The Folks

by Ray Garton

  “I don’t, darling.”

  “But you ordered me a Long Island ice tea? You just…know drinks?”

  “Oh, I know lots of things,” she whispered as she leaned over and kissed me again, placed a cool hand on my cheek. Then she continued sipping her ginger ale.

  It hit me so hard, I almost slapped my forehead with my palm, like those people in the V-8 commercials.

  She’s an idiot, I thought. She thinks my face is a mask, or makeup, some kind of Halloween costume. Which means she’s an idiot. Possibly retarded.

  The most liquor I’d ever had was a couple of sips of whisky, which I hadn’t cared for. But the iced tea was sweet and had only the slightest alcoholic taste.

  “Drink up, spaceman,” she said. “The sooner you finish that drink, the sooner we can get out of here.”

  “Get out of here?”

  She laughed, leaned close and put her hand on my thigh again, her mouth to my ear. “And go fuck in the graveyard, silly.”

  I surprised myself with a loud laugh. “What? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “It’s Halloween!” she said cheerfully with a grin.

  I laughed again, took another swallow of my drink. It was good, so I took another.

  “You mean, you really want to go down to the cemetery and—”

  “Not that cemetery.” She leaned closer again, slowly closing the gap between us as she spoke. “Not the one here in town, silly. I’ll take you to a graveyard you’ve never seen before. In a place you’ve never been.”

  I knew as she kissed me again that I would do it if she really wanted to, even in the pouring rain.

  “Hi, Amanda,” Carrie said behind me.

  I jumped as I turned to Carrie, who was smiling at the woman.

  “Carrie!” she said. “You look deliciously exotic. Are you telling fortunes tonight?”

  “I’m so tired, I can barely tell what time it is.” She turned to me, put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m going home, Andy. You gonna stick around for a while?”

  “Do you need a ride?” I asked.

  “No.”

  I turned to Amanda, and then I realized the significance of that name. “Amanda Bollinger?” I asked. “Miss Bollinger?” I blinked several times as I looked at her, and I saw it, finally. But her voice was different, deeper, and my God, she was beautiful, not the plain woman I was accustomed to seeing in the diner. And she’d just had her tongue in my mouth!

  “Who on earth did you think I was?” she asked.

  “Well, I-I-I…I asked if I knew you.”

  “And I answered truthfully that you do not. But that is going to change tonight.”

  She turned to Carrie. “We’re going for a Halloween ride.”

  Carrie grinned at me. “That’s great.”

  I quickly said, “But, um, Miss Bollinger, I came with—”

  “If you call me that again, I will have to punish you,” she said playfully.

  “See, the thing is, I came here with Carrie, and—”

  “Excuse me, Amanda, but can I borrow him for a second?” Carrie said as she clutched my elbow.

  “Of course, of course.”

  Carrie led me through the crowded bar to the front. Stopped beside the entrance and took her coat off the long rack on the wall. “You don’t have to worry about me, Andy, really.”

  “Then just say you need a ride, okay? So I can get out of here?”

  She looked at me with utter disbelief. “Are you insane?”

  “No, but I seriously think she might be.”

  “Andy, think of who you’re talking about, here. It’s not like she’s a total stranger, or anything.”

  “Yes, it’s exactly like she’s a total stranger.”

  “Look, Andy, I don’t know how you could possibly miss it, but I think she really likes you. Now, have fun, dammit.” She put on her coat and grabbed her umbrella, kissed me on the cheek, and disappeared out the door.

  When I returned to the bar, Amanda stood and said, “Take another drink, and then we have to go.”

  “We have to go?”

  “Yes. Right away.”

  “Why?”

  She smiled. “Because I’m already wet.”

  Five

  Amanda Bollinger drove like a madwoman. What made it worse was the fact that she was driving my Beetle, singing along loudly with an old Blue Oyster Cult song on the radio, feathered mask in her lap. The Beetle wasn’t much, but it was all I had, and I told her several times to slow down, take it easy, it wasn’t a Ferrari.

  On the way to my parked car, I had discovered my keys were not in my jacket pocket. I told her to wait, I had to go back in and get them, but she laughed and hooked her arm in mine, jangled my keys from her other hand.

  “I’ve got them,” she’d said. “You’re in no condition to drive, and even if you were, you haven’t a clue where we’re going.”

  I had my seatbelt on—Grandma had nagged me into the habit, until it became second-nature—and clutched the dashboard with my right hand as she raced around sharp curves through the rain. The windshield wipers slapped back and forth rapidly, unable to keep up with the furious strafing of my heart. We were going around the mountain rather than up Mt. Crag Pass, the road that led to the Village. After about thirty or forty minutes on the road, the fire-blackened side of the mountain was behind us.

  Lightning flashed in the eastern sky in great sheets, turning the night the dim gray of an old silent film, followed by distant thunder that was muffled further by the sound of the rain hitting the car.

  Amanda made a sharp right turn directly into the dark and smothering woods that went up the mountain.

  “Hey!” I cried as the tires crunched over gravel and the car hit a ditch so hard that, had I not been wearing my seatbelt, the top of my head would have slammed into the bug’s ceiling. As we humped and jostled over uneven ground, going much too fast, I cried out again, this time purely in fear. I slapped my other hand onto the dashboard and held on tight with both, expecting to have my spine wrapped around a tree at any moment.

  A second later, we were on smooth pavement again, going uphill. The headlights cut through the rain to reveal a road hidden among the trees, wide enough for only one vehicle at a time. It cut steeply up the mountain, and just ahead it disappeared around a sharp curve.

  “Hairpin!” Amanda shouted in much the same way a golfer might shout, “Fore!” as she pressed her foot on the accelerator.

  Terrified, I let fly a stream of angry obscenities as she took the curve too fast. I felt the Beetle’s worn tires lose their grip on the wet pavement and slip and slide dangerously for a moment. Then we were on a straight stretch again, climbing the mountain, and Amanda was laughing loud and hard.

  “Why aren’t you having fun?” she asked with great enthusiasm.

  “Because I’m too scared of dying to have fun!” I replied angrily.

  “Oh, I just adore driving. Unfortunately, I don’t get to do it very often.”

  “Yeah, I can tell.”

  Her laughter was close to a shriek. “I can tell that you, my dear, are quite desperately in need of a good fuck.”

  She took the car off the road again, but this time she slowed down first, so it was not quite as dramatic as before. The headlight beams spilled over an even narrower road of mud, but although the high beams were on, they did not shine very far. The night was even darker beneath the mountain’s tree. I had no idea where we were.

  I was still shaken by the life-threatening ride, worried about my car’s well-being.

  Amanda’s driving had made me angry. But I was still achingly hard, had been since we left the bar. I could not believe what I was doing. I was not even sure what I was doing.

  A waist-high stone fence appeared beside the muddy path, and Amanda pulled over and parked the car beside it. She killed the engine and turned to me, grinning.

  “Shall we?” she asked.

  “It’s raining,” I said.

  “Awwww,” she said
mockingly as she reached over and pinched my left cheek.

  “Does him not wanna get wet?”

  I sighed, smirked. “I can’t tell if you’re trying to seduce me or piss me off, Miss Bollinger.”

  She wagged a finger at me chidingly. “Ah-ah-ah. Didn’t I say I would punish you if you called me that again?” She leaned toward me. “The first part of your punishment…”

  Slid her hand over the bulge in my jeans. “…is to get out of the car…” Kissed me quickly and hard, sucking my tongue into her mouth and the breath from my lungs. “…and get soaking…fucking… wet.” Then she was out the door and into the night.

  I kept a Maglite flashlight on the floor behind my seat, one of the big ones, about twenty inches long with the beefy heft of a dangerous weapon. I opened the door and got out, pushed the seat-back forward, leaned into the car, and felt for the flashlight in the darkness.

  Something skimmed the back of my head and landed in the back seat with the rattle of a thousand teeth. I recognized the sound, knew what it was even though I could see no more than a ghostly, shapeless heap of darkness against the pale upholstery.

  She had thrown her beaded dress into the car.

  Amanda stood next to me, naked except for shoes, stockings, and black garters.

  She closed the car door, moved close and put her arms around my waist.

  “The rest of your punishment,” she whispered, “is to fuck me.”

  I passed a trembling hand lightly over the smooth skin of her back, already wet from the rain, as she nibbled on my neck. “That’s a punishment?” I asked as I pulled back and peeled my jacket off, tossed it into the car.

  I could feel her smile against my skin. “It can be.” She took my hand, pulled me into the night. “I know just the place.”

  I turned on the flashlight as she led me through a narrow gap in the stone fence.

  “What’s that for?” she asked disdainfully.

  “For…light.”

  “Turn it off. We don’t need it.”

  “Well, if you don’t mind, I’d like to leave it on till we get where we’re going, because I can’t see anything.”

  “What’s to see? You see one graveyard, you’ve seen ’em all.”

  I wanted to see her more than anything else. I was certain there was nothing plain about her without her clothes, and I wanted some light to see for myself. But I was so embarrassed, I was surprised I could speak clearly. If it had not been for the Long Island iced tea, there was no way I could have gone through with it.

  Did she know that? I wondered, with the taste of her fresh in my mouth.

  Not quite as steady on my feet as usual, I asked Amanda if she would slow down a little, and she did. I could hear her shoes slopping in the mud.

  “I hope you didn’t rent that costume,” I said.

  “Belonged to my great-grandmother.”

  Gravestones stood like soldiers all around us. We serpentined around them and the flashlight’s beam slid over their old, chipped marble surfaces chiseled with weathered letters and cherubs, praying hands and crucifixes. Amanda was right—if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all.

  She led me to a rectangular slab of stone flat on the ground, about six feet long, three wide. I couldn’t read the words in the rain, but there were a lot of them. It looked like a whole family had been buried there.

  Amanda snaked into the beam of light, stretched out on the slab on her back, propped on her elbows, one knee cocked. She smiled up at me. Even though the flashlight’s beam was not flattering light, she was beautiful. Until lightning flashed. It turned her already pale skin a harsh white, marbled it with a bruise-like purplish-blue. As she lay on the gravestone of a dead family. A shudder went through me and I took a step back.

  “I-I’m sorry,” I said. “But I can’t…I just can’t do this. It’s too…it’s too…”

  “Sick?” she asked, still smiling, and I nodded. She reached out and grabbed the waist of my jeans and said, “Oh, darling, we haven’t even started yet,” as she pulled me down to her.

  My nod had been inaccurate. Yes, it was probably sick to have sex on a gravestone, but that was not what made me want to go. I was unable to recognize it at the time—probably because of all the beer I’d drunk and the Long Island iced tea I had not quite finished—but it was probably the same feeling a young mother gets when the house becomes too quiet. It was the dead weight of the silence right after a pondful of frogs have all stopped croaking at the same instant. It was one of the many parts of the brain we do not yet understand pounding helplessly on the wall to alert the relatively small part we do.

  How I wish I had shown more respect for that shudder. But once she had me down there on the cold, wet stone, it was already too late.

  Friends have told me stories of their first times, the stories of their friends’ first times. I have only heard one that sounded like a truly erotic experience, and I didn’t believe a word of it. Most of them were stories of discomfort, embarrassment, and, as in the case of a guy I met at Hand of God, a senior named Oliver Hodel, life-threatening danger. A friend of Oliver’s oldest sister—a married friend—decided to make a man out of him, and told him so. At her place, with her psychotic husband on his way home from work expecting to find a hot meal ready. Oliver was seventeen, she was thirty-three, and her two kids were playing with friends next door. On top of that, she was on her period.

  And she was a gusher. He barely got out of the house unseen by her arriving husband and had to go out the bathroom window to do it. But it didn’t end there. When Oliver’s mother did the laundry the next day, she saw his bloody underwear and screamed as if she had discovered a corpse in the washing machine. When an explanation was demanded, Oliver, a nervous wreck over the whole thing, could come up with nothing but the truth, and was grounded until he turned eighteen.

  I like that story, and whenever the subject of first times comes up, I enjoy telling it. No matter how old I live to be, I will never tell the story of my own first time during one of those conversations. Never.

  I put the flashlight on the large gravestone beside us, still shining. The rain was cold, and the stone was colder. My clothes were soaked through, and it was an effort to get my jeans halfway down. I never had a chance to take them all the way off. She popped a couple of buttons off my shirt before I could unbutton the rest. I never managed to take it off, just left it open. She moved her hands around beneath my shirt, grabbed my erection—I assumed she had reached down between us—and pulled me into her.

  Until that night, the only person who had ever touched my face since the fire, besides doctors and nurses, was Carrie. She was the only person who had ever given me a friendly peck on the cheek or playful tweak of my chin. She would never know how grateful I would always be for those brief but warm moments of affectionate contact. I could not feel her touch on my scarred and grafted skin, but I could feel the pressure of her hand, her lips. My mom had not lived long enough to touch my face, and while Grandma had been quite affectionate when I was a boy, she’d carefully avoided touching me above the shoulders.

  Amanda, on the other hand, seemed to be unaware of the fact that I had been burned. Holding my head firmly between both hands as I moved inside her, she kissed me passionately, moaned as she filled my mouth with her tongue until I was afraid I would gag. Then she kissed my face repeatedly, licked it, sucked on my earlobe as her breathing came faster and faster, along with mine.

  I forgot about the rain, the cold, where we were. They were all melted away by the heat between us. I tried to slow down because I knew I would finish soon, and I did not want to, not yet, not so quickly. But she would not let me. She reached down and squeezed my buttocks, dug her fingernails in and pushed me into her hard and fast as she sucked on my neck, licked it.

  I was so close to exploding and didn’t want to, didn’t want to pop off in less than a minute like the virgin I was. Her tongue slid over my throat, back over the side of my neck, farther and farther back. Ove
r the tendons at the base of my skull.

  I opened my eyes. Saw that her head was still right beside mine. As her tongue crept beneath the back of my shirt collar to moisten the skin between my shoulder blades.

  My heart seemed to stop beating when I stopped moving. I froze for a moment, wondering if the beer and hard liquor were making some of my synapses misfire. But no, it was there, all right. Her tongue. Licking my back.

  I pulled my head back, caught a blurred flash of quick, glistening movement between our faces. Amanda smiled up at me as I started to pullout, to get up on my knees, but she wrapped her fingers around my penis and squeezed hard, holding me there.

  Except her hands were on my shoulders.

  As she squeezed my erection harder, still smiling, something curled beneath my scrotum and firmly cupped my testicles.

  I heard my scream before I knew it was coming from me. Next thing I knew, I was off her, crawling away from her, crab-like on my back, trying to get to my feet with my soaked jeans bunched around my knees, and in the shadowy glow of the flashlight I saw, once again, another whip of movement. This time between her thighs.

  Still lying on the stone, Amanda laughed like a little girl who had just tied the laces of both my shoes together. Then she got up.

  On my feet, I backed away from her as I pulled up my jeans, buttoned them. But she did not come toward me. Instead, she turned and ran in the opposite direction, arms spread at her sides, laughing as she skipped like a happy child every few steps, until she was swallowed up by the darkness.

  I quickly buttoned my shirt, picked up the flashlight. I was shivering, but not from the cold or rain. I could not feel either. My shivering came from fear, confusion. My scrotum had shriveled and was still tingling from the touch of…something.

  There was another corpse-white flash of distant lightning, and its glow filtered through the trees in an instant of dizzying patterns. In that moment, I saw her pale back as she danced around gravestones and through another gap in the stone fence, out of the cemetery.

  “You’re no fun!” she called over her shoulder.

  I shone the flashlight ahead of me and went after her, shouting, “Wait! Amanda! Where are you going?”