“I don’t do that anymore,” Rosie replied a bit louder, fighting the urge to cry. She wasn’t accustomed to being the butt of jokes. Did she really used to be this mean to others?
Like to poor, harmless, lovestruck Chaz?
“Don’t you miss it? Those hard inches rubbing your clit?” Dean stuck a hand down the front of his shorts. “I’ve got nine of those inches right here for you. Make you feel soooo good.”
“I’ve got ten. We’re not quite identical—remember, Rosie?” Don reminded her.
She thought she’d faint. She heard the hum of the florescent lights roar in her head, hot as flames against her ears. She placed both palms flat on the counter to steady herself. A few tears scorched her cheeks.
“Hey!” Dean slapped Don’s shoulder. “If anything, I’m bigger’n you!”
Don unzipped to take his cock out. “Oh yeah? Let’s compare. Rosie’ll be the judge of who’s the bigger dick.”
“You’re both big dicks. Why don’t ya fuck each other?”
Someone had come into the store. The twins jerked their zippers up, stuffing withering manhoods back inside. Dean caught his on the delicate skin of a testicle and yelped. They wheeled around, scared to death it was Frank Bunny. But it was only Marty Hardisty toying with a tin of pepper.
Marty smiled as Don stepped forward menacingly. “Get out of here, Swallow, you little roach shit.”
Marty sniffed. “Or what? Ya gonna slime me with Coppertone?”
Don pulled back his fist. He swung, Marty ducked. Then Marty threw the can of (opened) pepper in his face. The teen shrieked, knuckling his eyes. He doubled over, squealing like a piglet. Marty snatched the ammonia spritzer and sprayed him with it, adding insult to injury.
“You fuck!” Dean grabbed Marty by the front of his shirt.
“What’s going on out here?” Frank Bunny roared, wheeling through the storeroom door.
Dean let go of Marty and dragged his blinded brother outside. Don still bellowed, scratching his face and eyes.
“Nothing,” Marty replied quietly. Unlike most at school, he’d never felt intimidated by the man in the wheelchair. He had his own bullying grandfather, so he didn’t worry about this wreckage. “I came in to buy pepper and the top popped. Don’t make anything like they used to, huh, Mr. Bunny? Don’t worry. I’ll pay for it. I’ll even sweep it up.”
Frank looked into mirrors placed in upper corners, checking for boys hiding in the aisles. He heard the twins thunder out of the parking lot in their shiny car, tires screeching like Don Warvel. The pepper cloud diminished. Frank stared hard at the skinny boy, waiting for him to shrink under the demolition gaze. The kid stood his ground. Frank respected that.
Rosie was crying. That pair of rich jerkoffs had been part of the crowd who used to hang out, sexing up, buying crates of rubbers. Frank knew now what this had been. He eyed Marty, knowing this toothpick-with-eyes hadn’t been part of that group.
He nodded. “Broom’s in the corner. Don’t have to pay. We don’t charge for defective goods.”
He wheeled back into his office.
Marty began to sweep. Rosie still stared at the counter, trembling with shame. Gradually she looked up.
“Thank you,” she shyly whispered.
Marty shrugged. He’d done it, he supposed, because Roseanne had been Chaz’s great love. He still couldn’t imagine what Jazz saw in her.
“You’re Martin Hardisty, aren’t you? Chaz Chisholm’s friend.”
“Yeah,” he replied. “Where’s a dust pan?”
She handed it to him from behind the counter.
“Why did you do it?” she asked, shining eyes wide.
“For Chaz. And, ya know, what ya did for him the last night of his life.”
He emptied the pepper into the trash. Pepper scratched like fleas at the inner lining of his nose. The ammonia misting through the air didn’t help. Marty smirked, wondering how the Warvels would explain it at the ER. Gee, Doc, seemed safer than a snootful of coke.
Rosie gave him a sidelong squint. “What I did for him?”
“Yeah, may sound dumb but it meant a lot to him.”
“What are you talking about?” Rosie’s voice was tight, rage suppressed. Trying to rape her meant a lot to him? And then having her knock the holy crap out of him?
“Y’know, you’re doing it with him,” Marty put it, as delicately as he knew how. Why was she being so dense? “Jazz called me, that’s how happy he was. Guys brag to each other. It’s nothing personal and it doesn’t meant ya weren’t special to him. Just the opposite, wow! Girls always take it the wrong way… I mean, he was so insane about ya that finally…um…getting to…um…do it with ya put him on Mars. For as long as it lasted. Until the accident that same night.”
It dawned on Rosie that the fat boy hadn’t told his friend about the attempted rape. He’d claimed she let him screw her. As if she were some cheap little—don’t go there, girl! This wasn’t about reputations but about standards.
She’d felt sorry for Jizz and how she’d treated him. Damn, he was like the rest. Only interested in one thing, and if he didn’t get it—he’d say he did.
“We didn’t do it,” she said flatly, looking Marty straight in the eye. “We did not do it.”
Marty blinked. “There’s no reason to be embarrassed. I won’t tell anybody. Jazz wasn’t some good-looking jock. It was a mercy hump, am I right?”
“You’re not right at all,” Rosie emphatically replied. “I didn’t have sex with Jizz Jizzum.”
Marty backed off, hearing that horrid nickname Chaz had hated. He didn’t know what to say.
Maybe I shouldn’t have called it a ‘mercy hump’. Had this offended her? Women!
It just was impossible that Jazz lied to him.
Yet, Rosie didn’t seem to be lying either. It wasn’t as if she was trying to convince the world of her erstwhile virginity. Get real.
“I’d better go,” he said, setting the dust pan on the counter, leaning the broom against a shelf of cupcakes.
He paused. Rosie looked ready to hyperventilate. If she keeled, he could give some lippy mouth to mouth.
She wasn’t his type. It would be a waste of saliva. He’d only come in, hoping by way of a deviant miracle, to find another copy of necrOmania seXualis. When Marty’d seen the twins harassing Rosie, he’d picked up the pepper for leverage. He’d wanted to squeeze in a few tasteless remarks of his own, aimed their way. Now he wondered why he’d bothered as he clumsily backpedaled. Then he plodded out to the parking lot.
Marty didn’t know what to make of this. He glanced over his shoulder before crossing the street, seeing Rosie still standing behind the counter, hands over her face, sobbing. She hadn’t keeled.
Just as well.
Why did he feel sorry for the bitch? She couldn’t be telling the truth.
Yet if she wasn’t, why was she so upset over the idea of having done the groin-mesh with poor, dead Jazz?
««—»»
8:00 P.M., her father’s usual time to leave, came and went. Her mother wouldn’t drive the van over to pick them both up until shift change at 10:00. Frank refused to leave his daughter unsupervised. If he’d had legs, he’d have ground this worthless child beneath his heels.
How fortunate for Roseanne that her wrecked old daddy didn’t have heels, huh? No matter. He sure could snap his belt.
People straggled in to buy sodas, beer, cigs, tomato soup, squirt cheese, bean dip, pork rinds. Did they know her shame? Sizing her up behind smug faces?
A gang gaggled in, milling through the aisles, heads bowed, smirks wide to the point of bizarre. Thought they were damn cool, dressed head to foot in black. Must’ve come from Nubbing Cove.
Shit-eating grins. What was so hilarious?
Sure. She was. The rise and fall of Rosie Bunny, the talk there, too. Her fall rendered her suitably ridiculous to crack up even this deather trash.
Hey, she thought, The Crow was years ago already. Get a new gig. All that
black eye shadow and black lines at the mouth corners were passé, extinct. But maybe the lip style, drawn back across the jaws, only made them seem to be laughing at her.
Rosie observed, for the first time leaning toward their philosophy—at least what she guessed it was. The physical world wasn’t to be trusted, beauty was transitory, those clinging fast to the material would eventually be disappointed and despised.
They loathed themselves, so they re-invented themselves.
Could she do that? (She’d done it already, she reminded herself. Shabby trailer trash becoming a girl all the boys wanted: bad enough to pay for, bad enough to die for.)
No. A meaningful change. And whatever hellhole baggage came with it.
Dye her blond hair black, paint her nails ebon, get herself pierced in a dozen strategic locations, have some transvestite in fishnet stockings tattoo the portrait of a dead baby on her shapely ass. Take up clove cigarettes. What else…? Run away from home and be cared for by other Goths in the rebellious network of romantic murk. She’d become bride and love-slave to a vampire rocker in a black leather tuxedo and midnight tinsel cloak. Consume exotic narcotics known to ancient mystics, learn arcane knowledge, then haunt the world which needed one more twisted child to force it to accept its conscience.
Was there more? Something escaping the casual eye? Deeper than a pose flung in the shadows…
The gang crept to the counter. Wide know-it-all smiles. They put down a dozen of a new oval jawbreaker called Crimson Eggs, and a couple crumpled dollar bills. The cellophane crackled as it tore and was discarded. Candy popped into their mouths.
Rosie swayed on her feet, seeing their mouths open wide, wider, widest. Those weren’t just lines drawn from mouth corners, back across jaws like a ripper’s sliced manifesto. Each had suffered to have his (or her) mouth to be cartoonishly extended.
Crimson Eggs turned their tongues that very color, their gums, saliva. One zaftig boy—black curls greasy as bicycle chains—stuck a finger to the back of his tongue, then scrawled something in drool across the glass counter.
BLEED
They opened their mouths, truly laughing now, sloppy crimson spooling over their lips. Eggs—losing some of the signature coloring—showed white in places, looking for all the world like eyeballs. The kids left, rictuses practically preceding them out the door, lips and scar tissue ridges smacking like flags in the rain.
Rosie no longer wanted to imitate them.
“Freaks,” she muttered. “You’ve got nerve laughing at me.”
She sighed. “Yeah, ’cause if anybody laughed at you, you’d kick their butts. What can I do about how I’m treated? So who’s the freak?”
Damn you, Jizz. Toad. Piggy bastard. Liar.
Liar. Rapist prickstein. LIAR!
“Isn’t charitable to think of the dead that way,” Rosie murmured.
Swallow’d called it an accident. Perhaps Chaz Chisholm hadn’t died for love. He might’ve simply told a whopper so big it burned him.
(And I gave him my Rosie-ring…)
Served him right. Splendid irony. God struck him dead. Is there a god for working girls? Probably a goddess. Ishtar, the Sumerian deity in whose name the temple whores did the holy wild thing to fill the coffers with gold. Ishtar struck the toady piggy liar with a thunderbolt, leaving the scent of jasmine instead of ozone etched into stunned air.
(Close enough…)
Rosie turned her head.
…heard something?
After a few seconds, scanning the aisle mirrors, Rosie went to the reading rack for a fashion magazine. She enjoyed perusing pics of the latest goodies she’d never hope to own again. She never read the articles—stupid drivel. Tonight the glossy ads for clothes and cosmetics depressed her, ringless in her sneakers. Even a paper sample perfume failed to lift her spirits.
Could she read a real book? Something unchallenging, a formula romance. She’d work her way up to complicated novels that required concentration. Like those by, say, Jackie Collins.
But when she glanced at the paperbacks for a cover with a diamond-toothed, bare chested Adonis on it, she couldn’t find any. Rosie spun the rack again.
Her skin crawled as she read titles off in her head. Westerns, sci-fi, mysteries. Around again and the monotonous progression prickled gooseflesh up and down her legs. No romances at all.
(Literary minds, can you sing hallelujah?)
Wait… Where were the westerns, sci-fi, nor mysteries she’d seen but a moment before?
Every book was the same.
Every book was necrOmania seXualis. All in lower case letters save for the O and X. She might not make the best grades but she knew that wasn’t the way to do a title.
Her father’d pulled some eight or nine copies of this in the last couple weeks. Now every book? There hadn’t been a single copy when she’d first walked over to hunt luv-pulps. Their garish, shiny covers gone, now black, ghoulish.
Had the Goth gang slipped her drugs? Perhaps a contact acid on the money they’d used to pay for the jawbreakers. Was she hallucinating? Rosie rubbed her eyes but the black books remained.
“Daddy?” Rosie yelled. “Help!”
The storeroom door burst open commando style and the wheelchair spun out. Fiercely, Frank searched the store, hand clutching a grenade. A finger tensed through the intact ring. He kept some illegal explosives hidden under the war mags. Old habits died slow for a former demolitions man.
“Where are they?” he demanded.
Then, seeing no one, he snapped, “Shit, Rosie. I thought there was trouble. What’s the matter?”
She pointed at the book rack. He whirred the agitated wheels down the aisle, blanching when he saw more than a sneaky few copies of necrOmania seXualis. He remembered the trouble at Reddie-Eddie’s.
That didn’t mean he swallowed any nonsense about they’re appearing by their demonic li’l selves. He figured Eddie’d royally pissed somebody off.
Gears ground a metallic protest as Frank spun toward his daughter. “And where were you when they changed them? Sniffing the condoms in the restroom out back? Where’s my fuckin’ inventory?” She wasn’t worth a dumpster full of crap. Couldn’t even keep the Russian Mafia from pulling a lowlife switch so they could take over his business and open another neighborhood crackhouse and tea room.
“Nobody switched ’em,” she tried to explain. “I turned the rack and they… they switched themselves.”
“I may look like a guy with no legs, girl. Can’t help that. But I ain’t a man with no brains!”
Her hands came up in an empty shrug. Except one hand wasn’t empty.
“What’s that you’re holding? Did you peek in one of those nasty things? What did I tell you?” Red-faced, Frank’s torso swiveled up from foundation hips.
Rosie hadn’t picked it up. The book felt hot in her hand. Her mouth went dry. She ran the free palm across her lips to banish the taste of some dusty spice.
“Gimme that!” Frank cranked, snatching the book from his daughter with gnarled fingers. He still had the grenade in his other hand since he had no lap to set it in. He had trouble holding the book with his abbreviated fingers. He tucked it between one numbed hip and the chair. “Bring ’em all back to the office. Snap quick! I don’t want customers seeing any.”
Frank glanced furtively toward the parking lot. Public indignation had swiftly wiped out Eddie. Fortunately, Frank’d been able to keep on top of what few copies surfaced at the In-N-Out. He recalled seeing the same filthy book inside the Chisholm boy’s shirt, the last night the fat kid worked for him. He’d figured the creep brought it in. Now Frank wasn’t so sure.
(He was ripping me off. He saw it on the stand and swiped it.)
Rosie scooped as many copies as she could carry and hurried toward the storeroom, legs wobbling. She hated them against her chest, like a monster caressing her breasts. She recalled when Marty brought the book in a few weeks ago and the guys got it away from him. And inside it—oh, inside it—a picture th
at looked like her, if she was a snake. Why hadn’t they seen it?
(And the coffin smoke. The nuns. Sister Sophia Rose.)
What did it mean? It wasn’t fair; she wasn’t that smart.
It was hot in the store as the air conditioning weakly chugged. She toted books, breathing through her mouth as if hauling a rotty dead dog.
Frank zoomed ahead, propping open the storeroom door. He slipped the grenade back into the box, adjusted the Soldier Forever merc rags sitting loosely on top. He watched as Rosie dumped the books on his desk. He sent for more.
Rosie stopped at the rack, bewildered. She’d removed everything from one of the spinner’s four sides.
It was full again.
“Daddy!” she called. “My God…”
She peeked toward the parking lot, expecting to see a van, shadowy creatures, cardboard boxes shaped like coffins packed with necrOmania seXualis. But there was nothing. Not one parked car. Just the phone booth.
The rack slowly turned.
“Bring ’em here!”
Frank rolled out when she didn’t answer. She chewed a hank of her blond hair, terrified.
He stared toward the parking lot. The answer must be out there. Yet it was a slow night.
“Hand a bunch of ’em here.”
Rosie loaded them into his arms. The she grabbed a stack. Between them they cleared half the rack. They dropped them on the desk.
The spinner was full when they returned, less than two minutes had passed.
Frank tried to stay calm. What was wrong with the damn air conditioning? The back of his shirt and trousers—wet against chair metal—chafed him.
He’d never let them get to him, whoever ‘they’ were.
“You carry ’em back,” he instructed his daughter. “I’ll stay here and watch. I dare them to do it in front of me. I’m not afraid to see the goddamn devil.”
“But, Daddy, I’ve already seen them—”
“Go on, girl!” Frank bellowed. And he was afraid. The astrals of long-gone legs throbbed with spectral memory, nudging him to beware. He got their drift, rubbing his stumps as if inscribed with sacred words. He’d survived the devil before.
Season of the Witch Page 17
