Foodchain

by Jeff Jacobson

  “How’s the wound?”

  “Frank!” It was Annie, silhouetted in the front door. Then, more calm, more composed, as she slowly came down the steps. “Running off without saying goodbye?”

  Sturm grinned at Frank under the cigar smoke.

  “Hold on, okay?” Annie said. “Just hold on. Don’t go running off. Got someone here who wants to say hello.” She went around the side of the house, and a few moments later, Petunia came bounding out, claws digging into the bare dirt, tail wagging furiously. She slammed into Frank and nearly knocked him down. Her tongue was all over his hands and she bounced like a kangaroo, trying to reach his face. Frank grabbed her wide head and bent over, crinkling his eyes shut and curling his lips inward, allowing the dog’s wet leathery tongue to lick his cheeks, nose, and forehead.

  Annie followed Petunia at a leisurely pace. “I think she’s got the hots for you, you know.”

  “She’s just a good dog, aren’t you?” Frank said. “Yes. That’s right. A goddamn good dog. Yes.” Petunia seemed to agree, wiggling even harder.

  “You in a hurry?” Annie asked.

  “No. Suppose not,” Frank said, scratching behind Petunia’s ears.

  “Then let’s take Petunia for a swim.”

  Frank caught himself looking at Sturm for permission. Sturm just grinned back, puffing furiously on his cigar. Frank stood, and patted Petunia’s skull. “Where?”

  “Up at the reservoir. That okay with you, Mr. Sturm?” She’d caught Frank’s look, and this seemed to be more to fuel Frank’s embarrassment than Sturm’s okay.

  Sturm waved his cigar, smoke streaming in the orange light from the streetlight. “You kids go have fun.” He walked back over and shook Frank’s hand. “Don’t worry. Go have fun. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” Frank saw the hint of a wink, and felt something flat and stiff in his palm, left from the handshake. He casually tilted his hand and saw a twenty-dollar bill, crisply folded in thirds, tucked into his palm. Sturm walked back to his pickup. “Tomorrow.” He awkwardly stepped up into his pickup, like handicapped child clambering into a playground spaceship, and roared off.

  * * * * *

  Frank started the car and turned the air conditioning on while Annie folded the front seat down whistled for Petunia to get in the back seat. Frank thought of the quiet gentlemen’s reactions to a dog in the back seat and smiled. And not just any dog, either; Petunia smelled like she’d swam across a few of the sewage treatment plant ponds to get home. Hell, if he could, he’d get Petunia to take a dump on the front seat before he got rid of the car.

  Annie rode in the front seat and pointed directions while talking nonstop about her brothers. “Stupid goddamn fuckheads. They can’t stop jerking off for fifteen minutes to settle on anything but sex—and if they can’t get that—which of course they fucking aren’t—then it gets to anger right fucking quick.” She killed the AC and rolled down her window.

  Frank hit a highway going up into the hills and stepped on the gas.

  Annie lit a cigarette like she was shooting a gun into the wind. Petunia curled up in the back seat and went to sleep. “When they get into it, fighting, they’re like goddamn dogs, all that frustration where they don’t know whether to fight or fuck, so you just gotta treat ’em like dogs. Hose ’em off with cold water. Most of the time, that works. Most of the time.” Annie inhaled the cigarette in six savage bites and lit another with the filter of the first one. “Turn here.”

  Annie slowed down, relaxing into the seat, taking it easier on the cigarette. “I’m sorry. Tonight was important, and those fucking morons fucking fucked it up,” she said and put a hand on Frank’s thigh. But the touch was brief, and then her hand was on to fiddling with the radio. “Fucking radio around here sucks. It sucks long and hard.” With her particular emphasis on those last words, Frank couldn’t help but wonder if she meant something else. Fed up with the selection, Annie switched the radio off. “Where you from?”

  “All over.”

  “That much I guessed. Where were you born?”

  “East Texas.”

  “Where’s your family now?”

  “All over.”

  “You visit with ’em much?”

  Frank followed Annie’s finger and turned into an empty parking lot. There was a half moon, just enough to reflect off the fifty-acre reservoir. He shrugged as he pulled into a spot and stopped. “Didn’t see the point in driving all over to visit a bunch of cemeteries.” He stopped the car, facing the lake, under a billion stars.

  “Your mom?” Annie finished her cigarette, threw it out the window, but made no move to get out.

  Frank gave a sad smile. “Cancer.”

  “Dad?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “My daddy’s in jail. He’s not a good man. I hope he never gets out.”

  “How’d he get there?” Frank was hoping she’d put her hand back on his thigh.

  Annie gave her own sad smile. “He broke into seventeen campers and trailers across the southwest, killing the husbands and any children, then raping and killing the wife. You probably heard about it.”

  “Jesus.” Frank was sorry he’d asked.

  “No, I’m fucking with you. He’s in a jail, sure, but hell, he’s just a dumb-ass. He went after armored cars—he’d stake out an ATM and follow the truck back. He nailed two trucks, cops nailed him on the third. Thought he had to be a tough guy and use a loaded gun. So he oughta be up for parole in twenty years or so. I take a bus and see him once in a while.”

  Frank turned off the engine and they sat in silence for a moment. “My daddy was a preacher. Can’t exactly say he was a man of god. He believed in…well, he believed in the devil, one. That’s for damn sure. And two, he believed in serpents. He was one of them snake handlers, always saying the word of god was protecting him from bites. Didn’t matter that he got bit twice in the face. He said that was ’cause of me. And mom, but mostly me. His fault for spawning me. God was punishing him.”

  Annie twisted around to look at Petunia and put her hand back on Frank’s thigh. “You think she wants to go swimming?”

  Frank didn’t want to move, didn’t want to give Annie any reason to pull her hand back, but he carefully turned his head and glanced into the back seat. Petunia snored softly, curled up in a tight ball, dead to the world. “I don’t know. She looks awful comfortable.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Annie slid closer. “Kind of nice, just sitting here, looking at the water.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I know you’ve heard about me,” Annie said without looking at Frank.

  “What?”

  “Let’s stop pretending, okay? We do it all the time, with everyone, with everything that goes through our heads, so let’s…Let’s just not do it tonight, okay? Not between you and me. It’s demeaning. So, what did you hear? I know they filled you in. I want to know what they had to say.”

  Frank exhaled, long and slow, wondering if one of Annie’s cigarettes would help. He thought of something better. “Well. You’re talking about the guys, the clowns, right?” He felt around under the driver’s seat and pulled out the bottle of cheap rum he’d stashed earlier.

  “Who else?”

  “They’re…they’re big fans. Chuck is, anyway.”

  Annie smiled hugely. “Of course he is. But why? What did he say, exactly?”

  Frank unscrewed the top, let the cap fall wherever it wanted. “He, uh, he said you were the best.” He took a long, long drink.

  “The best. Best at what?” Annie still hadn’t moved her hand. Frank was sure he’d never been anywhere that had been so goddamn quiet. It was so quiet he could hear Annie’s thumb and forefinger tracing little circles, smoothing out the denim on his thigh.

  Frank took another hefty swallow, decided to get it over with. “He said that, for twenty bucks, you gave the best blowjobs ever.” He immediately took another drink, then offered it to Annie.

  She took the bottle with a knowing smile. “Good. Per
fect. That’s what I hoped he’d say.” She took a drink. “Uggh. This is crap. Where’d you get this?”

  Frank laughed, took it back. “It was cheap.”

  Annie lit a fresh cigarette, took it slow, enjoying the drag. She still wouldn’t look at Frank. “The way I see it, no matter what you do, no matter what kind of job you want to get, it’s all about marketing, you know? It’s all about word of mouth It’s all about perception, see?”

  Frank shook his head.

  Annie said quietly, “I never gave anybody a blowjob. Shit. I’m still a virgin.” She gave Frank a little grin that stopped his heart. “I just get ’em to pay for a blowjob, and then to say that they had one. You understand?”

  Frank wanted to nod and say, “Yeah.” But he said, “No.”

  Annie turned in her seat to face Frank, eyes alive with mischief. “It’s simple. Men and their dicks. You play with their ego. See, I start slow. Maybe a little rubbing, through the pants, but the whole secret is talking dirty. You get to talking dirty to a man, I mean, really working it, really stroking his imagination, and hell, you’re almost there. That’s all it takes. Want me to show you?”

  Frank’s heart had almost started beating again when this stopped it dead. “Why don’t you walk me through it first.”

  “You sure?”

  “No.”

  Annie laughed. “Okay. Okay. Well, it starts slow, like I said.” She started rubbing his thigh. “Then we go for a drive. Some place private. Like this,” she gestured out at the lake through the windshield.”

  “You been here before?

  “Maybe. So then I start talking about, oh, I don’t know, about the night or the lake. Doesn’t matter. The point is, I’m using words like soft, wet, smooth, for the place. Then I refer to them, using words like powerful, hard, strong. Things like that, you know?”

  With each adjective or adverb, her voice became husky, slow, seductive. The rubbing of his thighs matched her voice. “Then my hand moves up. Hell, half the time I don’t even have to unzip their jeans.” Her palm slid up to Frank’s crotch. He was surprised to find that he wasn’t the least embarrassed about his aching erection, and took another swallow of rum.

  “Then I just rub, slow, for awhile, talking to them the whole time. About what I’m going to do to them, about how much I enjoy it, how much I need it. I’ll go into detail about how soft my mouth will feel, how much suction my tongue will give, how much I want them. Sometimes, that’s all it takes. Sometimes, they last a little longer. So I use a rubber glove. Like a surgical glove. Didn’t bring one with me tonight, though.” Her hand paused on his belt buckle. “Thing with latex gloves though, you gotta provide a little extra lubrication, so I’d stick my hand down my pants, pretend to rub myself. All I had to do was act like I was enjoying it. Want me to show you?”

  “Not if it’s fake.”

  “You add a little spit to it,” she mimicked, licking her hand, “and yeah, sometimes you had to touch ’em.” Her hand closed into a fist. “I just pretended I was milking a cow. Usually didn’t take ’em long. ‘Specially if I talked.” Her hand unclasped his belt buckle with a smooth jerk.

  “Then what?” he asked.

  “Then what—what?” She pulled back and flicked the cigarette out of the window. “They came. I could usually talk them into wiping themselves with their shirts.” Annie thought this was pretty funny.

  “You never…”

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” She turned toward him, up on her knees, hands in lap, demure as choir girl. “Put something like that in my mouth? Please. Especially with the hygiene around here. But the thing is, they can’t tell each other the truth—they can’t admit that they never got a blowjob. Hell, they think they’re the only one that came before getting their dick sucked, and there’s no way they want to admit it to each other. They don’t want to be the only one that didn’t come in my mouth. So yeah, they’re out there telling each other that they got the best blowjob of their lives.”

  Frank didn’t know what to say. He checked on Petunia. She hadn’t moved. Annie blinked at him. His erection hadn’t gone down. His scalp itched from being shaved. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “’Cause I want you to know that I’m not…well, I was going to say not a whore, but that would be lying, wouldn’t it? I am a whore,” she said, almost proud. “I just have boundaries.”

  “So why are you telling me this?”

  “’Cause I like you. And I want you to like me.”

  Frank took another long drink. The bottle was nearly half empty. “Look. I, uh…” The rum decided he should be honest. “Ahh, fuck it. I do like you. I…shit. Ever since I met you, I can’t stop thinking about you.”

  Annie’s face glowed in the starlight. “Please Don’t tease.”“

  “I’m not. We both do things…things that we wish we didn’t have to.” He reached out and cupped her head, thumb just in front of the ear, the rest of the fingers stroking the back of her skull. He kissed her. Gentle. Tender. Her lips felt soft as clouds. He pulled back. “But you…stimulate cattle for reproduction.” Frank gave her a cold, lopsided smile and Annie wanted to pull away from his touch. “I kill.”

  * * * * *

  They sat in silence during the ride back. It wasn’t uncomfortable, though. It was more a contemplative quiet, each lost in his own thoughts. Both realized that they had revealed more of themselves to each other than perhaps anyone else alive. This was a new experience, a strange sensation, being so honest, so open with someone else. It felt like struggling into a new skin. Something that didn’t feel uncomfortable exactly, just different.

  Frank stopped in front of the satellite dish. Petunia, awake by now, licked his ear. He turned to Annie. “I need to see you again. Soon.”

  She gave a secretive little smile, clasped his face with both hands, and kissed him deeply on the mouth. He felt the electrifying touch of her tongue, just a brief little stab, but it was enough to stick in his mind for days. Then, without saying a word, she slid out of the car, let Petunia out, gave a tiny wave, and disappeared into the house.

  Frank finished the bottle of rum driving back to the vet office. He grabbed a beer and told the cats about his evening. He wasn’t sure if they were impressed or not, but he was happy. He hadn’t felt this good since the night of the town BBQ and carnival. The nagging worm of doubt about who was telling the truth was gone. Annie had shared her secret with him and he was sure she was being honest. He couldn’t say why, exactly. There was something about the way she watched him most of the time, direct, merciless; but she’d get shy every so often and couldn’t meet his eyes. Soft and hard. Sweet and sour. Yin and yang. It was the contrast, that wonderfully wild seesaw of feelings that pulled him in. He didn’t think she had enough control over her emotions to lie.

  He fell asleep on the couch, plotting out an escape to some tiny seaside town in Mexico. He’d earned plenty of cash, and Annie would come down later, only wanting to be with him, to lie in his arms and listen to the distant surf. It was a fine vision.

  And it seemed damn close to grab.

  DAY TWENTY

  Like the cheap rum, the fantasy had rotted the next morning, turning sour and sick in his mind. His head felt brittle, fragile, like his skull was too tight. He wanted to smash something breakable. Around six, the sensation of his head cracking apart like hardwood cooking in the sun drove him into the bathroom, where there was a bottle of aspirin on the toilet. He stumbled back to his cot where he slept dreamlessly until noon, when it took him at least ten minutes to realize someone was ringing the hospital’s buzzer.

  * * * * *

  Frank drifted along the rows of cages, the eyes of the big cats like starving leeches on his bare skin. His tongue felt as if fungus had covered it during the night. The horizon swam and lurched in his eyes.

  And when he saw the two deputies outside, his hangover got truly vicious, grabbing him by the ears and stabbing at the nerves behind his eyes and refusing to let g
o. His stomach spasmed and quivered, threatening to spatter half digested tiger meat, pasta, and spicy vegetables all over the tile floor.

  Through the bathroom window, standing on the toilet seat, Frank saw them waiting just outside the front door, hands on their hips, alternately watching the empty street and the door. They looked like they were trying hard to look bored, but the occasional cry or hiss from one of the hungry cats made their heavy-lidded eyes snap open in furtive movement. Then they’d glance quickly at each other, as if reassuring themselves that they were on the right track. Herschell Thibbetts still wore his mirrored sunglasses, anchored to his squashed, pinched face by a strap around the back of his head. Olaf Halford looked like he’d sheared his head that very morning. Neither one let go of the butt of their handguns.

  Thoughts swam sluggishly through Frank’s wounded mind. His first reaction was to simply bolt out the back door, snatch the cash hidden in the horizontal freezer behind the barn, jump in the long black car and drive north. He was all the way to the back door, his hand curling around the doorknob, when he heard Herschell shout, “Mr. Winchester. Mr. Winchester, we know you are in there. That car of yours is back in the barn.” Herschell hit the buzzer again. “Mr. Winchester.”

  The last shred of rational thought left in his head begged him to slow down and think. Driving north wouldn’t help him much. Frank needed help, plain and simple. He could always try to run later, if it came to that. As long as he wasn’t a suspect for the murder of some trucker. Or the murder of the zoo owner. Or, while he was being honest, one of the quiet gentlemen, the one he’d pulled into the tank with him.

  He let go of the back door handle and stumbled over to the black phone nailed to the wall. He dialed Sturm’s number, but Theo answered.

  “Hey. This is Frank.”

  “So?”