And that first taste.
Oh, Jesus, that first taste when the cold beer hit the back of your throat and the alcohol bit and there was a sweet bitterness to it all, because then you knew you were on the path, and after the first beer there was no taste, just the coldness of it. And pretty soon there wasn’t that. It was just the beer, and it was a motion, lifting the mug and pouring it down. Yeah. He thought about it. He wanted it. It went through his mind. A lot.
But now it was easier not to think about the beer—all the time, anyway. Because there was Tad and the one-with-the-universe business, and there was Talia, and she was the center of that big old universe into which he wanted to be absorbed.
“It’s been a long time.”
Harry jumped. He had been bent over, pushing some books into place, and when the voice came from behind, he jerked up, clipped his head ever so lightly on a shelf.
He turned and looked.
Kayla.
“Oh, shit. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you,” she said. She looked concerned, like a big kid who had only wanted to surprise.
Harry looked at her while he massaged his head. She had on a lot of perfume. It was so strong it made him step back, ending up with the backs of his legs against the bookshelf.
Perfume aside, she looked healthy. Blond. Coltish. Those beautiful eyes of hers. She was the same kid he had known those many years ago; now the kid moved beneath the fine mature bones of her face and in the sparkle of her eyes. Pretty, but not like Talia, who was a lust bomb enveloped in flesh. Kayla was more like the girl next door. Talia…Well, she was Talia.
“Damn. You’re going to have a bruise,” she said.
“I’ll say.”
“Not quite the way I wanted our first meeting after all these years to turn out.”
“Oh. It’s all right. It’s good to see you.”
“You too.”
“You signing up for courses?” Harry tried not to rub his head, but couldn’t help himself. It hurt.
“No.”
“Come to look at books?”
“No.”
“Can I help you with something?”
“I came to see you.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. You know. Just to say hello.”
“How’d you know I work here?”
“I’m a cop, Harry. I find things out…. I called your mother.”
“Oh.”
“She sounded well.”
“She’s all right.”
“You look good,” she said.
“Thanks. You too. Yeah. I’m fine. You’re fine?”
“Yeah. Still have…the sounds?”
“Oh, that. No. Nothing like that anymore. A phase with me. You know, kid stuff. Imagining.”
“Imagining?”
“Sure.”
“You imagined the ghost in the honky-tonk? You remember that?”
“I remember…I don’t know. Not really.”
“Not really what?”
“I mean, I don’t know.”
Kayla nodded. “Well, it’s good to see you.”
“You too.”
She laughed. “Didn’t we just do this?”
“Some.”
“I was thinking, Harry. It’s been a while, but maybe—”
“Friend of yours, Harry?” It was Talia. She had appeared as if she were an apparition. She came and stood close to him and put an arm around his waist. She looked as if she had just been pulled off the front of a fashion magazine, all hipped up in tight pants and a top, thick-heeled shoes that made her ass stand up as if it were peeking over a fence.
“What happened to your head?” Talia asked.
“I bumped it.”
What Harry noted, however, was Talia was not spending that much time looking at his injury. She was looking at Kayla.
“Oh,” Harry said. “This is Kayla. She used to live near me. We went to school together. Grade school. She moved away.”
“That right?” Talia said. “Just moved back, I suppose?”
“A little while now,” Kayla said.
“Catching up on old times?” Talia asked.
“Some,” Kayla said. “Nothing big. Just a word or two.”
“It’s great Harry can reconnect with his little friends,” Talia said.
“Little friends?” Kayla said.
“It’s nice to look back at your past,” Talia said. “You know. See where you’ve been, think about where you’re going.”
Kayla scratched the side of her head a little. Harry noted that she still had those long, lean muscles that she had used in youth to beat the shit out of him.
“Or to consider that maybe you’ve gone too far,” Kayla said. “Sometimes, you know, you can be in a good place, and then, before you know it, you can make some wrong choices. End up in a cesspool.”
Talia smiled, but it seemed to hurt her to do so. She said, “So you’re not someone who believes a person like, say, Harry should think about moving on. Learning from his past mistakes.”
“I think you have to be careful you don’t, how shall I put this, fuck up any future plans.”
“You’re so thoughtful.” Talia sniffed the air. “That perfume. Nice. Strong stuff. But very nice. Dime store?”
Before Kayla could respond, Harry said, “Kayla’s a cop.”
“No shit?” Talia said.
Kayla’s grin widened. “Yeah. No shit.”
“You could arrest us, you wanted,” Talia said.
“You’d have to do something.”
“Like insult an officer?”
“That would work. Or, if you did that, and we’re just talking here, I could just forget I’m a cop and beat the living shit out of you.”
Talia was silent for a time. Finally she spoke. “My daddy knows lots of cops. He knows your boss. The chief.”
“That right?”
“Oh, that’s right. Well, it’s been so good to meet you,” Talia said. “I hope your moving back to our little town won’t be a disappointment, and maybe, who knows, you might get a chance to—how did you put it?—beat the living shit out of someone.”
“Well, there’s always a turd or two you have to step over, no matter where you are. But I think, on the whole. I’ll be fine. And, who knows, I might just get my chance to beat the shit out of someone. Harry, nice seeing you.”
“I must get the name of that perfume,” Talia said.
Kayla smiled at Talia, but didn’t speak to her. She turned to Harry. “We’ll talk later.”
Harry, feeling as if he had just been run over by a truck, said, “Sure, Kayla. Real good to see you.”
“That toilet water she was wearing,” Talia said. “Where in hell would you find that? And darling, it was almost attracting flies.”
“It was a little strong, but it was okay.”
It was Harry’s lunch break, and they were walking from the bookstore to the little hamburger joint not far away. Harry walked very carefully, aware of staying on the path he knew, hoping nothing had changed recently. Like, say, since last night.
Cars drove by and Harry heard every motor, every backfire, music coming out of car windows, sometimes causing cars with windows rolled up to throb like an excited penis.
In the hamburger joint, they ordered, took a table. Talia reached out and gently touched the bump on Harry’s head. “Oh, that’s going to look really bad when we’re out. Maybe you should put some ice on it, see if you can get it to go down.”
“It hurts some.”
“You should get it to go down. It would look better if you used some ice.”
“Right. Ice.”
Talia turned slightly, looked across the way. Harry looked too. He saw she was looking at a guy over by the counter. Harry had seen him before. He was one of the guys he had seen with Talia the second time he had taken her for coffee.
“Good friends?” Harry asked.
“What?”
“That guy and you?”
“Are you jeal
ous?”
“Might be.”
“Oh, not at all. We used to date. It wasn’t much. He wasn’t much. That girl. You and her, did you used to be—”
“We were kids, Talia. I mean, kids.”
“When I was twelve, a fifteen-year-old boy showed me how the eel went into the cave. It wasn’t so bad, even if I was twelve. So kids, that doesn’t mean a thing, dear.”
Harry didn’t know what to say to that. So he said, “Kayla’s all right. She and I grew up together. She’s all right.”
“I’d rather you not see her, though, hon. People will think she’s upstaged me. And I’m not used to that. I don’t like to share my men.”
“Men?”
“Figure of speech.”
“She’s all right,” Harry said again. He felt all messed up inside, as if everything he had just learned to understand had suddenly gotten scrambled.
“Oh, that’s our number,” Talia said.
Harry got up to get the burgers.
It was a sweater night up in the hills, or what served as hills in East Texas. Up there, where the night was closer and the stars were brighter and the thick pines surrounded the narrow clay road, they sailed along in his car as if propelled not by the engine and gasoline, but by air.
They went to a little place blatantly named Humper’s Hill, way up in the trees where there was a clearing from what appeared to be the landing of a great spaceship, but was most likely the result of a once-terrific lightning blast that blew out the trees and burned a circle.
Talia knew the place, led him up there. He pulled into the empty circle. The moonlight, from a half-eaten moon, was bright and silver and clean.
There was a slight rise, and near the front of the car the rise fell off and there was a dip. Not a cliff exactly, just a slope, and Harry had heard that a car had actually gone off of it once, down into the brush, and no one knew it was there for some three, four years. It was a couple, and sometimes the story said they had been shot, pushed over the side in their car. But no one knew they were down there until years later when hikers found the car and discovered their remains inside.
Somehow the story, true or not, made the place more exciting, that and the tale that a flying saucer had burned the place black.
So when Harry parked, he did it at the peak of the hill, just before it dropped away, his headlights pointing at the sky. And when he killed the beams, there was the moonlight, and after a moment their eyes adjusted and the stars seemed to pop out, sharp, like shiny spear tips falling toward them.
Harry was thinking: She’s been here before. Do I say: “Have you been here before?” No. That’s not good. ’Cause if she has, I know what she was doing, and she’ll know I know, and maybe she just likes it up here, and this lonely place has got nothing to do with passion, maybe she’s just a goddamn nature lover, and—
She put her hand on the front of his pants.
—maybe not.
“Get me naked,” she said. “Show me the moon.”
It was the first time they made love, and it was constructed of writhing flesh, flowing moonlight, and cool fall air; it was ripe with the smell of pine needles and drying leaves and red clay and the acid sweetness of clashing sexual organs.
They changed positions a number of times, went from sweater-cool to naked-warm, and one time, when he was behind her, her head out the window, her midnight hair jumping as he went into her, back and forth, she said, quite loud, “You’re my poor boy, aren’t you? Fuck me, baby. Fuck me, baby.”
Poor boy?
He thought that one over and it tumbled in his head like junk falling down attic stairs, but the feeling was so good and the night was so fine, and the really bad noises, the ones that hid in the texture of this and that, that clanged and whanged and bammed and whammed, had been absent from him for some time now, at least in a big way, and the universe, it was his (when he didn’t tangle his feet in roots), and he was long gone from being who he was and how he was, so it didn’t matter.
Not at all.
35
Next day, in his apartment, lying on the couch, hands behind his head, contemplating the date with Talia, running it over and over in his mind, especially the parts out there on Humper’s Hill, the phone rang. Slowly he got up from the couch, went over, and looked at the caller ID.
It was Joey.
It rang three times and the answering machine kicked in.
There was a pause.
No message was left.
“Damn,” Harry said. He picked up the phone and dialed Joey.
“I just called,” Joey said.
“I know. I saw your name. I couldn’t get to the phone in time.”
“Must have been taking a shit. Small as your place is, you can get anywhere under, say, oh, I don’t know, two seconds.”
“You’re right. I was on the toilet.”
“The other night, your friend—he don’t like me much, Harry.”
“Figured as much.”
“He tell you about it?”
Harry lied. “No.”
“Want to know about it?”
“No.”
“He hurt my feelings, man. He didn’t treat me like I was your friend.”
“Got to admit, Joey, sometimes I got to look real hard to find the love.”
“Come on, man. Don’t go homo on me. This all got started over some girl. We don’t want shit like that to come between us. Thing is, though, I wanted to ask you. You really end up seeing her? Talia?”
“Yeah.”
“No joke?”
“No one laughing here.”
“She a good fuck?”
“Come on, Joey.”
“Is she?”
“I got nothing to say about things like that.”
“You must be lousy. That must be the thing.”
“Joey?”
“Yeah.”
“Blow me.”
Harry hung up.
36
A week passed.
It went by like a bullet, because he was seeing Talia, a lot. And all over, and in all kinds of positions. Next to a nonstop flight to heaven with free peanuts, things couldn’t have been better.
“You should meet Daddy,” Talia said.
“Daddy?” Harry said, not knowing what to think of this. Was it that they were so serious he should meet Daddy? Or was it that Daddy thought anyone dating his little girl should be met?
What was up?
As for himself, was he serious? He certainly thought so. Felt high all the time, way he felt when he drank, but without the hangover.
She had surprised him this morning, when he’d been sleeping in, and he answered the door in his boxer shorts.
“When?”
“Today.”
“Today?”
“Now.”
“Now.”
“Harry. Are you a parrot?”
“Parrot?”
“Now stop. He’s out at the shooting range.”
He looked at her, sitting on the edge of the couch so only a pinpoint of her fine ass was actually making contact with it. She never seemed comfortable there, but it was what he had. And he wasn’t nuts about going to her parents’ house. He didn’t know what it was like, but he knew she had money, and he knew he did not.
“I should clean up then.”
“No. You look fine. I like you like you are.”
From past experience, he knew his hair was sticking up like a rooster comb, ’cause it always was when he woke up, and he had a couple days of whiskers going, breath that would melt a wax block, and this was brought all the more home because she looked like a million bucks and change. It was a good bracer to meet a girl in a black miniskirt first thing in the morning, a halter top so tight you could tell her religious affiliation, but it also brought home the fact that he looked like a cardboard-box wino.
“I thought you should meet him, and now’s the time. He’s out at the gun range.”
“Gun range?”
“T
here’s that damn parrot again.”
“I don’t know, meeting a girl’s father at a gun range—it tends to make a man nervous. Especially since we’ve been doing more than swapping stories.”
“He’s very cosmopolitan.”
“Yeah, but I’m not. Guess I get to comb my hair and put on some clean undershorts.”
“If you hurry. Don’t bother to shave.”
Harry brushed his teeth, changed underwear and combed his hair, and put on the best pair of jeans he had. They were only moderately faded, and the cuffs were ragged where he had been stepping on them with his boots. As he pulled on his socks and tied his tennis shoes, he wondered what in hell Talia saw in him. What made him so lucky?
He took one more trip to the bathroom, looked in the mirror, said, “Sure I don’t have time to shave?”
“He’ll only be there awhile, then he’s so hard to find. He has all kinds of meetings and the like, and he doesn’t always answer his cell phone.”
“This shooting place. They haven’t killed…anything out there, have they?”
“What?”
“Killed anything. Been any accidents?”
“Harry, sometimes you can be so strange.”
She drove them over in a very new and very nice and very red sports car. That was good. New cars were good. They hadn’t had a lot of chances to get wrecked, not as much time to conceal bad memories.
The shooting place was a field, really, not far out in the country. There was a gate you went through, and to get through it you had to push code buttons.
Talia did just that, and they cruised in.
They parked near a long, low building, and walked out back. There were three men out there with shotguns, and three younger men pulling the skeet launchers.
They walked back that way, and Harry stole glances at Talia, way she walked, way the short dress sheathed her thighs, and how she stood tall with her breasts jutted out like high beams.
As they neared, Harry saw the young men at the skeet launchers turn to look at her. Two of the older men looked as well. One was a slightly heavy guy with a jet-black caterpillar mustache, hair gone slightly south, wearing clothes that could be called sporting clothes if you could keep them ironed while in the woods. He looked about fifty, but as he got closer, Harry realized he was much older. Sixty-five, maybe even right at seventy. Well preserved. Money could do that. The man gave them a brief glance.