Image of the Beast and Blown (5 page)

4

He had hesitated to stop her when she kissed him all over
his belly, although he knew what was coming. He con-
tinued to restrain himself when she took his penis and
bent down to place her mouth around the head. He felt
the tongue flicking it, shuddered, pushed her head away,
though gently, and said, "No!"

She looked up at him and said, "Why?"

"I never got around to telling you the fine details of
the film," he said.

"You're getting soft!"

She sat up in the bed and looked down at him. She
was frowning.

"Have you got a disease?"

"For God's sake!" he said, and he sat up, too. "Do
you think I'd go to bed with you if I knew I had the
syph or the clap? What kind of a question—what kind
of a person do you think I am?"

"I'm sorry," she said. "My God! What's wrong?
What did I do?"

"Nothing. Nothing under most circumstances. But I
felt as if my cock was frozen when you … Never mind.
Let me explain why I couldn't let you go down on me."

"I wish you wouldn't use words like that!"

"OK, my thing, then! Let me tell you."

She listened with wide eyes. She was leaning on one
arm near him. He could see the swollen nipple, which
did not seem to dwindle a bit as she listened. It might
have increased. Certainly, her eyes were bright, and,
despite her expressed horror, she smiled now and then.

"I really think you'd like to do that to me!" he said.

"You're always saying something stupid like that," she
said. "Even now. Do you hate me so much you can't
even get a hard-on."

"You mean erection, don't you?" he said. "If you
can't understand why my penis wanted to crawl into
my belly for safety, then you can't understand anything
about men."

"I won't bite," she said, and she grabbed his penis and

lunged for it with her mouth wide open and smiling to
show all her teeth.

He jerked himself away, saying, "Don't!"

"Forget about it, I was just kidding you," she said,
and she crawled onto him and began kissing him. She
thrust her tongue along his tongue and down his throat
so far that he choked. "For God's sake!" he said, turning
his head away. "What the hell are you trying to do? I
can't breathe!"

She sat up and almost hissed at him. "You can't
breathe! How do you think I breathe when you're shov-
ing that big thing down my throat? What is the
matter?"

"I don't know," he said. He sat up. "Let's have a few
more drags. Maybe things'll straighten out."

"Do you have to depend upon that to be able to love
me?"

He tried to take her hand in his but she snatched it
away.

"You didn't see it," he said. "Those iron teeth. The
blood! Spitting out that bloody flesh! God!"

"I feel sorry for Colben," she said, "but I don't see
what he has to do with us. You never liked him; you were
going to get rid of him. And he gave me the creeps.
Anyway … oh, I don't know."

She rolled off the bed, went to the closet, and put on
the kimono. She lit a cigarette and at once began
coughing. It sounded as if her lungs were full of snot.

He felt angry, and opened his mouth to say some-
thing—what, he did not know, just so it was something
that would hurt. But the taste of cunt made him pause.
She had a beautiful cunt, the hair was thick and almost
blue-black and so soft it felt almost like a seal pelt.
She lubricated freely, perhaps too much, but the oil was
sweet and clean. And she could squeeze down on his cock
as if she had a hand inside it. And then he remembered
the thing bulging out the pad over the woman's cunt in
the film, and the blood that had been pouring into his
penis became slushy and slowly thawed out and drained
back into his body.

Sybil, who had seen the dawning erection, said,
"What's wrong
now?"

"Sybil, there's nothing wrong with
you.
It's me. I'm
too upset."

She sucked in some more smoke and managed to
check a cough.

"You always did bring your work home. No wonder
our life became such a hell."

He knew that that was not true. They had rubbed
each other raw for other reasons, the causes of most of
which they did not understand. There was, however, no
use arguing. He had had enough of that.

He sat up and swung his legs over the bed and stood
up and walked to the chair on which he had piled his
clothes.

"What are you doing?"

"Some of the smog gotten in your brain?" he said.
"It's obvious I'm going to dress, and it's fairly predic-
table that I'm getting out of here."

He checked the impulse to say, "Forever!" It sounded
so childish. But it could be true.

She said nothing. She swayed back and forth with her
eyes closed for a minute, then, after opening them,
spun around and walked into the living room. A minute
later, he followed her. She was on the divan and glar-
ing at him.

"I haven't had such a ball ache since I was a teen-
ager and came home from my first necking party," he
said. He did not know why he said it; certainly, he did
not expect her to feel sorry for him, and to do some-
thing about it. Or did he?

"Necking party? You're sure dating yourself, old man!"

She looked furious. Unfortunately, fury did not make
her beautiful.

Yet, he hated to leave; he had a vague feeling that
he was somehow at fault.

He took one step toward her and stopped. He was go-
ing to kiss her, but it was force of habit that pushed him.

"Good-by," he said. "I really am sorry, in a way."

"In a way!" she screamed. "Now isn't that just like
you! You can't be all sorry or all righteously indignant
or all right or all wrong! You have to be half-sorry. You
... you … half-assed half-man!"

"And so we leave exotic Sybil-land," he said, as he
swung the door open. "It sinks slowly into the smog of
fantastic Southern California, and we say aloha, farewell,
adieu, and kiss my ass!"

Sybil sprang out of the chair with a scream and came
at him with fingers hooked to catch his face with her
nails. He caught them and shoved her back so that she
staggered against the sofa. She caught herself and then
yelled, "You asshole! I hate you! I had a choice to make!
I let you come here, instead of Al! I wanted you, not
him! He was strictly second-choice, and a bad second at
that! You think you're hard up, you don't know
what hard up is! I've turned down lots of men because I
kept hoping every night you'd call me! I'd eat you up;
you'd be days getting out of here. I'd love you, oh, how
I'd love you! And now this, you stinking bastard! Well,
I'm going to call Al, and he's going to get everything I
was going to give you and more! More! More! Do
you understand that, you?"

He understood that he could still feel jealous. He felt
like punching her and then waiting for Al and kicking
him downstairs.

But it would be no good trying to make up with her.
Not now. Actually, not ever, but he wasn't quite ready to
believe this. Not down there where certainty dwelt.

Trying to grasp what ruined their love was like trying
to close your fingers on a handful of smog.

He strode through the door and, knowing that she ex-
pected him to slam it behind him, did not.

Perhaps it was this that drove her to the last barbarism.
She stepped into the hall and shouted, "I'll suck his
cock! I'll suck his cock, you!"

He turned and shouted, "You're no lady!" and spun
around and walked off.

Outside, in the biting veils of gray-green, he laughed
until he coughed raspingly, and then he cried. Part of
the tears was engendered by the smog, part by his grief
and rage. It was sad and heart-rending and disgusting
and comical. One-upmanship was all right, but the
one-upman actually upped it up his own one.

"When the hell is she going to grow up?" he groaned,
and then, "When the hell am
I?
When will the Childe
become father to the man?"

Dante was thirty-five, midway in his life's journey,
when he went astray from the straight road and woke
to find himself alone in a dark wood.

But he obtained a professional guide, and he had at
least once been on the straight road, the True Way.

Childe did not remember having been on the straight
road. And where was his Virgil? The son of a bitch must
be striking for higher pay and shorter hours.

Every man his own Virgil, Childe said, and, coughing
(like Miniver Cheevy), pushed through the smog.

Somebody had broken the left front window of the
Olds while he was with Sybil. A glance at the front seat
showed him why. The gas mask was gone. He cursed.
The mask had cost him fifty dollars when he purchased
it yesterday, and there were no more to be had except
in the black market. The masks were selling for two hun-
dred or more dollars, and it took time to locate a seller.

He had the time, but he did not have the cash in hand
and he doubted that his check would be accepted. The
banks were closed, and the smog might disappear so sud-
denly that he would not need the mask and would
stop payment of the check. There was nothing to do
except use a wet handkerchief and a pair of goggles he
had worn when he had a motorcycle. That meant he
must return to his apartment.

He made up a pile of handkerchiefs and filled a can-
teen with water as soon as he was home. He dialed the
LAPD to report the theft, but, after two minutes, he
gave up. The line was likely to be busy all day and all
night and indefinitely into the future. He brushed his
teeth and washed his face. The wash rag looked yellow.
Probably it was his imagination, but the yellow could be
the smog coming out. The yellow looked like the stuff
that clouded his windshield in the morning after several
days of heavy smog. The air of Los Angeles was an
ocean in which poisonous plankton drifted.

He ate a sandwich of cold sliced beef with a dill
pickle and drank a glass of milk, although he did
not feel hungry. Visualizations of Sybil with Al troubled
him. He didn't know Al, but he could not bar shad-
owy images whose only bright features—too bright—
were a rigid monstrosity and a pair of hairy, never-empty
testicles. The pump-pump-pumping sound was also only
a shadow, but it would not go away either. Shadows
sometimes turned out to be indelible ink blots.

He forced himself to consider Matthew Colben and his
murderers. At least, he
thought
they were murderers.
There was no proof that Colben had been killed. He

might be alive, though not well, somewhere in this area.
Or someplace else.

Now that he was recovering from his shock, he could
even think that Colben might be untouched and the
film faked.

He could think this, but he did not believe it.

The phone rang. Someone was getting through to him,
even if he could get through to no one. Suspecting that
only the police could ram through a call, he picked up
the phone. Sergeant Bruin's voice, husky and growling
like a bear just waking up from hibernation, said,
"Childe?"

"Yes."

"We got proof that they mean business. That film
wasn't faked."

Childe was startled. He said, "I was just thinking
about a fraud. How'd you find out?"

"We just opened a package mailed from Pasadena."

Bruin paused. Childe said, "Yeah?"

"Yeah. Colben's prick was in it. The end of it, any-
way. Somebody's prick, anyway. It sure as hell had
been bitten off."

"No leads yet?" Childe said after some hesitation.

"The package's being checked, but we don't expect
anything, naturally. And I got bad news. I'm being taken
off the case, well, almost entirely taken off. We got too
many other things just now, you know why. If there's
going to be any work done on this, Childe, you'll have to
do it. But don't go off half-cocked and don't do nothing
if you get a definite lead, which I think you ain't going
to get. You know what I mean. You been in the busi-
ness."

"Yes, I know," Childe said. "I'm going to do what
I can, which, as you said, probably won't be much. I
have nothing else to do now, anyway."

"You could come down here and swear in," Bruin
said. "We need men right now! The traffic all over the
city is a mess, like I never saw before. Everybody's try-
ing to get out. This is going to be a ghost town. But it'll
be a mess, a bloody mess, today and tomorrow. I'm tell-
ing you, I never seen nothing like it before."

Bruin could be stolid about Colben, but the prospect

of the greatest traffic jam ever unfroze his bowels. He
was really being moved.

"If I need help, or if I stumble—and I mean stumble
—across anything significant, should I call you?"

"You can leave a message. I'll call you back when—
if—I get in. Good luck, Childe."

"Same to you, Bruin," Childe said and muttered as he
hung up, "
O Ursus Horribilis!
Or whatever the voca-
tive case is."

He became aware that he was sweating, that his eyes
felt as if they'd been filed, his sinuses hurt, he had a
headache, his throat felt raw, his lungs were wheezing
for the first time in five years since he had quit smoking
tobacco, and, not too far off, horns were blaring.

He could do something to ease the effects of the
poisoned air, but he could do little about the cars out in
the street. When he had left his wife's apartment, he
had had a surprising amount of trouble getting across
Burton Way to San Vicente. There was no stop light at
this point on Le Doux. Cars had to buck traffic coming
down Burton Way on one side and going up on the other
side of the divider. Coming down to the apartment, he
had not seen a car or even a pair of headlights in the
dimness. But, going back, he had had to be careful in
crossing. The lights sprang out of the gray-greenness with
startling rapidity as they rounded a nearby curve of
Burton Way to the west. He had managed to find a break
large enough to justify gunning across. Even so, a pair
of lights and a blaring horn and squealing brakes and a
shouted curse—subject to the Doppler effect—told him
that a speeder had come close.

The traffic going west toward Beverly Hills was light,
but that coming across Burton Way between the boule-
vards to cut southeast on San Vicente was heavy. There
was panic among the drivers. The cars were two deep,
then suddenly three deep, and Childe had barely had
room to squeeze through. He was being forced out of
his own lane and against the curb. Several times, he only
got by by rubbing his tires hard against the curb.

The light at San Vicente and Third was red for him,
but the cars coming down San Vicente were going
through it. A car going east on Third, horn bellowing,
tried to bull its way through. It collided lightly with