“Tom, darlin’, it's just not time yet. Not yet, sweetheart. Not quite yet.”
“Well, Daisy, darlin’, when exactly is this time gonna come? I'm a patient man but, well, Daisy, you've gotta shuck that girdle, girl. It's time—past time! Shuck it! Shuck it now!”
“Oh, Tom, I love it when you talk dirty to me! I love it!”
Tom Huff actually wasn't meaning to talk dirty to Daisy Ledet. He was being completely honest. Their relationship, he felt, was at a dire crossroads. Was Daisy too dim to understand that?
He had already written Daisy off on the work front. He'd monitored her closely for another couple of weeks after his first pessimistic assessment and had concluded he'd been totally right. In terms of office skills, the woman was a bimbo pure and simple, and he'd given himself a rare private rebuke for bringing her on board in that capacity. But that was not the crisis. Huff was highly certain that an agreeable way could be found to ease Daisy out.
No, the real rub: Huff had come to grips with the fact that Daisy was still in no hurry to part with her damnable girdle. In fact, she seemed to have grown slightly more distant lately, even reducing some of his privileges. Huff had imagined a steady arc of progress, and this setback was alarming to his carnal ambitions.
They were in his office, where he had always fantasized he would one day make short work of Daisy's girdle on the way to paradise. But Daisy, sitting on the edge of his massive desk, had feigned that she'd mistook Huff 's demands for dirty talk. The nerve!
“I'm not talkin’ dirty to you, Daisy,” Huff said gruffly. “I mean it. Lose the girdle or else, girl. C'mon. Time to deliver to ole Tom.”
Daisy looked at Huff, and a frown appeared on her rotund, overly made-up face. Of course, Daisy knew it had been building up to this moment for quite a while now, and she'd done (in her opinion) a very admirable job of managing Huff 's desires without totally succumbing to them. But here it was, finally—a plainspoken demand.
She knew that Huff sometimes considered her too dull to get him on some deeper level, but Huff was just another man who underestimated her.
And anyway, see, it was so complicated because she was actually falling for the little lug and yet people were making her do things that would make her Tom unhappy, and, see, if she shucked her girdle and gave in to Tom's demands (which she actually found quite appealing), well, then Daisy would probably fall for the lug altogether and then that would be a mess, oh yes.
A big mess.
And, anyway, the girdle was mechanically complicated in ways that Daisy regretted.
Thus, Daisy, now topless and still very much in command of her girdle, surveyed the situation with a certain clarity that comes when the man who is making these demands has his trousers and boxer shorts around his ankles; when the man is a man who has just moments before sunk his entire head between her two exposed and quite voluptuous breasts and has now arrived at a certain state that simply cannot be concealed.
Daisy surmised in these circumstances a decided advantage and realized that this was a time for bold action.
So she replied, in a whisper, “Oh, Tom, baby, don't be mad at li'l ole Daisy, please, huh, baby? Puh-leez?”
And then Daisy, before Huff could give a proper and forceful rejoinder, reached down and cupped him in her right hand, sliding from the desk and pushing Huff gently backward. Before he could find his forceful response, she had sunk to her knees and moved with such uncharacteristic speed and boldness to begin an act so wildly unexpected—began to perform it with such enthusiasm and verve—that Huff found himself turned more or less instantly to Jell-O.
Daisy had actually thought about doing this many, many times because, well, there was something fun about Tom's pudgy little body and his adorable little manhood, for which she had a secret name—my sweet little Chihuahua.
Indeed, no more than four minutes into this carnal ambush—in a moment of swift, surprising, tumultuous, and wordless climax—Huff 's knees went wobbly and he began to actually lose consciousness. He even wondered if he might be having a heart attack or a stroke, except that he felt so utterly blissful that he realized it didn't matter. He just didn't care!
Then he crumpled to the floor, falling past Daisy, vaguely aware that she had saved him from possible harm by cradling his head in her right hand as he went down. “There, baby,” she whispered. “That's what Daisy can do for Tom. You rest, sweetie.”
She bent over and gave the retreating Chihuahua a friendly little pinch.
Of course, Tom could neither hear nor feel this; he'd gone aphasic. He would slumber in this position for quite some time.
Daisy recovered her bra and blouse and calmly put herself back together, quite pleased with the outcome. She reached for a Kleenex in her purse to tidy things up. Then, looking at her peacefully extinguished lover, she pulled from the very same purse a small digital camera and quickly snapped a half-dozen photographs of Tom, now curled up like a half-naked cherub. The flash in no way disturbed him.
Yes, there were things that she might have to tell people soon that would not please her Tom, and she might need some foil against her Tom's anger. “Daisy never knows what Daisy might need one day,” she said aloud to no one in particular.
She walked from the office, charitably locking the door behind her from the inside so that no one could barge in and discover her man in such an awkward position. It was at the moment that she heard the door click shut that she realized she was feeling something else.
Taking her Tom's picture as he lay as satiated as a breast-fed baby on the floor, knowing full well that she had brought the mighty Tom Huff to his knees, had aroused her! Oh, baby! she thought. I'm a linebacker, too!
It took Huff a full hour to recover his wits. He had startled awake after what turned out to be a forty-five-minute nap—well, it was more like a coma full of luridly sexual dreams—and in a move of pure reflex clutched at his trousers and pulled them up.
He was so battered by conflicting messages—fiery anger at Daisy on one hand for not following his sexual script, yet a startling recognition that the very same Daisy had ambushed him with the best sexual episode of his life— that he could not even form a full sentence in his head. He made immediately for his executive washroom, ran cold water in the sink, and stuck his head in and out of the water for the next five minutes, snuffling like an otter as he tried to shake clarity into his brain.
When he finally could think again, one very uneasy notion formed in his mind: if he had to, he would beg Daisy to do that again. But Tom Huff never begged for anything.
He took a deep breath, toweled off his face, and walked back to his desk. He found his chair and decided he needed to take serious and sober stock of his suddenly vexing and perplexing universe, a universe made suddenly vexing ever since Justin Pitre had sabotaged the dragline. Yet he felt strangely calm—at peace. He knew he could not let rage or lust or pride get in the way of the things he needed to do. Cold calculations were in order.
He reached for a nearby yellow legal pad, fetched a gold-plated pen from its holder, and began to make a list.
Assuming Juke completed Part I, complete the humiliation of Pitre/Lasseine.
Sue the hell out of Hebert Oil Field over the dragline.
Scour the world for another dragline. Don't trust Hebert to find one. Get the thing digging ASAP—further humiliating Justin Pitre.
Expedite the search for a new secretary. Find a clever way to ease Daisy out but be firm. No matter what, DAISY MUST GO.
Huff was about to commit task number five to paper when he heard the phone ring in the outer office. He looked down and saw it was his most private extension, the number that he gave out only to big shots at headquarters and a few local people with urgent business. Daisy was supposed to be in that office catching the phone, yet it continued to ring.
Where was Daisy?
He could've sworn he'd heard her rustling around out there as he made out his list, but she was clearly not tending the phone.
“Huff here!” he growled into the receiver.
“Hey, there you are, podnah. Comment ça va, Tom?”
It was the deep, mellifluous voice of B.J. Duplessis. “Times must be hard if a big chief like you has gotta answer his own damned phone.” He chuckled.
Huff let this gratuitous dig slide. B.J. knew all about his parting with Louella and his troubles with his new executive administrative assistant.
“Oh, man,” said Huff. “I definitely gotta call that woman whose name you gave me. What's her name, Ruby or somethin’?”
“Judy. Judy Guilfoy. She's ugly-on-a-stick, Tom, my friend, but doggone efficient.”
“Well, that's just what I'm lookin’ for. So, what's up?”
“We gotta meet, Tom. Basically we're done with round one of our li'l project, and I've found another good spot for round two. I figger you want us to keep goin’, right? I'm givin’ you the same terms as last time. Same paperwork to cover the trails. You save big bucks, I make a few. That's capitalism, bro.”
Huff didn't have to think it over very long. “Well, yep, I'm definitely in. But let's let things cool off for a couple of weeks. I got other things to tend to now.”
“Hey, Tom, ain't no sweat off my ass. You tell me you're in, that's good enough for me. You tell me when to start, and I start. But, aw, Tom, lemme give you a li'l taste of what I got in mind. Let's just say I went out and got me another big ole duck-huntin’ lease, a thousand damned acres. And it's in a place so far away you gotta bring your own noise with you.”
“Sounds perfect.”
“Aw, well, you ain't heard the best part. See, there was some other outfit tryin’ to get that lease—some cheap-ass, piss-ant awl company that wanted to use it to impress the big shots back in Dallas. Bring 'em out huntin’, you know the drill.”
“You don't mean—?”
“That's right, I do mean—your favorite podnah, Randy Penwell and Oka-Tex. I bid that damn lease right out from under his fuckin’ nose. He ain't known what hit him!” B.J. cackled like a mad rooster.
“B.J., man, that's totally brilliant.”
“Ain't it, though? We're so good what we're doin’ should be against the law.” B.J. chortled, and so did Huff.
“Okay, Tom, well, we'll talk soon.”
“Okay,” said Huff.
Huff hung up, trying to remember where he was in his list of things to do.
Ah, number five—call Wylie Page.
Page was a notorious whiner, gossip, and old mother hen back at headquarters accounting who had left him a voice-mail message a few days ago. It was a message so long and convoluted that Huff had erased it before listening to the end. It seemed to imply some rumor so improbable that Huff had instantly dismissed it, a rumor about the possible sale of some of Big Tex's upstream operations. But in typical Wylie fashion, he seemed to have no real details.
Anyway, this had to be bullshit. Huff 's region was a rainmaker, and on something this big, Rodeo Perkins would've called Huff himself.
Still, Huff scanned his desk for the pad of paper on which he'd scribbled Wylie's cell phone number. Not spying it immediately, he was interrupted by the ringing of the phone again. He snatched it up, thinking, To hell with Wiley.
It was Daisy. “Did my Tom have a good rest?” she asked.
Huff found himself uncharacteristically flustered. “Yes, no, uh, I dunno, Daisy. I, uh—”
“It's okay, Tom. I just wanted to make sure you were fine,” she said sweetly. “I know you're busy now, but maybe I'll come in later. To check on you. Or maybe I'll come for somethin’ else.”
“Daisy, what on earth are you talking about?” he asked. “What do you mean ‘somethin’ else’?”
There was a pregnant silence, then Daisy said, “Hmm, if you promise to be a good boy, maybe I'll come for the Chihuahua.”
Then she hung up.