It was the worst night of the week for Red, what with half the local guys off at Reserve meeting and the rest at the Moose Lodge. There was so little going on in Evansboro this night every week that most of the bars even closed up for lack of business; so it was either stay home and watch TV with a cold six-pack standing by or face the long drive over to Kinston where there was at least the chance of a little excitement.
Red was sort of in-between… too old for the Reserves and too young, he thought, for any of those hale-and-hearty fraternal groups like the Moose and the Elks, the only two that functioned in Evansboro. Of course, for the monied set, there was always the Forest Acres Club. Red could have joined, for as a house-owner in Forest Acres, he was automatically eligible, but he knew better than to try hob-nobbing with the company wheels over there. He might have been the last word on the loading docks, but with those front-office guys, he knew where he stood-one peg above the rest of the flunkies like Don Willard.
He was sitting in his favorite chair, one of those vinyl recliners with the built-in vibrator, a gift from his wife Louise before she ran off with some bum from up north. It was the only reminder of her that was left in the house – everything else was gone. Pictures, their wedding silver, even the clothes of his that she picked out. And the only reason he kept the chair was practicality – he liked it and replacing it would cost a bundle.
Red leaned far out over the chair arm and opened a drawer in the front of the telephone table. His fingers found a worn metal frame, the glass gone years ago, and he took it out reverently, like it was a holy relic.
He looked down in his lap at the photograph, nearly ten years old now and never too clear even when it was new. It was a photograph taken at the state fair up in Raleigh, the only one that he had of Diane.
She hadn't wanted to pose for the fifty-cent photographer, but after Red ran into her on the midway, she finally agreed, and the expression was perfect – the slightly sullen, bored look of a beautiful woman in a teenager's body. A woman who could have gone on to almost anything, but stayed on in Evansboro with a husband that would never amount to much more than a day-laborer.
Damn, you were some good-looking girl, Diane, and you're even nicer looking as a woman! You could have had me or a dozen other men just for asking, but you chose that grease-monkey Don Willard. You fool, Diane, you silly cunt fool!
Like he always did, he felt a hard-on coming as he stared at the faded photograph, his eyes undressing her and, in his mind's, boundless imagination, his hands hotly coursing over the smooth voluptuous curves of her ripe young body. He remembered those beautiful firm breasts, their high soaring pride as she stripped that stupid night at Sal's, the night that he got drunk and lost his temper… the last night that Diane ever so much as spoke to him until five years into her marriage.
He could imagine himself unfastening those tight little shorts, cut-off jeans really, and as he looked at her photograph there in his hands, she seemed to come alive, smiling at him with that pert little come-on grin that she always had, her head cocked to one side as if she was sizing him up for a romp in her bedroom. She had one hand on her hip as she stared at him from the photograph as she had for years now, the same mysterious expression… and the same inviting young body, barely contained beneath her cut-off jeans and the tight-fitting T-shirt that somebody had sent her from San Francisco. It was silk-screened in day-glo colors and he remembered how she seemed to wear it day and night that last summer before she married Don; even at night, he would see her a couple of blocks away, frolicking with some of her young friends. One late summer's night, driving home from a stint on the swing-shift, he could see a group of teenagers down by the floating pier at Johnson's Pond. They were dancing in the moonlight to somebody's car radio, and he could clearly see the phosphorescent colors of Diane's California T-shirt as she wriggled to the latest surf music from the West Coast. He wanted to stop the car, to run down to the pond and grab her and take her away from those pimply-faced boys and show her what a real man was like. But he didn't. He drove on, like he had a thousand nights, home to his loveless marriage. Home to his unfaithful wife.
And now there wasn't even Louise to return to after a day's work. He missed her more than he liked to admit – after all, she had been around a long time. And despite all her faults, she could be a good woman and a loving wife when she wanted to be.
But she was like all the rest of them, slutbitches every one of them! Let a good-looking stranger with a fancy new car pass through town and they all start getting itchy drawers!
Red heard the car door slam outside and he hurried first to put away his prized photograph. There were few visitors at the Collins house – the executives never slummed with the production people like himself even though he was a foreman. And his men never bothered to come around, none too anxious, he guessed, to spend their off-work hours with the boss.
He slipped the time-worn photo into its resting place beneath the telephone and walked quickly to the door. Through the parted curtain that covered the glass front door, he could see a car parked at the end of his driveway and someone walking up the drive in none too great a hurry. He squinted, unable to make out who it was… Damn, it better not be somebody selling door-to-door. I'm in no mood for sales pitches tonight!
Suddenly his caller stepped into the pool of light cast by the porch light and his breath burst from his lungs as he realized who it was… His photograph had come to life, his dream girl was there at his door, alone.
It was Diane!