“Hello,” I said.
“Hello. Didn’t ’spect to find nobody here,” said the one with the long hair. His hair was yellow-gray with a few black streaks. It hooked around his ears and hung to his shoulders in greasy strings, curling up slightly at the ends. His beard stubble was all gray, and red and purple veins had burst across his nose and cheeks like fireworks. He looked muscular in a sunken sort of way—like he used his stringy muscles, but only halfheartedly. “Beer?”
“No, thank you. I don’t drink.”
“Don’t drink, huh?” They exchanged glances. “My name’s Juice. This here’s Earl Foster.”
“I’m Angelina.”
“Angelina.” Earl Foster spoke for the first time. “Well now, that’s a fine name.” His voice was harsh with irony. “Wouldn’t you say so, Juice? Angelina. Kind of what, rolls off the end of your tongue?” He drained his bottle of beer without taking his eyes off me. Earl had a solid round beer belly and loose stubbly jowls. His eyes were dark brown swimming in yellow and rimmed with red. His hair was thick and white and recently cut. As I stared at him with revulsion, he belched and smiled at me grotesquely. He had no teeth and his gums were red and diseased.
He tossed his beer bottle into the weeds and selected another, unscrewing the cap and flipping it to the side without looking.
“Angelina,” he said again.
My sense of atmosphere reeled, trying to stabilize the feeling that flitted about me. Was it danger? I looked from one to the other, trying to decipher the rhythm of their relationship. I couldn’t honestly believe either one was capable of raping me, but as I was still a virgin, I wasn’t all that sure of what equipment was necessary. Juice seemed by far the physically stronger of the two, but Earl seemed in control. Earl had the brains, if there were any brains to be had between the two of them. Juice just smiled.
“Drink up, Juice,” Earl said, his liquid tongue enunciating without the benefit of teeth. “We don’t want to keep Juliana waitin’.” He turned to me to explain, his gums clapping together, blowing the words out through his lips and spraying beer foam as he talked. “Juliana’s Juice’s sister. We’re goin’ to her house for supper. Her husband caught a mess of trout today. And the way Juliana fries up them fish . . . Ummm.” He ran his tongue around the end of his forefinger, gently sucked the tip, then sipped his beer, looking at me out of the corner of his eye. “You hungry, Angelina?”
I was starving. The thought of freshly fried trout was almost too much for me to bear. I nodded.
“Want to go with us? Their house ain’t more than, what, Juice, a mile away? Juliana don’t like drinkin’, like you, so we come here first to get a little buzz on, know what I mean?”
I looked at Juice and he just smiled his blank-faced smile and opened another beer.
“Why don’t you come on as our guest? We’ll go have a nice dinner and then we’ll bring you right on back here. Safe and sound and full of fish.”
Millions of thoughts flashed through my mind, and all of them were positive. I hadn’t been hurt in over a year on the road; never even been threatened. I’d taken every ride offered, and this was just another one, with a meal at the end. Could be this was one of the countless fortunate circumstances that had befallen me all along my journey, providing me with hot showers or clean sheets once in a while. This was fresh trout.
“Whaddaya say?”
“That would be nice,” I said.
Earl Foster turned to Juice and winked. “Them girls is always hungry, Juice.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out a key ring, which he laid on the picnic table. “Kin you drive, Angelina?” He drew his words out in a mocking way—kin you driiiiive, Angeleeena?
I nodded. I had no driver’s license, but I knew how to drive. I had taken over the task from many who needed to sleep but didn’t want to stop. I would feel much better being at the controls. He stood up, belching. “C’mon, Juice. I kin hardly wait to taste me some tender white feelay.”
I pulled down my hammock and folded my blanket, putting them into my pack. A little dark spot of wrongness poked at me from behind my ear, but my stomach was prodding me onward, and so was my sense of pride. I wanted life to be perfect and nourishing, and I needed to believe that this would turn out well. I had decided to settle down and I needed this to be an experience fit to crown my journey.
I had to adjust the car seat forward in order to reach the pedals. Earl Foster sat in the front and had to help me scoot the seat back and forth until we got it up close enough. He made a lot of grunts and moans as we rocked it, while Juice, in the backseat with my pack, giggled drunkenly. Earl sat with his arm across the back of the seat and his knees pointed in my direction.
The motor caught straightaway and I pulled on the lights. Darkness was settling in. We backed out and turned around and slowly approached the highway, where Earl indicated that our destination lay to the left. Then he looked over his shoulder at Juice and opened another beer.
We drove a short deserted distance, a mile, possibly two. Then Earl pointed at a flag, a ribbon, no, a rag tied to a tree limb, and with hard, bony fingers he gripped my arm and came toward me, huffing foul breath in my face as he leaned across, pointing to a gravel road barely visible in the undergrowth. I slowed and turned in.
We bounced off the seats as I tried vainly to miss the potholes, and in fifty yards or so the road—or driveway, I assumed—smoothed out. I still drove slowly, barely more than idling down the gravel, feeling more than hearing the strip of weeds between the tire marks as they scrubbed the underbelly of the Pontiac.
The driveway curved to the right, and then to the left, and then it was a straightaway as far as the headlights could see. I began almost to dream that I was awake. The scratching from the coarse weeds became so loud it filled the car, the brush on either side of us reached higher than the roof, and the headlights illuminated a narrow tunnel through which we drove. I felt that the three of us were locked in some immortal collusion—reality had escaped us—we were out of control, sliding down the birth canal of destiny.
And then the trees disappeared and we were in the open and the lake was silvery in front of us and another picnic table was beside us. I saw no house and no sister, smelled no fish, and fear took my mind and squished it between its gnarled fingers.
“Stop here.”
I obeyed.
“Turn out the lights.”
I punched the button in. Security evaporated.
“Give me the keys.”
I pulled the keys from the ignition and put them in the hand that had found my thigh.
“Well, now,” Earl said into the stillness. “Ain’t this cozy?”
Juice giggled in the backseat.
“Too bad we ain’t got a bitch in heat for you, Juice, old boy; this one’ll have to do us both.” His horrible fingers bruised my thigh in five round places. Then he picked up his beer and opened the car door. “C’mon, darlin’,” he said. “Juice. Bring her pack.”
I gripped the steering wheel until my fingers ached. I just stared ahead, trying to think, trying to decide, but the stuff with which decisions are made seemed to have fled my mind. The men sat on the benches in the starlight and spoke in low voices. They finished their six-packs, then fetched two others from the trunk of the car. Still I sat—silent, unmoving, trying to make sense of the mush inside my head.
It seemed I ought to run, yet I had a tie to my belongings. They had my entire life in their possession. The idea that two old men could rape me, kill me and throw me in the lake where no one would ever, ever, ever even miss me was somehow outweighed by the fact that I couldn’t leave my pack. And I couldn’t run down that terrible tunnel with them chasing me in the car. I didn’t know where to go or what to do.
I started to cry in frustration. I couldn’t think. But then from somewhere came the knowledge, the surety, that everything would end
as it should. Some deeper, more powerful force was patiently at work here. My mind was befuddled for a purpose, to keep me from acting on my own. It was like tapping into a survival state, where the conscious mind is drugged so that Nature, which is infinitely wiser than man, can proceed without interference.
The car door opened and the interior light came on, blinding me for a moment. Earl stood there, his stained T-shirt stretched tight over his bulging belly.
“Now, now, little Angelina. Don’t cry, darlin’.”
I looked up at his repugnant face, twisted with drink and lit by an unearthly fire. Something deep within me roiled. He smiled a square smile, his lips pulled away from those awful gums, while his eyes burned into me.
“C’mon now, Angelina. Give old Earl a little kiss and he’ll let you go.” He grabbed my arm and pulled me from the driver’s seat. I fell to the ground, rather he kick me than kiss me. I stuck my finger down my throat, hoping if I could retch, they would think me ill and take me somewhere, or leave me alone at the very least.
But there was nothing in my stomach to come up. I managed two or three gags, and Juice said, “She’s sick, Earl.”
His reply: “Them dirty hippies is always sick with somethin’.”
So I just lay there, on the gravel, between the car and the picnic table, and I cried.
They sat at the table and drank. When my sobbing slowed, I heard Earl Foster’s voice again.
“Angelina, honey, you snaggle-crotch whore, when you’re through with all that pissin’ and moanin’, you might want to shut the car door. You wear down that Pontiac’s battery and we might be here a real long time together. And you smell too bad for that.”
I wiped my face on my sleeve and stood up. I got back into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. What had happened to my mind? Why couldn’t I think?
Seconds later, the door opened again with an explosion of light and sound and Earl jerked me out and pulled me to him. He held me tightly against his wretched body; with one hand he pulled on my hair until my face came up, and then those beery lips came down on mine and his disgusting tongue slithered into my mouth and his whisker stubble rasped my skin.
All my muscles went slack. This is what it is to die, I thought. And then the roiling within me boiled up and out. Some primal force that Earl had unleashed by violating my soul with his filth rebelled and took control. I remember only the yell, not a scream, but a deep-throated bellow that came from way down in my guts. It surprised me more than anything else. I’d never known I was capable of that kind of sound.
Earl flew backward, as if flung.
In the light of the open car door, I saw him take tentative steps backward, then trip over a clump of scrub and land on his back. In the eye of my memory, he gets closer, so I must have approached him, although I can’t exactly recall. I can only remember how good it felt to be taken care of—to have relinquished control—to know I had to do nothing but watch the drama as it unfolded.
I remember an expression of terror on Earl’s pitiful face as he scrabbled back, trying to escape me. I remember the feeling of satisfaction mixed with puzzlement. I remember almost being able to grasp that elusive melody that had followed me all my life.
And then my memory fails me completely.
J.C. “JUICE” WICKERS: “So don’t rush me, okay?
“So we took her to our personal drinkin’ place. She was only too eager to go with us. And we get there and commence to drinkin’.
“Earl Foster, he gets a bit of a load on, and he’s a little pissed that she don’t join us and be sociable, she’s just sittin’ in the car poutin’. So he goes to get her out, come join us, have a few beers, tell a few jokes, you know?
“So Earl opens the car door, you know, to persuade her out, and she attacks him. She gives out with this yell, this—God A’mighty—it was like a cat in heat screamin’ at night, you know? And Earl backs off and she jumps on him.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seein’. It was dark, but the car door was open, and that old Pontiac’s got good interiors. Old Earl Foster, he was down on his back and that girl was like on his chest, humpin’—humpin’ up and down and old Earl was a gurglin’, his arms and legs wavin’ at first, then weaker, and she’s slurpin’, man, she’s fuckin’ slurpin’, and drinkin’ . . . God! . . . drinkin’ his blood. Finally Earl give this sigh and that’s the end, and I’m just sittin’ at that picnic table not knowin’ what to do, Jesus Christ, we pick up some scum from the beach and it’s a friggin’ . . .
“I didn’t know what to do so I just sat there quiet like. I thought maybe when she was finished with old Earl Foster, she’d come on after me, so I just sat there, barely breathin’, prayin’ that the battery in the Pontiac would hold.
“Then she just rolls off him, with her eyes closed. Old Earl’s neck is a mess of . . . Jesus, it was all tore up, and she’s got this look on her face, like—God—like she’d just gotten laid, all peaceful and smiley, and she turns back to him, cold and dead and turnin’ blue, and she strokes his cheek.
“Jesus, this makes me want to puke. She stroked his cheek, then hitched herself up and kissed him on his, his whatchacallit, his temple, and then she kinda snuggled into him and went to sleep.
“When I heard her start to snore, I snuck over and got Earl Foster’s keys out of his pocket, shakin’ all the time. I can tell you, nobody ever got sober faster in their life. So I got his keys without touchin’ him more than I had to, and she’s snorin’, and got his blood smeared all over her nose and cheeks and stuff. And I got straight the hell out.”
5
I shall never forget the dreams of that night. They were not dreams in the ordinary sense—with story lines and extraordinary experiences, or lifelike scenes all jumbled and confusing. That night my dreams were all sensations and feelings. Every positive emotion and pleasurable sensation I had ever had was magnified thousands of times and repeated in an endless performance all night long. The dance of life was choreographed to the most fascinating music—music that has never been heard on this earth before—fantastic music that spoke of friends and companions, shared secrets, trust.
The music was a continual stream of love and joy and togetherness. It was brotherhood and patriotism and the first sip of a cold drink on a hot day. It was the smell of baby kittens and the feel of bare toes in squishy mud. It was a hot apple pie with cheese and ice cream and being held and rocked and kissed on the forehead. It was running free on a summer’s night and putting nose to cold windowpane on a rainy day. It was cozy and full, fresh and crisp, warm and soft.
It was my music, my personal music. I’d heard the strains of that symphony all my life. It was the haunting echo of that music that encouraged my journey, that led me through the adventures of life. That music had always been with me, I had heard it every time I had ever been alone, but somehow, it was never quite attainable, I’d never quite heard it before, it was never totally mine before.
Before I awakened, I knew I had finally found something worthwhile in my life. The pursuit of that music, attainment of that melody, was to be the driving force for my ambitions. The piece that had been missing from my emotions had been found, and it fit securely into place in my personality.
I had become whole.
As I slowly awoke, the feelings ebbed and flowed. I wanted them to stay with me forever, but could feel them sheeting away as my consciousness arose to the surface. I felt my brow furrow involuntarily—I wanted to stay there, in that place of pleasure—but then I heard a voice, a voice I had heard before, somewhere, sometime, a voice as familiar to me as my own name, clear and melodic, crisp and sensuous. The voice was so near and clear that I could almost visualize the lips that spoke, loudly yet gently, directly into my ear, “It is you, Angelina,” and my heart pounded with joy, my spirits again soared, for the music was within me. I could know this place, could go there whenever I wa
nted. Peace and happiness flowed through me and I opened my eyes.
The sun was painting the sky to the east. The air was chilly, but I was not cold. The red and orange trees in their September splendor were silent. I stretched, hearing the gravel crunch beneath me. Had I slept on gravel all night? How odd. I sat up, rubbing a sore spot, and saw the body of Earl Foster next to me.
My stomach clenched in horror. What had happened? It looked as though a wild animal had had its way with him during the night. How could I have slept through that? Had I been drugged?
My pack was on the picnic table; there was no sign of Juice or the car. Could Juice have been responsible for this terrible mess? I ran to the table, grabbed my pack, and hugged it close to my chest. Then, as I looked back down on Earl Foster, pity overcame me. Poor man. As repulsive as he was, he didn’t deserve a death like that.
How on earth could that have happened with me right next to him?
I looked around for a telephone, or a house, but there was nothing but the lake, a few picnic tables in a little park area and the gravel road that led back to the highway. That was why Earl Foster had brought me here. It was deserted.
I took the blanket from my pack and covered him, as flies were waking up with the dawn. I pulled soap, shampoo, and towel from my pack and went to the edge of the lake. I dived in, clothes and all, and swam a bit, then took off my clothing, piece by piece, and washed them good, ending up naked and scrubbed. I brushed my teeth, toweled off, dressed in fresh clothes and hung the wet ones in a tree to dry. Then I sat down to contemplate Earl Foster and what action I should take.
Call the police, of course, and have something to eat.
I watched the unaccustomed stillness of the blanket on top of him. He should move, or breathe. The more I concentrated on him, the more I had a feeling that Juice was his only connection to life. Earl Foster had no family; he had no hopes, no dreams. Sad.
Black Ambrosia Page 3
