SOMETHING WAITS (5 page)

“And…?”

“He was there. We did it in the women’s john. Twice.”

“You didn’t!”

“He followed me in. I was sitting there doing my thing and all at once there he was, pulling back the door, grinning. He shoved me up against the tile, hiked up my dress and away we went. I came like a drunk nun, pounding on the wall.”

“You’re putting me on! In a mall toilet!”

“I think he liked it down and dirty like that. We did it in elevators too. Hotel halls. Any place dangerous and exciting. Outside in the park, sometimes. The warm sun on his hard, white ass. Neither of us uttering a word to each other. Just groans. And gasps. Mmm.”

“Karen, this is sick.”

“Isn’t it? We did it ten times one afternoon. Ten times. In
every
position. I was awash in the Big Sticky, kiddo. It was unreal. Unreal. It was…it was…”

“
What
! Don’t drift off on me now!”

“…it was…addictive. I fell in love.”

“You fell in lust. I can’t believe this is you talking.”

“It went on that way for weeks. Every day. I was so…sore. And the more sore I got, the more I wanted it. I got so bad one night I broke the rules. I shouldn’t have done that…shouldn’t have…that’s when it all started coming apart…”

“The ‘rules’?”

“The no-address rules. I followed him home one night. He lived over on the West Side, nice place, big two-story Victorian. Dormers and all. I pulled up down the street, watched him go in, watched him come out again. I should have gone home. But I wanted him, I wanted him so bad. And the only thing at home was Ed. And his smut. So…I sneaked into lumberjack’s house…”

“Please tell me you’re making this up.”

“I snooped around downstairs like a common thief. It was thrilling. Dangerous. Nerve-wracking. Made me wet. Can you understand? I went upstairs. He had this incredible enormous canopy bed. I stripped, lay across the satin duvet, awaited my prince.”

“Christ, Karen, I can’t believe—weren’t you—“

“To death! I heard voices below, then on the staircase. He had someone with him. I hid in the closet.”

“With your clothes, I hope!”

“He brings in this really gorgeous blonde, really stacked. I’m watching through the crack in the closet door. The room is suddenly very bright, very bright, like the sun just came up. Glennie—this gets pretty sick now…”

“Don’t—“

“He’s got her bent over the bed, his big thing in her, and it’s turning me on, Glennie, I know how that sounds, but this guy…I wasn’t jealous, wasn’t mad, just so goddamn unbelievably hot. That’s when…that’s when…”

“What
what
!”

“He picks up the knife.”

“No.”

“From atop the bureau.”

“Karen, don’t!”

“I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.”

“Oh Jesus, Oh Christ, I
knew
it! Don’t tell me anymore, I can’t do this!”

“He stabbed her, Glennie. He stabbed her. He stabbed her. The blood just…flew.”

“Karen—“

“And the bastard, the bastard is still in her! And then and then…then I guess I passed out.”

“Please, I’m going to be sick!”

“When I woke up, the room was dark. The house was empty. I got the hell out of there. Back at home, Ed’s waiting with his damn cuffs. And his stories about how they found another girl. I threw up most of the night. Told Ed it was the flu.”

“Dear God. Dear God.” Glenda shook spastically, managed to keep it under control. “You—my God, you’re lucky to be alive! Did they catch the guy? Karen? Hey!
Karen
--?”

“…what…”

“Wake up! Did they catch the guy?”

“I…no…I didn’t tell them…”

“Didn’t…
why
!”

“…you don’t understand, Glennie…you could never understand…I tell you I was addicted…I was…I was beyond sick…I’d like there in bed at night and see the knife, the red…and all I could think about was being under him. I didn’t care, don’t you see…I was ready to die for it…”

“Karen, oh God. What’s
happened
to you!”

“He happened. He happened. And I couldn’t let him go. Didn’t want to let him go. I got a knife from the kitchen, just for protection, took it with me. We had this Tuesday night thing at this cruddy motel. I don’t think I really intended to ever use it…didn’t really believe he’d—“

“Karen, don’t! I can’t breathe in here!”

“I panicked. He was standing over me there next to the crummy bed, naked…so big, so huge, huge…I just…I panicked. And then the knife was out of my hands and—in him. Way in. I don’t even know how it got there. And I was running…running…running…”

Glenda clutched nausea, the room listing lazily, like Uncle Fred’s yacht. “Karen? Honey? Are you there?”

Barely audible now, slipping: “…wasn’t much blood, not on me. And then I was just home again. Just suddenly home again. Like it never happened. Only it had. It had.”

“Baby…”

“No, there’s more. I washed my face, gave myself a few minutes, then came into the living room. Ed was setting up the damn DVD player, had this sick grin on his face. ‘You’ll like this one,’ he says, ‘One of them phony snuff movies! Lots of fake blood and bad acting!” And then he’s got me down, cuffed me down, and he’s huffing away and I’m…I’m…I’m looking up at the screen, my heart…my heart just seemed to stop…”

“What--?”

Just a whisper: “…it’s him, Glennie, my big silent hunk, my lovely lumberjack,
on the TV,
humping the stacked blonde in his bedroom. That’s why the lights got so bright that night…he was making
movies
…stupid, phony snuff movies…

“Ed was laughing. ‘That’s Sally Palmer,’ he says. ‘We call her Sally-the-Pump down at the precinct! Hooker! Works Cimarron and Central. Saw here there tonight, in fact. Does this sort of phony snuff crap all the time.’”

Glenda lurched up, twisting, pain spiking her ankle, groped for the lid, just got it up before her dinner and probably her lunch found the pale bowl.

The voice from the tub so feeble now, so dreadfully feeble: “…he wasn’t the killer at all, you see…I killed an innocent man…an innocent…man…”

Glenda coughed, raw-throated, slipped to her knees, sat there panting weakly, head down and swimming against the cool porcelain, dancing dots behind her lids. Pushed up and slipped again. Had she gotten some of it on the floor, have to clean it up, it was slippery all over the floor…sticky…

“Karen? Don’t fall asleep! Karen, you’ll drown…”

Her own voice sounded far away now. Probably she’d gotten it on her dress too, the Armani she’d worn at the meeting, damn. “Karen--?”

The air conditioner thumped on first.

Then the blinking fluorescents, stuttering brightness…the room coloring pink, then red…and deeper.

Red on the sticky floor, the walls, but mostly the tub, the tub filled with it, nearly black with it, sides scalloped crimson. Karen waxy as death within.

Glenda, strangely composed, stared at the friend’s corpse: breasts bobbing, chin tilted, mouth still caught in mid-sentence, livid islands in the sea of blood. The left arm, fallen free, dangled with deep slashes, leaking still.

On the sticky floor, Glenda’s shoe found the fallen razor, nudged it, smearing Karen’s blood. She stared curiously at it, dreamily, her swimming head cocked like a bird, eyes finally lifting to her own laughably shocked reflection in the sink mirror…staring silently, listening to her mind saying quite reasonably really: I’m a CEO, I live in Frisco now, I’m not part of this, any of this at all…

Along with screenplays and teleplays and novels I’ve been known to write a comic book or two. We all have our skeletons. Other than one other story in this collection, “Pride of the Fleet”, I haven’t done all that much cross pollinating between the formats. For one thing, short prose does not often a good comic story make. Also, I don’t like repeating myself unless absolutely necessary (read: broke). It was with some alarm, then, that I noticed, while picking out these various footprints of my youth, I’d used the following tale in a comic book version too, albeit title only. I know you can’t copyright a title and I’m not about to sue myself in any case, but it does add to the confusion. My billions of fans don’t like it. And it gives me a personal twinge; things are complicated enough in life, I don’t need an earlier marker for encroaching Alzheimer’s in my life right now. It also makes me wonder how many times in my career I’ve suffered similar redundancies unaware. Really, the two stories have nothing in common whatsoever other than the title; still it peeves me for some reason. Couldn’t I have been cleverer? Is my literary arsenal so limited? Am I getting sloppy? It’s like a criticism received recently for my novel SHIMMER. The book’s gotten consistent five star reviews so far, I’m happy to say, but for one very nice lady who gave it a “four.” She really did like the book, she admitted, except it was “too long” and had “too many adjectives.” I’m not even sure what that means but it bugs me. I don’t like having “too many” anythings: too many traffic tickets, too many TV channels, too many toes on one foot. (Too many long introductions to stories?)

One thing writers never get too much of is positive reaction. Facebook has changed that somewhat in recent years, which is nice, I guess. The following is one of the few stories I actually received good feedback on first-hand. When Blackthorne Press invited me to publish this story it was edited by good friend and associate Jane McKay. I remember Jane looking up after she’d finished the proofing, all wide-eyed and Oooo-mouthed: “Boy, Bruce, that ending really creeped me out!” Mission accomplished, I say. The kind of thing that makes my day, knowing I’ve affected someone with my work even if it has to be in a “creeped out” sort of way. So often we feel we’re just sitting here in our lonely little haunts typing into a void. Hello—our voice echoes, anybody out there? Anybody that’s not watching TV? No? Never mind.

My chief goal in what follows was the same goal I always have when approaching a story: try like hell to be original. I read a lot—I mean a lot—of short fiction as a kid; in fact I have this whole theory I call the “30 Minute Syndrome” from reading all that short fiction and watching all those half hour TV shows; which may partly explain my ADHD and mild dyslexia but that’s another story. But the one thing I swore to myself back then was when I grew up to become the next Faulkner, I would not repeat or willfully ape those great tales that so inspired me…nor repeat myself if humanly possible. I’d dig down deep, instead, seek out the nastiest part of that lurking ID that hides from us all, dwell with the horrid little bugger long enough to get back out alive and complete something as freshly original as possible. To what extent I’ve succeeded in this lofty endeavor over the years is open to debate, but the thing I want to impress upon you is--glib and offhanded as some of these tales may seem--I really did try. Gave them my best. Otherwise, my theory being, what was the point? There’s always the mall.

The sad thing, of course, is that the best stories can never be consciously unearthed; they always come from some other direction, a gift, usually when you’re in zone mode, taking a shower or weeding the yard. But maybe that’s a good thing…maybe that explains just how deeply subconscious some of the best ones really are. It’s like you couldn’t bear to face them in the daylight of awareness. All of which may be so much pie-in-the-sky but the only immediate rationale I have. It will have to serve for the moment. And to hopefully explain what in God’s name I was thinking while creating something as self-disturbing and cloyingly grim as

L
es sat tensely behind the wheel of the little import, lips pressed in a flat, sardonic grimace, patina of sweat filming his forehead, perpetual notch cleaving his brow. He was not happy.

The winding costal road was narrowly steep. The fog was heavy and viscous. The car salesman was a liar.

He’d told Les the little foreign import would behave well in inclement weather.
“Purr like a kitten through the thickest pea soup! These cars love the cold and wet!”
The car was neither purring nor in love. It was torpid, lunging and resentful. It
coughed.
Worst, the brakes felt soft on the steepest grades.