Jonnie nodded.
“Good. Be ready at ten tomorrow.” Mr. Phelps opened the door and left.
“Ah cain’t b’liebe May do dis. Ah jus’ cain’t b’liebe it. Ah cain’t.” He opened the front door in time to see the man’s car turn left into the dogleg of Marcella Drive. “Ah cain’t b’liebe dis. Ah cain’t b’liebe it.” He sighed and went into his bedroom and started stuffing some shirts and pants into a duffel bag, all the while repeating in his head, “Ah cain’t b’liebe dis. Ah cain’t b’liebe it.” Suddenly, he stopped. “NO! Ah ain’t gwine a do it! Dey ain’t a puttin’ Jonnie in no ‘tooshun! No suhee bob. Dey ain’t a puttin’ Jonnie in no ‘tooshun!”
He left the bedroom, walked through the living room, down the front steps, and onto the road. He marched determinedly north on Marcella Drive and then turned west onto Pennyroyal Road, walking on the right side with his back to the traffic, continually repeating, “Dey ain’t a puttin’ Jonnie in no ‘tooshun! Dey ain’t a puttin’ Jonnie in no ‘tooshun!”
He walked down Pennyroyal hill, passed the convenience store, and crossed North Dixie Highway into the woods that bordered the Great Miami River. He walked south along the river on the fishermen’s dirt path until he came to a small glade with tall weeds growing. He walked into the middle of the glade and stopped. He faced the river and chanted:
Sistuh deeah, sistuh deeah,
Yo an’ me’s one, yo an’ me’s one.
Come heeah, come heeah,
‘Foe duh day is done, ‘foe duh day is done.
Sistuh deeah, sistuh deeah,
Ain’t got no one, ain’t got no one.
Heeah muh prayuh, heeah muh prayuh,
Let us be one, let us be one.
Tears streamed down his face as he waited.
A doe stepped cautiously from the woods to his left, her ears twitching and her nose sniffing the air. Jonnie did not move but peripherally saw her coming towards him with mincing steps. She approached him apprehensively until she was within three feet of him. She stretched out her neck and licked Jonnie’s left hand. Her tongue was soft, warm, and wet. He slowly raised his arm and placed it gently atop her neck. She moved closer and faced the river, the same as Jonnie. He inched his arm down her neck until his hand was lying on her warm back.
A thin, blue mist rose from the weeds and surrounded them, as though the earth had softly exhaled. It continued to rise until it became a dense, blue fog. The fog began to rotate, slowly at first and then faster and faster, completely obscuring Jonnie and the doe in its blue vortex. Suddenly the rotation stopped, and the blue fog quickly dissipated. A magnificent ten-pointed buck stood beside the doe. It shook its antlers to see how heavy they were and stomped its feet to experience being a quadruped for the first time. They pranced off side by side in the direction whence the doe had come, the buck delirious with ineffable joy in every fiber of its being.
He sliced a piece off the prime rib and placed it into his mouth. It was the juiciest, tastiest piece of meat he had ever eaten. “This is the best piece o’ meat I ever ate,” he said to his father, sitting at the head of the table.
“I’m glad you’re enjoyin’ it, son,” his father said.
He cut a piece off the baked potato, piled high with sour cream, chives, and bacon bits and put it into his mouth. “Wow! An’ this potato. It’s incredible! Where’djou find such great food?”
“We picked it up at Woody’s on the way home from Harald’s auction in Dayton,” his father replied, wiping his mouth with a shirt sleeve.
Lastly, he tried the peas. They were green spheres of deliciousness, unlike any he had ever tasted. “An’ these peas! Mmmmm!” He reached for his glass of chocolate milk and accidentally tipped it over.
Dwayne opened his eyes. And remembered with sorrow that he had followed the harsh regimen that God had laid down for him of eating nothing but graham crackers and milk for ten years. He could foresee no prospect of deliverance. “I can’t do this no more. I can’t. This ends tonight.”
He got out of bed quietly so as not to disturb Melda, snoring softly on the other side of the bed, and walked into the dark kitchen. He opened the cutlery drawer beside the refrigerator and took out a butcher knife with a ten-inch blade. He held it aloft in his right hand, as though he were carrying a flaming torch and leading legions of the redeemed to the shiny, golden portals of heaven. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” he thought. He brought the torch down to counter level, turned his wrist so that the torch pointed toward his stomach, put his left hand atop his right and plunged it with all his might into his stomach. The flame surged instantaneously from the torch into the depths of his stomach. “Aaaarrrggghhh!” he screamed, dropping to his knees and then falling on his back to the floor.
Melda flicked on the light and screamed. “OH MY GOD!!! OH MY GOD!!! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!”
Dwayne was writhing from side to side on the floor in a pool of blood, his hands still atop the butcher knife. “Aye! Aye! Aye! I’m goin’ home! I’m goin’ home! Aye! Aye! Aye!” he shouted at her with a wild look in his eyes.
Melda rushed into the living room, turned on the light, and called the operator.
“Number, please?”
“Call an ambulance please! My husband just stabbed himself!”
Dwayne was in the operating room for three hours. The knife was extracted and the wounds to his stomach and peritoneum sutured. During his recovery, it was discovered that he had suffered a stroke while he had been anesthetized. The only outward manifestation of the stroke was a rigidity in his right hand, not allowing him to open or close it and giving it the appearance of a claw.
After he was released from the hospital, Melda drove him back and forth three times a week for rehabilitation. Eventually, he regained most of his speech functions and was able to walk with only a slight hitch in his right leg, as though he were stepping over an invisible roller skate with every step. He began eating regularly again. The stroke had evidently erased all memory of his former regimen of graham crackers and milk.
One afternoon, he awakened hungry from a nap. He knew it was hours until supper time. He glanced over to the nightstand beside the bed and saw a box of tissues. He sat up on the edge of the bed and pulled a tissue from the box with his left hand and stuffed it into his mouth. He chewed it slowly and swallowed. It was delicious. He ate tissue after tissue until the box was empty. Then he held the cardboard box with his right claw and tore off strips of it with his left hand and ate the box. The world suddenly became one giant comestible. He made a vow to himself to keep this a secret. No one else must know that the world that surrounded him was an enormous buffet. Now he needed some dessert.
He hitch-walked outdoors and dragged a lawn chair from beneath the willow tree and placed it next to the rose bushes beside the driveway. He turned the chair so that its back was toward the house. Before he sat down, he broke off a stem with a bright red rose at its tip and sat down. He placed the stem in his claw and began picking off the petals one by one and putting them into his mouth. Delicious. When he had finished the blossom, he wiggled three-inch sections of the stem back and forth until he was able to break them off and ate those also, thorns and all.
He managed to keep his secret for two weeks before he was discovered, although Melda had begun to wonder why the bar of soap disappeared every time he took a shower. She walked into the bedroom one day and found him on his knees in front of the window, gnawing on the window sill. “What are you doin’?” she screamed at him.
He turned and looked at her with a sheepish smile on his face and a sliver of painted wood jutting from the left corner of his mouth. “Jus’ havin’ a snack.”
“Havin’ a snack,” she repeated, incredulous. “By eatin’ the window sill?”
“Uh huh,” he replied, stumbling to his feet. “I was hungry.”
She suddenly realized what had been happening to the bars of soap. “You been eatin’ the soap, too, ain’tchou?”
“Don’tchou know you can’t digest wood an’ soap, you dummy?”
“No.” It had never occurred to him. All he knew was that he had been enjoying eating tremendously. He didn’t know why.
“Well, I’m callin’ Dr. Vanderglas, an’ I’m gonna tell him what you’re doin’, eatin’ wood an’ soap. We’ll see what he has to say about that.” She walked out of the bedroom. Dwayne walked back to the window sill and dropped to his knees.
Dwayne was placed in a nursing home for his own safety. All edible objects were removed from his room. An attendant accompanied him to the bathroom at all times to ensure that he did not eat the toilet paper or its cardboard holder. Whenever he took a shower, he was required to pass the bar of soap to the attendant after lathering. For him, life became one unbroken series of night and day, monotonous and bleak.
Six months into this extreme privation, he suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke and became aphasic and quadriplegic. He was able to move his eyes and swallow, but nothing else. He died at sixty-two, ostensibly of heart failure, but, in reality, of a broken heart at not being able to consume the world.
At seventeen, Travis tired of high school and being told what to do by his parents and decided to join the Navy and escape. He and Scotty went to the recruiting office together and signed up. They were eager for adventure and a life on the high seas. They entered boot camp a month later at the Great Lakes Naval Station in Illinois. Travis immediately discovered that he had exchanged one prison for a harsher one. He hated being yelled at, the endless exercising, getting up at five a.m., making his bed, and eating bad food.
Six months after joining, he decided that he would escape and went AWOL. He hopped a southbound train and ended up in Tennessee, where he found an abandoned cabin in the mountains near Grimsley. He survived by working odd jobs and hunting and fishing. After surviving a winter, he hopped another train and got off in Tombstone, Arizona.
He was having a beer in the Hacienda Bar on the outskirts of town near his single-wide mobile home when he glanced into the mirror behind the bar and caught a woman looking at him, who quickly looked away. She had an aquiline nose, long brunette hair, and glasses, which she continually pushed up her nose with her right index finger. “Hmm. Not bad,” he thought. He slid off the barstool and sidled up to her, wedging himself between her and the dark Mexican in a cowboy hat beside her. “How ya doin’ tonight?” he asked her. “Can I buy ya a beer?”
She leaned away from the bar so she could turn her body, took a good look at him, smiled and said, “Good, and yes, you can.”
“Great! What’s your name?”
“Lynn. Who are you?”
“I’m Travis.”
They found a booth and spent the rest of the evening talking and drinking. Lynn told Travis that this was her first night in Tombstone. She had caught a bus here and was escaping from her husband, who had beaten her that morning for the first time in their relationship. “An’ I never wanta go back to that son of a bitch,” she concluded.
“I don’t blame ya,” Travis agreed. “I don’t like bein’ beat myself.”
“Who beat you?”
“My daddy used to, with a three-inch-wide belt. That’s why I joined the Navy.”
“Oh. How long ya been out?”
“Almost a year now. I went AWOL.”
“Are they still lookin’ for ya?”
Travis laughed. “I hope not. I never wanta go back.”
She smiled. “Seems like we have somethin’ in common.”
“Yeah. Listen. Do you have a place to stay? You could spend the night at my place. It’s a trailer about two miles from here. It ain’t nothin’ fancy. I live by myself.”
“How do you make a livin’?” Lynn inquired.
“Well, that’s the thing,” Travis stated, “I can’t really git a reg’lar job where I haf to give ‘em my social security number an’ be put on a payroll an’ all, where the Navy guys could find me. So I make some runs up to Chicago for a friend o’ mine. That’s how I make my livin’.”
“Wha’da ya run?”
“Grass.”
“Ah, so you’re a drug dealer.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Well, why don’tchou show me that trailer o’ yours.” She smiled.
Travis smiled back. “Great.” He put his arm around her waist as they left the bar.
Lynn had never smoked a joint before. They were sitting on the dark green shag carpet on the living room floor with their backs against the sofa. Travis told her, “Just inhale as deeply as ya can, hold your breath, an’ when ya can’t hold it in no more, ya let it out. Like this.” He put the joint to his lips and inhaled. “Now hold your breath,” he said, holding his breath. He held his breath for thirty seconds and then exhaled slowly.
“I can’t hold my breath that long,” Lynn said.
“Then jus’ hold it as long as ya can.” He passed the joint to her. “Try it.”
She took a long drag and immediately began coughing violently. “Oh, my God! It’s so hot!”
“Heh, heh. Don’t inhale so deep this time. It takes some gittin’ used to. Jus’ take a little drag an’ see how long you can hold your breath.”
She took a shorter drag and managed to suppress the desire to cough. She exhaled after ten seconds.
“That’s better. Jus’ keep doin’ that. I’m gonna put on some sounds an’ git us a glass o’ wine. I’ll be right back.” He put Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” on the record player and brought back two yellow plastic tumblers filled with chilled Strawberry Hill wine. He offered one tumbler to her and asked, “How many tokes ya take?”
“Tokes?”
“Drags on the joint.”
“Oh. Three. It’s gettin’ better.”
He sat on the carpet next to her. “See? I told ya. Take a sip o’ this wine to cool your throat.”
She took a sip of the wine and instantly noticed how sweet it was. “Wow! I never noticed how sweet this shit is. It’s good, though.”
“That’s not all you’re gonna notice,” Travis thought. “But it taste good, don’t it?” he asked her.
“Yeah, it does.” She drank another sip. She took a toke from the joint and held her breath for thirty seconds. She passed it to him.
“You’re gittin’ much better at that.” He took a final drag and placed the joint in an ashtray. He began caressing her hair from the top of her head down the nape of her neck.
“Mmmmm. That feels nice,” she said.
“Does it?”
She leaned forward away from the sofa, and Travis continued the caress to her shoulders, down her spine to the top of her buttocks, up the left side of her back to the top of her head, and then down her right shoulder and right side, caressing her in this fashion for what seemed an eternity. She was intensely alive as she had never been, aware only of his caress and how gentle and warm his hand felt against her back and head. She had no thoughts. Her attention was focused only on his touch. He leaned forward so that his head was next to hers. While he continued to caress her head and back, he removed her glasses and put them on the sofa, placed his right forefinger at the top of her forehead and slowly traced an imaginary line from her hairline, down her brow and nose to her lips, where he gently traced her mouth. He turned her head toward his and mimicked what his finger had done to her mouth with his tongue. She opened her mouth and he slowly inserted his tongue as far as he could and then gradually withdrew it. When he inserted his tongue again, she began to draw on it. She wanted it to go as deeply into her body as possible.
It was as though their groins were electrically connected to their mouths and the switch had been thrown. He immediately felt his member straining against his underwear; she felt a delicious wet ache between her legs. He withdrew his tongue, stood up, and held out his hands. She put her hands into his and he pulled her to her feet.
He led her into the bedroom where sh
e experienced cunnilingus for the first time in her life. When she climaxed, she rose to a height of ecstasy she never could have imagined her body capable of experiencing. Just when she thought she had reached a final plateau, a higher level of bliss would open, and she kept rising and rising with the tide until a final orgasm seemed to shatter against the ramparts of a heavenly place unimagined in her wildest dreams. Exhausted, she momentarily fell asleep.
When she awakened, he was inside her, her legs forming a “V” as he held them aloft by her ankles. He was moving slowly and deliberately. She tried to pull him deeper into her, just as she had drawn on his tongue when it had been in her mouth. He suddenly stopped moving and remained deep within her, his cock twitching and jerking. He pulled out slowly, and then slammed it in and out hard until he climaxed for what seemed an eternity, moaning all the while. She did not think it possible, but she had one final small orgasm herself. He lay down beside her and stayed inside until he dropped out. “So, wha’da ya think o’ grass?” he asked her, caressing the top of her head as he looked into her eyes.
“Oh, my God! It’s heavenly! Why is it illegal?”
“‘Cause the government dudden want us to feel this good.”
“Why not?”
“Ya got me.”
They stayed in bed for three days and nights, exploring each other’s body, getting up only to eat, shower, and brush their teeth. On the fourth morning, he announced, “I gotta go out today.”
“Why?” she whined. “I wantchou to stay here.” She wrapped her arm around him and rested her head on his chest. She had never met anyone with whom she was so sexually compatible.
“I don’t wanta leave, neither, but I gotta make a livin’. I gotta make a run to Chicago.”
Fiery Rivers Page 31