“Am I right?”
“I don’t think I’m that shallow.”
“Let’s say you’re in the mood, and she’s in the mood, and she hasn’t got visible scars or oozing sores, and she looks pretty good and she’s got them big titties. We’re not talkin’ marriage here, or takin’ advantage. We’re talkin’ she’s willin’ and she’s not too damn smart—”
“Whoa!”
“Just listen. Say, she’s got like an IQ of, oh, I don’t know. We won’t put her in like some kind of home for folks can’t figure left from right, but let’s say we’re talkin’ someone’s not gonna challenge Einstein in the smart department.”
“That’s most of us.”
“All right. You get that one. Say, she’s not any smarter than, say, a postal worker. You know, ones at the counter with their mouth open, always put up a sign says NEXT WINDOW when you walk up to their slot.”
“I can see that.”
“Say, she’s, you know, that kind of dumb. And she’s willin’. Let’s even say she ain’t the best-lookin’ thing. I don’t mean she’s got her nose on the back of her head. She doesn’t scare people. But she’s got this shape, and them big ol’ titties. She wants you to throw her the sausage. Now, you’re tellin’ me, even if she ain’t so pretty, and not so smart, she wanted you, you wouldn’t fuck her?”
“All right, I might.”
“Might, hell. You’d be on that stuff like a duck on a June bug.”
“But I might do it if she didn’t have big breasts. I mean, she’s pleasant-looking enough.”
“Then you’re sayin’ you’d bang anything?”
“I’m not sayin’ that.”
“All right, you’re not sayin’ that, then you’re sayin’ you like big titties.”
“I think this conversation is rigged.”
Leonard pulled up next to my car.
“Well,” he continued, “I like a big dick. Think about it. A big tit really doesn’t do you any good. You get to suck on it, or whatever you heteros do. Roll it around in your palms or rub your head with it. Whatever. Frankly, the thought of it kind of disgusts me. You’re not accomplishing anything there. Just buy a beach ball.”
“It’s not like that, Leonard.”
“Now, a dick, there’s somethin’s got a purpose.”
“I’ll be going now, Leonard.”
I opened the door, got out of the pickup. Leonard punched in his Johnny Cash cassette, waved at me, and drove off to the sounds of “Delia.”
Just as I unlocked my car door, tossed my cap on the seat, and was about to climb inside, I heard a weak voice in the nearby patch of woods beyond the fence.
“Help me.”
2
THE VOICE HAD COME from the trees beyond the great chain link fence that surrounded the parking lot. Nothing else was said, but I could hear a whimper, as if a puppy were dying under an automobile tire.
There wasn’t much of a moon, but besides the whimper I could hear and see movement in the trees. I just couldn’t make out exactly what it was. I opened my truck door and jerked on the headlights, and what I saw horrified me.
Between two trees a young man was looking at me, startled, like a deer caught in headlights. His hair was mussed and full of pine straw and leaves, his face was smeared with something. He had hold of a woman’s wrist. She was on the ground, nude, her head turned slightly toward me, her dark hair spread out like a stain on the leaf mold. After a moment of glaring at me, the guy turned his attention to her and began stomping her, like he was trying to smash an insect. It was a horrible sound, way his booted foot came down on her soft face.
There wasn’t any way to get through the fence, and it was too far to go around. I thought about pulling my gun, but I’d done the gun thing already and was wearing scars from that, filling my head nightly with dark bad dreams. I was determined not to do it again. I leaped at the fence, climbed over, dropped to the other side.
No sooner had I landed than he came for me. He was hot to trot, and in my headlights he looked like a bad dream. What I had seen on his face was blood and dirt, and I figured the blood wasn’t from him. I caught a glimpse of the woman—a girl, really. One of her hands quivered like an animal in a trap.
He charged me and I sidestepped, slapped at the back of his head with both hands. He went past fast, slammed into the fence, turned, came at me again. I side-kicked him and knocked him back, but he didn’t go down. He leaped at me and I brought an elbow up and under his chin, but all that did was make him fall back a pace.
He jumped on me like a spider. I spun around, bent forward, and he flipped over my shoulder. He hit the ground, came up as if he had bounced off a trampoline. I hit him repeatedly, but he kept coming. The only thing I had fought before with this much tenacity and ability to absorb damage was a rabid squirrel, but the squirrel had been much smaller and Leonard had been there to help kill it.
I got him by the back of the head with one hand, the chin with the other, stuck my index finger in the soft spot on the side of his neck. He went around and down, but pounced up. We hammered at each other and I caught a good one over the eye. He came in for a tackle, and I hooked my arm under his neck and let his momentum carry me back. I stuck a foot in his balls as we went. He went up high and came down hard on his back. I rolled him over on his stomach, still holding on to his neck, trying to choke him out.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw the girl, lying there in the pool of yellow from the headlights. She was covered in blood, and one eye was nothing but a dark wet hole. Her head had literally been driven into the ground.
I kept choking him, but it didn’t seem to be bothering the bastard. I didn’t get it. This guy was half my size, not overly strong-looking, and I knew what the hell I was doing.
Up he came, and out of the choke, and wheeled on me. I started kicking his shins and inside his thighs and his groin, but he kept struggling.
I kicked him one last time and decided I liked the gun after all. If just to discourage him. I pulled it, an automatic. It didn’t slow him down. He charged and I jammed it forward into his face, hitting him with the barrel. I struck him with such force the barrel slide was knocked back and it ejected a shell, but still he came, trying to get the gun. I should have shot him, but didn’t. I avoided him and tossed the gun over the fence.
He bellowed like something out of hell, came on hard again, and I wished now I hadn’t been so ethical. In that moment, had I had the gun, I would have emptied it into him. I was so frightened I thought of trying to break away and climb the fence for the automatic. But there wasn’t time for that now.
I hit him with a slipping elbow to the side of the face, dropped my arm and hit him with a hammer fist in the balls, went for a hammerlock, but that was like trying to put a lock on a rubber hose. I couldn’t hold him. I jabbed a finger into one of his eyes, and for the first time I got the right response. He went back, holding his face. In an act of desperation I leaped up sideways with both feet and hit him in the chest with the force of my entire body.
I at least succeeded in knocking him down. I got up, scared. In this rare moment of breathing room, I considered again going for the fence and the gun, but he went for it instead, leaped, grabbed the links, began to climb over.
I grabbed the fence, started scuttling too. He beat me over by a second or so. I threw myself over the top and landed in front of my pickup. The automatic had fallen on the far side of the truck, and he was going for it. I put a foot on the bumper of the pickup, sprang onto the hood, pushed off with my foot and rolled over the roof, hit in the bed on my feet, leaped from the truck onto him, hit him hard in the back just as he was reaching for the gun. He missed his grab, went forward, getting a parking lot full of asphalt across his face and chest. He got up with me on his back, my arm around his neck. He whipped me off of him like a dog shaking off water.
He turned, and since we were away from the headlights, and there was only a little light from the parking lot, I couldn’t see his face w
ell, but there was asphalt hanging from his raw cheeks and his lips looked to be nearly scraped off. He began to beat his chest like Tarzan and yell. He turned, put both hands on the tailgate of my truck, and sprang into the bed, made the roof of the truck, yelled, “I’m a swinging dick,” and did a back flip onto the parking lot, hit hard. He hopped up from that and ran between me and the truck. I picked up the automatic, jumped into the truck. I was hoping the lights hadn’t run down the battery. It cranked. I backed out and went after him.
He was bearing down on Ella May. Ella May was a heavy black woman who worked in the department where the chickens were run through a neck slicer. On her shift she wore a hooded yellow slicker and high black boots, sat on a throne surrounded by a lake of blood, and it was her job to slit the throats of the survivors with a little hooked knife. She didn’t have her yellow slicker and boots on now, but that knife was her own.
As he charged her, she jumped back slightly and the knife came out and she cut him, deep. I could see blood fly up between him and her in my headlights. He ran right over her and kept running. He could have rushed around the building and out the open front gate where the shift was changing, but he charged the fence, ready to climb over. I put the pedal to the metal and bore down on him. He was already near the top. I hit the fence hard enough to knock him loose. He fell backward, smashing my windshield. I jerked open the door, leaped out, grabbed him off the hood, slammed him against the side of the truck, and kneed him in the balls two or three times.
He still succeeded in hitting me in the face. I wavered consciousness but didn’t go down. Ella May had come up on the other side of the truck and she was scrambling across the hood. She got him around the neck and stuck that curved knife in his cheek and pulled for all she was worth, splashing blood and exposing his teeth.
The guy reached up, grabbed the blade and tore the knife away from her. I got on that knife quick, latched a figure-four on his arm, swung him around and down, and butted his nose with my forehead.
“I teach you to jump on me, motherfucker,” Ella May said. She came off the hood and landed on his legs, then came around and started kicking him in the head.
I was beginning to swoon. Black spots swirled in my vision like gnats in the river bottoms. The two security guards who were my and Leonard’s replacements showed up and everyone dog-piled the bastard. We got him rolled over and handcuffed. One of the guards, a black guy I didn’t know, said, “You all right?”
“There’s a girl,” I said. “He was attacking a girl. Other side of the fence there,” and I pointed.
“I’ll call some law,” the black guy said.
I leaned against the truck. Ella May was kicking the guy still. He lay on the ground and took the shots without so much as a grunt. “Motherfucker, run over my ass. I’ll teach your cock not to stand up.”
One of the guards got hold of her and pulled her back, but she kept fighting. He finally pushed her up against the fence and held her arms behind her back and used his handcuffs on her. All the while, she was screaming.
“Handcuffs! Handcuffs! I’ll kick your dick over the fence, cocksucker.”
“Calm down, Ella May,” he said.
“Calm down, my ass. Motherfucker run over me … You’re hurtin’ my arm, goddamn it. I’ll remember your ugly face.”
The headlights from my truck, the lights in the lot, the darkness between and around them swirled together and I remembered feeling hot, trying to bend over to breathe better, trying not to faint, but when I bent forward I just kept going.
3
OUCH,” I SAID. “Take it easy.”
Leonard was poking at the deep cut over my eye with the tip of his finger, examining the stitches.
“One of ’em looks to be sewed too loose,” he said.
“It’ll do,” I said.
I was sitting on a gurney in a little room just off of the emergency room hall. An intern had just sewn me up and left. Now there was just me, Leonard, and John.
A cop, a friend of mine, Charlie Blank, had been in earlier to take my side of the story. He left shortly after Leonard’s and John’s arrival.
The young woman who had been beaten was in intensive care, and word was she wasn’t doing too well. One thing was certain, she had lost some teeth and an eye.
“Well,” Leonard said, “you did say you saw a wood rat out by the trees.”
“I just didn’t know he was so mean.”
“Yeah, he wasn’t as afraid of you as you thought.”
“I don’t think this sonofabitch was afraid of anything. I tell you, Leonard, he was the toughest dude I’ve ever fought. I’d rather fight three guys than fight him again, and me with a pipe wrench. I think Ella May wants a piece of him, though.”
“Ella May,” John said, “hasn’t got the sense of two nickels rubbed together. I’ve known her all my life. Before she was cutting chicken throats, she worked at the aluminum chair plant with me. She put the damn riveter through her fingers two or three times. I’m surprised she hasn’t cut her own throat at the chicken plant.”
“I’m not accusing her of intelligence,” I said, “just her willingness to fight. Come to think of it, her and this guy, they’d make a great tag team they wanted to get together. They’d be unbeatable.”
“Good thing she wasn’t on his side tonight,” John said.
“She hadn’t been there,” I said, “that sonofabitch would have gotten away. I wonder how bad messed up he is. I’d feel better he looked worse than me.”
“Well,” Leonard said, “it ain’t like you got to worry about your native good looks.”
“What I’d like to know,” John said, “is what’s this guy’s story?”
“Whatever it is,” I said, “it isn’t a fairy tale. More like a horror story, I figure.”
“Speakin’ of horror stories,” Leonard said, “that shirt Charlie had on, where in hell did he find that? It looked like it had been used to wipe up paint.”
“It’s colorful,” I said.
“Colorful is a nice word,” John said.
In that moment I realized since Leonard had been seeing John he dressed nicer himself. Nothing fancy, but a little slicker. John always dressed that way, like he was going to a casual prayer meeting.
“Charlie just looked like hell in general,” Leonard said.
“He’s divorced and not happy about it. He gave up cigarettes because his wife wouldn’t give him any unless he did. Turned out she was seeing a guy on the side who smoked. It really got his goat. Worse yet, now he finds he can quit smoking. Thing bothers him most, besides the wife gone, is he’s gotten hooked on this shitty Kung Fu television series. He said when he got to taping it while he was at work, looking forward to it at nights, he knew he had crossed the line into dark depression.”
“I don’t know,” John said. “Nothing to do, it’s not so bad.”
Leonard and I looked at him.
“I mean, I watch it sometimes,” he said. “I got nothing else on tape, you know. Now and then.”
We kept looking at him.
“Jeez, guys. I’ll quit. Promise. Really.”
I took a couple days off from work, enjoyed being a hero for about fifteen minutes. Me and Ella May. I wondered how she was doing. Probably still cussing and wanting to fight.
Night it happened I was so wired I didn’t sleep, and the next day I was still wired, and the next night too. I was not only wired, I hurt too. I felt as if I had been wrapped in duct tape and rolled down a rocky mountainside into a brick wall with my nuts in my teeth.
Friday some of it passed and I got a good night’s sleep, slept in late without the bad dreams, and was a lot less sore. Saturday morning, near eleven, I was up in my sweat pants, T-shirt, and bare feet, making coffee.
My new place was in town, a duplex. It was upstairs with a connecting kitchen/living room, a small bedroom, and a bathroom with a toilet that sagged into the floor when you sat on it. I figured some morning I’d be in there taking my morning constitu
tional and find myself flying through space, down to the bottom floor, having firemen dig my corpse out from under busted ceramic and a pile of shit.
There was some good news. The duplex was cheap. Mostly because the bottom floor was burned out. Before I moved in, according to the landlord, some drunk had left a frying pan on the stove and it and the grease and the chicken leg floating in it caught on fire and the blaze spread through the kitchen/living room like a yeast infection. The drunk had been sleeping on the couch at the time. He was in some kind of burn center, probably wishing he’d just opened a box of crackers and pulled the tab on a can of beanie weenies.
The place wasn’t going to be rented for a while, not until the landlord fixed it up, so he let me store some stuff down there in the only rooms that weren’t burned, the bedroom and the bathroom. Long as there wasn’t someone under me, the duplex wasn’t so bad, though now and then the burn smell would come up through the floor and stink the place up, make my eyes water, wake me in the middle of the night, and I’d get up to make sure I hadn’t left something on the stove myself.
All in all, it was all right, though living in town wasn’t my preference.
Anyway, I was making coffee and thinking about toast with jelly for breakfast, when I heard a car drive up. I went to the kitchen window over the sink, looked out. It was Charlie Blank. He was getting out from behind the wheel of a clean white Ford. A middle-aged, gray-haired guy in a brown suit got out on the passenger’s side. He looked up at the duplex as if he were observing some prehistoric hovel. Of interest, but surprised people once lived there, even more surprised to think someone might be squatting there now, perhaps supping on mastodon marrow.
Charlie, as usual, was wearing a colorful Hawaiian shirt, slacks, tennis shoes, and a sports coat the color of mustard, or if you really want to get technical, baby shit. A straw boater had replaced his felt porkpie. The new hat, I presumed, was part of his spring ensemble. The shoes he had on were the kind you might dress a juvenile Frankenstein monster in, black, thick-soled, and solid enough to drive a nail. He had a greasy brown bag in one hand.