Dominion

by Bentley Little

  “Candy ass,” Paul sneered.

  Dion ignored him.

  As before, they parked a little way up from Father Ralph’s house and crept through the bushes and the mud until they reached the backyard.

  This time all of the lights were out. Only the pulsing blue glow of a television shone from one of the windows.

  Paul crept up to the window, peeked in. He crouched immediately back down, giggling. “Check it out!” he whispered. “He’s in there boffing some babe!”

  The rest of them moved closer and peered into the bedroom.

  Dion’s stomach dropped. One of Penelope’s mothers, Mother Margaret, was on all fours on the floor next to the bed, the preacher kneeling behind her, grasping his hardened organ, positioning himself. Dress and underwear, pants and panties, were strewn across the rug. An empty bottle of wine lay tipped over on the nightstand next to the bed.

  Penelope’s mother cried out, and her large breasts jiggled as the preacher entered her from behind. “Yes!” she moaned. “Yes! Yes!”

  Dion turned away, sickened, slumping against the wall of the house.

  “Get ready to run,” Paul said. He stood, held up the camera he’d brought, and began snapping pictures. Dion could see in his mind the shifting tableaux as the dark was illuminated by a series of quick flashes. He saw the preacher’s shock and rage and fear, saw Mother Margaret’s confusion as she became aware of the crowd at the window.

  “Run!” Paul screamed.

  And then Dion was following the rest of them through the brush, crashing through branches, slipping in mud, tripping over roots until they reached the van.

  They took off, laughing excitedly, “Who was that?” someone asked.

  Kevin shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Nice titties, though.” Paul grinned. “No wonder my old man coveted her ass.”

  Dion closed his eyes as the other boys laughed, and they sped through the night toward the burger stand.

  He avoided Penelope the next morning at school, afraid to face her, feeling guilty, almost as though her mother’s actions were his fault, as though he was the one who had done something wrong.

  He met Kevin next to the lockers before class, but the usual joking insults were nowhere in evidence. His friend’s face was grim, his manner subdued. “You heard the news, didn’t you?”

  Dion shook his head.

  “Father Ralph’s dead.”

  Dion stared at his friend, not knowing what to say.

  “Heart attack, they think. Paul’s really taking it hard.”

  “What about the woman? Did they—”

  “Haven’t heard anything about her. I bet she split after it happened.”

  “Maybe it happened after she left.”

  “I don’t think so. I think she probably brought it on.”

  Dion closed his locker. “Does—does Penelope know?”

  “I have no idea.” Kevin frowned. “Why?”

  “Nothing,” Dion said. “No reason.”

  Kevin looked at him suspiciously. “No reason?”

  “No reason.” He swallowed, looked away. “Come on. It’s getting late.”

  Kevin nodded slowly. “Yeah. All right.”

  The two of them walked together to class.

  He talked to Penelope on the phone that night.

  She called him, worried, wondering why he had avoided her all day, and he wanted to tell her what he’d seen, what had happened, but instead he lied, told her that Kevin was having some family problems and that he’d felt obligated to be there for his friend, to give him some moral support.

  Penelope was silent for a moment. “I thought maybe it was because you’d changed your mind.”

  “Changed my mind?”

  “About us.”

  Now Dion was silent. His heart was pounding, and his hand holding the receiver was shaking. He swallowed, forced himself to speak. “I

  haven’t,” he said.

  Penelope, when she spoke, sounded as nervous as he felt. “How do you feel about me?” she asked.

  He knew what she wanted him to say, but he wasn’t sure if he could say it. Or if he should say it.

  He said it anyway: “I love you.”

  And it was true. He didn’t know if he’d felt that way before, if he’d felt it all along, but he felt it now, and his pulse raced as he heard her say softly, “I love you too.”

  A painful erection was pressing against his jeans. He was in his bedroom, with the door closed, and he unbuttoned his pants with his left hand, releasing his hardened penis. He touched himself gently, and he pretended that she was the one who was touching him.

  Neither of them had spoken yet, and Dion was aware that the silence was becoming awkward. “Do you—” he began.

  “Are we—” Penelope said at the same time.

  They laughed. “You go first,” Dion said.

  “Are we going to see each other this weekend?”

  “Yes,” Dion said. He was stroking himself, and he closed his eyes as he pressed the receiver to his ear, wondering if Penelope would be stroking him this weekend.

  “They’re having a fair tomorrow and Sunday,” she suggested. “I read about it in the paper.”

  “That sounds good.”

  “I can drive if you want.”

  “No, I can drive,” Dion said. He suddenly thought of Penelope’s mother, naked on her hands and knees in front of Father Ralph.

  And he came. Semen shot all over his jeans, all over the bedspread. He released his softening organ and looked at the mess, disgusted. “I have to go,” he said quickly. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Okay?”

  “Okay. What time are you going to come by?”

  “Is ten o’clock okay?”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Ten o’clock, then.”

  “Okay.” There was a pause. “I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  “Good night,” Penelope said.

  “Good”—he had been about to say “bye,” but somehow “night” seemed nicer, more intimate, more appropriate —“night.”

  He hung up the phone, looked around for Kleenexes or a towel or a napkin, something to clean up the bedspread. He grimaced as he wiped his sticky left hand on the cuff of his pants. What the hell was the matter with him?

  He didn’t know, but he thought again of Penelope’s mother, on her hands and knees, and for some reason he remembered the wine he’d had at Penelope’s house, how it had tasted, and his penis began to stiffen.

  Before he knew what he was doing, before he could think about it, he had pulled his pants down around his ankles and was once again furiously stroking himself.

  He climaxed almost immediately.

  “Fifteen cents is your change. Thanks.” Nick Nicholson dropped the coins into the young woman’s open palm and watched admiringly as she walked out of his store to the red Corvette in the parking lot. Her ass swayed gently back and forth beneath the material of her tight skirt.

  She looked up at him and smiled before unlocking the car door and getting in. He glanced quickly away, caught but not wanting to admit it.

  What was in those Daneam wines? He’d received a shipment on Tuesday and had just sold the last bottle of burgundy to the Corvette woman. And he wasn’t the only one who couldn’t keep them in stock. Jim over at OKay Liquor had sold out almost immediately, as had Phil at Liquor Shack.

  The amazing thing was that he had never before seen a Daneam label. He’d been aware of the winery, of course, but as far as he’d known, Daneam sold only by mail order and only to specialty collectors. Now, all of a sudden, the company had been supplying its vintages to area stores, offering everything in its catalog.

  Just as spontaneously, people had been buying. Not just collectors, not just connoisseurs, but regular people. There’d been no advance publicity, no hype of any sort, but there was now a sudden demand for Daneam wines among seemingly all segments of the general public.

  He didn’t underst
and it. He’d talked to several of his friends who were buyers for some of the area’s better restaurants, and they too had started carrying Daneam wines. Two of them had even elevated the vineyard’s products to “house wine” status.

  All within the past week.

  It was crazy.

  A bearded, burly man wearing ripped jeans and a Chicago Cubs T-shirt walked into the store, jingling the bells over the door. He strode directly up to the counter. “You have any Daneam wines?” he asked.

  Nick shook his head. “Sorry, just sold the last one.”

  The man slammed his fist down on the counter. “Shit!”

  “You might try Liquor Barn over on Lincoln.”

  “I just came from there, asshole.” He glanced around the store. “You sure you don’t have some hidden in the back?”

  “No. Sorry.”

  “Bullshit! I’m going to check myself.”

  “No, you’re not.” Nick reached under the counter until his fingers touched the handgun hidden there. “You’re going to leave. Right now.”

  “Who says so?”

  “I say so.” Nick looked hard into the man’s eyes, trying to stare him down, hoping he wouldn’t have to pull out the gun and threaten the man with it.

  “Fuck,” the man said, shaking his head. He knocked over a small display of Chapstick products and pushed open the front door, causing the bells to ring crazily as he stormed out of the store.

  Nick relaxed, able to breathe again, but he did not take his hand away from the handgun until he saw the man cross the street and disappear from view. He stood there for a moment, uncertain, then walked around the edge of the counter, locked the front door, and flipped the sign in the window from Open to Closed. The store wasn’t scheduled to close for another half hour, but he didn’t feel like remaining open any longer.

  There wasn’t any point to it.

  He was all out of Daneam wines.

  And he had the feeling that the customers who came in tonight weren’t going to be asking for anything else.

  Dion awoke, robbing his eyes, stretching. The blanket on top of him seemed heavy, and he kicked it off, sitting up. Outside the sun was out, light streaming through the window in pillars roughly the shape of the wood-bordered panes, but the atmosphere felt dark, oppressive. He had never been claustrophobic, but that was how he felt now. Everything seemed close, confining, as though both his room and the world outside were pressing in on him. Even his underwear felt unnaturally restrictive, the cotton much too tight against his skin. He peeled off his T-shirt, peeled off his shorts, but the feeling persisted.

  He stood up. His body felt small. It was a strange thing to think, but it was the only way to describe the sensation. He had certainly not shrunk during the night, but his body seemed somehow compacted, as though his being was too large for its physical form.

  No, it was not as if his body had shrunk. It was as if, inside, he had grown.

  But that made no sense. Why would he even think of something like that?

  He’d had dreams. All night. A lot of them. And though he could remember only fragmented images, he was filled with the certainty that the dreams had been all of a piece, that they had been not only related but interconnected, like individual episodes of a serial.

  That frightened him for some reason.

  Just as frightening were the images that had remained with him: the head of Penelope’s Mother Margaret, grinning, impaled on his enormous erection as he paraded before a huge, orgiastic audience in an outdoor amphitheater; a line of ants on the dirt suddenly growing, changing, metamorphosing into men who bowed before him and promised their undying fealty; dead women swimming in a black lake, their faces blank and lifeless but their legs kicking, their arms paddling; Mr. Holbrook, shirtless, pushing a boulder up the side of an incline in a dark cavern;

  three beautiful nude women standing on top of a high cliff, singing, as men on the flat ground below the cliff ran crazily forward, smashing their heads into the rock.

  He wasn’t sure why the dreams had frightened him so, but they had, disturbing him in a way that seemed almost more real than real life.

  What was most disturbing, though, was that there was an element of anticipation in the fear. Despite the fact that he was awake and the dreams were over, the unpleasant feelings lingered, and they were not fading residual reactions to something that he had experienced but growing expectant feelings of dread for something that had not yet happened.

  He walked into He bathroom, looked at himself in the mirror.

  Perhaps he was psychic.

  That was a scary thought He took a quick shower, and once again had the sensation that his body no longer fit him.

  He pushed that craziness out of his mind.

  He hadn’t told his mom that he was going out with Penelope today, and after he showered, shaved, dressed, and walked out to the kitchen to grab something to eat, she asked him if he’d mow the lawn this morning.

  He told her then that he was planning to go put, and to his surprise she paused a moment before giving her approval. He’d expected her to be understanding, accommodating, completely supportive. She’d seemed excited for him until now, happy that he was finally dating, and even this slight hesitation put him on the defensive. His mom hadn’t attacked Penelope, but anything less than total backing smacked of criticism, and he felt immediately resentful. Hell, his mom hadn’t even met Penelope.

  What was she doing passing judgment?

  Maybe she should meet Penelope.

  Maybe.

  He’d think about that later.

  He ate a quick breakfast of toast and cocoa and borrowed ten dollars from his mom, promising to pay her back.

  “Pay me back?” she said. “How?”

  “When I get a job.”

  “Are you planning to get a job?”

  He grinned. “No. But when I do, you’ll be the first person I’ll reimburse.”

  She tossed the car keys at him. “Get out of here.”

  He was lucky. The car’s tank was full, so he didn’t have to waste any money buying gas. He hadn’t thought of that before. If he had, he would’ve borrowed twenty dollars.

  He backed out of the driveway and pulled’ onto the street. He glanced east toward the hill as he drove, and though the sight of the hill had unnerved him in the past, there seemed something familiar and comforting about it now, and he could not remember what had so disturbed him about the hill before.

  Although it was only quarter to ten when he pulled up in front of the winery gates, Penelope was already waiting for him, sitting on a bench next to the driveway entrance. He was glad that she was alone, that he would not have to go up to the house and see her mothers. He didn’t feel up to that this morning.

  She stood when she saw him, and got in the passenger side when he reached over and unlocked the door. “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  They were shy with each other, the intimacy they’d shared on the phone, in the nighttime privacy of their own rooms, making them self-conscious in the rational light of day. Dion was embarrassed as he thought of the way he’d played with himself while talking to her, but he also found himself becoming aroused again.

  Would they do it tonight!

  He didn’t know, but the possibility both scared and excited him.

  Penelope reached into her purse, pulled out a newspaper article she’d clipped. “The fair’s on Elm, outside of town. You know where that is?”

  He shook his head.

  “Go down to the next street and turn left. I’ll tell you where to go.”

  “Okay.”

  They were silent after that, neither sure of what to say or how to act.

  Dion wanted to turn on the radio, but he was aware that that would only draw attention to the silence, and he kept both hands on the wheel.

  He cleared his throat. “What kind of fair is this? A Lion’s fair?”

  “No. It’s, like, a festival, a psychic festival. They have fortune
tellers and tarot readers, stuff like that.”

  Psychic? That was a spooky coincidence.

  “Turn left here,” Penelope said.

  He did so, glancing to the right at a grove of trees as he turned. The grove looked familiar to him, and as he looked he experienced a momentary flashback to one of last night’s dreams.

  Women in the forest, naked, smeared with blood, howling wildly, screaming, begging for him “What are you doing?” Penelope demanded.

  The car was half off the road and bumping over the shoulder toward the embankment. Dion swerved quickly, too quickly, and Penelope was thrown against the door as the car reentered the lane.

  “What was that about?”

  “Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “Daydreaming.”

  He felt a soft hand on his arm, and he realized that this was the first time she had touched him without his initiating the contact. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  He nodded. “I’m fine.”

  But he was not fine. His dreams had escaped their sleep-bound confines and had entered the waking world, intruding upon reality, almost getting them into an accident, and that scared the hell out of him. What was happening? He wondered briefly if it could be something like an acid flashback. Maybe, back in the old days when he was a baby, his mom had put LSD in his milk or some thing, and now he was finally experiencing the side effects.

  No, even at her worst, his mom would not have done something like that.

  He didn’t really think it was anything along those lines, though, did he? He wasn’t afraid that it was drugs he’d been given as an infant or ultraviolet rays streaming through the hole in the ozone layer or even mental illness. No. He didn’t know what he thought it was. But he knew that it was much scarier than any of those possibilities.

  “Are you sure?” she said.

  “Yeah.” He looked over at Penelope and smiled, and he hoped the smile looked more real than it felt.

  The Fourth Annual Wine Country New Age Music and Art Fair was scheduled to open at eleven, but when they arrived a little after ten-thirty, there were already quite a few people milling about, browsing amongst the booths, watching latecomers set up shop on the sawdust. The two of them got out of the car and, holding hands, walked across the small wooden footbridge to the fair entrance. The weekend event had been scheduled originally to be held in the park downtown, according to Penelope’s article, but an inability to meet city permit registration deadlines had forced the fair organizers to move to an empty meadow near the foothills.