But, he reflected as a little chunk of—was that lung, maybe? Fuck!—brownish tissue broke loose of its clinging place on the sidewalk and washed down into the drain, the square was kind of a metaphor for the town, wasn’t it?
Things weren’t ever really, fully, going to be the same around here.
“I hope Andrea and I are still fucking every day and eating steak at ninety-something,” Nate said, a bristly, wide-head broom ahead of him as he tried to scrape where Keith washed.
Keith scrunched up his face. “Are you fucking every day right now? And eating steak?”
Nate sagged, but kept pushing the broom. “No. Shit. We ain’t fucked every day since … I don’t know? First year of marriage. After we had kids, we were lucky to go once a week.”
“Once a week ain’t bad,” Keith said, and when Nate gave him a You must be fucking crazy look, he added, “When Nancy was pregnant, she got this thing where she got excessive lubrication going up in there. It was like …” He looked around just to be sure the square was empty. It damned sure was. “Like dipping it into a bucket of warm spit. Fucking useless, man. I went months getting nothing but head.” Keith felt a little twinge in his chest when he thought about that period. It seemed so damned long ago.
Nate frowned. “I’ve gone about a month before. That sucks. I’d still do it every day if I could, you know? I damned sure want to.”
“It’s all about time,” Keith said. “Your time, your wife’s time … getting those two to match up.”
“Exactly,” Nate said. “The problem is that, you know, when you first get together, you’re the only two in your lives. Maybe there’s a job to work around, but that’s it! Then you start adding kids, and suddenly it ain’t just you vying for her attention. So she’s dealing with the kids who are crying out at night at one year, and five years, and fuck, maybe ’til they’re twenty-five, it’s starting to feel like—”
“It’s like, how do you get laid when you’re fighting against the motherly instinct, right?” Keith was nodding. “And they’re tired—”
“All the goddamned time!”
“Because, you know as well as I do—kids are fucking tiring! I’m tired, and I don’t really get up with them but maybe one time in five when they call out.” Keith shook his head. Something about that caused an itch in the back of his head. “And then you get groused at for that—”
“See, when I get woke up in the middle of the night,” Nate said, nodding, “if I get up and walk around—I’m for up like, hours. She just cruises right on back to sleep. So my options—my shitty options—are to wake up and take care of the kid myself, and then I’m too tired to have a hope of sex the next night, going to sleep at like seven, you know? Or else I let her get up with the kids, and hope I slide into that window of five minutes or so between when we get the kids to sleep and before she conks out.” He held his thumb and forefinger a centimeter apart. “It’s a tricky business, trying to get into that window.”
“Yep. Spend most of my life trying to get in there.” Keith nodded right along, but something about it jangled within him, a discordant little thought that didn’t match up with what had been said.
Nate snickered. “That’s an old joke, you know.” Keith just shook his head; no idea what Nate was on about. “That when a man is born, he comes out of a vagina and spends the rest of his life trying to get back into one. That ninety-year-old fucker sure is proving that, ain’t he?”
“He’s giving me hope for the future, that’s what he’s doing,” Keith said. “He’s a fucking thought leader, that’s what he is. Ninety-something and still giving it to a woman fifty years his junior.” Keith saluted, over-exaggerated and yet still meant as a sign of respect. “This is a great man, there, with great stamina.”
“Probably just takes them blue bombers,” Nate said with a chuckle.
“Whatever you got to do to feed the beast, man,” Keith said.
They settled into a steady silence for a few minutes before Nate spoke up again. “That guy’s probably gonna die in the next few years.”
Keith only gave it a moment’s thought. “In his nineties? Probably. Though if he’s still craving pussy and steak, maybe not.”
“He ain’t even dead,” Nate said, adopting that pensive look he got sometimes, “and people are sifting his guts, you know?”
Keith didn’t quite see where this was going. “I guess …?”
“Because that’s what they do after a great man dies,” Nate said, probably thinking out loud, “they sift his guts. What did he do? What did he accomplish? What did he feel? You seen some of those biographical movies nowadays? Like the one for Ray Charles—”
“Yeah, I saw that,” Keith said. “‘Georgia On My Mind’ is one of the greatest fucking songs of all time—”
“You’re goddamned right,” Nate said, nodding furiously. “But did you see how they portrayed him in that? Drug addict, asshole, all that—”
“They did the same thing to Johnny Cash,” Keith said. “Fucking sacrilege. I mean, shit, we all know Johnny Cash wasn’t a damned saint—”
“Right, exactly,” Nate said. “But nowadays they lean in hard on the shit part of your story if they do a biography. ‘Oh, he was a drunkard who abused his wife every fucking night’ when you maybe got mad, had an argument and threw a glass at the wall one time—”
“I don’t think Johnny Cash got fucked up just one time.”
“You know what I mean,” Nate said. “It’s this relentless drive to embrace the negative. We crawl in there and really rummage through a person’s flaws these days when they die.”
“Not everybody’s,” Keith said. “I mean, you don’t hear about half the nasty shit that LBJ or FDR did, or at least it ain’t taught in school.”
“But it’s out there,” Nate said. “You could learn about how many women John Kennedy was fucking while he was in office, if you were of a mind to. And that ain’t the substance of the man, but nowadays it’s the stuff we dig into. We get right in there, right in the guts. If biography up to the last twenty years or so was climbing into the head of our heroes, nowadays it’s gotta be more like a ‘climb up their ass and see all the shit’ approach.”
Keith nodded, thinking that one over. “You might have a point there.”
“Yeah,” Nate said, and paused for a second. “I kinda like that trend, though.”
“Why’s that?” Keith turned the hose to a stubborn, clinging piece of refuse. It was anchored on the sidewalk like it had been glued. Looked like … hell, who knew at this point?
“Because it feels like in a lot of ways,” Nate said, “the people who rule over us these days … they’re almost like a substitute for gods.” He had a pensive look. “Back in the olden days—no, think about it—people had pantheons. Household gods. They had all these deities that they worshipped, and each of them did different things. And most of that went away with Christianity, but … it’s almost like people still need gods to believe in. And we don’t think about, y’know, gods of fire, or thunder, or whatever … now it’s ‘the distinguished gentleman from Arizona,’ or ‘the junior Senator from Pennsylvania.’ Or the Supreme Court Justice of choice, or whatever.” Nate shook his head. “Your favorite TV personality. Your sports hero.”
“Peyton Manning,” Keith said with an air of almost romantic admiration. He was well aware of what he sounded like.
“Damned straight,” Nate said. “For some people, their god is sports, for some it’s politics. They’ve got their household deities, and they go to their church, whether it’s their Sunday morning news shows or Sunday night football. And we worship—”
“But come on, Nate,” Keith said. “Lots of people go to church and then watch the game afterward.”
“I ain’t saying it’s bad or good, just saying it’s so,” Nate said. “Especially politics. You can hate a sports team—”
“The fucking Cleveland Browns. Fuck them. What a sorry-ass bunch of losers. I hope the Titans crush their fucking bon
es.”
“—and it’s gonna have very little consequence on the long-term effects of your life or anyone else’s,” Nate said. “You may hate the Browns and their fans, but y’know, it’s just you being crazy about your hobby. When politics takes on a religious importance, shit is hitting the fan—”
“Why?” Keith asked. “How’s that any different than sports?”
Nate stopped brushing the broom, the scraping sound of the bristles fading into the quiet morning and the emptiness of the town square. “Because the NFL doesn’t have any actual influence over your life if you don’t want it to. You turn off the TV, and so long as you don’t get snared in the traffic going to or from the game, or have a family member playing, your relationship with them motherfuckers is over. But Washington, DC … they got their fingers in your ass whether you watch ’em or not, and there are an awful lot of people with power over politics and policy, and these a-holes got sway over your life whether you want ’em to or not.” He shook his head. “I’d prefer not, personally.”
“Well, what’s the alternative?” Keith asked. “You get ruled from DC or you get ruled from Nashville. Which would you prefer?”
“Honest to God, I’d rather be ruled from Nashville,” Nate said. “I could at least drive the three hours or so over there and yell at those dickheads if I were so inclined. DC’s a long damned ways, and those people don’t know me—”
“That’s kinda the point of sending a representative or a senator, ain’t it?”
“I can’t watch everything they do,” Nate said. “I don’t want to watch everything they do. I don’t want politics to be my religion. I don’t want my government to have that much power. I want them to leave me the hell alone so I can do the things I want to do without them fucking it up. Is that too much to ask?”
“Yeah,” Keith said.
“Shit,” Nate said, sighing. “Don’t I know it. So instead we get ruled by gods who are damned near unaccountable, pretty well untouchable, whose names we know from legend—well, TV; same-ass thing these days—that are spoken of in awe or hate, depending on which side of the pantheon they’re sitting on—and they get to rule over us. A thousand miles away—might as well be on the moon for all the connection they’ve got to us and what we’ve got going on.”
“I bet if you did move governance out of the federal system and devolved the power to the states, you’d just end up with Nashville feeling like it was on the moon.”
“I already feel like Nashville is on the fucking moon,” Nate grumbled. “I was there last year. Walking down Broadway, I ain’t never seen that many man buns in my life. I wonder if there’s any testicles left in that town ain’t carried in a man purse.”
Keith chuckled. “You best stay away from Brooklyn or the left coast, my friend, if man buns offend you.”
“They don’t offend me,” Nate said. “I don’t give a fuck how you wear your hair. But it seems like there are easier ways to signal that you’re looking to be penetrated anally. Maybe a Grindr ad.” He paused. “That’s the gay one, right?”
Keith just shrugged. “Hell if I know.” He did know, but he didn’t want to admit to it.
“So you’ve got these unaccountable elites,” Nate said, “and you got the watchers slobbering all over them in worship, and it’s all one big circle jerk. Or a daisy chain, if you’d rather think about it like—”
“I do like watching a daisy chain every now and again,” Keith said, nodding slowly. God bless the internet.
“The problem is …” Nate said, “think about how much they’ve fucked up the last few years. How many things they’ve missed. And now we found out there are demons? That we never knew about? And the press don’t report on that shit. How can you be that wrong and still want to consider yourself some kind of knowing god? Or better than God? To rule over man, because you know we idiots out here in the flyover can’t figure out which one’s our ass and which one’s a hole in the ground.” He pointed at the grate where traces of red were washing down from where Keith was spraying the sidewalk. “They don’t really seem that elite to me. But they sure as shit know everything we’re doing wrong, while they’re doing nothing wrong, it seems like.”
“Maybe,” Keith said. “Maybe you’re missing the parts where they say what they’re doing wrong. I tend to notice the shit that offends me more than the shit that don’t apply to me.”
“You know what the worst part of it is?” Nate asked, leaning the broom against the wall of the old tire shop and sauntering over the cleanest section of curb. “I keep hearing how people are voting their interests. How these folks in DC just want to make things better. For the poor. For us, maybe; who knows?” He looked up at Keith. “I don’t have a lot of illusions left. Whether I was ruled from Nashville or from DC, you’re right—they ain’t gonna know me. Maybe if it was done locally … it’d be different. They’d have to look me in the eye at a county or a town meeting as they fucked me over.” He shook his head. “Or maybe it wouldn’t matter a damned bit. All I know is, they ain’t—any of them, federal, state, or even county, at this point, I’m starting to believe—gonna miss us when we’re dead. They ain’t even gonna notice.” Staring off across the empty square, Nate leaned back, surveying their handiwork of the last few weeks …
And he frowned. “We ain’t even a number on a spreadsheet to the people who are voting and making our decisions for us at this point. It’s been going on like this for all my life, but I’ve only really noticed it these last few years. And that … scares the shit out of me more than I care to think about, most days.” Nate’s shoulders sagged, and he stared at the stained ground. “Who knows what else we’re missing?”
*
Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” was playing on the radio when Erin’s alarm clicked on. It was somewhere in the middle of the beginning, and she moaned in her twilight state, not just upset in general about being awakened, but being awakened to a song that wasn’t really designed for full consciousness.
It launched into one of those long, trippy, dragged-out sections of the chorus, and Erin summoned the presence of mind to slap the damned snooze button right as it started to marshal its way to a half-hearted conclusion of the verse.
“Fuck Pink Floyd,” Erin said, slitting her eyes and seeing light streaming in through the cracks of the blinds. It didn’t hurt, but it was annoying. It would have been better if it had hurt, because then at least she’d have had the luck of being hungover.
But Erin didn’t get hungover any more, because Erin hadn’t had a drink in weeks.
Sure, she would have liked to have taken a deep dive into the bottle after Sheriff Reeve’s funeral a few days earlier, but that would have been … irresponsible or something.
The sad thing was, she’d actually bought a bottle of whiskey and poured one in a glass. She’d sat there at her kitchen table for something like an hour—or maybe five minutes that felt like an hour, who knew—staring at the amber glass, wishing she could just tip it back.
But she knew if she did, it wouldn’t be the only one. And that she’d be hurting in the morning.
Forcing her eyes open, Erin came back to herself, back to the world … and she knew she had no time to be hurting. Not this morning, not any morning.
She sat up, surrendering the last clinging vestiges of sleep that wanted to anchor themselves to her eyelids. No time for that. No time for any of this. It was go time, and she needed to move.
The station awaited, she reflected as she stood, ignoring the faint after-echoes of a headache. She needed coffee. Coffee was a manageable addiction for a deputy in the middle of a demon war. Whiskey wasn’t. With that in mind, she headed for the coffee pot, figuring on getting it started, appeasing her brain through at least giving it a sniff of the good stuff while she went through the motions of getting ready.
And maybe, by the time she got a cup down and everything else done, she’d actually feel alive—a feeling, she thought grimly, that an increasing number people in Midian wer
en’t feeling these days, and never would again.
*
Hendricks was getting rode like a fucking bronco, his ass buried in the motel bed, Starling’s crotch grinding against his, his hard-on swollen and buried so deep in her pelvis he felt like the tip had to be kissing her cervix. It wasn’t, but damn if he didn’t feel like she was riding him hard enough to push it up there when she let her leg muscles go and dropped that ass down on him.
She was in the reverse cowgirl—an appropriate position, he thought, and damned sure one of his favorites—so he had a prime view of her ass moving up and down on him. Her back was in shadow, the red hair dangling down behind her, and he could watch his dick sliding in and out of her as she tensed her legs and rose up, showing the snake sliding out of the hole, and then back down—whoosh, it was gone to the fucking pubic mound. She wasn’t doing it like a frenzied madwoman either, she was taking it slow, and the pressure had built over time to fucking insane levels. His dick was so swollen, he was so close, that he thought it might launch off like a bottle rocket. Then it really would hit her cervix, probably end up lodged in her throat or something.
“Fucking A,” Hendricks said, settling his head back on the pillow and closing his eyes. He didn’t need to watch to get turned on at this point, though it didn’t hurt matters. He dipped off into his imagination for a minute while Starling just kept on going.
It was a weird thing, getting to climax. He almost equated it to driving around on a racetrack, over and over, the speed getting higher with each lap, most of the time. There was an exit on the last turn though, and that was orgasm. Sometimes you’d come around on a lap and somehow miss the exit, and it was like you had to rev your speed back up to take it right the next time.
He’d seen someone diagram out the male orgasm at one point, like a steadily rising mountain peak. Women were different, but that was a man for you—an almost perfect rise to climax. He could vouch for that, but every once in a while you’d hit that minor peak and come down—miss the exit and go on another lap—and that happened to him now, as he slipped his focus and lost track of where he was for just a second.
Starling (Southern Watch Book 6) Page 51
