sixth chapter :: the date
What does one wear to take it to the next level?
I settled on black. Black cotton pants. Black turtleneck, it still being chilly in June in the evenings. A nice khaki shirt unbuttoned over it all.
“You look terribly dot com,” she said, in her capris, her halter, eminently fuckable again, and not just freshly fucked.
“And you look like a dot com slut,” I said.
“As long as we’re together,” she said, taking my arm.
“You going to be cold in just that?”
“If I am,” she said, snuggling up against me so that we almost tripped, “then, ha, then you can be all chivalrous and lend me your shirt. You nice guy, you.”
She sang along with Nicky’s tape as we drove.
“Trying hard to
Fit among you
Floating out to wonderland—take a right—
Unprotected
God, I’m pregnant
Damn the consequences
When I grow up, I’ll be stable!
When I grow up, I’ll turn the tables! Left, left, take
that left right there!”
We were deep in the south side of town, where the lakes begin, where the roads twist and turn around houses that tend to sell for a lot more than their physical presence would suggest, whose driveways were not made for the SUVs that fill them to overflowing. “You might want to stop singing along,” I said, braking too hard and just making the left in question, “and pay more attention to where the fuck we’re going.” I poked along, trying to make sure we were on a street, not a cul-de-sac, or somebody’s goddamn driveway. Houses were thinning on either side; we were approaching one of the lakes. “I’ll never find my way out of here.”
“Make a wrong turn,” she said, “and I won’t either. We’ll be stuck with each other, forever. Wait!”
“What?”
“We’re here. I think. Yes. We’re here.”
“You sure?”
“It’s been a while. And I never had to give directions before.”
I pulled over to the side of the road, behind a battered Citroën. We got out. There wasn’t a house in sight, but there were lights, down below us, through the trees, the sound of music, drums, something at once frenetic and laid back, Middle Eastern. Laughter. Jessie took my hand, and hers was warm and damp with sweat and her face was serious in the dying sunlight. “Look. We won’t be here long. Just watch. Don’t do anything. Don’t say anything. Don’t ask any questions. You’re with me, okay? That’s all anybody needs to know.”
And she led me down, through the trees.
It was a houseboat.
We broke out of the trees on the lakeshore, a poor cousin of one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses off to our left, weirdly floating in the dim twilit air, the sunset dying a bloody death in front of us, with those streaks of lavender and yellow and even green that look so unreal, and there, on the gunmetal water, was a square little houseboat. It had been white, once, I think. The music was pouring from a couple of speakers on what I guess was the bow (it seems absurd to apply nautical terms to that little tub). The only person I could see clearly stood by them: an enormous man in a billowy Hawaiian shirt, unbuttoned over his hairy belly, his thinning curly hair pulled back in a club-like ponytail. His eyes could only see Jessie as we picked our way down the rocky slope. Laughter broke out, suddenly, cruel, triumphant. Someone wailed. I couldn’t make out the words. The enormous man didn’t seem perturbed.
“Jessie?” I said.
“Shut up,” she said. She took my hand, looked me in the eyes. “Just don’t embarrass me. Okay?” She leaned up, planted a quick kiss on my cheek (a hint of her tongue, licking lightly). Then led me, pulling me by my hand as she scampered up the gangplank. I say “gangplank”: it was more like a long rope bridge with some planks to give it stability. I nearly stumbled following her up, but she didn’t let go, and I’d no sooner set foot on the houseboat than she’d yanked me into the den.
The smell of it, the air, hit me first, like a smack to the face. Pot, cloying, thick. Incense clashing with it, their smoky skirmishes twirling lazily through the air, blurring everything out of focus. Musk, the smell of old sex, at once animal and clinical, undercut with the cool bleach aroma of drying semen, the whole of it spiced with urine; someone had pissed in a corner somewhere. Other things I didn’t try to hard to identify. A couple of kids maybe Jessie’s age, a boy and a girl, the both of them dressed only in baggy blue jeans riding low on their hips (him, baggy boxers; her, yellow bikini panties) and, in his case, a black baseball cap with the word “Skunkworks” stenciled on it, were crouched around this thing, like a hookah out of the Jetsons, a gleaming stainless steel tower with startling orange plastic hoses coming out of its base. The girl, I noted, had a vaguely circular tattoo between her small, flat breasts. I couldn’t make it out. A third kid came up, wearing only a gold chain around his waist and a goofy grin, and dropped a vaguely familiar silvery canister into the central tower, and then dropped himself into the other boy’s lap. Boys and girl grabbed pipes, stuck them in their mouths, the naked kid leaned over and pushed a plunger on top of the tower, wssssht! and they all got rather more giddy.
A fucking hookah for restaurant-sized nitrous oxide cans. I turned to look at Jessie. Who wasn’t there.
But. On this ratty, half-collapsed sofa beside me was a woman I recognized, who does the weather breaks on the local WB affiliate. Not quite pulling off the Catholic schoolgirl look, her blouse knotted midriff-baring Britney style, passed out cold. A girl maybe thirteen years old was kneeling beside her and drawing a psychotically involved design on said midriff with a red felt-tip pen, starting in the vicinity of the navel and spiraling out with strange, jagged eructations whose logic I couldn’t grasp without more study. Which I wasn’t inclined to pursue; the girl glared up at me with wildly feral eyes, and I didn’t like the looks of the dark, crusty stuff smeared down the front of her cropped baby T and on along her bare belly and thighs.
“Look,” said a soft voice. “Look.”
You ever see a painting called, I think, Wet Angel? This crappy bit of late Victorian drawing room—well, porn, really. Which is readily available these days in the frame and print shop of any suburban mall, Lord knows why.
The Wet Angel was standing in the doorway leading down to the bowels of the ship. Sans wings.
I was maybe the only one in the room looking, but hey. Tracklights were shining like little spotlights and he stood there, legs canted just so, one of them in a neon-pink fishnet thigh-high. Arms just so. His cheeks, innocent of all but the barest peach fuzz, below eyes that looked out into the room with an inarticulate plea, “Please...” over lips too full for a boy that age. He even had the coiled, curly blond hair, the hair nobody has these days, fucking ringlets tumbling down to his shoulders. Though the illusion was spoiled by its not having been washed in a few days. And the Wet Angel in the painting doesn’t have an almost-erection bobbing below its belly, to say nothing of a neon-pink fishnet stocking. And it doesn’t spoil things by grinning suddenly, uncertainly, and wobbling on its feet, bouncing off the doorjamb, going, “Whooaaa...” and giggling, an unpleasant echo of the laughter we’d heard, coming down. Jessie?
So I’m chicken. I ducked back out the hatch, onto the deck. Music and enormous guy to my left. Heck. I headed right, towards the, heh, stern.
Blessedly empty. I sat there, on a low bench, and directed my roaring mind to take a lesson from its tranquil serenity. Don’t think. Don’t ask. Don’t do anything. And for God’s sake, don’t embarrass her. Just get the hell out, as soon as possible.
The music changed with a whip-snap snare kick to snarling guitars and computerized drums, which prompted a general “Woo hoo!” from inside and out. The houseboat began to shiver in time to the pounding beat, and I could hear them, faintly, drunken, high, yelling along with the chorus:
“Priests and cannibals
Prehistoric animals
Everybody happy as the dead come home!
Big black nemesis
Parthenogenesis
No one move a muscle as the dead come home!”
Which might have been why I missed the coming of the enormous man until his dark bulk loomed around the hatch, and it was too late to go anywhere without it looking like I was running away.
He shuffled up to sit next to me on the bench, his breath shallow and hoarse with the effort, a vaguely asthmatic wheeze. “You’re, uh, you’re here with Jessie. Right.”
“Right,” I said.
“Getting a little too old for this stuff. She is, I mean.”
I had no idea what to say to that. Don’t ask. Don’t do anything. Look at his Hawaiian shirt, which is covered with skeletons coupling in a wide variety of positions.
“And you’ve never been here before. Hey. Hey!”
He was yelling past me, over my shoulder. I looked. I could just see a man there, bigger, if possible, than the enormous man beside me, standing in a gap in the trees, just barely visible in the lights that spilled from the houseboat.
“Get the fuck out of here!” the enormous man next to me yelled. “Fuckin’ Beaver Bear! Fuckin’ troll! Get! You know the Hyatt Bridge?” That last to me. I nodded. “He’s one of the advertisers there.”
“Advertisers?” I said.
“You ever see the graffiti down there? I like young pussy, fresh pussy, twelve-year-old, ten-year-old, six-year-old cunt, ooh. Call me. Scribble your name and age in the second stall from the left in the women’s room at The Square and I will find you. That sort of shit. Like anybody ever answers ’em. Christ. But he must get a kick out of it, because the Beaver Bear from Delaware is all about the Hyatt Bridge. And ever since he found out about this place he can’t stay away. Piss off!”
I looked. The Beaver Bear was gone.
“So you, ah,” I said, turning back to the enormous man. “You look after this place?”
“Much as anyone can. When I’m not teaching Earth Sciences. Place has been going on forty, forty-five years. Mostly takes care of itself. The Garden of Do-As-You-Please. Croatan.”
“Croatan?” I said.
He nodded. “Hey, hey Kirsten!”
Kirsten, presumably, was the girl staggering across the gangplank, heading home. Presumably. “What!” she yelled, resentful of the interruption.
“Watch it! Beaver Bear’s out and about!”
She turned to look up into the trees, grabbing her crotch and thrusting it up and out. “Hey! Hey, you fucking creep! Come and get it, you fucking creep!”
“You should go find Jessie, you know,” he said.
“If she’s getting too old for this stuff,” I said, “then what the hell am I doing here?”
“Shit,” he said, grinning. “She asked you, didn’t she? Go on. Don’t poop the party.”
“Not exactly my speed,” I murmured.
“It’s like any party,” he said. “You show up, you feel out of place, you grab a drink and find a dark corner, and then you start to warm up to it. Next thing you know you’re in the thick of it, time of your life, never want it to end. Then it does.”
“What about you?” I asked, shifting my weight. Was I about to get up? I was. Jessie. The Wet Angel. Heck, nitrous. Why not.
“Oh,” he said. “Never. I just stay out here. Minute I start diddling something in there, well, I’d start playing favorites. Grading on a curve. Ugly. Besides,” he said, looking off into the deepening night. Sigh. “I mostly just keep to myself, these days. Some connections it’s better to leave to the abstract. Don’t try to actualize them. You know?”
“I might,” I said.
The naked kid with the gold chain around his waist was fucking the weather woman, still totally unconscious as she jerked and flopped with every thrust of his hips, one leg slithering off the couch that he made a half-assed attempt to catch, her skirt riding up over the pattern on her belly. Had the feral girl ever finished it? She was on her knees, the side of her face pressed into the carpet with a heart-breakingly lost expression, her thighs quivering, her calves clenching, her toes curling, her mouth working in time with the tattooed girl’s mouth, kneeling in her baggy jeans behind the feral girl’s naked hips, the Skunkworks cap now perched bill backwards on her head so she could more easily eat out the feral girl’s cunt and ass with extravagant, sloppy licks. The feral girl still clutched her red felt-tip pen in one hand. The other kid, capless, sat staring wide-eyed at the nitrous hookah as if it might speak to him at any moment. Who knows? Maybe it was.
“Want? Some?” said the naked kid between thrusts. Flop. Flop.
I passed through the door the Wet Angel had been standing in, and down the narrow, steep stairs, into the belly of the Garden.
A tall, skinny girl, wearing a faded, ratty slip once white, now yellowed ivory with age, was writing something on her arm with a pretty fair replica of a Sikes-Fairborn commando knife. The music was duller, down here; the thick air furry with the smell of old mold and damp and rot. I could hear the blood dripping from her arm onto the carpet, her bare foot. Plip. She took no notice of me as I stuck my head through the door behind her.
This might have been one of the bedrooms, or staterooms, or whatever you call them on a houseboat, but it had been tricked out some time ago, maybe the ’70s by the look of the puke-green shag and the dark paneling, as a rumpus room. And it had recently hosted quite the rumpus. I felt like I was walking into the detritus of a wrap party for one of those Calvin Klein jeans ads: kids, four or five, boys or girls I couldn’t tell, all of them somewhere between looking quite mature for twelve and awfully young for nineteen, naked, or half-wearing shredded jeans, giant Ts, baby Ts, underwear around knees or ankles or shoved aside from a bare cunt, someone’s finger desultorily inside, one sock on and one foot bare, a boy wearing a black lacey bra, passed out, asleep, post-coital, none of them Jessie, someone looking up from a wet kiss, dripping something viscous into someone’s mouth, a thick swallow, gulp, a grin, back to the kiss. A tipped-over keg in the corner, plastic cups littering the floor, one crumpling as someone rolled over on her back (“Ow”), a couple of Coke can bongs smeared with tar and ashes. A hypodermic needle or two. A spoon, blackened from flame. A bottle of Knob Creek, on the counter, with a couple of fingers left. I headed that way, stepping gingerly around limbs, pale white, dark brown, golden. Someone touched my ankle, briefly. And then I had the bottle.
By the counter—which had been doing adequate service as a wet bar (no ice, but a puddle in a Tupperware bowl that had probably been ice at one point)—was of all things an electric fireplace, some goofy thing with plastic logs and a red light inside that flickered. Over the fireplace, a mantel, of course, encrusted with a generation or two of candles and stumps of candles and the petrified puddled remains of candles. And burned into the front edge of the mantel with one of those wood-burning tools you use in summer camp when you’re twelve and then never again until you’re retired and making a sign for your summer house, partially obscured by stalactites of wax, a word:
CROATAN.
I poured a slug of bourbon straight from the bottle down my throat, realizing only after it had burned its way down that it might have been smart to investigate before drinking. Lucky me; nothing but bourbon. I had another slug to celebrate. Slug. Good word. It slid down my throat like some oleaginous pseudopod that sat heavily in my stomach and sent slimy little tendrils out through my bloodstream to lighten my head.
Someone giggled. Someone said, “Hey. Hey, mister.” Someone else said, “Oh, not again. Okay.” Wet sounds. More kissing; I didn’t bother to figure out what. Someone snorted in their sleep, and a foot kicked out, clattering away plastic cups and one of the makeshift bongs. Time to go. I’d take the bourbon with me.
But the wall by the door, the whole corner, that I saw as I turned to leave, was covered in photographs. Polaroids. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them.
Can you blame me?
Carefully over someone’s calf. Foot goes there, near her armpit, so. “Hey. Mister. You deaf?” Another giggle. “Again? I don’t—okay.” Movement over there—a gasp, someone rising up on elbows and knees, let’s not go that way, shall we? Over the leg, it’s moving, whoops, don’t fall. Don’t drop the bottle, either. A smile. Smile back. No, not right now, thanks anyway. Burst of laughter from another room, and the whole time someone’s been having what sounds like a heated argument with someone else I can’t hear somewhere else, and the music, it’s something bright and tinny, poppy. Don’t step on the underwear, look at the skidmark, did this kid ever do laundry? Eh. One more step.
And here we are.
The Polaroids.
Different sizes. Colored and discolored with age and spilled liquor and God knows what else and smoke and just about every other wear and tear possible except sunlight. Some of the photos were black and white, and some were even brown and yellow, on this thick card with the photo itself on a filmy overlay. Kids, all of them, kids going back—forty, forty-five years, he’d said, and if they had instant cameras back then, well. Crew cuts and long-and-straight and shag cuts and mullets and weird, angular ’80s things, punk cuts like the splattered remains of some demented rainbow, thick curls tamed or wild in ’60s ’fros, random, knife-cut sprigs, a baby dyke’s first bad haircut, a clone’s first flattop, jheri curls and big hair, nerds without pocket protectors (or pockets, for that matter), a little clique of goths and proto-goths clustered in a corner down there, all black lace and black dye and black lipstick and black, black eyes. Thick horn-rimmed glasses, and John Lennon grannies, and Ray-Bans everywhere. Like a yearbook from Hell. White kids, mostly, but here and there enough black faces and Asian faces and Hispanic and that girl, there, looks like a full-blood Native American, maybe. And here and there the occasional adult, looking as out of place as I felt, always with a kid in the picture: a man, beaming proudly as two girls kiss in front of him, a woman, there, naked, as a young boy grins and buckles something around her waist. No Jessie, that I could see, but was that? Yes. The weather woman passed out upstairs, smiling that famous Mona Lisa come-hither smile, the feral girl kissing her cheek, one eye turned like a deer’s to the Polaroid’s flashbulb. A brand new photo on the wall. The pictures stuck with thumb tacks, tape, glue, whatever was to hand, overlapping, with splotches of discolored paneling visible here and there, like rot; whatever this wall was for, it wasn’t a clear, immutable record. It was chaotic. In flux. Some pictures lay scattered on the floor—a girl, older than me now, dead for all I know, looking up with big, frightened eyes and no smile at all, face too bright, too close, eyes red, retinal blood blazing in the harsh light of the flash, someone’s footprint smudging her cheek, her temple, her forehead.
And always, over and over again, somewhere in the picture, the mantel. Clean; coated in candles; racked with liquor bottles; clean again. But there, in all of them, or almost all of them. And the word CROATAN had always been burned into it. Always.
More bourbon.
Laughter. The music now something rapidly percussive, filled with machine-gun snare bursts and weird shifts in tone. “I wanna—yeah. Like that. Ooh.” The argument was over; somewhere else, someone was singing limericks at the top of her lungs. “There once was a fellow named” something I couldn’t make out. Somebody, or at least two somebodies, were fucking behind me; slap, slap, slap, unh, oh, unh. Oh. “Hey. Hey, you with the bottle. Trey wants to see you.”
Who, me?
I turned; a kid lying on the floor, bra hitched up around his neck, someone’s heading bobbing over his dick, pointing towards the door. So I turned almost all the way round again.
And there was the Wet Angel. Whose name, it appeared, was Trey.
He’d lost his stocking, and hadn’t bothered to find any other clothing. He smiled, an utterly disarming smile, hey, and he crooked a finger at me. I followed. Behind me, the sound of water, or some liquid, falling from a height, spattering, “Hey! You fuckwad. You got it in my eye. Bitch.”
“Sorry.”
The girl in the ivory slip had set her knife down and sunk to squat on the floor or deck or whatever, staring at the streams of blood meandering down her left arm. Trey was further down the hall, still grinning; he held his hand out, and I took another shot of bourbon and then handed him the bottle. He drank it down like water, galoop, galoop, and then tossed it empty into a corner. The girl in the ivory slip watched its arc, jumped at the smash, stared at the shards. I grabbed Trey’s hand, and one of us pulled the other close. Cold sweat slicked the small of his back, and his ass was wet and sticky, and his breath tasted of bourbon, and his mouth was as sloppy and guileless as his grin. I pulled him tightly to me, and felt his erection warm and glowing pressing up and to the side between our grinding hips. “Hey,” he said, under my mouth. I grabbed his lip between my teeth and nipped. “Ow.” My momentum carried us up against a wall, smashing my hands against the paneling. I let go, took a step back, grabbed his hands as he tried to push away from the wall and knocked him back against it, pinning his hands to his sides. I fell on his mouth, his cheeks, his throat, biting at it, licking, feeling his muscles close under his skin, tasting the sweat that had dried along the line of his collarbone, salty and thin and acidic with old alcohol. His hair, long and curly, tickled my nose; I blew it out of the way, lifted my head. His eyes burned. I kissed him again, and he was more sure this time, his tongue meeting mine, his lips matching mine. I felt tendons shift in his arms as he flexed his fingers, made his left hand into a fist, relaxed it.
I wasn’t hard yet, stirring, but not hard. He was. I reached up and wiped the spittle from his lips, his cheek. He nipped at my palm, and I let him lick it. I spat in my palm for good measure, then reached down and held him, long and thin and warm, pulsing, bouncing a little in my fingers, a distant echo of his heartbeat, strong and fast. I stroked him, once. He grinned again. Stimulus; response. He reached out and played with my hair, coming loose from its ponytail. Tried to push my shirt open, off my shoulders; I shrugged away from him, gave him a warning look, a-ah. He grinned some more. I stroked some more. Kissed his mouth. His cheek and chin. His neck, and felt it buzz as he said “Mmm, hm hm.” The flat hairless plank of his chest, swelling with a deep breath as I stroked him some more, the sweat and spit and Cowper’s patented elixir enough to slick things along. His hips bounced, and again. I kissed his belly, smooth, a little soft, stirring the thin clear hair around his navel with my breath. I didn’t lick his navel. (Lint.) I did kiss the corner of his hipbone, there, and he wiggled and shivered at my touch. Down, along the hints of hair about the base of his cock, trailing silky down the inside of his thighs. Funk, musk, old sweat and sour sex, like dried salt, like bleach. His balls, prickly like thistles or small hedgehogs with dark hair, unlike the rest of his body. The skin darker in tone, olive, almost, against the golden blue of his legs. I shifted my weight, kneeling now as I licked the base of his cock, one hand adjusting my own as it grew and shifted in response to his “Mmmmm, yeah.” Licked along the underside, running my tongue along the veins, firm, but yielding slightly under the soft skin. There, the faint ridge of circumcision scar; there, the purple mountain majesty of his glans. I pulled back, seized by the impulse to take a bite, to chew on it, spongy, moist, like cake, like some bizarre new sushi. Warm mahi-mahi on a stick.
“Come on,” he said, pained. I smiled up at him. Brief, and in the imperative, but the first complete sentence I’d heard him utter. His voice was high, clear, weirdly unearthly. Or maybe that was just the bourbon, and the blood leaving my brain.
“Patience,” I said, my lips close to the head of his cock, bobbing with the pulse of his blood. Stirring him with my words. My word. I leaned forward. Licked it. Took it into my mouth and held it a moment, resting it, surrounding it in warmth and wetness. He moaned. Unearthly. It wasn’t just the bourbon.
“You know,” said a familiar voice, said Jessie, “nothing gets me hotter than watching two guys together.” I took my mouth off his cock and looked. She stood at the base of the stairs, naked, mostly behind the tattooed girl from upstairs who’d lost her jeans and her sneakers but still had that kid’s cap. Jessie nuzzled the tattooed girl. “What do you think, Kaitlyn?” she said. “You like to watch? You want to join in? All it takes is one good fuck, and they’re yours forever...”
Kaitlyn’s hand was jammed in her yellow underpants, and she suddenly sawed it back and forth, with a wet slapping sound. “Come on,” she whined. “Fuck me. Fuck me.” Trey, the Wet Angel, put his hand on the back of my head, and I gave his cock a little kiss, haven’t forgotten you, just a minute, what the hell, one more. But I kept my eyes on them. The shadows falling, just so, and I couldn’t make out the tattoo. What was it? And Jessie was kissing Kaitlyn, and reached down to grab her wrist and still her frantic masturbation, bringing her hand up to their mouths. And in the room behind the wall Trey was leaning against somebody slammed something, hard, the wall shivered, Trey’s cock jumped as his hips bucked. “Fuck!” somebody yelled. “Fuck a goddamn duck!”
Kaitlyn and Jessie’s kiss broke off, as Jessie held Kaitlyn’s hand up between them, and Kaitlyn tipped her head to lick her fingers. Her eyes on Jessie. Jessie, grinning, licking Kaitlyn’s thumb, nibbling it. “No,” she said.
Kaitlyn blinked.
“No,” said Jessie, “you’re just boring me. I want them.”
Kaitlyn threw her hand down. “Cunt!” she said, stamping her foot.
Jessie shrugged and stepped out from behind her. Strapped around her right thigh was an absurdly black rubber dildo. Kaitlyn stamped her foot again, and yelped. “Fuck!” she said, hopping up on one foot. “Fuck! There’s fucking broken glass down here! Fuck!”
Jessie walked past, towards us. Me, and Trey. The girl in the ivory slip looked up, sniffing the air, as the tattooed girl bounced off the wall and sank to the floor, still holding her foot, worrying at the glass jammed into her heel. The girl in the ivory slip crawled across the hall and over, sniffing the tattooed girl’s foot, gingerly leaning out and licking the blood. “Fuck,” the tattooed girl was muttering. “Just fucking fuck me, already. Fuck me. God. Please. I gotta. Just fuck me.”
And I could see her tattoo. Just before Jessie’s bare hip eclipsed the girls, the light hit her chest just so, and I could see it:
Well, part of it was circular, anyway.
“Who wants it, boys?” said Jessie, stroking the dildo strapped to her thigh like the nightstick from some weird fetish police officer’s uniform. “You’ve got me all hard. I just gotta come, or they’ll turn blue and fall off.”
Trey giggled.
“I think,” I said, stroking his cock, “we have a volunteer.”
“Yeah,” said Trey. “Sure. I’m game. Whatever.”
“Angel. Darlin’. Honey,” purred Jessie, as we shifted about, and I took the opportunity to unzip my pants and give my cock some room to play, and she snuggled up behind Trey and draped one arm across his shoulder, while her other hand made ripping velcro noises as she adjusted the ride of the dildo on her thigh, “that man on the floor in front of you about to blow your brains out is a writer. A writer, okay? So just shut up and don’t say anything and look pretty and try not to—”
Trey grunted.
Jessie thrust her hips, slowly.
“—embarrass yourself.”
“Unh,” he said. “Ooh. Uh-huh. Okay.” I wrapped my lips about him. “Ooooookay. Heh. Hey.”
Jessie smacked his ass. “Shut up.”
“Yeah, heh heh. Okay. Shutting—ow!”
I let her do most of the work, fucking his ass as I held his cock in my hands and let his hips slide his cock jerkily in and out of my mouth. A good old-fashioned skull-fuck, like we used to do in the old country, watch the gag reflex and you’ll do fine. Every now and then I gave him a hint of teeth, scraping along his flesh, at once hard and tender, and then rewarded him with an extra helping of tongue, sliding down under the base of him and back up to the top again, working the skin there with my fingers and thumbs, lightly. I could just see her eyes over his shoulder, past his ridiculous curly hair, and they smiled down at me, and then closed, in concentration. I felt for her hand and found it, on his hip, and our fingers entwined and squeezed. I could feel the pressure as she slid in and out of him, in and out, the mass of the dildo as it stretched him wide, passing, in and out, out of phase with the movements of his hips as the two of them rocked apart and then slapped together, grunt, but it was still almost like Trey dissolved. I was sucking Jessie off, fellating her cock, giving her head. He was just this odd medium of exchange between us, a doorway, a limen bodied forth and then ignored, tossed aside. He wasn’t there. He didn’t matter. He gasped and jerked hard, nearly whipping out of my mouth, splashing my tongue and my throat with come. “Oh,” he said, “oh goddammit stop,” as Jessie slapped against him one more time, and once more again. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, man. Fuck. That was. Fuck.” I swallowed, worked his cock between my fingers and squeezed out one last runny pearl as he groaned again, and I licked it off his tip. He was already going soft, but I was still hard, achingly hard, and as he staggered over to the wall I stood up, careful, and looked at Jessie, opening her eyes, and without bothering to let her strip off the dildo still shining, marred a little at the tip, I gathered her in and devoured her. Somehow she ended up on the floor without banging her head and her legs wrapped tightly about my hips and I was in her, inside her, fucking her so hard I was rubbing my knees and my elbows raw on the old threadbare carpet, and her ass, too, and still she was hissing “Harder, God damn, oh, brutal, just fuck me already, God damn.” The dildo was hung up on my open shirt, but I managed to shrug it out of the way. My belt was digging into my stomach with every thrust and I grabbed her hands and pinned them over her head and lifted myself up so the belt dangled down, out of the way, mostly. Trey was gone. Long, slow strokes now, even as she tossed her head back and forth, “Please, harder, dammit, Carter, I can’t, I have to, you fucking bastard.”
“How long?” I said, gasping. Slowly. What are you doing? “How long have you been coming here?”
“What?” she said, her voice a quiet gasp.
“How. Long.” Christ. I wanted her; I wanted to come. God damn. Thought was an effort. Speaking was next to impossible. I. Fuck.
“Two,” she said.
“Two what?” I said. Slamming down, pulling back up again. Inquisition through sex. Did those Spaniards ever think of this?
“Two years, dammit. Two!”
The girl in the ivory slip had crawled over to us, fresh blood slicking the palm of her hand, dripping from a finger or two. Hers? Or Kaitlyn’s? She knelt by Jessie’s head and watched the blood drip, plip, onto the carpet.
“Virginia?” I said, pulling up again.
She groaned and tried to buck, levering her hips, kicking my back with her heels. “Fuck you!” she yelled. “Just fuck me! God damn!”
“That’s not,” I said, lungs heaving, “how we’re playing this.” What are you doing? Why are you? What?
She jerked her hips, wrestled one hand free. Shoved at my chest. Slapped it. “Off,” she said. “Off. Get off. No, goddammit, get off me.”
A game? Girl says no, Carter, you stop. Immediately. No ifs ands or—but how do we read this? Is she just doing that to get you to get off her? Quid for some quo you can’t see? Is she—
Christ. Fuck. Shithead.
I pushed myself off her. She lay still; I hovered over her. We hung a moment there, unmoving.
She looked away, chewing her lip.
I rocked back and sat my bare ass on the carpet and held my head in my hands.
“Hey,” said someone. A girl. The girl in the ivory slip. “I could, you know, fuck.” I had no idea to whom she was speaking. “You like knives?”
“Go away,” said Jessie. “Carter,” she said. “Carter.” A stirring, a rip of velcro. “Carter. Look at me.”
I did. “Virginia,” I said, insistent.
“You know the answer,” said Jessie.
“Tell me,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “Maybe fifteen, twenty years ago. But yes. Of fucking course. Carter. Please.”
I looked away. I knew, and she knew I knew. What she didn’t want me to ask. What she was waiting for me to ask. So I didn’t. Hell. I might as well have asked about the blond girl from Flicker or her black-haired friend with the tattoo on her hand.
“Carter,” she said. She put her hand on my arm, and I didn’t shrug it off.
“Hey,” said the girl in the ivory slip. “I can fuck, you know?”
“Go away,” Jessie and I said at once. She put her other hand on my other arm, pulled my hands down from my face. I looked up at her. “I told you,” she said, her face serious, wise beyond her years, looking suddenly, startlingly, like her sister. “Don’t ask.” She kissed me, lightly, tentatively, and pulled back when my lips did nothing to respond.
“What,” I said, flatly. “Am I embarrassing you?”
“This was a bad idea.” She was stroking my arm. Reaching up, brushing my hair back, out of my face.
“Because I’m a nice guy,” I said.
“Because,” she said, leaning forward again, “you’re a nice guy.” We kissed. And kissed again, mouths opening for each other. Her hand, finding my cock, still erect somehow. My hand, finding her cunt, still wet, still open. Our mutual need. Our hands and legs, with minds of their own, our mouths without consulting us kept kissing, kissing, and she was in my lap, straddling me, and without looking or stopping to think we adjusted ourselves, just so, inserted tab A into slot B. We sat there a moment, joined. Engulfed. Invaded. Her head tipped down, forehead resting on mine. Her hair a blond curtain about us. Her arms wrapped about my shoulders, mine resting on her upraised thighs. “Just fuck me,” she said. “Just kiss me and eat me and come in my mouth and just fucking fuck me whenever we want to fuck, okay? Don’t ask. Just don’t ask. This has nothing to do with you. None of it.”
“I’m not sure I can do that,” I murmured. “I can’t just—“
“You have to,” she said. “You have to.” Rocking back and forth, the two of us. Motion. Friction. The sweetness of it. How right it felt. I was made for this, and she was made for this, and we were doing what we were made for, and I wanted her, and she wanted me, and it was all, really, that simple. It should have been.
“I have to know, Jessie,” I said. “I have to know.”
“No,” she said. “No, you don’t.”
“Jessie,” I said.
“No,” she said.
“Jessie,” I said. “I love you,” I said. “I can’t just—”
Her finger came up and touched my lips, shh. “I’ve learned,” she said, “not to trust such things uttered, mm, at the height of passion. Twenty-seven-year-olds have such a different idea of love than, aha, the rest of us.”
“Twenty-six,” I said. Rocking faster now. Oh, yes.
“Twenty-six?” she said.
“Twenty-six,” I said.
“Ten years,” she said. “Ten years older.”
“Ten?” I said. “Not eleven?”
“Tomorrow,” she said, pulling herself close to me. I leaned back, resting my weight on my hands, using the leverage, oh, to do just that, only moreso, better, faster. “Tomorrow it’s just ten. Tomorrow.”
Her mouth is sweet. Her tongue is nimble, and agile, as fast as her mind. Her breasts are if not some Platonic ideal of breasts then at least a Carterian ideal made oh-so-lovely flesh. Her cunt. Her legs. Jessie fucking James, she is. Christ.
“You know,” she said, as things stilled a moment, not stopped, but slower, a breather, both of us panting a little, resting up for the final push, “you know,” she said, “I wasn’t kidding about the two of you. You and Trey. You guys. You sucking him off. Fuck.”
“He’s a looker,” I said.
“You guys,” she said. “Fucking him as he fucked you. Sort of. But watching was—ah—was, uh, nice. I got it, I think. I felt it. Mm. Inside. All lit up, suddenly. Watching. The thousand eyes of my, my eyed blood.”
“What?” I said. And here we go. The roller coaster’s headed up that last hill. Chug-chug chug-chug, I think I can, I think...
“There,” she said, closing her eyes, up and down and up again, “There my beauty lay on her stomach, ah, showing me, showing the thousand eyes wide, wide open in my eyed blood her slightly raised shoulder blades, oh, oh, her, don’t tell me, oh, the bloom along the incurvation of her spine, the tense, fuck, narrow swellings, fuck, the swellings of her tense narrow, narrow nates, um, unh, clothed in black, in black,” her hands on my black turtleneck, small, insistent, my hands one behind me, holding us up against her thrusts, meeting her halfway, the other seeking out the sweet bare incurvation of her spine, “and, oh God, and the seaside of her schoolgirl thighs, fuck. Oh. Fuck.”
No stopping now. The top of the parabola. The crest of the hill. The rocket, poised in flight, hanging there, that brief spark of infinity, rainbow’s edge, as close to immortality as we ever get, there, the moment, the Now, catch it, carpe it, here it is, all you have to do is reach out and take it and it’s yours, it’s ours, oh God it’s rushing down now so big, so enormous, fighting itself free, and I fall, and she falls, and we’re falling together, coming and going and dying all at once, the lights flaring brightest just before they’re snuffed, the deepest darkness just before dawn.
Kissing. Still entwined. Blood sluggishly flowing back to brain. “What?” I murmur, again.
“Like that,” she says, her breath against my cheek again. Kissing. Borders are gone; discretion is gone, and with it the sense of the discrete. Actions flow, one to the other. Are we speaking? Are we kissing? Are we still moving, still pulsing? Yes, and yes, and yes to all, and all at once. Still within the shards of the Now. Clutch it close and hold it tightly, even as it ebbs away. “Like that,” she says, as we kiss, “but with boys. And my eyes. And my blood. And his schoolboy thighs. And your black.”
“What?” I said, and even then the color fades away, and we were two people again, and she was sticky with sweat and other things, and my pants were damp, and uncomfortable, and her weight was not exactly onerous but could be, soon enough. And I was short of breath. “But where?” I said. “Where—”
“Lolita,” she said. “You doofus. Nabokov. Come on.”
“I have,” I said, “a confession to make.”
“No,” she said.
“I, uh—”
“No,” she said. “After all that shit you gave me.”
“I haven’t read it. Yet. Ow.”
“You shithead,” she said.
“Hey,” I said.
She kissed me. I kissed her. “I’ll let you borrow my copy,” she said.
She had no idea what had happened to her clothing. She’d lost it all, somewhere. Neither of us felt inclined to look. “The halter was nice,” she said. “But the pants I got at Rave, cheap. The shoes—aw, fuck. I liked the shoes. Fuck ’em.”
I wrapped her in my khaki shirt, which covered enough to be barely decent.
Kaitlyn stood in the doorway of the Croatan room, her underwear around her ankles, Trey kneeling before her, his mouth busy at her crotch, the girl in the ivory slip standing behind her, kissing her neck, her hand brown with dried blood toying with a nipple here, a nipple there, crossing and recrossing that tattoo. Kaitlyn grinned. “Go Jessie,” she said, “wit’ yo writah. Go Jessie, wit’ yo writah.”
Trey turned his head from his ministrations; the girl in the ivory slip stopped kissing. Someone from inside joined them, drunken, high, fucking or just fucked, a rude rhythm following us up the stairs. “Go Jessie, wit’ yo writah, go Jessie, wit’ yo writah.”
She clutched my arm. “It’s really gone downhill lately,” she muttered. “Kids.”
I managed not to laugh.
The weather woman was gone. The kid whose cap Kaitlyn was wearing was gone. The naked kid with the chain around his waist was gone. The feral girl, naked now, scrubbed mostly clean, danced with herself in the middle of the room, slowly, out of beat with the music, noisy, crunchy, poppy punk. (Underneath, the nasty singsong playground rhythm still belting from the kids downstairs, words blunted, lost: “Da da-dah, Da-da da-dah...”) A man in a yellow shirt and a blue tie and wearing no pants watched her, his eyes oblivious to anything else as she swayed, bumped and ground her nascent hips, ran her hands through the air where one day her breasts would be. Jessie shivered. We stepped outside, onto the deck. Headed for the gangplank. Headed home.
“Jessie!” called a voice from the bow. The enormous man.
“Hey,” she said, quietly, stopping a moment, swaying there between ship and shore.
“You have a good time?”
(Da da-dah, Da-da da-dah.)
“Yeah,” she said, holding me close.
“Beaver Bear was out earlier. You folks take care.”
“Thanks, Bee,” she said. “Thanks.”
Barefoot, barelegged—I carried her up the slope. Rocks. Branches. Broken glass and God knows maybe even a needle or three. I insisted. She didn’t resist. Snuggled into my arms, her bare legs draped over me, my hand on her bare ass, still warm. Her arms around my neck. Pressing a kiss to my cheek, stroking it, as I struggled manfully up the hill, ducking under this branch or that, carefully, carefully, and God damn if I wasn’t coming up for one more go, and damned if she couldn’t feel me rising just below her hips, and damned if her kisses weren’t lingering longer and more sweetly. “You big strong man, you.” I didn’t set her down when we got to the roadside, but straightened my back—manfully, of course—and carried her down to my car. Kissing her. I set her on the hood, carefully, and kissed her again. Unlocked the door, turned on the stereo, rolled down the windows. Checked the clock. Punched play on the tape deck. Beaver Bear be damned.
“Music?” she said.
“Trust me,” I said. “If you got the joke, you’d think it was a scream.” The weirdly beautiful loungey thing that had been playing when we stopped the car came to an end, and crashed into the Buzzcocks. “What Do I Get?” I chuckled, and unbuttoned my shirt, baring her collarbone, her breasts, her belly, her sex.
“Not just yet,” she said, lying back. Bringing up her feet, resting them on the edge of the hood a moment, knees touching—then spreading them, deliberately, slowly, opening herself up to the night air. “I need a little—“
I was already bending down, kissing the inside of her thigh, that tendon, there, smelling her, licking slowly, carefully, up her warm, warm lips, and again. Feeling her slicken slowly under my tongue. Her shiver. Her head toss back and forth. Her moan. I unbuckled my belt, unbuttoned my pants. “Hey,” I said.
“Mm,” she said, kicking one leg out, a beautifully precise counterweight as she floated up to sit on the edge of the hood, her legs wrapping around my waist, her hands enfolding my face. Smiling. A kiss, and another kiss.
“Midnight,” I said. “It’s midnight. A little after, really.” And another kiss. “Happy birthday.”
“I’m sixteen,” she sang, “I’m beautiful, and I’m yours.” And she giggled, and I laughed.
It was slow, and careful. Loving. We were learning each other’s bodies, now, and knew how to say things back and forth, listen and decode and respond in kind. That gasp. This twitch. Eyes closed, just so; lips like that, and a kiss is necessary. Hands there, of course, where else would they go? And ever the eternal rhythm, in, and out; back, and forth; tension, and release.
And damned if Nicky didn’t put a little Robyn Hitchcock on his tape. Jessie sang along, quietly, a chuckle in her voice. “Use your arms, use your legs, and use your Heaven...”
And we did.
So.
This is the difficult part.
I haven’t been sleeping well, lately. Tossing, back and forth. Questions. My mind is aglow. Burning. Swarming. Something isn’t right. One of these things, Carter, just doesn’t belong. This is all going too well—when’s that other shoe going to drop? How big is it? Who’s holding it? Hadn’t you better be ready? Virginia. Andi. And Lenny James his own damn self. To say nothing of Jessie. Or Leah. Or—
Driving home. The tape sputtering its way to its end. I wasn’t really paying attention to the song, then; I listened to it again, later. “I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger...”
“I, uh,” I said.
“What?” said Jessie, curled up in my shirt, bare legs tucked under herself. Sleepy. Happy. Relaxed. Beautiful.
“Look,” I said. “I, uh—“
“Carter,” she said, warning me.
“Leah,” I said. She tensed. “Leah’s never been there. Has she.”
“Don’t. Ask,” she said, her voice gone quiet.
“I’m trying to make sense out of this,” I said. “I need to know why. Why you said certain—“
“There’s no sense to make,” she said. “There’s no ‘why.’ Stop asking, goddammit.”
“Leah,” I said, “came to the house today.”
“She did,” said Jessie.
“Yes,” I said. “She did.”
“Really.”
“She wanted to find out what my intentions were. Towards you. Whether I loved you. What was going on. You know. Big sister stuff.”
“She’s just a big ol’ jealous dyke,” said Jessie. But her voice was flat. Her heart wasn’t in it. “I told you that.”
“You’re right,” I said, “about the binoculars. I was watching you last night. While we were talking on the phone. While you said Leah was eating you out, while you were playing with her.”
“So I was lying,” she said. “Playing. Phone sex. More fun that way.”
“I asked her.”
Jessie said nothing.
“I said,” I said, “I asked her. Leah. Whether you two had ever slept together. I was—it was rude. I know.”
“You know,” she said, echoing me.
“But I had to know. And she said, she said no. She said never. She, she had no idea why you’d ever say such a thing.”
And again, Jessie said nothing.
“Jessie,” I said. “I’m sorry. I had to know. I—“
“Stop the car,” she said.
“Jessie,” I said.
“Stop. The fucking. Car.”
I did.
She sat there a moment. Took a deep breath. Unbuckled her seatbelt. “Stay away,” she said, and her voice caught a little, on the words. “Stay the fuck away from me. Forget it. Forget all of it.” She was staring down, at her feet. “This was a mistake. Christ. You bastard. For what it’s worth. I’m sorry. But you. You fucking idiot.” And she looked up at me, and her eyes were full of something dark and terrible. “If you drag my sister into this I will fucking have your head.”
And it was my turn to say nothing.
She opened the door. Got out. Stood there, in my shirt. Opened her mouth as if to say something, and shivered, choking on whatever word it might have been. Slammed the door shut.
Walked away, into the night.
I sat there, unable to think. Engine running. Lights shining. Nobody home. The tape snapped to an end, flipped over. Harry Connick, Jr. again. “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.”
And after about two or three or maybe even four minutes of that, I put the car in gear, and drove home.
One last thing to do, before I tried to sleep. Hanged for a penny, I might as well be hanged for a fucking pound.
I’d found it on my second day in the house, clearing my uncle’s papers out of the room I was going to use as a study. Thought nothing of it, at the time; an odd thing, a curiosity, a mystery never to be explained, now that he was dead. I certainly wasn’t going to ask Aunt Jean about it.
But everything is different now. To say the least.
So I opened up the storage closet under the stairs and used a flashlight to find the box in question and dragged it out into the hall and ripped it open and dug through slippery stacks of old papers, flinging them out, left and right, manila folders flying, tossing an old black binder over my shoulder for the sheer savage pleasure of throwing something. Damaging something. My face blank, my mind as empty as possible. If I’d come close to expressing what I’d been feeling, at that moment, I’d have blasted myself, left behind a scorch mark in the wooden floor, a few tendrils of greasy smoke curling in the air. God. Oh, God.
There.
It was, of course, a Polaroid photograph. Fifteen years old? Twenty? A little discolored. A ring of something dark on the edge of the white paper frame. A thumbtack hole at the top, a little ragged.
The man, there, face a little out of focus, looking away. My uncle. Tony Poundstone. The girl, standing before him—and I could guess now she wasn’t wearing some sort of strapless top I couldn’t see, I could reasonably assume, having been there, that her body was as bare as her shoulders. Her hair dark as it is now. Her face fifteen years younger, twenty years younger, but still sharp. That look, in her eyes. The deer, caught in the flash of the camera’s bulb.
The mantel, behind them, with fewer candles. Burned into its front, a little crudely, but competently enough, with one of those wood-burning tools, the word:
CROATAN.
Inspiration for the Garden and the Beaver Bear from Delaware drawn from “Bulletins from the Underground City” by Linton Robinson, as published in The Stranger. “When I Grow Up,” by Garbage; “Vanilla Jellaba,” by Muslimgauze; “Nemesis,” by Shriekback; title unknown, by Keiko Yoshinari, from Magic Knight Rayearth; “Roger Tessier,” by Spring Heel Jack; “Classy,” by Kenickie; “Sometime Later,” by Alpha; “What Do I Get,” by the Buzzcocks; “Heaven,” by Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians; “Ooh La La,” by the Faces. And Lolita, of course, by the divine Nabokov.
