next to the bed, still with a little stink of photo smoke in the room, and Coakley said, “This afternoon, I had this . . . vision, kind of. We’d be lying out there in the sleeping bags, you know, not much going on, and we’d start to neck a little. Then nothing would happen, and we’d go back to the truck, and fool around a little more, than we’d come back here. You know?”

Virgil shrugged.

“But those pictures,” she said. “How could you have any kind of decent sexual experience with those pictures still in your head?”

He shrugged again. “They were . . . out there.”

“So maybe . . . maybe I could stop by again? Like tomorrow night?”

“Sure. Don’t do anything you don’t want to, Lee,” Virgil said. “I mean, you know. Do what you want.”

She stepped away and said, “Tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

Then she stepped back, grabbed his shirt, shoved him back on the bed, following him down, and said, “Oh, screw it. Right now.”

14

Well, Virgil thought, when he woke up the next morning, that was different.

Whatever sexual frustrations Coakley had developed over the ten declining years of her marriage had been fully resolved, he thought. He groaned when he tried to sit up, reaching for his back. He’d pulled one of the hinge muscles between his back and butt. He’d felt it go at the time—it was a recurring injury from his baseball days—and then had forgotten about it. Overnight, it had tightened up, and now felt like a steel clamp.

He dropped back on the pillow. On most nights, before he went to sleep, he spent some time thinking about God, a leftover from the first eighteen years of his life when he’d gotten down on his knees each night to say his evening prayers. Virgil was neither a complete believer nor an unbeliever, though he was skeptical about God’s interest in such things as divorce, debt, or dancing cheek to cheek, or much of anything that human beings got up to, short of murder, rape, or driving a Chrysler product.

Last night, he hadn’t been thinking about God.

Last night, he’d been trying to stay alive in the face—and also the chest, hips, and legs—of unchained femininity. Coakley was in extremely good shape, and nearly as large as Virgil; when he was astride her, spurring her down to the quarter pole, he realized that he was looking at her nose and mouth, rather than her forehead, or even the top of her head, as had been the case with the other women he’d known.

And she just . . . manhandled him. Woman-handled him.

Then there was the whole question of her whatchamacallit. Actually, there were two questions.

The first was, “My God, what’d you do down here?”

As a blonde, when she blushed, she got pink from head to toe. “Some girlfriends talked me into it. We got lasered.”

“Really?” Virgil couldn’t think of what to say, but he liked it, so he said, “Cool. Interesting. It’s kind of like a little landing strip.”

The second question was one of nomenclature. If you’re going to talk about the whole lasering concept, the ins and outs, so to speak, it seemed like there should be some word for it. Vagina was too specific and simply wrong, as were all the other Latinate words for specific parts. While examining the situation, Virgil suggested that only pussy was expressive of the area.

“I really hate that word,” she said.

“Well, it’s warm and fuzzy—”

“Virgil, do you want to get your hair ripped out?”

“There’s a radio guy up in the Cities who refers to it as the ‘swimsuit area,’ but he uses that for both male and female, I think.”

“That’s so romantic,” Coakley said. “‘I love your swimsuit area, darling.’”

Virgil looked up at her and said, “I’m trying to fill a linguistic void here, and you’re not helping. There is no noun for what we’re talking about. Except—”

“Don’t say it.”

“And if we can’t say that one, we should feel obligated to come up with another. One that’s harmless, non-offensive, et cetera.”

“Like . . . apple?”

“An Apple’s a computer,” Virgil said. “And I’m not sure that adapting either fruits or vegetables would really be appropriate.”

“Or minerals. I’d rule out minerals.”

They hadn’t resolved the question, but Virgil determined to work on it in his spare time, if he ever had any.

HE LOOKED at the clock. Ah, man: 9:22. Had to get up. The DNA report would be coming in.

Anyhoo . . .

He yawned, scratched, trotted into the bathroom for a shower. All the towels