If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

The Girl Next Door
copyright © 1989 by Dallas Mayr “Returns” copyright © 2002 by Dallas Mayr “Do You Love Your Wife?” copyright © 2005 by Dallas Mayr

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

ISBN 0-8439-5543-0

The name “Leisure Books” and the stylized “L” with design are trademarks of Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

Printed in the United States of America.

Visit us on the web at
www.dorchesterpub.com
.

“You got to tell me the brave captain
Why are the wicked so strong?
How do the angels get to sleep
When the devil leaves the porch light on?”

—Tom Waits

“I never want to hear the screams
Of the teenage girls in other people’s dreams.”

—The Specials

“The soul under the burden of sin cannot flee.”

—Iris Murdoch,
The Unicorn

Chapter One

You think you know about pain?

Talk to my second wife. She does. Or she thinks she does.

She says that once when she was nineteen or twenty she got between a couple of cats fighting—her own cat and a neighbor’s—and one of them went at her, climbed her like a tree, tore gashes out of her thighs and breasts and belly that you still can see today, scared her so badly she fell back against her mother’s turn-of-the-century Hoosier, breaking her best ceramic pie plate and scraping six inches of skin off her ribs while the cat made its way back down her again, all tooth and claw and spitting fury. Thirty-six stitches I think she said she got. And a fever that lasted days.

My second wife says that’s pain.

She doesn’t know shit, that woman.

Evelyn, my first wife, has maybe gotten closer.

There’s an image that haunts her.

She is driving down a rain-slick highway on a hot summer morning in a rented Volvo, her lover by her side, driving slowly and carefully because she knows how treacherous new rain on hot streets can be, when a Volkswagen passes her and fishtails into her lane. Its rear bumper with the “Live Free or Die” plates slides over and kisses her grille. Almost gently. The rain does the rest. The Volvo reels, swerves, glides over an embankment and suddenly she and her lover are tumbling through space, they are weightless and turning, and up is down and then up and then down again. At some point the steering wheel breaks her shoulder. The rearview mirror cracks her wrist.

Then the rolling stops and she’s staring up at the gas pedal overhead. She looks for her lover but he isn’t there anymore; he’s disappeared, it’s magic. She finds the door on the driver’s side and opens it, crawls out onto wet grass, stands and peers through the rain. And this is the image that haunts her—a man like a sack of blood, flayed, skinned alive, lying in front of the car in a spray of glass spackled red.

This sack is her lover.

And this is why she’s closer. Even though she blocks what she knows—even though she sleeps nights.

She knows that pain is not just a matter of hurting, of her own startled body complaining at some invasion of the flesh.

Pain can work from the outside in.

I mean that sometimes what you see is pain. Pain in its cruelest, purest form. Without drugs or sleep or even shock or coma to dull it for you.

You see it and you take it in. And then it’s you.

You’re host to a long white worm that gnaws and eats, growing, filling your intestines until finally you cough one morning and up comes the blind pale head of the thing sliding from your mouth like a second tongue.

No, my wives don’t know about that. Not exactly. Though Evelyn is close.

But I do.

You’ll have to trust me on that for starters.

I have for a very long time.

I try to remember that we were all kids when these things happened, just kids, barely out of our Davy Crockett coonskin caps for God’s sake, not fully formed. It’s much too hard to believe that what I am today is what I was then except hidden now and disguised. Kids get second chances. I like to think I’m using mine.

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