Feet on the Street by Roy Blount Jr. Page B

another, it brings her up against me even closer.
    She smells like her corsage—they’re in town for the weekend, she says, for a football game—and her lipstick, maybe, which is certainly red enough to be aromatic, especially now that it’s set off by a fleck of horseradish.
    â€œNo,” I say, “ ‘A GOOD MAN’ can’t be right—see, fourteen down, ‘Greek love,’ would be AGAPE, and—”
    She looks at me with both eyes, and rolls them. “Ooh, I don’t think so, hon,” she says. “Let’s just jam it in there. We’ll make it fit.” She writes AGAPE in so that the
E
is on top of the
N.
    That fleck of horseradish is still there on her lip. I could flick it off for her. Or I could point to the same spot on my own lip so she could get it off herself. I refrain from doing either.
    Now she has one of my oysters. “Slurps” is too blatant. She takes it in juicily. Now she’s filling things in one after another, free association and spontaneity being the key more than strict interpretation or even in some cases the right number of letters. I am more tolerant of this than I would be in other circumstances.
    â€œYou know we could do this all evening,” she says, and in spite of my reserve I’m beginning to have the same thought. At this time I am unattached, and I am not thinking with as much edge as I was back there in that noir-narration frame of mind. But there’s Kyle. She turns to him and says, “Me and this man could keep on doing this till another puzzle comes out.” She takes the last of their dozen. “Kyle doesn’t do the puzzle,” she says. “Kyle could eat ever’ got-damn oyster in New Orleans and he still couldn’t do the puzzle. Let’s go, Kyle, put some money down.” He does, and my weight sags just a bit farther than I’d prefer in the direction of her abruptly withdrawn shoulder.
    Becca and Kyle turn to go, her arm in his; but she looks back long enough to lick the fleck of horseradish off, finally, and to say, by way of farewell: “They like it when you dog ’em out.”
    I look at my puzzle, which is a mess.
    â€œSay, ‘They’?” says the shucker.
    S LICK PULLED THE orphan story out of the fire. He had a wide circle of friends in, for instance, the ballooning and motocross and country-music communities, and one of them put him onto some photographable orphans. The cover picture, under the billing, “When Love Is the Best Gift of All—MERRY CHRISTMAS, AMERICA,” was of a little blond girl who had been an orphan before adoption. But when Slick told the story of the orphan story he tended to leave people believing that we had shifted topics on
Parade
and pulled it off:
Oysters.
He pronounced it
oischers,
to rhyme with
moistures,
as do many people who savor those mollusks’ juices. They say a mayor of New Orleans named DeMaestri hosted President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at dinner once and didn’t say a word until the end of the evening, when he said, “How’d you like them ersters?” This is one of several indigenous pronunciations.
    Some twenty years later Slick died, directly from drink. He was the second New Orleans rambling companion of mine who knew that drinking would kill him, who narrowly escaped dying once already from it, but went back to it anyway. One of the things Slick often said was, “I wouldn’t want to live like that,” in a not entirely facetious though mock-pious tone, pronouncing “live” sort of like “leeyuv.” Say we passed a man in the street who was carrying a cat in a cage labeled “Tom Doodle” in fancy script, and the cat was emitting a cranky-sounding moan and the man was talking back to it in a whiny, put-upon voice. Slick would say, “I wouldn’t want to leeyuv like that.” When liquor began to get the better of him, he was in and out of