She rose from the sheets—a vision in the blue-flowered lace—and put on a robe. She strolled into the next room to take a shower.
Still holding on to my erection, I jumped off the canoe and padded silently over to the bathroom. But the window was up too high and no bigger than a small picture frame. It also had thick glass that I couldn’t see through anyway.
I sighed, zipped up, and put my shoes back on. I went across the yard to my car.
At least I wasn’t tired anymore. But now I had a stubborn boner, on top of being sweaty and smelling like pizza.
I began to drive home. The Rolling Stones’ classic “Under My Thumb” was playing on the radio. Suddenly in the middle of the song, the music stopped and Frank Edmondson’s voice said: “Go to South Dallas.”
It took me by surprise as much as it did the first time months earlier. “Uh, what?”
“South Dallas, boy,” he said again over the speakers.
South Dallas was one of the places that filled rednecks with dread, like East St. Louis, West Hollywood, or Harlem. It was a place you steered clear of after dark.
I did as I was told.
Why?
Because I was freaked out. Dead man’s voice over the radio.
Most folks probably would have come to a screeching halt, leaped out of their seat, and run away screaming.
But not me. I drove.
I continued through Dallas until the glitter of the downtown skyline gave way to an area with no zoning restrictions whatsoever. There would be a really nice block with carefully renovated historical homes. And then right next to it, blocks of sagging, tiny, pier-and-beam cracker boxes with barred windows and entire packs of pitbulls behind every chain-link fence.
There were vacant lots used as dump sites for garbage until it looked like fortifications for a medieval fort. There were junkyards, reclamation scrap yards, and a host of dilapidated tire and hubcap places. There were a number of streetlights out, with glass shards shattered and scattered over the buckled asphalt. The night crawled alongside Monster as I drove deeper into a forgotten section of the city.
I passed the projects, half of them boarded up from being trashed by the tenants. Outside a few people gathered to talk, staring at the car with suspicion as I went past. Maybe they were wondering if I was about to do a drive-by shooting? Other than that, things were very quiet.
I even heard a word here, a word there. Always the same word.
Dead . . .
. . . dead . . .
Really spooked me. But absolutely no one made any threatening gestures. If anything, they saw Monster and moved back a little.
. . . dead.
I parked next to a crumbling brick building sprayed everywhere with gang symbols. Across the street was another building, the entire wall done in a terrific mural of a dozen rainbows crossing from a moon desert into an orchid-heavy jungle and then into snowcapped mountains. Happy people walked across the prism bridges.
There wasn’t a single inch of it marred by graffiti.
I wondered why I’d chosen to park by the building with the gang symbols instead of that one. I killed the car’s lights. Shadows strayed from corners, spilled out of alleys, slid from under parked cars to gather in the open. Since I wasn’t used to such a non-suburban setting, I imagined the red eyes of rats were really demons waiting to steal my soul. And the lizards and scorpions skittering across cracked walls were gargoyles put there as sentinels against evil.
Talk about letting my imagination get the better of me.
There was a knock on the passenger’s side window. It was a young Latina, wearing a tight-fitting, V-necked T-shirt that showed off her shapely breasts. She wore it over spangly short shorts. The kind I’d seen on the sexy dancers in Ricky Martin videos.
“Long time no see, corazón. Todavía esta calle está bien vigilada, especialmente de noche.” Her accent was thick. Her smile was false. She’d said something about the street being watched well at night, and I had a feeling that what she’d said was meant sarcastically.
I rolled down my window. We stared each other in the eyes.
“Oh,” she said, tilting her head. “I thought you were someone else.”
“Who?” I asked nervously.
“Some psycho cop I used to know. This looks like his car. But I think I heard he was dead.”
Dead . . .
. . . dead . . .
. . . dead.
She laughed. “Bet nobody’s bothered you in this thing, huh?”
When I didn’t reply, she ran a sleek finger across the hood of the car. She spit out a cheekful of gum and asked, “Are you looking for a date?”
I quickly looked up and down the street to make sure there were no police. I hadn’t been, but I wouldn’t tell her that.
What was I supposed to say? No, actually I’m only here because the ghost of the cop who owned the car commanded me to come out this way. And I’m nothing if not a good little robot.
Instead, I nodded. Grinned like a fool.
She opened the door and slid across the seat, crotch of the spangly short shorts glittering like a constellation of garish stars. “Drive around the corner and park between the side streets.”
It was even darker in the alleyway she pointed out. A horde of cockroaches crunched beneath the tires. A cat scampered past, something hairless wriggling in its mouth, flailing tiny paws or hands.
“I want the money up front,” she said.
“How much?” I asked.
She smiled. “How much you got?”
“Forty.”
“That’ll get you a blow job, fifty for straight.”
Did I know if she was telling me reasonable prices?
Did I care?
Whatever it was the cat had dragged off now screamed from somewhere close by. For some reason this had me as hot as I was when I’d left Connie’s. That idea ought to have profoundly disturbed me. But I fished out my wallet and took the money. I held it bunched in my fist.
She peeled off the tight T-shirt, revealing breasts that were even bigger than I’d thought. She snatched the cash from my grip and stuck it inside a tiny purse. I got a glimpse of the barrel of a small-caliber pistol. Might have been my imagination and it had really been only a large tube of lipstick.
“Unzip,” she ordered.
I quickly tugged open my jeans. I wanted to look cool and sophisticated, like I did this all the time.
I guess I expected her to produce a condom, like I’d seen in Pretty Woman. Or maybe she’d line the inside of her mouth with plastic sandwich wrap. But all she did was grab my cock and stuff it between her lips. I moaned, it was so wet and felt so good. She ran her tongue up and down my dick. All of a sudden, the heat wasn’t bothering me at all. It was what I lived for and was willing to die for.
Outside, several jumbo mosquitoes struck the windows. They sounded like slices of juicy peach hitting the glass. I was startled, seeing bloody smears. I gazed down at the head in my lap. I wondered how many hits of crack those pouty lips had taken today and how many other cocks she’d sucked, unprotected like this. Did any of those other fellers have diseases? Poisonous peckers?
( . . . was willing to die for . . .)
It felt too good to linger on any of those thoughts.
“Titty fuck,” Frank whispered over the speakers.
The voice froze me but I didn’t wilt. Apparently she hadn’t heard Frank, because she didn’t stop.
I took her head by the hair and pulled her off me. “Titty fuck,” I murmured, my mouth feeling as if it were suddenly lined with lead. My gums hurt. My teeth were tingling with raw nerves.
She gave me an odd look, then said, “You even fuck like him,” before arching forward and burying my cock between her breasts.
The slick texture of her breasts—damp, not sweating but glowing, soft on either side with the heart thumping rhythmically between there—was even better than her lips and tongue had been. I came instantly.
“Muy bueno,”
she said as she abruptly drew away from me. She grabbed her T-shirt and purse and jumped out of the car. She made a face, took a tissue out of her purse, and wiped off the wad of pecker cream that was starting to slide toward her belly, tossing the soiled Kleenex under the car. Then she put her shirt on and stalked away without looking back.
I shivered, zipped up, and drove down the alley slowly, trying to avoid broken bottles and disturbingly large, lumpy bags of garbage thrown all over the place. Occasionally one of the bags moved, black plastic rippling, pushing out, splitting open. I wasn’t interested in waiting to find out what might be inside.
“Don’t drive down this way, boy,” Frank’s voice said sternly over the speakers.
A man came out of nowhere—at least as far as I was concerned. I hadn’t seen where he’d come from. He lunged for the door and had it open before I could even wonder why I didn’t have it locked. He grabbed my collar with one hand and slammed a gun into my face. The blow almost knocked me out. But I didn’t lose consciousness. I just saw displays of savage fireworks and tasted blood. I felt cartilage in my nose slip, purpling within seconds. I flashed back on the rearrangement of my expression in the accident.
“Out of the car. Out of the car now or I’ll blow your brains all over it. Wouldn’t that be a shame? Nice, pretty old thing like this?”
I stared at him, seeing he wasn’t even as old as I was.
I obviously wasn’t wearing my seat belt, considering what I’d just been up to. I let him half-drag me out of the seat, thrusting myself in that direction to show some cooperation so he wouldn’t simply shoot me anyway.
Once I was in the dirt, he butted the gun across the top of my head and kicked me in the nuts for good measure. He jumped into the driver’s seat and prepared to take off. He slammed his foot on the gas pedal and . . . the car didn’t move.
He glared at me as if I’d caused the problem.
As I crawled around on the ground, there were shadows/rats/scorpions/lizards/fruit-sized mosquitoes on my eyeballs so I couldn’t see straight. I thought I saw him point the gun at me.
“What’s the matter with this piece of shit? Oh, you’re dead now, redneck.”
All of a sudden the dashboard lights started flashing. The radio began flipping channels. The windshield wipers swished back and forth rapidly. The heater came on full blast. The driver’s side door opened and slammed shut, opened and slammed shut.
Frank’s voice barked over the radio, “Goddamn asshole. Shit for brains. You picked the wrrroooong car to steal, motherfucker.”
The carjacker tried to jump out when the door opened again. Most of him did come out. But somehow his right foot got caught inside, whether wedged beneath one of the pedals or skewed in the seat belt—although I can’t imagine how. Maybe something had grabbed that foot. I don’t know. I wasn’t seeing very clearly. I didn’t even realize I had blood running in my eyes from the crease he’d put in my skull. I saw that cat streak past me inches from my nose. Cat with a tiny hairless man in its jaws.
Monster took off down the alley, dragging the kid through broken glass and pieces of old brick, roofing nails, and aluminum beer can pull tabs. There were razor blades and used syringes and even the scattered spokes from a pair of butchered bicycle tires.
I heard the kid screaming as Monster neared the end of the alley. A Dumpster stood to one side, making the passage narrower than where I’d entered. The car sped through it, angling toward the Dumpster on the driver’s side. The carjacker’s body caught hard between the Barracuda and the Dumpster. There was a pop, and the leg caught in the door was wrenched off at the knee. Blood sprayed as the kid flopped on the ground, now released from the car, which continued on into the street, finally rolling to a stop with its engine rumbling.
I stood and staggered toward him, horrified by what I’d seen in just a few frantic, savage seconds. His hands twitched in the dirt and trash. He’d been blinded by what he’d been dragged through and was covered with deep lacerations. The stump of the right leg gushed what looked like ink but, of course, wasn’t. He’d shit himself and was lying there, trying to cry with those ruined eyes, trying to ask for help, trying to roll away from the dying mess he had become.
I knelt beside him, reaching out with both hands. What could I do?
He doubled up, jerked onto one side, and vomited the contents of his stomach and then some of the stomach itself. Then he stopped moving entirely.
Dead . . .
. . . dead . . .
. . . dead.
I couldn’t help noticing—from the stench of pepperoni and oregano that I knew so well and the bits of crust in the swill—that his last meal had been pizza.
A terrible wave of sick laughter caught me shaking. I wrapped my arms around myself and hooted like a madman, unable to stop. I heaved, trying to throw up, too. But there was nothing down there. It occurred to me that I didn’t even know the last time I’d eaten anything. I rocked on my knees, sniffling, weeping, chuckling insanely. I tried to say a prayer for this poor dead kid and my own soul.
But all I could do was croon in a frightened little voice, “Let it snow. Let it snow. Let it snow . . .”
Monster’s horn blew once. Twice. I jerked my head up, cringing. I didn’t stand. I crawled out of the alley, into the street, all the way to the Barracuda. The driver’s side door opened, and the rest of the carjacker’s leg fell out onto the asphalt. I climbed over it and into the driver’s seat.
“Drive two blocks and take a left. There’s a car wash up the street,” Frank’s voice said.
I just sat there, quivering.
“You hear me, boy?” The voice rose to blast from the speakers, distorting woofer, tweeter, and space-time continuum.
I was shaken as sure as whatever that thing was in the cat’s jaws had been shaken. I paid attention. Had to.
Sure enough, there was an automated car wash. I grabbed some quarters out of my change holder and quickly sprayed away the blood, even running the hose over the inside of the driver’s door. I took great pains doing the wheels and the hubcaps on that side. I got down and sprayed under the car.
I watched the bloody water seep through the steel grids within the car wash.
I didn’t kill that kid. But I couldn’t stop it, either.
What had I gotten myself into?
I finished up by hosing off my own hose. Washing that hooker spit off me. I had a lot of other filth on me—grime, sweat, and worse—but that would have to wait.
Finished, I climbed back into Monster. The radio was playing Christmas songs. There was a voice laughing in the background, but it wasn’t Santa. Snow was spewing out of the AC vents.
The drive back was a blur. Somehow I ended up home.
CHAPTER TEN
MEETING MR. BROWN
When I was seventeen, I had another dream about that funny river—the one that looked like it was made out of liquid diamonds.
Earlier that day, I’d been arguing with a teacher at school. The teacher had accused me of hitting another student in the face with the bombardo ball in gym class. I hadn’t done it on purpose, but the poor guy had received a bloody nose from it. I remember I’d asked a very logical question that the teacher had refused to answer: “Why the hell are we even playing a stupid baby game like bombardo?”
Bombardo is a good game for weak little rug rats who can’t throw the ball too hard. But with big, strong teenagers tossing those hard red balls around, the game could easily knock a few teeth loose.
When I found myself on that rocky plain, I wondered if I was in hell for cussing in front of a teacher and/or giving another kid a bloody nose. Then I remembered I’d been to this dream plain before, and I started looking around for the scarecrow on the rock.
I found the edge of the canyon but no scarecrow man. I gazed into the chasm. In the distance, I could see one of those bat creatures. I crouched behind a large rock so it couldn’t see me. From my hiding place, I was still able to look down into the waters.
&n
bsp; I thought about what the scarecrow had told me—that if you stared into the waters and thought about pretties, you’d get to see them. Well, I was your typical horny teenager, so I tried to summon some images of sexy ladies.
In one of the liquid facets below, I saw a bosomy gal in old-fashioned clothes walking along a moonlit cobblestone street. She was wobbling a bit, and I figured she might have been drunk. Then, from out of a dark alley, a figure in a swirling cape loomed forth, a silver blade raised in one hand.
I turned away and found myself facing a bizarre figure, heading right for me. He didn’t seem to be unfriendly, though. In fact, he waved to me.
It was another dead guy. But whereas the other one had been mostly rotted away, this one had chosen to hold himself together. Most of his body was wrapped in filthy tin foil, like a cannibal’s leftovers.
“Howdy,” he said with a big smile, revealing large, yellow teeth. “You lost? You look awfully—alive—to be hanging around here.”
“I’ve been here before,” I said matter-of-factly.
“You have, huh?” He stared at me with slightly deflated eyes. “So what are ya? A tourist? That ain’t the Grand Canyon, ya know.”
“I figured that out,” I said. “Maybe you can answer a couple questions. I asked a different guy the last time I was here, but he just told me to go away.”
“Well, ya should go away. But, sure, I’ll answer your questions.” The tin-wrapped man shrugged. “If I can.”
“Where am I, and what’s that river made of?” I asked.
“That’s the river and this is the edge, so duh, you’re at River’s Edge. That’s what I call this place, anyway. And as for what the river’s made of . . . Well, everything, really.” The creature gave a smile so childishly stupid yet so oddly sweet—considering that his face was puffy and decayed—I had to smile back.
“I wonder what it would be like to swim in that river,” I said. “I bet it would be like swimming inside a big diamond forever and ever.”
“No one can swim in there,” he said in a hushed, anxious tone. “We’d all like to—we’d love to—but the Guardians won’t allow that. That’s those piggy-faced thingies. I once saw somebody, a good friend of mine in fact, try to swim in there. He looked so happy—for about three seconds. Then one of those Guardians plucked him out of the river and carried him to the edge. It just started chewing and clawing, clawing and chewing. It ate and ate on him until he was all gone.
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