Sweet Jane was standing on a corner when Waterboy drove by. He saw her and stopped.
Hey, Sweet Jane, what’s that in your hand?
Hey, Waterboy, I’m going empty-handed to where the real game is. Give me a lift?
What’s the real game, Sweet Jane?
Same as it always is, Waterboy, same as it always is.
How you talk, Sweet Jane.
Want you to meet a friend of mine, Waterboy. A fifteen-year-old bucktoothed divorcee. Her name is Jackie. Here, this is her house.
This one?
No, the one with the dead lawn.
They all have dead lawns, Sweet Jane.
The one that also has the car up on blocks in the driveway.
This one? But they all—
Kill the engine and come with me.
Jackie, you and Waterboy, you should really get together. Bedroom’s back that way.
Sweet Jane, I live here, I know where the bedroom is. Past the crib with the baby I had last year, and down the hall to the left.
Show Waterboy.
No. Don’t you have to go to the store and get me those things we like?
Yes, I guess I do, and I guess I will walk over there and get those items right now.
Get Waterboy here to give you a lift.
Jackie, I can walk, and Waterboy can stay right here and keep you company while I’m gone.
No, he can’t. Waterboy, go with Sweet Jane.
But Jackie, we just met, and the evening is long. Must I go?
Yeah. Keep her company.
Jackie pushed Waterboy toward the front door.
Okay, but before I leave—
There was Waterboy and there was Jackie and there was the door that wasn’t opened yet. Very little space separated the three. Waterboy kissed Jackie, open-mouthed, the way the French are rumored to do. Jackie fell back against the door.
Wow, Waterboy, you freaked me out!
Well, in that case…
Waterboy kissed her once again. This time, she remained fully erect, as did he.
Waterboy, you should ask Jackie to go with you.
Like, go steady, Sweet Jane? Like, my steady girlfriend, the fifteen-year-old bucktoothed divorcee with the baby?
Sure! Why not?
Don’t you think it’s too soon? Sweet Jane, Jackie and me, we only just met.
Waterboy, the time is speeding away.
Back at the house with the dead lawn and the cinderblocked car and the crib with the baby that never seemed to wake up and cry and the mother whose charms had proven sufficient for the engendering of said quiet child, and with Sweet Jane and Waterboy returned from the store and the items purchased there divvied out (candy bars and cigarettes and doughnuts and diapers), Waterboy looked at the time.
Oh, look at the time, I must depart. Sweet Jane, do you need a ride?
No, Waterboy, my ride will be here soon.
And Jackie, before I go, will you go steady with me?
Jackie fell back against the wall, limiting her avenues of escape.
Waterboy, that freaked me out! I’ll have to think about it!
Okay, don’t think too hard.
Waterboy, charmer extraordinaire and presser home of advantage, kissed her goodnight.
Don’t worry, Waterboy, I won’t.
It was summertime, and the living was easy, though the lawn was dry. Inside the house with the cinderblocked car out front, Waterboy sat on the sofa and Jackie sat on the floor next to the baby’s crib.
Waterboy, ain’t this a beautiful baby? Waterboy, say yes or no.
Yes or no, Jackie.
Baby’s a pain in the ass, Waterboy, though I love it so. I can’t have any more, though I’m on the pill just in case. Now tell me this a beautiful baby, Waterboy.
Jackie, that is a beautiful baby.
In truth, Waterboy would not have known a beautiful baby from an ugly baby. No man alive would, and the dead make no judgments of value, having only one thing to say. (As am I, so you shall be.)
Therefore, to maintain that any baby is beautiful is to make a statement with the same objective veracity as to maintain that any baby is ugly. Q.E.D.
Waterboy, what are you talking about? You didn’t cue any damn dee. You need to get yourself back into school.
Going next term, Jackie. Going to study journalism.
I’d like to study journalism, too, Waterboy, if I get my ass back in school.
Jackie, if you get your ass back in school, we’ll probably be working together in the journalism program, for I hear they’re going to make me an editor.
You’ll have to edit out the part of this story where we’re going steady, Waterboy, because that ain’t going to happen.
I don’t mind, Jackie. I’d rather not be tied down.
You guys, you’re all alike. Whorehoppers all.
Jackie, you hurt my feelings, I’ve never hopped a whore. And anyway, it was Sweet Jane’s idea, this going steady stuff. She talked me into it.
Even if it was your own idea, Waterboy, it just wasn’t going to work out. You see, I realized last night that I really like an old friend I haven’t seen for years.
Is that so? Jackie, Jackie, Jackie, I wish you girls could come up with some new lines.
Why should we do that, Waterboy, when the old ones work? When it’s convenient to have these little code-sayings that everyone understands, why not deal them out?
I can’t argue with that, Jackie, and I won’t even try.
You’re a smart boy, Waterboy, and as you see, I’m a smart girl. Isn’t it time for you to go? Shouldn’t I show you the door?
Jackie, it’s right there. But before I go—
Waterboy came to Jackie and he took her in his arms and gave her one of the passionate Continental kisses that he had in fact first learned from Sweet Jane only the previous spring, under blossoming trees dotted with chittering songbirds.
Well, Jackie, I guess that’s as far as we’ll go.
Few things could be more certain, Waterboy.
There was some part of no for an answer Waterboy wasn’t yet ready to take. It was the no part.
Back at Jackie’s yet again, the television on to some daytime dreadful dreck, Jackie at the crib and paying no mind, Sweet Jane watching and waiting but for what? and Waterboy watching and waiting—but for what? A man’s voice is heard from down the hall, direction of the bedroom, and Sweet Jane smiles, There’s my ride. And down the hall she goes and out of sight.
Jackie putters with the quiet baby.
I am angry, Waterboy. That damn Crazy said he’d be here two hours ago and he is not here.
That damn Crazy?
The very one. Love of my life. Fire of my soul. That sort of bullshit.
Father of your child?
How the hell do I know? I do know he was also supposed to be here last night and at the very last moment he phoned up and said, Oh, Jackie, my sassy bucktoothed fifteen-year-old divorcee with the quiet child, I am truly and deeply sorry, but something has come up.
Angry Jackie gently lays her baby down in the crib and roughly sits herself down on the sofa. Waterboy, generally cheerful and always somewhat clueless—they go together, like love and marriage, or fornication and regret—sits beside her.
Cheer up, Jackie!
How.
I know two ways.
Waterboy, your manipulative cuteness grows tiresome. What are these two ways?
Well, one is to get Crazy over here, and I don’t think I have to tell you the other.
Yes, you do. I don’t read minds. Or even magazines.
Jackie, you don’t read magazines?
Look, that’s life, Waterboy. There’s just no time for it.
There could be time for the other way to cheer you up.
Waterboy put his arm around Jackie to pull her close for kissing. She slid from his grasp like a golden freshwater eel slipping away beneath the waters of a swift-running brook—or like a girl evading the clutches of a boy she wishes would go away, she knows exactly what he wants, even if he doesn’t—and she slipped down to sit on the floor, where she sat. And she smiled, though not at him.
Waterboy, recognizing defeat at last and refusing to capitulate without snatching at least some shred of dignity and self-respect from its jaws, smiles and says, Now, see, I hardly did anything and I’ve already got you grinning!
And with that, he got up and left. And he never came back. And he never again saw the bucktoothed fifteen-year-old divorcee Jackie and her quiet baby, or the inside of their house, with its sofa and television and crib and bedroom down the hall to the—left? right?—he couldn’t remember, he would have to ask Sweet Jane when next he saw her.
But when next he saw her, it didn’t cross his mind. There he stood, at the corner of a lunch table in the school cafeteria, tray of industrial hot slop in his hands, and there was Sweet Jane.
Waterboy, hey.
Sweet Jane, it’s been a while.
Put that tray down, Waterboy, I’ve got something for you.
Waterboy knew that whatever Sweet Jane had for him it was likely to be more pleasant than that which lingered on the tray—same type of tray used at the county jail, but that’s another story—and he set that tray down on the table. And she kissed him, open-mouthed and hungry. Right there in the crowded cafeteria, their peers milling about.
Wow. That was sweet, Jane.
I’m like that, Waterboy. Though not every day.
So true, Sweet Jane, so true. What makes today a different day?
Today is the day I go away, Waterboy.
Sadder news I have not lately heard, though I don’t read the papers.
You study journalism, Waterboy, and you don’t read the papers?
Nary a single one, Sweet Jane, not even the little rag I edit.
Waterboy, you’re freaking me out, as Jackie might say. Explain it to me, give me a dose of schooled elucidation.
Oh, Sweet Jane, how you talk. How we jounalisimate now is the New New Journalism. It’s lean and mean and no more than sheen. We cook it up and dish it out and move on, never looking back.
Not unlike my life, Waterboy, not unlike my life. Did I tell you I’m engaged?
Sweet Jane fluttered her hand in front of Waterboy’s face, but the fingers wore no rings.
Sweet Jane, you did not, and had you not, I do not think I would otherwise have known.
Now you know, I’m tying the knot. Next news item, had you heard about my pregnancy?
There had been rumors bandied about. You know how schoolkids are.
We are as we are, Waterboy, though I am no longer dining for two.
Sweet Jane— Sweet Jane— Did you— ?
I had a miscarriage, Waterboy.
Waterboy, being entirely male, would never fully understand the full import of Sweet Jane’s news, so he said, Sweet Jane, is this good or bad?
Bad for the baby, Waterboy, though I’m likely able to be knocked up again, whether I’m likely to like it or not.
Is this… good, Sweet Jane?
Sometimes it makes me happy, sometimes it makes me sad. Sometimes it just makes me mad. But at least I won’t end up like Jackie, Waterboy, enmothered at fifteen and speeding away down breeder’s road.
How is our dear Jackie of the quiet baby and bucked teeth and truncated marriage? I never went back.
Your absence was little noted nor long remembered. Other, more pressing matters came closer to hand. Jackie had to snatch up baby and things and move on the lickety-split, as there was a warrant out for Crazy’s arrest.
That’s crazy.
Yeah, he’s like that. And now, as I said earlier, I am going away myself, heading for where the real game is.
I would say I will miss you, Sweet Jane, but the fact is, I hardly ever think of you.
I hardly ever think of you, either, Waterboy, though I suppose I may, from time to time as years go by, remember all that we have shared and all that we have not.
I promise you, I will do the same.
You’re such a sweet boy. Well, ta-ta!
And with that, Sweet Jane turned and left the crowded schoolhouse cafeteria and Waterboy wistfully watched her walk away before sitting himself down to his tray of industrial slop, cooled now and congealed.
Tetman Callis is a writer and artist who lives in Chicago. His stories have been published in a variety of literary magazines, most recently BULL, Tahoma Literary Review, Elm Leaves Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, Running Wild Press: Short Story Anthology Vol. 7, and Propagule. He is the author of the memoir, High Street: Lawyers, Guns & Money in a Stoner’s New Mexico (Outpost 19, 2012), and the children’s book, Franny & Toby (Silky Oak Press, 2015). He can be found online at tetmancallis.substack.com.
Read Tetman’s story in Propagule 2 here, his story in Propagule 5 here, and his story in Propagule 6 here.