Chum

by Jeff Somers

  “We are on your side, sweetie,” I cooed, with a half-hearted “yeah” from Flo somewhere in the background. “We’re here, aren’t we?”

  She nodded, smiling a little wanly. “C’mon,” she sniffled. “We’ve got to keep drinking.”

  I could almost hear Flo brighten behind us. I squeezed Denise’s hand in a sisterly way and we moved on.

  • • •

  Motherfuckery was universal. A natural resource. We were running out of oil and air and comfortable shoes, but fucking motherfuckery was being brewed up constantly.

  “Jesus,” Flo whined, spinning her phone on the table. “Can we go?”

  “Jesus,” I spat back at her. “Shut. Up. Florence.”

  I loved Flo. I loved her so much it made me angry, but she’d been whining nonstop for two hours and I wanted to pinch her tongue between my fingers until her eyes popped out of her head. I wanted her to leave if she wanted to leave. She wanted permission.

  I also wanted to pinch dear Denise. I wanted to pinch her head until it exploded.

  She was dancing. On the jukebox, an endless parade of terrible music; old, boring songs featuring saxophone solos and synthesizer riffs. Currently dancing with Combover and Gut, one man with two outstanding physical attributes. Who thought he’d hit some sort of pornographic lottery this evening, because he hadn’t yet met me. And my foot had an appointment with his balls.

  Somehow, Denise had absorbed six or possibly seven shots of tequila. Somehow two of the buttons on her shirt had come undone. Somehow she’d started dancing in the middle of the goddamn bar, and somehow when Combover and Gut had boogied up to her, she had not run screaming. She just continued dancing, floating on a thick wave of feminine motherfuckery.

  Combover and Gut spun her and pulled her close to him, wrapping one arm around her waist as she giggled. Stupid Denise letting this fucking nightmare grind his dumbfounded erection into her ass. Stupid Denise smiling stupidly.

  Combover and Gut thought he was taking Denise home. Or, more accurately, Combover and Gut thought he was taking Denise out to his rusted-out Chevy Nova. Where she was most likely to vomit into his lap with his big, calloused hand on the back of her neck applying friendly encouragement, a move perfected back at the prom and never improved upon. I watched Denise jiggling as he hugged her to him, her boobs dancing ecstatically.

  I wanted to kick them both in the balls.

  When she fell, sliding from his grasp and bouncing once on the sticky floor, there was a weak round of applause from the other men. I stood up.

  “Thank God,” Flo muttered, following suit.

  Motherfuckery. Denise sat on the sticky floor, laughing, face red, boobs jiggling. We were twelve. We were sneaking booze from our parents’ cabinet, cutting our arms, calling each other fat whores and crying, crying, crying. Over boys. Over motherfuckery. Somehow it had all turned into Motherfuckery. Motherfuckery for motherfuckery, and I was sick of it.

  “C’mon, sweetie,” I said, taking hold of one arm and pulling. Flo was there, hauling on the other one, and I forgave her a small percentage of her sins.

  “Aw, man,” Combover and Gut wheezed, slicking back his single long lock, like the swipe of a black marker on his head. He was smiling. “C’mon, the night’s young. Drinks … a round on me!”

  I ignored him. We had Denise up on her wobbly legs. She didn’t look so good. I imagined her vomiting into Flo’s lap in about ten minutes, and felt better.

  “Wanna stay,” she slurred. Then threw her arms around me and squeezed. “Stay with me!”

  She didn’t offer any resistance as we walked her toward the exit. Combover and Gut followed at a safe distance, protesting. Flo backed into the doors, pushing them open, and we wrangled her out into the parking lot. I lost my balance for a moment and we spun around, and then she was standing in front of me, her face suddenly bloated, her eyes big.

  “Uh-oh,” Flo muttered.

  Denise bent at the waist like a gymnast and vomited. Directly onto my shoes.

  “Mother-fucker.”

  I stared at the back of her head for a moment, and thought: They deserve each other.

  III.

  THE FOURTH OF JULY

  If I were telling the story, I’d start it off with: I’m perverse, and I know it, and that’s fine.

  Other people know it too, or sense it, and for some of them it isn’t fine, but hey—what can you do. I can help being perverse the same way the sky can help being blue. Fuck ’em if they don’t care for it: I am a celebration of life’s perversity, all rolled up into one attractive fucking package.

  I looked around. I’d known them all. Many times. There were only about four different types of people, after all, and their patterns and behaviors were obvious and painful to watch as they scratched it all out in slow motion. I knew them all so well I could predict the future. For example, the second Mike the Stupid Fuck said something about fireworks, I knew the day would end with one less hand. I couldn’t wait.

  The Bickermans were throwing a shindig because that’s what pleasantly engaged couples living in sin do—they rush toward the yawning chasm of boredom and murderous familiarity breeding babies and contempt in equal amounts. They throw barbecues on the Fourth and invite everyone over and stand there smiling until their lips bleed. Bickerman Alpha, the male of the species, is a nasty little ass, but so far the little cow Mary—Bickerman Beta—hasn’t figured that part out because she’s not the type to let her man run amok diddling everything in a skirt and still stand by him, twanging the sad banjo and wearing the dunce cap on her head. Bickerman Alpha looks good. He’s a deceptive bit of produce, though: firm and delightfully scented on the outside, rotten and mulchy on the inside. I know. I’d whored around with him enough.

  The Bickermans’ place was standard, filled with furniture from a catalog and a mash of colors and textures that set my teeth on edge. Five minutes in the Bickermans’ place made me want to burn it down. The yard was nice, though. Shared with everyone else in the complex, but nicely tended. I preferred Hank’s squalid apartment, four rooms, all earth tones and dust. When Hank threw a party in the winter he hung coolers of beer off of his fire escape. You crawled through his bedroom window and looked down, all you could see was the sturdy knot and a quick flash of rope. It was so wild and overgrown back there, like a fucking jungle. You couldn’t see anything, and the beer just got swallowed up. Henry said he’d tossed plenty of debris back there. He called it the Black Hole. You tossed it in the night, a high arc in the air; the mini jungle swallowed it, and it was like it had never happened.

  Everything at the Bickermans’ place was right out in the open where you could see it, and that was the goddamn problem.

  I patted my stomach. I’d eaten four hamburgers, drunk six beers; I lit a cigarette out by the rose bush and let out a magnificent belch, a classic, and thought again that I should carry a goddamn tape recorder with me because there’s one more thing lost to my descendants forever.

  It was a bright sunshiny sort of day, eh, and warm and logy and stuffed like a bratwurst was I. I turned and held my beer by the neck, letting my cigarette dangle from my mouth and casting an eye over the herd. What was great about knowing everything about everyone—really, what was great about being a tiny god in someone’s backyard—is that you can just wind them up and enjoy the fun.

  Henry raised his beer toward me and I nodded, hipper than him. Henry I’d never be free of. I suspected we’d been twins in the womb, torn apart when I started to eat him, dished off to separate foster families. I liked Henry; he was an unimaginative drone sometimes, but there were flashes, brief and exciting, of a true libertine lurking somewhere inside his pleasantly handsome face. He had a good sense of humor, too, and if I had no better places to be than where the Great and Powerful Bickerman lured me with his best meats and brews, I might as well hang out with Henry. Except, I wasn’t hanging out with Henry because Henry was still under house arrest from the Miriam Molestation Incident back in March. I spu
rn the Irish holiday because it brings out every heavy-breasted panter within range, but I wish I’d made an appearance at that one. Just to see everyone’s faces.

  Denise was holding Henry’s hand as if she might turn at any moment and find Miriam attached to him by the penis. She turned and followed Henry’s gaze to me and offered me a wan, disapproving smile. Denise doesn’t like me, or, as I suspected, she secretly lusts after me (as most women do), and in her fierce determination to repress the feeling she is cramped up painfully, lashing out at everyone around her. Poor thing. For Henry’s sake, I’d avoided really turning the full force of my charm on her, but maybe it would be better to give her a taste. Might calm her down a little.

  As for the Molestation Incident, Henry had told me she’d just about accepted his insistence that nothing had happened between him and the Sorority Slut. These are the lies couples tell each other—about 50 or 60 percent of all romantic conversation is lies for the Greater Good. She might have decided that nothing had actually happened, but watching her tight grip on the poor sod, I knew that she suspected she’d merely witnessed a busted seduction, and regarded little Miriam’s ass as her number-one enemy. Having conducted an exhaustive comparison of the two women’s asses, I had to agree with her: Miriam’s was fantastic.

  “Why are you standing here alone, Thomas?”

  The dulcet non-English tones of Luis; wandering, as usual, oblivious to the usual rules of polite society. I could not say with authority whether Luis was bizarre because of the cultural gulf between him and the people he’d chosen to live with, or if he was simply a bizarre person—if Spaniards also gave him steady looks and long pauses when he spoke with them.

  “I am here alone, my Romantic friend, because I suffer from a fear of crowds, sometimes, and needed some air.”

  Luis responded to every statement with squint-eyed incredulity, wisely assuming that all Americans would lie to him first and only tell the truth when pressed. I wasn’t sure if this meant that Luis was intelligent or incredibly paranoid. It was hard to tell with someone who spoke English like he had marbles in his mouth, and when I knew about three words in Spanish, all expletives.

  Luis was, I admit, beyond my powers. This was unprecedented, but I’d learned to accept it. Luis was therefore unpredictable, despite doing pretty much exactly the same thing in every situation. Luis was chaos.

  “If you fear crowds, Thomas,” he said, charmingly pronouncing my name Tohm-Mas, “why do you spend so much of your time in bars?”

  I returned his squinty stare. “Booze lowers inhibitions, allows me to mix. Why do you want to know?”

  He shrugged. “No reason.”

  I nodded and proceeded to ignore Luis, which he always took well. Luis enjoyed supreme confidence and assumed that unless you actively drove him away, he was wanted. I envied that, sometimes, that myopic, borderline-insipid peacefulness. I killed off my beer and let another enormous belch escape me. “Well, let’s rejoin the crowd.”

  “Okay.”

  I made for Henry, who was really one of the few people I could stand on a regular basis. Denise saw me coming and whispered in his ear, swirling off in a cloud of sundress. Denise quite rightly attributed some of Henry’s bad behavior to me. I admired flashes of her legs as she twisted away and clinked Henry’s glass as I arrived on the scene. Denise had wonderfully long, tan legs you couldn’t help but imagine wrapped around your waist, urging you on with little digs of those exquisite ankles. Henry, by comparison, had the blurry red look of the halfway drunk.

  “I’ve always known,” he said happily, “that you liked Luis better than me.”

  “The correct phrasing,” Luis said in his slow, careful second language, “is ‘better than I.’” As usual, he said this with dire seriousness.

  Henry clinked his beer against Luis’s in good cheer. “I’m sure you’re right.”

  I oriented myself on the Future Bickermans of America. Bick was making a show of flipping burgers, and his luscious fiancée was giggling airheadedly. She wasn’t stupid, but she liked playing it for Bick, who liked his women to be silent cows who sighed and giggled and came just from looking at him, a difficult combination to come by. Mary Harrows was one fine piece of ass. She was wearing short shorts, tennis shoes you just had to imagine placed delicately on your shoulders, and a sheer white T-shirt that revealed nothing but a bikini top beneath. Wonderful breasts. Not especially large, but wonderfully shaped. I stopped staring at her by closing my eyes and imagining her ripening sister, who was less well shaped (flatter, somewhat) but prettier in the face, in her old cheerleading outfit from high school.

  “Tom?”

  I opened my eyes to the disappointing sight of Henry and Luis. I smiled. “Sorry. Enjoying a little group sex fantasy with the sisters Harrows. What were you saying?”

  “Nothing,” Luis offered. Painfully honest at all times, he was constantly entertaining.

  I looked around to re-orient myself and caught Mary giving me a few moments of her attention. I winked, and she looked away. I chucked my empty beer bottle into a convenient barrel and went in search of another. Henry and Luis followed lazily, and we moved across the warm, damp grass.

  “What’s the countdown now?” I asked. I dreaded the Bickerman wedding. I think we all did. There was much to dread.

  “About four months, give or take a few hours,” Henry replied immediately, a loyal and useful lieutenant to the end.

  “It’s going to be a disaster,” I proclaimed, pausing at the cooler to fish around ice water for a beer. No one argued. They all knew it. I think even Bick and Mare knew it, on some level. They had the wide-eyed stares of people who have seen the burning bush and know the end is nigh. So did everyone else, for that matter. I’d had it myself since high school. Luis maybe didn’t have it, but his higher brain functions had yet to be confirmed via independent research.

  Then again, I made everything up, on the fly, all the time. I just entertained myself.

  “Not the wedding,” Henry finally offered, trying to find the fire in his belly. “The marriage, yes. The wedding, though, I think will be sedate. They’re both too image-conscious.”

  I gave Henry a steady look. “Henry, I sometimes can’t decide if you’re really that dense or if you use it, cunningly, as protective coloring.” He blinked in his lovably dimwitted way. “Image-conscious? These people don’t have that level of awareness, Hank. Look at them.”

  We all glanced over at the Future Bickermans of America just as Bick leered reptilianly at Kelly’s passing form, while Mare studiously chatted up his odious work friends.

  I put my hand on Henry’s shoulder. “They’re fucking animals.”

  I suddenly became aware of Luis.

  “Bick, for example,” he said in his direly serious tone, “is actually a panda.”

  Henry burst into the slightly unbalanced laughter I found so endearing about him. It was brain damaged, completely innocent. You heard Henry laugh, and you knew you could trust him.

  “Tom-O,” he sputtered, “two weeks ago you told me they’d last forever, two weeks from now it’ll be exactly one month. You make everything up, all the time.”

  I scowled. I hated it when the monkeys saw the pattern. “I do not.”

  “You do! You speak with complete confidence, all the time, but Christ if you don’t just make it up, from the air, every time.”

  I looked at Luis. He nodded. “It is true, Tom,” he said, pronouncing my name Tohm. “You lie as you breathe. It is okay. We know, and adjust accordingly.”

  Before I could respond to this, which was not information I wanted freely distributed, Mike bounced up, short and bald and black and wearing ridiculous tan shorts that went almost all the way to his ankles, which meant they were really just short pants and that just made me angry for reasons I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

  “Come on guys, we’re going to shoot off some fireworks,” he announced with adolescent glee.

  A psychic vision of Mike bleeding from the
stump of his arm flashed before me. Henry and I exchanged a dubious glance. I fixed my gaze just above Mike’s left shoulder and studied an interesting-looking tree in the backyard while Henry said something to placate the idiot. Luis just stared off into the distance, thinking things in Spanish.

  “Ah,” I said. “Fireworks.” Then I turned and walked off. It was more effective than one might imagine.

  I had a fresh beer, so I was free to wander the crowd and sow dissent. I didn’t know many people at the party; I was the black sheep friend that Bick sometimes denied, and Mare … well, Mare usually preferred to have nonverbal communication with me.

  And like a movie script, there she was, alone, futzing with the potato salad, fighting a losing war with the flies and vermin. I studied her pert little rump in those shorts for a few moments as I approached.

  “They get us in the end, you know.”

  She whirled, startled, and then fixed me with her “withering” stare: narrowed eyes, pursed lips. All in all, her best attempt at “withering” came out looking more like “constipated.” All women, it had been my experience, thought of themselves as real ball-breakers. Very few of them were.

  “What?” she snapped.

  “The flies. You can shoo them now. They’ll have the last laugh.”

  For Mare, I knew, I was just some unwanted baggage on the Bick side of the family, though she couldn’t seem to shake a certain drunken attraction for me. Henry, I thought, she liked. Mike, well, you could ignore Mikey pretty easily. Luis was so bizarre most people put him in the same category as furniture: It wasn’t the accent, it was the serpentine and creepy proclamations that escaped him, like gas.

  “I get it,” she snapped. “Death.”

  I eyed her breasts appreciatively. I wondered if she’d complained about me to Bick, and if he’d promised anything to her by way of punishing me. Or if he’d just laughed. Depending on what mood you caught Bick in, either was possible. Her eyes narrowed further, and she put her hands on her hips, which was Mare’s main way of telling you to back off (whoa), so I dragged my eyes up to hers.