Mockingbird

by Sean Stewart

  She shrugged. “Now, as it turns out, there are problems with being the class slut too. Darryl, the first boy I fucked, we did it in his bedroom a couple of times under a big Metallica poster. I must have said something about us being boyfriend-girlfriend now, and he laughed at me. He told me he had a real girlfriend and I wasn’t it. He told me real girlfriends didn’t let you fuck them. Would you believe I was shocked? Shocked! The whole point about sex was that it was true, dammit. All the rest of what they told us was lies and scenes and shit, but this was supposed to be it, the real thing: that skinny little cock, and me letting him put it in me.”

  “I feel terrible.” I looked at her. “I had no idea. I didn’t know any of this.”

  “I know.” She turned the page to Tiffany, the pretend schoolgirl, an innocent with her red-haired pussy showing under the hem of her nightie. Tonite I turn 19, and the party’s between my legs!

  I imagined my sister, fourteen years old in some strange man’s apartment, her panties around her ankles, looking past his shoulder, running away from our family on her back. “I’m sorry.”

  “I think you had exams or something.” Candy shrugged. “Seriously, Toni, you had all that fighting to do. All that winning. I didn’t want you to notice. I didn’t want you to know.”

  Softly I said, “Did you think I would be ashamed of you?”

  Candy’s eyes rolled up and she fell back to lie stretched out on the carpet staring at the ceiling. “Are you deaf? I didn’t want you in my fucking life, Toni. You were already using up most of the available oxygen. I didn’t give a damn what you thought of me back then, to be frank. You had your world and you were welcome to it. I just wanted to have something to myself.”

  “Oh.”

  She sat up and patted my hand. “Hey—the truth is hard. I care what you think of me now. A little, anyway. Especially now.” She glanced at my belly. “I’ve gotten pretty used to being your sister. This aunt-to-be thing is freaking me out. No, I mean it. I think about it every day.”

  “Hunh.” I sipped some iced tea. “Do you know if it’s going to be a boy, or a girl?”

  “Girl.”

  “I didn’t want you to tell me! I just wondered if you knew!”

  “Oops. Now you know.”

  “…Damn.”

  I touched my belly, and wondered if my baby could feel my hand there. My daughter. Slowly I said, “I think there are some things…there are some things a daughter ought to know, that would be hard to hear, coming from her mom.”

  “You reckon?” Candy said.

  “I do.” I looked back down at the magazine and shook my head. “Mr. Copper, eh?”

  “In sex? All of them, sooner or later,” Candy said. “Gods are big that way. Look at that anthropologist of yours. Rick. It’s the Preacher in him that you want to fuck, you know.”

  “Candy!”

  “The Widow…She’s the one I—” Candy shook her head. “The Widow is a bit hard.” She went looking through the stack of magazines and pulled out another one, called damage. There was a bound woman on the cover. She was tightly tied to a bench, facing away from the camera so you could see little of her beyond her bottom, exposed through a pair of panties that had been cut to ribbons. A man in a mask stood over her, holding a long pair of scissors.

  Candy flipped the magazine open to a picture of a woman tied to a tree with clothesline. The line was cinched tight at her ankles, her waist, her breasts, and around her throat. Her breasts were normal-sized and droopy. It made the scene much creepier and more real. There was a red rubber ball in her mouth as a gag, and she had wooden clothespins clamped to each of her nipples. She looked scared.

  My heart slowed, thumping very hard.

  “Lesson four: a lot of men like the idea of hurting women. This picture is kind of exciting,” Candy said quietly. “It’s also really wrong. You have to be…It isn’t Sugar that can enjoy this. Sugar doesn’t like raping or being raped. Hurting or being hurt.”

  “Jesus Christ, Candy.”

  “You can learn to be turned on by this stuff. You can learn to love being…violated, if you know how to open up to it. But you have to be very careful. If you don’t do it right, it feels bad. It feels horrible if you aren’t turned on, and if you do get turned on, that can be horrible too, if you don’t handle it just right. And in real life if you do this stuff with a jerk or a psycho, you are getting into some very serious shit.”

  I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t even open my mouth.

  She paged through the magazine and stopped at an ad. This time it wasn’t a photograph, just a line drawing of a woman bound and gagged and stuck full of pins. Pins in her belly and genitals and all over her breasts. Her eyes were wide. Underneath the picture it said, “Sexy girls Bound! Gagged! Cut!” It was an ad for a line of comic books. There was an address to send money.

  “How can you look at this, Candy?”

  “How can you afford not to?”

  She closed the magazine. “Of course that’s extreme. I’ve only ever met one guy who wanted to do that stuff to me for real. Looking at the pictures would probably get a lot of guys hard, but they would never do it to a real woman. But you’ve got to acknowledge it, okay? You have to face the world and look at it and see the truth. The torture stuff, it’s not a big part of the truth, but it’s there.” She closed the copy of damage and paged through another Hustler, quickly this time. “Ten years ago nobody showed pictures of women’s assholes. Now they’re everywhere. Lots of pictorials of anal sex. It’s the hot taboo in the air today. All men want to try it, but they won’t say that out loud. Show them that you want it, they think you’re hotter than an oil-field fire.”

  “This sounds like Sugar to me.”

  “The sexiest thing a woman can do is to want sex,” Candy said.

  “What about those other pictures? The violence.”

  “That’s…that’s a little different. That’s not about fucking, that’s about jerking off. That’s men not really wanting to think about their partner. Jerking off is about forbidden things. Screwing your boss, your secretary, your eighth grade teacher, your babysitter. Go a little to the fringe and you can include your sister. Five years ago anal sex was it. Now maybe anal sex is becoming routine, so the magazines have to find a new taboo.” She stopped and tapped a photo with one fingernail.

  In a moment of shock I recognized it as essentially the same scene as the one in damage, only without the overtones of real violence. In the Hustler picture, two naked babes were on a beach. One of them had “broken the rules” and was being punished. She was tied to a post with a few loose loops of twine, arms above her head. Everything about the picture, from the stagey poses to the enormous breasts, had a jokey, let’s-pretend feeling—but once again there were clothespins clamped to the victim’s nipples. “I don’t know exactly how far this is going to go,” Candy said thoughtfully. “Not too far, I hope. I mean this, this is just playing. This much can even be fun. But you look at the stuff underground or on the Internet, a lot of it is very rough. Really rough. Some of it is people playing with dominance and submission and getting a kick from it, but a lot of it is by men who truly hate women. Just hate us. Just hate the fact they can’t fuck us at will. We’re not people to them.”

  “So what do you do?”

  Candy shrugged. “Lots of people want to steal your car, too. I don’t know. Watch your back.”

  I finished my iced tea. “Candy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry about, about what you told me. I always wanted to look after you. Always. And I’m sorry that—”

  “Hey! Here I am, mailing out wedding invitations. Gonna be an aunt soon. Tía Candy. No tragedy. You keep acting as if sex were just dirty, nothing else. I like it. And it’s not the only thing in my life, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She looked at me. “Jesus. I’m gonna start feeling like I didn’t turn out good or something.”

  I wanted to laugh at that but I couldn’t qu
ite manage it. “I think you turned out fine. Really. And you’ve been really good to me since this happened,” I said, pointing to my belly.

  “Hey, Ms. Magnum cum laude. Someone has to look after you sometimes too, you know.” Candy scooped up her magazines and shoved them back in a drawer. Over her shoulder she said, “By the way, if it makes you feel any better, we’re both going to make it through the hurricane okay.”

  “Hurricane! You dreamed one?”

  “Mm. Last night. At first I couldn’t figure out what was going on, there was all this noise. We were in the garden at the house and it was a mess: all the flowers gone, the bananas hanging from the tree with their peels split open. Mud everywhere. Big cracked branch hanging in the middle of the garden. Then I realized the racket was chain saws. Zillions of ’em, all around us, like the morning after Alicia blew into town.”

  I leaned back in my chair. Hurricane Alicia had been an early lesson in privateering and free enterprise gone wild; in the aftermath of the storm, ten-pound bags of ice had been going for ten or even twenty bucks as people tried desperately to save the contents of their freezers from going bad in the protracted power outages. Parts of the city had taken two full weeks to get power back. Things spoil fast in a Houston summer. “There has to be some way to make a profit out of this.”

  “What?”

  “Momma did it. She made money off the future. We’ve never really tried.”

  Candy looked at me. “Momma paid for it, too.”

  “Well, the Riders are in my head anyway, and I’m not getting a thing from it. Paying off Momma’s debts again.”

  “Toni, don’t. You just…it’s no good messing with that stuff. The future doesn’t work that easily.”

  “I need the money.”

  She looked at me even longer.

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh Lord.”

  “What?”

  “Mary Jo. A hurricane, Candy. It’s going to bring her house down. Her roof will never take it. The water will be three feet deep on her living room floor.”

  “Oh my God,” Candy said. “Then I guess you better make some money in a hurry.”

  NINE

  Candy said that in her dream I had been grossly fat—thanks, sis—meaning the hurricane must be coming late in my pregnancy, August or September. Assuming it might take a week of work to get Mary Jo’s roof in shape, that meant I had better have the money to pay for it before the end of July. Just over two months.

  As a last resort I could use the American Express gold card I got while making good money at Friesen Investments, but I swore I would rather wash cars or flip burgers than go tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Momma would do that kind of thing: run up a gargantuan bill and then count on some miracle to let her pay it off. Of course Momma could make her own miracles. But there isn’t anything in this life you get for free, not even miracles. Every debt she ran up, the Riders made her pay in full.

  I couldn’t live like that. First, I didn’t have the talent. The Riders mounted me at their pleasure, as far as I could tell, without giving anything in return. Probably Momma left them creditors too, when she slipped out of her life, and I had been left behind to foot the bill.

  And thanks to Bill Friesen Jr. and his need to prove his manhood, I no longer had the comfortable job I had trained for years to earn.

  The phone was ringing when I got back from Candy’s place. “Toni Beauchamp speaking.”

  “Toni?”

  “Bill?” I said. “Bill Friesen Jr.?”

  “Uh—”

  “I was just thinking about you,” I said. “Not good thoughts.”

  “Oh. Um, look, Toni, I guess you’re still angry at me, but I need your help.”

  “Then you are in one sorry predicament.”

  “Please. I’m willing to pay.”

  “You know I have my own consulting firm now.” As of exactly this second, in fact.

  “Toni. I’m begging. Things have gone…Things aren’t very good for me.” He sounded desperate. I could imagine his blinking round face, the bemused expression he wore whenever things started to go wrong, as if he could evade any responsibility by slipping into a doze while events careened around him.

  I really did not wish to see him. “Always glad to help an old friend of the family. My rates are, ah”—pick something insane and impossible—“four hundred dollars an hour.”

  “Fine. Is now a good time?”

  I dropped the phone. “Damn, wait just…” I got it back onto my shoulder. “Did you hear me, Bill? I charge four hundred dollars an hour.”

  “Yes, fine, look, it’s just past one now, can you do a late lunch meeting today?”

  I kept forgetting what life was like for the really rich. I kicked myself for not charging a thousand. “Actually, I’ve just finished with a client here.” Lord, Toni, you just lied again. You’re getting more like Momma every day. “Lunch might not be a bad idea.”

  “Oh, great.” The relief in his voice surprised me. “Where do you want to go?”

  Since Bill would be buying, I tried to think of an obscenely expensive restaurant, but ended up asking to go to Pappadeux instead. It was moderate by Bill’s standards—fifteen to twenty dollars for the entrees—but I worshipped their food. The Pappas brothers were Greek immigrants who came to Houston in the thirties and opened a restaurant. As time went by, they grew more and more successful, opening Pappasitos Tex-Mex Cantinas, Pappamia Italian food joints, Pappas Brothers Steak House (with a selection of fine cigars and a smoking room to enjoy them in), and Pappadeux cajun seafood restaurants. The one kind of food the Pappas family does not serve, anywhere, is Greek.

  Pappadeux is always loud and full of junior executives and upwardly mobile twenty-somethings and an unfailingly pleasant “waitstaff.” It has a lot of cheerleader yuppie ambiance I usually don’t like, but I forgive it for the sake of the food, which is unfailingly superb. Even their iced tea is superior.

  By the time Bill and I arrived, there was a fifteen minute wait for a table in nonsmoking, so we sat on stools at the full service bar and studied the menus. Bill ordered a frozen strawberry daiquiri. I meant to be good and take only a glass of water. There was no point breaking my pregnancy diet, caffeine was a one-way ticket to a low birthweight baby. I was not my mother’s daughter in this. I had some strength of character.

  “Glass of iced tea,” I said. “And could you put a wedge of lime in that?”

  How much caffeine could there be in one little glass of iced tea? Anyway, I promised myself I would make up for my weakness by feeling guilty and miserable the whole time I drank it.

  Without booze—I certainly wasn’t risking fetal alcohol syndrome—there was no way I could run up a truly horrendous tab for Bill, but at least I could order the day’s special: grilled mahi-mahi in a sherry cream sauce with shrimp, scallops, and roasted pecans; served with fresh green beans and dirty rice. (Dirty rice, if you have not had it, is sort of like the shrimp fried rice you might get at a good Chinese restaurant, only instead of soy sauce, the dish is flavored with a particularly tasty sprinkle of mud. It is hard to explain why this is appetizing. Trust me.)

  Bill ordered the same. His frozen daiquiri came. He poked at it with his straw and then looked up at me. “You were right. First we took a couple of hits on some currency speculations. Nothing major, but enough to hurt. We saw an opportunity in a biomedical company, way undervalued. We went for it. Two days later the FDA repealed their chief product.”

  “What was it?”

  “Something for hair loss. Didn’t work. At first the FDA passed it because it didn’t do any harm, you know. It wasn’t toxic. Then it turned out the company was making false claims about the success rates of their treatment. This stuff was nothing. Nothing! Like insect repellent without the stinky stuff in it.”

  “You invested in hair tonic, Bill?”

  “The growth was just too good, Toni, really. Dollar growth, that is. Not hair. Obviously.” He ran his hand over his own hair. It was start
ing to recede, making his face look even rounder. He sucked up a little more daiquiri. “But it’s the oil deal that has me strapped. Go ahead and say ‘I told you so’ if you want.”

  “I told you so.” One of the bartenders dropped a salver in front of us with a miniature baguette wrapped in white linen. I cut off a slice and slathered it in whipped butter. Fat is good for babies. Truly. You can look it up. “You’re paying good money for my advice, Bill. Let’s hear the details.”

  They weren’t pretty. About a year before, Jim Edmonds, a friend of Bill Sr.’s, had come to him trying to sell his company. He had invested heavily in a parcel of land in the Hill Country not too far from Fredericksburg. The geologicals indicated good potential for large oil reservoirs. The oil was deep in Ordovician-age rock, about 10,000 feet down. Edmonds drilled four test wells; two of them hit, one stripper well at about ten barrels a day, but one good one at three hundred and twenty. No gushers, but decent production. He was making very good money off a series of wells he had drilled in Cuba for a song, so he decided to expand both the Hill Country and Cuban fields into major plays. He had stepped up drilling on both sites, starting ten wells in the Hill Country play, when the President slapped an embargo on Cuba. Not only could he not get his already-bought new equipment into Cuba, he couldn’t get the oil from his existing wells out of it. His loans came due and he found himself suddenly stretched out like a drumhead, effectively broke, even though he had hundreds of millions of dollars worth of functioning equipment sitting on perfectly good oil fields.

  So he came to Bill Sr., who said he was no longer of an age to be interested. He was content to put his money in T-bills, dabble in the market, watch his mutual funds grow and play a lot of golf. Bill Jr. was more ambitious. “I wanted to do something for once. Dad was funny about it, not saying much…I thought maybe he was testing me. Seeing if I had the guts to make a move on my own.”