Evil Companions

by D. M. Perkins

  So we waited for the last nail—his right ankle—to be hammered in. When he was up, he opened his eyes, rolled them until the whites showed, and moaned weakly, a silly grin on his face. One of the girls ripped off his shorts and plunged her mouth down on his balls, meanwhile pulling at his limp penis as if she wanted to tear it off.

  “Pain is so boring,” the girl on the floor said to me. I nodded in agreement and went on. A few yards away about five Vipers were standing in a circle with their hands on their cocks. They were pissing, and their target was Paulette—I heard her voice, a few octaves higher than usual—down on the floor in a pool of urine. She was drunk, and running at both ends. She kept screaming for more and taunting them. Like kids, they backed off a little each time and tried to shoot a little further than the next man.

  “I’m a deep-sea diver!” Paulette would scream as she received another wave of amber liquid. She was making it a game. Near her, The Charmer stood, a little spade chick manipulating him while he stroked his snake. As I watched, trying to avoid his eye, he came, and pushing the girl away from him, hit Paulette with a full charge in the face.

  “This shit is dull,” I commented to one of the guys on the stag line. He gave me a murderous look and shook his meat at me angrily, so I backed off.

  They were all so involved in balling, drinking, or beating someone that I was scarcely noticed. My eyes, accustomed to the dimness, began to pick out individuals in the corners. In one of them, far away from everyone else, Anne was sitting alone, a needle hanging from her arm. Her eyes were dead, undersea; I approached with my throat tight, instinctively circling her at first, like an animal coming on its dead. She was much thinner, and her hair had been rough-cut even shorter, so she looked like a boy. There was a new scar on a cheek, a very small one, put there with a razor, probably: a jagged swastika. The Deathhead brand. She was wearing her old Levi’s, one sneaker, and a man’s dirty corduroy shirt.

  I slapped her, and her mouth fell open, revealing bloody teeth. After a while, she choked, and came around, mumbling:

  “Yes. It’s you. You own. Flies. Roaches. Horrible instincts—insects. Bugs. You own me now. Can I go to the toilet now? My belly hurts.”

  I took the needle from her arm and put it in my shirt pocket, picked her up, and laid her on someone’s coat on the floor. Then I went off to get some water and towels. When I got back the Deathhead was toeing her.

  “Looks like she OD’d, man,” he said coldly, matter of factly. I pushed past him and started rubbing her vigorously.

  “You got to walk her. That’s what has to be done,” he said, standing above me, eyeballing us.

  “What’d you do to her?”

  “Used her. What else are chicks made for? Used her like a soup can.”

  “Did you buy the junk?”

  “She put out pussy for it. I don’t mess with it. But I’m telling you, weirdo, she needs to be walked.”

  “All right. Help me get her up.” Surprisingly, he helped me pull her up, and we started walking her back and forth, making her blood chase out the junk demons. While we supported her, we talked, not unamiably, of the body common to us:

  “She’s a nice piece. But a warped, twisted, I mean down head!” he told me.

  “Yeah. But she keeps things lively.”

  “You ever fuck her in the ass? It’s tight.”

  “It’s not bad,” I allowed. While we were talking so inanely, I thought about the crazy urges, the feelings that were whirling around inside. I wouldn’t have believed that I would even bother to lift a finger to help her. But here I was, straining my arm, and deeply involved. Something told me that I had to stick to her—that she had something to show me, if I could keep up with her.

  We had walked her for fifteen minutes or so when she started to come around. Started to come around by jerking away from us. I grabbed her again.

  “You’re O.K. now,” I said.

  “Nothing was wrong with me, nosey. How’d you get here?”

  “Daniel.”

  “I wish you’d go away.”

  “Oh, fuck it. I don’t give a damn anyway.” I got about five steps when she called me back in a voice cold as ice: “Don’t you leave until I tell you to!” I turned around and limped back. “I want you to see something, and then we’re going home,” she said. She went back to the Deathhead, who was watching us both with an amused glint in his eyes.

  “Hit me,” she ordered him. He looked at her, and a big grin spread across his fish face, like a crack in a plate. He knocked her down with his open hand. When she was down, he waited while she crawled toward him. A crowd had gathered—and why not? It was like a ballet. She crawled toward his shoes, and he retreated, teasing her. Finally she grabbed his ankles, and held him still while she slowly cleaned his shoes with her tongue. A sigh escaped from him. When she was finished, she pulled herself up his legs and unzipped him. His pants fell down around his ankles, and she began working on his crotch with her tongue. Once she paused to look at me, as if she were pointing out a significant fact in a lecture. He sank down to his knees, and she began to clean the crevice between his buttocks with her tongue. From the state of his prick, he seemed ready to shoot. She went around to his front again, and rose, blocking him from view momentarily. There was a sound midway between a scream and a bark, like a dog dying under the wheels of a train, and she jumped up. She had plunged the needle that had been in her arm into his throat. I stood there holding my empty shirt pocket. The screaming followed us all the way down the stairs.

  Chapter Twelve

  ___________________ Bent Bodies

  Anne told me that she had begun to hear voices when she was with the Deathhead. She had always been drawn to that kind of thing, but it wasn’t actually until she heard the voices that she fell all the way into it.

  I asked her about the time she had spent with the Vipers.

  “Oh, they’re drags. But I had some kicks.”

  What she wanted to tell me about was the voices—low, sometimes inaudible, they came to her even when she wasn’t high. Strange words that she had to interpret for herself.

  So she’d buy books on numerology and astrology and sit in bed studying them. She learned the Tarot, and after a while even began to try to chart her own sign, which was Scorpio. The apartment, which I had always considered black anyway, took on the look of a sorcerer’s den. I was left to take care of business—the knocks on the door, the connections at night on some corner—while she delved deeper and deeper into the magic pool. I was a delivery boy, fetching from this store and that, what she wrote down for me on long lists, until one day she announced, quite seriously, that she would need a freak, and would I go out and not come back until I had one for her?

  “Why don’t you cut this out, Anne? A freak, Jesus Christ!” But she turned cold eyes on me, as if she were reconsidering our whole relationship, and I had to relent.

  “I feel like Quasimodo. What do you need a freak for? And what kind, anyway?”

  “I need a freak for a ceremony I want to perform. I also want to ask him some questions. I want a freak with arms and legs that are only decorations.” She spoke in a completely logical voice, one straightforward sentence after another, as if she were already an oracle. She finished by telling me: “You are my Quasimodo.”

  She chased me out into an evening I had wanted to avoid. It was still too light for me, and the people out there, with their right-side-up faces, depressed me. I wanted to snarl at them, and jump for their throats. I wanted to take every one of them by their too-tight ties and hang them on a rafter; to catch their cocks in their zippers and rip them up; to beat them with their own men’s shop belts. When they saw me, they wanted to do the same things, but only the nuts would admit it. It ran the range from an aggressive “Why don’t you get a haircut” to “They oughta put him in a zoo,” to “Hey pussy-face.”

  I bought a newspaper and looked quickly over the vomit printed on the first few pages, trying to avoid nausea, and then ripped it i
n half and threw it to the bottom of a trash basket. I walked down the street until I came to a shop where psychedelic crap was sold, and went in to talk with Max, a friend of mine I hadn’t seen since I met Anne. We sat on a couch in front of the store while his woman Barbara handled the customers.

  “You look different,” Max said with a straight face.

  “Well ...”

  “You’re not uptight anymore. What I mean, you don’t walk around ready to vanish—you’ve got lines to you.”

  “Do you know Anne?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I’m living with her now.”

  “Lots of guys live with lots of chicks.”

  “You know where I could find a freak?”

  “Freaks are hard. Could put you onto a dwarf, though.”

  “No, it’s got to be a guy with almost no arms or legs.”

  “Sounds kind of sick.”

  I couldn’t think of an adequate response, so I got up and went over to the bulletin board on his wall. A lot of nuts advertised there. Baby-sitting, astrology, kittens, runaway kids (with heart-breaking photos of the lost ones), apartments for rent, and there, down in the lower left corner, a card with a jagged edge, so that it appeared to have been torn in half. It was a cheaply done card, hand-lettered, BENT BODIES, INC. There was an address, which was only a few blocks away.

  “That’s it,” Max said from over my shoulder. “A dwarf in beads came in and put that one up.” I saluted him, and set off to the dwarf’s office. It was a storefront on Avenue A, freshly painted black. The only sign was another jagged-edged card on the inside of the door’s window.

  The door was opened as soon as I finished rapping lightly on the glass.

  “Yes?” It must have been the same dwarf Max had seen. He was quite handsome, although his hair was thinning; and he dressed well, if eccentrically. I stared down at his bright skull shining through what hair remained, and put it bluntly:

  “I’m looking for a freak.”

  “What kind?” He responded as if my request were for a loaf of bread. I gave him Anne’s specifications, and he invited me in. The place was full of boards and paint.

  “We just opened a few days ago, and it’s hard to get help. What did you say you wanted this ‘freak,’ as you call him, for? Circus? Kids’ show?”

  “Well, I need a cook. As a servant, kind of,” I lied.

  “For yourself?” He looked up from a file of cards he was shuffling through.

  “No, no, not for myself. For a lady—a friend of mine. She doesn’t get out much.”

  “I see. I’ve got someone. An old entertainer—Bascomb Malcolm.”

  “I hope you don’t mean he’s old.”

  “No. Just that he’s an old hand in show business—since he was five, I guess. He’s in his thirties now. His last job was selling prosthetic goods, I believe.”

  He showed me to the door, and I patted him on the head on the way out.

  “Thanks,” he shouted after me. “Most people like me hate that; but it makes me feel good about people!”

  I had Bascomb Malcolm’s address—a rooming house on upper Broadway—and the information that he had just fallen in love and the woman was living with him. I tried to call Anne, and remembered that the phone had been disconnected. She probably wouldn’t have answered anyway.

  His room was on the first floor of a fire-trap hotel on Broadway and 90th. I imagined Bascomb Malcolm hopping up the stairs to his place every day like the Easter bunny, with a shopping bag over his arm. Or maybe his new love carried him up, under one arm?

  The woman who answered the door was being very careful about his privacy. She closed it behind her and confronted me in a bathrobe. She was obviously naked under it. She knew how to talk with her breasts, and I listened eagerly.

  Listen, her left nipple said, poking its tongue through the fabric, I’d like to be pinched by you, honey. And her right nipple said, you take care of both of us, lover. Unfortunately the woman could talk, too, and louder, through bad teeth:

  “Bascomb will not talk to anybody from the police department, or the newspapers,” she informed me. She was blowsy, but she had obviously climbed to the top at one time.

  “Well, I’m not from either of those places.”

  “I knew it. You didn’t have to tell me,” she said in a lower voice. “That was for Bascomb’s benefit, so he won’t think I’m doing a bad job. You look like a writer ... or something.”

  “I’m not. I have a job for Mr. Malcolm. Could I see him?”

  “What kind of job? Oh, I hope it’s something that pays a lot of money. We need it badly. Poor Bascomb has been almost suicidal, though I hate to say something like that. It’s a reflection on me, you know?” She was whispering now. I decided I’d rather talk to her nipples. The robe was open to the top of her thighs, and I glanced down at them, thinking about a party. She was sad, but I chose to ignore that in favor of what was still happy about her. Those kind of see-saw emotions were part of a lifestyle I had junked for the new age.

  “Won’t he wonder about you being out here all the time?” I asked.

  “Oh yes, yes he will,” she admitted, nodding her head several times, like a bird, but making no move.

  “I’m going to fuck you right out here.” I said to her. Her eyes opened wide with shock—and pleasure. That kind of direct statement was bound to get some kind of action—usually immediate and dramatic rejection, but once in a while it can be a shortcut to compliance. This seemed to be one of those times. She shuddered, and her knees seemed to sag a little. My fingers went to her nipples and pinched them savagely. She gasped and put her hands around my waist. I put a hand between her legs and jammed two hard fingers straight up her crack, without any preliminaries. It was like dipping into a bowl of hot glue. Her hands went down to my ass and pulled my pelvis against hers. I drew my head close to hers, as if to kiss, but instead caught her nose between my teeth, and bore down. Her breath exploded through her mouth, and she began to whimper from the combination pain and pleasure I was playing. Looking down the hall for interference, I pulled her limp body around and bent her forward, from the waist. She braced herself with her hands against the wall.

  She was crying, “I’m not a dog. A bitch, I mean. I’ve seen dogs doing it like this. Don’t put your thing in my bottom, please.” I pinched her soft ass, hard, telling her: “Shut up, goddamnit! The freak will hear. If you don’t keep quiet I’ll stick my knife in your asshole.” But her aging hole held no attraction for me. I aimed for the age-old place, and went in like cutting hot butter.

  “Oooh!” she cried, too loud. “Oooh, oooh, oooh!”

  “What’s the matter, doesn’t Bascomb Malcolm give you any?”

  “No. Oooh. I mean ... his thing is just like his arms and legs.”

  That gave me a kick. I started laughing, and the reaction in her brought her gates open. Flood, and I drove a jackhammer thrust up her and left a day’s semen where babies come from. I had to clap my hand over her mouth to keep her from shouting as I guessed she would. She sank to the floor and I went down on top of her.

  When I had her in a condition to introduce me to the freak properly, we went into the room. It was an ugly room, furnished in the late thirties, looking like it hadn’t been touched since then. The freak was sitting at a high chair over a drafting board by the window. He was typing with the aid of a small metal stick strapped to his shrunken arm.

  “Shhh,” the woman said to me, putting a finger in front of her lips. “He’s working on a poem.” We tiptoed closer.

  “Boo,” she said softly in her ear. He jerked around and smacked her on the ear with his metal drink-stirrer.

  “I told you not to do that! How can I concentrate?”

  Then he saw me, and he nearly strangled in his fury with her. He sputtered, looking at her with eyes that would have burned holes in Superman.

  “Who is this, Lydia? My dear Lydia, I will personally, all by myself burn your body and swallow your ashes...
.” His voice, filtered through years of cigarettes and bourbon, was a rich baritone. Lydia wept unashamedly.

  “But Bascomb, he wants to hire you. We need the money, dear.”

  That mitigated his fury a few degrees. “A job? What kind of employment have you to offer, my man?”

  “Well, it’s not me, it’s a friend of mine. She believes you might have magical abilities.” He looked puzzled at that, and looked down at himself, as if searching for an attribute his giant ego had not recognized before.

  “... Magical abilities? I don’t understand what you are talking about.”

  “Well, it’s kind of embarrassing. She meant your arms and legs.” His nose spat out flames.

  “My arms and legs!”

  “Yes. She needs a freak.” I said it just to irritate him. More of my black humor.

  “So the lady you work for—the lady you pimp for, I should say—needs a freak?”

  “We need the money, dear,” Lydia wheedled.

  “Shut up, you disgusting flop,” he commanded. He was considering it, despite his anger—that was obvious. While they stared at each other, I looked at the papers on his desk.

  “All right, it’s a good enough way to test that old commonplace, I guess. I’ll be a martyr for science. Maybe a freak like me does possess magical properties. I’ve never believed in that nonsense, but if there’s any truth to it, I could certainly use some magic.”

  “Fine,” I said, “let’s go.”

  “Wait a minute, now. What am I to be paid for waving my little feelers around in some black magic ceremony?”

  I mentioned some absurd sum. Surprisingly, he believed me and hopped off the stool.

  “Get my hat, Lydia.” She gave him a black bowler, he tucked an attaché case under his arm, took her hand like a child with his mother, and prepared to go. At the top of the stairs he stopped and told me it would take him some time to get down them, and would I wait at the bottom with Lydia?

  “Oh shit,” I said, picking him up under my arm and running down the stairs, his little flippers tickling me all the way down, fluttering in protest.