As he dwindled within her, sensations fading slowly as a fire, he felt capable of embracing the world. All at once the path of his life, leading through it to this moment, grew clear to him. He viewed it with amused tolerance, even the music in his dream, which he remembered now. It wasn’t that good, he saw, but it might be worth transcribing. Just now this sense of all-embracing peace was enough.
Or almost enough, for the girl was shivering. He could see the outline of her face now, in the moonlight that had begun to seep through the narrow windows. He lay beside her, his penis still in her, and stroked her face. “It was the first time for Renewal of Life too, wasn’t it? I hope it achieves what it was meant to. I just want to tell you that I’ve never experienced anything like it, ever. Thank you, Margery.”
He must be speaking more loudly then he intended, for his voice was echoing. He thought that was why she jerked away from him, lifted herself clear and fled along the glimmering aisle—and then he realized what he’d done to make her flee. He’d used her name, he’d betrayed that he knew who she was. They would never let him go now.
The notion of dying at this point in his life was unexpectedly calming. He felt as if he’d achieved the best he was capable of. He dressed unhurriedly and paced along the aisle, through stripes of moonlight. As he stepped into the darkness of the porch he heard a muffled sobbing outside the church. He hoped it wasn’t Margery. He grasped the iron ring and opened the outer door.
The moon was high above the green. From the porch it looked impaled by the rearing maypole. The sound of renewed sobbing made him turn toward the inn. Several women had gathered outside, and in their midst was Margery, weeping behind her hands. Someone had draped a black coat over her white dress. Sadie Thomas glanced at Kilbride, regret and resignation and a hint of sympathy on her face, as the Morris men who had been waiting outside the church moved toward him.
Bob Thomas was leading them. For the first time Kilbride saw power in his eyes, though the man’s face was expressionless. All the men had taken off their bracelets of bells, but they still carried the decorated staves two feet long they’d used in the dance. Their clogs made no sound on the grass. As Bob Thomas raised his stave above his head Kilbride closed his eyes and hoped it would be the last thing he would see or feel.
The first blow caught him across the shoulders. He gritted his teeth, squeezed his eyes tighter, prayed that the next blow wouldn’t miss. But the stave struck him across his upper arm, agonizingly. He opened his teary eyes in protest and saw that the women had gone. He turned to Bob Thomas, to try belatedly to reason with him, and read on the man’s face that they didn’t mean to kill him—not yet, at any rate.
They began to beat Kilbride systematically, driving him away from the church, heading him off when he tried to dodge toward his car. He fled toward the woods, his bruised body aching like an open wound. With their clogs they wouldn’t be able to keep up with him, he told himself, and once he was far enough out Of reach he could double back to the car. But they drove him into the woods, where he tripped over roots in the dark. Soon he was limping desperately. When he saw that they were herding him toward a hut beside a glade he lurched aside, but they caught him at once. One shoved a stave between his legs and felled him in the glade.
Kilbride struggled around on the soft damp ground to face them. He was suddenly afraid that they meant to stamp him to death with their clogs, especially when four of them seized his arms and legs. As Bob Thomas stooped to him, jowls dangling, Kilbride realized that someone had followed the chase, a small figure in the shadows at the edge of the glade. “Never experienced anything like it, haven’t you?” Bob Thomas muttered. “You’ve not experienced the half of what you’re going to, my bucko.”
Kilbride tried to wrench himself free as he heard metallic sounds in the shadows, saw the glint of a knife. Bob Thomas moved aside as the doctor came forward, carrying his bag. He might never have seen Kilbride before, his wizened face was so impassive. “Our women make us feel small but our friend here won’t, I reckon,” Bob Thomas said and stood up, rubbing his hands. “We’ll feed him and nurse him and keep him hidden safe, and comes Old May Day we’ll have our own Queen of the May.”
THE TOUCH by Wayne Allen Sallee
Wayne Allen Sallee is the main maniac of the small press horror field with, at latest count (his), 552 poems and short stories accepted for publication. His work seems to appear in virtually all of the current array of small press horror publications, as well as in countless literary magazines and outlaw poetry journals. Even granted that much of this involves short poems, it’s an astonishing track record—the more so considering that Sallee was born on September 19, 1959 and has had relatively few years to get things rolling. A Chicago native, Sallee continues to lurk in the Windy City, where his current projects include a novel entitled The Holy Terror, a 179-line poem entitled Narcopolis, and a stab at his autobiography, Living Like the Fugitive.
The man who looked exactly like Rifkin, the crooked lawyer from the old Barney Miller show, scowled at Downs from his table next to the stage. When Downs returned the stare, the fat man stabbed violently at the bridge of his plastic-framed glasses, pushing them farther up his pudgy nose. Both arms of the glasses were held in place by black electrical tape. The fat man sat hunched over in his chair, three empty beer bottles lined up next to the one he was currently working on, his legs wrapped around the stubby chair legs so that his feet were nearly touching. The man looked like a fat seal minus the whiskers.
The house lights dimmed slightly as a new girl stepped onto the stage from behind a battered Peavey amplifier. Downs did not know her name because this was the first time he had come to The Touch. Downs always remembered the names of the girls at the places he’d been before. He didn’t know why. Once, Downs had read a story about a serial killer talking to his unsuspecting next victim in a bar very much like this one, bragging that he always remembered people’s eyes. The man the killer had met, who was drunk, did not know the killer was talking about his victims.
Downs always remembered the girls’ names. He wondered if that was wrong.
The girl on stage danced to a song called “Rosanna.” Maybe that was her name. Sometimes they would play songs like that. Downs knew that most girls played cassettes with dance mixes that they chose themselves. And that they would often play a song like The Knack’s “My Sharona” or even Jan & Dean’s “Linda.” One time a black girl in one of the bars on Rush Street had danced to Little Richard’s “Lucille.” Now that had been a pip.
The song ended and the girl placed her left palm against the print-smudged mirror. She balanced herself as she took off her panties. Her panties were black.
Downs raised his empty bottle to signal the woman behind the bar to bring him another. The girl on stage was wearing a knee-length black negligee with butterfly patterns across it. One of the secretaries in the building where Downs worked wore pantyhose with the same pattern. The negligee was see-through and that was the reasoning behind taking her panties off after only one song. The girl knew that many men liked this better than seeing her prance in a g-string and garters. The other girls did that, and Downs knew that the quicker the girl on stage could arouse the men in the audience, the better chance she had of making more bucks. The girl’s pubic hair was shaved slightly.
The waitress, scrawny and ugly, came to his table, setting the seven ounce Budweiser and a glass down noisily. Downs gave her a five. She asked if he would like to give her a tip and Downs pretended not to hear. She turned away, purposely upsetting the table and nearly causing the beer to spill.
Downs grabbed the bottle and took a long pull, drinking half. He pushed the glass aside. You can never be too sure in a place like this. The song ended and an unenthusiastic few clapped for all of three seconds.
One of the girls walked between Downs and the stage, the lone green light above the stage creating a slight aura around her, illuminating the blonde hairs on her arms.
She tried avoiding
the man at the first table—the fat guy who had been giving Downs dirty looks—but came close enough for him to take a meaty swipe at her tush. The girl said a few words to him, but Downs couldn’t make out what they were because of the music. The fat man cursed her loudly. His tone was slurred and coarse. The girl looked back toward the doors, toward the bouncers.
Maybe that was why the fat man had been glaring at him before. Maybe he was jealous or pissed that the girls had gone to Downs’ table and not his own. And the guy looked as if he came in here often. Actually, only one girl had been to Downs’ table in the hour he’d been at the lounge.
Her name was Crystal. At least, that was what she called herself. She had been dancing on the stage when Downs had first arrived.
Crystal’s hair was bleached blonde and shoulder length. Downs could see the black roots when she bent closer to him. Her eyes were brown and she wore just enough makeup to keep her from looking like a mannequin. Crystal’s lips were thin and Downs thought that they looked that way because she spent a lot of time fighting back tears.
When she smiled, Downs saw that her teeth were perfect and white, but with a gap between the two front teeth. This did not make her look bad.
Downs had seen a girl in Las Vegas who had been gap-toothed, when he went there in January. She called herself Raven, and, unlike the girls here in Chicago, she did not have a bit of cellulite anywhere on her body. The bar was the Palomino, run by an old guy who looked like Captain Kangaroo, located on the old Strip across from Jerry’s Double Nuggett. Drinks were two bucks and there was a variety of beer brands. Downs had seen a girl on Rush Street who was a dancer and had a caesarean scar across her stomach.
The first thing Crystal asked him when she sat down was why he was wearing bands across his upper arms. Everybody Downs met eventually asked him about his armbands, especially now, in May, when he wore short-sleeved shirts. Usually, the guys who didn’t know just thought they were sweatbands for exercising. It was the girls who always voiced the question.
Downs had slight cerebral palsy. He had been wearing the bands since early 1985. The bands were held together with Velcro, so that they were easily adjusted. Thin rubber balls within the fabric created pressure points to help stop the pain. The doctor who prescribed the bands said “alleviate” the pain. Downs said stop the pain. A girlfriend of one of his roommates remarked that the bands weren’t too noticeable. Downs had said, oh yes, the bands were a big hit on Oak Street Beach.
Downs simply told Crystal that the bands helped strengthen his arms, not caring if saying that made the girl think him macho. Considering where he was, Downs didn’t give a good goddamn what anybody thought.
He was in a two-bit clip joint on Front Street in Fallon Ridge, Illinois on a Friday night drinking five-dollar Buds in two gulps apiece. The only thing that would make things any better, Downs thought sarcastically, would be when the scrawny waitress started serving four-dollar Jolly Good colas after midnight. So the hell with what the girl thought. And the hell with what the fat man in front thought. The hell with what everybody in the whole goddamn world thought.
Crystal, who looked all of nineteen, with a kind of cheerful exuberance not shared by Chicago hookers, whose faces were often dulled by age or by drugs, or by repeated beatings from their Broadway and Leland pimps, or by constant harassment by the plainclothes detectives of the Belmont-Cragin district house for any reason whatsoever, even crossing in the middle of the street, Crystal, whose sharp jawline and thin lips etched by private tears when the lights went down and the dancing stopped, Crystal the hooker sitting at Downs’ table, Crystal’s eyes lit up as she realized she had what she thought was something in common with the guy that was sitting next to her, the guy fate had had a field day with.
Crystal told Downs that she once had a dog that was epileptic. Downs loved it, absolutely loved it! He was talking to a hooker about her crippled dog. This was simply wonderful.
The dog had always been having seizures and Crystal wanted to know if Downs’ disease was, like, the same thing. He told her that it was not the same thing. Downs had known a girl in college who had epilepsy. She was twenty-four when, during a bad seizure in the middle of the night, her head smashed into the corner of her bureau. She bled to death. The actor William Holden died the same way. From a self-inflicted head wound. Only he was drunk.
Crystal then asked Downs if his hands and his arms were good enough to feel her breasts. If Downs would buy her a twelve dollar tom collins glass of ginger ale from the scrawny waitress waiting, vulture-like, in the shadows behind the bar, he could do just that. Feel her breasts. Touch the fabric of her blouse. Her white blouse with red stripes on the sleeves, matching her tight shorts. Downs could inadvertently cop a feel from a dozen different women on any crowded day in the Loop. He could do this for free.
Downs could have said something clever like, “I’m on a budget,” but he just told Crystal no, he wasn’t interested. He wasn’t even paying much attention as she left the table. Downs repressed the urge to say something nasty about her dog of bygone days.
The fat man at the first table motioned to Crystal and patted the empty chair next to him. She ignored him, walking past the table with her head in the air, crossing across the length of the bar to a door at the far end of the room. As she opened the door, Downs spotted a poster of Bruce Springsteen and a huge blue sign that said ALL EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS BEFORE RETURNING TO WORK. He snuffled a laugh at that.
Then the door shut and that was the last of Crystal the nineteen-year-old blonde hooker from the safe suburbs of Chicago.
Downs stared into the mouth of his beer bottle for several minutes. He was sick of killing time with his life. He was sick of hiding behind the lame excuse that his cerebral palsy was keeping him from being more successful. What was he doing sitting here in this dive? He couldn’t even justify things by being mildly buzzed.
A song by Alan Parsons Project broke the stillness as a new girl took the stage. Eye In The Sky. Downs had tried dancing to this song with a girl he met at Gingerman’s on Division Street a few weeks back. She had pretended to spot an old friend in the crowd and had left Downs on the pastel-colored neon stage like a flaming fool. “I am the maker of rules, the keeper of fools, I can cheat you blind ...”
The girl on stage had a face that was okay, but her body had seen better days. She didn’t seem to care enough to dance, as if dancing would draw attention to her looks. Downs thought that maybe she had kids to support or something.
The fat man started in on her immediately; Downs had wondered when the heckling would begin. There was always heckling. It made sense that the fat man would be the first to start. Downs figured that the woman was below the fat man’s tastes and deserved to be ridiculed. At least the others in the bar had encouraged the fat man further. Uneasily, Downs scanned the tables around him. About ten guys, all fairly young, had come in since the last time Downs had bothered to look, several beers ago. Four of the guys, at two separate tables, were wearing softball jerseys, red on blue, that advertised the Tapped-Out Lounge in beautiful, downtown Berwyn.
The fat man was telling the girl on stage that, as a deputy sheriff for Cook County, he should run her in on account of excessive ugliness.
So that explained it. The bouncers weren’t doing anything about that fat slug because, if it was true that he was a deputy, he could probably give them quite a bit of heat. Downs had recently read a story in the Tribune about the lousy procedures the state had in the hiring of their deputies. Virtually anybody could be eligible.
The fat man was absolutely degrading the woman on stage. He spoke of what kinds of animals would avoid having sex with her. He said that if he were to have sex with her, he’d probably have to pull her scabs off first. The fat man spoke very loudly and did not laugh at his own outbursts. He wasn’t a heckler, Downs decided. He was being a prick because he was in a position to get away with it.
Downs thought that the fat man was taking things too far. He decided
it was time to leave, and pushed away from the table.
Taking one last look at the girl, Downs saw her head lowered, her hips undulating listlessly. Downs walked between the tables to the bathroom, his hands in his pockets.
The bathroom was dimly lit, the lone ceiling bulb flickering every other second, it seemed. There was one bowl, no stalls or urinals: the deluxe suite. There were quite a few misses at the bowl. Downs read some of the graffiti on the walls as he urinated. The usual “For a Good Time, Call ...”; DOWN WITH KHOMEINI (when the hell did they scrub these walls down last, if ever?); Cassady 8-11-82; another admonition: AT LEAST THE TOILET SEATS IN THIS JOINT GO DOWN ON YOU FOR FREE; a few other mindless scribbles. Against the far wall, an ancient machine advertised a LOVE KIT or a RIBBED TINGLER for two quarters.
Downs zipped up and passed the bouncers on his way out the front door. The two men, both built as all bouncers are built, looking like they were made out of solid lead and suffering from perpetual hemorrhoids, were discussing the off-duty deputy up front. The older of the two, who resembled a Bears quarterback from the late ’70’s, told the other that something had to be done.
Then Downs was out in the early May night. It was about two a.m., he figured. A strong breeze came from the quarry across the lot; Downs smelled salt. A random sports page blew up from the quarry and was plastered against the surrounding chain link fence. Cans of Budweiser and Miller High Life were piled against the fence. The streetlamps on Front Street glittered against the gold of the Miller cans.
The Touch was at the corner of Front Street and Summit Avenue, the first strip joint/clip joint along a half-mile stretch of Fallon Ridge known as Sin Strip. The salt quarry, closed nights since the last of the Midwest snowstorms was long past, ran parallel behind Summit, a residential street dotted with gas stations and convenience marts. There was always controversy about Sin Strip in the local papers.
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