| OCR Text |
Show Acting Alone pa g e 33 bumwad, but yellow ribbon. Sam was by now habitually referring to this ostensible Spikey person as The Ostrich. It had gotten giggles out of Shannon for the last twenty miles or so (they were both getting car-frisky); but her giggles were always prefaced with a warning: "Don't let my cousin hear you call him that. He hates to be called names." "Certainly he does," said Sam. "All these primitive guys do. Like Arabs scared of instamatics, and cajuns scared of wax dolls with pins in them. The power of epithets and alien conceits! Whooooeeeeooo!" "You can really be a snooty guy sometimes, Sammy," she said. "But be careful around my cousin. I don't wanna have to carry you home in a bucket or nothing." The warning turned out to be unnecessary. Sam quit calling Spikey The Ostrich the second he saw how miserably short the Marine was. Almost a dwarf, though muscled like a stegosaurus. The result, no doubt, of countless generations of body-squishing peasant status. But Spikey had human being's eyes. Try as hard as Sam might to be flinty and scintillating, to classify new people according to ultra-objective sociological and genetic categories, he never could get past their eyes, if they had human being's eyes, which they did ninety-seven percent of the time. Sam had seen Bouncy's eyes over a 3:20 a.m. bottle of Maalox at Mini Mart not long ago, and he was seeing Spikey's eyes now: two light-colored questions at the top of this squatty little stegosaurus body. It was distracting and frustrating and softening. In no time at all they were receiving the official tour of the garden |
