Social Blunders by Tim Sandlin

First, he’ll offer you money to change the story.” She grabbed my arm. “Don’t take it.”
    “I don’t need money.”
    “Then he’ll threaten you with hired violence. Skip’s too wimpy to touch you himself.”
    Mimi’s voice was up near hysteria. “Cameron does not dip his wick.”
    “Oh, he does too,” Katrina said.
    “And Cameron does not deserve scandal. You. Leave my house this instant.”
    I stood up from the ottoman, but Katrina didn’t release my arm. “I’m sorry to have upset you,” I said.
    “Out.”
    Katrina’s fingernails dug into my skin. “Don’t make him go. I want all the sick, ugly details of how your Cameron and my Skippy soiled this poor boy’s mother.”
    At the word soiled , Mimi buried her face in her hands and sobbed. I hadn’t expected to have this effect on people. I hadn’t thought beyond the fathers and me, but now it sank in that others were involved—innocent strangers who’d never raped anybody.
    “I better go,” I said.
    Gilia looked from her mother to me.
    I said, “Nice to have met you.”
    Her lips parted, but she didn’t speak.
    ***
    “You ain’t my kid, you’re too scrawny.”
    Babe Carnisek was big—big as Billy’s coffin case. Even leaned back in a recliner with his hands curled in his lap he appeared in the upper-six-foot range and near three hundred pounds. He hadn’t gone to fat, either. A well-dinged free-weight set and lift bench filled the gap where the breakfast nook should have been.
    “But you did have relations with my mother,” I said.
    “I humped her, if that’s what you mean. I was number two behind that bastard Skip, before she got wore out.”
    Babe’s wife, Didi, came in from the kitchen, carrying three ice teas on an A&W Root Beer tray. “Who got wore out, honey?”
    “His ma. A bunch of us screwed this junior high chick and Pee Wee here says we got her pregnant. Says I might be his dad.” Babe was paying more attention to the Washington-Detroit game on TV than to his wife or me. Washington was up 21-8—not so close a game as should have pulled him away from the possibility of a son.
    Didi offered from the tray. “He’s too shrimpy, Babe.” She put a finger on her chin and studied me like a Food Lion steak. “You couldn’t be his father; unless your mama was a midget. Is your mama a midget?”
    “No, ma’am. She’s about the same height as you.”
    “I wish you was his boy. Babe always wanted a son, but we can’t have any, on account of the steroids.”
    “Look at that pussy block,” Babe said. “I can block better’n that, without my knees.”
    Didi sat down across from me on the vinyl-covered couch. “Babe had a scholarship to Virginia Tech, until he ruint both knees playing softball.”
    The tea had enough sugar to send a horse into diabetic shock. “If you aren’t my father, which one do you think is?”
    The Detroit quarterback fumbled the snap. “God almighty,” Babe said, “I hate quarterbacks. Every ratty little one should be horsewhipped.” He looked over at me. “Skip Prescott or the nigger, I imagine. Other than them we’re all linemen.”
    “Billy Gaines was an end.”
    “Tight end. And high school teams didn’t pass much in the fifties. Guilford County ran a T formation with Billy blocking the left side.”
    “Was he any good?”
    Babe snorted. “Billy’s blind as a bat. Mostly he stood in people’s way.”
    “So you think it’s Skip or Jake.”
    “I was you I’d hope for the nigger. I’d rather have a nigger daddy than Skip Prescott any day.”
    “You don’t like Mr. Prescott?”
    Babe went back to the game, but Didi clucked a couple times and gave the explanation. “Skip hired Babe the first summer out of high school, then said he’d fire him if he didn’t play on the Dixieland Sporting Goods softball team.”
    “And Babe blew his knees,” I said.
    I looked at Babe, who was pretending to watch the game. But I could tell he was thinking about what might have been.
    Didi