by Lee Durkee
Noel turned the paperback over to read the back.
“By the way,” she asked, “what are you reading these days?”
“Crime and Punishment. At least that’s what I’m supposed to be reading.”
“Egad.” She took his hand and led him to the end of the hall, where they stood together in the open doorway like travelers waiting to be asked inside.
“Kali,” Lily said, dipping her forehead, or perhaps bowing to the statue of the naked black woman. “Tantric goddess of Time.”
“Is that what you are, some kind of . . . ?” No word came to him; instead he asked, “If she’s a god, how come she’s holding up that cut-off head?”
“The decapitated head symbolizes the death of delusion. Cut off with the sword of discrimination. And the necklace of skulls symbolizes—”
“What about the dead guy she’s standing on?”
“Not standing, dancing. That’s Shiva. Her consort. And he’s not dead. Look, see that dagger he’s holding? It’s his erection. He’s a voyeur. In Tantra, Shiva represents the masculine half of God. The half that is never born, never dies. Kali is the female half of God. The active half. The exhibitionist. Energy that crystallizes into matter. Into earth, into stars, into everything that’s born and has to die. Into Lily. Into Noel. Into Kevin and Cecilia. Look at her earrings. Go on. She won’t bite.”
Noel moved closer and knelt with his hands on his knees.
“Babies?”
“Dead ones. Dead-baby earrings.”
Noel asked what dead-baby earrings were supposed to mean.
“Simple. Dead babies mean dead babies. Babies die here. At a tremendous rate. Have you ever seen a Shakespearean play?”
He shook his head.
“Well . . . used to be, back in the olden days, they wouldn’t let women act in them. So men had to play the female parts. A prepubescent boy played Juliet. Don’t you find that intriguing?”
Not especially, Noel indicated with the flop of his shoulders. He had already turned his attention to the window covered with the tapestry of vampires.
“Think about it, Noel. If our whole universe is the feminine half of God, that means that everything inside our universe is essentially feminine. Meaning not only Lily and Cecilia, but Kevin and Noel too. Everybody. Kali’s dance hypnotizes Shiva into seeing the world, but the world he sees is a feminine illusion, a play, stage. And we’re the players, we’re the actors so perfect that we’ve forgotten everything except our roles. It’s the exact opposite of those Shakespearean plays. Here, instead of everything being essentially masculine, everything is essentially feminine. Here, it’s the men who are by nature imposters. That’s why it’s so tough on men, this female universe is. Which might help explain why men are so wonderfully fucked up, yes?”
Noel turned full circle, pointing to each picture in turn and asking what are those things, what’s that, who the hell’s that?
“Herukas. Dakininis. That’s Troma. That’s Ugratara.”
When he asked about the vampires, she replied, “Those? Oh, they’re what the Buddhists call fierce deities. They symbolize the pure anger with which we battle delusion. They also represent the part of us that isn’t afraid, not of anything, not even of hell. That’s why they chose to look that way, fangs and all.”
“They’re all fucking.”
“No, not all of them, just the lucky ones.” She made a gesture that seemed to encompass the room, or maybe the world, then she dropped her arms and said, “You still want to take my picture in here?”
“Yes.” Then he asked, “Any way I want?”
“Any way you want, Noel. But I get to keep the film.”
•••
An hour later, and mere minutes before the cooking alarm would go bing, Lily suddenly lounged backward onto the sofa and picked up her glass of wine, sipped from it, then peered at Noel over the top of the glass. Now she was wearing an oversized Jets football jersey, number twelve. She had read about this jersey gimmick, as she called it, in some horrible women’s magazine. Men were supposed to find it devastating. She had a long list of such tricks. Often, as with the jersey, she revealed the source and kept inquiring, “Is this devastating you?” It became a pet phrase. “Are you finding this devastating?”
Noel was splayed backward on the couch.
“Aren’t you gonna . . . finish?” he asked.
She picked up the ashtray then relit a joint Noel had brought over with him.
“No. Not until you make a certain phone call. To a certain twirler.”
“You want me to call her now—like this?” He gestured to his own nakedness and in doing so accidentally strummed himself.
“Exactly like this.” Lily picked up the phone and started dialing the number, but Noel took the receiver from her and hung it up. “Suit yourself,” she told him. She advanced the alarm clock until it binged. “Goodbye.”
“You’re kidding me?”
“Oh, I don’t think I am.” She swirled her wine and gazed into its tides as if ascertaining there a bleak future. “Believe me, Noel, you will not be coming over here again unless you make that phone call.”
“She won’t even remember me. We only met that once.”
“Oh, she’ll remember you, alright. We’ve discussed you. Haven’t you guessed? I’m your champion.”
Noel hung his head, took the phone. A girl answered and ran off calling Cecilia’s name. Lily had one ear pressed against the edge of the receiver. Her hand was busy in Noel’s lap. “Cut it out,” he was saying as Cecilia came on the line. Noel quickly tried to explain who he was. Even though her reaction seemed lukewarm, she agreed to go out with him. They were setting details when Lily pulled away and picked up Noel’s camera and began taking his picture while he talked on the phone.
“Oh, Noel!” Cecilia exclaimed suddenly. “I thought you said Joel. I had no idea who you were.”
“You were going out with me not knowing who I was?”
Cecilia dismissed the question and asked if Noel had ever been to Pat McCool’s. It had the biggest disco dance floor in all Mississippi. “You like to disco, don’t you?”
“Disco?”
“Dance. Do you dance?”
At that moment Lily submerged her head into his lap, and Noel’s body became a horse galloping off.
“Yeah,” he managed to say. “Dance.”
•••
Lily, after teaching Noel to dance and otherwise coaching him through his first date with Cecilia, demanded payment in the form of intimate detail. She wanted to know everything. What had Cecilia worn? What makeup, what jewelry, what perfume? What had she been doing with her hands? With her legs? Her tongue? What kind of shoes was she wearing? When you touched her breast, right before she pushed your hand away, did she make any noises?
Her advice for the second date was, “Drink in front of her. Tell her all about you selling pot and getting in fights. Then, boom, ask her to pose naked. And when she says no, ask her to pose topless. And when she says no again, ask her to pose in that little spangly thing. Be a rogue. Head straight to third.”
“Third? I haven’t even got to second yet.”
“Trust me, Noel. Sometimes it’s best to run those bases backwards.”
Come the following Tuesday, Lily poured them each a glass of wine, took a tentative sip, then assured Noel, “Okay, I’m prepared. Let’s hear it. And don’t you dare hide anything. I’ll know if you do, I’m psychic today.”
Once again she showed too much interest in any sounds Cecilia had made, even forcing Noel into re-creating them. She also inquired about his various techniques but interrupted herself to say, “Wait—don’t tell, show.” She shifted positions on the couch so that she was sitting on Noel’s right. “Let’s pretend we’re in your car—v’room, v’room—and that I’
m sweet young Cecilia.” When Noel refused to attend to this game, Lily got up and repositioned herself on his left and took over the wheel. “Okay, have it your way, I’ll be Noel, you be Cecilia.”
On the fourth date Noel got to third, but only a vague hand-trapped third.
After hearing the details, Lily traced her lips with the tip of her tongue and concluded, “We have her. She’s ours, Noel. Whatever you do now, don’t call her for a whole week.”
•••
Over a week later Jay and Noel took the girls on a double date to the new drive-in in Hattiesburg. It had goofy golf out front, and the screen was a house the owners lived inside. “No!” Lily cried when Noel began to describe the make-out scenario. She was wearing only black panties and Noel’s brown flannel shirt. Noel had on unbuckled jeans and no shirt at all. Twenty-odd photographs of Cecilia in Dixie Darling attire were fanned across the magazine table. When he had finished describing how he and Cecilia had made out in the front while Jay and Cindy had used the back, Lily exclaimed, “Oh-my-gosh, what do you think would have happened if you two had gone back there and joined them?” She cringed. “Sorry. Never mind.” Returning her attention to the photographs, she asked, “Did you so much as ask her to undress for these?”
“In the middle of a football stadium? In broad daylight?”
“It’s empty, isn’t it? And God only knows what kind of fantasies she harbors about that stadium.”
“I couldn’t even get her to quit smiling at the camera.” He began fitting the prints back into the Eckerd’s packet. Not one picture had come back from the drugstore to his liking. “I need my darkroom back,” he complained.
“You still haven’t gone home, not once?”
He shook his head.
“You’re not giving up, are you, Noel? You look defeated.”
“It’s not gonna work. I mean, how am I supposed to get her to take off her clothes if she won’t even drink?”
“That’s the trick. You have to make her feel incredibly abnormal for everything she won’t do. And not only that, you have to make her think you’re going to break up with her because she won’t let you take her picture naked.” Lily focused an imaginary lens. “That’s why we have to get her to pose first, before we fuck her. Because if we fuck her first—trust me—then we’ll never get her to pose naked for us.”
“You’ve thought about this a lot, haven’t you?”
“Don’t interrupt.” She inhaled very slowly through her nose then exhaled very slowly through her mouth. She did this two more times. “Okay. Here’s the game plan. Next time she won’t pose for us, we get miffed and ask out somebody else. Somebody she knows and hates. Like a best friend.”
“Stacy?”
“Oh. You’re right. Stacy won’t do. I’ve got it. Are you ready? We ask out another twirler!”
•••
Jay parked his truck at the end of a dirt road that fed down a steep clay bank into the mud-driven Pearl. The road had been made by trucks backing in to dump garbage into the river. He pulled out the emergency brake handle and asked, “You gonna chunk it in?”
Noel tore a PBR off the warming six-pack. In the shadows across the clogged Pearl, the sun was setting blandly behind Louisiana soybean fields. Now and then a brave crow skimmed the water. Higher up, four buzzards circled something dying beyond the soybeans. A stripped wiper had left Noel’s half of the windshield rainbowed with red dust. This, at least, lent some color to the sunset. He stared at the white-disc sun until his eyes burned. The cassette player was blasting David Allan Coe out of one speaker at a time, switching left or right arbitrarily.
“Hell, pilgrim,” Noel said, imitating a guy on the third floor who could imitate John Wayne, “let’s just smoke up all this hootch ourselves.”
Passing the sheet of tinfoil and the hollow pen, they discussed the four high school guys who had gotten busted the day before, Noel describing in detail what he ought to do to them if they ratted. Hang them by the balls, cut off their nuts . . . the more he railed, the steadier he felt, but eventually Jay lost enthusiasm for the topic, so Noel let it drop.
The Pearl ran the color of topsoil and did not appear to be moving at all until an occasional styrofoam plank eddied past. Jay ejected the cassette and tapped it twice against his knee. When he inserted it again, the music came out both speakers. He turned it down and asked, “I ever tell you what my old man said to me after I got my first girlfriend?”
“Yep. Man said, Pilgrim, just ’cause she lets you play with her peehole, don’t let her get you by the balls.”
They both started laughing. Noel laughed a lot harder than Jay did.
“Peehole,” Noel said.
“So what you gonna do, Spoon?”
“I’m still deciding.”
“You scared?”
“Fuck yes I’m scared. Selling hash oil and ’ludes to damn minors—shit, they’ll throw away my key.”
“Pretty stupid thing to do, you stop and think about it.”
“One of them had a mustache better’n mine. How was I supposed to know they were high school? I thought they were from Myerson. Who the fuck told them about me anyway?”
“They’re gonna come after you, the cops are. Four local kids get busted, one of them’s bound to squeal.”
“Squeal,” Noel said and giggled.
“So you gonna chunk it in?”
“I’m damn deciding—if you let me I am.”
“I wish you’d decide faster. I don’t like having this shit in my truck. You want me to chunk it in for you?”
“I want you to shut up for a minute.”
Jay gestured across the cardboard box between them and asked how much all this was worth.
“On the street? Clear a grand easy.”
Jay whistled.
“That’s nothing, I got twice that in the bank already.”
“It’s gonna float.”
“It what?”
“Them scales’ll sink, and them vials, but not all that pot or them horse pills. You need to weigh it down. There’s a garbage bag in back. Tie it up in that. Them scales’ll sink the rest if you squeeze the air out good first.”
“Goddamn, son.” A moment later he added, “Gonna be some happy damn fish.”
“I don’t think there’s fish in there. Least I never seen nobody working it.”
“If I do throw it in, let me tell you, I’m retired. For good. I mean it this time. Look at my hands. I don’t need this shit.”
Jay watched the tremble of the hand Noel held out, then he held out his own hand next to it.
“Yours is worse than mine,” Noel said.
“I told you I don’t like having this in my truck.” Then he said, “Wouldn’t you know Cindy’s gone and got pregnant.”
Noel remained quiet a long moment while tracing a phantom pinballing of grief inside him. When it had finally subsided, he made a series of small coughs then managed to say, “Damn, and I used a rubber and everything.”
Jay stopped staring at the top of his hand and gave Noel a cautionary look and said, “I gotta marry her, Spoon.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“What, and get some bullshit shift down at Hercules Paper the rest of your life?” Noel shook his head. “Listen, here’s what we should do. The two of us, we’ll get my money outa the bank and head down to Mexico and live like kings. We’ll take this shit with us and sell it on the way.”
To Noel it seemed the perfect plan, but halfway through his itinerary of strip bars and legal switchblades, Jay interrupted him to say, “I gotta do the right thing by her. You know I do.”
“Bullshit.”
“Anyway, I got cousins can get me on the oil fields.”
“In fucking Oklahoma?” Noel’s
face changed expressions as quickly as an actor about to go on stage. Like someone practicing a repertoire of emotion. Finally he said, “Take her to New Orleans. I’ll lend you the money.”
“Yeah, and how’m I supposed to manage that? Tie her up, throw her in the back? It ain’t like we’re talking accident here.”
“She done it on purpose?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Anyway, it was my own stupid-ass fault for not using anything. She told me she had a tilted . . . something. Uterus? She said some doctor told her she couldn’t get pregnant even if she wanted to.”
“Uter-what?”
“A uterus. A tilted uterus. You ever heard of that?”
“What the fuck’s a uterus?”
“I don’t know. But hers ain’t tilted.”
Noel smoked the last slash mark then balled up the tinfoil and pushed it inside his empty beer can.
“You musta straightened that out for her,” he said.
“Yeah. Musta have.”
Jay was still staring at the river when Noel stepped outside. He bound up the contraband in the garbage bag and turned two hammer-throw circles before slinging it out into the middle of the river. He watched it sink with his arms crossed, then he stepped out of the mud and cuffed the instep of each boot once against the front tire and got back inside.
“Well,” he said. “That’s that.”
“I guess I’m dropping out.”
“I guess you are.”
“It’s only JC anyway. I mean, who ever heard of a junior college architect? Who ever heard of a junior college anything?”