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Back Loudermilk
Chapters (60)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Personae
  4. I: Early Days
  5. One. Control
  6. Two. Doubt
  7. Three. Fate
  8. Four. Same
  9. Five. Fine Arts
  10. Six. In Loco Parentis
  11. Seven. Settling
  12. Eight. Neighbors
  13. Nine. Prospects
  14. Ten. The Lucky
  15. Eleven. Instruction
  16. Twelve. Same
  17. Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
  18. Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
  19. Fifteen. The Reason
  20. Sixteen. That Person
  21. Seventeen. Predictably
  22. II: Writing Teacher
  23. Eighteen. Early Poems
  24. Nineteen. Motivation
  25. Twenty. Allegory
  26. Twenty-One. Grief
  27. Twenty-Two. A Portrait
  28. Twenty-Three. Veils
  29. Twenty-Four. Soft Power
  30. Twenty-Five. Lists
  31. Twenty-Six. A Break
  32. Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
  33. Twenty-Eight. Custom
  34. Twenty-Nine. Parity
  35. Thirty. Fortune
  36. III: Volta
  37. Thirty-One. Images
  38. Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
  39. Thirty-Three. Letters
  40. Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
  41. Thirty-Five. Love
  42. Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
  43. IV: Your Best Reader
  44. Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
  45. Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
  46. Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
  47. Forty. Détente
  48. Forty-One. Worlds
  49. Forty-Two. Recognition
  50. Forty-Three. Persistence
  51. Forty-Four. And Then
  52. Forty-Five. Mingling
  53. Forty-Six. You
  54. Forty-Seven. Persona
  55. Forty-Eight. Est et Non
  56. Forty-Nine. The Author
  57. Epilogue
  58. Afterword: The Libertine
  59. Acknowledgments
  60. About the Authors

Beans, currently dissimulating himself behind a set of mildew-infested laurel bushes, is about to benefit. And the reason Beans is about to benefit is that Loudermilk, whom he can perceive striding off into the near distance on long, khaki-encased legs, has a very serious bee in his bonnet and the name of this bee has got to be Harry, the minion, the little friend. Beans pops back out from behind one particularly spotty shrub and sprints up the block, taking cover again on the south side of a mailbox. His heart pounds and his stomach sloshes. Loudermilk, and Beans, are fast approaching the heart of the Grecian quarter.

Loudermilk apparently finds a certain solid-looking sorority to his liking. He stops at the edge of its lawn, pivots. Beans creeps closer. Beans gets behind a white Focus. He observes, across the Focus’s back seat, Loudermilk’s steely progress. Loudermilk is, from what Beans can discern, the opposite of delighted.

Though, to be fair, Beans reflects, it is difficult to say just what it is that the minion has done wrong. Is it that the minion has committed unspeakable carnal acts with somebody living on the inside of this sex-segregated mansion? Given the minion’s previously observed proclivities, not to mention the kid’s obviously crippling anxiety disorder, that seems unlikely. Beans’s eyes narrow. Loudermilk is going around the back of the building. Beans skips out from behind the budget vehicle, skitters across the lawn, throws himself behind the tumescent trunk of a convenient oak.

Beans observes from beside this helpful quercus as something relatively, though not entirely, unexpected occurs. Loudermilk, with the assistance of a rusty fire escape that whinnies with his weight as if alive, is scaling the rear of the sorority. Beans curses himself for having neglected to provision himself with a camera on this particular fact-finding mission. Surely this act on Loudermilk’s part is the epitome of what is forbidden in this intransigent social sphere!

Anton Beans recognizes that it will not be possible to imitate Loudermilk’s choice of route without running an inordinately high risk of being observed, as well as of having the fire escape collapse under the weight of Beans’s hypermasculine, if pleasingly rounded, physique. Loudermilk continues to ascend. Anton Beans grits his teeth. He recalls third-grade gym class, when he had made a name for himself as a wall-climber to be reckoned with, an inspired negotiator of ceiling ropes and ramparts. Though this was a long time ago, and though the Beansian corpus has met with a certain amount of expansion over the intervening years, Beans believes that the ability to convey your body weight vertically by means of your own arms and legs has to be enough like riding a bicycle that, once learned, it’s something you never forget.

Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter

Thirty-Nine

Their Penultimate Encounter