John's Wife

by Robert Coover

  Rex, though invited to the party, missed all this, his odor not among those that Pauline sniffed out, nor would she have recognized it had it been, for he was not of this place. He of those mighty pecs, traps, and dorsals that Nevada so admired was at the moment jogging toward the road out to his motel, mission accomplished (not of this place, not yet, but soon), not exactly as he’d scored it, but close enough that the original tune could still be heard. He’d been surprised when the scrawny dweeb who’d stolen the truck turned up in old Stu’s office out of nowhere like that, but he’d struck him a quick blow with the rifle butt that had caved his wispy-haired conk in like an overripe melon. Okay, so forget the old vendetta against John, my man, play the changes, improvise: put the rifle in the dingaling’s hands and let Stu shoot him with the pistol, the perfect crime. He’d pulled the door closed, arranged both bodies, turned to load Stu’s handgun, and when he’d turned back the door was still closed but the dingaling was gone. The next thing he’d heard: a van driving away. Hey, more to think about, but no sweat, back to the main theme. The head. Get John. He’d been tempted to speed things up with a car off the lot, why not, the place was half his now, he could take a new Connie for a spin, for example, but, no, play it like it’s written, man, save the joyrides for your fat tomorrows. More problems at the airport where he’d intended to return the murder weapon to John’s gun cabinet, but this time found the office door locked. He was just resolving that when the police showed up with some drunken tourists, and he thought for a bad moment he might have to waste all these people, few of whom seemed armed, but none friendly. Not a pretty thought, but life was like that sometimes. When the ancient bumpkin with the long snout reached for his rifle, he figured he’d have to be the first to go, but then it leaked through to his hyped-up nut that these yoyos thought he was on their side. So he was. Cool, man. What’s your story? They had to go shoot a woman. Sounded like a dead moose hunt to Rex, not his scene, but he went along with them until he could find a chance to break away. The redneck copper made it easy for him by posting him as a rearguard tailgunner, the only witnesses to his stealthy withdrawal being the preacher’s kid and some buddy, sitting by themselves in a ditch he was cutting through on his way out of the woods. He recognized the little dumbfuck more by his sudden panic than by his plastered-up face, which looked like a hockey mask glowing faintly in the dark. By now he’d shed the ax, so Rex just grinned as he loped past and chanted out an “Our Father,” his retreat marred only by the shit he had to slop through at the bottom of the ditch. Speaking of slopping in shit, he had a score to settle with old Daph next time he saw her: the bitch had lost her nerve, her tip-off meaning the body’d been found much too soon to suit him. But not tonight, she could sweat this one out on her own. Tonight, after this long run: a good shower, a joint, some jazz, and then, never know, Nevada might drop by, they could celebrate their latest business successes together. A pair of real tycoons, they were. A Porsche came bombing up from behind, roared past, making his sweats flap, then screeched to a spitting fishtailing halt a few hundred yards ahead. Rex knew this wet dream machine. He’d had to bathe and pamper it for John when he worked out at the airport, and had had a run or two in it himself at times when John was up balling some bird in the sky, being careful to set the speedometer back and top up from the airport tanks afterwards, John being touchy about people playing with his toys. So what did the abusive shit want now? Too late to switch tracks; Rex trotted up to the car, ready to punch him out if it came to that, and John’s barebreasted daughter opened the door and stepped out and asked him, leaning back and stroking her crotch, if he wanted a ride. It was like Christmas: his alibi, his shot at John, and a hot lick or two to top off the night, all handed to him gift-wrapped. The kid was fried to a crisp, her eyes like stones: her pinpoint-nippled tits showed more expression. Sure, baby, he said. What kind of ride can you give me? Get ready to fly, mister, she said. But, first, off with the sweats. Off—? Take them off! They stink, I don’t want them in the car! Come on! Is there nothing but blushing wimps around here? She whipped off her own shorts as a challenge and flung them over the hood into the weeds beyond, glared at him for a moment while he took in the lightning-illuminated sights, then she popped back in the driver’s seat and slammed the door. You coming or not, ace? Wouldn’t miss it for anything. He kicked off his shit-stained runners, peeled his socks away, stripped off the sweats, the jockstrap. Took his time about it. She watched him all the while but he wasn’t sure she could actually see anything, so ripped was she. He wasn’t hard but didn’t want to be. That’s pretty good, she said. You do that in front of a mirror every day? The little ball-buster. Every day, all day, he said, just waiting for you to come along. He dropped his bare ass onto the soft leather. You blow a pretty mean horn for such a scrawny little snotnose. Let’s see if you know shit about driving this mother. She hit the floorboard and they spun out of there, popping gravel, hit fifty at the first crossing, were doing better than eighty when she ran the first light. She had a lean adolescent shape with a prominent ass, a little slack, sinewy thighs, breasts like small muffins, was probably still a cherry; should be fun, he figured, in a fragile kiddiefuck sort of way. She stayed on the back roads, not all paved, doing over a hundred on straights and not much less on turns, took intersections without a slowdown, left the ground more than once, then hit rock bottom, never taking her bare foot off the pedal. Okay, mister, she said. Eat me. Sure thing, doll, but that wheel cramps my table manners. I got a—Now! she demanded, lifting her left foot off the brake pedal and up on the seat, knee against the door. Get to it, asshole, or get out! He figured this was not the moment to slap the little mink and so instead worked his fingers into her pussy, trying to open up a groove, but it was tight as a green walnut down there. This was going to be like blowing a stoppered sweet potato. As he leaned down to search out a mouthpiece with his tongue, he glimpsed something looming up ahead of them in the road. It was that old humpback bridge out by the selfsame woods he’d just departed, coming at them out of the heavy night at a hundred and fifty miles an hour. “Now! “ she yelled, and jammed his head down under the wheel between her trembling thighs.

  When the murderer came jogging through the ditch in Settler’s Woods, Fish—or Philip, rather—was just telling Turtle that he’d finally grown out of being hung up on Clarissa and that now that his sister had taken off, he’d soon be leaving, too, which Turtle was sorry to hear. “Why can’t you at least stay until I finish school, so I can go, too?” The breaking up of an old friendship was a hard thing. Though maybe it was already over. Fish, who didn’t want to be called Fish anymore, wouldn’t even talk to Turtle at the barbecue at first and said he was disgusting and stank like something dead and made him sick. Fish had finally got over his crummy mood and apologized, saying mostly he was just upset about the new baby, but every time Turtle tried to tell him about the amazing things he’d seen, about all the fornicators and the splitting movie screen and the beautiful colors and what happened when his weenie exploded, Fish told him to shut up, he really didn’t want to hear about it, and anyway it was stupid and boring, and asked him instead: “What made your old man so mad? Why did he hit you?” “He said it was all my fault, I’d made him lose something.” “Lose what?” “He wouldn’t say.” The police had come to Clarissa’s house then and asked for volunteers to hunt a monster lady and Fish had volunteered and then so had Turtle, but the police told them they were too young, go home and go to bed, which got Fish mad again. “I’ve done more stuff today than those dickheads have done in a lifetime,” he said mysteriously, scowling around the bandage in the middle of his face. “Let’s go out there anyhow.” That suited Turtle. His old man had promised him a good tanning, so he was in no hurry to go home. On the way out, passing under a streetlamp, Fish showed him the hickey on his neck that an older woman had given him that day and told him then all about what had happened in his father’s library. “You mean you fornicated her?” “I didn’t fornicate her, man, I fucked her
! Lots of times!” “Yeah, really? Is that different?” “Sure. It’s not what you do, but how you feel about it while you’re doing it.” He told him about the game the woman had played with him, seeing who could think of the most names for the things she pointed to in the pictures in his father’s books. “She said talking dirty made her hot. Proper words like fornication and penis and vagina didn’t even count. She always won, of course. But, boy, I really learned a lot!” “Yeah, me too. One thing I saw—” “I said shut up about all that!” “Yeah, sorry, Fish, I keep forgetting.” “And don’t call me Fish!” “Right.” “You know what else she said? She said I had a prong like a Tex-Mex chilidog! She said fucking with me was like dipping a jalapeño pepper in a pot of hot sauce!” “Wow! That’s great! Was it?” “Sort of. Better even.” They’d reached the meeting place just in time and had hovered at the edge while the police chief gave all the orders and then led everybody into the woods, bellowing through his bullhorn: “We’ll all stay together now!” But they didn’t. He and Fish peeled off at the ravine because Fish said he saw a man with a gun who was a murderer and who might want to kill him. “Why?” “Because I know he’s a murderer. And I fucked his old lady.” Fish was full of surprises. Turtle had missed a lot while he was gone. It was nice and quiet in the ravine, and Fish was in the middle of explaining about wet thighs (“I don’t know, they just sweat or something, it’s messy but it’s great!”), he was full of conversation now, so they stayed there to talk awhile. “It was the first time my athlete’s feet didn’t itch.” Turtle sat down on a round stone and, while trying to make himself comfortable, found a sort of wristband and put it on. “Kind of frilly, isn’t it? Looks more like something a girl would wear.” “I don’t care.” It was weird talking to Fish in the dark because the white bandage around his nose was like his whole face, only a midget face, it even had little dents and shadows that looked like eyes and a mouth, so Turtle kept talking to the bandage eyes instead of the real ones. “Do you smell something funny here?” Turtle asked. “You know, something like a toilet?” “Are you kidding? I can’t smell anything!” Turtle asked him why Clarissa’s father had hit him, and Fish said he didn’t have the foggiest idea, it was the biggest surprise he ever got, but it had sort of cured him of ever being interested in Clarissa again. Which was when that man came running past and Fish jumped up like he was going to run away and whispered that was the one, that was the murderer, even though he was reciting the Lord’s Prayer and cried out to Jesus Christ from the bottom of the ditch. When he was gone, Fish sat down again and said that praying didn’t mean he was religious, in fact just the opposite, that scum was really an atheist and a blasphemer. Turtle tried to get Fish to talk about doing it to the man’s wife, but Fish suddenly didn’t want to talk about sex anymore. So instead they talked about religion, Turtle asking him what blasphemy was. “It’s like swearing, or when you make fun of religion.” “You mean, like when we say, ‘Our Father which fart in heaven, hollow by Thy name?’” “Like that.” “What happens if you do blasphemy?” “You go to hell forever and ever.” “Wow, maybe we better stop.” “But I don’t believe it. I don’t believe there is a hell.” “You don’t?” “I don’t know what I believe anymore. I don’t think I believe anything. Nevada said religion was for wimps.” “Nevada?” “The woman I was telling you about. She made me read the Bible out loud, putting dirty words in place of the ordinary ones while she gave me head. It was maybe the most religious experience I ever had.” “While she what?” But before Fish could answer, they heard yelling and gunshots and then people running their way, so they jumped up and started to run, too. When they reached the road into town, they stayed at the edge of the woods so they wouldn’t be seen, though Turtle didn’t know exactly what the secret was about. He heard the crackle of fireworks and then a spooky noise like a far-off howl and he glanced up in the sky and saw a surprising thing. “Wow! Look!” How did he do that?! “Shut up! Here comes a car!” “No, look! Up there!” He had his hands together and his feet and he was pumping wildly like he was riding a pogo stick. Was that the trick? “There’s a guy flying!” There was a far-off ripple of lightning just as his ballcap flew off. “Yeah, sure, but come on, duck down before they see you!” “No, really!” But the flying man was already gone and Fish was dragging him down into the bushes as a car shot past on the road. “What are we hiding for? Why can’t we just ask them for a ride?” “Don’t be such a dumb jerk! Those old farts are completely out of control! They’ll shoot at anything that moves!”

  When Big Pauline shifted her hips, taking out a grove of trees, and pitched her old man out into the night like a football, all hell broke loose inside Settler’s Woods. Otis slithered down out of her crotch and dove for cover as the entire posse, what was left of it, opened fire, shooting wildly but probably hitting more often than not a target hard to miss. Kevin did not even take aim, firing haphazardly over his shoulder as he scrambled away, but he was sure he drilled her more than once, hearing the bullets go thuck, thuck, thuck into the soft wall of her flesh. All together they must have hit her with hundreds of rounds, but she hardly changed position except for lifting an arm in front of her face and swiveling a few degrees to take the low-flying bullets in her butt. Most of the flashlights had been abandoned and lay in the weeds now like glowworms, but even in the darkness Big Pauline was easy to see, a huge lowering silhouette, bigger than the trees, faintly illuminated from time to time by distant sheet lightning. In one such flickering, Kevin, reloading, saw that one of her eyes was bleeding like she was crying black tears and her flank appeared to be peppered with zits. She seemed more puzzled and hurt than angry and reminded Kevin of some deer he’d shot before they’d died, and of his own mortality. Well, he shuddered, life, death, it was a great fucking mystery, probably never to be fathomed; he aimed at her wounded eye. It had not been a good day for Kevin, if a day was all it had been, starting with Pauline and her partner cleaning out the clubhouse kitchen after she took that monumental dump in the rough at the fifteenth. She was big then, bigger now. John had lightened his heart with the offer to let him hire a new salesperson for the club shop, but after he’d unexpectedly found the perfect chick, who’d turned up like out of the blue, she’d been snatched away from under his nose while he was, in gratitude, boy-scouting at John’s barbecue grill. And then he’d realized, too late, that John wasn’t even around to appreciate his good deeds. He’d done a lot of drinking after that, maybe before as well, and now, in these dark damp woods, he was paying the price, his mind blistered and belly churning, kept on his feet and continent by a medicinal hip flask filled with twenty-year-old malt from John’s party, an emergency measure he hoped would serve him until he could get back to his rooms at the club and let it all blow. The gunfire had died down a bit: maybe she was dead but just hadn’t toppled. But then she let out a pathetic wail, oddly soft and girlish, and they all started firing away again. She swept her hand and took out the tops of half a dozen trees overhead as though swatting at bees, and that prompted a deeper retreat for most. Kevin felt too miserable to move, remaining huddled behind his topped tree and wishing somewhere behind his awesome nausea he were wearing something less luminous than yellow golf pants. Someone yelled at him, Otis maybe, to pull back, he was in the line of fire, so he got up on his hands and knees and began to crawl woozily to the rear, when he felt himself embraced all round by something soft and rubbery and warm and lifted through the air. “Don’t shoot!” he could hear someone shout. “She’s got Kevin!” “Holy shit!” “Look out!” “She’s going to eat him!” It was like being on a fast elevator: his stomach got left behind as the rest of him rose above the trees. His yellow pants had probably had it. With one finger she flicked the rifle out of his hand and he figured that hand wouldn’t be worth much for a good while. Up close he could see that her near eye was pretty much gone and her cheek on that side was pocked and bloody. The occasional glimmerings of lightning lit up her white teeth, clenched in a grimace, and the ghostly white of h
er good eye. She opened her mouth and there was a distant rumble of thunder and more shots were fired. Kevin ducked and she shielded him with her body, turning him upside down, and up came the barbecue. Down, rather. Woof! Out it came! From both ends! Gross! With her free hand she uprooted a tree and swung it like a club through the woods below. There were screams and shouts and someone yelled: “Pull back! Pull back!” Beyond his retching and gut explosions, he could hear them scuttering away, some groaning and shouting for help. He was being held up again in front of her face. He was all alone now and all cleaned out. Felt a little better, not much. More appreciative of his present fix, which made him feel worse. Hand hurt like hell. He could see through his tears that there was a sad inquisitive look on her face, but he was at a loss for words. What could he say to such a woman? “You’ve got a good natural swing,” was what came out. “Really.” This made no sense. But what did? It was always his best line and at least it gave her pause. Her grimace faded and her full lips spread into something like a melancholy smile. She licked her lips with a tongue that looked like the backside of a walrus. Her teeth lit up, her eye, there was more thunder: not just summer heat lightning, a storm was on the way. Would that he might live to weather it. If she was going to take a bite, he wasn’t sure which end he’d rather she started with. Either way, it was probably the end of his golfing career. Her smile faded. She lifted her nose, sniffed, and a frown crossed her broad brow: yes, no doubt about it, Kevin noticed it, too, there was the smell beyond his own smells of woodsmoke in the air.

  Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and Clarissa, soaring aloft into unknown realms, could see below a great burning ring of fire, and could feel it, too, the car red-hot beneath her seat, the scorching heat searing her, but as though from inside out, and between her legs a hammer blow, bone crunching bone, that popped the wheel from out her grasp and sent her father’s splendid machine bouncing up, as if undriven, from the road, yawing and rolling like an unruddered ship as it rose up into the black night. Take it easy, Clarissa, slow and steady, she seemed to hear her father say, giving her her driving lessons. Foot off the clutch, both hands on the wheel, and ease up on the gas, don’t try to set the world on fire, a car’s a tool, goddamn it, not a trip. Keep your wits about you! Real power is power you’ve not yet unleashed, so feel it all but use only what you need. Oh Daddy! I’m sorry! I won’t do it again! But it was too late for that, she could not turn back, could not get off the dreadful trajectory that, rashly, ruinously, she’d launched herself upon, and in the grip of blinding panic she rose and spun, while the forest burst into flames below as though ignited by her own wild fury’s folly. She’d hit the bridge with bare foot to the floor, thinking what? to rise where Bruce and Jen had gone? Some foolishness in her mind-blown rage, meant to avenge the insult of their snub, and that was when, as the axle bounced and the frame struck sparks and the steep ascent began, the hammer blow was struck and she lost her grip on the suddenly treacherous wheel, the car careening madly as it left the road. And as she overturned and the night sky reeled and the woodland burned below her, she felt a fire blaze up within as though a lightning bolt had struck her where she sat—and suddenly, spinning, she was thrown free (and, hey, buckle up, her father always said, because you never know) and for a moment hung in space, the wild whirl stilled, then down she plummeted, headlong, like a shooting star, falling and falling, landing at last in the little creek below the bridge which received her fall and cooled her burning body as pain engulfed her and her breath left her and her eyes went dark.