Green mountain boys
Miss America is an alcoholic. She woke up one morning in another New Jersey hotel suite and realized that her skin was deep enough and plastic enough to be considered all she really was, and since beauty was skin deep, she didn't have to worry. It was a comfortable suite, with ninety-seven channels for the big-screen TV, an extensive minibar, so before her community service for that day she watched old James Bond movies and drank martinis. There was enough in the minibar for seven martinis, so she had three before the event, in which she spoke about the lack of ethics in cloning, and four afterwards. She went out that night and drank herself into bed with a Manhattanville student, and things haven't been the same since.
It isn't only her mother she has to hide her cigarettes from, either, even though her mother knows. Teenage girls with nothing better to do recognize her by the extended sway in her hips when she walks, and come up to her asking for autographs and pictures. She has to be a role model: no divorces. No abortions. No cancer. People in McDonald's recognize her and realize she's eating a quarter pounder: Miss America doesn't care about health. No blemishes. She's seen buying cigarettes by a tabloid but the editor has a story about how Princess Di's death was foretold, so the fabulous redhead is only on page fifteen with no inset on the cover. Nobody foretold the downfall of today's youth idols. No negative publicity. So she finds her addict student and shotguns Budweiser on the sly.
Today, for example, Miss America had vodka and scrambled eggs for breakfast. It's really something you get used to pretty quickly: she cut the vodka with V-8 and put paprika and diced tomatoes in the eggs. Of course the tomatoes are non-genetically-engineered, to support the farmers in Nantucket or wherever the hell they are. It's an issue she's supposed to be paying attention to. The farmers' wives are big on American values and American ideals, and even if they would rather have a nice blonde girl win, at least she seems sensible.
God, if they only knew.
She had been sensible, before she was Miss America. She had been an EMT, zooming around in wailing ambulances and preventing death back in Colorado. She had had a sensible boyfriend named Jeff, but he'd gotten jealous of all the people she had to hold hands with on stage. It had been more painful for him than for her. After breakfast, she smoked her Camel Lights and thought about Jeff. They'd broken up two months ago, partly because he was jealous, and partly because she refused to buy condoms. No publicly known birth control for Miss America. It was all in the rules, and maybe it was fair and promoted women as beautiful, and maybe it was sexist and contributed to the patriarchy, but there was no looking in gift horses' mouths. She got sixty thousand dollars and a year's international travels for using lipstick the right way. Lipstick and bleaching toothpaste.
In only the three months she'd been Miss America, she'd been to each of the fifty states, Canada, France, and even Cuba, on a groundbreaking diplomatic mission: she was one of four judges of a beauty contest for children under the age of eight. Her standards of beauty were not those of the locals; she looked for bright teeth and eyes and not a strand of hair out of place, while they looked for strong arms and dimples. Forty-nine of the states received her well.
In Vermont, they stuck her in a measly bed-and-breakfast run by two old men on the outskirts of a miniscule town. It was a historic house, almost two hundred years old, and the old men had made all of the furniture in it by hand so that it creaked and looked unstable. Colonists had built the house, first, and additions and wings were added as they became necessary. Her room - not a suite, but a room - had a window that wouldn't shut all the way, so that natural-smelling air came in and permeated her dry-cleaned clothes. The only outlet in the room had two holes, not three, so that her hair-dryer couldn't plug in. There was no in-room bar with little bottles of liquor, so she had to walk to a bar down the street. They hadn't even given her a car.
Casey's Brewery was very small, and very dark, and it turned out that it really was a brewery, rather than a bar. They gave her free Casey's all night long, but it was cheap beer and tasted like the snow on pine trees. Not that she realized they wouldn't have been there at all if Miss America hadn't wanted to drink. They had families to go home to, and wives, most of them, but a drunk beauty queen was hardly something to pass up, so they took turns excusing themselves to the phone. When she wanted a cigarette, though, the men had to make her go outside to keep the fermenting yeast happy.
Two of them went out to smoke with her. The other three stayed inside, where it was warm and quiet and full of the smell of rising bread and foam.
"Miss America is drinking our beer," said Gabe. "Miss America is drunk, and she's here, and I'm married."
"You're married, she's drunk," Ben responded. "The way she keeps looking at Jamie is what matters. Mark my words, boys, mark my words, the town will know about this tomorrow."
"I bet he doesn't want Steve out there with them." David looked at the door to make sure it was shut, and then continued. "That guy's weird enough to try anything. I don't trust him. I heard he makes his own daughter pay for weed."
"You think he'd make a pass at her?" asked Ben. "Jamie's still young enough to be scared of girls; he won't do anything."
"I wouldn't blame him if he did." Gabe had only been married for a few months and wasn't quite used to restraint yet. The older men tried to ignore him when he said dumb things. "Have you noticed her legs? Ten bucks says she has her own calendar."
Outside, Miss America was vomiting in the bushes while Jamie held her hair back. She had asked him to, because otherwise Steve would have offered and she didn't like how he looked. He had long, straight, brown hair held back in a series of thin rubber bands and a small silver skull hanging from a leather braid around his neck. He liked how she looked, though: how her hair hung around her like a waterfall on fire, temporarily suspended in Jamie's hands. The green skirt she wore had a slit that wandered unbelievably far up her left leg and her skin underneath was absolutely white in the glow of the streetlamp.
She was the first Miss America in years to not have a tan: she didn't even freckle, but went straight to peeling. Mostly she just gave men goosebumps. She finished vomiting and stood up, wanting her toothbrush.
"Would you mind walking me to my hotel?" she asked, looking carefully at both Jamies.
"I don't mind at all," Steve answered for him. "I'll show you a shortcut." He rubbed out his cigarette.
"What about you, Jamie?" she asked, still focusing.
"I can take care of you," said Steve. He stepped closer, filling her field of vision, and then took her hand and started walking.
Jamie watched, his mouth flapping uselessly, trying to say something that would make her turn around. He watched as they disappeared behind a hill, and then walked back inside.
The men noticed her absence immediately. "Where's Miss America?" asked Gabe.
"Where's Steve?" asked David, thinking.
"Which direction did they go in?" asked Ben. "Did they take his car?"
Jamie realized he'd missed something terribly important: "They walked, towards the river. Not her hotel."
"Fuck, Jamie, why'd you let him do that? Come on."
The four of them walked to the top of the little hill, and waiting for Ben's arthritic knee, they saw two figures on the floodplain. One fell over, flailing wildly. The other much more deliberately sat down.
"Hold up a second," said Jamie. He ran back to his car parked in front of the brewery and came back with something shiny in his hand. Ben recognized it, and it made him even more irritated.
"What the hell are you doing with a switchblade?" he asked.
"I wasn't going to use it on anyone else, okay?" answered Jamie. "Besides, it ...it might be good to have, you know?"
Gabe laughed. "Even if it came to that, there's four of us and one of him."
"Guys, can we just do this?" asked David. "Steve isn't slowing down, with her. Ben, is your knee ...okay, let's go."
The next morning, Miss America went back to the brewery to beg them not to talk to the press. She'd have been dethroned, if the public found out, because Miss America isn't allowed to get in the sort of situation where she has to be rescued.