by K. W. Jeter
The bright sun glittered off the face's wire-rimmed spectacles. Mike felt the doctor's gaze upon him, the eyes penetrating to the back of his own skull, inventorying everything inside him.
He hadn't seen it before, but now he did: a black, doglike creature, with a grinning muzzle and sharp-pointed teeth. Bigger than a dog, leaner and harder. It sat on its haunches beside the doctor, its red gaze tracking on the same line.
"No, you're wrong." The girl pulled him up beside her on the steps. "There's never any time to waste. You should've learned that by now."
The angle of the verandah's roof blocked any view of the white-coated figure on the hill. He turned toward the girl. "But I'm dreaming. I know I am."
She shook her head, the smile holding a secret. She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the brow. "No," she whispered, bringing her cheek down beside his. "You've finally woken up."
He let her lead him across the lobby. He'd almost expected to see himself curled up in the blankets on the floor, but there were only the wooden planks, waxed and buffed to a glassy sheen, and the massive shapes of rugs with Indian designs, jagged lightning bolts and slit-eyed kachina faces. The clerk behind the marble-topped counter looked over his shoulder at Mike and the girl, then turned discreetly back to sorting the guests' mail.
"In here," she said. Her smile parted to show her white, perfect teeth. "They won't find us here."
She had taken him upstairs, to the corridor of numbered doors. To the door without a number that said Examining Room instead. She laid her fingers on the pebbled glass, and the door swung open as though weightless.
The room's smell, of disinfectant and sterile gauze, mingled with the girl's flower scent. Light sparked oft' the chrome and glass surfaces, the tray of sharp instruments, and the bottles in the cupboards, arrayed in the constellations of the night sky beneath. In that other world.
She pulled him down on top of her, on the examining table. "It's all right…" Her fingers twined in the damp hair at the back of his neck, drawing him closer.
"Here…" She let go of him for a moment, her fingers moving at her throat. The lace parted, and her breasts, white as the lace, rose as she arched her back and drew in her breath through the points of her teeth.
He cupped her in his hand, the familiar weight, the birdlike trembling, warming the skin of his palm.
"They won't find us…" She murmured the words, eyes closed.
"Who?" He had his mouth close to her ear, breathing her in. "Who won't?" It seemed urgent that he knew.
"My mother… and my father…" She turned her head, and he felt the motion of her lips against the curve of his jaw. The tip of her tongue against the flesh. "They brought me here… oh, I was so ill, I was so weak… they told me he'd cure me…"
He opened his mouth, tasting her. "He cured you…" He knew who she meant. The doctor that he'd seen standing up on the crest of the hill. His other hand had found its way under the folds of the long skirt; his fingertips grazed satin over an angle of bone and skin.
"Yes… yes… he cured me…" She put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him a few inches away. With a child's solemnity, she gazed through her lashes at him. She took her hands away, and touched herself, in the white space between her breasts.
A faint blue vein lay under the translucent skin. He balanced himself on his palms and elbows and watched her fingertips, the pearl ridges of her nails, pressing an indentation there. She gasped, a quick swallowing of breath, as the flesh yielded moisture.
A red line appeared. Squeezing her eyes shut tighter, she let her fingertips sink a fraction of an inch under the skin.
He watched. His own breath hammered inside his throat, dizzying him.
Her fingers went farther into herself, then curled. The red opening spread apart.
"Look… Her whisper. "You see…"
The opening grew, the points of the red line running up to her throat, down toward her navel.
"He cured me…"
Her ribcage spread open like wings. The white dress had fallen away into a bed of lace spilling from the edges of the examining table. Her nakedness as white as that, tinged with the blood running underneath the skin. And the secret place, the red center, trembling, revealed to him-
She lay open beneath him. The tracery of vein and sinew, the darker shapes clustered near the segmented wand of her spine, like fruit moistened by a summer rain that left them warm and soft. Her breath, pulled in through the teeth biting her lower lip, swelled the forms that had been hidden beneath her breasts.
And at the center… the motion of her heart, the contraction and pulse…
He had seen all this before; that was how he'd learned. But never in beauty like this.
Dreaming… He could barely hear the voice inside his head, his own voice. It had fallen away, back to that other world.
"Touch me… here…" Her hand took his wrist and guided him.
Inside her, the warmth seized him, the moistness of blood trembling inside flesh, soft yet urgent, yielding. A small, secret world.
"Yes…" A word not spoken, but hissed through the teeth breaking a drop of blood upon her lip.
His hand closed upon it, and the trembling was in his hand. He was at her center, the pulse of her heart beating into his fist and up his arm into his own heart. The same pulse now, his and the woman's; the red blinding tide surging up into his head; the skull too weak to contain it any longer, breaking-
"… yes…"
A cry, not of pain. Her face transfigured.
A drop of blood, his, fell upon the white silk of her cheek at the arch of the bone beneath. And in the drop's curved mirror, he saw his own face. His eyes glistened as though weeping.
The naked form beneath him; he fell, embracing…
***
He woke up in the dark, the lobby's empty space around him, the wood of the floor beneath the thin blankets.
Dreaming. But not like dreams-he could remember everything, the girl's face, her body opening its red secrets to receive him; the heart beating in his fist.
And before-the figure in doctor's white up on the hill's crest, the animal with its grin of sharp teeth beside him.
He let himself drift in memory-the girl, her smile, the bite of her teeth upon her own lip, the blood there and upon her cheek…
His own body remembered as well. He reached down, under the blankets, and touched the swell of his erection. His blood was only now starting to seep back from his groin, a tide easing into the sea of his flesh.
Outside, the watching forms paced and turned their red gaze toward him. He heard them there, as a sleep without dreams pulled him under.
TEN
The old man had a treasure trove about twenty miles past where the county highway split off from the Interstate-a constantly renewing source of wealth. The Arco station at the junction was the only gas for a long stretch in either direction. Most of the people who stopped there also hit the Coke machines at the side of the garage. In the summer's heat, it didn't take them long to drain the cans and toss them out their cars' windows. So there was money all up and down the highway, right in that stretch; money glinting in the dry weeds.
There was a trick to scooping up the cans without bending over so far that he'd screw up his back again. He could even stay on his bike-a girl's Schwinn, powder blue underneath the crusting badges of rust; it suited him because he didn't have to lift his stiff leg over the frame to get on. He had his clever stick, a sawed-off broom handle with a big ball of masking tape wadded at the end, held on with a couple of thumbtacks hammered into the wood. The tape was just sticky enough to snag a pop can off the ground. The trick was to make a good clean shot-he had to squint one eye to do it-right through the roadside weeds and hit the can dead on, without getting dirt and twigs and shit on the masking tape; if it got too dirty, he'd have to wind up a new ball and put it on the stick-end. The other trick was to rap the snagged can sharply in the open mouth of one of the black plastic garbage sacks hooked behind hi
m on the bicycle so the can fell off and joined the others clanking around in there. The old man alternated-left sack, right sack-so the bicycle didn't get lopsided. He'd patched the fraying sacks so often with electrician's tape that they'd become more like nets, the bright valuable cans peeking through the holes.
He liked to get an early start, get a good bit of business done before the sun made him dizzy. It was not much past dawn-the air still had a touch of the night's cold in it-and he'd already snared four or five Coke Classics, a couple of Dr. Peppers (didn't see those too often, they weren't in the vending machines at the gas station; must've been tourists passing through), a Sunkist Orange and a Seven-Up. People were fools-they just threw their money away.
He worked the county road, heading up to the junction and the big blue Arco sign that people could see for miles. The pickings would be even better going down the other leg; lots more traffic on the Interstate. The black sacks would be bulging all the way out to the sides of the bike, like the pollen sacs of some kind of mechanical bee, by the time he was done. He already had the feeling in his gut that it'd be a good haul today.
He heard the car before he saw it. Somebody downshifted, slowing to make the swing off the Interstate. But not enough; the old man looked up and saw a cloud of dust as the car, something low-slung and red, fishtailed off the road and onto the loose gravel of the shoulder.
The car was only a hundred yards away from him before the driver managed to get it back up on the road. It pulled a storm of dust and pinging rocks along with it, which enveloped the old man as it shot past him. A convertible; he caught, through the eye-stinging swirl, a glimpse of a blonde woman with black sunglasses. She didn't even glance over at him, but flattened the accelerator and rocketed on down the highway. The dust rolled behind her, slowly settling to the earth.
"Well, fuck me." The old man had gotten twigs from the dry weeds kicked up by the car's passage, and other shit, in his beard. He combed them out with his leathery fingers. "Fuck me for a nanny goat."
Some people were in a hurry, all right. The car was already just a red dot near the highway's vanishing point. He turned back to the way he'd been going, pedaling slowly and scanning the ground. Some people were in a hurry, but he wasn't. There was a lot of ground to cover out here; it'd take you your whole lifetime, no matter how fast or slow you went.
He didn't mind. He had all the time he needed. Day like today, he could just go on forever.
***
The party had dwindled to the final dregs. The dregs being Stevie Garza and three of his total load-o buddies. Doot didn't even know who one of them was-he couldn't recall ever seeing him at the high school. Maybe he was some kind of half-brother or cousin of Garza's; the guy had the same scraggly beard, which looked more like he needed to give his face a good hard scrub, and the same faded denim and tour souvenir T-shirt outfit that was the uniform for the school's heavy-metal-and-downers crowd. Plus the same slack jaw, mouth hanging slightly open, and pink stewed eyes. But then they all had that.
The four of them were beached like flabby whales all over the living room, two of them slumped on the couch as though their spines had been surgically removed, Garza sprawled in the brown Naugahyde recliner that was the favorite chair of Doot's dad. The fourth stoner was flat on the floor, either playing his air guitar or trying to scratch the white pooched-out stomach that his rucked-up T-shirt had exposed-Doot couldn't tell which.
The music was coming off the TV, some local station that filled in its gaps with repeats of a syndicated rock video program. Most of the kids in town had memorized the dozen different half hours, and could recite the intros along with the freeze-dried fossil in the sweater. They wouldn't get cable out in this butt-end of the universe until the year two-thousand-and-fucking-something-probably sometime after New Guinea got it-so a 24-hour job-tie like MTV was out of the question. Even if somebody's folks put in a satellite dish, all it seemed to do was pull in more goddamned football than any reasonable person could stand, and weird Latino variety shows that were like watching Lawrence Welk on bad acid.
Doot moved through the living room, stepping over the sprawled legs of the pair on the couch, gathering up empty cans and cigarette butts from the floor. This wasn't even the dregs of the party, but the aftermath, like walking around and picking up shell casings on a battlefield after the warring armies had crawled away. It even smelled like a battlefield, or what Doot imagined one would smell like: a burned odor-that was all the butts and the cigarette smoke that had settled into the curtains-and a smell of puke drifting in through the screen door, where one of the beer ODs had stumbled out and upchucked in the bushes. Doot figured he could get out the garden hose later on and try to wash away the accident scene, soak it into the ground-maybe it'd make good fertilizer. Right now, his head was aching, his mouth tasting as though all the cigarettes had been stubbed out on his tongue.
"These people suck," announced Garza, his half-lidded gaze on the TV. A belch rumbled out of him. "The big hairy one," he finished.
"This ain't real metal." One of the couch pair raised his head, his eyes looking like those of a snake that had been prodded with a stick. Doot remembered seeing him slouching around the high school in a hand-lettered T-shirt that said Death to False Metal. "Van Halen's like pussy metal. Fuckin' wimps."
The one on the floor gazed up at the ceiling. "They used to be good…"
"Yeah, but they're pussies now."
Doot hauled the trash sack toward the kitchen. He'd turned down the sound on the TV an hour ago, and none of the hangers-on had objected. They all looked a little fragile and shattered.
The dickhead in the sweater came on again-he had a weird way of moving his hands, like he was trying to hit a fly with the tip of his forefinger-then some bright-faced teenage girl smiling and bouncing around and doing little kick steps. Garza and the guys on the couch stirred, hopefully scanning for perky tit action.
At least there was plenty of time to get the place cleaned up before his dad finished his hauling run and came home. Doot shoved the trash sack into a corner of the kitchen and studied the debris layers on the counters. He could shovel away most of this crap and air the place out. Even replacing the broken-out window-thank God the party hadn't gotten rowdy enough to have sparked any other real damage-that could be taken care of easily enough. He could take the motorbike into town and score a glass pane, and putty it in. Replacing the cases of beer would be a problem, though.
Maybe-he felt his brain turning over sluggishly, a battery cranked down flat-maybe I should leave the busted window the way it is. Tell him that burglars ripped off the beer. He wondered if his dad would go for that.
The other problem, the one he had to deal with right now, was getting Garza and the other basket cases out the door. They were all semiconscious at this point; at least they opened their eyes partway and made noises out of their mouths that weren't just snoring. He'd have to work fast, though, if he was going to boot them out before they
lapsed into sleep. The last thing he needed was a crew of coma victims draped all over the furniture, mumbling and farting away. When they got that way, you couldn't even roll them out onto the lawn and leave them. The trick was to get them stumbling off toward some other source of amusement or food or more beer. Let them pass out in Big Lou's parking lot-Doot figured it wouldn't be his problem then.
He opened the back door and bumped the trash sack down the steps, then lifted its clanking weight into the thirty-gallon can. For a moment, he sat on the can's steel lid, his legs angled out, arms folded across his chest, breathing in the still-cool morning air that didn't smell like stale cigarette smoke and party sweat.
The fog was clearing out of his head, but he still felt stupid and disgusted. Disgusted at himself, mainly. Should've kicked all their asses out last night. When he'd come home and found the party already rolling-it wouldn't have been too hard, Garza and the other hardcore hounds already having been too fucked up to put up much of a fight.
Th
at hadn't been what he'd been afraid of-of having to swap a few punches with some staggering load-when he'd told himself there were too many to take care of, that he'd have to let the party ride. It was the weight of all the rest of them, squashing down on him, like they were sitting on his head or something, telling him what had already been decided: It's party time. They'd made the decision, and didn't give a fuck about what he thought.
Shit, it was like dealing with that spooky guy he'd left out at the old clinic building. That guy telling him what to do, and then his just going ahead and doing it, like he was some kind of zombie asshole on remote control-Yes, master! Whizz-click robot noises. Your wish is my command! That was all just more of what he'd been doing all his life. Leaning his weight against the trash can, he felt himself getting sick at his stomach, but not from anything he'd drunk last night.
It was something his buddy Anne had always gotten on his case about. You didn't want people to think you were a nerdy guy, a drag, unfun, so you let them walk all over you. If it wasn't that, it was the fucking teachers at the school. Your daddy drives a truck, so you let them tell you that you're stupid. He'd seen that in Miss Dick-breath's eyes all the way back in first grade; she hadn't even had to tell him that's what he was. Then they just went on telling you; you didn't get a chance to believe it or not believe it.
He looked out past the side of the house, across the scrubby lawn and the cracker-box houses, pink stucco or blue aluminum siding, and the scrubby lawns on the other side of the street. Nobody had come over while the party had been blasting away and told the kids to hold it down or threatened to call the police. In this part of town-the stupid part-everybody made noise: if not parties cranking through the hours to dawn, then all-out fights where the neighbors thought it was pretty mild if some guy's old lady didn't unload one of the deer rifles he kept under the bed, pow pow pow, right through their stucco and yours. So if you didn't call the cops about their noise, they wouldn't call 'em about yours-an arrangement that suited the cops fine, too.