John Shirley - Wetbones (11 page)

"Sure," Mitch said. He was sort of hungry. Queasy but hungry. "I'll eat it, Sam." All the questions were hiding just back of Mitch's teeth. Was it possible to ask this guy questions? Could a person even do it?

"And the vitamins!" the More Man said, setting the tray on Mitch's lap. "This one is Vitamin A. The carrot juice has a lot of A in it too! Good for healing! Needja strong! Got big happenins' comin down! The vibes are all there!"

"Great," Mitch said. What was he talking about? Songwriting?

"Record deals cookin' ", the More Man said, winking. "Hang in there. Sufferin' builds character - you're almost there. Just hang loose and heal. Record companies snappin' at my heels."

Mitch knew, this time, with a bedrock certainty, that the More Man was lying. There never had been any career in the making. Not for Mitch.

But. Say anything. Just say anything, Mitch told himself. Anything he'll like. "Great, rad, I'm stoked, Sam!"

"Just let ol' Handy take care of you!" The More Man flashed a fluorescent grin at him and started for the door.

Panic. "Uh - Sam! Listen - the pain. I need, I dunno, something. To chill out behind. It . . ."

"I'll get you a painkiller, just a little, wouldn't want you to get hooked!" The More Man chattered, opening the door, bouncing his head a little on his shoulders like Ronald Reagan used to do when he was in a good mood. Sort of like an excited cockatoo.

Sometimes there was a squirming at the More Man's crotch. Sometimes his eyes dimmed with euphoria. Sometimes his smile became a rictus.

"I was thinking of the Head Syrup . . . I mean, the Reward." Mitch said. Heart pounding. Hooked? He was already fucking hooked.

The More Man's smile went out like a popped

lightbulb. He turned Mitch a look of sucking vagueness. "Rewards have to be earned," he said, lifelessly.

And Mitch was relieved when the More Man went out and shut the door behind him. Even though he locked it.

Mitch made himself eat the meal. Take the vitamins, washed down with carrot juice. The Handy Man came in and brought him a cap of something, maybe a "dilly", judging by the way Mitch was feeling after taking it. Feeling like he was melting into his bed. A dilaudid. The pain ebbed . . . the starved and beaten dog in his gut dreamed about being a happy and stupid puppy . . .

A noise outside the door. Sounded like it was down the hall a little, but coming closer.

Mitch opened his eyes and stared at the door and, after a minute, it came into focus. He listened.

It wasn't the Handy Man's padding footsteps. It was a dry, scraping sound, like something being dragged or . . . more like crawling. It kept going. After a while it was gone.

4
The Outskirts of Bakersfield, California

The guy was kind of cute, Constance thought. He had a nice smile.

He's got a nice dick too, Ephram told her. Yes, she thought dutifully, he's got a nice dick.

When Ephram told her things, it didn't come like words in her head. Just little pushes of idea, maybe a picture or two. But Ephram was in there with her, all right.

She knew his name was Ephram, by now. She knew some other stuff about him, too. She knew that Ephram was a murderer. She had glimpsed it through the kaleidoscope strobing of mental ideation. He was a murderer, but he didn't let her care about that.

They were admiring the young man in a
Sizzler
steakhouse. The man was sitting across the aisle from them, a few booths up. He had long, wavy brown hair past his shoulders and a new-looking Levi jacket and a gold watch. There were some keys on the table with a

little plastic BMW tab on them. He had a nice face that looked slightly Latin.
And probably a nice dick. A nice dick, A nice dick. A nice cock. A big fucking cock
.

Constance had eaten most of her steak, though she didn't feel like eating. But she was afraid of what Ephram would do if she didn't. This was the second night they'd stopped at a
Sizzler
. The time before they'd had the All You Can Eat Shrimp Dinner and Constance hadn't wanted much so Ephram had jolted her in the Rewards, gave her a flush of pleasure if she so much as looked at the Shrimp, and even more if she ate it, so she did, she ate it, and ate more of it and more of it, and he sat there silently laughing, his jowls shaking, watching her, jolting her with pain if she complained that her stomach was too full, jolting her with pleasure when she ate more, so that even the big guys in the restaurant who could polish off five platesful, even they stared at her when she went back for number seven, and she wanted to cry but Ephram wouldn't let her, he kept making her eat, Constance wolfing the stuff down noisily and rapidly, till she threw up, she projectile-vomited half-chewed shrimp across the table and then he made her eat some of that and enjoy it and everyone was afraid to come over and tell her to stop and then they left, Ephram pasting a hundred dollar bill to the cash register with some of her vomit, "just to pay for her disgusting mess", and she'd tried to run away again and he'd punished her terribly as they drove away . . .

So tonight she ate her steak.

She looked out the window. Headlights like stars going two by two fell horizontally along the horizon (what was up and what was down? Constance didn't know, she didn't think anyone knew) under a sky heavy with slate and indigo . . . Nearer were the motel signs,

the gas stations and fast food places, this place so like the last town it was as if the day of slow driving hadn't happened, as if they hadn't travelled hundreds of miles.

"Come on, Constance," Ephram said aloud, as the young man Ephram had picked got up lithely and went to the door.

They followed him. Constance wanted to warn him but she didn't try, she knew Ephram wouldn't let her.

And why should she? (Was that her own thought or Ephram's? She wasn't sure). Why should she warn him? She had seen the world as she had never seen it before. Just watching TV with Ephram, she had seen it anew.

"Look there," Ephram had said. "Ethiopia, the government murdering thousands of its own people. Look there, our own government playing footsy with the Khmer Rouge after they murdered millions of innocent people. Look there, the industrialists are poisoning us - everyone knows they poison our air and water and people die as a result, but they feel no remorse, these men, and we are all too greedy for our economic comforts to truly punish them. Look there, how many thousands of rapes every week? How many murders? How many children are locked in closets or used for sex? How many
infants
used for sex? How many men have made how much money making nerve gas? Look there! The man who invented the Neutron bomb is on CNN, sweating with desire, urging that we use his toy on the enemy! How much murder are we considering, at his behest? Constance, did you hear that? Fifty thousand children die, every day, around the world, from famine! Think of the vast scale of the suffering! In Burma, in Ceylon, in Guatemala, people are murdered at the convenience of the government - but we are safe here, aren't we? Those of us free of persecution - what

do we have? If we're not beaten to death by men with baseball bats at our ATMs; if we are not dying of cancer on the fringe of some nuclear power plant, why . . . what do we have? What is our reward? Television and beer! Then:
death!
Or worse: abandonment to psychopathic strangers in nursing homes. Slow suffering! The horror of Death!
Annihilation!

"Let us at least be ourselves, Constance! Let us at least prey before we are preyed on! Let us reward ourselves and take part in the slaughter instead of being the slaughtered! Let us not mouth the lie that the world was not made for murder!"

He'd said all that. She wasn't quite sure if he'd ever said it aloud.

"Hi," she said to the handsome young man in the Levi jacket. Walking up to him in the parking lot of his motel. "What's your name?"

He looked at her, and at Ephram, then back at her. He swallowed. "Darryl. And uh what's - "

"Eloise. And this is Benny. We're kind of bored - my friend just likes to watch . . ."

Darryl's eyes widened. Then he hemmed and hawed and flustered for a minute or two. Finally he said, "Wow. That'd be kind of weird . . ."

"Actually he doesn't have to watch. He could just listen, in the bathroom. People hear you anyway. In the next room."

"That's true. What the heck."

She could tell he was thinking that he'd have a good story to tell his friends, about the kinky old dude and his weird little mistress.

Darryl glanced at Ephram, who was standing a few paces away. Not looking at them, but staring up at a clutch of stars glimmering in a cloudbreak. Ephram

stared at stars a lot and seemed to see things in them. Sometimes he talked to them.

"Uh . . ." Darryl said. "Your place, or . . . ?"

"Yours," Ephram said, not taking his eyes from the shining stars.

Darryl led the way. Opened the door for both of them. Hemmed and hawed a bit more. Constance scarcely noticed, as Ephram was lacing up her brain with soft snakes of pleasure, making the feelings slither down her spine and through her groin and up again to nest thickly over the empty place that she used to call her Heart . . . so she couldn't feel the emptiness . . . and she simply took off her clothes and drank some of Darryl's Blue Nun and then let him play with her body for awhile and then she rolled over on top of him . . .

"Oh yeah," he said, "I like it when a girl's on top."

Constance not thinking, just doing, with Ephram's star-glimmery fingers inside her brain like a hand fitting perfectly into a glove; Constance slipping Darryl's penis inside her (rewarded with a blaze of pleasure that made her arch her back, which Darryl mistakenly took for something she got from him) and reached behind her to Ephram as he stepped from the bathroom to give her the knife . . .

The room was dark except for the pushy crowding motion of the TV light and a deader shine that came in through the white-curtained window. Not far away, outside, the freeway made noises. Different cars and trucks had their different pitches. Sometimes a big semi sent a faint shake through the building. The light from a
Pizza Hut
sign - one of the really amazingly high signs towering to be seen from the freeway - shone through the curtains in one corner of the window, and you could see wavery red outlines of some of the letters on the

motel room wall. She could make out a
P
and a
Z
and an
H
and a
T
. Darryl had the wall-mounted colour TV on near the foot of the bed, MTV with the sound turned off, one of those fast-edited designer jeans commercials came on, and then Downtown Julie Brown with her hand on her hip, mincing and prancing,
wubba-wubba
, and then a Sting video (she wished she could watch it, she always thought Sting was cute . . . a flash of punishment for that . . . then a rewarding flush of pleasure as she thought: No, I'd rather fuck this guy and use the knife). And the noise of a crying baby and angry voices and slamming car doors from the parking lot and a thin honking from the freeway; a splinter of light from a truck flashing its highbeams, caught and spun through the Blue Nun bottle . . .

She cut off his nipples first. The knife was so sharp, they came off easily. The Niagara of pleasure that Ephram sent through him meshed with horror right in the middle of his face and the confusion was kind of funny (wasn't it?), a logjam of expressions and the blood welling prettily in the bluish TV light. Darryl, of course, briefly tried to escape but that was cut short by Ephram's ghost-hands working in the boy's brain, paralyzing him, then giving him a jolt of pleasure, making him giggle and making his face like The Joker, a horrible smile up to his ears almost, pasted there even when she starts to saw up the middle of his stomach with the knife, opening it up like with a can-opener (Next time, Ephram said, we
will
use a can-opener. and all the time her hips pumping on his cock which stayed hard because Ephram had control of that too, her vagina sucking, milking the semen out of him as the knife pulled the other lifebloods out of the belly and isn't it pretty inside, really, when you look at it just right and

feel the molten wax of pleasure up your spine smothering your heart, and
Just get into it,
Constance told herself, it was the only way to get away from what you were doing, just nestle deep inside the pleasure that Ephram gave you . . .

Perhaps, Ephram thought, I'm going too far with her too soon . . . This is the third stupid young man in as many nights and Constance will be losing her brain's capacity for pleasure soon (remarkable how the brain never really lost the capacity for suffering: your delicious irony, my Lord) if he didn't ease up and give her time to restore herself . . . perhaps put her on some sort of tranquilizer for a few days . . . Ephram himself feeling the strain of controlling her and the men. Perhaps that strain making him careless, that and his greed for sensation. Three murders in three days along the same route. He really should get rid of the Porsche; he'd found himself putting it off, one gets attached to a fine car. Soon . . . With luck, the other two bodies hadn't been found yet. Yes, that's it girl, now put the knife in his hands and I'll make him suck on its wet blade so that the blade makes ribbons of his tongue . . .

Ephram, meanwhile, slipping up behind the girl and sliding his mercifully small member up into her anus.

Ha ha, if her father could see her now!

Ephram wondered briefly if the postcard he'd made her write had convinced the police she was just another runaway. It should have. He shouldn't have sent that one, though he'd made her cross out the signal she'd tried to send - and of course he'd punished her severely for that - but he'd been tired, feeling lazy, and they had no more stamps in the shop and he wanted to get it done so he'd sent it off instead of making another card. She'd

scribbled over it well, so it shouldn't be a problem. So, he asked himself, why are you letting it nag at you? Concentrate on the pleasures at hand.

But there was another distraction: Ephram saw something from the corner of his eye, that made him freeze. Was it some errant shadow from the TV set?