Precarious

by Al Riske

  She took a deep breath. The whole place smelled like sex now. Stan (funny, she’d almost forgotten him) took hold of her arm, and to Glenn he said, “You’re wasting your time, man. She’s with me.”

  “Is that so? Hey, Donna—”

  Her T-shirt brushed his nose as she slung it across her shoulder and walked away.

  MCKINLEY DECIDED IT might be best if the band took a break right about then. His announcement was greeted with loud groans and shouts for specific songs, but he just said, “Be back in a few.”

  BUD WAS STILL on his stool by the bar when Glenn came over and began the following exchange:

  “God, I want to fuck her in the worst way.”

  “Why not the best way?”

  “What’s the best way?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “No, tell me. I want to know. You’ve fucked her?”

  “Look, you said ‘the worst way,’ so …”

  “So how does she like it?”

  “Forget it.”

  “No, really, I really want to do her.”

  Bud finished his beer and went to get his coat.

  THERESE WOULDN’T PUT her sweater back on because she knew it was driving Tim crazy. Let him suffer. He liked it. More than he knew.

  She pressed her palms against his chest and pushed off, hard. His shoulder blades hit the wall, and she stepped in close now, leaving him no room to move.

  “I’ll do whatever I want,” she said.

  She watched him swallow and try to speak, but nothing came out, so she put her right hand over his crotch. He was hard and she rubbed him slowly.

  “You’d better do as I say,” she said.

  DONNA PUT HER shirt back on and sat down with Stan. “Thought you were with Jill tonight,” she said.

  “What gave you that idea?”

  “I see you lookin’ down her blouse every chance you get.”

  “A man’s gonna look, sweetheart.”

  “I just figured you liked ‘em big.”

  “Big is nice. So’s small. There ain’t no one right size.”

  “You really think I’m sexy as she is?”

  “Sexier.”

  Like hell. He’d even be with Therese now if her old boyfriend hadn’t dragged her away. “You’re a good liar, Stan. But not that good,” she said, taking a lipstick from her purse and spreading it on with the aid of a small mirror.

  “You know I’m right. ‘Cause you know how to make a man hot.”

  “HEY, MAN, WHAT do you think you’re doin’?” It was the drummer, tapping Glenn on the shoulder. “You tryin’ to move in on my woman?”

  Glenn looked at him and thought: This fucker is worried—and well he should be.

  “Damn straight,” he told him. And then, to anyone who cared to listen, he all but shouted: “You all better lock up your women, ‘cause Glenn Lewis is in town!”

  The guy’s face looked funny, like he was going to smile but changed his mind halfway. Maggie was by his side, and she said, “I think he’s had a few too many tonight.”

  “I ain’t even begun,” Glenn said. “You can relax, though, fella, I ain’t after your squeeze. Otherwise I’da had her between the sheets by now. I’m gonna do that blonde over there.”

  “Looks to me like she’s with Stan.”

  Maggie was pulling on her boyfriend’s arm, whispering something Glenn couldn’t hear.

  “Looks can be deceiving,” he said. “Ol’ Stanley will have to contend with me before the night is over.”

  The drummer looked him up and down and said, “Don’t let your mouth get your ass in trouble because you can’t back up what you’re sayin’.”

  “Let me ask you somethin’,” Glenn said. “You think you’re fast enough to keep me from splatterin’ your head against that beam behind you?”

  AT THE NEXT table, a couple of guys were talking. Donna knew them—knew their names anyway. Booker and Danny. She’d spoken to them a time or two here at The Well.

  She heard Booker saying, “So I told him, What—you think you’re special? She’s hit other guys before you.”

  Danny saw her trying to listen in (Stan was getting more beer) and said, “Hey, Donna, you ever hit a guy?”

  “Never had reason to,” she said.

  “Your little sister gave Cory Stevens a helluva shiner last week.”

  Donna shook her head. “She’s crazy. You can do a lot more damage with words.”

  “You haven’t seen Cory’s black eye,” Booker said.

  “Don’t matter. Words hurt more.”

  THE DRUMMER AND his girl were gone. Scared shitless, no doubt. No sign of them anywhere. And he had just been talking to them not two seconds earlier. Intimidating people was so easy, Glenn thought. He’d learned that back in junior high. B-ball practice. Let that tricky little double-pump guard get airborne, then bump him hard and send him crashing into the hardwood floor. He wasn’t so quick to drive on Glenn after that. Not half as cocky once he understood he could be hurt.

  Glenn went to the men’s room to take a piss, and when he came out he noticed a cable-knit sweater on the floor. It seemed familiar, though he couldn’t think why. Then he heard rustling at the end of the hall. The redhead with the plump breasts had somebody cornered behind the phone partition, almost out of sight. Pants down around his knees. White pants.

  “Don’t take no for an answer,” he told her, and went to get another beer.

  THERESE KNEW SHE could take Tim home and make him do anything she wanted tonight. But she also knew she couldn’t make him stay with her. He’d run away again the next day or the next week.

  She picked up her sweater and left him there, right on the verge.

  STAN’S LEGS FELT heavy for no apparent reason—he hadn’t exactly been tearing up the dance floor—and that was enough to start the downward spiral that so often took hold of his thoughts on nights like this.

  He set the pitcher on the table and sat next to Donna without speaking. When he looked around at the other patrons in the bar, he could see they were all a few years younger than he was. And yet they were way ahead of him. The ones he’d talked to were all earning good money or else starting careers with promise.

  “Stan?”

  By now he would have expected to have something. Something more than an old Buick with faded paint, torn upholstery, and a tendency to overheat. Which, when he thought about it, was the single most expensive item he owned.

  “Stan! Are you going to pour me a beer, or what?”

  Stan shook his head. That damn car.

  “Pour me a beer,” Donna said, “before I smack you.”

  When Stan finally looked up, he saw Donna and two smart-ass punks drinking beers with little wedges of lime in them. They were laughing and looking at him. Why?

  “Don’t make me get nasty,” Donna said.

  “Look, honey, I’m not forcing you to do anything you aren’t dying to do.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, what was all that out on the dance floor? Looked plenty nasty to me.”

  Nobody was laughing now.

  “You’ve lost me, Stan.”

  “That so? You gonna get these guys here to do you instead?”

  THE BARTENDER WOULDN’T serve him, so Glenn got his coat and went outside to get some air. With his Camaro right there, he decided to take the pistol out of the glovebox and stuff it in his coat for safekeeping. As he did, he noticed someone, barely visible in the fog, throw down a cigarette and stamp out the orange glow with her high-heeled shoe. The redhead. Her angry footsteps echoed as she walked down the sidewalk out of sight.

  DONNA STOOD UP quickly, felt dizzy, and may have been crying. “You idiot,” she said. “All I wanted was a goddamn beer.”

  Stan started to say something but stopped, and Donna watched his face change. It went through about a dozen expressions as he tried—with little success, from the looks of it—to make sense of what was happening.

  “I just wanted
you to pour me another beer,” she clarified. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  As Stan slowly stood, Donna spun around—and smacked into Glenn. He must have been standing right behind her, his coat zipped up and his hands deep in the pockets. He looked bigger somehow. Puffed up.

  “This sorry son of a bitch bothering you?” he asked.

  “Outta my way, shit for brains.”

  He grabbed her arm and it hurt.

  “YOU GOT SOME mouth on you, you know that?” Glenn said. “I guess I’m gonna have to teach you what that hole is for.”

  Ol’ Stanley made a feeble move in his direction, but Glenn was too quick for him. The homely bastard was staring into the barrel of a big, bad .45 before his other foot touched the floor. He looked almost sober all of a sudden. Nothing clears the cobwebs like a .45 automatic.

  “Hey, man, relax. You don’t want to use that thing.”

  “Care to try me?”

  People all around were backing away slowly.

  “Oh, you’re a tough customer, I can see that. But you don’t—”

  “Shut up, Stan,” Donna said. “I’d shoot you myself if I had the gun.”

  “Well, well,” Glenn said. “Looks like the little lady has finally made her choice.”

  BEHIND THE BAR, Jill dialed three numbers on the phone, then felt a bullet zing past her ear, heard the shot and glass shattering behind her.

  The gunman whirled in the opposite direction and shouted, “Away from the door!”

  Jill put the phone down. The gunman took it and pulled the cord from the wall. It was dead quiet, and he was smiling. “Now that I have your attention,” he said, “Donna here is going to put on a little show for us all. Aren’t you, Donna? Sit down, Stan! But first—“ He handed the six-foot phone cord to Donna. “First, I want you to tie ol’ Stanley up so he doesn’t do anything stupid.”

  She did as she was told.

  “DON’T DO IT, Donna,” Stan said. She was tying the cord much too tight. Did she think he was superman? He’d never be able to free himself.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “He can’t make me do anything I’m not dying to do anyway.”

  “Alright, I deserved that. But he don’t—”

  Glenn delivered a sharp left jab to Stan’s nose, and a stream of blood stained his silk shirt. “That’s what you deserve.”

  “He’s not going to use that thing on you, Donna. You know that.”

  “What thing, Stan? You mean, the gun? He won’t need that.”

  Glenn was smirking at him now. “She wants me, Stanley. She wants me bad.”

  “Want me to dance for you, honey?” She smiled and whispered, loud enough for Stan to hear, “Make him eat his heart out.”

  Glenn waved his gun in the direction of the stage and told the band to “play something hot.”

  Donna’s knees were weak and she could hardly move at first, but it turned into quite a performance. Everyone was enthralled. By the time she was down to just her bra and panties, Glenn laid the gun on the table and put his hands behind his head. Donna was bent over, smiling at him between her legs, her shiny red undies riding up between her perfect buns.

  Leaning back in his chair, he turned to Stan and chuckled. “Enjoying the show?”

  Donna kicked the chair and sent him sprawling. She had the gun.

  “Now it’s your turn to dance,” she said.

  Someone went to untie Stan, but Donna said no, leave him be. So all was not lost, Glenn figured, getting up slowly.

  To McKinley, she yelled, “Play ‘Like Hell!’” Then she fired once at Glenn’s feet. Floorboards splintered and her hand flew back. The shot echoed through the basement bar. Nobody moved, least of all Glenn. Donna smiled and fired again, ready this time for the recoil.

  “I said dance!”

  Glenn started moving even before the first notes came from McKinley’s guitar.

  She sat down and asked Jill to bring her a beer.

  “Shuck those pants, baby. We want a good show,” she said. “Not too fast now. You gotta make me want it.”

  Donna drank her beer and watched Glenn take his clothes off. With one eye closed and the other looking over the barrel right at Glenn, she waited until he was down to his underpants.

  “If I don’t see a hard-on,” she said, “I’ll think you don’t want me. You do want me, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I do. In the worst way. The best way.”

  “Then show me.”

  Glenn closed his eyes and tried to concentrate, tried to get inside the music. Donna implored the ladies to “give him some encouragement” and his ears were filled with hoots and crude remarks. Unable to block them out, he was forced to incorporate them into his fantasy. They all wanted him, not just Donna, but the others would have to go away frustrated. He could see them all in their beds, masturbating, wishing they could be with him.

  When he opened his eyes, naked and erect, Donna was gone. Everyone started laughing. His eyes moved quickly to Stan’s chair. Empty. Then he felt a tap on his shoulder, and suddenly the bar was dead quiet.

  Just Admit It

  I MET JODY at church. Kyle introduced me.

  “This is my brother, Bill,” he said. “Be nice to him; he’s a sinner.”

  It was a joke, but Jody had looked at me as if she wanted to save my soul or something.

  This was at the church I had been attending all my life. I had simply been away, attending college back east, and was home for the summer. In my absence, Jody—herself a freshman at a small Bible college just beyond the city limits—had become a regular.

  After the evening service, I let myself be swept up into a little excursion to achieve pie a la mode with Kyle, Brenda, and the new girl.

  She wasn’t bad looking and really did go out of her way to be nice to the wayward sinner among us, which was funny except that she seemed way too sincere. At any rate, it was a brief excursion because we had to get her back to her dorm before the school’s antiquated 10 p.m. curfew.

  My mistake was in agreeing to a second “date,” in which we would circumvent the curfew by having Jody spend the night with Brenda at her apartment.

  And so the longest night of my young life began back at Buckley Hall the following weekend.

  THE BROWNSTONE DORMITORY was for women only—there was no such thing as a coed dorm at Pacific Baptist—and I had to wait in the lounge while someone dashed upstairs to tell Jody I was there. When she finally appeared, suitcase in hand, I was talking to two coeds who could only be described as boy crazy. (They evidently didn’t get many male visitors because they seemed almost giddy, which was not the usual reaction I got from women.)

  Jody smiled sweetly and said hello to her classmates, but she let me know with a furtive toss of her head that she wanted to go. The gesture sent her shoulder-length hair swinging away from her head on one side and halfway across her face on the other. I liked her hair. Dark red, it was her most arresting feature.

  Outside she said, “It must look kind of funny, me and my luggage leaving with you.”

  “Scandalous.”

  I took her overnight bag and stashed it in the backseat of my Bahama blue Volkswagen.

  “That’s why I wanted to get out of there—before they started asking questions.”

  She was whispering, although there was no one in sight. I shrugged and held the door for her. If she was afraid someone would get the wrong idea, that was easy enough to understand. After all, Pacific Baptist was a school that still had rules against going to movies and dances long after its own students considered those things acceptable. She didn’t say any more until we were on the highway, the VW’s engine droning at a steady 55 miles per hour.

  “How’s your brother?” she asked.

  I looked at her without answering right away.

  “Kyle isn’t really my brother,” I told her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We were just putting you on.”

  “But in church, when he
introduced you, he said—”

  “I know, I’m surprised God didn’t strike him dead right then and there.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said.

  I just shook my head. I had made up so many crazy stories—well, the brother thing actually was Kyle’s idea—that Jody couldn’t seem to recognize the truth when she heard it.

  We got into town just as the street lights were coming on. I downshifted and Jody waited patiently until the noise from the air-cooled engine died down to normal.

  “You know,” she said, “you never told me what we would be doing tonight with Brenda and your brother.”

  “Well, that story about your spending the night at Brenda’s place was just a front. Actually, I’m taking you to a motel down by the railroad tracks,” I said, turning the wheel and keeping my eyes on the road. “Don’t worry, I’ll have you in church for the morning service. No one will suspect a thing.”

  “Oh, Lord,” she prayed aloud. “I thought it would be alright. I met him in church.”

  JUST THEN I spun the car into a new apartment complex, a series of two-story stucco buildings on Liberty Boulevard, south of the railroad tracks.

  “This is it,” I said.

  When she didn’t move, I shook my head and told her, “It’s Bren-da’s place.”

  I carried Jody’s bag and she followed me down the walk to apartment nineteen, but I felt sure she expected me to produce a key and unlock the door rather than knock on it.

  Brenda invited us in and gave me a hug. She had just gotten home from work, she said. Kyle, who had suggested the date in the first place, was the last to arrive, and it quickly became clear that he didn’t have anything definite in mind. In fact, there wasn’t much we could do since he had just spent most of his cash on fishing gear.

  “This guy I know has a boat and we’re going up to North Fork in the morning,” he explained.

  “You mean to tell me you’re going to miss church?” I said in mock surprise.