The Bone Parade (25 page)

“You see that out there?”

Lauren tried, but could not make out what he was pointing to.

“Here, hold on.” He shrugged off his small backpack and took out a monocular, then stood like a pirate as he focused the lens. He reached back and handed it to her.

“Look below that peak at about ten o’clock.”

She saw a house, barn, and a flat brick building. “Is that Stassler’s place?”

“It sure is. She was so stoked about working with him at first. You know, I met her the first day she was here, and she practically bragged about him to me. But by the time we made our ride up here, she said she didn’t care if the whole place blew up.”

Lauren continued to study the compound through the monocular, but privately wondered why Kerry had never shared her misgivings.

“You see those hills by the compound?” Jared said.

She nodded. They looked like hefty humps rising from behind his house, though with the monocular’s compression of distance she doubted they were that close.

“A lot of that is his land too.”

“Is that a river running through there?” she said.

“Yeah, that’s the Green River. This time of year it gets some mondo rapids.”

“Do you know if they ever did any mining on his land?”

Jared put his hand out for the monocular. “I’ve heard that they mined all over. I guess they could have mined there too. It’s a huge ranch. She could be anywhere.”

“Anywhere there?” Is that what he was saying?

“Could be. Whatever happened to her was done to her. You know how you can feel something like that in your bones?”

Lauren nodded. So did Ry. The three of them stared silently into the distance.

On the way back down, Lauren almost flew off a five-foot drop, which was precisely what Jared had done, racing off its lip and landing some twenty feet beyond without even a wobble of his wheels.

Lauren braked, skidded, and managed to follow Ry as he threaded down an easier route. They didn’t catch up to Jared until he stopped by the dogleg that led to the pool.

“I thought you guys might want to hit it. I’m going to go back, but you should do it while you can.”

“What about getting back to town?” she said.

“That’s easy. Just go back to the highway the way we came and hang a right. It won’t take you more than fifteen minutes, and it’s almost all downhill. Believe me, it’s worth it.”

Is he smirking, Lauren wondered, or smiling?

“What do you think?” Ry said to her. “I think a dip in the pool would be great.”

“I do too,” she said with finality. She reached for Jared’s hand and thanked him for the ride. “And for talking to us.”

“You still think I’m guilty?”

Ry shook his head.

“What about you?” he pressed Lauren.

“The jury’s still out.” But she was smiling, and was sure the young man knew what she was really thinking. She could feel it in her bones.

When they rode up to the pool, Lauren looked around for signs of bikers, hikers, anyone who might intrude on their privacy. No one.

They stashed their bikes between two of the boulders, and hurried toward the trickling sound of the water streaming from the hanging moss. Ry stripped down as naturally as Joy had in the studio. Lauren took a deep breath and also peeled off her clothes.

The water felt cooler than the air temperature, but by no means cold, and she felt pleasantly weightless in its soft formless bosom.

They drifted separately before his foot touched her leg. An accident? She didn’t think so; when she opened her eyes, she found him smiling at her.

“A penny for your thoughts,” he said.

“They’re worth a whole lot more than that,” she teased.

He eased over to her, and she ducked playfully beneath the surface, eyes open to the silly sight of his penis lolling freely in the water.

She had to resist the impulse to reach for it. She came back up into his arms and kissed him, and then when she did reach down she found that he wasn’t quite so limp as he had been moments before.

His hands encircled her waist, and drew her close. It felt as natural as their buoyancy for her own hands to settle on his hips, her fingertips on the tops of his buttocks. All the tension she’d felt the night before had dissolved somewhere between the start of the trail, and this moment. She’d have to thank Jared for suggesting so strongly that they stop here, if she ever got to know him well enough for such a confidence.

Ry took his turn ducking down, kissing her belly and breasts before taking each nipple in his mouth and suckling her softly, then with an urgency that surprised her.

He broke the surface gasping for air, his face a magnificent picture of water droplets and desire. She reached down and took him again in hand, pressing him close, not sure if this would work. She felt excited, very excited, but the only time she’d tried this with Chad it had been painful, and they’d both ended up lurching for shore.

But Ry slipped right in, and she realized that her own wetness was more than equal to the water.

He cupped her bottom as she wrapped her legs around him and filled with pleasure. She squeezed him, hungry for his hardness, and forced herself forward. Their hands swam all over each other, finding pleasure, and then groping impatiently for more.

Her back settled against a mossy rock, and she arched her spine to consume every bit of him. The trickle of the stream fell beside them as his hands finally rose to her face. He kissed her repeatedly, and her mouth opened as readily as leaves in the desert to an early morning mist.

Her fingers dallied over each of his features, and she kissed his wet nose and eyes, feeling his lashes on her lips as the softest of burrs, and tracing the tip of her tongue along the curlicues of his outer ear, listening to him moan, growing more excited by the pleasure she gave, squeezing him as he moved in and out, the motion growing rapid, more fevered.

“I can’t stop myself,” he confessed.

This excited her even more, to see the helplessness on his face, to feel him so out of control, and to know that she alone had done this to him, was doing it even now, squeezing him, kissing him, pressing her eager breasts into his chest as his thrusts grew desperate and deeper still, and then to feel him all the way up inside her, his pelvis hard and flat and muscular against her own, the sweet friction that would not cease, not even after he came and made her come too, with his interest, his desire, his unwillingness to do anything in these sweetly private moments but hold her tightly away from the world.

O
YE OF LITTLE FAITH.
I stare at the monitor and repeat these joyous words to myself because I have underestimated Diamond Girl, and I couldn’t be more pleased.

There she is cuddling, embracing,
kissing
Her Rankness, the two of them like furtive lovers huddling behind a bush. The sight leaves me almost paralyzed with pleasure.

This revelation comes at the end of a very long twenty-four hours, and I rewind the tape to six this morning, when I dragged Sonny-boy out of there and left them alone with each other for the very first time. Were they kissing even as I turned my back to them and took his impression, as I tried mightily to make the boy mature, to outgrow the narrow, narcissistic concerns of childhood?

I must know. I hit
PLAY
when I see Diamond Girl whispering into Her Rankness’s ear. I can’t hear a word. Her Rankness whispers back. Sweet nothings? From the evidence, what else could it be? Now the tape reveals the first truly intimate moment: Diamond Girl looks into her lover’s eyes, caresses her shoulders, and Her Rankness—this
does
surprise me—offers no resistance, not even at first. Instead, she succumbs with a smile as Diamond Girl’s touch drifts to her chest, her hips, her firm round bottom.

It
moves
me. It’s as if Diamond Girl—and it must be at the instigation of Diamond Girl, so inconceivable is it that Her Rankness could ever initiate anything so supremely, delightfully depraved as to have sex in the immediate presence of murder—has once again reached into the most fertile of my fantasies and flooded them with desire, brought them to bloom with this raw, indulgent, highly explicit display.

Fingers, yes, now at this very moment her nimble eager fingers are down in her own underpants, knuckles bulging against the satiny fabric. She must know that if I see them I won’t be able to look away, that I will be struck motionless by the sight of them. Indeed, I do stand here like those legion of husbands who cannot grow excited but for the image of their wives, their homely conservative wives, on their knees receiving with their papery lips the boldly erect penis of a stranger as another man lifts her decorous skirt and prepares to couple her rudely from behind. Husbands—and I have read the research and know there are many who are mad for such a lewd, sluttish show—who imagine their wives growing wanton, crazed, uncontrollable from such untoward attention.

This is my Diamond Girl, whore and harlot, seducer and strumpet, igniting in me the same storied emotions, the desire to see her taken, mounted, making even Her Rankness erotic by association. Her Rankness! Whose top is up around her throat like a necklace, and whose breasts I see—yes, I
do
see, cannot look away, even from her—are firm and pointy in the manner of all the small-breasted young women around here who ride their bikes until their buttocks are hard and round and randy.

I feel I could be hallucinating, such has been my final experience with the Vandersons. I did create a Frankenstein with Jolly Roger. After I dispatched June, he became wholly unruly. Those bowls he pounded into the earth could have filled with his tears, so struck was he with grief. He was yet another sharp reminder of how unpredictable the human animal can be. I had him pegged as a pushover, a cipher, but in the wee hours I realized that he was one of those creatures who couldn’t believe in darkness until he’d stared into the deepest shadow. Then he underwent a change so profound that it was frightening. All his dopey-headed optimism, his enduring belief in the ultimate safety of himself and his family, of my ultimate goodness, I suppose, once all that had been torn from his chest and left to drip before his eyes like a heart on a bloody stake, he became a beast who swore and stomped and tore at the cage as if to slam it to the ground and march across the room and kill me. His fury was far more powerful than anything I could have conjured up with words, and I realized that in his dying moments I would not have to coax resistance from him as I did from June and from so many others because he had found his own true rage for the first time in his life, and as with any other fresh discovery the rules of display—the boundaries and borders—had yet to be drawn.

No, the challenge with Jolly Roger was getting him on that table, strapping him down. He would not accept the lie of Sonny-boy’s survival in exchange for his own skin (yes-yes, another pun. Enjoy!). He held Sonny-boy against him like a shield, and Sonny-boy held him—surely I can say this—in a
death
grip.

So there I was, tired, impatient, cranky, with a huge workload ahead of me, all kinds of details to attend to, and there were Jolly Roger and Sonny-boy clinging to each other while Diamond Girl and Her Rankness looked on, Diamond Girl in visible amusement, and Her Rankness in what I would have described at the time as horror. But I question this now, question both her state
and
my perception of it, so unsteadied am I by the girly sex I am witnessing on these screens.

I had to threaten Jolly Roger with the worst abominations to Sonny-boy’s body, and point the gun right at the boy’s crotch before he willed himself to the side of the cage and placed his hands behind his back.

There was still the problem of Sonny-boy clinging to his leg like lice. I was all but ready to shoot him off (bullet holes be damned), as you would a locked door handle, when Diamond Girl led him away. The boy, perhaps as shocked as I was by his sister’s sudden display of kindness, let himself be comforted. He buried his face in her chest and began to wail as I reached in and cuffed Jolly Roger, placed him in leg irons (I was taking no chances), and locked the cage behind us. I even saw Diamond Girl whispering to him as I spoke to their father.

“I don’t want your kids,” I assured Jolly Roger as I strapped him to the table. “They’re pawns for you and June.”

I didn’t disabuse him of this until I had the last strap as tense as a steel cable, and the black ball in his mouth. Then I told him what I really had in mind for Sonny-boy, the pride and joy of his progeny.

Frankenstein.

When Sonny-boy’s turn came, he never fought me, and there was little I could do to kindle a real fire in his flesh, only the reflection of pain, a pallid substitute for scorching terror; and if that’s all my work can show, then why bother? But that’s always the problem with kids: they simply don’t have enough life experience to appreciate a truly terrifying death. Terror thrives on the bottomless pit of the imagination, and the imagination comes to life with the passage of time. Time is its vintner, the family its fertile field. Only as a child comes of age, passes through puberty with its rude surprises and brute understanding that all he knows of life can be replicated ad nauseam—the mother, the father, the sister, the brother, the aunts and uncles and grannies and grandpas with their wet kisses and smothering hugs and suffocating smells—only then can he refract pain through the undying prism of terror, only then can the shadow skin come to life, the one that I urge into the unknowing unconscious of the viewer, that invisible organ of agony that hovers just above my sculptured bodies and makes you
feel
every inch of them, and tremble when you do so. My
Family Planning
series has made the invisible to the indelible the shortest of journeys.

Their “skins” lie next to one another in the foundry: June, Jolly Roger, Sonny-boy, green lengths that seem to me as if they are my greatest work to date. I can’t be sure of this until I cast them, but when I look at June’s twisted pelvis, or Jolly Roger’s arms, so newly developed, veiny and embossed with raw muscle, I am hopeful. As for the dreary appearance of Sonny-boy, I can say only that he looks no worse than the other children in the series. Maybe it’s enough to simply depict their pain, though I have not given up, have read scores of studies about children and terror, many of them about children in war, and expect to make some significant breakthroughs in the future.