Camouflage
twin of Stuart’s, defender of Margaret Mead.
They sat at a small round marble table by an oscillating fan. The changeling looked at the bill of fare, a small two-sided card. “How ’bout I buy us a banana split? I couldn’t eat a whole one.”
“I’ll split it with you.” He reached into his pocket.
“No, my treat. I’m researching the odd inhabitants of this island.”
He snorted. “Margaret Mead wouldn’t find much here.”
“Oh, I bet she would. Probably about as many people here as on her island.”
“Yeah, and we go around half-naked and screw anyone we want.” They both laughed at that.
The soda jerk, a young redhead with a face full of acne, was approaching with his pad. He gave them an uncertain smile. “Where’s that, Stu?”
He held up the book. “Samoa, Vince. We’re gonna go there soon as school’s out.”
Vince gave the changeling a funny look. “Sure you are. Where the hell is Samoa?”
“Middle o’ nowhere, in the Pacific.”
“They fight there?”
“Don’t know.” He raised eyebrows at the changeling.
“Don’t ask me.” The changeling had passed the island group as a great white shark, on its way to California, and hadn’t seen any naval presence. But the war still had a few years to go, then.
“So hi,” he said. “I’m Vince Smithers. You’re not from, uh . . .”
“Matt Baker,” the changeling said, and shook his hand. “San Guillermo, California.” This was interesting. The changeling had some difficulty reading subtle emotions, but jealousy isn’t subtle. “We’re gonna split a banana split, and I’ll take a Coke.”
He scribbled that down and looked at Stuart. “Vanilla Coke?” Stuart nodded and he went back to the fountain.
“You guys know each other?” the changeling said.
“Everybody knows everybody here. Vince and me used to go to school together, but his parents put him in a military academy. What was that shitty place, Vince?”
“God, I don’t want to say the name. I left to pursue a career in banana-split-ology. Much to my father’s delight.”
They continued in a kind of uneasy banter, the changeling watching with an anthropologist’s eye. They were less exotic to it than Polynesians, but no less interesting.
There was a conspiratorial edge to their exchange. They had done something forbidden together, something secret. Not necessarily sex, but that would be a good first guess. Did Stuart mean for his new companion to make that inference? The changeling’s only experience with homosexuality had been in the asylum, and there had been no social aspect to it; he had just been a receptacle for two of the guards. There had been a third, who only came to him once, and had been more interesting than the two brutes:he had quit after a couple of minutes and started weeping, and said how sorry he was, and evidently quit the job right after.
It was so much more complicated than it had to be, but the changeling had noted that this was true of every human biological function that wasn’t involuntary.
Vince brought the split and Stuart’s Coke. “You don’t want some vanilla in yours?” he said to the changeling.
A complexity. “Sure. I’ll try anything once.” Vince nodded grimly. It was an obvious turning point.
They divided the confection meticulously, and pursued it from opposite ends. Stuart told the changeling about his scholarship to Princeton.
“Nice campus. Major in anthropology?”
“No, English and American lit. You’ve been there?”
“Once, visiting relatives.” A semester, actually, studying invertebrate paleontology.
“You have relatives everywhere.”
“Big family.”
He made a face. “Mine are all in Iowa.” He said it as “Io-way,” with a downward inflection.
“You don’t plan to come back and raise a bunch of Iowans yourself?”
“No and double no. Not that I don’t like kids.” He speared a piece of banana. “I hate them.”
“Brothers and sisters?”
“Thank God, no. The kids at school are bad enough.”
The changeling was absorbing all this avidly. They finished the split. “Well. Want to show me around fabulous North Liberty?”
“You got five minutes?” On the way out, the changeling gave Vince a dollar and airily waved off the change.
“Rolling in dough,” Stuart said.
“Best crap shooter in San Guillermo.”
“ Bull shooter.” They both laughed.
It actually took about ten minutes. From the center of town, Stuart led him down West Cherry
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