Bodily Harm (29 page)

But what’s it
for?
Jocasta said, intrigued.

Your guess is as good as mine, the policeman said. It’s too short for anyone standing up, and there’s no place on it to sit down. Anyhow, the way it runs around the room like that you couldn’t keep up with it. We’ve got a private bet on here. Anyone comes up with some use for it that wouldn’t take your guts out, we give them a hundred dollars.

Maybe it’s for very active midgets, Jocasta said.

Maybe the police made a mistake, Rennie said. Maybe it really is just a floor polisher, with kind of a strange handle. Next thing you know you’ll be raiding General Electric and seizing pop-up toasters.

Fifty percent of fatal accidents occur at home and now we know why, said Jocasta.

The policeman somehow did not like them laughing. He disapproved of it. He took them into a third room, which was set up with black-out windows and a video viewer and showed them some film clips, a woman with a dog, a woman with a pig, a woman with a donkey. Rennie watched with detachment. There were a couple of sex-and-death pieces, women being strangled or bludgeoned or having their nipples cut off by men dressed up as Nazis, but Rennie felt it couldn’t possibly be real, it was all done with ketchup.

This is our grand finale, the policeman said. The picture showed a woman’s pelvis, just the pelvis and the tops of the thighs. The woman was black. The legs were slightly apart; the usual hair, the usual swollen pinkish purple showed between them; nothing was moving. Then something small and grey and wet appeared, poking out from between the legs. It was the head of a rat. Rennie felt that a large gap had appeared in what she’d been used to thinking of as
reality. What if this is normal, she thought, and we just haven’t been told yet?

Rennie didn’t make it out of the room. She threw up on the policeman’s shoes. Sorry, she said, but he didn’t seem to mind. He patted her on the back, as if she’d passed a test of some sort, and took her arm, leading her from the darkened room. Politely, he did not look down at his shoes.

I thought that one would get to you, he said. A lot of women do that. Look at it this way, at least it’s not for queers.

You need your head repaired, said Jocasta, and Rennie said she thought maybe it was time to leave. She thanked the policeman for being so cooperative. He was annoyed with them, not because of his shoes but because of Jocasta.

I can’t do this piece, Rennie told Keith.

Why not? he said, disappointed in her.

It’s not my thing, she said. I’ll stick to lifestyles.

Maybe it is a lifestyle, he said.

Rennie decided that there were some things it was better not to know any more about than you had to. Surfaces, in many cases, were preferable to depths. She did a piece on the return of the angora sweater, and another one on the hand-knit-look industry. That was soothing. There was much to be said for trivia.

For a couple of weeks after that she had a hard time making love with Jake. She didn’t want him grabbing her from behind when she wasn’t expecting it, she didn’t like being thrown onto the bed or held so she couldn’t move. She had trouble dismissing it as a game. She now felt that in some way that had never been spelled out between them he thought of her as the enemy. Please don’t do that any more, she said. At least not for a while. She didn’t want to be afraid of men, she wanted Jake to tell her why she didn’t have to be.

I thought you said it’s okay if you trust me, he said. Don’t you trust me?

It’s not you, she said. It’s not you I don’t trust.

Then what is it? he said.

I don’t know, she said. Lately I feel I’m being used; though not by you exactly.

Used for what? said Jake.

Rennie thought about it. Raw material, she said.

Later on, she said, If I had a rat in my vagina, would it turn you on?

Dead or alive? said Jake.

Me or the rat? said Rennie.

Feh, said Jake. You sound like my mother. Always worrying about the dustballs under the bed.

No, seriously, she said.

El sleazo, he said. Come on, don’t confuse me with that sick stuff. You think I’m some kind of a pervert? You think most men are like that?

Rennie said no.

I ran into Paul in Miami, says Lora. At first he told me he was in real estate. I was down there with some guy, that was after me and Gary split up, and around that time if there was a free weekend going I took it. It wasn’t the sex, I couldn’t have cared less if a man ever touched me again or not, that’s how I felt then. With Gary it was never that great anyway, it was a lot like going through a revolving door, in and out before you know it and if you sneezed it was all over except for washing the sheets.

Maybe I wanted it that way, maybe I wanted to be able to take it or leave it. Maybe I thought if I got to like it too much I’d be stuck.
I wanted to think, Chuck you, Farley, there’s nothing much I need
you
for, if I want to I can turn around and walk right through that door and the only one who’ll be missing a thing is you. I thought it was just something you let men do to you. I don’t think most of them even liked it very much either. They only did it because you were supposed to.

I guess I just wanted to be with someone. It wasn’t the nights that were bad, it was the mornings. I didn’t like to wake up in the morning and have nobody there. After a while you just want someone to like you. You want someone to maybe have breakfast with, go to the movies with, stuff like that. I used to say there’s only two things that matter, is he nice or is he rich. Nice is better than rich but take it from me, you can’t have both, and if you can’t get nice take rich. Sometimes I said it the other way around. Not that there’s a whole lot of either one hanging out there on the trees, you know?

At first I thought Paul was only nice. He wasn’t mean like a lot of them, he was easy to be with, he wasn’t a pain in the ass, you know? Then I figured it out that he was rich, too. He had this boat, he only had the one then, and he said why didn’t I come down here for a couple of weeks, get a tan, relax, and there wasn’t any good reason not to. Once I got down here I couldn’t see any good reason to leave. Around that time I found out what he really did.

I worked on the boats for a while. Most of these boats have two or three crew and a cook, they really do run charters on the boats, it would look funny if they didn’t, and the crew all knew what he was doing, they were in for a percentage, he had people he could trust. I was supposed to be the cook, what I knew about cooking on a boat you could stick in your ear, it’s not like cooking in a real kitchen, but I picked it up. I was seasick as hell at first, I puked my guts out, but I figure you can get used to almost anything if you have to and when you’re out in the middle of the ocean there’s only one way off the boat, eh?

A lot of girls work the boats here, the straight boats as well, though you never really know if the boat’s straight or not, you learn not to ask what they’ve got in the hold. Whoever runs the boat expects you to make it with them; if you don’t like it you can always get off the boat. I never made it with the charters though, that wasn’t part of the deal. It’s always them that get the maddest about it too. They think if they’re renting the boat they’re renting everything on it. Maybe I’m for sale, I’d tell them, but I’m sure as hell not for rent. How much? one of them said, an asshole. Hot-shot lawyer or something. You couldn’t afford it, I said. Funny, you look pretty cheap to me, he said. I may be pretty but I’m not cheap, I said. I’m like a lawyer, what you’re paying for is the experience.

Anyway you only had to do a few charters, maybe once a month, you could survive on that. The rest of the time I was living with Paul. Or anyway that’s what it was called. We slept in the same bed and all, but there was something missing in him, it was like being with someone who wasn’t there, you know? He didn’t care what I did, anything I wanted to do was okay with him, other men, anything, as long as it didn’t interfere with him. Deep down inside he just didn’t give a shit. You know what the locals say about him?
He does deal
. With the devil, is what they mean, they don’t mean the business. It’s what they say about loners.

About the only thing that really turned him on was danger, as far as I could figure out. Once in a while he’d do this really dangerous stuff.

Like, a couple of months after I came down here there was this thing with Marsdon. That was before Marsdon went to the States. He was living with this woman, and he came home one day and caught her in the sack with one of his cousins, I forget which one. It could be anybody, sooner or later they all turn out to be cousins if you study it hard enough.

Of course Marsdon beat her up. If he hadn’t beat her up, the other men would have laughed at him and so would the women. They expect it, for being
bad
, which is what they call it. But he went too far, he made her take off all her clothes, not that she had that many on when he found her, and then he covered her with cow-itch. That’s like a nettle, it’s what you do to people you really don’t like a whole lot. Then he tied her to a tree in the back yard, right near an ant hill, the stinging kind. He stayed in the house, drinking rum and listening to her scream. He left her there five hours, till she was all swollen up like a balloon. A lot of people heard her but nobody tried to untie her, partly because he had a mean reputation and partly because it was a man-woman thing, they don’t think that’s anyone else’s business.

Paul heard about it and he walked into the back yard and cut the rope. You just don’t do that. Everyone waited to see what Marsdon would do, but he didn’t do anything. He’s hated Paul ever since. It was after that he went to the States and got into the army, or that’s what he said he was doing. I wish he’d stayed there.

Paul didn’t know the woman, he wasn’t being noble as far as I could tell. He did it because it was dangerous; he did it because it was fun. Some fun if you ask me. You’d never know when he was going to pull one of those, you’d be washing your hair and you’d look out the window and there he’d be swinging from some goddamn tree, like Tarzan. He was like a little boy that way. He always said he knew what he was doing, but I knew some day he’d try it once too often and that would be that.

That’s one of the reasons I stopped working on his boats. He was taking too many chances.

The stuff comes from Colombia, on the freighters. For the government there it’s just another cash crop. Nobody can do anything about the freighters and once they’re out in the ocean nobody can
do anything about that either, except maybe hijack the boat. People have tried that but it’s not too safe any more, they’re shooting back. The U.S. knows which boats it’s on, they follow everything by satellite, they can track the big boats by the sound of the motors; so they can’t get it into the States that way. They bring it here, to one of these islands, and they split it up and put it onto yachts or private planes, they’re using those more now, and they take it up to Miami or maybe in through the Virgin Islands. It’s not just the U.S. and Cuba trying to control it here. The third group is the mob, and they’re spending more money. It’s a guaranteed multi-million-dollar business, so they can afford a top-level lobby in Washington, to keep them from legalizing it. Nobody wants it legalized, then you could grow it right there in your own back yard, the bottom would fall out of the market.

Ellis never stopped them, they were paying him off, but that may be changing, he may want in on the ground floor. He just made a big bust in the harbour over at St. Antoine. It seems some locals were growing it up there behind the bananas and smuggling it out on the fishing trawlers. A medium-sized operation but the big ones don’t want any competition, and Ellis doesn’t want the peasants marketing it themselves, he’d lose his cut. I’d guess it was the mob who put Ellis up to making the bust. Two to one he’ll resell it himself.

At first they were just hiring Paul’s boats, piecework, to make the run up from here to Miami. But then he went down there himself and bought his own army general. He figured why should he be the middleman when he could buy wholesale himself and sell retail, which makes sense except that then he had them all down his back, the
CIA
, the mob, Ellis, the works. No thanks, I said, I like my skin the way it is, only the holes God gave me. I told him I’d do the tourists, they’d trust me more because I was white and a woman, as long as he bought a few local cops for me, I’d do retail, but none of that other stuff.

The second reason I stopped was Prince. I just met him in a beach bar and it was love at first sight, that never happened to me before. I know you think it’s weird because he’s so much younger than me but that’s the way it happened. I don’t know what it was, maybe it was the eyes. He looked at you straight on, you felt that everything he was saying just had to be the truth. It wasn’t always, I found that out, but he always believed it was. He even believed all that communist stuff, he really believed he could save the world. He couldn’t tell you something and not believe it himself. He was so sweet. I was a real sucker for that.