As if sensing the complaint forming behind Dick’s lips, the woman steps out of the downpour. She approaches the spa, dips a toe into the frothing water, and holds a finger to her lips. “Shh,” she says, and Dick remains silent.
She eases down the hidden steps, aerated water splashing first against her ankles, then her thighs. Bubbles crash against the perfect curve of her hips, then fight for the privilege of caressing her flawless breasts. Dick watches her immersion, forgetting that, in some mystical way, Woman has abruptly replaced Girl. In his obsession, the allure of virginity pales; the glory of maturity beckons. But the difference between what was delivered and what has arrived never occurs to him.
This new creature sits opposite him. Beads of sweat cling to her shoulders. Dick leans away from the wall of the hot tub to reach for her, but she pushes him back with a gesture. He settles back against the jets. She fixes a lock of hair that has the audacity to fall across her brow.
“I want to put you in a movie,” he says breathlessly, almost believing his own bullshit for once.
She smiles coyly, licks her lips again.
“Where did Stanley find you?” he asks. His heart is racing.
She ignores the question, sucks a perfect finger in her perfect mouth. Her tongue moves around the digit, and Dick nearly swoons. Beneath the swirling surface, he is hard as iron, the skin of his groin stretched taut, as he’s bigger than he’s ever been.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
The woman sucks on her finger as she draws it out, then nibbles at the end. She smiles. “Just working myself up.”
He begins to speak again, but the woman is on him. She’s crossed the spa in the space between heartbeats, and molds herself to him, enfolding him in the silky smoothness of her bare skin. Dick’s senses are on fire, overwhelmed by the sensation of her touch. She kisses him with her entire body, every pore a blessed pair of lips that caress him to the point of insanity.
“Wait…”
“Shhh…”
She runs her hands up his outstretched arms and brushes her fingertips against his knuckles. Her hands leave him for a moment, and he cries out from the ache created by absence of her touch. Then her fingers return and he rejoices. Tears roll down his face. He surrenders to her ministrations. Dick is so happy that he doesn’t notice when the first strap tightens against his wrists. He’s so delirious with pleasure when one hand strokes his penis that he ignores the nylon binding she slips around his ankles with the other.
Nothing wrong with a little bondage, right?
When she takes his head in her hands, Dick opens his eyes, weeping like a baby, and gazes enraptured at the answer to his prayers. He whimpers as she draws him closer…
««—»»
The truth is that I cannot be certain precisely what happened inside Dick’s mansion that rainy day, although I was present when the attorney arrived with his offering. Also, I’m only guessing what conversation may have transpired between attorney and client, and have no knowledge of how they agreed on the exact number of zeroes on that cashier’s check. But one can speculate.
I also don’t know how long the screams lasted before the sound of human suffering drowned out the rolling thunder, pierced the tinted windows of the limousine and drew my attention away from the last chorus of a George Jones tune. I turned the radio down.
“Noooooo! Pleeeese…!”
I froze. Listened to water flowing down gutters and distant clouds coughing up rain. Relaxed…and then heard another scream.
The attorney told me that he wouldn’t be inside for long, but we all know about a lawyer’s promises, especially a lawyer whose specialty was pimping for the Hollywood elite. I stayed in that dark driveway while he took that poor girl into that awful house so now I told myself it was none of my business. I fiddled with the CD player and switched on the wipers to clear the windshield. I stole a sip from each of the crystal decanters in the passenger compartment. I did what limousine drivers do best: I waited for my tip and tried to see, hear and speak no evil. But my heart raced like a hare being hunted as guilt coursed through my veins.
I heard more awful, keening wails and then panicked. Enough! I decided to break through the front door and rescue the pitiful child who was being so horrifically tortured. I got out of the limo, opened the trunk and removed the tire iron to use as a weapon. What I was about to do would doubtless ruin my career and quite possibly cost me my life, but who could bear witness to this and do nothing? As I tested my grip on the lug wrench, the shrieking changed back to words: “Oh, please not again! No… NO!”
I paused, my heart in my throat. My will to be a hero completely disappeared. I dropped the tire iron and swallowed bile. The voice was not a woman’s at all.
It was a man’s.
Again, I told myself it was none of my business, and that limousine drivers weren’t paid well enough to put their lives on the line for sleazy clients. I had driven the attorney before, and while he wasn’t The Dick, he was a dick, and the only dick I was concerned with was my own. Fuck him. I dropped the wrench in the trunk, slammed it shut and got back into the car.
To be candid, I am now certain that both impulses, first to help the girl and then to abandon the producer, combined to save my life.
As I sat in the driver’s seat in the stormy weather, a foot on the pavement and a hand on the shift knob, listening, the screams decreased in frequency and pitch, changing from hysterical shrieks to ragged, weary moans and eventually to an eerie silence. Then just when I had almost convinced myself that I had imagined the entire thing, the front door opened and the porch lights flicked on. I don’t know who I expected to see walk out of that house and into the rain, but I never imagined I’d see the most beautiful woman in the world.
She was stark naked, but that had nothing to do with my assessment. Even if she had worn a green Hefty bag, her mythic exquisiteness would have struck me the same way. No woman I had ever known had even approached her elegance, and frankly, she’s been the basis for comparison for every woman I’ve known since. No one has even come close.
This siren walked down the stairs, her breasts bouncing gently, her wet flesh steaming. Stunned, I climbed out of the car and met her in the middle of the driveway, my rapidly soaking suit no hindrance to my approach.
“What…?” I began, but the beauty stepped up to me, placed a hand on the back of my neck and pulled me into the sweetest kiss I’ve ever experienced. My trousers tented, closing any gap remaining between us.
And that is when I noticed that this exquisite creature also had the foulest breath I had ever experienced—perhaps more animal than human.
The kiss ended. Her eyes glowed, and I entered some other dimension. She/it spoke to me, although not exactly in words. The creature informed my spirit; transmitted musical waves of energy, thought and effect. We melded there in the humid downpour, and I heard lurid tales from the dust of human antiquity; sensed a hunger for vengeance and a mission of divine retribution. The goddess sang of soulless monsters that fed upon the weak and the defenseless; people who thought themselves above the laws of man or God. She shared tales of predators and prey, and explained how the lines between them sometimes blurred, how the roles sometimes reversed in pursuit of justice.
And this is the most difficult thing to recount: While she communicated, there in the downpour, she…changed. It was as if each sentence came from a different pair of lips; each kernel of wisdom passed through a different mouth. A dire warning to man and men issued from a visage that morphed more and more rapidly as she spoke. But although she shifted with every remark, in another way she never altered at all. And when she finally finished, mere seconds or endless hours later, I could not recall a single word, though I knew exactly what she’d meant. I shook like a man poisoned.
She turned away from me, rippled like a mirage in the pounding, driving wetness and was gone.
For a long moment, I stood alone in the driveway of a millionaire, soaked to the skin—a dumb co
untry boy with an erection in his pants and the macabre echo of ancient human screams ringing in my ears.
I ran for the house. I pushed through the front doors and promptly slipped on something. I thought it was rainwater, but it was a scarlet mess of entrails lying in the foyer. My shoes skidded through clotting blood and offal, and when my balance failed, I fell into the scattered remains of the attorney. Most of him now covered the floor and the walls of the entry. The bigger pieces still bore teeth marks. I gagged; then pulled myself from the lawyer frappe and followed the long hallway to the patio. The sliding door was open, but I never crossed that threshold. I couldn’t. It wasn’t necessary anyway.
I heard Merle and Ol’ Hank Junior singing in my memory, and saw Aunt Harriet standing in the dooryard, plucking poultry in hand and chanting: “There. Good! Aha!”
The hot tub still bubbled, but not because of the pressure jets. The whirlpool was silent; these bubbles traveled from the bottom of the spa and broke in crimson on the surface. Jacuzzi engineers had never designed their product to perform quite like this, but it certainly did the job. The contents of this pot were cooking, and cooking along quite well.
Dick’s skin was gone; a few tattered remnants illustrated that it had come off in strips. His exposed muscles twitched—I couldn’t tell if it was from the heat or from leftover neurological impulses. As the boiling water shifted him around, I saw that the submerged parts were a deeper red than those left exposed to the air, and again I thought of Aunt Harriet and her culinary endeavors.
A combination of muscle contraction and boiling liquid caused Dick to bob to the surface for a moment, and I saw the jagged hole where his groin should have been. The meat of his pelvis was torn away—ripped tendons and arteries flopping against his savaged abdomen like overcooked pasta—and I knew the reason for the woman’s extreme halitosis.
I cannot be certain, but also I tend to believe this when my hair went completely white.
Many years have passed since that stormy evening. Some nights I can sleep reasonably well without medication. My vegetarianism causes some small inconveniences; for example, it slows my ability to order from a drive-thru window, but I survive. I pursue my classical education and my little hobbies. I get by.
You see, once upon a time, I picked a stained cashier’s check with a lot of zeroes out of some bloody trash, and now, thanks to some careful investing, can live my life any way I want. I have learned that creepiness becomes charming eccentricity when backed by the right amount of money.
I still avoid country music and barbeques but, for the most part, I manage. Nevertheless, when the wind is right and the neighbors fire up the Weber grill, I might spend an hour talking to The Great God Ralph on the big white phone. I generally explain my dietary choices with the help of a lot of Eastern rhetoric, because it gets the job done; if all else fails, I even tell the story of Aunt Harriet and the chickens.
But trust me, I never mention Dick, or that sleazy attorney, or the most beautiful woman in the universe and how one amazing kiss was meaty enough to last me for the rest of my natural life.
The Fever Called Living
with dgk goldberg
Damn, Deputy Clemmons thought, poor Luanne Spivey lives her life so…alone.
His squad car rolled through potholes and mud and bounced to a stop near the filthy trailer. The chubby young officer wiped sweat from his sun-reddened face and waited for the dust to settle. Wayne Clemmons examined the papers on his clipboard for the third time. He knew he was stalling. It was kind of sad to be out here again.
Hell, everybody in Hemingway already knows Luanne is crazy. After all, her daddy was a drunk and her mama had bad nerves. She comes by it honestly
.
It was no surprise to Deputy Clemmons that he’d have to haul her off to Bull Street in Columbia again. Luanne’s husband Bobby done already took the kids over to his mama’s. Deputy Wayne didn’t give much thought to Bobby’s rambling about how he’d given up on Luanne ever keeping things clean. Hell, all of South Carolina was engaged in a constant battle against bugs; and right about now, mid-August, the insects generally won. So all those spiteful, mean comments in the statement about Luanne? Just custody battle stuff, that’s all. Wayne had heard it all before, knew he was bound to hear it again.
Poor Luanne was a card-carrying 10-74 most days, crazy as a rabid raccoon. But she wasn’t stupid. Wayne had driven her to the state hospital a couple of times before. Sadly, she never seemed to mind.
The trailer was pale blue, dented and rusty. It had shelves with dead flowers in small pots below the windows. Wayne knocked on the trailer door, stepped back so she could open it. “Luanne? You want to pack a few things. Magistrate says I got to carry you to the hospital in Columbia ‘cause your nerves are acting up again.”
A fat garden spider crawled out from underneath the door. Wayne grimaced, went to step on it and missed. It pranced away as if choreographed. “Luanne? Hurry it up. It’s hotter than hell out here, but my cruiser’s air conditioned.”
A slight woman with deep-set blue eyes and pale hair appeared. Luanne wore cheap lipstick and bright rouge. Her faded blue skirt was frayed from countless washings and her faded red blouse was unbuttoned to reveal the tops of small, wary breasts. She was so thin she slipped between the barely opened door and the doorframe. Before the metal door closed, Wayne saw what seemed to be a shiny, mottled patchwork quilt that rolled like waves on the lake. Must be a heat mirage; like when you see water on the asphalt far ahead and it ain’t rained for months.
“Hey, Wayne.” She batted her eyelashes at him. Her voice was soft as cotton candy but had a faint scratch to it, like a finger tapping on an emery board. “You got papers on me again? Seems like old Bobby been downtown.” A hint of a smile flickered across her wan face. “I guess I ain’t wanted nowhere there’s people.”
“Yeah, I got papers.” Wayne stepped back, out of the way. He felt slightly embarrassed to be taking her into custody again. It ain’t like Luanne is a bad crazy. She doesn’t make a lot of noise, or stop traffic, or shoot anybody.
“S’alright, Wayne,” she said, soothingly, as if reading his thoughts. “I can use a rest. Just so long as you stop along the way so I can get out of the car and smoke every so often.”
“No problem.”
Luanne placed a small, bony hand on his sleeve. She hung on him like a very old woman badly in need of love and daintily tottered on down the rickety stairs. Meanwhile, Deputy Wayne Clemmons wondered why she was wearing a pair of absurdly high dress heels in a darkened trailer in the daytime.
««—»»
Admitting Note:
The patient is a twenty-eight-year-old Caucasian married female with two children who has a history of three prior admissions. She is neatly although provocatively dressed in contrast to her rather reserved self-effacing manner. Sans makeup, she appears somewhat malnourished but does not manifest any symptoms of an eating disorder. She is oriented to time, place, person, and circumstance. Affect is appropriate to the content of her speech and she demonstrates no overt signs of psychosis or mood abnormalities. She reports that her husband petitioned for her involuntary commitment secondary to a custody dispute and further adds that she does not mind as she “can use a rest.” She reports that her need for a rest results from constantly attempting to keep her trailer clean. According to the patient, her husband actually left her because she failed as a housekeeper and the trailer is “just too filthy for words. That mess is sucking the life outta me.”
At the conclusion of the interview she asked when she might be allowed access to her cosmetics and cigarettes. “I don’t feel right without my make-up,” she commented, “my face hangs out in the world.” This struck me as oddly incongruent, because she also states: “I reckon I’m not wanted anywhere there’s people.”
««—»»
Visiting hours are over. The ward is still, yellowing floors as deserted as the lunar surface; silent, except for the snores of the patients and
the squeaking of the tennis shoes worn by the night staff. Betty Nelson sets down the newspaper and pours a cup of sludgy coffee into her dirty mug. Something about the new patient on the unit keeps nagging at her. She keeps thinking about some research paper she read back in the eighties; something about patients from rural counties seeming psychotic and then clearing a few weeks after admission. Had it been an eventual diagnosis of nutritional deprivation from a diet consisting primarily of collards and yams?
Betty shakes her head. That can’t be right. The closer she gets to retirement the more obsessive she becomes; the more she recalls bits of this and that from years ago but it’s so difficult to apply the knowledge. Something about this new woman intrigues her.
And comes near to breaking Betty’s heart.
Betty walks down the hall toward the new patient’s room. She peers in the door and watches the delicate features twitch in the shadow and moonlight. All seems well. Betty turns to go. She steps forward and hears a sickening crunch from beneath her crepe-soled shoe. Something seems to scurry away.
She glances down the hall. A tube of mascara or something? The object seems to roll into the corner and disappear. Too many late nights.
««—»»
To: Janitorial
From: Nursing staff
Maintenance Request
URGENT! Ward B is infested with insects. The situation is so severe that we are in violation of JACO standards. Please deal with this immediately.
««—»»
Group Note 7/6/2001
Patient L. Spivey
Patient continues to resist disclosure to the group but seems to listen attentively when others speak. She refrains from making eye contact; sits immobile, facial expression seldom changing from one of polite interest. Today when another patient was disclosing a history of marital discord, patient commented that she and her spouse seldom have sex because she feels unattractive and unworthy and anyway she is too tired from constant housecleaning. Seems preoccupied with her failures as a traditional housekeeper and wife.
A Host of Shadows Page 13
