Creekers (17 page)

Phil stared. Could this really be?
I cannot believe this,
he told himself very slowly. Then his words grated, “I didn’t dump her.”

“Bullshit, Phil. When you leave a girl for a job, and she doesn’t want to move with you, that’s the same as dumping her. After you left she went nuts. She turned nympho. And when I shitcanned her, the very next week, she was stripping up at Sallee’s and turning tricks every night. Still don’t believe me?”

Phil’s voice turned black when he said, “No.”

Mullins, with a sour look, hoisted himself up, retrieved a folder from one of his file cabinets, and turned. “Buck North, Pete Adams, before they quit for the other departments, this PCP headache was just starting up. So I had them doing the same thing you did last night. Staking out Krazy Sallee’s, trying to get a read on what’s going on up there. Only these guys didn’t just take down tag numbers. They took pictures.”

Phil gulped as if a chunk of broken glass had stuck in his throat…

“Take a peek at your own risk,” Mullins warned. “But don’t get pissed at me for showin’ ya, ’cos you’re the one who asked.”

Then Mullins dropped the folder in Phil’s lap.

It was some presage, a hideous one: Phil refused to believe any implication, yet his hands hitched toward the folder like someone about to unveil an as-yet unidentified cadaver on a morgue slab. He opened the folder—

No,
 he thought very simply.

—and stared. His face felt as though it had fused into a mask of impassive stone. A small stack of 8x10 black and whites showed him first several nondescript women leaving Sallee’s hand in hand with various rubes. All tackily dressed in tight skirts, glittery blouses, high heels. Some were clearly less-defected Creekers, like the ones he’d seen last night. Next, a few grainy telephoto shots, obviously taken with fast film through a low-light lens. The discreet snapshots depicted the same women engaged in various sex acts with rough, jean-jacketed men. In pickup trucks and souped hot rods, behind the building.

One photo showed a Creeker woman—with one arm undeniably longer than the other—lying on her back on the garbage dumpster behind Sallee’s, her legs wrapped around some anonymous redneck’s back. Natter’s Imperial was seen in several of the shots, and so was Natter himself, tall, gaunt, and crevice-faced as he leaned to speak to several patrons in the entry.

And the last four photographs showed Vicki Steele performing the act of fellatio in the cabs of different pickup trucks. A final photograph showed her flashing a wicked smile as she stuffed paper cash into her bra. Something shiny splotched her blouse and hair, which could only be semen…

“Told ya so, didn’t I?” Mullins harped. He loaded a fresh pinch of snuff and immediately spat. “But you wouldn’t listen. That’s your problem, Phil. You never listen to anyone. You always gotta know more than the next guy about everything.”

Fuck you,
Phil thought, but now, as he closed the folder, he knew the chief was right.

I asked for it, I got it,
he thought.
Happy now, you asshole?

“Now you know the score,” Mullins informed him. His desk chair creaked as he shifted his significant weight. “Sometimes the world really can be a piece of shit, huh?”

Phil didn’t say anything. He coldly placed the folder up on Mullins’ desk, his face still stiff as plaster.

“Go on home. Get some sleep.”

Phil rose as if climbing out of a tomb. The imagery swarmed behind his mind: Vicki’s head buried in some slob’s lap, semen shining like diamond-points in her hair, and like jeweled studs on her blouse.

A whore,
Phil thought as he walked out of the station.

I dumped her, and she turned into a strip-joint whore…

— | — | —

Eight

It was a fascinating sound
, a slick wet clicking, like duct tape being pulled off something tacky.

The world seemed to hum in his head: glories, wonders.

Mishmash words ricocheted in his brain.
My poor brethren,
he thought.
I bless thee in thy error. I love thee…

Ah-no-prey-bee!

Skeet-inner!

Ah-no, slave-luss!

He watched, in reverence, in faith.
What an honor to behold sights such as this…
He felt heady and warm. He felt exuberant.
The flesh of the world… My God, we are blessed…

That slick, wet sound resumed. Colors glittered, contrast flashed. It was just so beautiful! Red running over white.

His eyes turned to the window, to the sky.

And the wet sounds continued.

Soon,
the Reverend thought. His heart burned like an ember, an ember of love, a hot, glowing ingot of molten truth.

Yes. Soon it will be time again…

««—»»

He was a little boy. Bugs buzzed at his face, some of them sinking stingers. Dead branches and leaves crunched beneath his blacktop Keds as the sun blistered through the trees.

He didn’t feel good. At school, Miss Cunningham mentioned that a real bad flu from China was going around.
I won’t get it,
he remembered thinking.
I’m not Chinese.

But his skin felt cold in spite of the drenching heat. His stomach felt dry—he’d thrown up earlier, hadn’t he?—and he knew it must be the stuffed peppers his aunt served for dinner last night. He hated stuffed peppers. Why couldn’t they eat Pop Tarts every night instead? The cinnamon kind were great, and the strawberry kind with the white icing…

He didn’t want to go home. He didn’t want to believe he was sick.
I’m not sick,
he convinced himself.
I don’t have any Chinese flu!
So on he marched, wandering as children do in a pent-up glee, in a curiosity that was as honest as it was without direction of any kind. This gully here, he’d played in with his G.I. Joes. And over here by the stump that looked wide as a manhole cover, he and Dave “Cave” Houseman had shot at Nehi bottles with the BB gun that Cave had borrowed from Eagle. And they’d hit plenty of the bottles.

His Keds crunched on. He didn’t know where he was going, and he didn’t care. One night he’d stayed over at Eagle’s house, to watch the Alfred Hitchcock show, and a lady on TV had killed someone with a frozen leg of lamb. And Eagle’s Uncle Frank had come in—he built houses—and said to never go in the woods because there were “things” in the woods that ten-year-olds shouldn’t see. So naturally the next day he and Eagle Peters had gone into the woods, which they did almost every day from then on. One time they’d found a warm can of Miller beer, and they even drank it once they found what Uncle Frank called the churchkey. Another time they found a dead cat behind Buckingham Elementary, and the cat’s belly was moving from a bunch of worms that got in it. And then there was another time they found a big dark-green plastic bag full of moldy magazines, only these magazines had lots of pictures of naked ladies in them, and they laughed because it reminded them of a show called
Naked City.
One of the ladies was pouring honey between another lady’s legs, then she was licking it off! In another magazine a lady was sticking a gun in another lady’s hole. And after that she was sticking cucumbers and bananas and things in her. And in one other magazine there was a caption that said “WENDY LIKES TO SUCK,” and that reminded them of the song they heard all the time, called “Wendy,” or was it “Windy”? The lady had a black man’s thing in her mouth!

He and Eagle roamed the woods whenever they could, but they never found the “things” that Uncle Frank said ten-year-olds shouldn’t see.

“Uncle Frank said a girl got raked out here once,” Eagle told him one day when they were shooting slingshots at bottles by the creek. “He said it said so in the paper.”

“A girl got raked? What’s that?”

Eagle seemed to know everything, and, as he lined up his next shot—at a Briardale Cola bottle—he spoke like it was nothing.

“It’s when a man puts his pee-er in a lady, and she doesn’t want to.”

This confused him. “Why would a man want to do that?

“‘Cos it feels good, stupid. Don’t you know anything? He squirts baby-juice in her, and it feels good.”

“Oh… What’s baby-juice?”

Eagle laughed. “You’re stupider than Larry on the Three Stooges! Baby-juice is the stuff that comes out a man’s pee-er when he puts it in a lady. It makes ’em have babies. But when rake-ists do it, they do other things too.” Eagle pulled the slingshot back. “Bad things.”

This made him wonder. When Eagle hit the Briardale Cola bottle, it exploded. “What bad things?” he asked Eagle.

They called him Eagle because he had blond hair, but his father always made him get a crewcut, so he looked like a bald eagle. And Eagle said, “Well, they beat the ladies up too, and sometimes they kill ’em.”

Something bloomed in the little boy’s head, a curiosity like the time he broke his arm, and it itched under the plaster so bad he stuck one of his aunt’s knitting needles up there to scratch it. When Doc Smith took the cast off, he cried ’cos the doctor did it with a little saw that sounded worse than Doc Verib’s dentist drill. And when the cast fell away, his arm was covered with white flakes, and all the hairs on his arm had turned blacker than Lisa Cottergim’s eyebrows. She was an Oriental girl who got ’dopted by her parents, and her pretty eyebrows were blacker than a crow’s feathers. Maybe she was Chinese, and that’s why they had this Chinese flu going around that his teacher had told him about. But, anyway, Doc Smith told him his hairs turned black only ’cos the plaster had covered the hairs from the sun for six weeks. And anyway something itched in his head just like the way his skin itched under the cast.