Vernon God Little
World-class knifing, I have to say. And just one smug face left, on the girl.
I saunter toward smells of sausage and coffee, looking for a public phone. Outside, I see a huge patio laid out with a buffet. I stupidly pick up a menu. The cheapest thing on it costs more than a fucken helicopter joyride. Then a waiter starts to hover, so I keep walking towards some bathrooms that are in a service area by the pool. I pass a real-life psycho on the way, too; an up-and-coming one. This fat little dork is standing next to another kid in the pool, being a real pal, while his little sister dive-bombs the water around them. Then, out of earshot of his buddy, the fat kid snarls at his sister: ‘I told you to jump on him, not near him . . .’ A future senator, guaranteed.
I pass some lounge chairs facing the bay, with boats and parachutes gliding past them, and the squeak of bitty children in the surf nearby. I start fantasizing that some kid starts drowning right in front of me, and I jump in and save him. In my mind, I rehearse what I’d tell the reporters, and I even see the newspaper headlines spinning up. ‘Juvenile Hero Pardoned,’ and shit. After a minute, it’s the fucken president’s kid I’m saving. The president weeps with gratitude, and I just shuffle away. See me? All this drags through my head like a fucken rusty chain.
To snap myself out of it, I go find a phone on the street outside the hotel. I punch in Taylor’s number.
‘Glassbadanbow?’ says a kid. He’s handing out flyers by the road.
‘Say what?’
‘Jew like croose in Glass badan boat?’
‘Tayla,’ the phone answers. I wave the kid away.
‘Mexico calling,’ I say.
‘Hi, killer.’
Something’s wrong, I can tell. I get a pang to curl her up around me, her and her safe, deodorized world, where her biggest problem in life is getting bored, or smelling Glade around the house. Probably her biggest personal secret is eating boogers. She’s been bawling just now, you can tell.
‘Everything okay?’ I ask.
Taylor gives a sniffly laugh. ‘I’m just like, what the fuck, you know? This damn guy I was dating . . .’
‘The doctor?’
‘The so-called doctor, yeah. I just want to run away, God ...’
‘Know how you feel.’
‘Anyway, where are you?’ she asks, blowing her nose.
‘Acapulco.’
‘Dirty dog. Lemme see the map – are you, like, by the beach?’
‘Yeah, on the main boulevard.’
‘That must be the Costera Miguel Aleman – there’s a Western Union agent at a place called Comercial Mexicana.’
‘I’ll make it up to you, Tay.’
‘But listen – it’s Sunday tomorrow, and I can’t get the cash till Monday. The agent’s open till seven Monday night, so if you go at six . . .’
‘No sweat,’ I lie, watching the last credits drip off the screen.
‘And babe,’ she says. Beep. The line goes dead.
*
The fucken Love Boat is here. I swear to God, from those ole shows my mom watches, with the horny cruise director, and Captain Stupid and all. It has the Wella Balsam kind of logo on the funnel. Star-studded Acapulco, boy.
I pull my head into the cab as the bay falls away behind us. Pelayo’s truck bangs over some hills, then heads north along this TV-movie coastline, with coconut trees, whole fields of them. The beach ain’t as white as Against All Odds, and the water ain’t as blue, but hey. A lagoon runs alongside us for part of the drive, right out of Tarzan or something. We even pass through a military roadblock, with a fucken machine-gun nest, no bullshit. My intestines pump, but they end up just being kids, these soldiers, like cartoon ants, in oversized helmets.
After a few hours, we leave the road and turn down a track toward the sea. The track ends with some logs sunk into the beach, and jungle backed up behind. It’s a minuscule town, of slummy wooden houses, with pigs, chickens, and grizzly-looking dogs around. Not even slummy, more like out of National Geographic. Fucken paradise. Pelayo parks behind a store that’s held together with Fanta signs, and a porch of dry palm leaves. Two men lay in hammocks there, sucking beer. A flock of kids gather as we pile out of the truck. You can tell Pelayo’s the dude around here. He’s probably like the Mr Lechuga of town, except human. Now I’m the alien in his world. He takes trouble to make me feel at home, snapping at the kids to get away, and calling up a beer from the store. I just stand quiet, nose up to the breeze, listening to a dictionary full of new bugs. Ungawa wakashinda, I swear. Pelayo opens the beers with his teeth, and proudly walks me to a covered patio on the beach. Two older men sit at a table, and an ole lady leans behind a makeshift bar.
A naked kid suddenly brushes past her, trying to spear a wounded crab on the sandy concrete. He finally stabs it clean through the back, ‘Yesssss!’ he says, stopping to pull back an imaginary lever with his fist. Pelayo kicks the crab out of my way, and sweeps me to a table by the beach.
A crowd of bottles gathers on the table. Toward evening, a young dude turns up who speaks some English; a lean, smart-looking guy called Victor, with braces on his teeth – something you don’t see much down here. He tells me how important it is for him to get ahead in life, so he can bring wealth into the village and all. Makes me feel like the lowest fucken snake. He translates the words painted between the mud-flaps on the truck. ‘You see me, and suffer,’ they mean. ‘Me ves, y sufres.’
When I first show signs of being loaded, the boys offer me oysters as big as burritos, right out of the sea. Fucken forget it. I ate one when I was a kid, and it felt like something I sucked down the back of my nose. They even offer me the oysters at a time when I have a booger-plug ready to suck down my throat. Without thinking, I point at my nose while I suck it down, then pull a face, and point at the oyster. They drop Acapulco-sized loads over that. They can’t look me in the face for an hour after, for the fucken loads they drop. Typical of me to introduce slime to paradise.
After a tequila, as lions and tigers stir under this silicon-clear evening, I try to explain the beach-house dream, the mud-flaps, and Fate. I’m a little loaded. Fucken loaded, actually. But as soon as I start to talk about it, Victor and Pelayo take my arm and lead me up the beach, through the palms, where bats now orbit, to a place ten minutes away, where the jungle almost pushes you into the sea. Kids follow us, shining in and out of the surf. Then Victor stops. He points through the fading light, and I squint to follow his finger across the sand. There, all locked up, almost hidden in the jungle, sits an ole white beach-house. My place.
The boys say it’s okay to camp here until Monday. Maybe longer. Maybe for fucken ever. After they totter home up the beach, I sit on the balcony of the house, let the evening filter off the sea and through my soul. Suddenly all the different waves inside me alloy into one tune, with feathers of my original dream dancing the edges of this new symphony; my ole lady down here, checking out the neat sanitation, reflecting on how good things got. I may have to change my name, or become Mexican or something. But it’s still me, without any trace of slime around. I look out over the garden of this place, onto the beach, and see Taylor there running around in her panties, brown like a native.
I spend all Sunday in this Valhalla, lazing with my dreams. When I wake Monday morning, a hot, wet wind blows across me, and my boy is like fucken reinforced cement, like he’s chipped off Mount Rushmore. My hand’s nowhere near him, he’s just being guest of honor at his own little parade. I look around to see the sky clouded over, and shabby gray pelicans swoop and dive into the surf. The heads of coconut trees swish and move around at the speed I wish my life would go, cool and smooth. For the first time in a while, there’s that little edge of gladness to be waking up this morning. Today’s my birthday.
Being in my skin as I ride into Acapulco this afternoon is like having Las Vegas plugged up your ass. I’m sixteen, and Las Vegas is plugged up my fucken ass. I’m on my feet before the bus even gets into town, buzzing with potentialities; tropical fish and bird
s, banana leaves, monkeys, and sex. The beach-house. Turns out it belongs to an ole fruit farmer behind the village, who doesn’t use it at all. Victor thinks I could probably stay there for free, if I tended it.
The boulevard in Acapulco is sticky this evening, colored lights blare as big as ideas along its length. Victor loaned me a straw hat, to soften my coconut-tree hair, and oyster-shell ears. I catch my reflection in the window by Comercial Mexicana; Huckleberry Finn, boy. I put on my guns before entering the store, to compensate for the hat, I guess, then just strut around in a circle, like a dog deciding where to lay down. I eventually spot the Western Union counter, with folk waiting around it, including shiny red and white folk from home. An attendant sees me right away.
‘Uh – I’m expecting a wire from Houston, Texas.’
‘Name?’ asks the clerk.
My face starts to calculate Pi. ‘Uh – I ain’t sure who she sent it to . . .’
‘You have the password?’ asks the guy. Fuck. I feel more people line up behind me.
‘I better call and get it,’ I say, shuffling away from the counter.
Folk look at me strangely, so I keep on shuffling, right out of the store; out of the freezer, back into the fucken oven. I have to get hold of Taylor. Maybe she didn’t send it, once she knew about the password. I have no points left on my phonecard. I can’t even call Pelayo. Vegas sputters and dies in my ass.
I walk up the boulevard until I find a phone. I don’t know if it’s like TV, where you can call anybody collect, from anywhere. I decide to call her collect. Sweat flows between my mouth and the operator when I talk. She speaks English at least. Then sweat runs between my ear and the operator when she tells me you can’t call this mobile number collect. When I hang up the phone, sweat dammed on top of my ear crashes onto my fucken shoulder, then runs crying onto the road. Probably back into the fucken sea after that.
It pisses me the hell off, actually, that all the well-raised liars and cheats will go to their regular beds tonight, with no greater worry than what they can screw out of their folks tomorrow. Me, I’m stuck in Surinam with a bunch of criminal charges forming an orderly line back home. Anger fuels me back to the store, up to the agent’s desk. Nobody else is around right now. The clerk looks up.
‘I can’t find the password,’ I tell him.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Vernon Little.’ I wait for his eyebrows to blow off his fucken head. They don’t. He just studies me for a moment.
‘How much you expecting?’
‘Six hundred dollars.’
The guy taps at his keyboard, checks his screen. Then shakes his head. ‘Sorry, nothing here.’ I pause for a moment, to calculate the depth of my fuckedness. Then the agent’s eyes rivet to something over my shoulder.
I’m suddenly grabbed around the waist. ‘Freeze!’ says a voice.
eighteen
My ass jumps into my throat. I break the grip around my waist and spin toward the entrance, legs coiled like springs. Shoppers stop and stare.
‘Happy Birthday!’ It’s fucken Taylor.
I spin a full circle, looking for the heavies who must be here to get me. But it’s only Taylor. The clerk at the wire agent’s counter smiles as she wraps an arm around my waist, and leads me shaking from the store.
‘You didn’t wait for the wire details, like the password, dummy,’ she says.
‘Uh-huh, so you hopped a fucken plane.’
‘Language, killer!’
‘Sorry.’
‘Well I couldn’t leave you stranded. Anyway, I’m bummed back home, and this is my vacation money – I hope you don’t mind sharing. Here’s three hundred, and we’ll work the math out later . . .’
‘I’ll try to cope. How’d you know it’s my birthday?’
‘Hell-o? The whole world knows it’s your birthday.’
The reality of what’s happening starts to tingle in my brain. Taylor’s here. I found a beach-house, and Taylor’s here, with money. One thing to be proud of: I don’t respond to the flood of joy-hormones, the one that makes you want to sniff flowers, or say I love you. I contain myself like a man.
‘Wait’ll you see where we’re staying,’ says Taylor, dragging me along the street. ‘If they’ll let you in – you look like an Indian.’
‘You got a hotel?’
‘Twin room, so you better behave – serial killer you.’
I become heavier for her to pull. ‘Wait up – I found somewhere to stay you won’t believe – on a beach, with jungle . . .’
‘Eew! With, like, spiders and bugs? Eew!’
‘You never saw Against All Odds?’
‘I already paid for the room, Vern, like, God.’
Whatever. As we walk, I remember I have to keep enough trouble around me to not give a shit how I act with her. You can only really be yourself when you have nothing left to lose, see? That’s a learning I made. It may sound dumb, but it ain’t easy when your dreams roll up. Take note, you can feel jerksville lurking in back. And as we know, just by thinking it, you suffer it worse. The learning: potential assholeness when a dream comes true is relative to the amount of time you spent working up the dream. A=DT2. It means I could even fucken puke.
She’s wearing white shorts, I can’t tell yet if there’s a visible panty-line because they’re kind of crinkled. Maybe one of the crinkles has formed over the topography of her panty-line. She also has a peach-colored T-shirt with a little Scorpio logo on it, and a stiff kind of jacket that she wears over the top. Her long brown limbs are perfectly attached to her body. I kind of frown at the jacket, though. She sees me and smiles.
‘The plane was like a refrigerator.’
It’s almost dark when we reach her hotel, one of the bigger ones. She pulls me into the lobby, where all these folk start looking at us. My shoulders hunch. Everything suddenly looks alien, like some kind of store display, with me the only one moving. Except I ain’t even moving, not at all. I just become silent.
Taylor collects her key, then her voice goes into overdrive, or underdrive, more like it. ‘C’mon upstairs – you’ll like it – c’mon.’
I look at her perfect nose and skin and hair. She smiles a crooked little smile, a horn smile, and takes my hand. Actually, she takes my fingers first, just the ends of them, and caresses them all the way up to my palm. I get electric fucken shocks to my boy. We climb into an elevator car and ride up to her room. Nice room she has, with a view over the whole bay. Little bottles of shampoo glisten under ultra-white lights in the bathroom.
‘Welcome home,’ she says. She pulls some tequila miniatures out of the mini-bar, while I just stand here like a spare prick, then she curls up on the bed closest to the window. Somewhere in the composition of the air-conditioning is a licked-skin smell that brings a plague of fruity tangs to mind, damp edges of elastic crusted by sand and sea; salt lips pouting musk and vinegar. I scatter them, and move to the bed. Her sunny-smelling hair makes it seem like a regular day on vacation; fluffy, normal and free – I guess like your sixteenth birthday should feel. But my ole lady will be home, thinking it’s my birthday, and trying to shut things out of her mind. She probably bought my cake while I was still there, just to start looking forward to it. I picture a lonely cake on the table, with my mom sobbing over it. ‘Lord, you’ll make it soggy!’ Pam would say. Even the truth of things, like that she’d probably be at the Barn with Pam, even that makes me sad. Taylor must pick up some of this backwash, because she throws a tequila at me.
‘Snap out of it.’
I fumble the catch. ‘Tay – you’re here to see I ain’t committing any murders. You’re a witness – right?’
‘Whoa, back up. I don’t want to even, like – you know? I’m just here for whatever.’
‘But if a court, I mean if . . .’
‘You ain’t quitting, are ya, killer? She pats the bedclothes by her thigh. Come to Tay-Tay, you bad boy.’
Taylor raises her bottle, and we slug our tequilas down. I lie back on
the bed like I’m wearing guns. She crawls half off the bed to grab some beers, and as she does it, her ass strains into the air. Panty-line. Bikinis. I’m fucken slain. In my dreams we’re always alone, stuck tight together, somewhere secluded and safe, but never anywhere fancy like furnished rooms. Always just in a gap in some bushes, or in a field, where she absorbs me like an ameba, all kiss-smell, and thighs, and lips blow-drying the sweat on my skin. Part of the dream includes a kind of yearning to be in a room, all locked up with her, but I never am. Until now.
After four drinks, I’m laid back on one elbow feeling like it’s my birthday. Drinks are wonderful that way. Taylor kicks off her leather sandals, one of them flies behind the TV. She runs a finger around the lip of her bottle, and studies me through vixen eyes.
‘Vernon, tell me all those things you did.’ Her voice is like a little girl’s.
What did I say about trouble? She rolls closer until there’s an inch of breath between us, alcohol haze with a far-away hint of cheese. We don’t touch at all, but hang suspended, sucking chemical data like trembling dogs. Then comes a shock from the tip of her nose, wire touching wire. We melt into each other’s mouths, my hand finds the round of her ass, surfs it, a finger charts an edge of panty – doesn’t pick, or lift – just teases and glides, moving higher, feeling the climate change around her rudest rebellion, all for Vern.
‘Violent, nasty boy,’ she says. ‘Tell me you killed for Tayla.’
Her whisper becomes a thread in the lace, fibrous and baking with desperate heat. She squirms out of her shorts, kicking them onto the floor by the mini-bar. Panties – The Final Frontier. I lower my face as the creases on her mound disappear, taut glory unfurling, pressing into my touch, forcing my hand flat to squeeze nectar through the silk, lagoons that trickle over the elastic and run down her thigh.
‘Death-bug – God, murder – uuugh, God ...’
She tries to close back her legs, wriggles hard, but she’s lost, I’m on fire, committed even more now she’s shy of her musky damp. I pull aside her weeping panty to face a delta writhing with meats, glistening with sweat carrying spicy coded silts from her ass; olives, cinnamon dust and chili blood. She gives up, beaten, without a secret left in the animal world. Her knees bend up and she takes in my tongue, my finger, and my face, she cries and bucks, horny ridges, ruffles, and grits suck me up, suck me home to the stinking wet truth behind panties, money, justice, and slime, burning trails through my brain like acid through butter. Pink Fucken Speed.