Bunny Man's Bridge

by Ted Neill

  But this was different. He had come for Tyra out of friendship. He knew he was special, because he wasn’t trying to get anywhere. He wasn’t objectifying; if anything, he was romanticizing. And after all, Tyra still believed in Jesus. She was just doing this to pay bills. That somehow made her more beautiful than all the other girls. Her skin was smooth, her hands running over it. Her hand moved over her panties, over her belly button, up her chest, and the bra snapped away. There were her breasts. They had always been there, but now he was finally seeing them. Then her panties fell down, and her six-inch heels stepped out of them. It wasn’t that much of a shock to see her completely naked. Daniel had already seen the other naked dancers’ vulvas—Tyra’s wasn’t that different. It was just anatomy after all.

  She wrapped dollar bills around her fingers like rings. She raised her leg slowly, above a man’s head, as if imitating a dog urinating, the man playing the role of a gratified fire hydrant.

  He turned away happy.

  Three men went up at once, placing tens, not ones, on the stage.

  They turned away laughing, giggling.

  The young man with the good build but ugly face went up. He turned away amazed, leaving three twenties behind.

  Tyra would reach down for the money slowly. Looking at her patron and mouthing the word “thank you,” accompanied by an intimate gaze, as if they were the only ones in on it.

  The men loved it. They whooped, hollered, and cheered. Tyra looked at Daniel. He was looking in her eyes. She smiled. He knew everyone in the audience was now watching him, or aware of her eyes on him. She slid down the mirror, her hair collecting behind her, her knees bending, her thighs spreading into a wide V.

  Then something unexpected.

  She blushed.

  It was all over her, in her face, the skin of her breasts, her lower back. Daniel shifted. They both were uncomfortable. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings by looking away, or maybe she realized halfway down into her crouch that she didn’t want him to look, but it was too late. She came up too quickly. Her movements were out of sync with the music.

  A man in a bruise-blue suit sat down beside Daniel. He had a cigarette smoldering in his mouth and a martini glass filled with brown liquid. He reached out his hand.

  “Guido.”

  “Hi. Daniel.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Guido said.

  Tyra’s Sprite was still beside Daniel’s vodka tonic. Daniel was not sure how many he had drunk. Both drinks were sweating and turning the paper napkins beneath them into dark red pulp.

  “Is she your friend?” Guido said, gesturing with his martini hand towards Tyra.

  “Yes.”

  “She’s very beautiful.”

  “I think so.”

  “You think so or you wouldn’t be her friend, right?”

  Daniel laughed, because he felt he should. But he knew he was Tyra’s friend for reasons that were not as superficial as that. Guido was looking at him, waiting for him to say something. The stare was making Daniel nervous; maybe he needed another drink. Guido had one single eyebrow across the wide expanse of his forehead and a bristly mustache that was a smaller copy of the eyebrow. He would be a hairy old man, Daniel thought. Guido’s eyes were slag gray. His hair close-cropped on the sides. On top it was longer; it looked gelled. It had to be gelled.

  “It’s more than that,” Daniel said.

  “Of course, that’s why anyone has friends. It’s more than that.”

  “Yes.”

  They looked at her, but now Daniel felt self-conscious. As if Guido was watching him watch her. Tyra’s back was to them: a back nimble like an archer’s bow, mounted on mounds of flesh, parted in a crescent moon.

  “What’s her name?” Guido said.

  “Ambrosia,” Daniel said. It was her stage name. Of course, Tyra never revealed her real name at work. He didn’t like the name. It rolled off the tongue awkwardly. Of course, it did. It was Greek.

  “Here’s my card,” Guido said. Daniel looked at the card without reading it, not understanding why he now had it.

  “Maybe you can introduce us,” Guido said.

  “Uh. Yeah. You can introduce yourself. I’m sure she’ll come around.”

  But when Tyra came around after her set, she pointed towards some empty chairs in the back of the bar. She didn’t want to sit around customers. Daniel shirked his shoulders at Guido as he got up.

  From the back, Daniel and Tyra evaluated the strippers, picked out the fake breasts, talked about high heels. Tyra pointed out the girl who did the best “pole work” again. All the time, Guido kept looking back over his shoulder. Daniel noticed this because Guido’s was the only head not turned towards the stage.

  “That guy gives me the creeps,” Tyra said.

  “He gave me his card. His name is Guido.”

  “Figures.”

  Daniel stayed late. Guido stayed late—he kept ordering drinks. Guido had to. Daniel did not. The waitresses were friendly to him and didn’t enforce the “you sit, you sip” rule on him. The other dancers walked by and smiled at him like he was an insider. At 2 a.m. Tyra was off. Another dancer would take her place in the schedule. She disappeared upstairs, then reappeared, her body concealed under a white turtle neck and black jeans. Daniel followed Tyra to the exit. The aisles got crowded with the shift change. Girls in robes were climbing up to the stages while others were leaving, their duffel bags slung over their shoulders. Daniel tried to stay close to Tyra. He saw Guido getting up out of the corner of his eye.

  “Yo, Daniel,” Guido said, leaning on the back of a chair.

  Daniel walked. The music was loud. He pretended he didn’t hear Guido. He was leaving with a dancer. Of course people wanted to call his name. Wanted to chant it. He couldn’t help smiling at the thought. He hooked his finger through Tyra’s belt loop. She looked back at him and smiled. It was just right, he thought.

  Rodney wished them good night, shook hands with Daniel. Daniel felt like he was part of a club, almost felt like he was leaving a family reunion. The air outside was cold and refreshing after the hot clouds of cigarette smoke. They turned down the street. Daniel decided he would walk her to her car. Then he heard Rodney, in his voice of authority, his voice of confrontation,

  “Hey. You can’t go out with that.”

  Daniel turned to see Guido. He was coming out the door of the club. He had sideburns of sweat. He was drunk. In his hand was the object of incrimination: the martini glass, still filled with brown liquor. He felt Tyra squeeze his arm, press her body against the length of his. It thrilled him.

  Rodney held Guido by the sleeve of the bruise-blue jacket. The padded shoulders lifted up and looked weird and unnatural. Guido was determined. They could see it in his face. Daniel and Tyra were frozen in place. They’d never turn their backs on a face like that. Guido pulled his arm out of the jacket; the shoulder pad deflated. Rodney lost his grip. Now there was something in Guido’s hand. Now he was turning. Now, whatever it was, some weapon, some blunt object, perhaps just a garage door opener or a cell phone, or even a blackjack. Whatever it was, he was hammering it down on Rodney’s face. Rodney fell back, his arms retracting to his nose, a fountain of blood the color of wine issuing forth.

  Then the second calamity: Guido stepped. His foot landed half on the little non-negligible step, half off. Underneath Rodney’s cries, there was a scuffing noise that was Guido’s foot losing traction on the cement. The foot went, twisted clumsily, and his body tipped, suspended in a way that was beautiful and graceful and imminently painful.

  “Oh, fuck,” Guido said. He burped the words, saying them half-heartedly as he concentrated on swinging his arms. His hand reached up high. Daniel watched it fall, down, down, the cathedral appeared behind it, the stone lit blue and gray by ground lights. A plane flew behind one of the spires like a tracking star. The hand came down, towards a parking meter. The bruise-blue jacket was just touching the ground. The hand passed the parking meter, then the elbow.

/>   Followed by the bang. Guido’s head jerked back as it hit the meter, which didn’t care if a living or inanimate thing collided with it. It stood fast regardless. The martini glass rolled out of his hand and broke in a spreading fan of glass.

  The music was still playing. Rodney was holding his nose. A red and black crevasse yawned where the top of his nose had been opened. Someone inside felt a draft because the door was left ajar. When they came out, they saw the scene and called the police.

  Once they had made a statement to the police, Daniel and Tyra left. She drove them home. Daniel would come back and get his bike later. Tyra had her own studio apartment now. The couch was a foldout bed. Daniel told her to wash up. He would make the bed for her. She hugged him.

  “Thank you, Danny. I don’t know what I would do without you.”

  She closed the door to the bathroom. He pulled out the bed, fluffed the pillows, tucked the sheets under the mattress. Good and tight. He finished. She was still in the bathroom. Girls took a long time. He sat down on the bed since the couch was now gone. He wanted to watch TV, but she didn’t have one. So he listened to her.

  There were sounds of water running, drawers opening, closing, a bottle clinking on the sink top. She brushed her teeth. She spat. Water ran. The door opened. She walked over wearing a pink Winnie the Pooh onesie. Pooh was smiling on the front, oblivious to the breasts behind his ears. She laid down with her head on Daniel’s lap.

  “Going to get under the covers?” he asked.

  “Okay.”

  He tucked the blankets around her and rubbed her feet to warm them. She squirmed.

  “That tickles.”

  “Sorry.”

  He leaned on his elbow beside her. He ran his fingers through her hair and over her scalp, drawing the locks out on the pillow. That night she had come over to his dorm room drunk, the same night he would not kiss her, she had slept on his couch. She asked him that night, “If you won’t sleep with me, Daniel, then just run your fingers through my hair, like my mom used to. It comforts me.”

  He did then. He did it again now. She smiled. Her lips were their natural color now, pink. He smelled of smoke. She turned on her side. She was a landscape to him: her hair on the pillow, a river delta; her shoulders, a precipice, leading down to the valley carved out at her waist, followed by the rise of her hip, then the gradual slope down her legs to the wasteland of the bed that was not her.

  He realized he had not run his hands along a girl’s body since Inez. He did so, letting his hand linger in the hollow of her waist before ascending the peak of her hip, riding in the air back to her hair to repeat the whole journey again.

  He wanted her.

  He wanted her close to him. Like she was when Guido first came towards them, when she had turned to him for safety, for protection. He wanted her body against him, that warm softness beneath him.

  He was trembling.

  “You cold, Daniel?”

  “Yeah.”

  More minutes bred and died. Nothing happened. He ran his fingers though her hair again. It was straight now. All the tangles were gone. He curled it away from her ear, wrapping it under the lobe. He saw the little hole where her earring punctured her body. He kissed it. Then kissed her head right behind her ear. He felt her body shift. Her legs straightened out. It was her cheek that moved itself under his lips. He pressed his lips to her again, and it was her mouth. It tasted of toothpaste and cold water. She was soft, softer than him, but solid, full, and real. All he knew was Tyra. He heard the sound of the onesie unzipping. She unbuttoned his shirt and jeans. Her softness was bare and pressed close beneath him. Then it was rubbing against him. Then it was moving in cadence with him; it was all around him. He was inside her.

  Daniel was fucking Tyra. Blocks away, Rodney was bleeding underneath fluorescent ER lights. A needle was being forced under the skin of his face to inject lidocaine, another in his arm for a blood transfusion. Guido was on another floor, restrained as he was slid into an MRI machine to scan for a cerebral hemorrhage. Afterwards, he would be detained by the police. They would charge him with assault and battery and carrying a blackjack as a concealed weapon.

  All this because Tyra still believed in Jesus.

  10.

  Milk Money

  It’s a milk chugging contest. A dozen or so competitors are gathered, and about twice that many stand watching. The competitors are sheepish—made sheepish, that is, by the presence of two football players among them, Doogs and Bill. Doogs with his stocky build, red face, and shifty eyes and Bill. Tall, solid Bill. As he lifts off his shirt before the competition, we see he has a forest of hair across his washboard stomach. Bill is calm and collected in front of the crowd, like Bogart, Grant, or Connery.

  They commence the drinking. At first, one of the skinny guys keeps pace with the football players. Adam’s apples are working hard, dancing in the competitors’ necks. The skinny guys show their inexperience by sipping the bottle, then stopping to breathe. Sipping. Breathing. Sipping. Gasping. Bill is silent and persistent, slowly guzzling, not letting his lips move away from the bottle. He has performed this feat before, upside down in repeated keg stands at repeated parties. It is a skill he has honed with which the pencil-necks cannot hope to compete. The plastic jug contracts from the vacuum created. Doogs is faster, the vacuum in his jug seems slightly greater, but a skinny guy is still trying to keep up.

  The first to break, to lean over the trash can in defeat, is a skinny guy with a goatee. Milk comes out of him in bubbly spurts, looking gray when it dribbles in his black facial hair. Two other skinny guys stop and put down their jugs simply from the sight. The crowd is cheering now.

  This raises the stakes.

  Doogs is ahead, and his football friends begin to cheer for him. Unlike others in the ring of spectators, they gesture, cheer, and jump; their limbs enter the circle. Doogs takes the jug from his mouth and waits. They cheer louder.

  “Doogs, Doogs, Doogs!”

  Bill still drinks. Slow. Steady. Unstopping. Doogs, smaller and stockier, smiles and shifts his eyes to his teammates. It’s a contract, a deal between a clown and the audience that they all know. Doogs’s face says it clearly enough: if you cheer for me, I will drink.

  They do not cheer for Bill. Bill still drinks slowly and has yet to remove his lips from the bottle even once. He drinks because he chooses to.

  Another skinny guy vomits. Two others drop out with him. Doogs waits, the cheers building, the pressure in his stomach growing. He drinks again. More cheers. The sight of white streams running down his neck sends the football players into full-throated ecstasy.

  The goatee boy is still vomiting. Bill is still drinking, sucking slowly, his jug imploding from an imbalance of atmospheric pressure. Doogs pukes. First a cough that produces chunks, then a thick stream. His head dips. The crowd lets out a collective Ewwwww.

  He drinks again.

  There is a girl in the crowd. Her hair is dyed blue; Smurf blue she likes to call it. Smurfette is tattooed on her ankle. Her fingers are shaking. As she tongues the ring in her lip, she wonders if it is nicotine or caffeine she is jonesing for. Normally, she might be one to protest the injustice of such a wanton waste of milk. There are starving children in this city, she might say. But she doesn’t. She decides it’s nicotine she needs. She lights a cigarette and cheers for Bill. This is way too much fun.

  Bill stops, leans over the can, and sticks his finger down his throat. There is method to his madness, an element of purpose in his gesture.

  “Is he trying to make himself barf?” a girl asks.

  “He’s trying to make himself barf!” another girl says.

  “Nice,” the Smurf girl says.

  Bill knows he has to vomit before he drinks more. It is the only way he will catch up to Doogs. Experience has told him this. Doogs knows this too. He stops drinking. His teammates grumble.

  “I have to barf again,” he says.

  Bill’s finger in his throat didn’t work. He push
es it farther, his hand disappearing to his knuckles. He chokes, coughs, but nothing except a few stringy drops are produced. A skinny guy lets out a gush of vomit. He collapses beside the trash can. He’s out.

  Bill drinks. Doogs drinks. It was only ever between these two. Their faces grimace and their bodies contort with involuntary muscle contractions. These are reflexes that have served the human body for millions of years. Vomiting is an action like breathing, defecating, ejaculating. It is accompanied by a surge of stimuli to either encourage or discourage future repetition. In vomiting’s case it is, of course, accompanied by unpleasantness—negative stimuli—a neurological reaction meant to remind the body of primeval man: next time, don’t ingest that rotting wildebeest carcass, that berry, that mammoth gizzard.

  They will never drink milk again.

  Bill needs no help from his finger now. He chugs. He bends. For some reason, the crowd does not ewwww as much when he does this. It is not funny. He is handsome and noble in his pursuit, and his vomiting is tragic. Doogs is the buffoon. We want to see him vomit. We relish it. When the milk is coming out his nose, and he puts his finger to his nostril and blows, we cherish it. Doogs blows out his other nostril. White shoots out at an angle. His teammates howl. So do we.

  Bill drinks. Doogs drinks. The skinny boys watch in silent admiration, trying to smile, but their stomachs are constricted in knots with milk that they imagine curdling within them as they stand there under the hot sun. One of them looks at his own vomit. It reminds him of feta cheese: liquid, yet chunky. He will never touch cheese again.