Bodies and Souls

by John Rechy

  “Hell, no, Orin,” Jesse withdrew. “Just joking.”

  “It was willed to me by an old woman. Died just a short time back,” Orin spoke those words in a voice that still buried—or controlled tightly—any emotion. “Why I'm here, now.” Then he fired at Jesse: “You sure your name is Jesse James?”

  It was clear that Orin's anger was a warning to Jesse—and to Lisa—of what such questioning might provoke, a dredging of their lives. Was she next? No, he was sealing their pasts from inquiry. Lisa was all too willing to discard her past.

  Jesse's face crimsoned. “Yeah,” he said. “Except it's really James Jesse.” He regretted his probing. No more serious questions!—that was that!—no matter how many he collected in his mind.

  Orin laughed. “Just joking, Jesse, just joking!”

  About all of it? Which part? It was true that sometimes in a clueless voice, Orin would say something that sounded very serious, and then he'd laugh, for having put something off on them. Lisa preferred to move away quickly from this mined territory: “Tyrone Power played Jesse James in the movies,” she informed Jesse. “Linda Darnell could've died when they shot him, she loved him so—and then he was so mean to her in Blood and Sand,’’

  Jesse said dejectedly: “Cagney should've played Jesse James.” He was genuinely saddened that Cagney hadn't.

  Lisa slipped the snapshot into a small wallet she carried. She sat in the middle of the front seat. Her skirt rose slightly. Her thigh connected with Jesse's. Sometimes—but she cautioned herself increasingly—she still let it touch Orin's briefly.

  Orin drove expertly. Several times Jesse prepared to offer to “help” with the driving, then didn't, reluctant to get a “No” from Orin. The engine purred, as if throughout the many years of its existence the car had lived sheltered.

  Orin maneuvered into the still light, early afternoon traffic on Sunset. Heat was throwing away the coolness in the rising breeze. Lisa liked to describe the various flowers she spotted, constantly thrilled by the city's beauty. “Pink stars with red hearts! Orange orchids!” She was enjoying the growing pressure of Jesse's thigh against hers.

  She didn't prefer Jesse to Orin, no; she liked both, a lot, equally. Before Jesse joined them—just standing there so tall in the pale desert—she would slide tentatively toward Orin so that their bodies would touch if the car lurched. At times he seemed to welcome the sensual contact; she would feel an answering pressure; and then—and now more often than not—he pulled away from the touch. Sometimes he'd actually wince. The first night they stopped at a motel, Orin got a room for her, a room for him. At first Lisa had felt hurt, rejected; but the old movies she cherished had saved her. From them she borrowed explanations for Orin's contradictory reactions—he was being faithful to some one; hurt by a powerful love; or “saving” himself for the exact one. Eventually those conjectures satisfied her less: It was the abandoned women of those romantic movies who pined for true love that way. And, too, Orin reacted to a lengthened touch as if it hurt him, really hurt him. Then he'd be quiet, and the murmuring of the Cadillac would be like unformed whispers. When those silent periods had stretched and pulled along the miles to Los Angeles, Lisa told him about the movies she had seen—“only the old great ones,” she emphasized.

  She had seen them all in a theater in Chicago that showed only those cherished “all-time favorites,” as its marquee proclaimed. It changed movies three times, sometimes four, each week, double-feature each day. Running away—from Mundelein—about two hours and several worlds’ distance away—to the dark ecstacy of that theater, she would sit through the movies over and over, repeating lines to herself.

  And so as she had traveled with Orin through the sun-misted forests and then vaporous deserts—and later with Jesse, who would listen enthralled one moment, then tease her the next while Orin listened, just listened—Lisa told about Pearl Chavez, the half-breed in Duel in the Sun; mounted on her horse, Pearl moved determinedly under a bleeding sky to her inevitable assignation with her lover, Lewt—“so mean to her, so mean.” Lisa would shift easily to tell about Roberto—“Ro-ber-tow,” she emphasized the correct pronunciation—and his betrayal of “beautiful Maria” in For Whom the Bell Tolls—forced by her lover to leave him, wounded, though she longed to die with him. “You told us and told us,” Jesse would disguise his eagerness to hear it all again as she moved on to tell about Scarlett O'Hara. Scarlett!—among the blackened stones of Tara—“swearing to survive no matter what!” That scene didn't exactly fit with the others, but she loved it. Her voice became strong with Scarlett's conviction then, but as the Cadillac glided on the heated concrete, the tone of lament for the doomed heroines buried in the darkness of that old theater would resume, and she evoked the ghost of Cathy, cursed by Heathcliff—“so mean”—to wander the desolate moors of Wuthering Heights until he, too— …

  “Flaming birds!” she named another flower now, now in this city of blossoms and dead movie stars. Her own words jarred a sad memory—of a bird that had crashed against the windshield of the car before they picked up Jesse. The bird splashed blood and feathers. Orin cried out. He stopped the car. He got out and gathered the crushed bird carefully in his handkerchief. She saw him carry the small bleeding bundle to a side of the bare highway. He searched until he found a bush to bury the bird in soothing shade.

  Jesse restrained himself from turning the radio on. Earlier, propped by evoking the image of Cody, he had suggested another station—the news bombarding him; and Orin agreed. Jesse felt good about that. “We going to the beach?” He tried to make it a statement, but it came out a question. That occurred often. “Sure,” Orin said—but Jesse wasn't sure he'd even heard his words.

  They passed a sign that said “Bel Air.” Carefully tended pools of orange, purple, and yellow flowers gather there between white portals. Paved tributaries off Sunset Boulevard dash into the depths of the locked verdure where other mansions flee to haughty seclusion. Dark brown arms crossed impatiently over her white-uniformed bosom, a black woman waited for a tardy employer to pick her up.

  “Broken hearts, bleeding,” Lisa named another cluster of flowers—and quickly changed the name: “Red valentines!”

  They drove past a grotto of green vines surrounding a white statue of Christ, in splendid, festive white robes. Several long blocks farther, they passed another statue of Jesus, on the lawn of a church. That figure was crucified, its bloodied forehead haloed by thick thorns. “I wonder which one he looks like now—real happy, or still real sad,” Orin said.

  Both Lisa and Jesse were becoming used to the way Orin seemed to collect his thoughts, then connect them aloud.

  “Just depends, I guess,” Orin answered himself.

  “On what?” Lisa queried. These were the moments—when his voice was so soft, a sigh—that Lisa longed to touch him, just to touch him.

  “On what people do,” Orin said.

  Past the exits and entrances of the San Diego Freeway in a rich area called Brentwood, a giant American flag over a slick hotel flapped erratically in the undecided wind.

  Lisa moved her leg away from Jesse's, Orin's sad sigh lingering.

  Last night, the first night the three spent together, Jesse hadn't known what would happen, whether Lisa and Orin would sleep together. Orin had been flicking television channels off and on; it was late and several stations were off the air. In a short nightgown, Lisa slipped into one bed. Jesse, lanky in his boxer shorts, stood between the two beds. Orin nodded toward the vacant one. Then in his own shorts and t-shirt, he got into the bed with Jesse and lay on his back—all night and hardly moving, as far as Jesse could tell—on the extreme opposite side of the bed. The whole incident had surprised Jesse; he hadn't been sure whether to be disappointed or encouraged; all depended on whether the situation made Lisa more or less available to him. Orin clarified that soon enough—this very morning when Jesse touched Lisa's bare shoulder. Chin's look froze on him. And yet, Jesse noticed, Orin often stared at Lisa himself—maybe wasn
't even aware he was doing it, his blue eyes fixed on her breasts, or on her exposed thighs when she moved into the car. Orin's stares contained desire, Jesse recognized that. But then his gaze, darkening, would pull away from Lisa's flesh.

  Lisa pointed out the window at saffron-tipped flowers: “Exploding stars— …”

  Orin braked. Lisa's head jerked. Jesse's pulled back, then forward. “What the hell!” Jesse said. The Cadillac almost skidded into a car that had stopped just as abruptly. Ahead of it, another car had, too. There was the gathered scream of brakes. Traffic froze. Nearing sirens shrieked, gasped, shrieked. Approaching red lights swirled just ahead.

  Orin guided the finned convertible along the shoulder of the boulevard. On a side road, he parked near a velvet-grassed incline. He jumped out, running up the short mound.

  The sirens were throttled into silence. The red lights swirled within a contained radius now.

  Jesse followed Orin up the incline.

  At first Lisa decided she'd stay in the car. An accident had occurred, that was obvious. She didn't like the sight of blood, not real blood, anyway—only “romantic blood,” like in the last scene of Duel in the Sun, when Pearl Chavez climbs the desert rocks to die with— … But it was too hot to stay in the unmoving car. She blew into her blouse, cooling her breasts as she walked toward Orin and Jesse. She still didn't want to look, afraid of what she might see.

  Sounds of panic came from nearby, exacerbated voices. Then there were sustained screams. The red eye of police-car lights tainted the area in a bleeding glow. Orin and Jesse were looking down into a schoolyard.

  A few terrified men and women—teachers—were herding and rushing more than a dozen children away from a large tree on the grounds. The children balked, looking back. Two or three policemen and some men in white uniforms dashed toward the tree.

  Lisa looked away from the schoolyard—she had caught a glimpse of what was there. Turning away, she saw cars backed up on the street. Heads leaned out of open windows to gape. Lisa looked away from that, too. She felt hot, caught in a sudden fierce darkness.

  “Jesus Christ!” Jesse James said.

  In the schoolyard, the body of a man was hanging from the branch of a jacaranda tree. The strap that held his strangled neck was partially obscured by pretty, dainty lavender flowers. The head, tilted to one side, was covered with a black hood.

  Amber: “Meat”

  Deliriously, vibrant red hair flailing like a whip, Amber Haze rode the man's cock. Her hand held one breast like an offering, a firm, round, pink offering, nipple hard as the tip of a finger. Spreading her perfect legs, she lowered her torso, raised it, lowered it, her red-furred cunt clinging to the full round cock inside her. Lying on the lavender sheets, the man shoved his hips up, farther up, pushing harder, his long legs propped in order to penetrate her more deeply, into the farthest depth. Amber opened her eyes widely—gold-flecked eyes, heavily lashed, darkly outlined—and looked up in an expression of delirium. She moaned, groaned, sighed, moaned. The hand not stroking the proffered breast reached back, behind her arched buttocks, as if to double the sensation of the lunging cock—in her, and sliding on her eager finger tips. Now the man tumbled over her roughly and mounted her thrusting body.

  He was a slender man in his thirties, tall, just slightly better-looking than plain—hair brown, features as regular as those of anyone walking any street. Still, he was extraordinary. He was Jimmy Steed, the man reputed to have the largest cock in the country, perhaps the world. Again he manipulated Amber's body over, his large hands pulling her up from the stomach, so that her buttocks were toward his waiting cock. She was on all fours, kneeling. One of his hands still grasped her flat stomach and slid toward the pink breasts, his other hand clutched his inflated organ, and he shoved it into her cunt.

  She groaned, red hair glorious, luxuriant over her face. She pushed the cascading hair away. Her head turned from side to side. Her gorgeous face, tongue licking her scarlet lips hungrily, seemed to be about to accept the ultimate in sexual grace as Jimmy Steed fucked her. Even in that position, her breasts, large and sculpted, retained their firm hardness, although he pushed forcefully against her in hard, jerking shoves.

  Again in one tough motion, Jimmy Steed turned Amber over, face-up on the pillow. Her lips parted, moistened wine red, and her tilted nose flared as if to allow for the increased quickening of her ecstatic gasps. He fucked her from the front now, separating her legs with his hands, allowing his penis to display its full, round length before entering her again. Proudly, Jimmy Steed looked down at his organ, not at Amber. As if in a state of pained bliss, her beautiful face turned toward the pink pillow, biting it as if to contain the spilling ecstasy, to extend it. Quickly, Jimmy pulled out his cock, and pumping forward from his hips, he came in a jetting arc. Holding the sputtering cock like a shooting gun, he aimed the cum at Amber's magnificent breasts. When the sputtering diminished, he rubbed the sticky thickness on her nipples. He moved his dripping cock in an arc over her breasts and made a whistling sound with half-smiling lips.

  Amber stood. The mound of red pubic hair shocked the creamy flesh into greater nudity. In the bathroom now, she stretched her resplendent body in a sunken tub. Following her there, Jimmy turned the shower on. Water streamed onto Amber's breasts. Leaning her head back, eyes closed, lips licking at random drops, she rubbed the water on her breasts, between them, on her nipples. Spread-legged, Jimmy stood over her in the shower. The intercepted water ran down his shoulders, his chest, his stomach, his cock—and from there it jetted down over her breasts. Then he turned the shower off. He stood over her again. The liquid flow continued—now only from his cock. “Rub it on good, babe!” his twangy voice commanded. “Drink that— …”

  “Goddamn that son of a bitch!”

  “Shhh.”

  “Shut up!”

  “Shhhhhh!”

  The irritated admonitions came from the darkness of the theater. In a row toward the back, Amber Haze turned away from her reflection on the movie screen. As if anticipating that moment in the film, waiting for it, a man in front of her gasped, then surrendered into the velvet seat. Amber was aware of at least two other men nearby—concealing convulsed movements.

  This was the time of day, just after lunchtime, when there were the fewest people in the Pussy Cat Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, where Meat, starring Amber Haze and Jimmy Steed, was breaking attendance records. She had waited for this early day in the week, this hour of the day, to see the film for the first time.

  In the theater now, she wore a bandanna to hide her famous, identifying mane of red hair—its real color; and she had changed her makeup. That son of a bitch! Anger stabbed more deeply. For a few moments she did not move, still facing away from the screen, hearing her recorded voice reciting stupid lines, silly double entendres, which Jimmy Steed—the worst “actor” in the world—was trying to answer in his slow drawl: “Wanna eat th’ sweet candy, li'l girl, while I eat— … ?”

  Until she heard the man's whimpered, smothered sounds, she did not realize she had been looking in the direction of a man sitting in the same row but across the aisle from her. Having waited too long, he was coming now, during one of the few unsexual moments in the film. Amber thought she should want to laugh. She wondered why she didn't, didn't want to.

  Removing the concealing bandanna, she stood up, releasing the red crown of her hair. She walked out of the theater. Nobody even glanced at her—eyes fixed on the flickering garishly colored figures on the screen. Another man, in a back row, was choosing his moment to masturbate. Amber glanced back at the screen and saw a full shot of her nude body exposed. She had always loved that, the knowledge that men would fantasize about her, her body, long after the movie was over.

  The lobby of this theater is carefully decorated—mirrored, gold and red, pseudo-neo-“Victorian.” Because Amber Haze was one of the three top female stars—perhaps the top female star—in pornographic films, her movies did not play in the rancid, crouched, sten
chy, black-squashed theaters along the lower part of the boulevard.

  Standing in the bright light of the lobby, Amber frowned. She was staring at her own reflection in a mosaic of mirrors that decorated one whole wall. Her reflection was chopped into glass blocks, individual body parts separated by the partitions between the small mirrors. Spread apart in the reflection, her breasts seemed extracted from the rest of her body, which appeared distorted. She turned away from the fragments of herself in the silver mirrors. The usher—wearing white gloves—recognized her; she knew that look. He was about to speak, but already she was outside in the sweating heat of Hollywood Boulevard.

  The trashy street shimmered in the heat—or perhaps it was the assault of afternoon brightness that made it seem so. The sweetish odor of smog tinged the unseasonably warm air. A chilly night had become a coolish morning, which was giving way to a sudden warmth, shoved in by the desert winds.

  Amber pushed the bandanna off her neck, releasing her hair freely—her pride, yes, as much as her breasts. The blowup outside the theater and behind glass exhibited them fully—her hair, her chest; longish scarlet hair over creamy white breasts. STEED MEETS AMBER IN “MEAT” AND IT SIZZLES! The tips of the M in the title pointed to her exposed nipples. Behind her, the thin body of Jimmy Steed was rendered full-length, the lower portion of the T in the title concealing yet emphasizing—and exaggerating—his famous cock.

  Wearing a gray jacket in the hot weather, a red-haired youngman faced her. Nearby, an extremely pretty girl revealing freckled shoulders over a white-embroidered blouse stood next to a tall youngman with a cowboy hat, shirt open, the two were looking from the poster to her. The other youngman frowned at her, and the frown transformed his face entirely; moody, angered.

  Automatically, Amber shook her hair in defiant abandon, and her lips parted as she moistened them—that was her automatic reaction when she sensed a verbal assault about to be unleashed. But the man, still staring, said nothing. The “cowboy's” eyes shifted from her to the poster, as if to intensify the feeling of radiating sexuality.