Madame X and Mr. Feynman's Pajamas!

When we were about twenty feet from the barn where Jim lived, the music was so loud it sounded as though he'd set up speakers in his backyard. I knew Jim was inside running around and aiming an air rifle into dark corners and under furniture. He had Electric Light Orchestra blasting, and ELO had been Jim's rat killing music of choice ever since I'd known him.

I shouted at Nellie, "He'll never hear us!"

"What? I can't hear you!" she shouted back.

Yooooou and your sweet desiiiiiire
you took meeeeee ooooh
higher and higher baybay…

I horrified Nellie by grabbing a good sized branch from under a pecan tree at the corner of the lot and running toward the window beside the front door. She was faster than I, though, and before I got within any respectable distance of the glass, Nellie had tackled me. Just as we pitched to the ground, struggling and pushing at each other and trying to stand up at the same time, the music shut off, and Jim stood in the open doorway shaking his head.

"You know, when we were younger, it was okay if I walked outside and you were rolling around on the ground with some girl. It was sort of titillating back then. But now it's just embarrassing," he said.

I drew back the branch still in my hands like a javelin. "Shut up!"

"Make me!" Jim shouted.

Citizen Jim reading Hawking

On Nellie's face was the look of sniffing cheese gone bad. "And, so, this is Citizen Jim? This is a man who reads Hawking and Von Neumann?" she asked.

Jerking his chin in the direction of Nellie, Jim asked, "Who the hell is this? I know she's too goot looking to be your girlfriend. Sounds too smart, too," he decided. To Nellie, he said, "What the hell do you think you know about Jon Von Neumann, anyway?"

Prisoner's Dilemma William Poundstone

"Well, just a little, actually, and I'm mostly familiar with Prisoner's Dilemma. I'm somewhat versed in theories concerning ordinal and cardinal payoffs, but I'm a lot more interested in iteration with error than either of those things," Nellie said. "I did a little with spatial dilemmas, but unless you have a good chunk of free time to devote to it, there are just far too few theories to use alongside any half-hearted dip into those particular kinds of PDs."

Jim looked over at me and scowled. "I oughta punch you," he said to me, making a fist.

To make him feel better, I cowered.

He looked back at Nellie. "Well, who gives a shit what you know about PDs? I bet you don't know jack about Richard Feynman's PJs!"

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" Richard P. Feynman

Nellie shrugged. "If for nothing else, I respect Feynman for asserting that nobody—not even he in his lifetime—truly understands quantum mechanics. But you're correct in your assumption about my not knowing anything about his pajamas," she said, the glow of talking about prisoner's dilemma gone, replaced by the stinky cheese look.

"Ha! I knew it! I win!" Jim barked. "I got me a pair of Mr. Feynman's pajamas off eBay last month. Powder blue with pink pinstripes and hardly any tears in the seams."

"Okay, okay," I said, stepping directly between Nellie and Jim. "You're both too cool in your own special ways. Jimbo, we need your help, is why we're here."

"Bullshit! You just brought this girl by to make me look bad! And now you need a favor? Ha!" Jim said.

"We need to put Nellie's horses inside the barn here," I said.

"You've got to be kidding! There's no room inside there for even one horse," Jim said. "And besides, I have a hot date with *** ******* tonight. I can't have a horse in there stinking up the place and making noise while I'm trying to donkey punch *** *******. She's not the Town Whore, you know!"

"It's just for one night," I said.

"Right. Next you'll be telling me it's got to do with some 'secret assignment' for that 'agency' you supposedly work for on the sly," Jim said. "Buncha crackpot Catholic bastard Freemason rip-off creeps."

Nellie thrust her hand out toward Jim. "I couldn't have said it any better myself," she said.

"Stimpy!" Jim shouted, not even shaking Nellie's hand. "Who the hell is this? You better tell me right now, or I'm gonna flip you like a strawberry and mayonnaise omelet!"

In my best spy movie stage whisper, I said, "That isn't important right now."

He finally invited us in, asking us to excuse the mess. A lawn mower engine was strewn all over the floor beside a squat, coffin-shaped wooden box with wheels affixed to each corner, his explanation being that he was bringing it all together to make a "bitchin go-cart."

Jim then proceeded to entertain us as guests in his unique way, offering us "snacks" from a bowl made of carnival glass; Nellie proved to be more southern than any southerner I'd yet met, dipping the raw egg noodles into a coffee mug full of Miracle Whip and crunching them as if she were eating brie on water crackers.

Pleased with himself, Jim sat on an orange crate and smacked his hands together. "Well, then! I say we just take those horses over to Kenny McLean's. He's got so many of his own, he'll never notice," Jim said. "See? Problem solved!"

"Jim, we don't know Kenny McLean. We can't just sneak over there with Nellie's horses and 'drop them off for a night.' God, you drive me nuts!"

"Listen, then - I thought you said you knew that Russian chick who takes care of all Kenny's horses? Didn't you sleep together a few times?"

Once again, Jim had it all wrong. "She's Welsh, not Russian," I said. "And I think you're confusing 'sleeping together' with 'exchanging pleasantries while she bought cards at the bookstore,' jackass."

"Aw, same difference. This one here, she slept with everyone who came into the bookstore. That's the real reason she got fired. All those men found out she was visiting their wives while they were fishing down in the Cayman Islands and they told Granny she better get rid of Stimpy or they'd close out their charge accounts. God, sometimes she was with two or three in one day! She was worse than the Town Whore with all those women in Montrose and Point Clear!" he said, waiting for Nellie's reaction.

"Is there a switch on the back of his neck that we could employ to turn him off?" Nellie asked.

"There was, but it broke off through repeated use," I said.

"That's fine," Jim said, throwing his hands up, palms outward. "I was gonna try to help you bimbos, but never mind now. Don't try to make friends with me later, either. I got people who appreciate me elsewhere."

I shrugged. "Okay," I said. "Come on, Nellie. We'll go ask some other best friend of mine to help us. Maybe Meredith knows where we can board your horses."

We got out the door and half-way down the sidewalk when Jim called, "You guys better wait up, or I'll bust your mouths open!"

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