Limited experience or not, Caleb need not be a regular in such a place to deduce that the girl was a prostitute and the bartender her pimp.
But so young and attractive? This bothered Caleb. She could have been his age. Perhaps younger.
“What are you doing all tucked away in the corner by yourself, Mr. Quiet Guy?”
Caleb shrugged. “Drinking.”
“You always drink alone?” she asked.
His father had been a diehard Simpsons fan. Therefore Caleb became a diehard Simpsons fan. Had every season on DVD and could quote damn near any episode verbatim.
And so when the young woman asked him whether he always drank alone, he took the opportunity to quote one of his favorite lines from the show, that line being Homer’s response to Marge’s growing concern about his drinking, Marge wondering whether he often drank alone.
“Does the Lord count as a person?” Caleb quoted.
The girl laughed. It seemed genuine too, not a transparent, fawning gesture she undoubtedly used to expedite her ulterior motive.
“No,” the girl replied, still laughing.
Holy shit, Caleb thought. She unknowingly served it right back.
“Then, yes,” Caleb replied, just as Homer had, feeling a sense of silly pride he believed his father would have appreciated. And this, of course, brought on the all-too-familiar feeling of loss.
And if you asked Caleb, the loss was stronger towards the notion of what could have been as opposed to what had been. Caleb was very young when Patrick died. Concrete memories grew fuzzier with each passing year, recall demoted to what felt like passing moments of déjà vu or a pleasant dream you felt more than remembered upon waking. Yes, the true loss, according to Caleb, was for what could have been. Because although he struggled to recall, what Caleb felt in his heart was that what had been had been wonderful, and what could have been had held the unquestionable potential to be more so.
Caleb gulped the shot of whiskey before him and chased it with three deep swallows from his bottle of beer, polishing it off. Gonna need a refill on this prescription, doc. Starting to get those emotion things again. He waved the bartender over.
“What’s your name?” the girl asked.
“Caleb.”
“You look sad, Caleb.”
He stared at her. Was “I can cheer you up, if you let me” coming next, or was she simply making an
(astute)
observation?
“I am sad,” he decided to say, not caring that he was assuredly giving her the exact reply she was hoping for. Truth was, he was just drunk enough to consider accepting any offer that might come his way. Truth was, he would accept it, not to get his rocks off, but to see whether he could get his rocks…without fantasizing about hurting anyone.
Only she didn’t come back with the line he’d expected. She delved deeper. Not the speediest of closers, Caleb mused. And here he’d thought prostitution was all about high turnover.
“Why so sad?” she asked.
Caleb laughed. He couldn’t help it. Get comfortable, my dear, he felt like saying, this could take a while.
And if he had been so inclined to say as much, he never would have gotten the chance. The bartender appeared a second after. Tall and thin and fidgety, the man laughed along with Caleb as though he was in on the joke.
“How’s it going, you two?” the man asked.
“Good,” Caleb replied. “Can I get another round?” He turned towards the girl. “Do you want anything?”
She went to reply but got no further.
“What she wants is you, man,” the bartender said, leaning over the bar. He spoke in hurried whispers. His breath stunk of cigarettes. “Young, good-looking fella like you.” He looked at her. “Isn’t that right?” Again, not giving her a chance to reply, whipping his head back on Caleb: “Whaddya say, man? Whaddya you say?”
Caleb’s desire to make arrangements with the girl conflicted with his immediate distaste for the bartender. He did not want to start any sort of trouble, but still could not resist fucking with the guy a little. He decided to play dumb.
“Is that right?” Caleb asked the girl.
She nodded and smiled.
“Well, maybe you can give me your number and I can call you sometime.”
The bartender leaned in further over the bar, not even trying to hide his sudden annoyance. “No—dude, dude; she doesn’t want to go on a date with you.”
“I don’t understand,” Caleb said.
The guy snorted. “Jesus, man; what fucking planet are you from?”
Caleb finally held up a hand. “Relax, man; I was just joking around. Yes—yes, I would like some time alone with her.”
The bartender snorted again, unamused. “Fifty bucks,” he said.
Caleb started for his pocket.
“Not in here,” the bartender said quickly. Then, under his breath, hardly moving his lips: “Outside. You pay her. You try to run afterwards without paying, and I’ll find you. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Hurry up.”
10
The girl had a white van. Or, Caleb had initially thought, the bartender has a white van that the girl uses.
But those thoughts were now miles away. Right now, Caleb’s thoughts were solely occupied with the fact that he’d lost his erection midway through.
He’d been attracted to the girl. Was drunk enough to initially numb the dark thoughts that teased his mind and—shamefully, excruciatingly—his groin.
Or so he’d thought.
It had started well enough. He was very aroused for the first few minutes, achieving erection with no problem, maintaining it with no problem as she performed oral sex on him. There was even a moment when he thought he was golden, that he might actually start and complete the entire act without issue. That his experiment was a success, and that future successes could be achieved through simple conditioning of his body to accept what was right and reject what was wrong.
That was until the girl stopped fellatio, lay back on the van floor, spread her legs, and invited Caleb to climb aboard. Told him she never did this for everyone unless they paid extra, a lot extra, but he was so damn cute and she was so damn horny, and though he couldn’t be sure, Caleb was fairly certain the rest of her offer went something like: So, how about taking advantage of this limited-time offer, Caleb, and get your ass over here and fuck me, and oh yeah, if you could please try to reach orgasm without fantasizing about or, God forbid, actually strangling the life out of me, I’d really appreciate it.
Caleb’s erect penis literally wilted before her eyes.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“Why did you do that?” Caleb said. “I was nearly there. I was nearly fucking there as it was. Why did you stop and make me think?” He tapped his head hard with his finger. “Why did you stop and allow it to creep into my fucking mind?” He slapped his head now. Hard. “Why did you let it creep?!” He slapped it again.
She got to her knees. “Hey, hey, hey—stop. What’s wrong?”
“Why did you stop?”
She looked at him as though he’d asked her a riddle. “I was offering you something more.”
Tears rimmed his eyes. “I was so close. I was almost done. Now I’m right back to where I was before.”
She placed her hand on his shoulder. “Do you want me to go back to doing what I was before?”
He nodded. It was too late, but he nodded all the same, dejected, like a child offered a consolation prize after losing the one he’d been after.
She bent forward and placed his limp penis into her mouth. She worked vigorously at it to no avail.
“Stop,” he said. “Just please…stop.”
She looked up at him with what appeared to be true confusion, if not concern. “What is it?”
Caleb inched back, dug into his pocket, and produced a wad of cash. He thrust it at her, not caring if it was more than fifty dollars. “Here, take it,” he said.
�
��You don’t want me to finish?”
“I’m done,” he said. The tears began to drip down his cheeks, yet he refused to cry.
“What’s wrong?”
He said nothing, just thrust the money at her again. “Just take it.”
She ignored his money and began to get dressed.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
Dressed now, she shook her head. “I’ll tell him you changed your mind.”
Caleb frowned. “He won’t buy that. He’ll think I finished and ran. Please, just take it.”
“No.” She placed her hand on his cheek. “Keep your money. I hope you figure out whatever’s bothering you.”
The clichéd hooker with the heart of gold? Really? It made him angry for reasons he couldn’t process. “Will you please just take the fucking money?”
She only shook her head and opened the van door. “Time to go,” she said.
Caleb hurried out of the van without another word.
• • •
Caleb sat on the curb across the street from the bar, drunk, head in his lap. He recalled an episode of one of those cop shows with sex offenders where a pedophile who did not want to be a pedophile took excessive amounts of hormone-altering drugs to stunt his libido. He wondered whether there was something like that for him.
Abstinence was the first thing that came to mind. Good old abstinence. Time tested and true. For how long, though? How long could he resist? Like his mother—like every damn member of his family—Caleb was learned on the subject of the psychopathic mind. He could resist now, but for how long? How long before the urges became too great? Seized his mind completely and forced his hand.
Oh God. He dropped his head into his lap again and wept.
He heard the entrance door to the bar open, the transitory sound of music rising. Then the door banging shut, music along with it. Caleb raised his head and spotted her. Her body language seemed all wrong. When she lit a cigarette, and the momentary glow of the lighter illuminated her cheek, he spotted the welt.
Caleb hopped to his feet and crossed the street without care for oncoming traffic.
“What happened?” he asked.
She turned her back on him. “Go away.”
He walked in front of her and stood firm. “What happened to your face?”
She only dragged hard on her cigarette, head down.
“Let me see your face,” Caleb said. “Look at me.”
She lifted her chin. It was not a slow, dramatic raise of the head, waiting for gasps of the audience to follow as the extent of the wound came into light. It was a sudden, jerky movement, her non-cigarette hand pointing to the wound as if to say: There! Fucking happy?
“Who did that?” Caleb asked. “Did he do that? The bartender?”
She said nothing. Just chuckled dryly, as one does when asked a stupid question, and drew hard on her cigarette again.
“Why?” Caleb asked.
She finally looked him in the eye. Her gaze was neither friendly nor mean. It was the hopeless look of a prisoner up for the parole they would never get. “Because I didn’t take your money. I made the cardinal sin of empathy. You think I’d learn by now.”
Empathy. The irony here was painful to Caleb. Here was a girl conditioning herself to shun empathy out of necessity, out of survival. And here he was, hoping to condition himself to embrace his God-given empathy
(because you do have it. You DO)
above all else.
Then why, goddammit? Why the urges to…
He couldn’t even bring himself to finish the thought. He could, however, bring himself to continue to compare their plights. This girl was not made bad. Life had made her bad, just as life had made him…
(Made you what?)
Caleb dug into his pocket once again and produced a wad of cash. “Here.”
“Will you just leave? Please?”
“Take it,” Caleb said. “It’s the least I can do.”
“Fuck off!”
The entrance door to the bar opened, music rising. Out stepped the bartender. The door slammed shut behind him. Music gone. “The fuck is this all about?” He got in Caleb’s face. “What? You want another crack at her, kid? Hoping your dick will get hard this time?”
Caleb could not rescue the girl from this life. Nor did he want to. This was no ridiculous fairy tale. No saving the hooker with the heart of gold. He did know one thing, though.
He wanted to hurt this man.
“I want to pay her,” Caleb said.
“Pay me, you mean,” the bartender said.
“Yes,” Caleb said.
The bartender held out his hand.
“Not here,” Caleb said.
The bartender laughed. “Oh, so discretion is important to you now? Just give me the money and fuck off while you’ve still got the legs to do it.”
Caleb turned and began walking towards the alley adjacent to the bar.
“Hey!” the bartender called. “Where the fuck you think you’re going?”
Caleb continued walking deeper into the alley, away from prying eyes.
“Motherfucker…” the bartender mumbled, hurrying after him.
The bartender reached Caleb and latched onto his shoulder, spinning him around. Caleb used the momentum to launch a right hook into the man’s jaw, dropping him cold, the man’s unconscious head ricocheting off the unforgiving concrete with a sickening crack, his body instantly going rigid as he seized up, eyes rolling back into his head, arms out in front like a man sleepwalking on his back.
Caleb raised his heel and brought it down onto the bartender’s face, once, twice, and then a third time. The bartender’s body began to convulse. Caleb had once knocked a man cold outside a bar in North Carolina while enlisted. A fellow Marine who he’d been drinking with immediately told Caleb to roll the man onto his side so he would not suffocate on his limp tongue. Caleb did, and the two of them had hurried off after without incident.
Caleb did not want to spare himself the pleasure of watching this man suffocate on his own tongue.
So, he left him as is, looking down on him, watching him die, not a clue as to what his next move should be.
Only that wasn’t entirely true. Caleb did know what he wanted his next move to be. And when he spun and saw the girl behind them, eyes wide and panting after taking it all in, he reached out to her, took her by the wrist, and bent her over a dumpster.
And she let him. Did, in fact, seem aroused by it all.
Caleb had the best sex of his young life, coming so hard he felt faint after.
• • •
When it was all over, they’d driven the bartender to a second location and dumped him, covering his body with a considerable pile of trash—a large rug, tires, boxes, anything of decent size.
When they returned to the lot behind the bar, she asked what would happen when his body was ultimately discovered. And Caleb, still quite buzzed, both on alcohol and what had just happened, merely shrugged and said: “Occupational hazard. Next case.”
“Occupational hazard,” the girl repeated.
“Making you think, is it?”
“About what?”
Caleb flashed on the look the girl had given him earlier. The hopeless look of the prisoner up for the parole they would never get.
“You’ve been paroled,” he said.
“That’s true. I could go back to school. I could get a real job. I could reconnect with my daddy. I don’t know why I never considered those things before.”
Her biting sarcasm all but drew blood. Again, Caleb found himself drawing eerie parallels between himself and the girl. Both resented their prisons, and yet when the gate was unlocked, the guards looking the other way, she refused to leave, and Caleb…Caleb had left the prison gates with the best of intentions, stopped, did an about-face, and walked right the fuck back in. Walked right back in while tacking on another twenty years to his sentence.
Because that is what you did, you know? Tacked on more year
s to your sentence. You’re drunk now. You’re still a little numb. But when the gravity of what happened here tonight hits you, the TRUE gravity, you’re gonna lose your shit. Never mind killing a man—he was lower than scum; some might even say what you did was righteous. But to use that moment as fucking Viagra…Christ, man, you just got your first true taste for something really bad. For nine out of ten killers, it’s all downhill from there.
Whether the girl wanted Caleb to stay and mollify her pessimism or not, Caleb didn’t care. Again, no fairy tale, this. He wanted to get home. Get home, sober up, and then lock himself in and never leave the house again.
“Take care of yourself,” Caleb said to her.
“It’s what I’ve been doing my whole life,” she said.
Caleb left.
The girl stayed put by the van for a spell, taking it all in. Headlights suddenly appeared in the dark lot behind the bar. She froze. The car rolled to a stop alongside the van, and she breathed an audible sigh of relief when she saw it was a station wagon, not a police cruiser.
The driver’s side window rolled down. A young man with dark hair smiled at her. There was a second man in the passenger seat. “How’s it going?” the driver asked.
Two things Caleb had said repeated themselves in her head. “Paroled” and “occupational hazard.” She could take her parole and simply walk away, stay on the straight and narrow. Or…
“Better now,” she said to them, smiling back.
“My buddy and I were hoping you might want to hang out for a bit,” the driver said.
She peered deeper into the car. The passenger, a skinny kid with a shaved head, looked equally as young as the driver. Kids. Kids were easy. They came quick and were hardly ever a bother. Easy money.
“One hundred,” she said. “Each.”
“Done.”
She turned to open the van.
“Two hundred if we can do it in here,” the driver called to her.
She turned back. Cocked her head and considered them. “Why?”
“Just feels safer, I guess,” the driver said with a nervous little chuckle. “We’re kind of new to this, you know?”
It made sense. Bunch of sheltered suburban boys venturing out from their safe little pond for a little nookie. They were probably just as scared as they were excited. If doing the deed in mom and dad’s station wagon made them feel safer—and got her paid—then what the hell?
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