Mom Swap Chapter 2, Verses 1 and 2
A few more minutes, a few more details, and Billy cuts the interview short. He's crying openly now, and his eyes keep jumping to a framed photo above the fireplace: a woman, waif thin, with hair so blonde it's almost white. She wears a red sweater and a brown trenchcoat, and looks as if she's about to be carried away by the wind.
"That your mom?"
Billy nods. I stand, walk to the photo, take it off the mantle. This close, I can see the teeth in the woman's smile. She's grinning hard, ludicrously happy. Behind her is a brown building, a brick wall.
"Strange place for a photo."
"That's taken just outside her job," Billy says. You can hear relief in his voice, the ease of talking about something comfortable. Normal. "It was the day she got hired."
"Rockfall Communications," I say.
"Yeah," he says. "How'd you know?"
"My partner's over there right now. Talking to your mom."
Billy stares, gapes. He looks betrayed. "You have a guy talking to my mom? My freaking mom—"
"Relax," I say. "Kevin's a good guy. He'll make her feel comfy."
"Get out," Billy says, and jumps up. "Get the hell out."
"Can I keep this photo?" I ask, but he just grinds his molars in response. I drop the photo and get out of the house, out of the too-hot living room and back into the bitter wind of November. "It smells like sex in here anyway!" I yell when I'm halfway out the door, loud enough for the neighbors to hear. Billy slams the door hard enough that the glass of the window rattles. I take a few steps and spin around. "Mom sex!"
. . .
The actual "mom sex"—the Mom Swap—took place two weeks before. Billy Hughes and Robbie Waller got drunk on cheap beer, probably Natural Light, and decided to fuck each other's moms. Their mothers, both divorcees, had no problem with that. No problem at all.
The swap should have been a secret. Secrecy is inherent to all Mom Swaps—it's part of the deal, part of the contract that goes unspoken: you fuck your friend's mom, he fucks yours, and you don't talk about it. But something went wrong with the Hughes/Waller Swap; one of them talked. It couldn't have been Billy, but it could have been his friend, and it could have been his mom, and it could have been his friend's mom. Any of them. It doesn't matter; what matters is that the news leaked to some cash register jockey or salonist or high school chum and then it spread through town, whispered at lockers, across lunch counters, laughed about over beers at one of the bars downtown or on College Hill, the university's bar district. And from there it reached the Jack Spraut at the Cedar Falls Courier.
Spraut was an old college buddy, a partner in Senior Reporting Methods, the final class required for a degree at the U. of Northern Iowa. We'd teamed up to report on the fencing team's cross-country to trip to compete in Sacramento, riding along in the back of the van, stuffed shoulder to shoulder between bags of white cloth jackets and white cloth breeches and white padded armor. We put twenties together and bought $40 worth of batteries, then recorder the entire fucking trip. There was one stop on the way, a hotel in Montana, and while the team practiced stabbing each other in the hotel multipurpose room Jack and I drained whiskey sours in the bar and tapped our story out onto my old iBook. We spilled whiskey into the keyboard twice, lost use of Z through C, but finished our report on the first night and spent the rest of the trip fuzzy with liquor. We came back exalted and exhausted, handed in a 30 column-inch feature, and received it back a week later with a D scrawled acrosss the cover in red ink. We hadn't spoken since.
I was on my bicycle when the call came in, pedaling across Grand Avenue, dropping off the sidewalk and into a gap in the traffic. It was some time after evening and before night, and the bike was a beige Goodwill model with an Ames Police Biek Rodeo registration sticker dating back to 1981. The tires were half flat and the reflector had long since fallen off. I was an invisible creature on the streets of Des Moines, a wobbly shadow on wheels. It took all my concentration to stay upright and alive, but I reached for my phone anyway, pulled it from the flapping pocket of my jacket, and stared down at its screen, a phosphorescent blue rectangle in the shadows of my hand.
Spraut, it said, which made no sense. Spraut, Spraut. Jack. Jack Spraut was calling me for the first time in . . . half a year. I started to swear but the front wheel of my bike collided with the curb, and I fell/jumped to the sidewalk. Handbars tangled in my ankles and I slammed into the plexiglass wall of the bus stop at the same time I accepted the call. Jack was talking by the time I pressed the phone to my face.
"—got a great story for you, man. How are you doin, anyway? It's been what, a year?"
"Six months," I said. The bike lay in a tangle at my feet, and beer leaked from one of the plastic sacks I'd dropped. I nudged it with my foot, heard the scratch of broken glass against broken glass. Two of the bottles were broken. I sighed, snatched up one of the remaining four, and unscrewed the cap, turned my back. A cop on Grand would never stop for someone with a cell phone; on Grand they only snagged hobos. "What are you talking about?"
"Crazy story," he said. "We got this tip in on the hotline, the news hotline—"
"Jack—"
"I'm a designer for the Courier now," he said. "But we have this news hotline that you can call with ideas for stories, right? Usually it's old women complaining about their neighbors—every old woman has a meth factory for a neighbor—but other day we get this call in, something about a 'mom swap'—"
And he told me about the swap, everything he knew. It wasn't very much, really but enough to sink a hook—couple kids had sex with each other's moms, it was arranged, some of the news boys had checked out the sources, done the preliminaries, decided the story might hold some truth.
"Jack," I said. "This is ridiculous." And I laughed. The beer was Killian's, the best I could afford on my salary as a low-level state researcher. It tasted red and buttery and too cold for a November night. "If this story is even remotely true, why isn't the Courier covering it?"
He snorted. I could see his face again: pudgy cheeks, raggedy goatee, icy blue eyes. "Tim, come on. Mom fucking. You think the Courier's gonna run this story?"
"Guess not."
"Besides, it's not really . . . news. In the sense of newspaper news. I mean, who gets hurt?"
"If it's not important, why'd you think I'd want to cover it?"
"Because it's weird," he said.
. . .
Kevin is across town, interviewing Billy's mom on her smoke break. He's got the car, so I'm fucked. I start walking away from Billy's house, through the maze of streets that makes up the suburbs. The wind is slow but picks up every fifteen seconds or so, whips into my face and and neck, and when that happens I walk faster, stride longer, until finally I'm jogging and then finally running, loping along the edge of the road, leaving swooping gray tracks in the beige dust of snow and dirt.
The houses slide past, front to back, all the same, all white and plastic. I wonder what's going on in each of them, if any other moms in this neighborhood have been swapped.
Minutes pass, enough time for the skin of my neck to turn to marble. I pass a busstop and think of Jack's call two weeks ago. A few blocks later the bus itself catches up with me, and at the stop light I board.
"This thing go anywhere near Rockfall Communications?" I ask as I dump a handful of change into the slot.
"Sure," the driver says. "That's 6th Street. We'll drop you right outside."
"That your mom?"
Billy nods. I stand, walk to the photo, take it off the mantle. This close, I can see the teeth in the woman's smile. She's grinning hard, ludicrously happy. Behind her is a brown building, a brick wall.
"Strange place for a photo."
"That's taken just outside her job," Billy says. You can hear relief in his voice, the ease of talking about something comfortable. Normal. "It was the day she got hired."
"Rockfall Communications," I say.
"Yeah," he says. "How'd you know?"
"My partner's over there right now. Talking to your mom."
Billy stares, gapes. He looks betrayed. "You have a guy talking to my mom? My freaking mom—"
"Relax," I say. "Kevin's a good guy. He'll make her feel comfy."
"Get out," Billy says, and jumps up. "Get the hell out."
"Can I keep this photo?" I ask, but he just grinds his molars in response. I drop the photo and get out of the house, out of the too-hot living room and back into the bitter wind of November. "It smells like sex in here anyway!" I yell when I'm halfway out the door, loud enough for the neighbors to hear. Billy slams the door hard enough that the glass of the window rattles. I take a few steps and spin around. "Mom sex!"
. . .
The actual "mom sex"—the Mom Swap—took place two weeks before. Billy Hughes and Robbie Waller got drunk on cheap beer, probably Natural Light, and decided to fuck each other's moms. Their mothers, both divorcees, had no problem with that. No problem at all.
The swap should have been a secret. Secrecy is inherent to all Mom Swaps—it's part of the deal, part of the contract that goes unspoken: you fuck your friend's mom, he fucks yours, and you don't talk about it. But something went wrong with the Hughes/Waller Swap; one of them talked. It couldn't have been Billy, but it could have been his friend, and it could have been his mom, and it could have been his friend's mom. Any of them. It doesn't matter; what matters is that the news leaked to some cash register jockey or salonist or high school chum and then it spread through town, whispered at lockers, across lunch counters, laughed about over beers at one of the bars downtown or on College Hill, the university's bar district. And from there it reached the Jack Spraut at the Cedar Falls Courier.
Spraut was an old college buddy, a partner in Senior Reporting Methods, the final class required for a degree at the U. of Northern Iowa. We'd teamed up to report on the fencing team's cross-country to trip to compete in Sacramento, riding along in the back of the van, stuffed shoulder to shoulder between bags of white cloth jackets and white cloth breeches and white padded armor. We put twenties together and bought $40 worth of batteries, then recorder the entire fucking trip. There was one stop on the way, a hotel in Montana, and while the team practiced stabbing each other in the hotel multipurpose room Jack and I drained whiskey sours in the bar and tapped our story out onto my old iBook. We spilled whiskey into the keyboard twice, lost use of Z through C, but finished our report on the first night and spent the rest of the trip fuzzy with liquor. We came back exalted and exhausted, handed in a 30 column-inch feature, and received it back a week later with a D scrawled acrosss the cover in red ink. We hadn't spoken since.
I was on my bicycle when the call came in, pedaling across Grand Avenue, dropping off the sidewalk and into a gap in the traffic. It was some time after evening and before night, and the bike was a beige Goodwill model with an Ames Police Biek Rodeo registration sticker dating back to 1981. The tires were half flat and the reflector had long since fallen off. I was an invisible creature on the streets of Des Moines, a wobbly shadow on wheels. It took all my concentration to stay upright and alive, but I reached for my phone anyway, pulled it from the flapping pocket of my jacket, and stared down at its screen, a phosphorescent blue rectangle in the shadows of my hand.
Spraut, it said, which made no sense. Spraut, Spraut. Jack. Jack Spraut was calling me for the first time in . . . half a year. I started to swear but the front wheel of my bike collided with the curb, and I fell/jumped to the sidewalk. Handbars tangled in my ankles and I slammed into the plexiglass wall of the bus stop at the same time I accepted the call. Jack was talking by the time I pressed the phone to my face.
"—got a great story for you, man. How are you doin, anyway? It's been what, a year?"
"Six months," I said. The bike lay in a tangle at my feet, and beer leaked from one of the plastic sacks I'd dropped. I nudged it with my foot, heard the scratch of broken glass against broken glass. Two of the bottles were broken. I sighed, snatched up one of the remaining four, and unscrewed the cap, turned my back. A cop on Grand would never stop for someone with a cell phone; on Grand they only snagged hobos. "What are you talking about?"
"Crazy story," he said. "We got this tip in on the hotline, the news hotline—"
"Jack—"
"I'm a designer for the Courier now," he said. "But we have this news hotline that you can call with ideas for stories, right? Usually it's old women complaining about their neighbors—every old woman has a meth factory for a neighbor—but other day we get this call in, something about a 'mom swap'—"
And he told me about the swap, everything he knew. It wasn't very much, really but enough to sink a hook—couple kids had sex with each other's moms, it was arranged, some of the news boys had checked out the sources, done the preliminaries, decided the story might hold some truth.
"Jack," I said. "This is ridiculous." And I laughed. The beer was Killian's, the best I could afford on my salary as a low-level state researcher. It tasted red and buttery and too cold for a November night. "If this story is even remotely true, why isn't the Courier covering it?"
He snorted. I could see his face again: pudgy cheeks, raggedy goatee, icy blue eyes. "Tim, come on. Mom fucking. You think the Courier's gonna run this story?"
"Guess not."
"Besides, it's not really . . . news. In the sense of newspaper news. I mean, who gets hurt?"
"If it's not important, why'd you think I'd want to cover it?"
"Because it's weird," he said.
. . .
Kevin is across town, interviewing Billy's mom on her smoke break. He's got the car, so I'm fucked. I start walking away from Billy's house, through the maze of streets that makes up the suburbs. The wind is slow but picks up every fifteen seconds or so, whips into my face and and neck, and when that happens I walk faster, stride longer, until finally I'm jogging and then finally running, loping along the edge of the road, leaving swooping gray tracks in the beige dust of snow and dirt.
The houses slide past, front to back, all the same, all white and plastic. I wonder what's going on in each of them, if any other moms in this neighborhood have been swapped.
Minutes pass, enough time for the skin of my neck to turn to marble. I pass a busstop and think of Jack's call two weeks ago. A few blocks later the bus itself catches up with me, and at the stop light I board.
"This thing go anywhere near Rockfall Communications?" I ask as I dump a handful of change into the slot.
"Sure," the driver says. "That's 6th Street. We'll drop you right outside."
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