Chum

by Jeff Somers

  “Anyway, Henry, I think she’s nuts. I can’t imagine anyone being annoyed with you. You’re too cute.”

  I could tell when I was being had, and I gave her the fisheye on that one. I’m a sucker, and a fool, but even I wasn’t that dumb. Or that drunk, maybe. I looked over my shoulder as I straightened, and I gave Miriam my eyebrows and said, “I should get back to Denise before she gets even more pissed.”

  “Yes,” she said back, grinning widely. “You should.”

  Fucking teenagers.

  I struggled my way into the bathroom, a truly grotesque display of puddled gray water, cigarette butts, empty bottles, and other, less definable things. Some guy was in the stall, moaning and cursing. There would be this horrific watery noise, and through it, simultaneously, he would moan fuuuuucccckkkkk. I stood at the urinal staring at the graffiti on the tiles and tried to keep a straight face.

  There was no sign of Bick. I went about my business and made my sweaty way back to the bar.

  Mike, Bick, and Mary sat glumly and watched me approach. I stood before them in shame and just sighed.

  “Ah, fuck,” I managed. “How long ago?”

  Bick seemed almost humanly awkward. “About ten minutes, ’cording to Mare.”

  “They didn’t say much. Kelly and Denise came huffing through, grabbed up Flo, and were out.”

  I looked at Bickerman. He looked at me.

  “Fuck ’em,” he said heartily, holding my eyes. “Let me buy you a drink, Henry. You can plumb the mysteries of that woman tomorrow.”

  And I let him.

  • • •

  In my dream, I was lying on my back looking up at Mary, who was the Most Beautiful Girl in the World. The Most Beautiful Girl in the World was stroking my hair and holding my hand and making cute little comforting noises from deep within herself. The Most Beautiful Girl in the World was miles above me but could still reach me. The Most Beautiful Girl in the World smelled like beer and cigarettes. Beer and cigarettes were making me nauseous.

  I turned my head slightly and surveyed my world, my kingdom. Bickerman and Mike, Mike and Bickerman. The last guy in the world who needed a Yes Man and his own personal Yes Man, grinning around as if his head were broken, lolling wherever gravity took it.

  Gravity was weird. I kept getting pulled in odd, often opposing directions.

  Mike and Bick were speaking in an odd language I didn’t recognize, full of mushy vowels and stretched-out consonants. It was a secret language only they understood. I resented that because they were talking about me, me and Denise, Denise and me. Denise, who had been mad at me, it seemed, since before we’d met, and me, who’d been apologizing since the day I was born. The world lurched and stopped, lurched and stopped, and I was pushed into Mary’s soft belly, which smelled like cigarettes and alcohol, while Bick and Mike spoke softly in their mushy secret language about me and Denise and how Denise had left me in the bar because she thought I was either fucking Miriam or wanting to fuck Miriam or somehow instinctively seeing fucking Miriam as a possibly pleasurable option or what have you.

  I tried to mount a defense, even though my defense team was my only audience. Still, I thought it best to practice my summation anyway, despite a lack of prosecution, judge, or jury. I tried. But the defense team hadn’t wanted to hear it, and shut me up with booze.

  I looked up at the Most Beautiful Girl in the World and said, “You’re beautiful.”

  “Can we please get him home? He’s drooling on my skirt.”

  More mushed language from the boys, reassuring, calming.

  “If he yaks on me, David, I’m going to punch you.”

  Mush, mush, mush.

  The world stopped, and there was commotion. Mike was getting out of the cab. Bick was getting out of the cab. I was getting out of the cab, pushed from behind by the Most Beautiful Girl in the World, who made little grunting noises as if I was a huge weight, impossible to think that a small girl like herself could move my immense mass, and pulled from the real world by Bick and Mike. I lurched into a semblance of uprightness, a dead arm thrown around each of them, my feet working feebly against the sidewalk, dragging more than anything else as the two men pulled me forward.

  Mush, mush, mush.

  “Chums,” I said, feeling that this special moment required some sort of speech, “thank you for escorting me home after all this tragedy and drama. You are the truest of friends. I love you both, very much.”

  It didn’t come out right.

  Mush, mush, mush. I wanted them to speak clearly.

  “English, dammit! English!”

  Mush, mush, mush. Bick’s greasy laughter.

  I was propped up in front of a door, not my door, a door I recognized, and it filled me with foreboding. I was propped up against something, I didn’t know what, but it supported my weight and I rested against it, relieved, and I did not fall. The door was troubling. Bick and Mike stepped up to it and simultaneously rang the bell and pounded the door.

  Then they ran away, cackling to each other: Mush, mush, mush.

  I regarded the door quietly, just listening to myself breathe, listening to my heart pound troublingly. A moment later, the door opened, and Denise stood in it, wearing just an old, oversized T-shirt, her hair up, her face clean and tired. She looked around before catching sight of me.

  “This wasn’t my idea,” I said by way of defense. “But I seem to have lost control of my legs. I had to have them cut off, you know.”

  She sighed loudly and put her hands on her hips. “I ought to leave you out here, asshole.”

  “Don’t yell at me. I didn’t do anything.”

  She stared at me for a moment. Her face softened. “Christ. You okay? You going to be sick?”

  I shook my head. “I couldn’t possibly.” Then I proved myself wrong, and she moved forward, took me onto her shoulder, pulled me into her place. She smelled good, like soap, like home, and I closed my eyes.

  • • •

  I was dreaming, I know. I was dreaming that Bick and I were having a talk. We were sitting in Denise’s small kitchen, at the card table she kept in there, living like some frat-boy bachelor or something. Miriam was bartending, standing on the other side of the table. She was wearing tight black jeans and a tight black Too Much Joy T-shirt. Bick ordered a gin and tonic, and she produced it from under the table as if she had had it ready for him. Then she turned her attention to me. She was pretty, I realized, but not gorgeous, not beautiful, like Denise was.

  “What’ll it be, Henry?”

  She said it like a poem: What’ll it be / Hen-ree?

  “I’ll have a glass of milk.”

  Miriam didn’t say anything. She produced a tall glass of milk, with a wedge of lemon, and placed it in front of me.

  “Fag,” Bick said genially. He was always full of bullshit homophobia like that. You got used to it.

  “Where’s Denise?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “She’s mad at me.”

  Miriam started to giggle. I gave her my most annoyed face and then looked at Bick. He was laughing.

  “Dude, you know what I’d do if the Monster started pulling that shit on me?”

  I knew I didn’t want to hear the answer, but I shrugged, playing it cool while dread crawled up my spine. “What?”

  “Kill her.”

  I looked at Bick, and he nodded as if I’d said something. “Make it look like an accident. I swear to God, I’d kill her. You and Tom would help.”

  I thought, No way, but I didn’t say anything.

  “Sure you would. She’d deserve it.”

  Miriam was still laughing.

  • • •

  “What’s wrong? Are you going to be sick?”

  I sat up, sweating in the cool air of Denise’s bedroom.

  “Yes.”

  X.

  MARY’S FUNERAL

  This was the second time in my life I’d wanted to fuck a corpse.

  The first time, I was little. Ten, eleven, I forg
et exactly. Ms. Keller had been my teacher the year before. Not a pretty woman, looking back. Not ugly, but not beautiful. But, and this was the important part, she was easily fifteen years younger than the other teachers. Thirties, I guess. Thin and wore skirts just above the knees with stockings or pantyhose, whatever. Her legs made this wonderful dry noise when she uncrossed or recrossed them. I’d spent the year before in her class listening to those legs until I had to ask to go to the lavatory and then masturbate in one of the stalls. This probably three, four times a day. She wore a skirt every goddamn day, and after a month in her class I had red, scaly skin on my prick from tugging it to her.

  Wallace men develop fast. We have to, because we’re unlikely to reproduce under normal circumstances, so evolution has widened our potential breeding window, to give us a decent chance. And for thousands of years we’d made a go of it. I was there as living, breathing, masturbating proof of that, and for a while Ms. Keller starred in my quick fantasies. She wanted to teach me things, all right. She wanted to teach me so damn bad.

  And then, she died. It was mysterious.

  That was my first funeral. I wanted to go. I’d spent months fantasizing about this slim, flat-chested woman with kinky black hair and a vague flowery smell, and I wanted to put on my tiny Sunday Mass suit—rarely worn—and go marvel at a person who I’d known, now dead.

  So my mother, whose name escapes me, bundled me up in my starchy suit and took me to the funeral home where Ms. Keller was laid out. I guess we did not, actually, go to the funeral, now that I’m resurrecting this ancient memory. We just went to the viewing. The wake.

  My memories are like that. They disappear, go hidden. And then I’ll think of something I did once, long ago, and it’ll be thin and gray at first, gruel, and then as I think on it details will fade in, slowly, reddening up until it’s dripping with juice.

  I remembered the pale green carpet of the funeral home. The silence. The smell of flowers. The open casket, and there was Ms. Keller, looking fantastic. Better than she’d ever looked alive. Her face made up, all the imperfections covered up, spackled over. Her hair done and not just pulled back with an elastic band. Her boobs pushed up and out in a way that seemed like voodoo—she had boobs, which was a revelation. In my fantasies I’d often given her the gift of boobs, like a genie charitably handing out miracles, but there they were, somehow. Bloating, maybe. Gases building up, inflating her tits. I didn’t know how, I didn’t care. I was immediately aroused.

  Mother encouraged me to walk right up to the casket and kneel there, say my final farewells. This seemed like a trick. I was suddenly certain my mother had figured out my dirty little secret and was prompting me to do something terrible in public, something she could punish me for. Which was a trick Mother liked to play on me. I crept up to the coffin and knelt down. Incredibly close to her. In class I’d often tried to get close to her, sidling up to her desk and leaning in, or asking her for help with classwork so she would lean in over my desk, her smell filling the air around me, brushing against my arm.

  She was perfect. A doll. No wrinkle or imperfection marred her. As I knelt, I got a hard-on right there, and wanted to climb up into the coffin with her and do things. What, I wasn’t 100 percent sure, because even in my masturbatory fantasies this was sort of muddy ground. Things. Play with those improbably expanded boobs, if nothing else.

  It was years before it occurred to me that this was not a normal reaction.

  Now I was leaning over another coffin. My back to all of them, I let my face relax. Studied Mary, who looked fucking fantastic. Better than she’d looked since the wedding. She was a cupcake again, perfectly frosted, sculpted into the absolute wet-dream image of a girl who’d been a blond cheerleader-cum-sorority girl since her inception, emerging from the womb with pom poms and kneepads, ready for her calling.

  Before I could become inconveniently aroused again—and we Wallace men find it difficult to hide our immense, civilization-founding erections—I stood up and made a vague approximation of a religious gesture, spinning and putting my game face back on. And there they were. My friends. My albatrosses. Bick, drunk but looking sober and playing his part well, but Bickerman always did well on stage. It was in private that he transformed into a beetle and scurried around eating dead skin and dung. Miriam next to him, and the other Harrowses, all fair and vaguely Norwegian or Swedish or something, diluted through years and years of good old American crossbreeding.

  Miriam was a knockout in a black dress that covered every inch of her skin except her puffy face and her bitten-down nails. If her dead sister had not looked so absolutely edible, I would have been scheming to get her drunk later and peel her like a ripe fruit. She’d been crying since she woke up, it seemed, and that didn’t bother me at all. I’d incorporated it into my fantasies: Miriam pinned under me, an ankle in each of my hands, weeping ceaselessly in deep depression.

  Then, of course, everyone else. Luis looked great in a dark blue suit. Mature. Serious. Successful. He looked like he worked at the funeral home. I realized I did not actually know what Luis did for a living, and was suddenly certain he did work for this funeral home.

  The potential of that concept filled me with excitement.

  Next to him, Henry. Next to Henry, Kelly. Next to Kelly, Flo. Next to Flo, Denise. Denise and Henry, not speaking. No one looked at me, and I looked at no one.

  • • •

  We were at the Harrowses house. Harrows House. Harrohouse. I was drunk. Not my fault; the elder Harrowseses, who were tiny little people with white hair and the kind of clothes that cost some money but were meant to last for decades, completely neutral in style and coarse to the touch, had put out a spread of booze that answered many of the questions concerning the Harrows daughters and their behavior around alcohol. With so much liquor in the house it was certain the two sisters had been drunk since grade school. They probably went to bed at night and found bottles of rye stashed under their pillows.

  Denise was talking to Kelly. Denise was not breathing. Denise spoke continuously, a drone, her words washing over Kelly in a repetitive loop. Henry. Motherfuckery. No listening. Vile Tommy. Henry. Motherfuckery. Denise was moistly tipsy and Kelly had a stone-faced expression of resignation on her face. I was not Kelly’s favorite person, but I suspected she would gladly let me touch her boobs if I offered to rescue her from Disapproving Denise at that moment.

  I was invisible. A pariah. Everyone was pretending they couldn’t see me.

  • • •

  Luis was talking to Henry. They were standing by the food, trays of simmering bacterial infections. Luis was telling Henry that in his hometown back in Spain, the people have stopped holding funerals because they regard the local church as corrupt and greedy, so they just break into the graveyard and bury people themselves. He’s telling Henry that an old man everyone regards with affection because of his adorable alcoholic adventures throughout town always gives the eulogy, rambling on drunkenly until he just sort of stops and wanders off. Henry keeps nodding as if any of this makes any sense to him at all, which is impossible. I watch Henry carefully. He doesn’t look good. Secrets weigh Henry down.

  Luis tells Henry that this may be the basis for a new religion, that a thousand years from now this old man might be revered as a new prophet, that this makes as much sense as any religion, and Henry nods, seriously. His glass is empty and I can almost feel the gravitational pull of the bar on him.

  • • •

  Bickerman is talking to me. We’re standing in the damp grass at the cemetery. Bickerman is just a hair too loud, but this is because he is a hair too drunk, having been sipping from his flask since waking up that morning, the morning we buried his wife. Who fell down the stairs.

  “He’s going to break.”

  Henry, he means Henry. I shook my head. “No.”

  Henry liked himself too much. Everything Henry did was, by definition, morally okay. Because he was a good guy. It was a circle. He was a good guy, so everything he did
was good, because he was a good guy.

  “We should talk to him.”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  I realized I was going to be having a lot of endless conversations with Bickerman over the coming weeks. I was not looking forward to it.

  • • •

  Denise was talking to me. This was unusual.

  Denise was kind of drunk, which wasn’t unusual and which explained a lot. She was still too fat for her dress and was popping out of it, as if she’d been baking all this time and was now rising like good bread. Bread with awesome tits. At first I’d struggled manfully to keep my eyes off her chest while she slurred at me, at least when she was looking at me, but then I realized she didn’t seem to care so I just lost myself in her overflowing boobs.

  Denise was unhappy. This was not unusual.

  People always thought they were deep oceans of secrets, mysteries wrapped in enigmas and such. Never true. Maybe Luis. But, generally speaking, never true. Denise felt that Henry was not truly with her. That he was still with Bickerman and me. I tried to offer him back, but she wasn’t listening to me. She was just complaining.

  I was listening. I didn’t like what she was saying. Henry. Chatty, open, honest, stupid Henry. Noble Henry.

  “Thanks for listening to me ramble,” Denise finally says, touching my arm. I look down at her hand, then back at her.

  • • •

  Miriam was talking to me. Except replace “talking” with “weeping.” For the first time in our association, I did not find Miriam at all erotic. She was the same pretty girl with the same hot little ass, in a passably tight dress, and I was still sporting a semi-erection from Mary’s coffin cleavage earlier, but she was just a soggy, sad mess. She’d come up to me with a saucy little smile and a glass of wine in her hand, and I’d been encouraged and glad to see her. Then her face had done some sort of remarkable collapsing thing, like a special effect, and she’d pushed her head into my chest and just burst into tears. She’d also spilled red wine on my jacket.

  I stood there patting her back and letting my eyes roam the Harrowseseses fussy living room, plush carpet and dark wood and bric-a-brac everywhere, exhausting to look at. I had to get free of them. All of them. This had gotten boring.