Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet (classic fiction txt) 📕

good fit for half a coconut shell. The breasts would have red circle marks on them, like glass rings on a coffee table.

Maybe he should work on Casey, with regard to the phone-sex problem. Sure, she was an adult, but adults made poor choices all the time and she was no exception. Maybe he should press her harder to go to college. She was still young enough. Was it wrong of him to let her choose her own path? She was his daughter. And she was only in her twenties. And she was doing phone sex. She was going down the old phone-sex road. Where did that road lead? That road was a dead end.

It was all very well to be accepting. Acceptance had its place. But maybe he was shirking his duty. Maybe he should plead with her, or threaten. Did Susan know? She did not, was his suspicion. Maybe he should talk about it with Susan. Maybe they should formulate policy. Of course, he had just told Casey he was fine with it. The downside of drunkenness. But it was true, in a way. That is, he was fine with the sex aspect, in a sense. What sense? Well, in the sense that he could admit his daughter was a female, and—

OK, so he was fine with it in the sense that he could ignore it, if he tried, or maybe chock it up to youthful mischief, risk-taking, or perversity, or also possibly a nihilistic, self-abnegating impulse Casey had been known at times to embrace. But he was not fine with the whole career dead-end thing. Would she feel amused and fulfilled doing phone sex at fifty? No she would not.

When he got home he would hunker down with Susan. They would devise a phone-sex strategy.

•

“What the hell happened to you?” asked Brady, when Hal approached with drinks in hand, finally. He already had a new one, and was talking to a pretty girl. Cleve the lawyer was not around. “You fall in?”

Brady’s sharpness and his focus were on Hal, yet Hal sensed it was for the benefit of the pretty girl. She was half Brady’s age at the most and quite elegant, with her black hair swept up on top of her head in a chignon style Hal’s mother had favored. This, he realized, was why Brady had driven fast to the party.

He put down the cognac and G&T on a table, the better to drink his own whiskey. Behind Brady, against a vine-covered wall, people in skimpy bathing suits were blindfolded and playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey, shrieking with laughter. He drank the whiskey; Brady was leaning in close to the girl, plying her. He was trying to get her to sleep with him. Hal could not hear what he was saying, nor did he want to.

But his whiskey was already gone.

He grabbed up the extra G&T surreptitiously, without Brady noticing, and moved away from the two of them, toward the taped-up banner of the donkey. Tails hung all over it, willy-nilly. He stood there sipping and watching as a plump woman in a tiny, ill-advised purple thong approached, giggling. She was being roughly steered, almost pushed in fact, by a large man behind her who held onto her shoulders. She raised a braided donkey tail, her arm wavering.

“Colder, colder, warmer, colder,” chanted other men in the crowd. But they were toying with the woman. They misdirected her and then they laughed.

Abruptly the large man turned her toward the pool, and she stepped forward. She screamed as she fell. But then seconds later she resurfaced, sputtering and annoyed, tugging at her blindfold as laughter resounded. Hal stepped away, thinking maybe she had let it happen—there was something about her, something irritating—but also touched by sadness.

At his elbow was a young man with a brush cut in wet swimming trunks, toweling his buff body.

“Pathetic, isn’t it,” said the young man.

Hal felt called upon to defend the woman.

“She’s the victim,” he said. Possibly slurring.

“That’s what I mean,” said the young man, and shrugged on a T-shirt. “They’re pathetic. Not her.”

“Oh. Yeah,” said Hal, though in fact it was all of them.

“You know anyone here?” asked the young man.

“No one I want to talk to,” said Hal. “You?”

“Same,” said the young man. “I’m on leave, I don’t live around here.”

“You in the army or something?”

“Air Force.”

“I was just with some Marines,” said Hal. “Or something like that. Coast Guard. Green Berets. Shit, military-type guys, what the hell do I know. In the jungle.”

“Yeah?”

“Down south, on the Monkey River,” said Hal, nodding.

“No shit,” said the Air Force guy. “Me too!”

“Get out,” said Hal. Was the guy playing him?

“Serious,” said the Air Force guy. “We did a raid on a guerrilla camp.”

“A raid? You mean like—”

“I’m a pilot.”

“So you mean like a bombing raid? A—dropping bombs on them?”

“Limited airstrike. Yeah. Cluster bombs.”

“Cluster bombs?”

“CBUs.”

“Don’t we—I mean don’t we have to declare war or something?”

“Hey. Just following orders. My understanding through the grapevine, this was a War on Drugs operation.”

Hal felt dazzled. Water splashed up from the pool onto his back, and people were still shrieking. He thought for a second he was back by the river, exhausted. Was it his fault? Bombing Mayans . . . but maybe they weren’t Mayans at all, maybe they were drug kingpins. He gazed down at the drink in his hand; he had mixed tequila, whiskey and now vodka. It was dizzying.

“There you go,” said the pilot, putting a hand on his back and moving him. “Guy was about to stick a tail on you.”

“You mean on this side of the border, right?” asked Hal.

“Wanna get some food? I’m starving.”

“Sure,” said Hal, but he felt unsteady. “They have shrimp puffs.”

“There’s a whole table. Follow me.”

At the table there was a surfeit of food. The pilot picked up what looked like a kebab.

“Is that meat? Does that look like meat to you?”

“I think so,” said Hal, bending to look at it.

“I think so too.”

He put it back.

“What,” said