And for Charlie’s money, the only thing that would solve his irritation was a good long snooze and a hearty meal in the morning. That was a pragmatism that his dear ol’ dad never had. But Charlie had the wait-and-see attitude his old bastard of a father couldn’t seem to find. His big brother too. And it had served Charlie well, hadn’t it?
Now, after his one second, it was plain as the dark night around them. All Charlie wanted to do was go to bed.
Instead of verbally pouncing on his fresh bride, he rolled his eyes in the dark as he stood at the foot of the stairs with the weight of all that luggage on him. Hell, she probably couldn’t even see the whites of his eyes, not in this black-as-manure middle-of-the-goddamn night.
For heaven’s sake, woman, we’re in the bumhole-nowhere, not a soul in sight, and no one even knows we’re coming...
“Jesus, Chrissy—” he said, dropping the bags into the dirt.
But he was cut off before he could get out another word. A bulb behind the front door flicked on. Its light blew light out onto the verandah and Chrissy turned hopefully into it as it bathed them in a pale yellow wash. They both blinked hard against its sudden appearance.
There on the verandah, right next to the door, stood a man leaning against the clapboard wall of the house, only a second ago shrouded in the heavy black shadow cast by the overhang. He had been there the whole time.
“Nice night,” he said to Charlie and Chrissy. It came out plain and dumb, just two simple words.
Chrissy let out a gasp and dropped her purse. It fell to the wooden boards of the verandah with a clunk. “Good Christ,” Charlie said breathlessly. He hobbled up the four steps in a hurry with his heart banging in his chest. He took hold of his new wife’s wrist and pulled her to him. “You just standing there? This whole time?”
Closer now, he could see the man’s face. And the man? Well, the man didn’t look quite right. He was maybe in his fifties or early sixties. Balding, with only the thinnest wisps of long, white hair pulled back over a suntanned head. He was dressed in greasy coveralls and pulled a red-checked hanky from his back pocket to blow his nose.
“Yuh,” the man said after a honk and a dig and a wipe. “I’m Zeke.” He didn’t look right at their faces as he spoke but mainly at their chests and shoulders. His eyes darted around a bit as he stuffed the hanky back in his pocket. “M’ daddy’s old, ye see. Real old. He can’t stay up s’late no more. So I’m up to get y’in. Sure shootin’ I am, sure-sure-shootin.” He stuttered a bit, not like an impediment, but more like he wasn’t used to speaking to people. “Y-y-you both’re the Cobies, aren’t ya?”
Charlie looked about, half expecting others to pop out of the woodwork. But there was no one else lurking. He took a breath and tried to calm his running heart. “Yeah. The Scobies, actually. Christine. And I’m Charles.” He looked at his wife, exchanging a glance that they both understood.
They were talking to a retard. This here Zeke wasn’t dangerous. But he was slow-minded. That much was clear to them both, even in the five or six seconds since he’d piped up from the dark and given his hanky a thorough helping of boogers.
“Sure is a nice night, boy,” Zeke said, looking off at the lit patch of trees. “I’d-a thought the spring would never come this year.” He stepped forward, not in a threatening way, but just in an ambling gesture. Someone had taught him, this is how you make small talk. You talk about the weather. “Sure is a nice night, boy,” he said again.
Labouring over it, Charlie agreed. “Sure is,” he said.
Charlie shrugged at Christine and she mirrored him.
“We have a reservation,” he said and forced a smile.
“Well alrightee, then,” Zeke said, as chipper as could be, considering it was the middle of the night and he’d just scared the living bejesus out of them both. “Come with me,” he said without eye contact as he yawned open the squeaking front screen door and led them in. “Yer room’s all made up. Sure shootin’ it is, sure-sure-shootin’.”
6.
This Zeke fellow ambled down the dark path to retrieve their last pieces of luggage. Looking superhuman in strength and appearing inexhaustible in stamina, the fool hauled them up three flights of stairs to join the newlyweds on the top floor, the converted attic of this old farm house that served as his ol’ pa’s bed and breakfast hotel.
Charlie didn’t want to get on the older man’s bad side. Despite his age and slumped shoulders, the feller was an ox.
Chrissy was already checking out the bathroom when Zeke plopped her luggage inside the doorway. He stood motionless, watching the new guests move about the space, getting acclimatized, taking things in, yawning.
Charlie removed his jacket and tie, a less formal brown from the black and tails of the ceremony. That felt like three days ago, not this morning.
He lay his jacket across the back of a leatherette chair and then set about unbuttoning his cuffs. His feet ached and he kicked off his shoes, then straightened them at the foot of the chair with his toes.
The width of the windows showed the room as an orange, glowing mirror: Zeke at the doorway, silent except for his heavy breath. Though it wasn’t from heaving Chrissy’s luggage. Charlie thought the fool just breathed like that. Maybe from years of drink or God knows what. Charlie removed his watch and set it on the nightstand by the bed, and Chrissy appeared in the frame of the bathroom door.
“Charles?” she said.
“Hmm?” He looked at her, then at Zeke who stood watching her. Chrissy turned back into the bathroom and he heard her turn on the tub’s faucet. “Right,” he said, then under his breath, “I’ll take care of it, honey. My pleasure.”
He thumbed through his bill-fold and got out a couple of ones. A pittance compared to what Chrissy wanted him to give the cabbie. Now that had been extravagant.
When he reached the doorway and looked up from the money to Zeke, the old feller was stone silent and staring. Zeke followed his gaze. It ended at the doorway to the bathroom where a tall shadow of his new bride was pulling her unhitched bra away from the dark, round shapes of her bosom. It was only a shadow puppet show, but it was crisp and detailed, leaving little to anyone’s imagination.
“Alright, alright, feller,” Charlie said. “Show’s over. Off you go. Thanks for your help. We’ll do up the paperwork with, uh, your pa in the morning.”
He reached out and opened Zeke’s hanging hand. He pressed the bills into it, closed it and stepped back. Zeke only moved backwards into the hall when it became clear that Charlie’s closing door would have thumped him in the face.
From behind the door, Zeke said, “Enjoy da honeymoon sweet.”
Charlie would do his best. One bucket of golf balls with Chrissy’s dad and then he’d do his best to stay inside and avoid mingling with the locals as much as possible. Up here at the B and B, away from town, it would be a little easier. If Chrissy wanted to flaunt her wedding ring to her high school friends in town, that might be a different story.
“Is he gone?” It was Chrissy, her voice calling from inside the bathroom. She had squeezed shut the faucet, and the sound of running water fell away to a dribble and then a few drips.
“Not having a bath after all, huh?” Charlie said absently. He started unbuttoning his dress shirt and heading for the bed.
“Sure am,” Chrissy said. “But I need company.” She said this last with a pretend pout and a pursed set of lips as she moved out of shadow and into full frontal view in the bathroom doorway. Naked from head to toe, she had long legs, round hips, a slim waist and a tiny indent for a belly button. She was dripping wet, her hair mounding at shoulders and running their water down her flesh in rivulets. She held both large round breasts, one in each palm. She offered them gently to Charlie who stood in a dumbfounded stupor.
“Chrissy!” he said. His tone was mild shock but his eyes wore their version of a sly smile. He scanned her from head to toes, taking in every inch of her smooth flesh and finally ending at the growing puddles on t
he tile floor beneath her.
“Not too tired, are you?” she asked like an innocent schoolgirl, giving herself a saucy squeeze. “You didn’t carry me over the threshold but I think you can make it up to me.”
Charlie took two quick steps back to the main door and double-locked it. “I can,” he said, with the smile extending from his eyes down to his mouth. He also hit the lights and plunged them into semi-dark with only the bathroom light transforming Chrissy’s beautiful form into a shapely halo of dark against light. Before joining her in the bathroom, he looked off to the windows overlooking the dark cove. No pinpricks of light out there. No one watching.
This was secret. His secret.
7.
Chrissy ran out of steam first. She held out as they started in the tub, stood up and turned on the shower, then out onto the tile floor of the bathroom. When Charlie slipped and nearly crowned himself on the edge of the toilet, she giggled and led him back into the bedroom. Still wet all over and coated in suds, she wriggled under the covers, sticking here and there. He wanted the lights on. She didn’t. Same old story.
They compromised by leaving the bathroom light on.
“Don’t you want to see this?” he asked as he folded into bed on top of her. She felt him pressing down on her and she reached out to confirm it. “Well, I have told you how...endowed you are. As long as you don’t get amnesia and forget how to use it,” she said, referring to the half-inch of room his noggin had given the hard corner of the vanity a few minutes ago.
He gave her a playful little purr. He was gifted down below and she would never let him forget it. She mentioned it every time they played together and he knew from the looks her girlfriends gave him that she’d bragged openly to at least some of them.
He had to admit it, there was nothing quite as satisfying as her constant reminders.
“Come here, you,” she said in a low, growling voice. She grabbed hold of his mass and pulled it—and him—to her before slinking under the covers.
8.
She passed out well before he did.
Charlie lay in the moonlight and smoked with his head propped up on a couple of wet pillows. He listened to the drip-drip-drip of the tub tap, just knowing that would keep him from getting to sleep.
He hated the feeling of sticky sheets. It was fun in the moment, but now, with her snoring lightly on her side next to him, blissful, he just couldn’t stop thinking about the moist leavings in the sheets. Not just his seed, but her fluids and, in particular, the soapy water from the tub, now making the whole bed a festering nest of tepid muck.
And there would be more to this festering nest. Much more.
In the morning, Chrissy would smile sweetly. He did think she had a genuine smile, but one that was often tainted by the dumb emptiness that she simply couldn’t help. It was the way she was. It was part of her. And she inherited it from her father.
She might want a second roll before breakfast—which was fine; he liked that his largesse pleased her so—but then, over breakfast, it would be more sweet smiles and more of her reaching out to hold his hand. And then it would be, “Oh Charles, I have a few things—just knick-knacks and such—I want to buy in town. Will you lend me the cab fare and some twenties?” And then it would be, “You know I’m from here, Charles, I’ll simply have to stop by so-and-so’s house on the waterfront to see how they’ve been keeping.” And then it would be, “Oh Charles, let my father beat you this afternoon. And laugh at his jokes, and his friends’, won’t you? Oh and let him buy your drinks after. It will make him feel like he’s doing his part.” And never mind that Charlie was his own man now, after he’d tip-toed out of the wasp’s nest and stepped up to make something of himself on his own. Never mind that Charlie Scobie could buy his own damned drinks.
But Chrissy would never understand that. And Charlie was beginning to wonder if he’d made a mistake—marrying a woman for her tits and her…cravings…as much as for her father’s money. A woman’s craving for those things went away—and usually before the tits sagged down to the belly. Time did that. He knew such from his own mum and dad. His aunts and uncles, every marriage he’d ever laid eyes on, in fact.
He felt his chest tighten as he smoked and realized his whole body was tense too. She didn’t understand, never would. Chrissy was exactly like her smile: sweet. But dumb, in a vacuous sort of way. Oh, she could talk the talk and definitely walked the walk. She wore the right rings and matched the right handbag with the right shoes for all the best crowds to notice. He’d looked past it all to get married and get started on what everyone around him thought was the beginning of a man’s real life. He was matching his own handbag to his own pair of shoes, you might say.
But the aggravation was that she didn’t understand the basics. Handbags, sure, gossip and the right society women to snuggle up next to…but not the foundational pieces. Namely, that Charlie Scobie paid his own way. Chrissy assuredly didn’t get that integral part about where her golden soother had come from. And just who was paying for it now.
He sucked back a final drag and then stubbed his Viceroy out in the tray on the bedside. He got up, out of the cold muck of the damp bed, retrieved a towel from the bathroom and dried himself off in the sallow light. He looked at his naked form in the long mirror in there. His flaccid penis hung more than halfway down to the knobs of his knees. It was impressive. Seeing it hang there like that, bigger than any he’d seen in any locker room, well, it made his ego swell. In part, it was a real shame he was tied to only one woman now. A prize like this should really be shared with as many women as possible.
His belly was a little rounder than he’d like. Not as trim as it was last time he’d visited this island. Too many after-work drinks with the boys. If and when Chrissy’s step-mom started hounding about kids, those late nights would have to cease. Good thing he’d made his career strides first.
He pulled up his boxers, dressed and left the room, careful to click the latch lightly and pat his pockets to ensure the key was coming with him. It was.
Charlie Scobie, he thought again, buys his own damned drinks.
9.
There had been two spotted flutes and a bottle of warm champagne on the small table in the kitchen. A plate of croissants sat steaming up the insides of Saran Wrap next to it. The setup was likely for the Scobie party, third floor. He’d bet real money that ol’ Zeke the Retard there had forgotten to bring it up to their room. He took one croissant and the bottle of bubbly. He’d celebrate on his own. And maybe, after the booze, he’d be able to join his wife in happy slumber, dripping tub tap or not.
He went out the back, and swore under his breath when the wooden screen door banged the jamb.
The night sprayed him with the smell of the surf. It was refreshing, reminding him of the cool, fragrant haze from a waterfall he and Kelly had visited on a rare school trip when they were boys.
It was a pleasant memory. At once, Charlie’s mood softened. He looked down at the bottle, hesitated, then threw it back and chugged. Its taste was the epitome of thirst-quenching. The sparkle of its effervescence tingled in his throat, but he kept swallowing, taking more than half the bottle. Breathless, he pulled the mouth of it from his and wiped his face with the back of his hand. He’d learned to handle his liquor. Not like his father, he knew when to put up a hand and tell the barkeep, no more. At least he did these days. Like anything, it was a skill a man—any man—could learn and master.
A lightness hit him. He knew this bubbly was low on the booze, but it didn’t matter. The weight of the day left him, sailed up into the black sky and floated away.
Guilt trod in after about five seconds. How dare he.
How dare he think of poor Christine as ‘sweet but dumb’. And that he should share himself with more than one woman? On his wedding night of all nights. What an awful way to think. And of his new bride! If there were such things as Thought Police, Charlie Scobie would soon be snared by invisible shadows and hauled off to their jail.
&nb
sp; He closed his eyes for a moment as he walked out from under the swaying canopy of dark trees onto the part where the dirt and weeds gave way to miniature rolling plains of sand. After a few breaths, he opened them again. The white of the surf was lit brightly with the heavy moon.
He kicked off his shoes, hooked fingers onto his black socks and left them all in the dirt. Then he padded through the cool sand, letting it burrow between his toes, taking his sloshing half-bottle of bubbly with him.
It was picturesque—all those shades of dark blue, grey, black and then the stark white of the breaking waves and the almost-circular bulb of the pockmarked moon.
He wished Chrissy was awake and here with him now. He’d hold her hand—because she still liked that—and he’d whisper in her ear, letting his lips linger on her warm lobe. He’d say something a bit cute and a bit saucy. And he’d make her giggle.
He did love her. He did. He was just...irritated. He hated this island, had nothing but sourness for his memories of it and for who he was the last time he’d been here. He hated travel, too, absolutely loathed it. And he didn’t much care for small talk, either. The day had been chock full of all those things, and, apparently the promise of the driving range with a bunch of old men would bring more of it. And, while he was on the subject, he didn’t care for golf either, though his new father-in-law was fine at smoothing most awkward conversations.
“Absurd,” he said aloud, though there must surely be no one in any radius that could hear him. If there were other guests at the little hotel, they would all be sleeping, just as his wife was. “Absurd and stupid,” he said. “Was nearly ready to up and leave. But I’m the one who’s stupid and selfish. Me.”
He looked up at the moon and called out. “Do you hear? It’s me! No one else!”
He belched. The acidic return of the cheap champagne in his mouth. He swallowed hard against the burn. Even at his unripened age, it was a taste he’d known well.
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