The Caretaker's Wife

by Vincent Zandri

  “Yeah,” I said, my mouth suddenly dry, my pulse elevated just enough to make me slightly dizzy. “Something like that.”

  Time for me to drink some more beer, wet my way too dry whistle.

  “Did you know that he was a criminal lawyer in his old life?” she said. “He’s not as unwashed as you might think, Kingsley, despite that stained apron he wears in the kitchen.”

  She was so close to me now I could smell her sweet breath. It didn’t smell like beer. It smelled like raw sex. Or maybe it wasn’t her breath at all that I was smelling, but instead her pussy.

  There, I said it. The P word.

  When I first saw Cora, I couldn’t help but think how much she looked like my wife. And what was the one thing I liked best about my wife? It wasn’t her kindness, or her smarts, or her sensitivity. Because she possessed none of those things anymore. The thing I liked best was her pussy. I was drawn to it like a bee was drawn to honey. But therein lie the problem. Leslie was perfectly aware of how much I desired her pussy, and she used it against me like a weapon of war. She’d lock it away when she hated me, and on occasion, she’d unlock it and let me ravage it. Even then, she’d sometimes look at Netflix on her smartphone, or watch television, or even talk with a friend while I was going down on her. Didn’t matter where I did it. In the bedroom, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, or in the living room, her legs spread on the couch and her black thong panties down by her ankles, I would go down on her until my jaw hurt. And when she decided she’d had enough and it was time to release, she’d let loose like Old Faithful. After that, she’d put her pussy back in the closet again for who knows how long. Just to make sure I couldn’t get at it, she’d secure it with a padlock.

  Ever since I went to the joint, I knew I had to find a replacement for Leslie’s pussy. But this time it would be different. I needed to find a pussy that belonged to a woman who desired me as much as I desired her. This afternoon as I walked into the tavern, I knew right away I’d found that woman, and that it was just a matter of time until I not only got to her sex but until I got to her heart also. I didn’t just desire a small piece of this woman. I wanted the whole package. I wanted her naked body, and I wanted her heart and her soul.

  “Looks like Sonny’s left the law far behind,” I said after a time.

  But I wasn’t sure if I hated him more for knowing he was a lawyer once, or I just hated him because he had Cora to call his own and I didn’t. Didn’t matter, the result was the same. But then, who the hell was I to complain? She was coming on to me. I knew it, and she knew it. God knew it. So did the devil. For the briefest of seconds, I was convinced our lips were about to connect, and once that happened, there was no telling where it would all lead from there. Instead, Cora cleared her throat and took a step back. She drank down what was left of her beer and set the empty in the sink.

  “I’d better be going,” she said. “I’ll leave you alone so that you can get settled.”

  My heart was throbbing in my chest. I wanted her so bad I couldn’t stand it. My body was physically trembling with desire, and with a passion so profound my brain was buzzing and my sex was swelling. I wondered if she could see just how hard I was—if it was showing through my jeans. When I saw her eyes look me up and down, she couldn’t help but see my hard-on. I wondered if it was turning her on. I could only hope so.

  She made her way to the door.

  “Listen,” she said, “maybe, if you’re not writing tomorrow, we can take one of the canoes out after breakfast and do a little fishing. The lake was just stocked and the brown trout are hitting like crazy. So are the bass.”

  “You’re the first woman I’ve ever met who likes to fish,” I said, knowing that Leslie would never go within ten feet of a fishing pole, much less touch a live trout. “You sure your husband won’t mind?”

  She placed her hand on the doorknob.

  “So what if he does, Kingsley?” she said. “You’re not afraid of him, are you?”

  I felt my pulse elevate. Was she trying to get a rise out of me? She was succeeding at getting a rise out of more than just my heart rate.

  “I’m a warrior,” I said. “I don’t scare so easy.”

  She licked her lips, making them moist and luscious. It was all I could do not to jump her, toss her on the table, and have my way with her, whether she liked it or not.

  “You keep reminding yourself of that, Kingsley,” she said. “Why don’t you come by for dinner later at the tavern. It’s our treat.”

  I wasn’t sure how much I looked forward to having dinner with Sonny Torchi, but it was worth putting up with his presence so long as Cora was there.

  “If you’re sure it’s no bother.”

  “I’ll even toss in a few drinks,” she said. “At Loon Lake Inn, peace and serenity is our motto.”

  Opening the door, I watched her walk out of the cabin and into my life.

  6

  Just to calm myself down, I opened a second bottle of beer and drank it down like nobody’s business. God, it felt great drinking beer again. I’d lost my wife and daughter, but I’d gained a humble, lakeside chunk of the world. Or so it seemed. This morning I’d hocked Leslie’s jewelry for cash, and now I had a nice cabin on a quiet lake in the Adirondacks with my own private beach. I had a job, and soon I’d be writing the novel that would pull me out of the bottoms. Yes, that’s bottoms with an S. What more could a desperate ex-con want?

  I went to the bunk, picked up the box of groceries, and brought them to the kitchen. I put everything away. Then I grabbed another beer and carried it down to the private beach. A cool wind was coming off the lake, and it caused ripples on the lake surface. In my head I saw myself back in uniform, my M16 gripped in both hands, tactical vest covering my torso, my 9mm strapped to my hip, my tan combat boots laced up tight. My scruffy face was grimy and gritty, and I peered at the blasted out two- and three-story concrete structures that flanked both sides of the street. Smashed concrete, broken glass, and twisted rebar were everywhere. My squad and I were being watched and targeted. It looked like we were entering a ghost town. Instead, we were being set up for an ambush. I whispered into my radio, “Wait for it…wait for it…” When the first RPG round came at us from a rooftop position maybe two hundred feet dead ahead, I knew we had a battle on our hands…

  Welcome to Fallujah.

  I drank some beer. I thought about the men I lost that day. Almost half the squad either KIA or shot up. One man lost a leg. Another, half his face. War was and remains hell. But damn if I didn’t find something to love about it. Was it the exhilaration of surviving a rain of bullets and enemy explosives? Was it the hunt? The performing of duty in the face of constant fear? I never once thought I would die on the battlefield. I never contemplated having a leg or an arm blown off. I imagined what it would be like to have those things happen, but I never believed it could happen to me. And it never did.

  Prison was a different story.

  I was locked up in a big concrete and razor wire cage, and any number of bad things could have happened to me. From a shiv to the gut to a gang rape in the laundry facility to a bullwhipping in the shower room. The latter happened to me when I least expected it, but I damn well should have been expecting it. I’d let my guard down. The difference between the battlefield and prison is that in war, you had your brothers and sisters to rely on. They watched your back and you watched theirs. The Band of Brothers concept is most definitely not romantic bullshit. It is the truest of the true.

  But in prison, it’s every man and animal for itself. It was kill or be killed, if you’ll pardon the cliché. But since I had no intention of being incarcerated for more than my allotted sentence, I most definitely stayed away from killing anyone for as long as humanly possible, even if they threatened me with my life, which happened on more than one occasion. I survived by keeping my eyes open even when I slept and by keeping my guard up at all times. The second you let your guard down is when the bad stuff happe
ns.

  It happened to me when a gang of Aryans, armed with strips of towels modified with metal shavings sewn into the ends so that they mimicked cat-o-nine-tails-like bullwhips, cornered me in the shower. I’d had a face full of soap and my eyes were shut. I never saw the first whip that connected with my back. But I felt the searing electric pain. It was so painful, it robbed me of my breath. Then came the second strike and a third. I felt my skin split open, the warm blood spray out. I dropped to my knees. I couldn’t catch a breath. My eyes were burning from the soap. There must have been a half dozen of them, all of them armed with homemade bullwhips. They were striking me, rapid-fire, the pain so searing and bone deep, I felt myself going in and out of consciousness even before I hit the floor.

  That’s when somebody had the bright idea of turning the hot shower to cold. They sprayed the water down on me so that I wouldn’t pass out. Then they whipped my body again and again. They whipped my back, my ass, my legs, my chest, my face. They cut me everywhere. Blood streamed into my mouth.

  If only I could breathe, I might not feel so much pain…

  No choice but to curl up in a fetal position, knees pressed against chest, face hidden between my thighs. I was a bloody mess. The cold water sprayed down on me, and I couldn’t even work up the breath to scream. I was about to die, and they knew it. The last thing the Aryans wanted was a murder on their hands. What they wanted instead was a slave. They were terrorists who caught me in the weakest of moments.

  They left me alone on the shower floor, my blood combining with the water as it was swallowed up by the drain. Only when my breath returned was I able to crawl out of the shower and onto the floor of gen pop, where a team of corrections officers found me. A general lockdown followed, and I was rushed to the prison infirmary where I remained in isolation for two months.

  I drank more beer and gazed out onto the lake. A trout rose to the surface and caught a fly, then disappeared back into the lake. Natural selection at its finest.

  I had my revenge on the Aryans. It was a quick affair and carried out with all the deadly efficiency of a midnight raid on a terrorist compound. Like I said, the prison superintendent had become a friend of sorts. We had a bond. We were brothers in arms. Brothers from another mother, despite the fact that I stood on one side of the bars and he stood on the other.

  I’d also gained the trust of more than one CO. So when it came time for me to engage in payback for what those Aryans did to me in the showers, both the super and the COs had no problem turning their backs on what would surely be a massacre. The showers were once again the perfect place to carry out my mission. I waited until they were naked. Until one man knelt before the leader and took eleven inches into his mouth. While the other four swastika-tattooed men stood around, watching, jerking themselves off.

  The shiv I carried had been fashioned from a plastic food tray one of the COs gifted me in exchange for a critique of the short story he’d just written. I was able to make an eight-inch razor-sharp knife from a long piece of that tray, the handle of which I wrapped in surgical tape lifted from the infirmary. That guaranteed an excellent grip even when it got soaked with blood, which it was sure to do.

  I waited until the COs killed the lights per our pre-arranged agreement and only the red emergency lighting illuminated the big white devils. That’s when I entered the shower fully clothed, my face hidden by a black kerchief, my head covered in a black skull cap. By then, I’d assumed full military mode, and I intended to put every bit of my lethal training to work.

  I slit the first man’s throat so fast he didn’t realize he’d been cut. He just kept right on whacking himself off, until he began to choke on his own blood. Within a half second, I cut the second man. Then I quickly cut the throats on the third and fourth. As they dropped to the shower floor one by one, I wrapped my free arm around the kneeling man and slammed his jaw shut on the leader’s cock. The leader screamed like a girl as I went to work on his kneeling lover’s neck, opening it up like I was slaughtering an overly fat pig.

  The blood that shot out of Leader’s masticated dick was dark, nearly black in the dim red light. He was trying to stop the bleeding by pressing the pathetic folds of skin together, but all he was managing to do was paint his fat belly and meaty thighs in his own arterial blood.

  When he dropped to his knees, I pulled down my mask and showed him my face.

  “Remember me?” I said.

  Then I pulled up my shirt and showed him my scars. Scars that were still thick and purple. His face drained of all its color. His mouth was opening and closing while the blood drained from his cut-off sex like filthy water pouring out of the ugliest fountain you ever did see.

  “Got a present for you,” I said.

  Taking a knee on the blood and water soaked ceramic tile floor, I grabbed hold of his cut-off cock, pulled it out of his now dead lover’s mouth.

  “Open wide,” I said to Leader.

  He didn’t respond. I pressed the blood-soaked business end of the knife against his throat. He opened his mouth. I shoved his own cock into his own mouth. Getting back up on my feet, I left him there to bleed out on his knees.

  The bodies were taken away and incinerated. The showers were cleaned up. As far as the superintendent and select COs were concerned, I’d been occupying my cell the entire night. I wasn’t anywhere near the showers. They would attest to that fact should things get legal, which they never did. I’d provided the entire prison with a great service, and for that, I was never threatened nor touched again. I’d become something of a mythical figure to the rest of gen pop. A militarily trained vigilante killer.

  It was something to be proud of. Trust me when I say, prison is no place for an altar boy.

  Draining the rest of my beer, I headed back to the cabin and tossed the empty away. A quick glance at my watch told me the dinner hour was fast approaching. A shower, shave, and a clean shirt were in order. I wanted to look good for the caretakers of Loon Lake Inn.

  Correction, I wanted to look good for the caretaker’s wife.

  7

  By the time I made it to the tavern, Sonny was already seated at the bar, sipping on a cocktail. A martini. He was wearing a white button-down, a pair of black trousers over black loafers. He wore a gold chain around his neck, and his shirt was unbuttoned almost all the way down to his protruding gut. He slid off his stool when he saw me.

  “You clean up okay, Kingsley,” he said, going around the bar. “Hope you won’t be too lonely out there in that cabin all by yourself.”

  Cora came immediately to mind. If she were to visit me every night for a while, I wouldn’t be the least bit lonely.

  “It’s quiet,” I said. “A good place to write. Thanks again for letting me take it.”

  Being that I was at the mercy of this man, I was trying to be polite and as kind as possible.

  “Don’t mention it,” he said. “Like I already told you, you’re gonna earn your keep.”

  He laughed when he said it, his voice doing that cracking and squeaking thing again. It was a horrible sound to have to put up with. But what the hell could I do about it?

  “How about a drink?” he said. “It’s all on the house tonight now that you’re a brand new member of the Torchi team.”

  “You don’t say,” I said. “In that case, a cold beer and a Jameson back. Neat, if you don’t mind.”

  “Don’t mind at all,” he said, turning and pulling the green translucent Jameson bottle off the top shelf.

  “I’m a sucker for Irish whiskey,” I said, just to make conversation.

  He pulled a drinking glass out from under the bar back and poured a generous shot, then returned the bottle to the shelf. Grabbing one of the mugs set on a clean dishcloth, he drew me a beer from the tap, avoiding too much of a foamy head. Turned out Sonny was a pretty good bartender in his own right. But if I had to guess, I’d say he was an expert not at pouring for others, so much as pouring for himself.

 
; He came back around the bar, sat back down on his stool. I sat down on the stool beside him. He lifted his glass as if to make a toast.

  “So what shall we drink to, Kingsley?” he said, a smile painting his round, red face.

  My eyes were gazing at him, but in all reality, they were searching for Cora. I couldn’t stand being alone with him, and I wanted nothing more than for Cora to be in the room with us. Grabbing hold of my beer, I raised it up to his martini glass.

  “How about your lovely wife, Cora?” I asked.

  How could he object to a toast like that? But he chewed on it for a moment, as if even speaking about his wife was out of bounds. His round face went tighter, his dark eyes became beadier. But then he forced a grin. It told me he’d observed the way I’d been looking at her ever since I arrived this afternoon. He must have seen the effect she had on me. Maybe she had that kind of effect on lots of men, and it drove him mad.

  But then there was the way she looked at me. There was the way she touched me. Touched my leg, the fingers on my hand, and my arm. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Cora had eyes for me also, and Sonny knew it. He clinked the rim of his glass to my beer mug.

  “To Cora,” he said, just the smallest hint of martini dripping over the rim.

  “To Cora,” I said.

  We both drank. I downed a long swallow of the beer, then set the mug back on the bar. Lifting the drinking glass, I stole a sip of the whiskey and felt its wonderful burn. The burn hadn’t yet abated when she waltzed into the tavern. Cora, looking lovely and happy in a short white dress that showed off smooth, milky legs that seemed to go all the way up to her shoulders. Her thick dark hair was pulled up into a bun, and her dress was wide open in the front, showing off a substantial amount of her cleavage and the black lace bra that had the privilege of holding her breasts. Like earlier, she wore a couple silver necklaces and maybe a half dozen silver bracelets on each wrist. But this time instead of cowboy boots, she wore gladiator sandals on her feet. Her toes had recently received a fresh pedicure and the nails were polished fire engine red. My favorite.