NIGHT CRUISING (29 page)

Suddenly he slapped the
inside of her thigh hard enough to leave a palm print. She scooted
away from him, hugging her knees together. Tears stood in her dark
eyes.

"Just a little
love tap," he said, grinning.

"It's not funny,"
she said in her quirky accent.

"Come here, baby.
Let me make it all better."

She shook her head and
long black hair fell around her brown shoulders.

He grabbed himself and
smiled. "Don't you want this? Come on over here and help me make
it work again."

Lust overcame her fear
as he knew it would. This little backwater whore never failed him.
She did it for money and she did it out of burning need. She relaxed
her legs until they were out again on the bed beside him. He gently
pressed her ankles apart and leaned over her fragrant core.

"Umm, so sweet."

She reached to the bed
table and dipped the tips of her long fingers into a brass dish of
golden honey. She let drops of it fall past his face onto her flat
belly. She smeared it in a circular fashion all around until he began
to slurp from her fingers.

"Now it's
sweeter," she said, arching her back for him.

Cruise relinquished
himself to taste and touch, everything in the room dimming at the
edges as if a fog undulated over the sparse furnishings.

"You," he
murmured, pointing behind him, "come join in the fun."

The second girl who had
been napping in a chair against the wall woke immediately and sidled
over to the bed. She wasn't nearly as pretty or willing as the girl
on the bed, but she would do. She didn't understand a word of
English. She took orders from his tone of voice, from how he pointed
to what he wanted.

"On your tits,"
he said. "Put the honey there."

She covered her small
budding breasts with the golden syrup, massaging her nipples until
they stood out like small milk-chocolate cones. She lowered the top
half of her body

toward him.

Cruise leisurely tasted
the two girls. The last time should be the best one. He had to hurry
before the sun was too much higher in the sky. He couldn't
concentrate when the room grew too light.

Mental flashes kept
intruding so that his tongue slowed as if the battery powering it
were losing energy.

Molly lying on the sand
in the desert.

The convenience store
clerk compliant in his arms until the knife worked a path through her
throat.

The bottled water
sluicing over his head.

Edward's face under the
skim of river water, his mouth open in a last choking gasp.

Damn it!

He pushed off the two
girls lying side by side in the bed. He ran a hand over his face,
pulled on his beard until it hurt.

"What's the
matter?" the pretty one asked.

"Shut up. You just
shut up."

He crossed his arms
over his chest and moved his hands up and down the scabrous wounds.
They needed opening again.

He might be able to get
it up for a final session if there was blood on the girls.

He reached beneath his
hair for the knife. Both girls looked at him in horror. They knew
about the knife. They had touched it during their lovemaking as if it
were an icon of luck.

"Don't worry. I
don't want to cut you."

He spoke the truth. He
wanted to cut himself to let out the worms of anxiety. They crawled
beneath his skin in tormenting waves that would not...

Would not cease.

He made small incisions
an eighth of an inch deep, two and three inches long all up and down
both arms from the top of his shoulders to the inside of his wrists.
The blood peaked and ran. He put away the knife when he felt that he
could, and held out his dripping arms over the bodies on the bed that
watched him in silence and increasing dread.

Cruise didn't see how
they turned their faces away when he began to lick the red honey
mixture from the brown succulent skin. He didn't notice when they
turned cold as statues as he mounted one and kissed the other's blood
ruby lips.

THE SEVENTH NIGHT

All day Molly blistered
in the sun. Heat waves rose from the Chrysler's hood, wavering and
blurring her view of the cantina walls. At one point Molly was forced
to beg for water. One of the girls waiting tables inside was given
the message by an old man pushing a grocery cart of aluminum cans.
The bar girl came out with a tall bottle of Coca Cola slippery with
ice crystals. Molly thanked her profusely, her throat so dry and raw
her voice sounded deeper than it really was.

The girl stood beside
the car waiting to return the empty bottle inside. She appeared to
think it the most natural thing in creation for someone to be held
prisoner by ropes while the sun baked the town clean of pedestrians.
She swiped at a cloud of black flies that hovered just at the window
edge, but they came back, re-formed into the original configuration.

Molly tried to talk to
the girl. She looked to be sixteen or seventeen, and she had a sweet
Madonna face that did not smile. Molly wondered if the girl had ever
known a situation that called for smiling.

"Will you untie
me?" Molly held up her wrists as far as they would go. She
lifted her ankles from the floorboard and let her feet thump down
again. "Cruise won't let me go. Can't you help me? I want to go
home. Wouldn't you want to go home if you were me?"

The Mexican girl stared
off across the street behind the Chrysler as if she didn't understand
and didn't care to. She tapped one sandaled foot in the sand, waiting
for Molly to finish drinking the Coke.

Molly finished, gulping
the last of the fizzing liquid down her parched throat. The rapid
guzzling gave her a temporary bout of hiccups. She wouldn't turn over
the bottle until she could make the girl understand. "You know
Cruise, right? He carries a knife hidden in his hair, did you know
that too?"

The girl reached
through the window to take the bottle. Molly held it out of reach.
"No, wait! Isn't there anyone here who will stand up to him? Are
you all so scared, you'd let me stay prisoner in this car all night
and all day? You'd let him take me away from here and kill me
somewhere, leave me beside the road? How could you live with
yourself? How could you let that happen? Don't you have police?
Someone--anyone-- who cares?"

Molly ran out of breath
and sat hiccuping, crying now, her voice so pitiful that she had made
herself miserable. There were deep half moons beneath her eyes. Her
lips were rough and reddened, a split caked over with scab down the
center of her bottom lip. Scrapes and scratches from the fall she
took in the desert left red marks on her arms and face, burn marks
were raised on the flesh of her chest where the man with the mustache
rubbed against her. She had managed to drape scraps of cloth from her
torn blouse over her breasts, but the breeze kept blowing them aside.
She tried, but couldn't get her fingers to the zipper in her jeans.
They still stood open so that the top elastic of her panties showed
white against her ivory freckled skin.

"Look at me."
She had to scream. The girl wanted nothing to do with her beyond
supplying the cold drink. She wasn't listening.

"Will you just
look what he's done to me?"

The girl flinched at
the shout, but she continued staring into the distance.

Molly handed over the
Coke bottle and lay her head on the window ledge. "Never mind
then," she said quietly. "I don't care." And at that
moment she didn't.

"You
want...tamale? Chalupas?" It was the first words the girl had
bothered to say. She
did
know English.

Molly didn't raise her
head. She said, "I don't care. I don't care if I starve to
death."

She heard her walking
away, small bits of gravel stone crunching into the sand beneath her
heels. Sometime later when the sun was high overhead and Molly fell
into and out of bizarre dreams, the girl returned with three tamales
wrapped in wax paper, and another icy Coke. This time she didn't wait
for the empty. She left immediately for the cantina.

Molly wolfed down the
food, grateful to have it. She needed to go to the bathroom. She
wondered if she was going to get used to the feeling of bloat and
fullness, wondered if her bladder would expand or if she might have
to release it while she sat tied in the car seat. She had held it all
day in Lannie's house, trapped in the bathtub. It was Lannie, upon
untying her, who let her use the toilet right away, standing guard
outside while Cruise called down the hallway for her to hurry, it was
past dark, they had to leave.

In the sultry, stifling
afternoon a little boy came by the car swinging a tin can tied by
string to a stick. Molly called him over. "Hey, kid! C'mere a
minute."

The boy was about six,
big black eyes, a youthful and trusting grin splitting his face. The
grin dissipated the closer he came to her. She knew she must look a
fright with her hair uncombed and full of sand, her face tired and
scratched. She thought the boy wouldn't be able to see inside the
car, see that her clothes were ripped. But when he came closer,
dragging the can behind him, he stood on tiptoe. He put hands on the
window frame, and his eyes widened on seeing her naked breasts.

"Look...I..."

He was fleet as a
startled deer, running from the car into the dirt street,
disappearing between houses, his can rattling along the ground beside
him.

"
Damn.
"

Sweat rolled down her
temples into her eyes and stung with her own body salts. She leaned
down to wipe her eyes against the strips of fabric hanging from her
shoulder. She wished she could hide the bra, could cover herself. She
wished the girl would come back so she could beg her help just once
more. She was sure she could convince someone to help her, if she
only tried harder, pleaded with more zeal, cried more furiously,
shouted longer and louder.

She thought this, kept
her hope alive, until the sky darkened and the sun died in flames of
red and gold glory. The skinny rooster strode the street again,
crowing in confusion. Men laughed and made jokes when they came to
touch her hair before entering the now lively cantina.

Cruise appeared in the
doorway in the dull gray twilight. He looked rested and washed, his
hair reflecting light from inside the cantina. He wore the same
clothes, the long-sleeved blue shirt, the navy slacks, but something
was different about him, and Molly couldn't put a finger on what it
was. His upper body looked...bigger, maybe. No, it was his arms. He
had Popeye arms. Arnold Schwarzenegger arms. They looked so thick
they bulged and stretched tight the material of his shirt. How could
he have done that?

Before he could get
into the driver's seat, she said, "I have to go to the bathroom.
I have to put on some clothes."

He sat down in the
seat, leaving the car door open. It was the first time he had seen
her partially unclothed and she blushed and looked down at her hands,
ashamed of her nakedness. She hunched her shoulders, but that
produced a slight cleavage that distressed her so she tried to relax.
It wasn't her fault The Nubs were bare. It was
his
fault those
men had touched her...had done those things to her. He was the one
who should feel shame. Nevertheless she ducked her head and tried
pretending it didn't matter.

"Can I get a
shirt?"

He reached behind him,
his movement causing her to jerk sideways. He hauled her blue
carryall into his lap and unzipped it. He drew out a T-shirt with
pink flamingos imprinted on the front and a legend below that spelled
out FLORIDA in lime green.

He threw the bag in the
back seat.

"You'll have to
untie me first."

"I'm going to.
Gimmee time." He carefully unraveled the rope and slipped the
loops from her hands."You can take it off your feet yourself,"
he said.

She leaned down, her
nipples brushing against her thighs as she took the rope from her
ankles. She shivered as if a mild bolt of electricity had shot
through her veins. Even her nipples were raw. She was going to bawl
again if she thought about the men who molested her.

Her muscles ached, her
back was a solid pain zone, and her poor backside--her buttocks felt
dead as stones. The T-shirt fell into her hands as she sat up. She
turned her back to Cruise, wriggled out of the torn blouse, slipped
the shirt over her head. She zipped the jeans over the pudge of her
bloating stomach, sucking in as she did so.

"The bathroom?"

He nodded, and stepped
out of the car. She opened her door, had a little trouble lifting her
legs to the ground. She had to lever herself from the seat by hanging
on to the top of the door. Her legs felt wooden. Her bottom tingled
and stung now, the circulation coming to life. She groaned, took a
step away from the car. Cruise stood back, giving her a chance to
make it on her own.

"Where?" she
asked.

"Go inside.
There's a bathroom behind the curtains at the back, near the stairs."

She hobbled into the
cantina, trying not to look anyone in the eye. Some of these same men
had been the ones who assaulted her the night before. She didn't see
the girl who brought her food and Cokes. She kept her gaze lowered,
watching her footsteps as she shuffled across the room, the crowd
opening a passageway as she moved through it. The noise in the bar
died down to an uneasy silence.

"Damn you,"
she muttered at Cruise beneath her breath. "You bastard."

He was right at her
back. "Shut up. Just keep going."

"Damn you."

She made it without
falling down, but her rear was a pincushion of new sensations. She
slipped past the flowered curtains, across a dark hall, past the
shadowed stairs, into a dirty bathroom painted a shade of red she'd
never seen before. Cruise shut the door for her, stood outside
waiting. She had to lower the toilet lid with the tip of one finger,
afraid of the splashes and dark spots around the rim. She couldn't
hurry fast enough to get her jeans undone and stripped down her legs;
she was dribbling water before she ever lowered herself to the seat.
She never sat on public toilet seats, but this time she hadn't the
strength to hold herself suspended over it. She covered her face with
her hands in despair when she saw there was no toilet paper. All
these small things might build to such a peak they destroyed her, she
thought. The humiliation of it. The helpless feeling, the refusal of
everyone to lend a hand to save her from Cruise.