Love in Vein
Page 38
“The world don’t give a shit,” the guy said, eyes on a restless carpet of silver and red and blue.
“You got that right.” They were getting on. He saw the two at the left wander closer, both thin, one of them gawkier now and younger than the other; they ignored him. The blond one, the older hood with pockmarks on his face, called to Brad’s new friend: “Hey, Michael, Joey here he needs a match. You got some?”
“Think so.” Calm voice, comforting. And he reached in and caught a matchbook, raising it between two fingers like a flag. Then there was a quick dash in the sand and the two on the left surged inward, their bodies violating his space as if it didn’t matter; and there flew new rush of sand behind him, voices coming in and hands assaulting him, his arms yanked back and bound, oily cloth whip-drawn across his mouth and tied so tight it felt as if calipers had been clamped to his face and were digging for bone.
Brad struggled. He was falling, backward into rough arms. They blanketed him, rolling him, his nose striking a smack of sand, then onward until he was on his back and they duct-taped the blanket tight about him and moved off like triumphant calf-ropers. The leader cowled over him, a new edge opening inside his eyes. “Life,” he said, “it just gets tougher, don’t it?”
The blond one said, “Fuckin’ Joey, no way he’s ready for this. He’s gonna pee his fuckin’ pants.”
A higher-pitched voice piped up: “Lick my shit if I ain’t.” The tone of it sank Brad’s heart. He’d thought, in those first moments of being subdued, that he’d escape with bruises, a bone broken, a shaved head maybe. Beyond that, his mind had refused to go.
Now he knew better.
“Prove it, you little fuck,” the blond one said. “I think this guy needs a smoke real bad.” A challenge, one Brad didn’t understand.
Then Joey flurried about like a scrawny rooster from one hood to the next. He came back to Brad with two long glowing cigarettes, dragged to enflame the tips, blew the smoke out the side of his mouth like it was a curse. And then the cigarettes were one in each hand and coming down closer and closer to his face, not stopping, the heat and the glow on on ON, eyelids closed against them, struggles to turn his head, avert it—but the toughs held him still and the searing tips bit, burned, kept burning deeper and deeper, blinded him without mercy over gagged screams.
Then Brad was lifted and hauled, yanked in jangle by many hands, and tossed into the back of a pickup truck, a slammed right hip and shoulder, the knock of metal at his right temple as the bare platform of the truck came up to stun him. The motor gunned into life. A crazy turn. It shot out into the surge of cars, zooming hard like it was late and time was running out.
Before long, they stopped.
Holding a glass of iced tea, mint perfect, he paused by the pool in the midmorning sun. Deep breath of still, moneyed air. Bliss. His left hand idly rubbed his lemon belly, the fine weave sensual beneath his fingers. Green and yellow were good colors, most of the off-reds way too faggy somehow for his tastes.
Milly, over the hill now at fifty—funny, how women, even the sleek ones like Milly, aged less gracefully than men—rumbled out the breakfast cart. Steam off scrambled eggs as she lifted the silver cover. “Juice this morning is orange or cranberry or grape,” she said.
“Mix’em.”
She gave him her once-cute grimace. “Come on.”
“Humor me. A third of a swig of each.”
Milly didn’t move.
“You only live once,” he said. “Gotta eat the whole enchilada while you can.”
“Your funeral.” As Milly poured the concoction, the kids occurred to him, a vague feeling of absence. “Where is Esme? And Brad? Haven’t seen ‘em for days.”
“The cars are gone, the one she was using, Brad’s as well.” She shrugged. “Tooling around?”
“Brad maybe, blowing off his frigging job. But Esme she wouldn’t do that, she’d tell me. Maybe we should put out some feelers, call around.”
“You want me to?”
He sipped his drink, cringing it down.
Just then, the French doors opened. Orchestrated by good old Darren again, he’d have to give the canny fucker a raise: Three killer bitches, bikini bottoms only, made their sexy way through the sun-glow, perfect boobs lightly bouncing. High heels, matching their triangles of cloth, clicked on concrete. Tall blonde, pert brunette, a short platinum dandelion puff atop the third.
Heartmelt.
They sang and strutted to Darren’s silly song. Gave him enough time to size them up, watch their big red lips O’ing around words, as soon they’d O around his cock.
“Very nice,” he said, and they smiled. “I just love to check hair color right about now.” He gestured toward their crotches, a magician’s flick. Darren having primed them, at once they tugged at the string ties, whipped the fluorescent triangles off and away.
He moved, glass still in hand, to them. No perfume. He’d made sure of that. He wanted to smell the life from that perfect flesh unmediated by manufactured scent. The left one was high school prom-queen stuff. “A two-tone,” he said, touching her dark private hair, gripping it like a squeezed Brillo pad. “I like two-tones.” The next one was shaved and squeaky smooth, swooning in a fetching way when he fingered her, parted the lips, admired the smooth moist pink. But the third girl—platinum above, platinum below, and a face that could melt diamonds—she gave such pleasure from her whole body that he sensed possibilities in her. She excited him sexually, yes; but there was far more than that, far more, that just might harden the mind cocks of movie audiences coast to coast.
He touched her silver-white softness of private hair and felt blessed. Her eyes, if she was acting, showed it not in the slightest. All he saw were subtle shadings of pleasure as he fondled her and moved finger-deep, finger-tight, inside her—shadings a camera would see and caress and pass along to needful men sitting in darkness.
“I do believe,” he said, holding eye contact with an angel in heat, not looking at the others, “that it’s time I gave you three lovelies something to suck on.”
And that time it was indeed.
Inevitably, eternally, under the sun.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Do Not Hasten to Bid Me Adieu
Geraldine
In the Greenhouse
Cafe Endless: Spring Rain
Empty Vessels
The Final Fête of Abba Adi
Cherry
White Chapel
Delicious Antique Whore
Triptych di Amore
Queen of the Night
The Marriage
In This Soul of a Woman
The Alchemy of the Throat
Love Me Forever
— And the Horses Hiss at Midnight
Elixir
The Gift of Neptune
From Hunger
A Slow Red Whisper of Sand
—And the Horses Hiss at Midnight