Honey is Sweeter than Blood (6 page)

For a moment, he believed the gangster had shot him in the back of the head, but that the bullet had deflected off his skull.  He had heard of such things happening in suicide attempts.

And then he realized that Kot was no longer moving.  His weight had settled heavily across his back, like that of an exhausted lover, but even more still.  Kot’s hard cock remained embedded inside his gut.

With both terror and revulsion, Cheung realized the truth, and pulled himself out from under his lover.  Kot’s erection at last slipped heavily out of Cheung’s ass.  Cheung rolled off
the bed to the floor, scrambled backwards across the dirty carpet like a crab, ignoring the pain in his bandaged right hand.  He felt one of the drops of warm fluid on his neck wind its way down to the small of his back.

Kot’s face was turned to the wall, and that was preferable.  Though the back of his head was shattered like a doll’s, blood pouring over a jagged rim of bone to dye the sheets scarlet, it was better to see this horrific exit wound than his beautiful face in death.  Blood soaked into the pillows now, streamed down the side of the bed.

And tears streamed down Cheung’s cheeks.

And the last of the rain streamed down the windows as the deluge began to move on.

Impressions

“I don’t believe two people lying down could get hit by lightning,” said Andrea, having snicked her tongue before saying it.

“Well, it’s the highest point around; it’s like a hill,” defended Jen, who had shown them to this place, had told them the old story about it as related to her by her mother.  As a child her mother had taken her on walks through Pine Grove Cemetery, and passing this spot had said that two people had been struck by lightning and killed here.  It wasn’t until three years ago, when Jen was fifteen, that her mother informed her they’d been copulating at the time.

“
Hill.
” Andrea sneered.  “There are trees over there.” She pointed with a jut of her chin.  “They’re a lot higher than a guy’s bare ass on this little mound.”

“Maybe they weren’t there, then,” Diane offered meekly.  “Jen said this tree wasn’t.” She had her hand on the flank of a massive oak.

“Oh, so this used to be a desert, huh? I see.  When did this happen, 1923? So that tree is only seventy years old and it’s that big around?”

“That’s long enough, wouldn’t it be? Why not?” Jen said.

“Come on, it’s as big as a house.  That was here in 1923.”

“My mom says it wasn’t.”

“Your mom told you that story when you turned fifteen and started feeling funny new urges, my dear child.  It’s a suburban legend invented to scare people sexless.”

“I’d been feeling funny urges since I was thirteen, Andrea, and my mother doesn’t resort to old wives’ tales as a form of birth control; she put me on the pill herself.”

“See how paranoid she is?”

Jen groaned.  Diane was gaping straight up into the canopy of leaves, the thick branches snaking off into them like black rivers seen from a plane, vanishing into misty jungle.  “It’s so
thick
,” she heard Jen saying, “because the thing is
engorged
 with their passion.”

“It’s like Apollo and Daphne,” breathed Diane, a restless camouflage of light and shadow stirring on her face.

“
Huh?
” Andrea turned slowly.

Diane had regretted it the moment she’d said it.  She liked Andrea, but also found her caustic, perpetual cynicism intimidating.  She knew she had to get it out now so she got it out fast and simple.  “The old myth about Apollo? How he and Daphne got shot by Cupid’s arrows…one that made Apollo in love with Daphne, and one that made Daphne repelled by love, so that she kept running away from him.  Just as she was finally about to be caught she begged the Gods to transform her so she could escape him, and they turned her into a laurel tree.” There, it was out and said, and she waited for Andrea to turn to Jen and sputter into laughter.

But Andrea could be oddly gentle toward Diane at times, and only chuckled a little and said, “Yeah, the Gods were always doing shit like that.  You look at them the wrong way and
poof
…you’re a zucchini.  ‘And that, children, was the birth of the first zucchini.’ ” All three girls laughed.  “See? Jen’s mom was trying to scare her into believing that if she had premarital sex on a hill in a graveyard, Zeus would turn her into a giant oak tree.”

“You want to see their
graves
 now, Andy?” Jen said tolerantly.

“Sure, sure…lead on.”

Diane glanced over her shoulder at the tree as they moved down the grassy, shaded mound, an island in a sea of slanting, pitted tombstones stained with dirt and lichens.  She had shivered for a few moments back there in that deep shade, the rough bark cool under her soft palm.  But she had liked it in the damp shadow.  It was a place that called out for her to return, maybe to sit propped against that trunk with a book in her lap.  
The Age of Fables or Beauties of Mythology
 by Thomas Bullfinch, it would be.  She had her grandmother’s copy printed in 1898.

It was glaringly summer-hot elsewhere in the cemetery, the grass yellowish and dry like straw, not moist and squeaky green as it had been on the mound, where there had even been soft-fleshed pale mushrooms hiding in the grass.

The man’s stone was in the middle of the sprawling graveyard.  DAVID McKAY, it was inscribed.  Born in 1901.  Died in 1923.  There was no clever poem or epitaph to explain his early demise at twenty-two.  “You went out with style, Dave,” Andrea patted the top of the stone, “but that’s what you get for sticking your lightning rod out when a thunderstorm’s brewing.”

“Talk about your orgasms,” Jen speculated.  “What a way to go.”

“Yeah…they didn’t smoke cigarettes after-wards, they just smoked.”

The young woman had no grave of her own, her name chiseled into a looming family monument, a weathered white obelisk.  MARIE BARNES…1903-1923.  Her ignominious fate was inscribed on the tongues of the town folk, and didn’t need to be immortalized here.  Commenting on this, Andrea said, “Hey, at least it’s nice to be remembered for something.  Everybody else in here was probably pretty boring.”

“I think it’s beautiful, in a way,” Diane ventured, a little encouraged by Andrea’s failure to attack before.  “Don’t you?”

“Beautiful? To get burnt to a crisp at twenty? Um, let me think about that for a second.  
No
.”

“Well, I mean, to die together in a joined moment of love…isn’t that just a little romantic?”

“Honey, who said they
were
in love? Joined together in lust, it could have been.  If it’s so great why don’t you go make it with somebody in a car on some train tracks?
Real
 romantic.”

Diane decided to keep her feelings and impressions to herself; that had been more the Andrea she knew and feared.  Andrea knew damn well Diane had yet to make it with anybody, in any location.  And that the occasion wasn’t imminent, either.  She was bookish, dark-haired, mushroom-bodied.  Andrea was pretty, blond (artificially, but blond) and a hard, half-anorexic brown.  

“Now do you believe me?” Jen said.  

“
Yes
, Jen, I believe you,
okay
? Davey McKay and Marie Barnes really went out with a bang.”

“Oh God.”

“Oh Zeus, you mean.”

*     *     *

Jen and Diane returned to the mound the next day…without Andrea along.  It had been Diane’s idea to stroll here again.  

It had rained earlier, the air thick, almost too heavy to breathe in.  Mosquitoes bobbed in the air.  They stopped, of course, at the mound and climbed its slippery side.  Diane’s sneakers skidded out from under her and she fell on her hands and knees, smearing them with green juice.  A mushroom had become mush under her left palm.  Andrea would have been in hysterics.  Jen helped Diane to her feet.  

Under the pavilion of the tree they idly scanned the rest of the graveyard around them.  “Cows used to graze in that field.” Jen pointed beyond a distant fence.  It was a corn field now.  A shiny-domed silo protruded above the trees at its farthest edge.

Diane touched the damp bark of the tree, and shuddered.  She looked directly at it.  Mossy grooves.  Hard wrinkles of age.  “I should carve their names here.  Wouldn’t that he neat?” she breathed.  

“Yeah.  But the tree’s so old…you shouldn’t hurt it.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t, I’m just saying.  The best thing would be if they were both buried right here.”

“Mm,” Jen grunted, slapping at a mosquito that nuzzled the back of her neck.  She wanted to go.  It was near dusk, too, and she sure didn’t want to be in a graveyard in the dark.  

“I can picture them.”

Jen looked to Diane with a big grin.  “Oh? Doing it right here where we stand, huh?”

“No.  Right here where the tree stands.”

“Yeah, with mosquitoes all over Dave’s rear.” Slap.  

“How is it, Jen…with you and Kevin?”

“Don’t feel bad about it, Diane, you’re only eighteen…you aren’t a
crone
.  It can be excellent and it can be blah and usually it’s somewhere in-between.  You aren’t any less alive than me, Di,
believe
 me.”

Diane was staring blankly down into the grass.  An ant crawled across a mushroom.  “My mind knows that.  My body says different.  Sometimes it hits me so strong.  Like right now.” She swallowed.  “I don’t mean to embarrass you and spill my guts on your feet, but just thinking about that couple on this very spot seventy years ago…doing it in the open air… a huge dark storm gathering above.  Then a lightning bolt hits them…”

Jen chuckled uncomfortably.

“I know,” Diane smiled, “but it does grab you, doesn’t it?”

“I guess.  The analogy or whatever.  But it isn’t always thunder and lightning, Diane…sometimes it’s just a breeze.  I don’t want you to be disappointed later, and build it up now into some dynamic fantasy experience.”

“I know better than to do that,” Diane murmured softly.  When she lifted her gaze she realized Jen was watching her run her flattened palm up and down the darkly glistening dinosaur hide of the oak tree.  

A rustling sound above, maybe a scurrying stirring.  Diane looked up.  A darting form.  Blur of fast-moving life.  A squirrel.  Branches shook.  A small rain of loosed drops pattered across her face.  

*     *     *

The next time Diane was alone, and had her book.  She came several days a week during the remainder of that summer.  Once in a while a few boys on bikes would sail past on the paved paths and she would feel embarrassed…guilty, even, as if she’d been caught arousing herself.  

In a way, she had.  And soon, she did.  

She would sometimes lay the book in her lap, one hand under it, and rest her shoulders and head back against the tree with eyes closed.  She wore a halter top several times so as to feel the bark directly on her pale skin.  Once she even went around behind the giant tree, hidden from the paths, and lowered her halter to embrace the tree, its hard furrows impressing her shy soft breasts and her pimpled cheek.  Afterwards she was shaken, confused, ashamed, and didn’t do that again.  

Autumn came.  She sat in the gold, let it shower her…but with the fall and the first year of college, her thoughts of David McKay and Marie Barnes had begun to dwindle like the leaves.  In the snow she came just once, and stayed under the barren tree on the skull-like mound only a few moments.  She felt nothing.  

Her pimples didn’t leave, only changed location like stars with the passage of time.

She didn’t think to return to the tree until late May.

It was a humid afternoon, advance notice of summer.  The cemetery was not yet burned yellow.  The grass was long already even after last week’s trim for Memorial Day, so full of life and vitality was it.  It was especially lush in the shadows crowning the mound.  

Diane stood a little apart from the tree, hugging herself.  The shade was cool, as if she were in a forest hollow.  She wore shorts and a t-shirt, and much flesh was open to the air.  She actually felt gooseflesh rise on her forearms and rubbed at it.  She neared the tree.  Reached delicately to it.  

It was so cool she almost flinched.  She ran a finger lightly along inside a groove.  An ant traveled in another groove.  Diane took in long slow breaths of the mushroom-darkened air.  

She turned at a faint rustling of the grass near the mammoth roots in time to see a breeze sweep gently down through it.  

Diane came back with her book the next day.

*     *     *

It was dusk, eight-thirty on a July evening.  

Diane had stepped out of her underpants, and trembled as she straightened, hugged her goose-bumped arms across her breasts.  She felt as if her new husband lay on their honeymoon bed watching her, smiling, patting the sheets invitingly.  But she had no husband.  She was alone.  Before her stretched the gravestones almost phosphorescent in the black-grassed gloom.  

The soundless heat lightning lit the horizon, silhouetting tree-tops and the ominous silo.  It was this lightning which had inspired her to ride out here, as if it had summoned her.  With its energy.  Its power.

She was afraid…but her body crawled with hungry ants and fluttered with birds.  See? An ant had just crawled onto her bare foot…but she nervously brushed it away.  

She was waiting.  She didn’t know how to make the first move—she was a virgin.  

Yes you do, she argued with herself.  You’re just afraid.  You tried it before.  You know how.  You’re just afraid to go all the way.

I’m not afraid.  I
want
 this.

She went behind the tree and hugged her nakedness to it.  She closed her eyes and leaned her cheek hard into it, so that it would leave an impression of its bark there when she moved away.  The smell of damp ancient life was so close.  An ant crawled across her lower lip but this time she let it.  A smile hesitantly blossomed.  Diane moaned a little, and nuzzled her nose into the cracked hide.  She extended her tongue and lazily drew it along a groove in the bark.  On the next stroke she probed another.  The ant crawled into her mouth.  She was a bit apprehensive but swallowed it in saliva.  

A bright, silent flash made her open her eyes.

It had grown so much darker in the short time her eyes had been shut, but she could see the grass at the base of the tree swaying.  It rustled.  There was a soft, almost imperceptible rhythm to its stirrings.

Diane moaned, hooking her fingers into the bark’s grooves, watching the grass stir.  

She only heard it once, and she was moaning herself when she heard it so she couldn’t be sure of the moan…

*     *     *

For her brother’s wedding, Jen had gone out of her way to fix Diane up with her cousin Richard, but Diane hadn’t made the effort to dance with him once…even after she told Diane that Richard had shyly confided in her that he found Diane cute and—she swore to God he’d actually said it—sexy.  How could Diane have been so nonchalant, and smilingly so?

Today her shadowy concerns about Diane were pulled into stark daylight.  Diane had called her up, sobbing, nearly frantic.  And here they now stood—at the foot of the mound in Pine Grove Cemetery.  

The mound was yellow.  A vast plateau of a tree stump crowned it.

Diane clung to her friend’s arm.  “How could they
kill
it?
Why?
”