The Bone Parade (21 page)

They lingered over shop windows as they walked back to Ry’s Land Rover. Lauren had the feeling that they both found it uncomfortable to consider the question of whether they’d spend the night together, and right then she decided they would not begin their love life this evening. Something felt off. Maybe it was the phase of the moon. Maybe it was hearing about Ashley Stassler. More likely it was just a quirkiness on her part, but it didn’t matter: she wanted them to start off in sync.

“Did you know that Kerry had a boyfriend?” Ry said as he started the Land Rover.

“No, I didn’t. Here or in Portland?”

“Here. She met him the day she arrived. His name’s Jared.”

“Did Stassler tell you about him?”

Ry nodded as he pulled away from the curb.

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know, but Stassler said he told the sheriff about him. He figures they talked to him right away.”

“Maybe we should too.”

“That’s a good idea.”

But they didn’t talk to each other again until they reached his motel, when the awkwardness Lauren had felt back in town became downright acute, rife with all the possibilities of what could go wrong, what had gone wrong with Chad and the others too. She said good night as soon as he pulled into the space next to her car.

“All right. Good night.” He looked and sounded perplexed. She could hardly blame him. “Do I get a kiss?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. But this smile came with effort too, and he must have sensed it.

“Lauren, what’s wrong? It’s not that crap Stassler said, is it? You’re a great artist.”

“No, I don’t think it’s that, and I’m not a ‘great’ artist. I’m a sculptor of limited renown, and a pretty damn good teacher who’s in Moab to try to find out what the hell happened to her best student. And I feel out of sorts and really, really wish I didn’t.”

He cracked open his door. “I guess I’ll see you in the morning then?”

“That sounds good.”

“Do you want to meet here, or at your hotel?”

“Why don’t you come to the hotel, and then we can find a place to eat downtown.”

He leaned across the seat and kissed her, and she remembered the soft invitation of his lips. Even on a trying night like this, they were as welcome as the smooth hands that settled on her face and cupped her cheeks with warmth.

Al Jenkins was at his perch behind the desk of the Green Glow Inn when she and Leroy returned. They’d made it to the stairs before he looked up from his book and asked where she’d gone to dinner.

“A Thai place,” she said.

“Must be Manny’s.”

“Manny?”

“Manny Santiago’s got the Thai Joint and the Burrito Barn. Most successful restaurateur in town. How was the grub?”

“Okay.” She sounded tired. “I liked the spring rolls.”

“You’re being nice. Manny’s food stinks, but no one comes to Moab for the fine cuisine. They come to bike, or go jeeping, but you don’t look like the bike or Jeep type. What’s your story anyway, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“No, I don’t mind. Did you hear about the girl who disappeared?”

“The one whose face is on those posters all over town?”

“Yes, Kerry Waters. She’s a student of mine.”

“So you’re a teacher?”

“Actually, an associate professor.”

“Let me tell you something.” Al leaned his head over the desk as Lauren and Leroy walked back toward him. “You know all that stuff they’re saying about her ending up in some abandoned mine by accident? That’s what they’re saying, right?”

“That’s what I’ve heard.”

Al shook his head. “I been in this town all my life, my daddy was a miner, and every time someone comes up missing they blame it on an abandoned mine, like there’s a whole slew of them out there waiting to gobble up anybody stupid enough to step off a trail. They make it sound like those mines are nothing but big old vacuum cleaners sucking those folks right off the face of the earth.”

Lauren studied him. Al Jenkins looked serious, and intelligent, a man who once could have commanded the attention of a room simply by walking in the door.

“What are you saying?” she said.

“What I’m saying is that they should be blaming the people that
pushed
them into the mine in the first place. A mine’s dark, and a mine’s deep. And it’s filled with a lot of things you don’t want to meet. You figure out who wants them in there, and you got yourself the killer.”

He settled back on his stool.

A chill trailed Lauren all the way upstairs. She shivered as she climbed into bed. She pulled the spread up around her neck and tried to fall asleep, but she couldn’t stop thinking about Al Jenkins’ final words: “… and you got yourself the killer.”

E
VENTUALLY
, J
UNE WILL FIGHT, WILL
blister her heart with her hatred of me, but for now she turns away and meekly puts her hands behind her back so I can reach through the bars of the cage with the cuffs. She even casts a kindly eye on Jolly Roger, and he, as addled as ever, waves to her.
Waves!
Doesn’t rush to hug her, much less to try to hold her back from the horror. He waves as she steps to the door. And he must suspect, as June does, that this is their final parting. I took the impressions of their backs yesterday. They saw
#8
’s young girl, so they know the possibilities. I wanted them to know. But perhaps they still fall prey to hope, or prayer. That’s so sweet, sickeningly sweet, hilarious in a wretched sort of way when the sorriest among them start mumbling the most predictable of all prayers:
Our Father Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name.
Blah, blah, blah, I whisper in their ear. Blah, blah, blah … Your God is not in heaven. Your God is me.
I’m
the one who decides if you live or die. You’ll see. You’ll see. So try praying to me, and forget your goddamned God. They do too, for the little it’s worth. I like to leave them bereft of
all
hope, especially in a God so impotent that he can’t even get it up to save them.

I have June walk ahead of me. She slouches, her shrill defiance is gone. She may believe she’s resigned to her fate, whatever it is, but I know better. I know that none of them truly surrenders. I simply won’t permit it. I need their most furious resistance, and one way or another, I always get it.

Their bodies have come around nicely, even Jolly Roger’s. While he’s hardly a candidate for the cover of a muscle magazine, he’s as buff now as he’ll ever be. It didn’t take long to bring out their definition, not after weeks of rigid dieting melted away all that fat. It’s easy to see a freshly pumped biceps without a pound of blubber in the way. But sculpting them with diet and weight lifting only roughed out their form. The real fine art begins now, when I take them out of the cage and strap them to the table. That’s when I sculpt their minds, their deepest, most tender fears, the thoughts and images that leave them insane with the sharp edge of every passing second. I’m not overstating this in the least. Trust me, you’ll see, for once they are on the table, there’s no lollygagging. I always rise to the challenge of a new subject, and I find the prospect of doing so again tonight nothing short of intoxicating.

June’s in her freshly laundered sweats. Freshly bathed too. I despise the smell of a sour body. I want only the scent of fear when I go to work on them for the last time. This morning June bathed, as did Jolly Roger, Sonny-boy, and Diamond Girl. Only Her Rankness refused, apparently determined to earn every stripe of her sobriquet. In time, peer pressure would force her to bathe, if she were to have both time and peers; but these are huge questions marks for Her Rankness, whose fate lies not so much in the balance, as in my mood of the moment. My interest in her whispered intimacies with Diamond Girl has faltered. I’d hoped, no, I had imagined much more from the two of them: young girls, caged together, barely clothed, would surely bow to the hormonal imperatives of prison. As it is, I’m left with an extra body lying around, and I’m still puzzling about what to do with her. Even if I could display her, an absurd and self-defeating notion because of her link to me, her form does not intrigue me enough to cast, and her skeleton would provide not even a grace note to the bone parade. In short, she does not inspire me to do anything with her at all. Let her languish until she turns as pale as an aphid. To be truthful, my only impulse is to ignore her. If I cared at all, I could compel her to do any number of things, including bathing, violating whatever sense of modesty and decorum she no doubt possesses in measures wholly out of proportion to her appeal. But that would be a misdirection, a terrible allocation of energy when I have so much to do, and so little time in which to do it. She can fester in her stink for all I care.

I see that June’s eyes are wet. Her suspicions are turning to certainty as I order her to lie faceup on the table. Her family and Her Rankness line up at the cage to watch, though Sonny-boy is already turning away, beginning to bawl loudly. I’d give him a medal for this, so effective is he at reminding June of why she must offer me each wrist, each ankle, even as the alginate awaits her. Yesterday, as I worked the green gum into the rich valley of her fine buttocks, I told her that eunuchs make the best lovers. I repeat this now as I strap her down. Eunuchs make the best lovers, June. Just ask the Pope, or any sultan of the Turkish crown. Eunuchs (I use the word often for its frightful effect) have but one means of arousal, June, and they use it with a hunger known only to the most profoundly afflicted. They become
promiscuous
, June. Like the fingers of little girls free to explore for the very first time, eunuchs scamper among errant pleasures and renegade erections. And Sonny-boy has such a sweet fanny. I’ve seen it often, June, so lie still and don’t fight me, not yet, or I will bring him here and make you watch. I will make you study the carefully applied tourniquet once known only to bishops and sovereigns and the boys to whom they devoted themselves so smugly. The knots and ties and twists of cord that saved lives and created such perfect, round-bottomed lovers. You see, June, your fears back at the house were not completely incorrect. You wanted to satisfy me in the hope that I would spare the children. And you hope this still, don’t you? But you’re about to see that I can’t be sated by your body, only by your most indulgent death. Do you hear me, June? Your most
indulgent
death. You will be free to experience every sensation fully, richly, gloriously, and though your thanks will never come, your gratitude will be cast in bronze.

I bring out the dark rubber ball that protrudes from the middle of a thick black strap.

“Open your mouth.”

She does this, but to protest, or to question me, bore me with “Why …” but I jam it in with a viciousness she hasn’t seen, could never anticipate, and as she gags I crank the buckle as tight as a fat man who’s trying to make his belly disappear. It will take her a minute or two to realize that the pain of the hard rubber ball is worse than the buckle digging into the back of her head. Until then, the ball and the buckle will feel like lovers trying desperately to copulate through her skull.

Alginate, dear June. It’s your friend.

Now the fight begins. It’s inevitable. No matter how self-sacrificing a mother, the body rebels, becomes the rage of slaves in open insurrection, slaves whose heads no longer bow in hope but rise in hate. I’ve seen this so often that it’s as predictable as rain, as tears, as the rushing waters that carve the most beautiful canyons.

So revel in your revenge, June the Cleaver, take it all out on me. I want to see every inch of your body’s rebellion. Die with hate curling your lips, broiling alive the cilia of your lungs.

I cut off her sweats. She has become marvelously lithe, always the overachiever, right June? She is appealing, and her legs are open, her sex available. I try to envision the cast. Do I want her vulva swollen, or in repose? This is also part of the sculpting, what I do with the sexual apparatus of the body. Some women had bodies that begged the violation I gave them, and have appeared ever since with the ruffles of flesh that define a well-satisfied woman in the momentary aftermath of intercourse, with whatever instrument I’ve chosen, producing “a singular sexual madness,” according to the critic who liked this effect the most. Need I tell you he was a man? Who else could romanticize such derangement, though I hardly share the affliction, honoring as I do the separation of art from the artist. I am not that madness. I am but the medium of its expression, and this difference is not so slight as it might seem.

She must be shaved. This is a sudden inspiration. I can’t answer the question of her vulva until I can see it clearly. I leave her strapped to the table while I steam towels and gather tools. These I do with some measure of practice, and return to my labors only to hear the baubles of conversation between June and her hubby. These cease with my appearance, and I will have to check the tape to see if they contain anything more than the most predictable pleas that punctuate certain lives at such moments.

The towels are hot, but not scalding, and after recoiling from the shock of their touch, June relaxes. I squeeze the nozzle, and take pleasure in the way the aquamarine gel transforms itself into a white foam as I rub it into her pubic hair. She squirms at my touch, and I smile because I know from past experience that if she’s squirming now, her body will be screaming later. It’s the very best prognosticator of pain, this aversion to all touch. It makes the greater violation as deep as the universe, and as horrifying to contemplate, the finite space of infinite pain.

Though I am sorely tempted to slip in a finger, two, maybe three, I force myself to abstain. If I choose to sculpt her as a sexual woman, then I will violate her with all the enthusiasm the act demands; but if I want her like this, with her outsides all but crawling into her insides to get away from me, then she must remain unmolested.

I use a straight-edge razor. I strop the blade against a leather strap, and find the whisking sounds so pleasing. Then I kneel between her legs and scrape away great tufts of black hair that swim in a sea of white cream. The purity of the colors, the arc of the spectrum here, is nothing less than bewitching. I’m extraordinarily careful not to cut her. I want to save myself from the odd nick that bleeds through the cream and black strands. While I’ll admit that even the tiniest trickle possesses a lush insurgent beauty of its own, I prefer the stark clarity of black and white, and care not at all for the phony intrepidness of blood.