by Bruce Jones
“What else is on your mind?” Maser asked companionably, staring down at his golf shoes.
Richard glanced up in mild surprise. “What makes you think there’s more?”
Maser stuck out his lower lip in that thoughtful way he had. “I dunno. You look a little tense.”
“I feel great!”
“Just having weird dreams at night, is all…”
Richard turned to him. “You were pissed at me before, in the clubhouse? How come?”
“Not pissed. You were upsetting Scroogie.”
“Scroogie can’t take care of himself?”
“He’s…had some personal problems lately.”
Richard looked hurt. “Well, why the hell didn’t he tell me?”
“He hasn’t told anyone but me.”
“Physical stuff?”
Maser eyed the green speculatively. “I don’t think so. Probably mental. Stress. I’m having some tests run.”
Richard shook his head. “Christ, we’re all falling apart!”
“No, we’re just none of us thirteen anymore.”
They walked in silence a moment, then Maser said. “We’ve know each other a long time, Rich. Could practically read each other’s thoughts in the old days, remember? So come clean. What are these weird dreams of yours really about?”
Richard made an exasperated sound. “I told you. Just walking around, that’s all.”
“In the woods.”
“In the woods, yeah.”
“Just the four of us, the Deadenders.”
“That’s it.”
“Uh-huh. Wouldn’t be a fifth face somewhere in those dreams by any chance?”
“Fifth face?”
“Pretty one, with long dark hair, whose initials are Laurie Seasons?”
Richard stopped so quickly it sent a sliver of pain up his neck. “As a matter of fact, yes.” He took a step back from the Maze. “Jeez…you been practicing the black arts too?”
Maser’s smile was obligatory. “What happens in these dreams? And remember—“
“—‘you’re not a psychiatrist’,” Richard sing-songed—
--and Maser finished for him, “but I play one on TV.”
Richard grinned. “But you said yourself you studied some head shrinking in school, right?”
“Only to get the sheepskin. And quit stalling.”
Richard wasn’t suddenly so sure he really wanted to talk about this. It wasn’t all that weird a dream, he supposed. And after his big restored hearing reveal, the dream seemed a little anticlimactic.
Then he thought about the dream with Laurie…
“Look, Maze, it really isn’t a big deal—“
“You were fucking Laurie Seasons,” Maser said..
Same sudden stop, same small pain up Richard’s neck. “Damn, Maze! Stop that shit, huh? You really are beginning to scare me!”
Maser snorted, bending to pick up someone’s lost Titilus. “Doesn’t take a mind reader to know how you felt about Laurie Seasons.” He turned the little white ball over in his hand, reflecting its dimpled, plastic luster. “Want to know a secret? I’ve dreamed of her too. The difference is, you got there.”
Richard turned away to look back at the clubhouse behind them. “Not for long, though…”
“Hey,” Maser came wistfully behind him—heard perfectly aligned with both Richard’s ears—“just once would have been enough for me.”
If Maser expected Richard to turn back around to him he was disappointed. “Too bad it wasn’t enough for me, huh Maze?”
Maser let it sink in for a while, let them start walking again awhile around the little putting green, before he said, “Maybe that’s it. You never got over her. She was your first, wasn’t she?”
Richard glanced at his old friend. “Did I tell you that?”
Maser smiled. “Not in so many words. Oh, hell, Rich, everybody knew.”
Richard nodded at the manicured green ahead of them. “Yeah,” he said finally, “Laurie was the very first.”
Maser flipped his hands at the air. “So, there you are. Nobody forgets his first. I still dream about Janie Simpson. Occasionally.”
“Janie Sim—Maze, she was, not to be unkind, she was--”
“The town pump?” Maser shook his head, maybe a little stubbornly. “Not to me. Hey. The hearts knows what it wants.”
“Did you say ‘heart’ or ‘hard’?”
“Fuck you. Asshole writer.”
“Dirtbag sawbones.”
“Dick breath.”
“Shithead.”
Maser began to mouth another retort—chuckled instead, shaking his head. “Shit, I’m out of practice! Can’t think of anymore sophomoric epithets.” He looked up at Richard, disappointed to find him not grinning back. His old friend—his best friend ever--looked strained. Something definitely on Denning’s mind. And what, Maser told himself, are old friends for? “Hey!”
Richard turned absently.
“So, what’s the rest of it, Rich? Regale me.”
Rich Denning waved a limp hand at the air. “Let’s just forget this, Maze…”
“Come on now,” and Maser banged into him heavily with his shoulder like they used to, so Richard stumbled a little, “an Ender never holds back from an Ender. Give forth, old buddy, forsooth, before I pull a council on you.”
No one had ever ‘pulled council’ on a fellow Ender, but it was a vague, always-there threat they’d conceived if never actually executed. The probable equivalent of your old man admonishing you with behind-the-woodshed threats. It was something that had kept the old friends honest with each other.
Richard sighed, paused again in the short, thick, impossibly green grass. He gazed down between his shoes a moment at the thick turf. “How the hell do they get it to grow like this? My lawn just lies there, sprouting the occasional patch of crabgrass. Mocking me.”
“They do it the same way I got my ex-wife to give me head—lots of high tone seeding and constant attention. And you’re avoiding the subject.”
Richard looked back up at the sky, actually believing, for one mad moment, it was a seagull, not a grackle he saw darting across that fleece of clouds. “She, uh…I was naked and she came in and we were--”
“—fucking,” Maser finished for him.
Richard scowled. “I wasn’t going to use that word!“
Maser shrugged. “Go on…”
Richard lent him an exasperated look. “Jeez, Maser, that’s a big deal for me! I haven’t had a hard-on since you cut out my--”
Maser eyed him critically. “What else?”
“I—there was a scratching at the door, and this smell, this horrible smell, and Laurie started screaming—“
“Obviously you’re horny and now that you can’t get it up, having sex is associated with failure—i.e., the bad smell. Simple!”
Richard threw up his hands, rolling his eyes heavenward. “Jesus, Maze, could you say it a little louder—I don’t think they heard you on the fourth green! Thanks for making me feel all normal and healthy about it! Where’d you earn your MD again, correspondence course?”
But Maser was pondering it now, his analytical face on, his lower lip protruding reflectively, eyes intently regarding the copse of maples visible past the west wing of the clubhouse. “Hm! Interesting...”
“Thanks. You’re welcome.”
Maser nodded, ignoring him. “And it makes perfect sense, really…”
Richard turned hopefully. “It does?”
“Your reptile brain—your id--was remembering the lustful young, tits-out-to-here Laurie Season of your youth. But your superego knew the Laurie of today, like the rest of us, has aged. Not quite the wasp-waisted icon of your youth. More the middle-age spread of her mother. Hence the smell of decay at the door. It was age that was stalking both of you. Age and--”
Richard regarded his childhood pal. “—death, right? Knowing I’m going to die…”
“Richard, I’m sorry—“
“F
orget it!” Richard answered sharply, aware of the hurt look on Maser’s face.
Then to cover it up, Maser turned as if that concluded the matter, drew back his arm, leaned into it and sent the lost Titilus zinging toward the 3rd hole sand trap.
Richard nodded, impressed: a pretty good throw for an old fart.
But the Maze was frowning and rubbing hard at his pitcher’s elbow, wincing a hiss. “…Jesus, that was a stupid dumb-ass thing to do!”
Which got Richard laughing heartily.
Miffed and in pain, Maser searched about them until he located another golf ball, rose and tossed it with stiff challenge to his buddy. “Okay, hotshot, let’s see you do better.”
Richard tossed it back. “I was kidding, Maze! Get a grip.”
Maser tossed it right back again. “Chicken shit.”
Richard caught it. “Pussy.”
“Wimp ass.”
“Dweeb queen.”
“Dick breath.”
“You used that one already, doesn’t count.”
Richard sighed, juggled the ball, finally reared back slow, unwound and set the little white ball soaring high into the near cloudless blue. And higher. And higher still, before finally leveling, arcing and starting its long fall toward…
Richard blinked.
…could it be? Yes! Toward and over the distant copse of maples.
No one was more amazed than he.
Not so much the startling distance, or even the unbidden power behind it, but the outright ease of the throw, like he’d been in pre-season training.
Maser was staring at him as though he had leprosy, as opposed to merely cancer.
“You prick. You have been working out!”
Richard shook his head, still tracing the path of the throw.
Maze kept searching his friend’s face as though waiting…waiting for Rich to stop holding back, to wince and groan and register pain in his elbow and back.
But there was no pain.
Richard held his throwing arm before his own astonished eyes. It felt warm. And strong. And aching to throw something again, a baseball maybe. It felt like the arm of a thirty-year-old.
Richard glanced up at Bobby Maze and got another shock.
His old friend’s expression was almost, not quite maybe, but almost…fearful.
“Maze--?”
“Christ, Denning,” the doctor breathed, taking a step or two back, “…the flying fuck is up with you?”
FOUR
Richard was almost asleep the next time it came calling.
Except almost would imply he was still somewhat awake—that it was not entirely a dream. And it had to be a dream, of course. Had to.
Their bedtime routine—his and Allie’s—had become since discovery of his cancer and removal of his tumor what Richard liked to think might politely be described as routine. But which he was sure Allie regarded more as ritual. A bedtime ritual. And not the kind one looks forward to all day at work.
But the kind you finally, unavoidably give in to, because you’re helpless in the face of it to do otherwise. A dragging, dead-in-the-ass, Monday-morning kind of ritual. Times ten. Then squared.
They started by watching TV in the upstairs master bedroom, the one his parents had slept in throughout their marriage. Usually Charlie Rose or The Cartoon Channel depending, mostly, on Richard’s mood. Richard liked Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Allie found Meatwad cute. If Harvey Birdman followed, Richard stayed up to include it in the nightly agenda. If it was one of the series of obtuse, imported Japanese animated series, he switched off the TV instead and made his nightly rounds. These included checking the locks downstairs, shutting off the lights, and—if need be—adjusting the hall thermostat. Age old habits inherited from his parents that Richard found somehow unable to break, as if he’d be dissing some sacred code of ethics if he did. Even though the small town neighborhood was perfectly safe, old as it was, and the amount of electricity a sixty-watt bulb burned was negligible.
Next, he came back upstairs clad in pajama bottoms and T-shirt (St. Louis Cardinal’s or Samurai Jack, depending on which one was clean), made the rounds of all the second floor lights (rarely finding one on), and finally was back through the bedroom doorway, covers adjusted, the latest Dennis Lehane thriller in his lap. Which is where the worst part of his day always began. And not because of his choice of reading matter. It was Allie.
Allie always did one of two things every night after Richard flicked off the TV and started his safety, energy rounds. She either got out of bed to undress in the bathroom and slip into her silk nightie, brush her teeth, fool with hair and lotions, and finally come back to pull up the covers and switch off her nightstand lamp. Or she did none of the above and simply rolled over on her side, back to him, and drifted off in her clothes. The one time Richard had inquired about this she’d given him a level, doesn’t everyone? look and informed him this procedure had been de rigueur with her since high school days and she saw no need of changing now.
For thirteen years it had been, to Richard, a source of delightful and looked-forward-to nighttime amusement. Now it was one of dread. Now it had gone from a simple pleasure to a tortured nightly decision. On his part. Which was simply this: whether to watch her when she did undress, or casually avert his eyes.
Allie was many things, not the least an almost unfairly lovely woman from tippy-toes to rich blonde curls. But one thing she never was and never had been was remotely modest.
Some women, with a package like hers, might have been. There are womanly figures and there are womanly figures. Some of the better variety range between the well engineered but wholesome Miss America runway, others tend to find themselves on the covers of Biker Man and Hot Curves. The rare ones, like Allie’s, are a maddening mix of the two. They seem to demand a least a modicum of modesty. Or at least a general awareness of their effect on the opposite sex when revealed in all their unencumbered splendor. Allie never seemed to give her nudity much thought.
Richard didn’t subscribe to this school of reasoning.
Richard had, in the beginning perhaps, suspected his lovely wife’s night time ritual of undressing in front of him as at least an offered form of seduction, a little innocent and perfectly delightful visual foreplay before the lights went down (or sometimes stayed on) and the couple went down with them in ways sometimes not always in a manner that suggested sleep. But as the years crawled on, longer and longer and suddenly—overnight it seemed--became days that flew on, faster and faster, the sexual part of their marriage lowered in intensity and frequency from athletic inferno to comfortable simmer, with the occasional happily surprising flame-up. But always good. Often great. And never in the least a problem. Sometimes even a handy and inexpensive denouement to inequitable arguments or spats.
Until Mr. Cancer came knocking.
Announcing, without invitation, “Hello, there, happy couple! I’ll be moving in now for the rest of your lives and generally fucking with you and making life unbearable and oh by the way you won’t need this old prostate anymore so I’ll just be taking that with me. Have a nice day! And remember: safe sex!”
The first bout of chemo pretty much ended the sex, safe or otherwise, right off the bat. Though God knew Richard had tried, sick as he was (question: can the male species learn to come and vomit simultaneously?) and tried, and tried. But the sex, as they had known and coveted it, went pretty much into the toilet along with his lunch and most of his dinner during treatment, and by the time good old childhood pal Maser was shooting the chem juice directly into the little walnut-sized gland hugging Richard’s urinary tract, he could not, as he told a patiently nodding Maser one limp afternoon sitting bare-ass on a steel table in his hospital johnnie, “get a single drop of jiz from this floppy dead dolphin if Wynona Ryder was jerking me off with Cool Whip while Dolly Parton suffocated me between those thunderheads.” As for the high-hard-one…fah-get it.
Once the prostate tumor was removed, it was ‘Aloha’ on a steel guitar. The sex
was gone in just about every way but fond memory and the occasional giddily optimistic if never-wet-on-awakening dream.
The spirit, of course, was always willing. It was the plumbing that was clogged. Although Maser assured him over and over again that it should work just fine.
The need, on the other hand, was at times maddening.
Richard may no longer have had the hormones of a sixteen-year-old, but he’d certainly reacquired the single-mindedness. Which only exacerbated the act of watching. Watching his firm, curvaceous, maddeningly oblivious wife strip. Article by silky article. Out of her day clothes and into one of her seemingly endless repertoire of pastel-translucent jigglers. And into bed.
To lie there beside him.
Lie there all curled and warm and waiting beside her impotent, worthless husband.
Waiting. Waiting. Until Richard could detect the soft sound of his beautiful wife’s gentle snoring through the bedroom darkness.
And the emptiness inside him seemed to expand and fill the whole room and push back against him from the walls until he thought he’d go insane. Until, on some nights, he actually reached down there under the waistband of his pajamas just to assure himself he had one, that his deflated excuse for a male member was really there. Dead and shrunken and useless as an acorn, but still attached. We start out in diapers pissing ourselves, someone had once remarked, and we go out the same way. And what was that other great old chestnut some other great old person Richard couldn’t remember had said—something about Jacob advising God when He was creating Adam and Eve: Don’t put the excretios organs next to the sex organs, Lord—it will only lead to confusion…
Well, not in Richard’s case. No sir, he was about as confused as a sixteenth century choirboy. Gentlemen, I give you the castrated penis! Pee through it, stroke it, whack it on the floor boards till the cows come home; but never attempt shoving it up the perfumed gates of the female quim! Oh, no! That, gentlemen, is tantamount to shooting pool with a garden hose!
There were those operations, of course. Those operations.
See, what we do here, Mr. Denning, is we stick this rigid-looking dohicky up your dingus to create a kind of temporary rigidity, an erstwhile chubby as it were, a sort of bone for the old bone, what? Oh, yes, jolly good analogy!