FICTION-

JEAN BOULLET from VRIENDSCHAP

by jim ramp

HEART'S

CORE

Tell me. How do you walk up to a big guy--bulging with muscle--a mattock in his hand--or a shovel. Sweat runneling down his heaving chest, making tracks through the black hair. How do you look at his granite face? The white teeth gripping a stubby black pipe? The broad, brown cheeks smeared with muck where he has swiped at it with impatient hands that look like cleavers in a slaughter house? The icy glare of blue eyes under heavy brows that say roughly: "Go to hell, you!"

Tell me... If you are a brand new college instructor-straight out of a Methodist grant University--a piddling school with grim-minded professors and Halleluhahs echo-

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ing from the belfry when you need another fifty winks in the mornings. Well--my starving gut was stuck to my backbone when I got my sheepskin and made tracks for another ideahatchery which had offered me a job.

Teaching English, business methods--and short-story-no less.

And I was happy as a longnecker clam in warm sand on a deserted beach. I arrived in this small western city in June; Got myself a job in a small hotel downtown as a night clerk and took out a library card. And then this guy had to turn up. He drew me like steel to a magnet. The city had decided to gut the street in front of the hotel. And I had a ring seat in the front of the hotel--second floor. What in hell was going on I don't know. Something to do with sewers, gas mains, electric cable. It looked like a summer long job-and the yakking of pneumatic hammers during the day did nothing for my sinus headaches. I` yenned for September and the opening of school. Meanwhile, 'I was pinned like a fly upside down on fly paper by this guy.

I hung around on the street with other gawkers. I watched him from my window. I started dreaming about him at night. Even wet dreams. To which I'm not accustomed--not being a horny guy. And certainly not a....homosexual one. I let my grub burn on the double gas plate I was allowed for "lite housekeeping" (as the euphemistic landlady called it.) My belly cramped. And my balls. I felt guilty. I took cold showers. I would have joined the YMCA if I could have afforded it. I read books till my eyes ached. It was, I figured, a matter of mind over sex. And sex won hands down.

Now look! I come from a long line of lean, clean-living Americans. Sex is a kind of hush-hush proposition. Children are born. You look at your blushing neighbors and think-privately, of course--"so you went and sinned.” And you forgive them--if they are properly married--and the nine months of decency have passed. Sex--according to my father--is just one of those things even the God-fearing has to put up with. It's a kind of mechanical thing and started away back in Bible days. So-and-so begat. Why, it doesn't say. It seemed necessary, I guess. But it wasn't nice, And Good People didn't talk about it. Even in the university we skirted skittishly around it, and I expect Onan had more descendants than any one of the Begats. Me--I think I was his eldest son.

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