Acquaro

by Trevor R. Fairbanks

  Only he was afraid. Jamie was always afraid. Every time he awoke in the night he feared the monster would be here. He could see it now. It was shaped like a giant penis, with pink skin and a glowing red head burning like an infected eye. Long insect-like legs poked out through bloody holes in its sides, six of them that scrambled about on the linoleum trailer floor. But it was the eye that frightened him the most. The single horrible eye at the end of the flesh stock, looking at him. It was the type of eye that saw everything, even the terror in a little boy’s heart.

  Beside him his brother stirred and finally sat up in the fold out bed that they shared. Jamie winced. He hated it when Roderick woke up.

  “What happened?” Roderick asked in a deep whisper, knowing that anything louder might awaken her and that was something neither of them wanted. “Is everything all right?”

  Jamie did not answer. Instead they both stared at the TV and the rest of the living room around it. This was their room, or at least where they slept. Miss Felony got the master bedroom. They got this and were lucky to have it, according to Miss Felony. They got the big room and all the monsters that came with it.

  Sometimes Jamie looked at his brother and saw himself. There were certain small differences between the two, but only under intense scrutiny. Anyone who noticed them on the street would claim that they were twins. They were not. They were adopted. But they had bled together. They were going through Hell together. Brothers in fact or not, they would always be together.

  Roderick had shorter hair, and it curled up around the nape of his neck in a style Miss Felony called the Hercules. But he had the same sallow tan skin and dark eyes that glistened in the night. He was slightly bigger than his little brother, especially in ways that made Miss Felony single him out. And under his shadow Jamie sometimes felt like a flower, wilting beneath a tree.

  Jamie looked at him. Around them the trailer became a blur. If the monster was here, they would not be able to see it. Not without turning on the light. And that would wake Miss Felony up, so the trailer was consumed by shadows, as dark as the mind’s eye put out by a thick blanket. As dark as the head-man’s hood and an ax covered in heart’s blood. The abyss was all around them and if they weren’t careful it would devour them.

  “I had another dream,” Jamie said, slipping a flat palmed hand over his face and pushing away the bangs. A slight sniffle escaped his nose, coupled with a soft shiver that made the bed shake.

  “What happened?” Roderick asked with a deep sigh.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “It was weird. Really weird. See, there was a girl. And she was young. Our age, maybe. Like, ten or eleven. Maybe even younger. She was standing in the middle of a bullfighter’s ring, you know, like in that movie Miss Felony made us watch. The one from Mexico.”

  “Busty the Bullfighter,” Roderick nodded in agreement. It was one of his favorite movies, and sometimes he dreamed about going back to Mexico, where both boys were from. They were happy dreams.

  Jamie only had nightmares. America was full of nightmares.

  “She was so pretty, dressed in a gown with all these blacks and oranges and reds, all the colors in the world! and they offset her hazel eyes that were so deep, so deep a boy could just get lost inside them. Her hair was the same color, all curled and tousled and falling off her head in gentle waves of black. But her skin was white, barely kissed by the sun. And she had these chubby cheeks that looked so full, with freckles that were small. Really small. You had to look really close to see them.”

  “Children aren’t allowed to go to the bullfights,” Roderick told him. “Miss Felony told us so. Remember?”

  Jamie shook his head, ignoring him. “But she was there, in that ring. She was special, like a goddess! She could see things that no one else can. These grown men ran around her in slow motion, kicking up dust that hazed her body. She twirled with them, like a maypole dance, with her arms spread out. There were bullfighters, in sequins and hats, and they waved their swords around her proudly. Then there were other men dressed up as bulls with shaggy pelts and real horns attached to their heads. They danced to her song, moving with her voice. I can remember that song. She was singing about Acquaro.”

  “Acquaro?”

  “The Bull Who Lives on Thorn Mountain. I don’t know. I don’t understand. But it was beautiful. And the stadium was burning, and the girl was singing but the flames would not touch her. She was special. Her eyes could see things that no one else can. She knew things, things that we can only dream about.”

  Roderick slipped a gentle arm around his brother’s soft back, feeling the tangled hair tickle his wrist. “You need to go back to sleep, Jamie. If Miss Felony caught us ...”

  “But the monster ...”

  Suddenly all the lights snapped on. All the dreams of penis monsters and little girls in bullfighter rings disappeared, replaced by her.

  The boys shuddered in bed, looking up. The smell of urine, with the sudden light, seemed that much stronger.

  Miss Felony stood in the doorway to the room. She did not look happy.

  “What are you doing?”

  The trailer was no longer a dark place. Posters and pictures of naked women had been hung on every wall until nothing could be seen underneath. Across the ceiling were more naked women, positioned from various erotic angles. Some of them were masturbating alone. Some of them had boyfriends. Some of them were with other women. All of them were in the throes of passion. And all the women were white which seemed strange. Miss Felony was black as the night.

  The floor was littered with slick magazines, all of them filled with adult content. Over beside the wall was a television set and next to that a collection of bloated boxes holding video cassettes with triple X titles. The room looked as if a porno store had burst at the seams and bled erotica out. The books on the shelves were classics of hardcore literature, some of them about how to make love to a woman, complete with graphic pictures. Some were about bondage, with real leather covers. Jars of petroleum jelly sat here and there, half spent and collecting flies. Tubes of KY lurked under the bed like boneless serpents.

  “I asked you a question.”

  Jamie and Roderick did not answer.

  “Why are you awake?” Miss Felony demanded. She was dressed in the muu muu she slept in, all blue and beige that hung down around her chubby knees and swollen ankles and big ugly feet. Under that dress her knees were knobby and whorled from the time she spent kneeling on the carpet. Splotches decorated her skin that was old like bad pudding. A birth mark seemed to seep over and leak gray pus, bleeding down her neck. Tonight, her hair was pulled back into tight curlers and her face was lined with age, like an old hickory tree baking in the sun. Once vibrant dark skin had gone dull with lack of sunlight, and crow’s feet danced across her eyes. Wisps of gray hair hung over her forehead, straining to get away from the confining curlers. “You better not be pleasuring yourselves,” she admonished. “If I catch you boys wasting your semen again I’ll ...”

  “No,” Jamie was quick to speak up. “Miss Felony, I had another dream. A nightmare.” He looked up into the face of his harsh mistress and all the blood ran from his cheeks, making them suddenly very pale. A single tear slid from his eye and beside him, Roderick trembled.

  Miss Felony came closer and sniffed. “You pissed the bed as well,” she said. “I can smell it. Hell, I can see it. This is wrong. Wrong! You should be asleep, the both of you. We have a big day ahead of us and growing boys need their rest.”

  “We’ll go back to sleep,” they chimed together. “We promise.” But their voices fell on deaf ears as Miss Felony shook her head, loosening a curler that fell to her feet. She ignored it and walked towards them. The trailer shook around her like a snoring leviathan. She turned and bent over to pick up the curler, shoving her fat ass at the boys like a cannon. They shook but continued to stare. They knew better than to look away.

  “You just give me a second,” she commanded and disappeared, lumbering back into he
r bedroom. The boys stayed in bed, perfectly still. They knew what was coming.

  Miss Felony returned. The muu muu was gone and replaced with shimmering black leather. Long boots shined with perfection and clutched and clung and grasped at her fat legs. A midnight colored bra seized both breasts in tight cotton fists and made her bosom look bigger. Jamie could see the faint traces of rose colored nipples underneath. The curlers were gone, and her graying hair had been pulled into a single long knot that drifted around her bloated stomach. The boys knew that she was wearing a wig.

  Miss Felony was now the Mistress Felony, a bondage Queen born to strike terror into the hearts of young white boys everywhere. In one hand she casually held a cat-tail whip and smacked it against her palm with loving menace. She smiled. Her grin sent shockwaves or fear through the two.

  “You boys need to be reminded of your purpose in life. You cannot be having bad dreams. You cannot be wetting the bed. You must see the goal and want it. Once I wanted to be a porn star. Then I met Warren Falconer. He made me a porn star, but he kept everything, every dime I made. Now I am going to see to it that you boys become bigger than he is. You shall both be sex Gods. You will star in porn movies. You will ...”

  She was still talking as she approached the two, like a blue whale ready to devour a feast of tiny krill.

  ***

  As the sun came up Miss Felony sat at the edge of the fold out bed. She lit herself a cigarette and breathed deep. There was a happy moment in her lungs then she exhaled and filled the room with gray haze, followed by an ache that she feared might be cancer.

  All the furor she had delivered to the boys the night before seemed to leave her body along with the menthol smoke, as if she was breathing the bad out. But the bad always came back. Always.

  “Didn’t used to be like this you know,” she whispered. “Nah. Not like this. My childhood was worse. I wish you boys coulda met my mama.”

  Jamie and Roderick were both covered in red skin. The whip had taken a lot out of them. They had sweat. They had bled. Through it all she told them that it was for the best. That she was teaching them how to be men. Real men.

  “But the only real man I ever knew was Warren Falconer.”

  A cold smile crossed her face, and her eyes caught the first glare of the sun. They seemed to wink, but it was only the tears that had formed, getting ready to spill down her cheeks. She took another drag off the cigarette.

  “He was an artist,” she answered a question that no one had asked then exhaled, filling the cramped trailer with even more secondhand smoke. “A true artist. See, all them writers and poets and painters and film makers they never get to the heart of the matter.” She shook her head with doubt. She looked at the boys. “All they do is pretend. Make believe bullshit. Not pornography. Pornography is real, as real as the world. That’s why they call it adult entertainment. It is for adults.”

  They looked back at her, knowing that they were children. Both were exhausted, but they could not lay down. Even sitting was an ordeal. Their asses hurt.

  “Pornography is real,” she told them. “That was what he taught me. Warren Falconer.” Miss Felony smiled around the name. Just saying it brought a beloved memory to her heart. “No singing. No dancing. No special effects. No bullshit. Pornography, he would tell me, you’re either going to love it or hate it. It’s either going to turn you on or make you sick. Either disgusted or attracted, you have no choice in the matter. Now, that’s power,” she said, pointing the burning end of the cigarette at them. “That’s true power. That’s the sort of power all them other artists and writers, those dilettantes, will never understand. That’s what I’m teaching you to be. Real artists. Pornographers.”

  But Jamie did not feel like an artist. Neither did Roderick. If being an artist meant agony like they were experiencing, they wanted nothing to do with it.

  “Do you know how you come to be pornographers?”

  “By fucking,” they answered in unison.

  “That’s right, she smiled. “By fucking. Hell, I was already fucking when I was your age. Girls always start younger. I fucked men night and day, day and night. I fucked men I didn’t even like! I just fucked.”

  Roderick and Jamie sat and listened. They could feel the misery of this woman passing through them. The memories were painful for her. The memories hurt her the same way their asses hurt them.

  “And then I had to go and get old,” she whimpered and put her face in her hands. Miss Felony started to cry. “Got too old to make movies for Warren Falconer. He kicked me to the curb. I was broke, children. Broke! What was I supposed to do? I went to Daily. The fucker.”

  They watched her body shudder. They saw her shake. Neither one dared to touch her. Especially not now. When she started talking about Daily things were about to get worse.

  “You know what kind of movies he put me in?” she asked. They did not answer. “Shit movies. He paid men to shit on me and they did. They loved it. They would just poop and poop all over me and jerk their little white candles while they did so. You ever smell a man’s shit? Of course, you have, but not like this! Not another man’s shit. And I had to take it. I had no choice. I needed the money.” She was always talking about money. “You two should be grateful,” she said, finishing her cigarette. “You’re lucky I found you. The two of you will never want for anything. You’re going to be stars.” She stubbed the cigarette out in an overflowing ash tray. “And then you’ll take care of your mama, won’t you?”

  They looked at her and knew that they were not related. Miss Felony was not their mama. They did not know their mama.

  “Ain’t you?” she shouted.

  “Yes, Miss Felony.”

  “All right then.” She turned and lumbered back into her room. “I have to go to work. You boys will be good until I get back, right?”

  They did not answer.

  “Right?”

  “Yes, Miss Felony!”

  The Point of Imperfection

  Under the soft light of a mellow reading lamp, Joseph Opus spread open his briefcase and looked inside. With all the precision of an expert surgeon he went over the contents, quickly taking inventory. In seconds his mind had calculated exactly what he could use for himself and what he could sell without losing any profit. And the smile on his lips mirrored the glow of the tiny lamp.

  Of course, there was enough, more than enough for him to have a slight fix. Just a small one, sure. Only a dash. A taste. But there was enough. His smile grew wider and his teeth glowed in the dark, like a junky.

  Reaching into his pocket with long dexterous fingers, he carefully removed a slim pipe with a rounded end. One hand gripped it while the other went to a tiny vial in a hanging pocket on the briefcase. Inside were white powdery rocks. Carefully a pair of tweezers removed one and slid it into the burnt end of the pipe. Gentle, always gentle. Always soft. Always careful. He was a pharmacist. He knew that drugs like this could be fragile. They had to be treated with respect.

  Crack cocaine had been the Joseph Opus drug of choice since the late eighties when he first became a licensed pharmacist. Even now his prescription pad lay inside his briefcase. Tomorrow he would write himself up but tonight ...

  This one was on the house.

  Next, he pulled the cigarette lighter from his pocket. It was standard issue, the kind you could buy in a pack of six at any local grocery or liquor store. Nothing fancy, except that the flame had been set to its highest intensity. With trembling hands Joseph lit the pipe and let it smolder. When it and he were ready, he pulled the thick smoke into his hungry lungs.

  For a long moment he held it there, letting it seep into every pore. The crack flowed through him like a dirty river, moving into his stomach and corrupting his heart. It tasted good and Joseph enjoyed the warm sensation before exhaling in a sigh of relief. The hooks were already there. He could feel them like alien fishermen diving for his brain. The drugs turned them into a bright shade of neon, so that he could see them against the broken mag
ic screen that was his mind. There they were, worming into his ethos like false fantasies. He took another hit, deep and full of soul like a saxophone player playing smooth jazz music on a stage, until it was all in his system. He switched the lighter off after being entertained by the flame. Fire was beautiful.

  “Are you finished?” Marget, his bride to be, asked from the other room. She sat on the edge of their bed, hands in her lap, dressed in black. Joseph looked at her and grinned. His teeth were stained a deep shade of yellow from nicotine abuse.

  With the gentle slide of a man high on an illegal substance, he drifted over to her and wrapped an arm around her velvet body. The trailer was warm, but she was always cold. It was the thing he liked about her most. Sometimes when they made love he liked to pretend that he was fucking a corpse. And when she lay perfectly still beneath him he liked to have his orgasm, filling her cadaverous body with all his unborn children.