Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel

by James Hynes

  “Git yer britches off, cowboy,” she said, kicking off her sandals and popping the button on her jeans. “This is my favorite way to go.”

  And—oh, what bliss it was to be alive on that evening!—they fucked a couple of times on an old army blanket in the bed of her truck, under an endlessly black sky full of hot stars. Crickets screamed all around them in the heat as they rocked together on the blanket, and Paul thought he might die from happiness—at the sweaty clutch of her thighs around his waist, at the hot, slippery grip of her cunt, at the rhythmic slap slap slap of their flesh. Paul’s usual repertoire of transgressive endearments escaped him, and he gasped wordlessly, driving single-mindedly towards the goal while Callie clawed at his ass and shoulders and grunted encouragement. But what he liked best, what he planned to remember fondly behind his eyeballs and in the tips of his fingers for the rest of his days, was when he lay flat on his back and she straddled him, her brow knotted, the veins standing out in her neck, her mouth a perfect, bloodless 0 of concentration. The cold metal ridges of the truck bed cut into his shoulders and backside through the itchy blanket, but he didn’t care. The sight of her swaying above him, hot and pale in the starlight, her freckles like flecks of ash in the sheen of sweat on her shoulders and breasts, only sweetened the pain. They were ecstatically noisy; the truck creaked merrily under them like an old brass bed. At one point Callie leaned over the side and yelled, “Shut up!” at the screaming crickets. “Y’all are distracting me!” she hollered, grinding against Paul until he groaned like a man in agony.

  Afterwards, they lay slick with sweat side by side, watching the twinkling stars in the electric black above the truck, listening to each other pant in the heat. There wasn’t a breath of a breeze.

  “I don’t want to spoil the buzz,” Paul gasped, “but this isn’t about me, is it?”

  “It’s mostly about you,” Callie panted.

  “You used to come here with Mr. X, didn’t you?”

  She laced her fingers through his and squeezed. “Yeah, but you were better.”

  The squeeze shot straight down his spine and nearly made him hard again. “Thanks for the endorsement, but that’s not what I meant.”

  “It is what you meant,” laughed Callie. “It’s what y’all always mean.” She let go of his hand and raised herself on her elbow, looming over him against the stars. He could smell her in the heat; right now, he’d have happily licked her clean.

  “I needed to take this place back,” she said, “with a nice guy.”

  “Again, I don’t want to kill the buzz, but I’m not that nice.”

  “Nice enough.” She flopped back down on the blanket.

  “Seriously. I’m not.”

  “Well, at least you’re not the motherfucker who knocked me up and then ran off with a sorority girl.” She snorted. “Plus we ain’t even drunk.”

  “Really? A sorority girl?” Silently Paul thanked Mr. X for driving Callie to this pitch of anger. For once it was a pleasure to reap the rewards of some other guy’s boorishness. “Did he bring her out here?”

  “Change the subject,” said Callie.

  “Come on, did he? Is that why you brought me?”

  “Change the subject!” shouted Callie.

  “Um . . .” Paul couldn’t think of a thing, but suddenly Callie rolled against him, scratching lightly at his chest with her bitten nails.

  “So why ain’t you teaching someplace?” She winced and said, “Aren’t.”

  “Callie, it’s okay,” he laughed. “It’s not like there’s going to be a quiz later.”

  Callie sighed. “So how come?”

  Paul was glad that the dark hid his irritation. “Same reason you aren’t waiting tables. I wanted something with a little more self-respect.”

  She slapped his chest lightly. “Well, if you don’t want to talk about it, just say so.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about. Some things just don’t work out.”

  “Don’t I know it.” She rolled onto her back again.

  They were quiet for a moment, listening to the crickets, watching the sky, smelling their own juices rising off them in the dark.

  “Does it bother you I got an abortion?” She laid the back of her hand on his chest.

  Oh, Christ, thought Paul. “I thought we were done with twenty questions.”

  “Does it?”

  “I honestly haven’t given it a moment’s thought.”

  Callie slowly rolled her knuckles up and down his chest. Paul thought it was the finest sensation of his life. His cock began to stir happily.

  “You tell some boys something like that, they think you’re easy,” she said. “You tell some others, they think you’re a heartless bitch.” She swiveled her head against the blanket to look at him. “Some boys, they don’t mind so much that you did it, they just don’t want to hear about it.”

  “Honestly, Callie,” Paul said, “it doesn’t bother me.”

  “What’s the worst thing you ever done?” She scrunched her eyes. “I mean, did.”

  Paul groaned, and Callie rolled over onto her stomach and pressed her palm against his shoulder. “I mean it. What’s the worst thing you ever did? I told you mine.”

  Paul shifted under Callie’s weight and wished she’d just throw her leg over and ride him again. “Change the subject,” he said.

  “It’s my truck.” She slapped his shoulder. “Only I can change the subject.”

  What can I say? thought Paul. That I cheated on my wife? That I cheated on the woman I cheated on my wife with, and then cheated on that woman, too? No doubt Callie would believe him. His sexual history would only reinforce her embittered waitress view of the world.

  “I was divorced.” Paul could scarcely believe he’d said it.

  “Divorced!” cried Callie gleefully. Dee-vorced, she said it, like a country singer. “From the meteorologist?”

  “Before her.” The stars above trembled in the humidity.

  “How come?”

  Paul shrugged. “I said tomato, she said tomahto.”

  “Come on.” Callie was wheedling him now, squeezing his love handles. “You’re a college professor, for cri yi. What’d you do, sleep with a student?”

  I should have kept my mouth shut, Paul thought.

  “How bad can it be?” Now Callie was practically on top of him. She tugged his chin between her thumb and forefinger and forced him to look at her. “I murdered a fetus,” she said, her face ghostly in the starlight, her eyes unfathomable. “Whatever you did can’t be as bad as that.”

  “Depends,” Paul said, without meaning to. “How do you feel about cats?”

  “Cats?” She let go of his chin, but she didn’t pull away. Paul slid out from under her and doubled over, reaching for his trousers.

  “We ought to head back,” he said. “We both have to work tomorrow.”

  She laid a hand on his shoulder, but more tentatively than before. “I’m just funnin’ with you, Paul. I don’t mean nothin’ by it.”

  “Anything.” Paul stood in the rocking truck bed with his back to her and yanked his trousers up. “You don’t mean anything by it.”

  “Yes, sir.” Callie jerked her jeans into the air, slapping them against the side of the truck. “Will that be on the exam, Professor?”

  They bounced back down the two track to the gate without speaking, the truck glugging angrily. At the road, before the truck even stopped, Paul heaved open his door and jumped out to get the gate, half afraid as the truck rumbled over the cattle grate that Callie might just keep going and leave him there. But she waited as he shut the gate, her elbow hanging out the window, her eyes dark hollows in the dashboard light. Paul climbed into the cab and slammed the door, and she jammed the truck into gear. They roller-coastered back up the two-lane road towards the main highway. With each free-fall dive down a hill, Paul was lifted slightly off the seat, and he felt a regretful little tingle in his balls. The truck banged around a rocky curve and then rattled over a low wate
r crossing. FLASH FLOOD AREA, read a sign over the culvert, DO NOT DRIVE INTO RUNNING WATER. A-fucking-men, thought Paul, sneaking a glance at Callie’s angry cheekbone in the dashboard light. It seemed to Paul that she was taking the road faster than she had coming the other way. She’s in a hurry to get back to Lamar, he thought. She’s in a hurry to be rid of me.

  At the junction with the highway, she skidded to a gravel-slinging stop. Dust churned through the headlights. Then she gunned the truck out onto the road and started to coax it gear by gear up to the speed limit.

  “I killed a cat.” Paul lifted his voice over the rising whine of the truck. “I drowned it in a bathtub.” He looked at her and found her gazing back at him along the seat. “I guess that’s the worst thing I ever did.”

  She didn’t say anything for a long time, working the stick shift up through second and third. Paul’s stomach tightened the longer the silence went on, and he began to regret having said anything. He was certain this was his last evening with Callie, and the sad thing was, he actually sort of liked her. As the hill ahead was silhouetted in the orangey glow of Lamar, she said, “Why’d you do that?”

  “Kill the cat?”

  “Yeah.”

  Paul swallowed. Did he really want to tell her this? “It’s a long story,” he said.

  “It’s a long way back to town,” she said. “Radio don’t work neither.”

  So all the way back, rolling through the dark over and under the hills, past the spreading subdivisions and the late-night supermarkets with their empty parking lots in the harsh fluorescent glare, and finally along a gaudy strip past the drooping pennants of car dealerships and the red glare of fast-food joints and the forlorn glow of check-cashing emporia, Paul told Callie the story of Charlotte. To his own astonishment, he told her the truth: about his failing academic career, about his bloodless marriage with Elizabeth, about his giddy affair with Kymberly, about his war with the cat to keep the affair secret. Callie said nothing all the way into Lamar, but now and then she looked at him, as the light from a streetlamp or the glare of a neon sign glided over her through the windshield. Paul, meanwhile, gazed out the windshield without really seeing anything. He felt numb by the end, and when he reached the part about drowning Charlotte, he didn’t relate all the awful details: how he’d torn his apartment apart in a rage looking for her; how he’d grasped her, yowling and flailing, by the scruff of her neck; how he’d put her in her cat carrier in the bathtub and turned on both taps. His right forearm began to sting where, in the right light, he could still see the faint traces of the scratches Charlotte had given him that night.

  All he could do now was rub his arm and say, “So I drowned her in the bathtub.” Bless me, Callie, for I have sinned.

  “You mean, like kittens in a sack?”

  Paul stomach twisted. “Yeah, like that.”

  “Whew,” was all Callie said.

  Paul fell silent and gazed into his lap. He decided there was no point in telling Callie about the aftermath—she already knew that he’d lost his academic career, and she wouldn’t believe that he was still haunted by the ghost of a cat. He scarcely believed it himself.

  When he looked up again, the truck had stopped; through the windshield he saw his own apartment door in the glare of the headlights. Callie’s truck was chugging in place, and Callie was watching him down the length of the seat.

  “Why’d you want to know that?” Paul met her gaze. “What the worst thing I ever did was?”

  Callie shifted her gaze out the windshield, as if she were looking at a distant horizon instead of the brick wall of the apartment five feet beyond the hood of the truck. She drew a breath to speak, caught herself, then drew another breath.

  “ ’Cause with every guy I ever been with, sooner or later I find out what the worst thing they ever done is. And usually it’s what they done to me.” She turned to him. “I figured this time I’d get it out of the way first thing. Then maybe we could work our way up from there.”

  “Well, now you know.” Paul yanked on the door latch, but Callie leaned down the seat and caught his arm.

  “I’m glad you told me,” she said. “Now we know the worst about each other.”

  Not quite, Paul thought. He still hadn’t told her about Charlotte’s ghost.

  “Now I know two things about you,” Callie said. “One is, I got to watch you like a hawk around other women, but what else is new?”

  “What’s the other thing?”

  “That there’s at least one way I don’t have to worry about you hurtin’ me.”

  “What’s that?” His arm was still burning.

  “I don’t have a cat,” Callie said, and she kissed him.

  Paul’s head was spinning as he fumbled for his keys at the door of his apartment. Behind him Callie’s truck banged over the loose grate at the center of the parking lot, then grumbled out onto the road. As he fitted his key into the lock and opened the door, he heard her roaring away, heard the stuttering whine of each gearshift—first, second, third—and he imagined the marvelous flexion of her gear-shifting arm. Then he sort of floated into his apartment, amazed to think that at the end of this long, impossible, humiliating day, he had had ecstatic, sweaty sex under the stars in the bed of a pickup truck with a passionate girl; that he’d told her the worst thing he’d ever done (more or less); and that, miraculously, the girl was still speaking to him afterwards. He felt more relief than joy, it was true, but as he felt for the light switch inside the door, he was certain that nothing could make this day any stranger.

  Certain, that was, until he turned on the light. Someone had been in his apartment and tidied it up. Paul was not the most fastidious person in the world, and it was instantly obvious that the small-scale chaos of his little flat had been put in some sort of order. The chair from his dining table, which he had set in the middle of the floor for Callie, had been returned to the table. The table itself was clean and uncluttered, the thrift shop salt-and-pepper shakers set to the side, the little stack of paper napkins wedged between them. His secondhand dishes—the battered pot he’d boiled the hot dogs in, and his purple plastic plate—had been washed and set to dry in his dish drainer. Paul saw all this instantly, and as he closed the door behind him and edged warily into the apartment, he saw that the floor of his kitchenette had been swept, that his little counter was clean of crumbs and stains, and that the enameled top of his dinky little three-burner stove had been scrubbed spotless.

  “Who’s here?” Paul whispered, afraid to move any deeper into his own room. “Mrs. Prettyman, are you in here?”

  But the apartment was too small for anyone to hide in. He peered through his bathroom door and saw that the tub gleamed a little brighter, and his towel hung a little straighter.

  “Charlotte?” he said, his voice beginning to tremble. “Did you do this?”

  But Charlotte was nowhere to be seen, having vanished into the ether, or wherever ghost cats went. He turned slowly away from the kitchenette, as if afraid to turn his back on his newly gleaming stove and countertop, and saw that his bed was still pulled out but that someone had tucked the sheets and blanket in all around, military style, tight enough to bounce a quarter. The pillow had been smoothed flat and centered at the head of the bed.

  And then, as Paul’s pulse pounded in his ears, he saw, neatly centered on the bed, resting lightly on the taut drumhead of his blanket, the little blue Tiffany’s box that he had discarded that afternoon at work, the Outstanding Stand-in award that he had jammed in among the crushed and sticky cans in the recycling box. It sat on the middle of his bed, almost glowing, as if at the center of a little spotlight.

  “Oh boy,” Paul said, to no one in particular.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  AFTER A FITFUL NIGHT, miraculously uninterrupted by Charlotte, Paul gave up trying to sleep and got out of bed at 6:30. As a result of last night’s energetic lovemaking, he ached in muscles he hadn’t known he had, so he showered longer than usual, letting the hot water soak
into his thighs and his shoulders. As he shaved he was pleased to find a bright purple hickey just above his left nipple, and he took a moment in the glare of the overhead light to twist this way and that in the mirror, looking for another. But his anxiety crept up on him again as he dressed, so, as he prepared his breakfast, he made some executive decisions about the carnival ride of the previous day. His graduate training in literary theory had taught him that there was no one, indisputable interpretation of any situation. There is no truth; all reality—Paul reminded himself as he poked at his scrambled eggs with his plastic spatula—is linguistic. So there was no reason to accept the hegemonic construction of yesterday’s events.

  In other words, Paul decided, I do not work for Olivia Haddock, and this morning I’m going to make that fact clear to that spineless little milquetoast Rick. That’s number one. Next, Paul decided, the recycling box is a recycling box, not the portal to some bottomless, infernal pit. I was upset, he thought, my mind was playing tricks on me. Just as it was—decision number three—when I thought I saw the Colonel give a thumbs-up to Boy G and the others on the bridge. For obvious reasons—thank you, Charlotte—I am prone to seeing the bizarre around every corner.

  Paul sloshed the eggs, still runny, onto his purple plate, and retrieved the salsa from the dank recesses of his fridge. Number four: no more lunches with the Colonel and his stooges. I don’t know what they want from me, and I certainly don’t want anything from them. He doused the eggs liberally with salsa, then hesitated with a forkful halfway to his lips. What number am I up to? he wondered, then decided, I tidied up my own apartment last night, before Callie showed up. I just don’t remember doing it. And finally, I stuck the Tiffany’s box in my pocket without thinking about it, brought it home myself, and left it on the bed. ‘Nuff said. The end.

  After breakfast, Paul put the Tiffany’s box into his lunch bag with his cheese sandwich and his little baggie of pickles. As he carried it out to his car in the early morning heat, he was intercepted by Mrs. Prettyman, who came teetering down the parking lot in her high heels as if walking on tiptoe. “Oh, Mr. Trilby!” she sang.