by Mark Dunn
Cornell sometimes felt like a voyeur, even as the kids sat and talked to him, or when occasionally the three would enjoy a late lunch together. But he needn’t have; Kieran had, quite early on, designated Cornell guardian angel of Cal and Kieran’s love, and Cal was just fine with that. (“The man knows motorcycles. How could he possibly be a perv?”)
In time, Cal and Kieran came to learn that Cornell spent his Sunday afternoons with the Ludviks, several blocks from Cornell’s house on Cliff Street. In time, Cal and Kieran, acting on Cornell’s toss-away admission that he hardly ever kept his doors locked, began to spend a couple of hours every Sunday afternoon sneaking into the old man’s house through his wooded backyard so that they could have sex on the bed in his spare bedroom. Kieran usually brought a blanket in a backpack so that after their departure there would be no evidence that they had been using this otherwise rarely occupied room as a trysting place, or, as Cal sometimes referred to it when alone with his beloved, “the place we go to fuck each other’s brains out.”
Kieran loved this about her boyfriend: his sensitive, romantic nature.
One September Sunday, Cornell came home from the Ludviks’, sated on Cornish game hen and mushroom stuffing and a third, shamefully prodigal glass of Zinfandel, and discovered that his back door had been left ajar. Thinking that his home had been broken into, he moved cautiously from room to room, brandishing an old fireplace popcorn popper. Finding no burglar or prowler about, nor even evidence of there having ever been one on the premises, Cornell deducted with some relief that he had apparently left the door open on his last visit to his backyard, whenever that may have been.
It was not until later in the evening that Cornell, having wandered into the spare bedroom to look for a particular missing title from his collection of John le Carré first editions, noticed a certain sloppiness in the way that the bed had been made up. Rumples which bunched up the duvet in the vicinity of the pillows betrayed the bed-making hand of someone even more careless than himself. What’s more, when he pulled the duvet and underlying blanket away, there were moist spots upon the sheet. Unknown to Cornell, this was the only Sunday afternoon in their string of secret weekly home invasions that Kieran had been unable to bring along her blanket. The lusty teenagers had first considered copulating on the floor but had grown accustomed to the bounce and plushy give of the bed’s mattress. So they took their afternoon delight upon the bed without their protective full-sized blanket condom, and hoped that its only marginally observant octogenarian owner would have no cause to put two and two together and get four-nication.
But he did. In fact, given all his years of forensic experience as the chief investigator of campus infractions, a.k.a. high school principal, he figured it out fairly quickly. Had his eyes failed to glean the evidence, Cornell’s sense of smell, still keen at his advanced age, would have told the story, for the room smelled both rankly and fragrantly of the sweat and musk and love liquids of adolescent carnality.
Cornell became lightheaded. Suddenly, the wrong of it became excised from the equation. All that was left was the want and need for it. To be young again, to be young and lubricious and driven by hormonal impertinence to feral acts in strangers’ beds, and goddamn the consequences. For the first time in several weeks (the last during a rerun of Baywatch) Cornell got an erection—one that did not go away for quite some time.
Through the early part of that week, Cornell found himself returning to the room and staring at the turned-down comforter and blanket. He sat in the armchair in the corner and pictured what went on in the room, from the first hungry kiss to the final bucking, writhing, toe-tingling orgasm. By the middle of the week, Cornell had talked himself out of saying anything to the young couple, even though he knew that he would see them inline skating at the park with other teenagers, or catch Cal playing Hacky Sack with his buddies while Kieran looked on adoringly.
However, by the end of the week, Cornell’s thoughts had begun to run to the more prurient and far more sinister. He would do this: He would send regrets to the Ludviks, though he would make sure that he could be seen walking in that direction (because he was certain that his house was being staked out, the two young sex addicts watching and waiting for the coast to clear). Then he would take a roundabout way home—the back way—a way not at all anticipated by Cal and Kieran. Finally, having given the kids sufficient time to invade his house, to place their ravenous naked bodies upon the bed in the spare room, he would enter and catch them—what was the phrase?—fragrante delicto. He would not scold the young ones. He would not judge them or punish them for doing what nature and youth dictated. But he would explain that there was still a price to be paid for their youthful skullduggery, and the price was this: that they should continue with their lovemaking with him there, sitting in his armchair, observing quietly from across the room, servicing his own brittle, superannuated sexual needs, but intangibly, at safe distance, in promiscuous peep-show proximity. They would do this for Cornell, or he would report them, if not to the police, then to their parents. Someone would be told—someone they would not want told, for why else did they sneak around so? This would be the deal that he would offer them, and they would have no choice but to accept it.
They came for their clandestine assignation that day, and Cornell arrived twenty minutes later, just as he had planned, ready to ambush them and then to name his extortionary terms. As he crept quietly down the hall toward the spare bedroom, he could hear them in there, could hear the noises of bodily abandon, the groans and moans of unfettered youthful sensuosity. He stopped just to the side of the open door, waiting a moment, not looking inside—waiting another moment and then another—putting off that which in his imaginings had given him intense anticipatory pleasure.
He pictured his own young self in that bed with the first girl he had ever lain with. They had both been frightened, but then lost all of their inhibitions and threw themselves into the act. He thought of how it should feel if someone had stepped into the doorway and revealed himself to be their interloper. And an old man—a man whose life would in due time be drawing to an end. A man for whom the incandescent sexual fire that characterized his youth had long burned itself to embers. How would he have felt in the presence of such a pathetic old man? The thought now disgusted him.
Cornell sank to the floor in the hallway, perhaps five feet from the door of the spare room. Here he sat and here he wept. There are old men who never cry—men who have seen enough pain in their long lives to build a carapace around themselves until death—and then there are old men who come to walk with softer steps through the emotional rooms of their lives. Cornell was of that second group, and so he cried for what he had lost and for that hurtful thing he had almost done in an effort to somehow compensate for that loss.
The sounds from the room stopped. A moment later, Cal emerged. He was naked, his penis still hard. Kieran, a couple of steps behind him, was wrapped in the blanket that this Sunday she’d succeeded in bringing along. Rather than demonstrating surprise over finding Cornell sitting upon the carpeted floor of the hallway, blubbering now like a lost child—rather than recoiling in shame and bowing their heads in Garden-of-Eden contrition, the teenaged boy and girl presented expressions of silent pity for Cornell. Cal reached down to help Cornell to his feet.
“We won’t do it again if you don’t want us to,” he said to the old man, almost matter-of-factly. “We figured you’d be cool with it. I mean, we didn’t ask on the chance you might not be, but—hey, you’re okay with it, right?”
Cornell stared at the naked teenage boy for a moment, not knowing at first just how to answer. Then the answer came, and there was an ease to it that surprised Cornell: “I know you kids have no place to go. You can come here if you like.” And then he added: “When I’m out.”
Cornell wiped his eyes with the knuckles of both hands. Cal nodded. Kieran nodded too. She was holding the blanket as if it were an oversized sarong, one hand bunching the folds of the fabric together
to cover her hips, her buttocks, her vagina, but not the creamy-white, sun-shy mounds of her young breasts.
Cornell stared at the breasts as if he had never seen such things before. And then, with no sense as to what his hand was doing, he reached out as if he desired to touch them. Kieran turned and looked at Cal.
Cal shrugged. He drew his lips together and then pulled them apart to say, “They’re your boobs, monkey.”
Hearing that which she needed to hear, Kieran took a step toward Cornell, placing herself within the vicinity of his outstretched fingers. She allowed Cornell to touch the nutty nipple of her right breast and then to cup his hand beneath it, holding it lightly in his palm. Then he drew his hand away and dropped it to his side.
“How long has it been, old man?” asked Cal.
“A very long time,” said Cornell in a near whisper.
Cal nodded. Then he led Kieran back into the room and shut the door. From what Cornell could hear, the two quickly picked up where they had left off. But Cornell didn’t stick around to listen. He went into the kitchen to make soup and sandwiches.
They’ll be hungry when they’re done, he thought to himself. Young people are always hungry.
And he nearly smiled.
1991
FILICIDAL IN MISSISSIPPI
Bianca Toland moved out on the morning of October 12, a Saturday. She had moved out before. Whenever Lloyd’s drinking got out of hand, she would pack up the bags and drive up to Southaven with the kids to spend a few days with her sister, Christine, and her brother-in-law, Buzz. This time she told her husband, in a note she left behind, that she meant business. She wasn’t going to come home—not she nor their son Shawn, who was eleven, nor Kimberly, who was six—until Lloyd took solid steps to end the drinking.
Buzz knew about a clinic up in Nashville. He had been there himself. As a recovering alcoholic, he was familiar with all of Lloyd’s tricks. He knew the ways that Lloyd was playing Bianca. He and Christine advised Bianca to give Lloyd this ultimatum and only to come back after he’d gotten the kind of serious help that could truly turn things around.
Bianca’s note to her husband, magneted to the refrigerator, said that since their two kids were presently visiting Bianca’s parents at their house in Germantown, she would have to come home on Sunday to pick up their clothes and other things. What Bianca didn’t realize, though, was that Grandpa Naughton hadn’t gotten the word that he was supposed to take Shawn and Kimberly to Southaven and drop them off with their mother and aunt and uncle. He took them instead down to Coldwater and left them with their father.
Lloyd didn’t seem himself when the old man and the two kids walked in. He was holding Bianca’s note in his hand, but he didn’t tell his father-in-law what he’d just found out.
Ned Naughton drove away thinking that Bianca was at K-Mart.
“Where’s Mama?” asked Shawn after his grandfather had gone.
“She’s moved out again.” Lloyd was sober. He was seeing things in the clearest way possible. He was weighing his options.
“Are we gonna stay with Mama and Aunt Christine and Uncle Buzz for a while?”
Lloyd shook his head. He crumpled the note from the refrigerator into a wad and threw it in the kitchen garbage pail. “This time you’re gonna stay with me.”
Shawn sat down at the table. The Tolands lived in a large circa-1980 two-story log house that was laid out just the way Lloyd and Bianca wanted it. The kitchen had a raised ceiling, which, just like the living room, went all the way up to the roof. Large skylights brought the afternoon sunlight cascading down onto the table.
Kimberly jumped up into the chair nearest her brother’s. “Can we have pizza tonight?” she asked.
Lloyd didn’t answer. The phone was ringing. He walked over to the wall and unhooked the receiver. It was Bianca.
“I thought you said everything you wanted to say in that note you left this morning—the note you left while I was down in Senatobia.”
“Daddy was supposed to bring Shawn and Kimberly here. Did he go there by mistake?”
“Yes.”
“So you have them there with you?”
“I have them.”
“Will you bring them up here?”
“No.”
“I don’t want them staying with you, Lloyd.”
“I’m sober.”
“For now.”
“If you want the kids, you can come get them. But we may not be here. Kimberly wants pizza. I was thinking I might take them to Pizza Hut.”
“Go to the one in Southaven and I’ll drop by and pick them up after they’ve eaten.”
“Or maybe we’ll go someplace else.”
Shawn was watching his father. He was studying his father’s face, examining the way his dad looked when he gave Shawn’s mom a hard time. Lloyd always seemed to be playing a game with Shawn’s mother, but there was never any fun involved. It was as if he had to talk to her this way, had to make things hard for her to keep her from getting the better of him. But he didn’t enjoy it.
“Please just bring them up to Southaven and we can hash this all out whenever you want to.”
“We could’ve hashed it out this morning. The kids weren’t around. We could have said whatever we needed to. But you bailed out.”
“I had to get away, Lloyd. Do you even remember how out of control you were last night? Do you ever remember the way you are with me when you get like that?”
“I’m tired of losing my kids every time you go running off to your sister’s or your parents’.”
“It doesn’t have to be this way.”
Lloyd was wrapping the coiled phone cord around his hand and now he released it with a springy snap. “I’ll go to that clinic.”
“I would be so happy if you really meant that.”
“Just let me keep the kids for the rest of the weekend. I won’t drink.”
“I don’t believe you.” Bianca got very quiet. Then she said, “You waved your gun at me last night.”
“I waved the gun?”
“Yes.”
“Did I say that I wanted to shoot you with it?”
“You don’t remember?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Lloyd. You said that you were going to shoot yourself. But then you changed your mind, because you said I didn’t deserve to have Shawn and Kimberly all to myself while you were buried six feet under. That kind of talk scares the crap out of me, Lloyd. The kids need to be with me until you can get your head back on. You’re sober right now, so you should understand that.”
“I’m taking them for pizza. They’ll be here later this evening when you get Buzz to drive you down. What did you do with my gun? It needs to be under lock and key when it’s in the house.”
“It isn’t in the house. I disposed of it. I didn’t want it around anymore.”
Lloyd drove his 1989 Honda Accord coupe up the graveled drive to his neighbor’s house a half hour later. Both men were in their late thirties. Jason, like Lloyd, was a weekend farmer. Both men worked weekdays up in Southaven.
“Hey,” Lloyd said as Jason answered the door.
“Hey,” said Jason. He craned his head to see Shawn and Kimberly sitting in the car, Shawn in the passenger side bucket, Kimberly in the back. “What’s up?”
“Did Bianca bring my gun over here this morning?”
Jason’s wife Dolly appeared next to her husband. She wore a scarf and there was a smudge of something on her cheek. She’d been cleaning. “We don’t have your gun, Lloyd.”
“It isn’t Bianca’s to give away,” said Lloyd.
“It is if you’ve been waving it around scaring the daylights out of her.”
“Jason, I want my goddamned gun back. I’ve been using guns responsibly since I was fourteen. I’ll put it away.” Then to Dolly: “I was waving it around for dramatic effect. There weren’t any bullets in it.”
Jason, over his wife’s protests, went to get the gun. He placed it in Lloyd’s palm. “A
nd here are the bullets that you said weren’t in the gun.”
Dolly could hardly speak. “Why? Why, Jason?”
“Because things aren’t going to get better until somebody starts to trust Lloyd again. Don’t let me down, Lloyd. Keep the gun away from the kids.”
Lloyd nodded. “Thanks, guy.”
He didn’t say anything to Dolly. Dolly and Bianca were good friends.
Bianca told Dolly things.
Lloyd put the gun in the glove compartment of the car. He dropped the bullets into his shirt pocket. “Don’t open the glove compartment,” he said to Shawn.
Shawn nodded. “Are we going for pizza, Dad?”
“All right.”
Lloyd took his son and daughter to a pizzeria close to home. He decided to get the pie and Cokes to go. “We’ll drive over to Arkabutla and have a twilight picnic.” The sun was going down.
It took almost twenty minutes to get to Arkabutla Lake, where Lloyd knew there would be picnic tables. The three ended up eating in the half dark and swatting at mosquitoes. Lloyd had forgotten to get napkins and Kimberly cried when she couldn’t get the tomato sauce off her face and hands.
“This was a mistake,” said Lloyd to himself.
“The pizza was good,” said Shawn.
“Let’s get back to the house. We’ll pack your bags and I’ll take you up to your Aunt Christine and Uncle Buzz’s house like your mother wants.”
“Thanks, Dad,” said Shawn.
Lloyd drove out of the picnic area. He stopped to let a truck and boat trailer pull up from the concrete boat ramp. The truck turned and drove away. But Lloyd remained parked, his motor idling. Lloyd and his son and daughter were alone now in the dark.
