by Ray Garton
“Hey, hey,” he said as he pulled away from her. “Have you ever kissed anyone without severing the brainstem?”
“What? Whatta you mean?”
“Well, when you kiss, you don’t have to suck so hard. I think you put a kink in my uvula.”
Rain laughed. “So how the fuck’m I supposed to kiss?”
“Well, you just...just...” What am I doing? Adam wondered. Being in this room is dangerous. Hell, being in this house is dangerous.
“Just go ahead and kiss however you want.” He turned and went to the door.
Rain followed him, saying, “Show me!”
Standing in the doorway, Adam turned to her slowly. “If I show you...do I still have to go out with you tonight?”
She frowned. “What the fuck do you mean, course you’re still goin’ out with me tonight. Quit being such a prick and relax a little, would you? Don’t worry, you’re gonna have fun.”
He left the room and started down the hall wearily. Shirt wadded in a ball in his hand. “I’ll show you later.”
ELEVEN
"Dude, when...did your life turn into a V.C. Andrews novel?” Carter said. He stared across the desk at Adam as if he had never seen him before, jaw slack.
They sat facing each other at an old partners desk that had occupied the attic for as long as they could remember. Adam had told him all about Rain, and Carter had quickly forgotten the issue of Fangoria open before him.
“I like to think my life is written better than a V.C. Andrews novel,” Adam replied.
“Maybe written better, but still trashy as hell. And definitely paperback.”
“What am I going to do? I mean...I can’t go to Gwen about it.”
“Why not?”
“Are you high?” Adam said. “She’d go ballistic if I told her I was—look, can you imagine me saying to Gwen, ‘Rain made me have sex with her at gunpoint this afternoon, could you have a talk with her?’ Think she’d believe something like that?”
“Hey, she might! Sounds like your story might not surprise her.”
“She’d kill me.
“Look, if anybody’s gonna kill you, my money’s on the underage chick.”
“Rain.”
“Yeah, whatever.” He shook his head. “Who the hell names a kid Rain? What kind of sick bastards would do that? Was her father a weatherman, or something? I think I’m more upset about you boning a woman who would name her daughter Rain than about you boning an underaged psychoslut.”
“Look, Carter, I know my situation may be funny from a certain distance, but I’m in the middle of it, okay? I really need you to be serious.”
“I am serious!” Carter said. “She should sue her parents for that shit. Naming her after weather.” He shook his head, looked down at the magazine.
Adam felt fidgety. He stood and wandered around the studio, looked at the strange objects on the shelves. “What am I going to do, Carter?”
“You’re asking me?” Carter blurted. “I just found out about all this sordid shit, I need a little time to digest all the details, man, that’s a three-part miniseries at least. Probably ABC.”
Adam sighed as he stared back at a human face with skin that had been eaten away. Carter had researched the flesh-eating virus, printed up some pictures from the Internet. He had done a great job, too. Adam never ceased to be amazed by Carter’s talent. But at the moment, he was getting angry with him.
“What part of ‘I’m in serious trouble’ don’t you understand, Carter?” Adam asked with an exasperated swing of his arms as he went back to the desk. Hands flat on the desktop, he leaned toward Carter. “If she goes to the police, I’m fornicated, my friend. I mean, if the jury finds me...what, Carter? What do you think the jury would find me?”
Carter looked at his friend with surprise and concern. He was uncertain if Adam expected a reply. “Well, I-I-I—”
“Even if they found me not guilty, that would be with me forever. You can’t shake something like that. Statutory rape, jeez. Of course, being a free statutory rapist is better than being one in prison. I already have hemorrhoids, Carter, I wouldn’t survive prison!”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know this was such a big deal with you, shit, I didn’t mean to make fun of it. But think about it. Should you be takin’ her this seriously, man? She’s sixteen, for crying out loud. And obviously neurotic already. Maybe she’s just a...I don’t know, maybe she just likes to make trouble, you know? Like one of those soap opera vixens? Or maybe, hey, no offense, but maybe she just annoys the hell out of you and you’re making her sound worse than she really is, you know what I mean?”
Adam ignored him, frowned as he went away for a while into his own thoughts. After half a minute of silence, he asked, “You think mental illness would keep me out of prison if Rain turned me in?”
“Is that, like, a plan?” Carter said.
“It might be, I don’t know. It just came to me.”
Carter leaned back in his chair and put an ankle on his knee. “Maybe it would keep you out of prison. But you’d go into some kinda mental institution. You’d be in prison, what? Five years, probably less. Once they get you in one of those cuckoo’s nests, though, they can keep you there till the day you turn into a great big pissed-off pre-casino American Indian who can lift a marble sink and throw it through the window. ’Bout how long you think that would take?”
Adam sighed. “Let’s get out of here, go someplace. I’m antsy.”
“Where you wanna go?”
“I don’t care. Let’s go to Creature Features, see if Wally’s got anything new. You drive.”
Carter brightened. “I get to drive your convertible?”
“No. Your car.”
Carter’s car was one of his dad’s Mercedes. He drove them to Hollywood.
“There has to be another alternative,” Adam said on the way. “Go to prison for a few years...go to a balloon factory for God knows how long, or...what? Everybody gets better choices than that. Sophie had better choices!”
“Oh, you’ve got another choice,” Carter said. “But it would, you know...you’d have to, like...well, you know.”
Carter looked at him, serious and unsmiling. Adam knew what he meant, and it surprised him. Carter was letting him know that considering it was not so bad. And actually doing it might be...negotiable. The very thought made Adam dizzy. And it was not an entirely bad kind of dizzy.
“Jeez, you sick bastard, you did it again,” Carter said. “Got me caught up in one of your stories.”
“It’s not a story, Carter.”
“You tell it like one. Look, man, I’m not saying I don’t believe you, I’m just saying I know how you get when somebody pisses you off.”
“How many times do I have to tell you? This is not just how I perceived her. She makes the girl in The Bad Seed look like Cindy Brady.”
“But don’t you think it’s a little unfair that I don’t know this girl? I mean, you’re telling me all this stuff about her, and I haven’t even met her.”
“Unfair? You should get on your knees and thank God you haven’t met her!” Adam spotted an opportunity and grabbed it up. “You want to meet her tonight?”
Shrugging, Carter said, “Sure.”
“So you’ll come with us?”
“Come with you where? On your date? What planet is your dealer from, Adam? Huh? You strung out on pangalactic gargleblasters, or something?”
“I’m serious. I don’t want to go alone with her, and you’re right, you should meet her.”
“What if she doesn’t want me to go?”
“So what?”
“If she’s carrying a fucking piece, man, I don’t wanna—”
“If she’s carrying a piece?” Adam interrupted.
“Huh?”
“You just said the words, ‘If she’s carrying a fucking piece, man.’”
“Well, yeah. So?”
“Who are you, Al Pacino?”
“No. But I still say DePalma’s Scarfac
e is a masterpiece, no matter what you say.”
“Look, Carter, I don’t know if she’ll be, uh...carrying a piece, or packing heat, or whatever. But I think she might be safer with two of us there instead of just one.”
“Think so?”
Adam nodded. “You might be saving my life, for all I know.”
“I’ll think about it.”
In Hollywood, Carter parked in a public lot and they walked the remaining block to Creature Features Book and Video Emporium. When they walked in, a skull beside the door screamed as its eyes flickered red.
“Hi, guys!” Wally Kirk said from behind a row of glass display cases. He closed the register drawer, grinned, and a gold-capped front tooth gleamed.
Adam and Carter had been frequenting the store since they were in the sixth grade. Most of the genre movies and books they owned had been purchased there. They sometimes hung out in the store and talked movies and books with Wally even when they bought nothing.
“Where you guys been?” Wally asked. “Haven’t seen you in a couple weeks.”
Carter said, “Takes time to satisfy all the women in Los Angeles. We’ve been busy.”
They went to the display case and looked down through the glass top at the merchandise inside: trading cards, buttons and key rings bearing logos of genre movies and TV shows, expensive pewter figures of characters from Star Wars and Star Trek.
“Anything new since we were here last, Wally?” Adam asked.
“You kidding? Lotsa stuff.” He was fifty-nine, with unshaven steel-colored stubble on his round, chubby-cheeked face. His gray hair, shot with a few remaining streaks of black, was long and braided in back. He moved along the showcase and turned, dropped suddenly as he went down the ramp. What was left of him, the part he had brought back from Vietnam, was in a wheelchair. “C’mon over here. You guys’re gonna love this. The horror movies of Herschell Gordon Lewis, all on DVD.”
As they followed him to the DVD section, Carter said, “No shit? 2,000 Maniacs?”
“All of ’em. Blood Feast, Wizard of Gore, they’re all here.”
Adam and Carter wore broad grins as they snatched DVDs from the shelves.
“Over here,” Wally went on, wheeling the chair with thickly muscled, tattooed arms, “I got a digitally remastered Conqueror Worm under the original title, The Witchfinder General. The British version that was never released in America. And right here—” He took a DVD from the shelf, “—Oliver Stone’s The Hand, with audio commentary by Stone and Michael Caine, Good commentary, too.”
They were ecstatic, euphoric.
“There’s a new T.M. Wright novel,” Wally said. “Just arrived yesterday, in fact. And the new Stephen King, of course.”
Adam checked his watch, which he was not wearing, as he asked, “A new King already? What time is it?”
They spent a few hundred dollars of their dads’ money, and left the store with four plastic bags heavy with DVDs, novels, magazines, comic books, and toys.
Back in the car, Carter started the engine and pulled out of the lot. He asked, “You think, uh...well, I mean, if she’s really like you say she is, you think she might, um, hit on me? Try to blackmail both of us?”
“Carter, I’m honestly surprised she hasn’t nailed you already. She might do you in the backseat of the car while I drive.”
“Are you shitting me?”
“I don’t know, Carter, that’s what I mean! She’s completely unpredictable. Like a pit bull. One second it’s licking the baby’s face, next second it’s eating the baby’s face. I want you to see that, to see what she’s like.”
“I, uh...don’t know if I want to.”
Adam sighed and shook his head. “Don’t bullshit me, Carter, I know you better than that. You’ve got such a hard-on to meet her, you couldn’t stand up right now without popping your zipper.”
Carter laughed. “Yeah, you’re right.”
Adam grinned and said, “Then come with me, dammit!”
Carter thought about it awhile. Turned on the radio and found some music. “Okay, but only on one condition.”
“What? Anything.”
“If weird shit starts to happen, or if my woman’s intuition kicks in and I start feeling like weird shit is about to happen, I’m gone. You drop me off and I call for a car.”
“Deal,” Adam said. “No problemo, Kimosoggy.”
“Then I’ll go.”
TWELVE
Adam’s 1959 Cadillac Fleetwood convertible was the glossy color of a freshly-made candied apple, with a hungry-sounding V-8 engine ready to chew pavement, and fins on the back like the ones on the Batmobile in the old TV series starring Adam West. The black leather upholstery was pristine, and the original black top could not have been in better condition the day it was manufactured.
Although he did not like prolonged exposure to the sun, Adam was not immune to the siren’s call of the convertible. It was heard loudest in Los Angeles, where everyone drove everywhere, freeways coiled and tangled above and beneath one another in the desert heat. In Los Angeles, where a drive to the grocery store is potentially an all-day event, a car is an integral part of life, a necessity rather than luxury. Adam discovered there was something at once exhilarating and deeply calming about driving a convertible. Especially around dusk, when the setting sun turned the dangerously high levels of deadly toxins in the air such lovely shades of red and purple.
The convertible was his father’s way of assuaging his own guilt, of saying, Look, Adam, I’m not sorry for anything I’ve said or done, but...here’s a really cool expensive car for your birthday, okay? Adam could live with that. But the convertible was a surprise. Something his mom would have been more likely to buy him, not his dad. He wondered if Gwen had been involved in the choice.
“This is not a car you take just anywhere,” his dad had told him. “You don’t know exactly where you’re going? You take the Lexus. It’s three years old and outta shape. Unless you’re going someplace with a protected garage, or at least valet parking, leave the convertible at home. That car didn’t come cheap. Anything happens to it, I’ll drown you in the fucking pool like a sack of cats.”
Adam had no intention of letting anything happen to the convertible. That was why he usually drove the Lexus. Going out with Rain would be no different than any other time.
“What?” Carter said as they walked through the main garage. “You’re not taking the convertible? You mean I’ve gotta sit in that shitbucket Lexus again?”
“Yeah, I wanna go in the fuckin’ convertible, Big Brother!” Rain said.
Carter and Rain walked several paces ahead of Adam, arm in arm. Adam had not turned on all the lights in the garage, and in the shadows, they looked like Laurel and Hardy without their bowlers.
The right side of Rain’s face looked puffy, but any bruises she might have sustained from her time with Adam that day were invisible. He assumed she had covered them with makeup.
She had been flirting with Carter ever since Adam introduced them, and Carter flirted back, seemed to enjoy her company. Adam hoped his friend was keeping a clear head about everything. He had been warned.
Adam got into the car and opened the garage door with the remote clipped to the visor. On the other side, Carter and Rain decided who would sit where.
“You sit in the front, Carter,” Rain said. “I love backseats.”
“No, you’re in front, Rain,” Adam said.
She opened the passenger door, leaned in to give him a wicked smile. “You want me to sit up front with you, Big Brother?” she said with a wink.
“Actually, I don’t want you behind me, okay?”
“Hey, that’s no problem,” Carter said, getting into the backseat.
Before they reached the gate, Rain found a radio station playing hardcore rap and turned it up loud. Adam stopped at the gate, killed the radio, turned to her.
“It’s very important that you listen to what I’m about to say, Rain,” he said. His index finger pointed r
igidly upward between them. “If you are in a car that I’m driving, under no circumstances are you to tamper with the radio or the CD player. Don’t even reach for it as if to tamper with it.”
“Jeez, what’s up your ass?” Rain said.
“Nothing,” Carter said from the backseat. “He’s always that way about the radio. He has an allergic reaction to rap.”
As Adam drove on, Rain leaned toward him and puckered her mouth. She spoke through it in babytalk as she reached over and casually squeezed his genitals: “Poor widdoo bay-beee.” Adam quickly slapped her hand away.
Rain leaned back in her seat and lowered her window. She wore a pair of red-framed wraparound sunglasses that matched the red of her lips. Short black skirt, tight purple sleeveless top. A small black bag hung from her shoulder by the loop of its long silver chain.
“It’s after ten o’clock at night,” Adam said. “Why are you wearing sunglasses?”
She smiled at him. “I like it dark.”
“I think it’s cool,” Carter said. “It shows individuality. A refusal to conform. Those are admirable traits, Rain.”
She turned around in her seat, got on her knees. “You think so, Carter?”
“Sure. You’re a rebel. You don’t accept the status quo. You’re—”
“Rain, would you please sit down,” Adam said. “And put on your seatbelt.”
Rain turned to Adam slowly and glared. “I’m talking to Carter,” she said, teeth clenched.
“Then I’m pulling over, because I’m not driving while you’re sitting like that.”
“Unfuckingbelievable,” Rain said as she sat in the seat and put on her seatbelt. “I bet you go to church every Sunday and visit old people in rest homes, don’tcha, Mr. Douglas.”
“Mr. Douglas?” Carter said. “What’s up with that?”
Rain explained why she called Adam “Mr. Douglas,” and Carter laughed. The more he thought about it, the harder he laughed. Pointed at Adam and said, “Fruh-Fred MacMurray!”
Adam ignored him, turned to Rain again. “Look, I don’t even know where we’re going, okay? So you’ve gotta tell me.”