Static!

by Michael R Collings

  Ric looked up and smiled again. He had overheard a counselor who said it was a feral smile—he had never taken the time to find out what that meant. Sounded like something tough, though.

  “Not too badly, though,” Wheeler hurriedly added, as if afraid that he was putting too heavy a demand on Ric. “Just a small jolt.”

  “What make is it?”

  “I don’t remember,” Wheeler answered.

  “I’ve got to have that for the work order. Mind if I check the note?”

  Ric was opening the envelope even as he spoke, glancing again toward the door as he slid his finger along the sealed flap. He tugged the paper out. The key fell with a clatter to the counter top. He pretended not to notice.

  “Here it is,” he said, leaning over the pad and laboriously filling in a space with a serles of numbers and initials. He was left-handed and had only a passing acquaintance with school—they had parted some years before, school and he, on a mutually antagonistic level. His handwriting was large and uneven, more that of a ten-year-old than an adult. It didn’t fit too well with the rest of him—his long, roughly styled hair, the way he filled his T-shirt and jeans. Maybe sometime some chick would invite him to come over to her place for some lessons in penmanship—it might be a good scam. Good enough for him to get lucky. Or her.

  “That’s all,” Ric said, straightening up. “Just sign here.” He pointed to an X and a line across the bottom of the form. Wheeler wrote his full name, adding underneath “for Payne Gunnison,” then slid the pad back. Ric studied the name for a second.

  “Thanks...Mr. Wheeler.” He looked straight into the guy’s eyes when he spoke.

  “Nick,” the guy said finally. “I live next door to Payne.”

  There was a pause. The silence in the shop was heavy, thick.

  “Yeah,” Ric said, really getting into the game. This shit was ripe for stringing along.

  Maybe tomorrow when he went over to fix the DVD player, he’d fix something else, too. He’d done that often enough, bashed the freakin’ queers that tried to feel him up in alleys and johns.

  Ric ripped off the top sheet and handed Nick a copy. He flashed the smile again.

  “Sure thing, Mr. Wheeler.” He hit the name hard, throwing everything he could into his voice.

  The guy almost winced.

  Ric slipped the original into a manila folder and stacked it with several others alongside the well-worn cash register.

  “The key?” Wheeler said suddenly, shoving the bit of metal across the counter with a fingertip. Right on cue, Ric thought, couldn’t have done it better if I had told him when and give him a stopwatch.

  “Oh. Yeah,” he said as he picked it up, easily, as if he had completely forgotten that minor detail. His fingers brushed against Wheeler’s, curled around the key, and dropped it into the folder. “Thanks.”

  The front door clattered open. Ric jerked his eyes up and called out over Wheeler’s shoulder.

  “Hi, Mr. Tasco.” He smiled. It was a different smile. Safer.

  As he spoke, he slid the ripped envelope out of sight across the counter and dropped it into the wastebasket.

  Wheeler turned just as an old man crossed the room, grunted at the two of them, and disappeared through a door hidden behind a stack of packing boxes.

  Ric grinned. “He loves pizza but can’t eat it without getting gas. He’s probably back there chugging down on some white guck right now. Thanks for bringing Mr. Gunnison’s stuff by.”

  He was every inch the conscientious clerk now. Hs could hear old man Tasco rummaging through desk drawers, probably looking for his medicine and burping and farting. He stared into Wheeler’s eyes again, noting the almost imperceptible flinch as he did so.

  “Come again soon.”

  “Uh, yeah. Thanks,” Wheeler said hurriedly as he left the store.

  Ric watched the door swing shut, listened to the clatter as it hit against the worn jamb, even followed Wheeler’s silhouette until he slipped into his car and edged it into the lane of traffic and disappeared.

  Then he laughed.

  It was a high sharp laugh, not at all pleasant.

  Tasco yelled from the back room. “Enrique, quiet out there.”

  Ric swallowed the rest of the laughter, almost choking. He glanced down at the name and address. Then he reached over and touched the side of the folder, touched it right where the key to The Greer’s place lay next to the purchase order. Yeah, there could be some fun times ahead. Gotcha, fag.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  When Payne returned three days later, he was in an unusually good mood. He felt rested and refreshed in spite of a grueling flight back to LAX—the plane had been detoured twice because of mechanical failures and had spent a total of six hours idling in the hot sun on tarmacs in Houston and Denver. Even so, by the time he climbed out of his car and onto the porch, he felt good. He could breathe more easily here in the coolness, and the scent of the decades old jasmine blooming along the edge of the house smelled like rich perfume. He was happy to be back. To be home.

  More to the point, perhaps, things had gone well. He had been able to field most of the questions his relatives, friends, and even a few former neighbors had posed about California, Los Angeles, and Great-Aunt Emilia, and he had had a fruitful meeting with the Pennsylvania lawyers about his mother’s estate. He even checked with them on the restrictions in Aunt Emilia’s will—the provisions were peculiar, everyone had agreed, but legal. One of the lawyers had pointed out a few possible loopholes. Payne might be able to make a few necessary changes around the place to make it more livable.

  In addition, he had discovered just where he stood, financially. He had known that he had inherited a fair amount of property from Great-Aunt Emilia, but until the details of both estates had been clarified, he had not known just how obscenely wealthy he was. He glanced into the darkness, toward where the new Toyota sat cooling in the driveway, its engine plinking faintly and its new-car polish hidden by a thin coat of airport parking lot dust. I should get it washed soon, he thought absently. Somehow, the car didn’t seem as horrendously expensive now as it had when he signed his name on the check a few weeks ago and drove away from the dealership nervous and emotionally exhausted. With his inheritance, he had discovered, he could probably afford a new car every month for years if he wanted, even after taxes took their chunk.

  In exchange for having that much money, he had decided on the last leg of the flight home, he could put up with a few minor inconveniences like dead-fish white walls and eerily effective draperies and television monitors in every room.

  His mood lightened even more when he unlocked the front door and walked in. Tucked beneath the unused chess board on the small table in the living room, he found his key and a bill from Tasco. He glanced at the amount—after the sums the lawyers had been discussing, it seemed ridiculously small. He stuffed the paper and the key into his pocket and dropped his suitcase off in the bedroom. It made a dark splotch against the whiteness, like sweat on a white T-shirt, even in the dimness of the hall light.

  He started to change, pulling off his tie and tossing it still half-knotted onto the dresser. It coiled against the mirror, a narrow, conservative blue-and-gray striped serpent staring hypnotically at itself in the glass. He unbuttoned his shirt and tugged at one sleeve before deciding against changing right then. He shrugged back into the shirt and walked out of his room and down the hall into the control room.

  He pulled out a DVD and slipped it into the machine without even looking at the title. While the player was warming up, he returned to the bedroom.

  It was late. It had been dark for several hours, but Payne’s body was still trapped somewhere between California time and Pennsylvania time. This flight had not been as traumatic as the first one—was it only six weeks ago?—but here in the real world of Tamarind Valley it was ten o’clock, maybe ten-fifteen.

  He crossed to the far side of his room and pulled his shirt off. The soft fabric was damp to the t
ouch as it slid over his back and arms. Without it, his skin felt warm where the night air caressed it.

  He wadded the shirt up and tossed it through the doorway into the hall. He would pick it up tomorrow and put it with the rest of the dirty laundry from the last day of his trip.

  He sighed, slipped his shoes off and threw himself onto the bed, hot and sticky from travel but suddenly too tired to stir. He heard a static crackle. A bluish tint flickered on the white walls.

  The DVD player flickered into life.

  Almost too tired to move, he glanced at the monitor. The film looked like a musical or something, fairly old at any rate. It was in black and white. He didn’t recognize any of the actors. He listened for a moment, but the tune playing over the credits wasn’t familiar either. He turned away and stared at the white wall opposite, noticing the subtle play of shadow from the screen on the smooth plaster only inches from his face.

  He was home again.

  Home.

  He felt tired but comfortable. He had missed the place, missed this bed, his bed, missed the films and the sounds and the sights. They all made up for anything else. Even for a night that was hot and sticky. He was hot and sticky. He was tired.

  But he was safe.

  Safe!

  He sat up, his heart thumping. Why had he thought that? After all, what was there to threaten him back home in Pennsylvania. Only his childhood, his youth, his relatives who—slightly greedy and covertly envious, perhaps—nevertheless seemed to enjoy his visit. So why safe?

  The blue and silver reflections danced across the wall. The sound was pitched low enough that the vaguely forties-style music faded to a solemn hiss, rising and falling with his breathing. Or his breathing with it.

  For a few moments he relaxed. He almost fell asleep half-dressed on his bed.

  The opening credits finished. There were a few seconds of dialogue, still too soft to be intelligible. He glanced over in time to see a man and a woman standing shoulder to shoulder, studiously ignoring each other against a backdrop of a railroad station.

  He sat up again and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He stared at the monitor for a long time before he finally sighed and stood up. He loosened his belt, unzipped his slacks, and let them drop to the floor. Now he wore only dark nylon dress socks and the black bikini briefs he had bought on impulse only the day before in the Sears store across the mall from the lawyers’ offices—a puzzling purchase for him, since he always wore conservative, full-cut boxers.

  He felt suddenly and unaccountably ill-at-ease standing in the skimpy underwear, half embarrassed at their low-cut waist and high-cut legs. He felt as if he were doing something forbidden and was suddenly and irrationally afraid his mother burst through the door without knocking and seem him standing there and laugh at him and then punish him by taking away his TV privileges for a week.

  Cut it out. Don’t be stupid.

  He felt an instant of embarrassment, not at what he was wearing but at how he had thought about his mother. She had never, would never have burst into his room uninvited. Would never have laughed at him.

  He glanced at his image in the mirror, seeing his body cut off at mid-thigh by the coiled tie. What he saw was not bad, he decided. He sucked his stomach in and tensed his abdominal muscles until they stood out taut and firm. Not bad at all. And the briefs did fit nicely. He kicked one leg outward. The high-cut leg openings gave him a sense of freedom.

  He stretched, trying to relax the tired muscles in his arms, shoulders, and back.

  He would have to see about getting some more briefs. Give the old boxers to Goodwill or something, stuff them into the collection bins that littered supermarket parking lots all over the area.

  He crossed the hall to the bathroom and soaked a washcloth in cold water and wrung it out and drew it across his forehead, letting the water drip down his skin and bathe his neck and shoulders. A few drops beaded down his back, rolling until they disappeared beneath the elastic on his briefs.

  “Shit,” he murmured, wetting the cloth a second time and reaching across the tub to open the window. What breeze filtered through was as hot as the inside of the house.

  He thought about a cool shower, even went so far as to pull his socks off and step out of the sweat-damp briefs before deciding against it.

  Too much trouble, only get all sweaty again drying off.

  He sniffed at one armpit experimentally, then the other. He could almost hear his mother’s whine—Disgusting habit, she had always insisted, but what the hell, he was alone now. If he could stand himself, who else was there to worry?

  Instead of showering, he slapped at his underarms with the damp washcloth, patted dry, then tucked a clean white towel around his waist and walked barefoot into the kitchen.

  The linoleum felt hot and sticky. There was barely anything on the shelves, even less in the fridge. He had pretty well cleaned everything out before he left.

  He found a couple of slices of hard cheese tucked behind a plastic container of outdated yogurt. He filled a pitcher with tepid water and dropped in a dozen ice cubes from the freezer.

  Sipping the water as he walked, he returned to the bedroom and lay down. He breathed deeply. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, force the chest to rise, the belly to press against the spine as the air passed in, out, in, out. The loosely knotted towel loosened even more until it fell onto the bedspread beside him. The terrycloth rippled whitely, like sun-bleached sands at a beach. He glanced at the screen again, barely half conscious as hero kissed heroine and the credits flickered over the screen.

  Can’t be over. Not enough time. I’ve only been home a few minutes.

  He looked at the clock on the nightstand.

  Eleven-forty-seven.

  He must have drowsed off relaxing on the bed, napped without realizing it. He thought vaguely about checking to see if Nick’s study light was on. If it was, he might invite Nick over to watch something. The thought passed.

  Anyway, he decided, he was too tired. And it was probably too late. His stomach growled. He could walk down to that all-night place up the street and pick up a couple of cans of Campbell soup, maybe some tuna and bread, but even that seemed more exertion than he wanted. So he just lay there, eyes on the credits, mind miles away.

  He thought of Cathy and, silently, thought passed into dream. Sunlight glistening on her hair, gold on gold, sunlight on her cheeks, sunlight surrounding her like a nimbus as they sat in the fragrance of the rose arbor at John’s. Her laughter at dinner, her smile, her sparkling eyes. She was a splash of color against the whiteness of his rooms, a splash of life against the evenness of his life.

  Dream fingered through memory, remembrances shifted and distended, and she was there again, dressed as she had been at the beach, and he was beside her, lying with their dark flesh on white sand, and feeling the warm sand—no, the hot sand where it dug into bare flesh of shoulders and hips and thighs.

  And then she was naked…and he was naked and strong and hard and aching for her as she suddenly sat just beyond his reach where she watched waves slipping onto the sand, consuming the sand, spiraling it away, oblivious to him, to his need. He reached to touch her, tried to pull her down to him and feel her against him, surrounding him....

  The heat increased as the sun focused on them. The waves hissed louder, no longer slipping gracefully onto the shore but assaulting it, spitting anger and naked fury at the white sands and black boulders and the naked figures motionless just beyond their reach. Their roar grew until it distorted into white static, the white sands wavered beneath the heat, merged with the black of boulders, striated, elongated, and blurred into visual static. Cathy was still beside him, but now looking directly at him, terror in her eyes.

  Run run run run run she radiated, her throat quivered as she struggled to speak, but her tongue refused to move, her lips refused to form coherent sounds. But Payne knew anyway.

  She wanted to run, run from him, but she could not. For some reason she could not even
stand. Instead, she knelt in front of him, hunched over, and tried to hide herself with her hands. The shadows of her arms where they crossed her breasts cut blackly against the whiteness of her breasts.

  He was sweating, slipping in sweat that became waves and died into flurries of burning snow. The static intensified. She screamed.

  The knife shadows cut deeper and now black blood flowed down the curve of her belly.

  She screamed again, a piercing keen that blended with the static.

  He reached for her, touched her. As if she were a statue of white snow beneath the shadow of a naked oak, at the heat of his touch she dissolved, flesh steaming away to ghostliness until his hands penetrated her, reached through her to nothingness. Beyond her, superimposed on the ghostly afterimage of her face, images moved jerkily, like characters in a badly filmed movie, black and white figures distorted by too many shadows, too much darkness. He couldn’t identify them but they terrified him. One—suddenly dwarfed by Cathy’s face—curved around the hollow of her eye; another rested supine beneath her lip. Both were naked, faded to a dismal gray against the white and black flurries of snow.

  He tried to stand, to move through her to them, discover who and what they were. He was still hot, his skin slick with sweat. His stiffness throbbed painfully.

  The tiny figures swirled, shifting across the landscape of her face, transforming the angles of her cheeks, the roundness of her lips into hills and vales, slipping along the planes of her nose, twining and intertwining at the jointure of her mouth.

  He leaned closer.

  He could hear his own breathing, his heart racing in the heat.

  He could smell her, them, the fetidness of heat and sweat and rotting crabs rejected by the waves at high tide.

  He leaned closer.

  It was as if he were trying to kiss her, to kiss a ghost.

  Cathy disappeared. Gulliver-like, he peered into the minuscule world of the figures, studying them as they intersected and joined, swirled apart, coalesced and separated yet again. The eroticism of their movements penetrated to his core, achingly, burningly.