Fire Ants and Other Stories. Gerald Duff

thought long, he thought hard, he turned on a battery-powered boom box programmed to play the same song over and over as Celia Mae lay in her stupor, lost in the drug-induced dreams of a head cheerleader of one of the most powerful high schools in the Golden Triangle of Texas. That musical offering, purring away in the tape drive, was Engelbert Humperdinck singing “Delilah” again and again directly into her ear.

      Surely, Bobby felt, that hymn to the mystery and power of a woman able to conquer the strongest man in the Holy Bible would feed into Celia Mae’s unconscious mind, delivered as only Engelbert could bring it, and soak into her head a message of appreciation and awe for the kind of prime high school senior she was. It would show her, even while she was asleep against her will, the nature and depth of feeling the man who had captured her and brought her to the fish cabin was capable of. Whether she was interested in that fact or even cared to know it, she would have to hear it. Engelbert, chanting his tribute to her kind of woman over and over, would bring it on home.

      When Celia Mae woke up, she woke up fast. Her eyes popped open, she sat up in bed, the brand new floral sheet cascading from off her uniformed chest to reveal the maroon and gold applique of megaphone, stars and bright letters, and she put both hands to her head and began to fluff her hair.

      “What,” she said, looking not toward Bobby in his chair or about her at the one-room space of the fish cabin, but at the boom-box beside her pouring forth “Delilah,” “is that shit on the radio?”

      “Engelbert,” Bobby said, swallowing hard and instinctively tensing to run toward the door should Celia Mae suddenly come flying at him with her fingernails held out, “Engelbert Humperdinck.”

      “Is that a name?” Celia Mae said, still working at her hair with both hands to get out the tangles and the telltale signs of bed-head. “Or something you’d call a retard?”

      “He’s a vocal stylist,” Bobby said, still poised on the edge of the sea horse and crab chair, enough so that the plastic was cutting into the underside of his thighs. It would leave deep red marks, he knew, and it was already putting his feet to sleep. “He does what they call romantic ballads. Or did. He might be dead by now, I don’t know.”

      “Right,” Celia Mae said. “Sure. Where’s the eject?” She leaned over the edge of the bed and began punching buttons on the boom box, hiking up her cheerleading sweater as she turned to do so, high enough that Bobby could see a flash of bare skin. Something twisted a little somewhere deep in his belly, and he felt as though a meal he had really wanted when he was eating it was announcing now that it might be deciding to come back up.

      “It’s got a mark on it,” he said. “It says E on top of the button.”

      Now Celia Mae Adcock was examining the Engelbert Humperdinck cassette and reading the words on its label out loud. “Engelbert Sings Tom Jones: Smoky Bars and Dark Cabarets. Now who’s this one? Tom Jones. He must be using a consumed name.”