Stories (2011) (44 page)

"I'm talking about raping them, though, not marrying
them. Getting kissed."

"You're with the kissing again. You been reading Cosmo
or something? What's this kiss stuff? You get hungry, you eat. You get thirsty,
you drink. You get tired, you sleep. You get horny, you kill and fuck. You use
them like a product, Merle, then when you get through with the product, you
throw out the package. Get a new one when you need it. This way you always got
the young ones, the tan ones, no matter how old or fat or ugly you get. You
don't have to see a pretty woman get old, see that tan turn her face to
leather. You can keep the world bright and fresh all the time. You listen to
me, Merle. It's the best way."

Merle looked at the woman's body. Her head was turned toward
him. Her eyes looked to have filled with milk. Water was running out of her and
pooling on the grass and starting to spurt from between her legs. Merle looked
away from her, said, "Guess I'm just looking for a little romance. I had
me a taste of it, you know. It was all right. She could really kiss."

"Yeah, it was all right for a while, then she ran off
with a sand nigger."

"Arab, Dave. She ran off with an Arab."

"He was here right now, you'd call him an Arab?"

"I'd kill him."

"There you are. Call him an Arab or a sand nigger,
you'd kill him, right?"

Merle nodded.

"Listen," Dave said. "Don't think I don't
understand what you're saying. Thing I like about you, Merle, is you aren't
like those guys down at the plant, come in do your job, go home, watch a little
TV, fall asleep in the chair dreaming about some magazine model cause the old
lady won't give out, or you don't want to think about her giving out on account
of the way she's got ugly. Thing is, Merle, you know you're dissatisfied.
That's the first step to knowing there's more to life than the old grind. I
appreciate that in you. It's a kind of sensitivity some men don't like to face.
Think it makes them weak. It's a strength, is what it is, Merle. Something I
wish I had more of."

"That's damn nice of you to say, Dave."

"It's true. Anybody knows you, knows you feel things
deeply. And I don't want you to think that I don't appreciate romance, but you
get our age, you got to look at things a little straighter. I can't see any
romance with an old woman anyway, and a young one, she ain't gonna have me . .
. unless it's the way we're doing it now."

Merle glanced at the corpse. Water was spewing up from
between her legs like a whale blowing. Her stomach was a fat, white mound.

"We don't get that hose out of her," Merle said,
"she's gonna blow the hell up."

"I'll get it," Dave said. He went over and turned
off the water and pulled the hose out of her and put his foot on her stomach
and began to pump his leg. Water gushed from her and her stomach began to
flatten. "She was all right, wasn't she, Merle?"

" 'Cept for them feet, she was fine."

* * *

They drove out into the pines and pulled off to the side of
a little dirt road and parked. They got out and went around to the trunk and
Dave unlocked it. They looked at the young woman's body for a moment, then they
each took a leg and jerked her from the trunk, and with her legs spread like a
wishbone, they dragged her into the brush and dropped her on the edge of an
incline coated in blackberry briars.

"Man," Dave said. "Taste that air. This is
the prettiest night I can remember."

"It's nice," Merle said.

Dave put a boot to the woman and pushed, she went rolling
down the incline in a white moon-licked haze and crashed into the brush at the
bottom. Dave pulled her shorts from the front of his pants and tossed them
after her.

"Time they find her, the worms will have had some pussy
too," Dave said.

They got in the car and Dave started it up and eased down
the road.

"Dave?"

"Yeah?"

"You're a good friend," Merle said. "The talk
and all, it done me good. Really."

Dave smiled, clapped Merle's shoulder. "Hey, it's all
right. I been seeing this coming in you for a time, since the girl before last
. . . you're all right now, though. Right?"

"Well, I'm better."

"That's how you start."

They drove a piece. Merle said, "But I got to admit to
you, I still miss being kissed."

Dave laughed. "You and the kiss. You're some piece of
work buddy . . . I got your kiss. Kiss my ass."

Merle grinned. "Way I feel, your ass could kiss back, I
just might."

Dave laughed again. They drove out of the woods and onto the
highway. The moon was high and bright.

For a birthday present Fred’s wife, Karen, bought him a
plastic, inflatable dinosaur -- a Tyrannosaurus Rex. It was in a cardboard box,
and Fred thanked her and took the dinosaur downstairs to his study and took it
out of the box and spent twenty minutes taking deep breaths and blowing air
into it.

When the dinosaur was inflated, he sat it in front of his
bookshelves, and as a joke, got a mouse ear hat he had bought at Disneyland
three years before, and put it on the dinosaur's head and named it Bob.

Immediately, Bob wanted to go to Disneyland. There was no
snuffing the ambition. He talked about it night and day, and it got so the
study was no place to visit, because Bob would become most unpleasant on the
matter. He scrounged around downstairs at night, pacing the floor, singing the
Mouseketeer theme loud and long, waking up Fred and Karen, and when Fred would
come downstairs to reason with Bob, Bob wouldn't listen. He wouldn't have a
minute's worth of it. No sir, he by golly wanted to go to Disneyland.

Fred said to Karen, "You should have bought me a
Brontosaurus, or maybe a Stegosaurus. I have a feeling they'd have been easier
to reason with."

Bob kept it up night and day. "Disneyland, Disneyland,
I want to go to Disneyland. I want to see Mickey. I want to see Donald."
It was like some kind of mantra, Bob said it so much. He even found some old
brochures on Disneyland that Fred had stored in his closet, and Bob spread them
out on the floor and lay down near them and studied the pictures and wagged his
great tail and looked wistful.

"Disneyland," he would whisper. "I want to go
to Disneyland."

And when he wasn't talking about it, he was mooning. He'd
come up to breakfast and sit in two chairs at the table and stare blankly into
the syrup on his pancakes, possibly visualizing the Matterhorn ride or Sleeping
Beauty's castle. It got so it was a painful thing to see. And Bob got mean. He
chased the neighbor's dogs and tore open garbage sacks and fought with the kids
on the bus and argued with his teachers and took up slovenly habits, like
throwing his used Kleenex on the floor of the study. There was no living with
that dinosaur.

Finally, Fred had had enough, and one morning at breakfast,
while Bob was staring into his pancakes, moving his fork through them lazily, but
not really trying to eat them (and Fred had noticed that Bob had lost weight
and looked as if he needed air), Fred said, "Bob, we've decided that you
may go to Disneyland."

"What?" Bob said, jerking his head up so fast his
mouse hat flew off and his fork scraped across his plate with a sound like a
fingernail on a blackboard. "Really?"

"Yes, but you must wait until school is out for the
summer, and you really have to act better."

"Oh, I will, I will," Bob said.

Well now, Bob was one happy dinosaur. He quit throwing
Kleenex down and bothering the dogs and the kids on the bus and his teachers,
and in fact, he became a model citizen. His school grades even picked up.

Finally, the big day came, and Fred and Karen bought Bob a
suit of clothes and a nice John Deere cap, but Bob would have nothing to do
with the new duds. He wore his mouse ear hat and a sweatshirt he had bought at
Goodwill with a faded picture of Mickey Mouse on it with the word Disneyland
inscribed above it. He even insisted on carrying a battered Disney lunchbox he
had picked up at the Salvation Army, but other than that, he was very
cooperative.

Fred gave Bob plenty of money and Karen gave him some tips
on how to eat a balanced meal daily, and then they drove him to the airport in
the back of the pickup. Bob was so excited he could hardly sit still in the
airport lounge, and when his seat section was called, he gave Fred and Karen
quick kisses and pushed in front of an old lady and darted onto the plane.

As the plane lifted into the sky, heading for California and
Disneyland, Karen said, "He's so happy. Do you think he'll be all right by
himself?"

"He's very mature," Fred said. "He has his
hotel arrangements, plenty of money, a snack in his lunchbox and lots of common
sense. Hell be all right."

At the end of the week, when it was time for Bob to return,
Fred and Karen were not available to pick him up at the airport. They made
arrangements with their next-door neighbor, Sally, to do the job for them. When
they got home, they could hear Bob playing the stereo in the study, and they
went down to see him.

The music was loud and heavy metal and Bob had never
listened to that sort of thing before. The room smelled of smoke, and not
cigarettes. Bob was lying on the floor reading, and at first, Fred and Karen
thought it was the Disney brochures, but then they saw those wadded up in the
trashcan by the door.

Bob was looking at a girlie magazine and a reefer was
hanging out of his mouth. Fred looked at Karen and Karen was clearly shaken.

"Bob?" Fred said.

"Yeah," Bob said without looking up from the
foldout, and his tone was surly.

"Did you enjoy Disneyland?"

Bob carefully took the reefer out of his mouth and thumped
ash on the carpet. There was the faintest impression of tears in his eyes. He
stood up and tossed the reefer down and ground it into the carpet with his
foot.

"Did . . . did you see Mickey Mouse?" Karen asked.

"Shit," Bob said, "there isn't any goddamn
mouse. It's just some guy in a suit. The same with the duck." And with
that, Bob stalked into the bathroom and slammed the door and they couldn't get
him out of there for the rest of the day.

Even before Morley told him, Dennis knew things were about
to get ugly.

A man did not club you unconscious, bring you to his estate
and tie you to a chair in an empty storage shed out back of the place if he
merely intended to give you a valentine.

Morley had found out about him and Julie.

Dennis blinked his eyes several times as he came to, and
each time he did, more of the dimly lit room came into view. It was the room
where he and Julie had first made love. It was the only building on the estate
that looked out of place: it was old, worn, and not even used for storage; it
was a collector of dust, cobwebs, spiders and dessicated flies.

There was a table in front of Dennis, a kerosene lantern on
it, and beyond, partially hidden in shadow, a man sitting in a chair smoking a
cigarette. Dennis could see the red tip glowing in the dark, and the smoke from
it drifted against the lantern light and hung in the air like thin, suspended
wads of cotton.

The man leaned out of shadow, and as Dennis expected, it was
Morley. His shaved, bullet-shaped head was sweaty and reflected the light. He
was smiling with his fine, white teeth, and the high cheek bones were round,
flushed circles that looked like clown rouge. The tightness of his skin, the
few wrinkles, made him look younger than his fifty-one years.

And in most ways he was younger than his age. He was a man
who took care of himself. Jogged eight miles every morning before breakfast,
lifted weights three times a week and had only one bad habit -- cigarettes. He
smoked three packs a day. Dennis knew all that and he had only met the man
twice. He had learned it from Julie, Morley's wife. She told him about Morley
while they lay in bed. She liked to talk and she often talked about Morley;
about how much she hated him.

"Good to see you," Morley said, and blew smoke
across the table into Dennis's face. "Happy Valentine's Day, my good man.
I was beginning to think I hit you too hard, put you in a coma."

"What is this, Morley?" Dennis found that the mere
act of speaking sent nails of pain through his skull. Morley really had lowered
the boom on him.

"Spare me the innocent act, lover boy. You've been laying
the pipe to Julie, and I don't like it."

"This is silly, Morley. Let me loose."

 "God, they do say stupid things like that in real
life. It isn't just the movies . . . you think I brought you here just to let
you go, lover boy?"

Dennis didn't answer. He tried to silently work the ropes
loose that held his hands to the back of the chair. If he could get free, maybe
he could grab the lantern, toss it in Morley's face. There would still be the
strand holding his ankles to the chair, but maybe it wouldn't take too long to
undo that. And even if it did, it was at least some kind of plan.

If he got the chance to go one on one with Morley, he might
take him. He was twenty-five years younger and in good shape himself. Not as
good as when he was playing pro basketball, but good shape nonetheless. He had
height, reach, and he still had wind. He kept the latter with plenty of jogging
and tossing the special-made, sixty-five pound medicine ball around with Raul
at the gym.

Still, Morley was strong. Plenty strong. Dennis could
testify to that. The pulsating knot on the side of his head was there to remind
him.

He remembered the voice in the parking lot, turning toward
it and seeing a fist. Nothing more, just a fist hurtling toward him like a
comet. Next thing he knew, he was here, the outbuilding.