“Sure.”
“What kind of a girl do you think I am?”
“That kind.”
“Let’s go.”
I fell in line with the pickups and sedans and sheepishly joined the parade. We attracted many stares and several smirks, but mostly we were welcomed. I pointed to a window above a clothing store. “The woman who lived up there was a whore. When there was a coffee cup in the window she was open for business. For ten bucks you got everything she knew or had read about, which wasn’t much.”
“You ever visit her, Marsh?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Scared I’d get caught or catch something.”
We turned two more laps.
“Christina Batchelor used to do it for money, did you know that?”
“Christina Batchelor? You’re kidding. She was Rainbow Queen, for God’s sakes.”
“She told me one night when we were selling popcorn at a basketball game. She charged five. She told me after I sold a bag of popcorn to one of her customers.”
“Who?”
“I can’t tell.”
“Who?”
“Carol’s father.”
“Carol Hasburg?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus.”
We both were silent and then we both laughed, at the ridiculous conversation and its distance from the way we had tiptoed around such earthy matters thirty years before. I turned off the square and headed for the reservoir.
“How many women have you slept with, Marsh?”
“Not many.”
“Really. How many? More than a hundred?”
“No. Christ. I haven’t even talked to a hundred.”
“More than twenty?”
“Maybe.”
“I was the first, wasn’t I?”
“You were. How about you?”
“Six, counting you.”
“Any while you were married?”
“Two. But not till it was over. Not till Eric did it first and told me the gory details. If I tell you something, will you promise not to get mad?”
“What?”
“You weren’t the first for me.”
“Who was?”
“Chuck.”
“Chuck Hasburg?”
“He came by one night after he and Carol had had a fight. He had some beer. We went out behind the foundry. I’d never been drunk before. He had his way with me, as they say. Then I threw up.”
“My old buddy Chuck.”
“It was my fault as much as his.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
Chuck and Sally. I thought of how careful I had been of her, how slowly I had inched toward her virginity, how leery I had been of piercing her psyche as I pierced her hymen. The inevitable pathos of ignorance made me laugh.
“I thought you’d be mad,” Sally said.
“I am, a little.”
“If I’d told you about it when it happened, you’d have never spoken to me again, would you?”
“No.”
We left the town and bounced along an abandoned stretch of highway and turned onto the dirt road to the reservoir. The night was black and cold. The windshield frosted crisply behind the hot powder of our breaths. I drove to the top of the dam and stopped. We looked out over the black water of the lake, divided by a creamy stripe of moonlight. The only sound was the faint splash of water coursing down the spillway, as peaceful as the sound of my erased illusions.
“My father built a sailboat once,” I said after a while.
“I didn’t know that.”
“It was before we started going together. He got a kit, spent hours and hours on it every night after work. Broke champagne over it when we launched it and everything. Chuck and I brought it out here one Sunday and sank it.”
“Clear to the bottom?”
“Yep. Still down there as far as I know.”
“On purpose?”
“No. Jesus. Why would I do it on purpose?”
“I don’t know. I thought maybe you were mad at him.”
“I was never mad enough to do that.”
“Your father must have been upset.”
“Sad was more like it. As far as I know he never built another thing in his life.”
“And you blame yourself.”
“Not really, I guess.”
The spillway splashed some more, unused and useless liquid trickling off to nowhere.
“Remember when we went skinny-dipping?” Sally asked.
“Yeah.”
“I was so afraid.”
“Of getting caught?”
“Of you being disappointed in how I looked next to Carol.”
“As I recall you looked just fine.”
“Her breasts were bigger.”
“That’s true.”
“You liked big breasts. I know you did.”
“Yours were big enough.”
“They’re bigger now.”
“What?”
“Eric made me get an implant.”
“Is it … does it work?”
“Here.”
She took my hand and put it on her breast. What I felt excited me. “Feels the same,” I said, and tried to laugh.
“Not to me.”
I dropped my hand away.
“Carol looks good, have you seen her?” Sally said.
“No.”
“She’s changed a lot, I hear.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. She’s bitter, and angry. They say she sleeps around a lot.” There might have been a hint of triumph in the last. “With more than Billy, I mean.”
“Did you ever hear anything more about Carol and Billy? Besides what you told me?”
“No.”
“They’re burying Billy tomorrow,” I said after a while.
“Do you want me to go with you?”
“I’d better stick with the family.”
“I’m family, Marsh. I’m more family to you than Matt.”
“I guess you are.”
I drove back to town and parked behind the hotel. “Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked as we sat in the quiet darkness.
“I’m sure.”
“Okay.”
Some time during the evening it had become easier to do what she wanted. I didn’t know why and didn’t want to. We got out and entered the hotel and climbed wordlessly to the room, past the sleeping eyes of the desk clerk.
The room suddenly seemed tawdry, as tawdry as what we were about to do. “Just don’t say anything, Marsh,” Sally said as I turned to her. “Nothing at all. Let me do what I want.”
Sally went into the bathroom and shut the door. I found the pint of Scotch and poured myself a drink and downed it in two gulps. Then I started to take off my clothes and then I stopped. Sex seemed suddenly unmanageable. I poured another drink, then picked up the book I was reading and lay on the bed and cast my eyes over senseless words.
“Marsh?”
The call from behind the door interrupted my nervous fit.
“What?”
“Turn out the light.”
I went to the wall and did what she asked. The bathroom door opened on a squeaking hinge.
She was naked, her pose burlesque—arm overhead, hip cocked, leg thrust forward, back arched—the final bump at the end of the act as the lights go out and the patrons cheer for more. Her flanks aflame from the light behind her, Sally saw where I was looking. “You like them?”
“Very nice.”
“I’m glad. Now don’t say anything else, Marsh. Just take off your clothes. No. Come here. Let me.”
I walked as near to her as I could get, still carrying my book as though it made me immune to fault. Sally began unbuttoning my shirt. I began to help her. She brushed my hands away.
She removed my clothing and my reluctance. I let her go ahead, uncertain whether as reward or punishment, certain only of desire, remembering how terribly she’d cried the first time I touched her breast.
Thirteen
When we were finished Sally nodded off, making herself cozy beside me, silence becoming sleep. I looked at the cracked and sagging plaster in the ceiling, its slight disrepair comparing favorably with my sense of honor.
I had enjoyed it more than I thought I would, but part of the reason was that, someplace along in there, I had tried to make Sally pay for what she had done to me thirty years ago. To make matters worse, Sally seemed to understand and assent to what I was doing, to endure my roughness as her due. Or maybe it was how she got her kicks. Sex is so terribly wonderful, it becomes too easy to make it the converse. I rolled to my side and slipped out of bed and got dressed. Sally murmured a question and I told her to stay where she was. I had a date with a WILD man.
The streets of Chaldea were empty of all but strays. Swaddled in the buzz of sleep and drink, I felt like one myself. A single light burned in the window of the WILD bungalow. Sounds of Eastern music crept out of the blackened windows, tickling my ears with the strains of sitars. The fragrance wafting through the air was sandalwood and, beneath that, something more biting, more familiar; something that had, I guessed, begun its life on the secret slopes of the Tanner farm. I crossed the porch and knocked on the sagging screen door.
Zedda opened the door and beckoned me inside. Both the music and the smell intensified in the entryway, which was lit to a golden hue by two large candles that rose off some sort of altar at the far end. The object of worship seemed to be a picture of John Lennon. From rooms at the back of the house came giggles and halting song fragments. I sensed many people, mostly female—a harem for the dashing Zedda. I followed him into the living room.
The floors were bare, the wax finish worn to the hardwood where traffic was heaviest. Mounds of tasseled satin pillows were scattered about, as were bits of clothing, ashtrays, books, and empty cans of food. In the corner a three-foot hookah rose off the floor like a cobra being charmed.
Zedda sat on a pillow and urged me to do the same. On the wall behind him, the intricate mix of colors in an Oriental rug seemed to ebb and flow, evolve and subside, in the prismatic haze. The room had a warm and muffled aspect, cozy in a dingy sort of way. I had to glance around two times, through the smoky glow and to the umbra beyond it, to make sure Zedda and I were alone.
As I struggled for comfort in the pillows Zedda asked if I wanted some tea. I shook my head. “Grass?” His smile was mocking.
“No, thanks.”
“We have alternatives, if you have a drug of choice.”
“Only alcohol.”
“We have wine, is all. Hard liquor reduces sexual function.”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“Swell.”
I started to lean back, then realized there was nothing behind me to lean back on. The incense made me work to stifle a sneeze. My shoes felt suddenly the size of coffins. Zedda stood suddenly and left the room through a door at the end of the entryway. The candles and I both trembled from the draft that blew through the room like the leavings of a ghost.
When he came back, Zedda was puffing on a meerschaum that contained cannabis instead of Prince Albert. The bowl was carved into the shape of a dragon. He wore the same leather pants I had seen earlier in the day, but now his shirt was ribbed and fluffy, as though fashioned from a bedspread or a drape. A clear crystal amulet hung from his neck. From time to time it caught the candlelight, which turned it blue and icy, the color of slow death. A red bandanna pressed his long hair to his temples. At the center of the bandanna was a silver star. I gestured toward it. “Military?”
He nodded once. “I’m a certified genuine American hero.” His grin was more maniacal than heroic.
Zedda inhaled deeply the smoke from his pipe, held it in his lungs for long seconds, then exhaled and leaned back against the wall and clasped his hands behind his head. He seemed prepared to be expansive. I asked him what he did before he went into the army.
“Nothing.” The smile was broad again, but late. “Everything.”
“Drafted?”
“Is there another way?”
“When?”
“Sixty-eight.”
“Where’d you take basic?”
“Fort Knox.”
“How about AIT?”
“Fort Polk.”
“Nice place, I hear.”
“If you get off on swamp.”
“Is that where you met Billy?”
He shook his head. “Nam. I met Billy-boy in the Southeast Asian Republic of Vietnam. He was quite the boy.”
“How do you mean?”
“Why Billy, now, he was one of those special souls. They’d given him the best they had—jump school, ranger training, even some time at a counter-fucking-insurgency school in the Philippines that only three people in the Western world know about. Oh, yes. Billy-boy was quite the troop by the time I caught his act.”
“Where was that?”
Zedda ignored my question. “These farm boys, see, they make number-fucking-one killers, man. They been killing pigs and chickens and shit since the day they were born, see, so they get real used to it. I mean, taking life ain’t such a big deal to them, not like to city boys, white city boys, at least. The only thing is, you got to make sure your basic plowboy is convinced that killing what you want him to kill is the American way. I mean, he’s got to think God wants him to kill gooks, just like God wants him to kill pigs and shit. When you get that job done, you got yourself one hell of a weapon. Just point the fucker in the right direction and stand back.”
Zedda laughed to himself and drew deeply from the pipe and looked at me through shiny, sleepy eyes. “Who are you again, man?” he asked carelessly.
“Billy’s uncle.”
“Oh, yeah. Right. Billy. Hell of a dude, man. Sorry he’s gone. Even if he did fuck me over.”
“How did he do that?”
“What?”
“Fuck you over.”
Zedda inhaled again. “None of your business, man. Billy’s dead. I loved the dude. He did what he thought he had to do and I respect him for it. R.I.P., man. R. fucking I.P.”
I let the borrowed black patois float to the ceiling with the smoke, then tried to get Zedda back on the beam. “Where’d you meet Billy?” I asked him again.
“Nam. I thought I said that already.”
“Where in Nam?”
“Base camp outside Tay Ninh. We’d both been in-country about nine months, but Billy, he’d started out down in the delta someplace, wading around in the slime paddies, slitting gook throats, and he was so fucking good at it they attached him to us as some kind of special scout or some such shit. See, Billy was so fucking slick at killing gooks every swinging dick over there wanted him in his unit. The body count, you know, man.”
I started to say something but Zedda started his soliloquy again. He was on a reefer roll and I let him go. Since I didn’t know what I wanted, I decided to take it all.
“See, what I learned later was, when I met him Billy was just back from Cambodia. Now at that time Cambodia was a sovereign fucking nation, man. I mean, we weren’t supposed to be in there, if you know what I mean, so you can imagine the kind of undercover shit Billy must have been into to get there. I mean, when I saw him first his fucking jungle boots were worn down to the slick and his tiger suit was so faded you couldn’t see the fucking stripes, and his eyes, man, you could have roasted wienies on those baby blues. The poor fucker was insane. And he loved it, was the thing, needed it, even. I mean, he was fucking into killing Cong, man. And it was all hand-to-hand. Fucking knife-in-the-teeth, crawl-on-your-belly, sneaky shit. Oh, yeah, Billy-boy was one lethal son of a bitch till I straightened him out.” Zedda’s smile was oiled with smugness.
“How’d you do that?”
“See, the command group up at division, they finally figured out that Billy-boy was getting off a little too much on this counterinsurgency shit, figured maybe he�
�d start practicing on white ass, you know, so they made him stay in the rear for a week with the rest of us REMFs.”
“REMFs?”
“Rear Echelon Mother-Fuckers. I served Uncle by tending bar and dealing dope in the EM club. That’s where I first saw Billy. He was on his twentieth beer or so one night, looking like he wanted to waste every troop in the place with a smile on his face, so I went over and bought him a few more brews. We started rapping and over the next couple of days Billy-boy started to get real interested in what I had to say.”
“Which was?”
Zedda’s lazy smile narrowed. “Just some facts, man. Facts that related to the military-industrial complex in this country. Facts that related to exactly who was doing the dying over there in terms of the socioeconomic structure of society; facts that related to how the war was being fought in its racial aspects; facts that related to the corruption of everything from the Thieu regime to the army club system. Facts like that. Before the week was out I laid out the whole fucking picture for Billy-boy.”
“And Billy came to oppose the war.”
“That’s affirmative. Billy-boy came to oppose that fucking war in every corner of his Anglo-Saxon soul.”
“What happened then?”
“When the week was up they tried to send him back out in the boonies with his knife strapped to his leg and a grenade in his teeth, but he told them to get fucked. He about slit some bird colonel’s throat, is what I heard. They talked some about court-martialing him, but Billy-boy knew some shit they didn’t want coming out in no fucking courtroom so they sent him to a shrink for about six minutes and then sent him home. Like to have been there when mom and dad laid eyes on the boy. Anyway, I came along a couple of months later, and eventually ended up down here.”
“What brought you to this area?” I asked.
Zedda took another puff, sucking smoke to his toes. I was afraid he was going to pass out. “The land, man,” he murmured. “All this fucking dirt. I’d seen so much land ripped up over in Nam I decided to do something to save what was left of it over here, you know, man?”
“There’s land in Michigan, land in Nevada, even land in Jersey. Why here?”
“Because this is the prototype. American Gothic and all that. There’s shit growing all over this state. Ain’t nothing but land here.”
“Then why Chaldea? The soil here’s only marginal at best. Why not up north, where the good stuff is?”
Fatal Obsession Page 10