by Jack Ketchum
Title changes are a funny thing. The first time I was ever censored was with the title to NEVER TRUST A SMART CUNT WITH TWO FIRST NAMES, which was retitled FIXING HER PLUMBING. This story, originally called OLD MEN DANCING, became DANCIN'. Probably because for the men's mags of the period old was as dirty a word as cunt.
Did I really feel that decrepit and in need of a boost when I wrote the story, at age thirty? I guess I did.
THE LIAR
I sat one row behind her on the opposite side of the bus so at first there was only her profile. The countryside was stark and lovely but now we just watched the girl. She had long brown hair and wonderful light blue eyes and her skin was very pale. I wondered how she'd do in the powerful Cretan sun. She was dangerously fair.
Through the window beside her the land whirled by—olive trees, cypress, century plant, a flurry of poppies, the rolling sun-scorched earth. There was an old man in black by the side of the road loading fresh-cut scrub onto a donkey. She turned to look at him and the blue of her eyes poured into me for a moment. Her mouth was wide, her lips full. In a little while the bus pulled over into the town square. I got up to get my bags and glanced at her again. Her skin was cream-colored and rose against the bright white-washed walls of the taverna.
"What do you figure," I said to Mike beside me. "Irish or English?"
"English," he said.
"I figure Irish. Did you see those eyes?"
"Do you want to meet her?" he asked.
"Of course I do."
He shrugged. "Matala's a small town. It ought to be easy. Just find out where they serve the best calamari and she'll turn up. The English are suckers for calamari."
"What about the Irish'?"
"Screw the Irish."
But Irish she was, born in Dublin, a midwife of all things. Her name was Mary and her best girlfriend's name was Helen but she was traveling alone now because Helen was a bitch who had left her in Mykonos for a Greek boy. That's what she said. She liked delivering babies but had not liked her job before that as attendant in a Dublin asylum.
It was easy to meet her as Mike had said it would be. The next day he had already made a place for himself next to her at Red Beach over the mountain. Like most of us she took the sun naked. Her skin was so pale you could see the delicate web of blue just beneath the surface of the flesh. Her eyes were Ionic blue like the sea. Sometimes it seemed you could gaze right through her to the waves and the sea beyond as though she were transparent, as though she and the sea were one.
She'd decided on the bus that if I asked her I could sleep with her. And of course I was asking. But it wouldn't last. In a few days she would leave Matala to make Istanbul before the ten days left in her vacation were up. I tried to tell her that was a bad idea. The Turks were famous for mauling fair-skinned women travelling alone. We joked about white slavery. I told her that if you wore pants in Turkey you were a whore. She said skirts would be fine with her. She was going.
I admired her independence if not her good sense. But who was I to talk. I had a pound of coke in a suitcase under my bed. The price would be good in Athens but one mistake and I was finished. Maybe she was as vulnerable as she looked and maybe she wasn't.
At dinner that night there was too much cheap cognac so we wandered down to the tourist beach nearby to clear our heads and find someplace to lie down for a while. As usual there was a sky full of stars overhead and you could fix on them and feel the cool breeze over you and the sand cool beneath you and listen to the regular pounding of the waves like a sobering steady hand gliding over your body.
It was a lazy night and we were in no hurry. We kissed like sleepwalkers in a long fine dream. Her hair smelled of the sea. There was drunken laughter and long contented sighs. Whatever passion there might have been was buried beneath strong drink and contentment. We fell asleep.
When I woke up she was gone. So was the moon and it was getting on to morning. I called her as loudly as I dared without waking the campers on the hillside. There was no answer. I tried to remember if she or I had been first to fall asleep. It seemed important. If I had dozed first I might have wounded her somehow. But if she was first, then why had she left me? Had she simply changed her mind? There was nothing to do but go home with my worries and sleep and wait till morning.
It was nearly noon before I was dressed and out the door. Mike and the Canadian girl he'd met the night before were drinking coffee in the square. He called me over and his smile told me he'd seen her. The Canadian girl smiled too. Ironically, I thought. I decided I didn't like her much.
I said, "What's the bad news from Ireland?"
"Ire," he said. "I just saw her on her way to the beach. She's very pissed at you, you know. Very pissed. Says the two of you fell asleep out there last night and when she woke up you'd split."
"What?"
"That's what she said."
"That's crap," I said. "It was the other way around. I woke up and she was gone."
"That's not the way she tells it. I'd give her the day to cool off if I were you. I've already invited her to dinner tonight so you can straighten things out between you then. Sit down and have some coffee."
"No thanks. I'll go over the mountain to Red Beach as long as she's staying here. You think there's a chance she'll come looking for me?"
"I doubt it. You sure you didn't walk out on her, Ben?"
"Are you sure she wasn't kidding you?"
"Absolutely. Odd, don't you think?"
It was odd. I tried to think of some way we could both be telling the truth. There wasn't any. I knew I wasn't lying. That left her. But what was the point? All day long I worked the problem over in my head. I got nowhere. Then at dinner all she did was smile at me.
"Pretty poor trick, mister," she said.
"You're serious, aren't you."
"Of course I am."
"You really think I left you."
"I don't think it. You did. I had to find my way back from the beach alone. I was still rather drunk, too."
"I didn't leave you, Mary."
"Don't be silly."
"I woke up and you were gone. I called you. I looked around. I couldn't find you anywhere."
"Please, Ben, let's not be ridiculous about it. I've long since forgiven you."
"You've forgiven me?"
"Naturally."
"That's nice."
I drank my drink. Leave well enough alone, I thought. There was no explaining it. She was lying for some reason I couldn't figure out. Maybe it didn't matter.
After dinner we walked back down to the beach, back to where we'd lost one another the night before. In the darkness we took off our clothes and went into the water. As the warm calm sea rolled over my thighs and hips it was as though I were already inside her. I rose to meet the ocean's hot womb and when she turned and wrapped her legs around me she was open as a woman who has already had the full hard length of her lover.
Our wetness turned the night air cold. We dressed quickly. We walked the beach slowly in our damp clothes. Suddenly she stopped and turned and kissed me hard on the mouth. I tasted blood. I kissed her back blindly through the fever-chill of pain and cold flesh flashing heat through my lips and thighs. We fell to the sand. I stripped the pants from her and then stripped off my own and lurched inside her again.
"No," she said. "I want to taste you in my mouth. I want to taste both of us."
I did as she asked, clasping my hands to cradle her head. In the moonlight her eyes were wide with fear and greed and something else too. I couldn't put a name to it. Then her lips slid slowly over me and I threw back my head and looked up at the stars. I was in another ocean, another current, warmer than the other and better. Unexpectedly, she stopped and looked up at me.
"Take me with you," she said. "Ask me to go home with you and stay with you. Now. While you're having me. I want to go home with you, Ben. Ask me!"
I asked. I moved down to fuck her.
"Good," she said.
I took her coo
l sandy ass in my hands and punished her.
I thought I was teaching her not to lie to me.
Two days passed, softly and pleasurably and I figured she'd forgotten all about Istanbul. We made love and sat in the sun. Mike and his Canadian girl were usually with us and it was good to watch the two women get on together, two beautiful nudes lying by the shoreline. I had left my initial problem with the Canadian behind. We lay back, closed our eyes and heard them laughing far away. In the water we let them ride our shoulders and fight each other down again. There were other women on the beach but we had no need even to talk to them. All our needs were cared for now.
But one night there were a pair of German girls across from us at dinner, their escort a strong affable Swede named Tommy whom Mike had met in Heraklion. While we were waiting for Mary and the Canadian we joked with the girls and I thought how good a German girl was to her man and envied Tommy a little. By the time Mary and the Canadian arrived the atmosphere had become flirtatious. That was fine with Mike's girl but as the Demestica flowed and the heady retsina followed Mary grew sullen. I might have stopped it then but something told me to play it through. The game was innocent enough. The girls were Tommy's. I wondered what Mary was seeing.
I knew now that it had been anger in her eyes on the beach that night because here it was again. A cold muted anger that slowly turned her nasty. The Germans spoke English awkwardly and Mary used that against them. Her jibes got progressively cheaper. Mike and his girl felt the change in her and drew more and more toward the other table. Neither Tommy nor the German girls appeared to notice. I listened long enough to get disgusted and then decided it was time.
"What are you doing, Mary?" I said quietly.
"I expect you know," she said.
"I don't know."
"Do you think I like being made a fool of?"
"I don't suppose you do. But how are you being made a fool?"
"I see you toying with these women. Which one is it you want?"
"I like them both," I said. "I want neither of them. They're with Tommy, or haven't you noticed?"
"I know that kind of woman," she said. "They're with anyone who'll have them. Helen was just the same."
"Helen?"
"In Mykonos, remember?"
"Oh yes. Your girlfriend."
"I hate that kind of woman. Don't call her my girlfriend."
"You're imagining things," I said. "Nobody's making a fool of you."
"Just tell me one thing," she said. "Am I going home with you tonight?"
"Of course you are."
"I thought it was questionable."
"To me it was never questionable. It's getting so now."
"Leave off with them!" she said. Her voice was quiet but I was receiving an order nevertheless. I didn't like it.
"Don't tell me what to do," I said.
"I am telling you!"
Something slid into her eyes dangerous as a snake. A cold anger, physical and somehow erotic, suffused the beautiful face and made it ugly. She was dangerous, all right. I accepted the knowledge with a shock of recognition and a strange intoxication. "You ought to be very careful going to sleep tonight," she said.
There it was. An open naked threat. Suddenly I was very tired of her. I said, "Go. Get out of here. I don't want to look at you." I was cold sober and maybe as dangerous at that moment as she was. "Get out of here before I break your damn neck." She went.
I don't know how she got into my room above the taverna that night unless it was through the window off the long narrow sun-porch which connected all six top-floor rooms. It was accessible by a stairway from the garden below. But when I arrived she was waiting for me on the bed. She had rummaged through my things and found a bottle of cognac. She was either drunk and angry, or just plain angry, I couldn't tell which. She also could have just been stoned. Because she'd also found the cocaine. The bag was open and I wondered how much of it she'd tasted.
"You've got a hell of a nerve," I said.
She looked down at the coke and smiled. "You're a bit cheeky yourself, then, aren't you."
"Are you drunk?"
"Are you?"
"Let's go out on the terrace," I said. I wanted some air and time to think. I didn't like the turn things were taking.
We sat down in the deck chairs and I let the huge theatre of sky and stars produce the accustomed calm in me. After awhile Mike and the Canadian girl appeared and I handed them the bottle of cognac. They took it with them to the far side of the terrace, away from her, unwilling to get too near until they were more sure of her again. That left me to reconnoiter the territory. I didn't want the job. I would just as soon be rid of her. But there it was.
There was something merry and predatory, something utterly incongruous in her eyes as I looked her at that made me wonder what cards she figured she was holding. She had draped a white cotton sheet over her body. She was naked underneath. I supposed that was one card. The coke was another. What else? I got right to the point.
"I don't want you here," I said. "Not anymore, not after tonight. I don't like being threatened."
"In your position I can understand that."
"There you go again."
"I'm sorry. It's just that you always seem so vulnerable."
"Vulnerable? What are you talking about?"
"Remember that first night on the beach, when you thought I had left you?"
"Yes."
"I hadn't left you. I was right there a few feet away. I heard you calling."
"That's impossible."
"You think so?" She laughed. "And now look at you, holding cocaine in a foreign country, a secret that isn't a secret anymore. You could go to jail, couldn't you."
"I could also wring your neck."
"No, you couldn't. Look."
Before I knew it she was up off the chair and standing in front of the window to the room next to mine. It was dark inside. A couple of Italians were staying there. She opened the cotton sheet and if the Italians were awake they could see her standing naked in the moonlight. She began hooting like an owl.
It was four in the morning.
"Hoo, hooooo," she said. "Get your asses out to play with us, dears! Come on!"
She flashed the sheet in front of her like a matador and moved to the next window. Kicked a chair out of her way. It crashed to the railing. An American couple was in there. Not young and very conventional. Before she could repeat her owl act I was out of my chair and slapping her hard across the face, wrapping her in the sheet and hauling her into our room. I had a glimpse of Mike looking astonished. Inside she began to cry.
"You bloody bastard," she said. "You damned bloody bastard."
"Shut up," I said. "One more sound out of you and I'll fucking kill you."
It was just what she wanted to hear.
"You wouldn't dare," she said. She dropped the sheet to the floor. "I dare you. Come on. Kill me, you bastard. Try and kill me."
"Just make another sound."
She opened her mouth to scream. I put my hand over her mouth and pulled her down to the bed. I held her tight against me. She bit my fingers and began to struggle. I needed both hands to hold her so I pulled the hand over her mouth away. Something told me she wouldn't scream. Suddenly I got the picture. She wanted to hurt me with pure Irish muscle. She wanted to hurt me and make me hurt her at the same time. It was a good hard fucking she was after and all of this had been some kind of crazy foreplay.
I pinned her arms above her head with one hand and slapped her again with the other. He eyes flashed pleasure at me. I slapped her again. She smiled. It was going to be one hell of a night. I spread my free hand over both her breasts and dug hard at the nipples. She groaned and writhed and tried to throw me. I held on. I brought my knee down on her stomach and doubled her over. I figured that would hold her for a while.
I stepped back, pulled off my pants and mounted her. She was coming almost as soon as I got inside, slippery with pain and lust. But tonight she'd planned t
o drive herself wild and I was hardly through. Even as she shuddered under one orgasm I could see her working herself up for another. Her hands went to her breasts and she squeezed them long and hard. When her hands fell away her breasts were inflamed and her knuckles dead white. I felt her fingernails dig into the flesh of my ass and rake across my back and shoulders. I got hold of her hands again and spread her arms wide against the bed.
"Bite me," she said. "Bite me hard! Draw my blood, you bastard!"
I obliged her.
I bit deep into the soft flesh of her pale upper arm, deeper into the joint of arm and breastflesh, deepest of all into her long damp beautiful neck, each time slamming at her with my cock held hard and high against her. I drew back and opened my mouth wide and saw her gasp as I came down on her breast, filled my jaws with her and then moved slowly back and away, closing hard over her breast, biting and scraping back in slow withdrawal until there was only the tip of her nipple between my teeth, erect and salty-tasting and I knew at last I'd bloodied her. Her orgasm was like a slow dying. Her body arched against me and fell, arched and fell, arched and fell again and then I came inside her too and we collapsed into an unholy heap of stink and sweat.
Soon she fell asleep. I sat awake for a long while watching her. Remembering what she'd said to me at dinner. You ought to be very careful going to sleep tonight. To hell with it, I thought. To hell with you. Then I too fell asleep.
I got rid of her the following morning. I put her on a bus to Herkalion and watched her smile at me through the window. It was as though we had always been good friends. To the very end she was unfathomable.
I stayed on in Matala two more days then I left too. It was time to get to Athens and deliver. In Heraklion I boarded a ship for the mainland. It was a second-class ticket and the compartment was filled with Greeks and students on their way home to school in September. I sat down next to a pretty blonde who was reading a book I'd just finished, THE GREEN HILLS OF AFRICA. It was a good way as any to start a conversation. I remarked on the coincidence and pulled my copy from my travel bag to show her. She had just arrived from Hania in the northwest. She had walked the gorge. I said it would be nice to do that someday. Some other trip. I asked if she was traveling alone and midway through her story I realized who she was.