The Scream Catcher
Page 34
Plus I smelled.
I hardly ever showered or bathed, and it was a struggle to work up the enthusiasm to shave. It didn’t help that I hadn’t sold a script in months… Okay, scratch that… hadn’t sold a script in years. Or that our house was in foreclosure proceedings, or that Susan who’d only recently entered full force into a new body-changing exercise regimen worthy a Navy Seal, was in the process of becoming a chiseled statue and just as hard. While her life changed for the better, mine seemed to know no bottom, as if in slicing open my foot and inserting four permanent screws, I’d allowed my life, my talent, and my confidence to spill out onto the floor.
There were other issues to contend with… issues that kept me from being formally introduced to the woman I watched in secret through the window. The main issue being that I’d become reacquainted with the bottle, so to speak. The bottle helped me out on two fronts. First, it helped me forget the physical pain that seemed a constant companion. And second, it helped fill the void left behind when I found I was far too occupied with Lana’s presence to even type the words, “Fade in.”
So I guess you could say the booze became like a friend to me after she moved in and all I wanted to do with my time was stand by that bedroom window, crutches holding me up, my brown eyes staring out onto the most angelic sight you ever did see living and breathing on Orchard Grove.
And sure, the liquor helped me cope with the guilt. Guilt that accompanied looking at her for even a few seconds. It wasn’t just an invasion of her privacy. It was just plain wrong, and I knew it. Still, I found myself glued to that window while everything else around me seemed to fall apart. In all honesty, it made me feel good to look at her. Made me feel like I was still a man and that all the old private parts still worked.
It was the opposite of how I felt when Susan would return home from work or her P90X class. When she’d take a good look at me, a double bourbon gripped in hand, no pages typed on the typewriter, a three day growth sprouting on my face, she’d simply shake her head in disgust (or disappointment which was worse) and silently walk away.
Lana’s morning routine was almost always the same, and it was something I’d come not only to count on, but look forward to. She’d emerge through her house’s rear sliding glass doors onto the attached wood deck at nine o’clock sharp. Always, and I mean always, she’d be wearing a silk, red and black robe with Japanese images printed on it.
What do they call them? Kimonos?
Delicate red cloth covered in Japanese letters and pictures of smiling, naked Geisha girls with their hair pinned up into buns, fanning men lying on their backs.
Her hair was lush and blonde. It also draped her shoulders, but most of the time it was pulled back neatly into a ponytail, while on other occasions she’d allow it to fall where it may, like a silken gold veil that would become swept up in the wind. Covering her eyes were big square sunglasses like the kind you might find the women wearing on Venice Beach or down on Fifth Avenue in the Big Apple while they shopped on a sun-drenched afternoon. The thick sunglasses allowed her to look straight up into what thus far had been a perfect summer of unrelenting sun, seemingly without pain and without damage to eye and iris, as if she were exempt from the laws of biology and nature. As if she weren’t human at all, but some lovely creation I made up in my head out of desperation. A woman whose life I had just begun to script.
She wasn’t a tall woman, but she wasn’t short either. Her name (according to the mailman who’d also taken special notice of her) was Lana Strega Cattivo. The family name, Strega, no doubt originated from Italian decent. But, if I had to guess, her blonde, blue-eyed features screamed of northern Italy. Her body was Gold’s Gym slim without being overly muscular or too thin so that it retained every ounce of femininity and, in fact, oozed with it.
Her bottom was heart-shaped for lack of a better description and it provided the perfect balance to a pair of breasts that reminded me of fresh peaches. Those delightful breasts were fully exposed when she removed her Japanese robe, gently setting it onto the empty chaise lounge beside the one she always occupied without fail.
The house her APD detective husband, who himself was a transplant most recently from the Poughkeepsie PD and prior to that, the LAPD (thanks again, Mr. Postman), purchased for her was also a ranch that, like I said before, was identical to my own. Its layout was precisely the same so that the locations of the rooms were a mirrored reflection of my own home. Mine and Susan’s that is. The home she’d been paying for on her own. The home we were about to lose, unless that is, Hollywood came knocking at my door again, which didn’t seem very likely seeing as I hadn’t even begun my new script.
I guess, if nothing else, Orchard Grove was a cookie-cutter heaven or hell, depending upon where your architectural sentiments lie. But nowadays, the only thing that resembled an apple orchard around here was the name printed on the battered roadside street sign.
Sometimes at night, while lying beside Susan, my right foot elevated by two pillows stuffed under my heel, my body only inches away from the exterior wall that separated my home from the Cattivo’s, I pictured Lana lying in her bed a mere two dozen feet away. Perhaps she was sleeping on her side, facing me, breathing in and out gently, maybe her sheer, satin nightgown having run all the way up past her waist to the very bottoms of her breasts.
As of late, I found myself dreaming about her.
It’d become a kind of recurring dream. Together we’re lying in a bed inside a room with no windows or doors. Naturally, we’re both naked, but we have no clothing lying around, as if God put us in that room for us to discover and explore one another without anything in the way but our own nakedness.
In the dream, we aren’t making love so much as we’ve just finished the act, and now we’re resting, she with her head on my chest so that I can smell the lavender scent on her blonde hair, our naked bodies covered in a sheen of sweat that glistens in a light that doesn’t come from electric light bulbs or candlelight, but that seems to shine down from the ceiling, like moon rays.
The music begins softly at first, but then builds up. Arabic music with drums beating, cymbals crashing, horns blaring. The once bare room becomes a forest suddenly, our bed surrounded by thick trees, all of which bear fruit. Round red fruit just oozing with juice. In the dream, Lana always says the same thing to me.
“I know you’ve been watching me. Through the window. Your wife, Susan, told me that you spy on me.” She smiles then, sits up, and plucks a piece of fruit off the tree. “I like it when you watch.”
I don’t respond because my throat has closed in on itself while my chest grows tight at the sight of a black snake that’s emerging from out of the tree foliage, its long thick body coiled around the same tree branch from which Lana stole the fruit. A snake with black eyes and a pink tongue that slithers and hisses as it slips in and out of a narrow half-moon shaped mouth.
Watching that snake, I don’t feel fear so much as I feel myself being aroused. Something Lana can plainly see and enjoy. Reaching out with her free hand, she takes hold of me, and begins to caress me. She bites into the fruit and laughs, while the snake lowers itself down from the branch, opens its mouth wide, exposing four curved fangs that impale themselves into my neck…
Sometimes after I woke up from the dream, sweating and breathing hard, Susan would be lying on her side, facing away from me. Although she was asleep, I’d consider rubbing her back, and maybe sliding my hand gently in between her thighs. But knowing she hadn’t slept with me in more than a year, and that she had no intention of starting back in on our sex life now, I always pulled back to my side of the mattress.
Eventually, I’d silently go back to sleep, praying that my physical reality might once more turn back into my dream life. The life I preferred to live with my new neighbor, Lana.
Back to reality… if you want to call it that.
Standing before the window, the crutches positioned beneath the tender place where my arms met the shoulders at the sockets
, I’d watch her beautiful tan body awash in the bright morning sunshine. Since my work had taken a serious backseat to lust, I might already have a drink going. And if I were feeling particularly nervous or edgy, a joint going from the pot-for-profit plants I was harvesting inside a small patch of thick woods located just beyond the backyard privacy fence (A Maxwell House coffee can filled with five emergency G’s was also buried on the site).
But the drink was just a hobby and the weed a way to make some badly needed dough, not to mention, a way of numbing the pain of not working. The pain of the guilt, and of knowing that my lack of production over the past two months was just one more reason that Susan and I were not only about to lose our home, but on the verge of losing our marriage.
I knew I should peel myself away from the window, dump the whiskey, and at least try to get back to my typewriter, forget that this woman ever existed. But as much as I would try, the effort seemed impossible. The problem wasn’t that I hadn’t written a word since Lana moved in. The problem was that I didn’t want to write a word. I didn’t even want to make the effort. It didn’t hold an interest for me, as if her presence had severed the synapse or vein inside my brain that connected the desire to write to the actual physical act of production. You could say I was a doomed man. Doomed from the start. All I wanted to do was look at her. It was as though her very half-naked presence had cast a spell over me, rendered me impotent and worthless as a scriptwriter while, at the same time, making me feel like a new man.
In a word, I’d become a slave. But a more or less, happy slave.
Since Lana Cattivo moved into Orchard Grove, all I wanted to do was stare out the bedroom window at her body and when nightfall came, all I looked forward to was laying my body down only two dozen feet away from hers, and dreaming about our bed inside the forest.
The following is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in an entirely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Vincent Zandri
Cover and jacket design by The Cover Collective
Ebook designed and formatted by:
www.emtippettsbookdesigns.com
ISBN 978-1-943818-18-1
First edition: 2011 by Stonehouse Ink
Reissued in ebook edition: December 2015
by Polis Books, LLC
1201 Hudson Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030
Table of Contents
Praise for Vincent Zandri
Title Page
Also by Vincent Zandri
Quote
Prologue
Part I
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
Part II
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
Part III
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
Part IV
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
Part V
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
Epilogue
108
About the Author
Orchard Grove
PART I
Prologue
Chapter 1
Copyright Notice