by Jim Nisbet
“Recycled air fit only for breeding vicious Legionnaire’s bacteria,” put in Ted, with a ridiculous flourish of his hand. “Ah,” he sighed dismissively, and made the bold move of feinting two fingertips, nearly touching them to her lips, before, with a flourish, he took up his glass again.
She had moved her lips to meet the touch, but his fingers, falling short, retreated. She pouted as he repeated, “A taste of spring…” into the mouth of his beer glass.
“Voila,” she said, as if proud. “To one accustomed to such an environment a nude companion writhing with pleasure in twisted sheets and semi-darkness is about as romantic a landscape as one might realistically expect ever to see.”
This got Ted’s attention. “Or touch,” he managed to say, awkwardly brushing the work-swollen knuckles of two fingers along the cord of her neck. Stanley winced. He remembered the cord of that neck.
“Or taste,” she whispered.
“Oh, yeah,” Ted uttered thickly.
A charming flush of color did not rise from her shoulder to her cheeks. But she agreed with him verbally, repeating, “Taste,” and softly encouraged him by catching his hand in one of hers and bringing its fingers to her lips.
And now — who could ask for more? — Roy Orbison began to sing I’m Falling. Who, indeed, thought Stanley, touching their reflections on the neon-illumined glass with his own fingertip, as it weaved down the playlists.
Donna folded her own fingers into Ted’s fist. “So,” she concluded. Without another word she dipped a fingertip of her free hand into her Tom Collins and touched his lower lip with it. “Can you guess the next step?”
The poor guy took the fingertip between his lips. Stanley imagined the taste of Tom Collins and, quite strangely, sensed a twinge of… Was it jealousy? Remorse? Nostalgia?
“At the moment I’m, like, totally incapable of pursuing a logical thesis,” Ted admitted, fitting the words around the tip of the glossed nail. “Help me.”
“Can you stand the notion of the human body as the industrial landscape of the twenty-first century?” she responded gaily.
She dropped her hand and slid its fingers along the denim inside his thigh, pausing just as her fingers reached his groin, and moved her lips close to his ear, so that their cheeks touched. “If ever there were a resource-intense economy,” she whispered, “it’s the human body. The last natural resource remaining to be exploited in a devastated world.”
She pushed his leg aside and slid off her bar stool, so that she stood up between Ted’s parted legs, and within his tentative embrace. She breathed a sigh into his ear, and followed it with her tongue. Stanley stood close enough to hear the click of saliva. He watched as her free hand swept up under the tail of the sheetrock taper’s flannel shirt, over the pale roll of fat, his ribs, onto his lower back, coming to rest where, had it been Stanley’s back, the palm would have encountered a line of stitches.
He wondered if she smelled of lavender and acetone.
“It seems that you have already entered the resource market,” she said into poor Ted’s damp ear. “This market is demanding. Does your schedule afford you a proportionate amount of… leisure time?”
He pushed her to arm’s length. “You mean, like, trips to China?”
She forced a smile. “Since you bring it up…”
“No fucking way,” Ted Nichols said, a little too thickly. “China my ass.”
One for the landlubbing proletariat, thought Stanley.
Donna laughed, a little too loudly, and ruffled her victim’s hair. “Silly boy.” Then she grabbed two fistfuls of his hair and shook his head as if it were a drying gourd and she needed to hear if any of its seeds were loosened yet.
Ted winced and raised both of his hands to covers hers, but said nothing. They stood like that for just a moment. She, her eyes burning, held great thick tufts of his hair, as if on the verge of getting his attention by really hurting him. Well, she was. A fascination etched into her features what, even by the luridly backlit reflection in the jukebox, could only be the result of her own amazement that this specimen might subconsciously think she might let him get away, as he had from every other woman in his life.
And Ted, covering her fists with his own two hands, grimacing, not entirely sure what had happened, still interested in only one or two things, said “Ow, shit,” in a gentle, good-natured, softly confused voice.
Donna softened her smile. She freed one hand and, not releasing the other’s grip on Ted’s hair, pulled his face very close to hers, flattened her palm against his cheek, and whispered, “How about San Francisco, then? My place. No plane tickets involved,” and kissed him full on the mouth.
Startled, Ted was slow to respond, but when he did he came on with everything he had. Poor Ted must have been sitting in front of that television over the dry cleaner for a long time. Probably ever since a redhead with gray eyes had thrown him over for a rich drywall contractor, Stanley thought bitterly. At any rate, tired as he was, Ted was hungry and eager. He pushed Donna against the bar and kissed her hard, and she let him do it.
What a gig, Stanley thought.
She waited until Ted released her.
Ted Nichols stood back a step, weaving just a bit. A tuft of hair stood straight out from one side of his head. As he turned aside the stub of a pencil dropped from behind his ear, bounced off his shoulder, and fell to the floor. He was breathing as if he’d just run a block to tell everybody in the bar that a swarm of killer bees had cornered the mayor with his pants down in his executive bathroom and stung him to death.
Ted reached for his drink but couldn’t find it. He tore his eyes off Donna long enough to locate the glass and turn it upside down over his mouth, even though the glass was empty.
“Sure,” he said, dropping the glass to the bartop and wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “Your place.”
Emboldened by drink and the sixty-second kiss, Ted had finally taken the initiative. As she started to turn back to the bar he took her arm in one of his hands and turned her back towards him.
“First your place,” he said. He moved his eyes very close to hers and lowered his voice to a husky whisper. “Then maybe we’ll see about China.”
Donna laughed straight into his face.
Stanley left the bar.
By the time Donna and Ted had paid up, Stanley would be sitting across the street in the pickup, ready to follow them.
There was little time to feel sorry for Ted, for Guy No. 2, with his weary eyes and flannel shirt. But if Stanley made a mistake, Ted was on the spiral to being Guy No. 10 on a different list.
Chapter Fourteen
IT WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT. TRAFFIC WAS INTERMITTENT. Most of the storefronts had long since darkened, and fog had begun to isolate the streetlights along Geary Boulevard. The temperature had dropped with the intrusion of a layer of cool marine air. There was a taste of salt in the fog, and every couple of minutes the big bass foghorn groaned from the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, beyond the Presidio.
The truck was parked across the street from the bar, headed west. Stanley had jaywalked across Geary and unlocked the driver’s door by the time the sporting couple exited Camp Kill-Care, heading east on Geary. They walked arm in arm, huddled against the cold of the fog, each with a hand in the other’s opposite hip pocket, as lovers will. Stanley quietly rolled down the window of the truck, adjusted the side-view mirror and followed their image in it. As they approached 4th Avenue, a tractor pulling a forty-foot Safeway trailer slowed for the light and stopped, blocking his view. He gave up on the mirror and turned to watch the intersection. Though there was no other traffic and the truck was obviously going to go straight on after the light changed, the couple did not jaywalk across 4th Avenue. A foghorn sounded. A car slowly hissed along the middle of the damp three-lane boulevard and passed him, headed west.
The light facing north changed from emerald to orange to ruby. The Safeway truck grunted, then pulled through the intersection, its diesel w
histling between gear changes. The trailer’s receding taillights revealed no loving couple. They had turned up 4th Avenue.
Stanley started the truck and pulled diagonally across west-bound Geary. He U-turned through a breach in the cement median—a sign forbidding left or U-turns briefly glared in the headlights—and drove diagonally across east-bound Geary until he turned right and south, up 4th Avenue. At the top of the block he saw the couple just jaywalking across Anza Street.
He motored slowly uphill, as if looking for a parking space. When he got to the intersection, fog blew straight through the lights, right to left, west to east. It was a four-way stop and he stopped for it, leaning over the wheel to look west, south and east. In fact there was no parking to be seen. Nor could he see his quarry. As he sat there wondering what to do about it, a police cruiser suddenly burst into the intersection from the south, opposite him, all its blue and red lights flashing, its siren silent. Stanley hadn’t seen or heard it coming and jumped three inches—exactly the distance allowed by the vertical clearance between his head and the headliner of the little pickup. The black and white braked briefly enough to dip its front end and emit a brief whoop from its siren. Then, its carburetor moaning for air, it leaped across Anza and passed the truck with a sound like a sliding door violently slammed shut. Stanley watched it descend the block in his rear view mirror, slough whooping and sideways through the intersection at Geary, and straighten out enough to head west.
Silence and fog descended again on the Avenues.
Stanley turned left through the intersection and proceeded slowly along the line of parked cars. Four slots in front of him a car turned on its lights. He braked to a stop and waited.
The car was a new BMW. It was late in a quiet neighborhood. There was no one else around. The BMW almost certainly had to contain Donna and Ted. Possibly Ted Nichols had never been in such a car before. As its lights came on its radio antenna telescoped up out of its sheath in the rear fender. After a moment the white backup lights came on, its front wheels turned toward the curb, and the car backed until its bumper nudged the car behind it. Then its front wheels cranked outward, the backup lights turned off, and the car inched forward.
He waited, not dimming his lights as politeness might suggest, until he could see the silhouettes in the BMW. When the car pulled into the street he caught a glimpse of long hair and a flash of earring as the driver racked the steering wheel and glanced to her left and then, aha, he saw her passenger’s shoulder draped in square-checked flannel. The license plate was California DDT 301, which he copied onto the top page of the little notepad with the red Chinese logo that rode on a stalk held to the truck’s windshield by a suction cup.
He dimmed his lights and pulled in front of the parking space as the BMW rolled to the end of the block. He even put the truck in reverse for appearances’s sake; but as soon as the BMW reached 3rd and turned left, Stanley threw the pickup in first and took off after it.
The BMW was a creamy white with gold alloy wheels cast in a geometric pattern. Its dashboard glowed reddish-orange, like a fire in a distant canyon. It wasn’t the car that Stanley remembered Donna driving six weeks ago. But, six weeks ago, Donna hadn’t been the green-eyed brunette’s name either. She had been called Vivienne Carneval then, practically an homage to his credulity, and she drove Stanley to her Excelsior apartment in a navy blue Pontiac station wagon. He’d found that address again, three weeks ago, its red and white FOR RENT sign visible from a block away.
At the time Stanley had thought the Pontiac remarkable, not only because he hadn’t been inside a non-Japanese vehicle in something like ten years, but also because it enhanced his vision of Ms. Carneval as an angry divorced or estranged up-scale housewife who would demonstrate in bed more desperate tricks under Stanley than the CIA under Casey.
Short of scarlingus, that is.
Had Stanley been paying attention, this thought might have given him pause. Supposing scarlingus—voluntary, nay, willful scarlingus—treatment superior to that which he had received from the deceitful tongue of the green-eyed Donna, would Stanley not be well-advised to allow the BMW’s taillights to fade into the night? And having done so, would it not be prudent and civic to then drive straight to Iris’ apartment; telephone this BMW’s license number to Corrigan; let the cops do what cops do best; and finally surrender to the fanciful elaborations of the nurse’s fetish, as the present and more-than-equable resolution of his fate?
Prudent, no doubt. As well as civic. Safe, too.
But Stanley was paying attention to other concepts. Revenge, for one. To inflict injury upon he, in this case she, who has injured thee. Actual sex with Green Eyes, as additional compensation, for two. The possibility of continued good health by virtue of a new kidney, from the vantage of which he might resume drinking himself to death without any further help from disinterested parties, thank you very much, for three.
Stanley eased his foot off the brake, and let the truck drift downhill to the intersection.
His story to Corrigan notwithstanding, Stanley remembered a great deal about that Friday six weeks ago. His memory of the events that led up to the subsequent three-day blank might even be described as relentlessly vivid. Making Donna, for example, had been no trouble at all: The green eyes, of course, brunette, 5’", 130 pounds, northern Midwest accent—possibly from Detroit, which at the time he thought might explain her taste in cars.
Now he surmised that her cars were stolen, one per job.
He remembered a lot more. The expert way she’d psychointellectually manhandled Ted varied little from the way she cajoled Stanley into going home with her. She’d smoothly parried, without deflecting entirely, Ted’s amorous intentions with a story about global ecology, not unlike one she had foisted on Stanley. Different theme, though. One theme per job. At the time he’d assumed that she was sounding his politics, that if he weren’t liberal enough, she wouldn’t sleep with him. No doubt Ted was thinking the same way. Subsequently her aggressive kiss came as a welcome surprise to a man too worn out from a week’s work and too disarmed by drink to fly very high in the blue skies of the eco-theoretical.
She turned east on Geary.
Stanley followed.
About now she would be suggesting that Ted take a look in the glove compartment. There he would find a pint of excellent brandy, a three-pack of lubricated prophylactics, and a short-handled whip. Then she would ask him if he thought he would mind handling all five of them, and her, too.
This query would make Ted thirsty.
While he took a sip of brandy, her right hand would drop to the inside of Ted’s left thigh, high up, and gently knead where no woman had lately kneaded.
Gosh, Ted would be thinking, I could have stayed home and watched any one of the three versions of Star Trek currently available to viewers everywhere—approximately what Stanley himself had thought six weeks ago.
He was still thinking it.
The BMW swung off Geary, up the ramp to Masonic, and turned south. Stanley let the choppers of a couple of Hell’s Angels already on Masonic merge in between his truck and the Beamer, which wasn’t driving particularly fast, nor were the two Angels, who were biking one-handed, passing a joint back and forth over the blacktop between them.
At Turk Street the BMW caught the red light and stopped. All four vehicles sat in a row, idling comfortably in the cool night. A single car drifted across the intersection from the west and continued downtown. Two cars waited northbound on Masonic.
His partner declining the roach, the other biker stubbed out its coal on his own tongue, then swallowed it.
Stanley was just thinking how quiet it was for a Friday night, when the light changed to green. The two Angels simultaneously twisted the throttles on their Harleys and caused a tremendous roar to engulf the two idling automobiles as completely as a grouper swallowing a brace of guppies. The two motorcycles split around the BMW and blasted across the intersection before the woman at the wheel even had time to take her foo
t off the brake. The rider on the left, his teeth clenched like a skull’s in rigor mortis, jetted across Turk Street and down the hill perched on the rear wheel of his scooter, its front wheel high in the air above and barely before him, with two and three foot flames belching out of the bike’s parallel exhaust pipes, bathing the asphalt beneath them as if to melt it. The other bike bolted forward while almost perpendicularly sideways to its vector of travel, straddled by its rider as if with intention to brand it, just as soon as it could be wrestled to the pavement. The machine switched and wallowed across the three southbound lanes of Turk Street, the beam of its headlamp sweeping every direction within ninety degrees of straight ahead, purple smoke spewing from its nearly tractionless rear tire. This rider’s left elbow came perilously close to tearing the right side mirror off the still motionless BMW, and the steel-clad heels of one or another of his boots spewed rooster tails of blue sparks as they skidded along the pavement.
Within just a few seconds the motorcycles were completely out of sight, though still audible. Only a swirling blanket of blue smoke remained, the visible component of the distinctive paraffin reek of Castrol. A few seconds after that, the cars opposite Stanley and the BMW began to move north. Still the BMW did not move into the intersection. A car behind Stanley sounded its horn. Stanley quickly moved his left arm across his face, as if to adjust the rearview mirror. Whether or not Green Eyes glanced into her mirror he could not tell. But the BMW began to move. As it did so, the signal went to orange. A Volvo abruptly passed Stanley on the right, charging through the intersection as the light changed to red. Its driver honked his horn and raised his middle finger as he passed the BMW.