Afterburn

by Colin Harrison

  "Please," she asked. "Let me get. Knees."

  She presented herself. Slow, he told himself, go slow. It's your only chance. She had her face in her hands, as if kneeling in deep prayer, and his long fingers circled her waist. He slipped himself into her, his bony hips pressing the flesh of her ass. She groaned, almost angrily. Again he felt her stomach muscle gather into a rippling knot. Almost doing nothing. He slowed but did not stop, counting to thirty, and her hands flew forward to grasp the headboard. He stopped moving, just rested on his knees behind her. His head felt hot, thighs tiring already. He was not a young man anymore. He started again, best he could, chest a little tight. She was within herself, he could see, far within herself, no talk necessary. He was just something she was using right now, something that went in and out, and that was fine. Her back was covered with sweet-smelling sweat, and now she spread her hands out to either side across the mattress. He reached down and moved her legs closer together. He'd lost his count, would start again. She kicked her foot against the sheet in impatience. I can't go yet, he thought. Well, maybe in and out ever so little. An inch in each direction. One and two. All right. He silently counted to forty-one, glancing out the window toward the shadows across the street. She convulsed again, slapping her hands against the sheet.

  "Don't stop," she commanded. He didn't stop and she moaned and kicked her legs against the sheet, growling, sweeping her hand across the bed until she found a pillow that she tossed away for no reason. "Oh, goddamn it," she said.

  He kept going. Not too fast, just fast enough that she wanted it faster. A great wetness was emptying itself against his penis, like a stream receiving a fish, except the stream gripped and released him, gripped and released as she shuddered and cried out. This is definitely her, not me, Charlie smiled wickedly to himself in the darkness, I'm not this good, nowhere close, I'm an old man who happens to have a hard dick tonight. But that's all. He stopped and breathed, funny pains crawling across his chest. Have the heart attack now, he commanded heaven, it's as good a time as any. But he didn't. No, sir. He was kneeling behind her, kneeling in a very funny dark church. Devil take the hindmost. Ha-ha, Charlie, you demented fucking fuck. How can you be doing this? Because you must and you will. Her ass was shaking and he spread his hands back and forth across it, calming her. Maybe she needed to stop now.

  He sat back on his haunches and she rolled over. She needs to rest, he thought. But she lifted up her legs, hooking them over his shoulders. He could tell she'd shaved her shins and calves very recently, smoothed soft with cream. Then one of her hands lightly slapped his thigh. He didn't move. She slapped his thigh harder. He eased forward and she pulled his penis—hard—and pressed him into her. Tough girl, he thought, a surprisingly tough girl who—And in that moment the disparate, nearly invisible strands of the discrepancy wove together: the absence of a phone number or business card, no eyeglasses or contact lenses in contrast to Towers's information about her driver's license, no talk about her work, her aggressiveness, her vague recognition of his question about Seattle.

  A coldness passed into him. "You're not Melissa Williams, are you?" he said.

  She opened her eyes. "What?"

  "You're not Melissa Williams."

  She blinked rapidly and laughed. Nervously, he thought. "What do you mean?"

  "I mean you are not Melissa Williams. You're someone else."

  She waited while she considered her answer, and while she waited she made sure that he kept moving in and out. So wet, so good. Best in years, best ever, maybe.

  "Who do you want me to be?" she finally whispered.

  He stared into her face—darkness in the darkness. He was jammed up inside some unknown, strangely orgasmic woman in her late twenties, some woman tough-minded enough that she could pretend to be someone else, pretend to fuck as someone else. She was not Melissa Williams, she was anybody but Melissa Williams. Not a good girl from Seattle but some kind of clever hustler who talked a fast game, sounded educated, and had found her way into the bar of the Pierre Hotel looking for a soft touch, a lonely, self-important jerk-weed like Charlie. This thought made him mad and it made him keep moving. He knew he should stop and pull out and probably stick his dick into a jar of rubbing alcohol or insecticide or something and ask her what the hell was going on, but he was not going to. No. Just the opposite. If he pulled out now, then she'd stolen something from him, and his anger would not allow that. He pushed harder and realized that she liked this, liked him pushing, struggling with him a little violently now; she liked the fact that he did not know who she was, found power in his powerlessness. Something had equalized suddenly, her mystery and youth reversing against his status and age. But if you fuck with me, then I will fuck with you, he told himself, and he pressed down on her, damn the back, damn Ellie, damn Teknetrix, damn Mr. Lo and Vista del Muerte and all of it, and stroked through her with a vicious, teeth-clenched effortlessness he'd not known for almost thirty years, his cock swollen into stone, the Chinese medicine releasing him to press the question over and over, Who are you who are you, mouthing it even, feeling her rise and shake again and again, her orgasms clustering one against another in a kind of angry hallucinatory chaos as she shook her fists in the air and growled almost bitterly, seeming to birth something awful, tearing time out of herself, curled and shaking, and when the moment came he pressed his hot forehead heavily down upon hers, and delivered himself fully into her—the bomb, the hatred, the roar; the joy, the sadness, the dream.

  AFTER THE BATHROOM she sat in the window well, naked in the shadows. "Are you mad?" came her voice.

  "Yes."

  "How did you know?"

  "I had someone check a few things about Melissa Williams. Her father is a prominent, busy lawyer in Seattle. She wears glasses or contact lenses."

  She shifted to the other side of the window. "Why did you bother?"

  "Because I wanted to find out who the hell you were. Or were not, as the case may be."

  "Why?" she asked coyly. "I'm probably just some girl who liked your tie."

  She's scared, he thought. "How do you know Melissa Williams?"

  She shook her head. "Oh, she's just a box of papers that I found in my closet when I moved into my room. Never met the girl."

  She slid off the window well toward him. Something about the way she walked, slowly and naked and I know you're looking at me, reminded him of Ellie a generation ago—before Teknetrix, before his father's death, before Ben, before Vietnam. Ellie was no longer confident of her nakedness, kept it to herself now, and it was just as well, in fact. He didn't want to see her anymore.

  "Just tell me, please." He watched her parade before him. Don't fall into this, he warned himself, you're not sentimental, you don't believe that this is anything other than a strange little episode. Time is not being cheated here.

  She came to the bed and lay next to him. "You really want the truth?" she said softly. "It's not pretty, as they say."

  "Tell me the truth or I'll just walk out, you know?"

  "Oh, don't." She took his hand and pressed it close to her.

  "Give me a reason."

  "Well, I like you a lot."

  "How about a better reason than that."

  She said nothing. He waited a minute, sat up, and swung his feet to the floor. I can still go home and take a bath, he thought, catch the news.

  "Wait," she said.

  "I am."

  She sighed. "I hate telling the truth. It never sets you free, it just makes everything harder."

  "That's great," Charlie said coldly. "Now we're getting somewhere." He stood up. "I'm leaving. I've been an idiot and you've been a liar." He found his clothes. "Thank you for the sex, however, miss. That was probably the last best sex of my life, and I am in fact grateful, even under the circumstances. You're full of energy and intelligence, and I don't know why the hell you're doing what you're doing, not just to me but to yourself. I actually believe that you're better than this somehow, if only you can get yourself
there. That's my cheap psychologizing for the night, lady. I wish you well."

  She dropped her head into her hands, pulling her fingers through her hair. "My name is Christina, okay? Christina Welles. I grew up outside of Philadelphia, not Seattle."

  "Your parents there?" he asked more gently.

  "My father's dead," she told him.

  "What'd he do?" asked Charlie.

  "He repaired subway cars for SEPTA. Southeastern Pennyslvania Transit Authority. He was a kind man who wore a cheap watch. My mother lives in Sarasota, Florida, now. Her name is Anita Welles. Once upon a time I was a nice little girl who got straight A's and practiced the piano every afternoon . . ." She stared at him with bitter amusement. "Then things happened. Some usual things and some not-so-usual things. Most pertinently, in respect to your anxiety and self-identity and imagination, I, Christina Welles, the girl you just popped with such mutual gratification, was released from Bedford Hills maximum-security women's prison three weeks ago."

  "Oh, Jesus," Charlie said, sitting down.

  "My boyfriend ran a ring of truck hijackers and smugglers. I helped him. We got busted bringing a load into New York and I went to prison." She stood and found her bag on the dresser. "It's more complicated than that, but that's the basic explanation. I'm out now, I got released, and I'm trying to make a living, working as a waitress downtown—they think I'm Melissa, too. I'm not really a bad person, Charlie. A little lost, yes. But I'm not some cheap floozy or anything."

  "Hot, but not cheap."

  She opened a new pack of cigarettes and pulled one out. "Yes. Sure. I'll take that."

  "Did you go to college?"

  She stuck the cigarette in her mouth and tilted her head to one side as she lit it. "Columbia. I dropped out because I was having some problems. I felt nervous a lot of the time, not safe, sort of. I didn't really like the dorms, the other kids. I was a good student for a couple of years." She lay back in the bed, pulled the covers over herself. "I sort of fell for this guy Rick and just wanted to be with him. He was a bodybuilder. He was beautiful and sad and full of self-important shit like the rest of you guys, and I was pretty crazy about him. For a while, I mean." She blew smoke into the darkness. "I'm fickle," she said, almost to herself, and with no gladness. "I've always been, always will be. You get hurt too much, you get that way. Sorry, but it's true. All my problems started then. I've fucked up a lot of my life so far. But I'm here now, with you, because I like you, Charlie. That's all. Believe me, since I've come back to the city, there've been plenty of offers."

  He was getting the full throttle of her personality now, all its edginess and irritation and passion. "There's no trick?"

  "No."

  "You don't have any communicable diseases, do you?"

  She pulled the cigarette from her mouth angrily. "Hey, I've been in prison for four years, Charlie. I've had sex with one other guy since coming out, but he, unlike you, wore a rubber, okay? I don't do drugs, I'm clean, I—"

  "Okay," he interrupted, standing again with his pants. "Tell me what's happening now, what the story is."

  "I will. Just give me a moment. Don't leave, Charlie, please."

  "I'm not, I'm cold." He went over to the air conditioner and turned it down. "Go on. I want to hear about your life of crime."

  "You're not mad anymore?"

  "Are you?" he asked.

  "No," she said flirtatiously.

  "Then I'm not, either."

  "And you still like me?"

  "Yes."

  "You still think I'm terrific?"

  "The cat's pajamas."

  She was pleased. "Good." She propped herself up agreeably on the pillows against the headboard. "I told you I used to help my boyfriend deliver truckloads of stolen stuff, right? After a while he got me to plan the arrival in New York, get the buyers to show up at the right time in the right place and make the whole thing go down smoothly. I sort of liked it."

  "An intellectual task."

  "Right. I had a map of all the truck stops on the Eastern seaboard in case we had trouble with the truck. I had false importer's invoices printed up . . . false order forms from a dummy corporation, fake phone numbers, fake answering machines . . ." She retrieved the pillows absentmindedly and plumped them into shape. "Rick had a legitimate commercial trucker's license. We were careful about having up-to-date licenses on the outside. The way you do that is you use ones from trucks that are being repaired."

  Charlie lay back on the bed. "Go on," he said. "Christina, right? Go on, Christina."

  She gave him a playful punch. "You'll like me better this way, I'm telling you."

  "Sure, okay."

  "That is, if you want to see me again."

  "If I see you again, I have to go into training first. Keep telling it."

  "Simple," she said. "I got tired of it, I wanted to get out. That's all I've really wanted for like five years now, just to be left alone. I wanted to stop being involved with Rick and his people." She spoke toward the dark ceiling. "He wanted to do three more jobs, each one bigger, just to get set up, and then he was going to go legit. Maybe buy into a car dealership, a gym, a bar, something. His older brother was a mob accountant, could have set him up easily. With a really big job he would make maybe a hundred thousand. I went along with it."

  "Weren't you worried?" Charlie asked. He couldn't help but run his hand over her belly.

  "Three or four days a month were tense, where everybody got nervous, but once the thing went through, you sort of just hung out." She turned over and pushed him onto his side. "We usually took a little trip after a job, just to relax. But I wanted to stop. I never told Rick." She rubbed the scars on his back as she spoke. "I'd done a lot of jobs and I was tired of it. I was tired of Rick. We were going nowhere. But I couldn't get away from the . . . well, the sex. I wanted to . . . but I was stupid, I guess. I needed to break it off somehow. But if I simply walked away, then his people would come looking for me."

  "You knew too much."

  "They couldn't just have me floating around out there. I was scared of this guy Tony Verducci, our boss, I guess you could say. I'd always be looking over my shoulder. We had a job coming up and I spent a lot of time thinking about it. Air conditioners. The thing with these jobs is, you want to get the stuff disposed of quickly. We had to pick up the truck—that was Rick's business—and then get it into the city. The fence wanted to be able to take the cargo out in maybe half an hour with a forklift, which, if the stuff is on pallets, is not a problem, not at all, especially if you have two forklifts and guys who know what they're doing."

  He pictured it. "I used to watch forklifts load huge cargo planes."

  "Also, we wanted the truck back," she said. "Sometimes we'd pick up a used cab over on Tonnelle Avenue in Jersey City, where they sell them for eight, nine thousand, no questions asked, all cash, maybe use it a few times, then vacuum it, all the hair and everything, then wipe all the fingerprints off and leave it somewhere, but we wanted to keep this one. The load was just air conditioners. In the summer in the city it gets so hot, people just say what the hell and go out and buy them. Or they've been running theirs all day and night and it breaks. A small air conditioner can cost three hundred dollars. The middle of July was the best time. People've come back from the July Fourth holiday and started to settle in for the real heat. If you buy an air conditioner in the end of July, you're going to think to yourself that you made a good decision because you can still run it for another six weeks."

  "You sound like a corporate marketing executive."

  "I'll come work for you."

  He grunted at the impossibility of it. "Keep telling me."

  "You enjoying this?"

  "Very exotic from my point of view."

  She kicked her legs. "See, a young woman like me is very insecure with an older gentleman like you. I worry that I might not make an impression."

  "That's a lie and you know it."