship. Travis paid for his plastic surgery so now Devondre looks kind of like Katharine Hepburn with the physique of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He quit takin’ steroids, though, ’cause they shrunk his private parts. Anyway, I didn’t have any available cash so Travis took me in and then gave me a bunch when I decided to leave Savannah. I don’t much like that town—they don’t let dogs or even people walk on the grass in the parks there.”
    Punzy and Pace were sitting in facing armchairs in his cottage, drinking rum and Cokes. Pace wasn’t sure what he should do about her; he was still attracted to Punzy but he knew she was forty miles of bad road. His weakness disgusted him and while she talked he was working up the nerve to send her on her way.
    â€œWhen I was stayin’ at Travis’s, though, I thought deep and hard about how careless and foolish I’ve been with my one and only life. Devondre helped me out there, describin’ his own self and discoverin’ he couldn’t handle goin’ through the remainder of his time on earth without bein’ the person he knew he really was. Of course I’d thought about this before, which is why I decided to become a nurse. I’m thinkin’ I should go to Africa and help rid Sudanese or Congolese kids of all the diseases they got.
    â€œBitsy’s and my daddy, Purvis Pasternak, was an evil man. I don’t know if Bitsy told you about him. He owned a gun store in Charlotte where all the Klansmen, if there still is a Klan, hung out. When our mother, Martita Hunter, who was from Mississippi originally, died, I was eleven. Bitsy was just out of college. Daddy began molestin’ me then, after Bitsy was gone to graduate school in Chapel Hill. She was so smart the colleges all paid to have her. Daddy told me it was what God intended, to keep the comminglin’ of the sexes, as he called it, in the family. I guess he never done nothin’ with Bitsy because Mama was still alive. When my sister’d come home for the holidays, he’d leave off foolin’ with me until she’d go back to school. I got pregnant when I was thirteen so Daddy sent me to stay in a home for unwed mothers in St. Louis, The Saviors of All the King’s Daughters it was called. When Bitsy came to see me there I told her it was our daddy who’d made me with child and she swore she’d never again go back to his house,