Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  “What was that about?” I asked Jack.

  “Power, man,” he said. “God, I love women. I just love ‘em.”

  “Your problem is you don’t know the difference between love and sex.”

  “Yeah? What is it? Come on, I want to know.” The music was too loud to argue with him. I shook my head. “See? You don’t know either.”

  The brunette pushed her hair back with both hands, chin up, fingers spread wide, and it reminded me of Kristi. The theatricality of it. She’d played one of Tennessee Williams’ affected Southern bitches once and it had been almost too painful to watch. Almost.

  “Come on,” I said, grabbing Jack’s sleeve. “It’s been swell, but let’s get out of here. I don’t need to see her. I’m better off with the fantasy.”

  Jack didn’t say anything. He just pointed with his chin to the stage behind me.

  She had on a leopard skin leotard. She had been a dark blonde in high school but now her hair was brown and short. She’d put on a little weight, not much. She stretched in front of the mirrored wall and the DJ played the Pretenders.

  I felt this weird, possessive kind of pride, watching her. That and lust. I’d been married for eight years and the worst thing I’d ever done was kiss an old girl friend on New Year’s Eve and stare longingly at the pictures in Playboy. But this was real, this was happening.

  The song finished and another one started and she pulled one strap down on the leotard. I remembered the first time I’d seen her breasts. I was fifteen. I’d joined a youth club at the Unitarian Church because she went there Sunday afternoons. Sometimes we would skip the program and sneak off into the deserted Sunday school classrooms and there, in the twilight, surrounded by crayon drawings on manila paper, she would stretch out on the linoleum and let me lie on top of her and feel the maddening pressure of her pelvis and smell the faint, clinically erotic odor of peroxide in her hair.

  She showed me her breasts on the golf course next door. We had jumped the fence and we lay in a sandtrap so no one would see us. There was a little light from the street, but not enough for real color. It was like a black and white movie when I played it back in my mind.

  They were fuller now, hung a little lower and flatter, but I remembered the small, pale nipples. She pulled the other strap down, turned her back, rotating her hips as she stripped down to a red G-string. Somebody held a dollar out to her. I wanted to go over there and tell him that I knew her.

  Jack kept poking me in the ribs. “Well? Well?”

  “Be cool,” I said. I had been watching the traffic pattern and I knew that after the song she would take a break and then get up on the other stage. It took a long time, but I wasn’t tense about it. I’m just going to say hi, I thought. And that’s it.

  The song was over and she walked down the stairs at the end of the stage, throwing the leotard around her shoulders. I got up, having a little trouble with the chair, and walked over to her.

  “Kristi,” I said. “It’s Dave McKenna.”

  “Oh my God!” She was in my arms. Her skin was hot from the lights and I could smell her deodorant. I was suddenly dizzy, aware of every square inch where our bodies touched. “Do you still hate me?” she said as she pulled away.

  “What?” There was so much I’d forgotten. The twang in her voice. The milk chocolate color of her eyes. The beauty mark over her right cheekbone. The flirtatious look up through the lashes that now had a desperate edge to it.

  “The last time I saw you, you called me a bitch. It was after that party at your teacher’s house.”

  “No, I...believe me, it wasn’t like...”

  “Listen, I’m on again,” she said. “Where are you?”

  “We’re right over there.”

  “Oh Christ, you didn’t bring your wife with you? I heard you were married.”

  “No, it’s...”

  “I got to run, sugar, wait for me.”

  I went back to the table.

  “You rascal,” Jack said. “Why didn’t you just slip it to her on the spot?”

  “Shut up, Jack, will you?”

  “Ooooh, touchy.”

  I watched her dance. She was no movie star. Her face was a little hard and even the heavy makeup didn’t hide all the lines. But none of that mattered. What mattered was the way she moved, the kind of puckered smile that said yes, I want it too.

  She sat down with us when she was finished. She seemed to be all hands, touching me on the arm, biting on a fingernail, gesturing in front of her face.

  She was dancing three times a week, which was all they would schedule her for any more. The money was good and she didn’t mind the work, especially here where it wasn’t too rowdy. Jack raised his eyebrows at me to say, see? She got by with some modeling and some “scuffling” which I assumed meant turning tricks. Her mother was still in Dallas and had sent Kristi clippings the couple of times I got my name in the paper.

  “She always liked me,” I said.

  “She liked you the best of all of them. You were a gentleman.”

  “Maybe too much of one.”

  “It was why I loved you.” She was wearing the leotard again but she might as well have been naked. I was beginning to be afraid of her so I reminded myself that nothing had happened yet, nothing had to happen, that I wasn’t committed to anything. I pushed my beer over to her and she drank about half of it. “It gets hot up there,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe. Sometimes you think you’re going to pass out, but you got to keep smiling.”

  “Are you married?” I asked her. “Were you ever?”

  “Once. It lasted two whole months. The shitheel knocked me up and then split.”

  “What happened?”

  “I kept the kid. He’s four now.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Stoney. He’s a cute little bastard. I got a neighbor watches him when I’m out, and I do the same for hers. He keeps me going sometimes.” She drank the rest of the beer. “What about you?”

  “I got a little boy too. Jeffrey. He’s seven.”

  “Just the one?”

  “I don’t think the marriage could handle more than one kid,” I said.

  “It’s an old story,” Jack said. “If your wife puts you through law school, the marriage breaks up. It just took Dave a little longer than most.”

  “You’re getting divorced?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” She nodded. I guess she didn’t need to ask for details. Marriages come apart every day.

  “I’m on again in a little,” she said. “Will you still be here when I get back?” She did what she could to make it sound casual.

  “I got an early day tomorrow,” I said.

  “Sure. It was good to see you. Real good.”

  The easiest thing seemed to be to get out a pen and an old business card. “Give me your phone number. Maybe I can get loose another night.”

  She took the pen but she kept looking at me. “Sure,” she said.

  “You’re an idiot,” Jack said. “Why didn’t you go home with her?”

  I watched the streetlights. My jacket smelled like cigarettes and my head had started to hurt.

  “That gorgeous piece of ass says to you, ‘Ecstasy?’ and Dave says, ‘No thanks.’ What the hell’s the matter with you? Alice make you leave your dick in the safe deposit box?”

  “Jack,” I said, “will you shut the fuck up?” The card with her number on it was in the inside pocket of the jacket. I could feel it there, like a cool fingernail against my flesh.

  Jack went back to his room to crash a little after midnight. I couldn’t sleep. I put on the headphones and listened to Robert Johnson, “King of the Delta Blues Singers.” There was something about his voice. He had this deadpan tone that sat down and told you what was wrong like it was no big deal. Then the voice would crack and you could tell it was a hell of a lot worse than he was letting on.

  They said the devil himself had tuned Johnson’s guitar. He died in 1938, poisoned by
a jealous husband. He’d made his first recordings in a hotel room in San Antonio, just another 70 miles on down I-35.

  Charlie and Gonzales and I took my car out to what Gonzales called the “site.” The sheriff and a deputy were in a brown county station wagon behind us. Charlie sat on the passenger side and Gonzales was in the back. Charlie could have opened the door at a stoplight and been gone. He wasn’t even in handcuffs. Nobody said anything about it.

  We got on I-35 and Charlie said, “Go on south to the second exit after the caves.” The Inner Space Caverns were just south of Georgetown, basically a single long, unspectacular tunnel that ran for miles under the highway. “I killed a girl there once. When they turned off the lights.”

  I nodded but I didn’t say anything. That morning, before I went in to the “office,” Gonzales had told me that it made Charlie angry if you let on that you didn’t believe him. I was tired, and hung over from watching Jack drink, and I didn’t really give a damn about Charlie’s feelings.

  I got off at the exit and followed the access road for a while. Charlie had his eyes closed and seemed to be thinking hard.

  “Having trouble?” I asked him.

  “Nah,” he said. “Just didn’t want to take you to the wrong one.” I looked at him and he started laughing. It was a joke. Gonzales chuckled in the back seat and there was this cheerful kind of feeling in the car that made me want to pull over and run away.

  “Nosir,” Charlie said, “I sure don’t suppose I’d want to do that.” He grinned at me and he knew what I was thinking, he could see the horror right there on my face. He just kept smiling. Come on, I could hear him say. Loosen up. Be one of the guys.

  I wiped the sweat from my hands onto my pant legs. Finally he said, “There’s a dirt road a ways ahead. Turn off on it. It’ll go over a hill and then across a cattle grating. After the grating is a stand of trees to the left. You’ll want to park up under ‘em.”

  How can he do this? I thought. He’s got to know there’s nothing there. Or does he? When we don’t turn anything up, what’s he going to do? Are they going to wish they’d cuffed him after all? The sheriff knew what I was up to, but none of the others did. Would Gonzales turn on me for betraying Charlie?

  The road did just what Charlie said it would. We parked the cars under the trees and the deputy and I got shovels out of the sheriff’s trunk. The trees were oaks and their leaves were tiny and very pale green.

  “It would be over here,” Charlie said. He stood on a patch of low ground, covered with clumps of Johnson grass. “Not too deep.”

  He was right. She was only about six or eight inches down. The deputy had a body bag and he tried to move her into it, but she kept coming apart. There wasn’t much left but a skeleton and a few rags.

  And the braces. Still shining, clinging to the teeth of the skull like a metal smile.

  On the way back to Georgetown we passed a woman on the side of the road. She was staring into the hood of her car. She looked like she was about to cry. Charlie turned all the way around in his seat to watch her as we drove by.

  “There’s just victims ever’where,” Charlie said. There was a sadness in his voice I didn’t believe. “The highway’s full of ’em. Kids, hitchhikers, waitresses... You ever pick one up?”

  “No,” I said, but it wasn’t true. It was in Dallas, I was home for spring break. It was the end of the sixties. She had on a green dress. Nothing happened. But she had smiled at me and put one arm up on the back of the seat. I was on the way to my girlfriend’s house and I let her off a few blocks away. And that night, when I was inside her, I imagined my girlfriend with the hitchhiker’s face, with her blonde hair and freckles, her slightly coarse features, the dots of sweat on her upper lip.

  “But you thought about it,” Charlie said. “Didn’t you?”

  “Listen,” I said. “I’ve got a job to do. I just want to do it and get out of here, okay?”

  “I know what you’re saying,” Charlie said. “Jesus forgives me, but I can’t ask that of nobody else. I was just trying to get along, that’s all. That’s all any of us is ever trying to do.”

  I called Dallas collect from the sheriff’s phone. He gave me a private room where I could shout if I had to. The switchboard put me through to Ricky Slatkin, Senior Assistant DA for Homicide.

  “Dave, will you for Chrissake calm down. It’s a coincidence. That’s all. Forensics will figure out who this girl is and we’ll put another 70 or 80 years on Charlie’s sentence. Maybe give him another death penalty. What the hell, right? Meanwhile we’ll give him another ringer.”

  “You give him one. I want out of this. I am fucking terrified.”

  “I, uh, understand you’re under some stress at home these days.”

  “I am not at home. I’m in Georgetown, in the Williamson County Jail, and I am under some fucking stress right here. Don’t you understand? He thought this dead girl into existence.”

  “What, Charlie Dean Harris is God now, is that it? Come on, Dave. Go out and have a few beers and by tomorrow it’ll all make sense to you.”

  “He’s evil, Jack,” I said. We were back at his place after a pizza at Conan’s. Jack had ordered a pitcher of beer and drunk it all himself. “I didn’t use to believe in it, but that was before I met Charlie.”

  He had a women’s basketball game on TV, the sound turned down to a low hum. “That’s horseshit,” he said. His voice was too loud. “Horseshit, Christian horseshit. They want you to believe that Evil has got a capital E and it’s sitting over there in the corner, see it? Horseshit. Evil isn’t a thing. It’s something that’s not there. It’s an absence. The lack of the thing that stops you from doing whatever you damn well please.”

  He chugged half a beer. “Your pal Charlie ain’t evil. He’s just damaged goods. He’s just like you or me but something died in him. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve felt it. First it goes to sleep and then it dies. Like when you stand up in court and try to get a rapist off when you know he did it. You tell yourself that it’s part of the game, you try to give the asshole the benefit of the doubt, hell, somebody’s got to do it, right? You try to believe the girl is just some slut that changed her mind, but you can smell it. Something inside you starting to rot.”

  He finished the beer and threw it at a paper sack in the corner. It hit another bottle inside the sack and shattered. “Then you go home and your wife’s got a goddamn headache or her period or she’s asleep in front of the TV or she’s not in the goddamn mood and you just want to beat the...” His right fist was clenched up so tight the knuckles were a shiny yellow. His eyes looked like open sores. He got up for another beer and he was in the kitchen for a long time.

  When he came back I said, “I’m going out.” I said it without giving myself a chance to think about it.

  “Kristi,” Jack said. He had a fresh beer and was all right again.

  “Yeah.”

  “You bastard! Can I smell your fingers when you get back?”

  “Fuck you, Jack.”

  “Oh no, save it for her. She’s going to use you up, you lucky bastard.”

  I called her from a pay phone and she gave me directions. She was at the Royal Palms Trailer Park, near Bergstrom Air Force Base on the south end of town. It wasn’t hard to find. They even had a few palm trees. There were rural-type galvanized mailboxes on posts by the gravel driveways. I found the one that said Spector and parked behind a white Dodge with six-figure mileage.

  The temperature was in the sixties but I was shaking. My shoulders kept trying to crawl up around my neck. I got out of the car. I couldn’t feel my feet. Asshole, I told myself. I don’t want to hear about your personal problems. You better enjoy this or I’ll fucking kill you.

  I knocked on the door and it made a kind of mute rattling sound. Kristi opened it. She was wearing a plaid bathrobe, so old I couldn’t tell what the colors used to be. She stood back to let me in and said, “I didn’t think you’d call.”

  “But I did,” I sai
d. The trailer was tiny—a living room with a green sofa and a 13-inch color TV, a kitchen the size of a short hall, a single bedroom behind it, the door open, the bed unmade. A blond-haired boy was asleep on the sofa, wrapped in an army blanket. The shelf above him was full of plays—Albee, Ionesco, Tennessee Williams. The walls were covered with photographs in dime-store frames.

  A couple of them were from the drama club; one even had me in it. I was sixteen and looked maybe nine. My hair was too long in front, my chest was sucked in, and I had a stupid smirk on my face. I was looking at Kristi. Who would want to look at anything else? She had on cutoffs that had frayed up past the crease of her thighs. Her shirt was unbuttoned and tied under her breasts. Her head was back and she was laughing. I’d always been able to make her laugh.

  “You want a drink?” she whispered.

  “No,” I said. I turned to look at her. We weren’t either of us laughing now. I reached for her and she glanced over at the boy and shook her head. She grabbed the cuff of my shirt and pulled me gently back toward the bedroom.

  It smelled of perfume and hand lotion and a little of mildew. The only light trickled in through heavy, old-fashioned Venetian blinds. She untied the bathrobe and let it fall. I kissed her and her arms went around my neck. I touched her shoulder blades and her hair and her buttocks and then I got out of my clothes and left them in a pile on the floor. She ran on tiptoes back to the front of the trailer and locked and chained the door. Then she came back and shut the bedroom door and lay down on the bed.

  I lay down next to her. The smell and feel of her was wonderful, and at the same time it was not quite real. There were too many unfamiliar things and it was hard to connect to the rest of my life.

  Then I was on my knees between her legs, gently touching her. Her arms were spread out beside her, tangled in the sheets, her hips moving with pleasure. Only once, in high school, had she let me touch her there, in the back seat of a friend’s car, her skirt up around her hips, panties to her knees, and before I had recovered from the wonder of it she had pulled away.