Strangers (4 page)

The man petted him. The dog’s hindquarters swung in tail-wagging happiness. The man said, “You are a miserable old piece of shit, aren’t you? Sure you are, you useless old fucker.”

Still stroking the dog’s back, the man turned the animal around, talking softly and reassuringly. Then the man clamped his hand around the dog’s muzzle.

The dog didn’t like that. He tried to open his mouth and could not, tried to squirm free and could not. Then the man was twisting the dog’s head, hurting, pressing down on his neck, hurting.

In the dog’s throat was a growl and
a yipe
of pain that couldn’t get out.

When the dog’s neck broke, the sound was muffled by fur and flesh.

— | — | —

TWO

STEAM ROSE from the tub and their bodies. The enclosure’s fiberglass doors were clouded. In these few square feet of wet and heat, Beth felt sealed away from the starkness of a sometimes too-real world; this was better, a wispy, ethereal softness enveloping her like a good dream.

Smiling, Michael said, “I’ll get your back for you.” She turned, dipping her head into the full force of the shower spray, rinsing out the lathered shampoo.

Washcloth covering his fingers, Michael massaged her neck, kneading away the muscular stiffness. He rubbed her shoulders,
then
moved down the center of her back, tracing the ridges of her spine.

“That’s nice,” Beth sighed, feeling as though she understood why cats purr. Then she nearly hiccupped, but managed to catch herself, changing it to a giggle.

She was drunk—not
drunk
drunk but happily buoyant and wonderfully relaxed. Along with the chicken, Michael had brought home a bottle of Blue Nun. Lounging on throw pillows on the carpet in the basement rec room, they’d had an air-conditioned picnic with paper plates and plastic glasses.
And all right, I ordinarily don’t drink that much but it was so good!
They’d had the stereo on, violin-heavy “beautiful music,” the type she generally ignored in elevators or doctors’ waiting rooms, but that tonight had seemed sweet and lushly romantic. And when the meal was concluded, the wine bottle nearer empty than full, Michael said, “I do love you, Beth, really love you.” The way he’d said it, his hazel eyes, touched her as a spontaneous overflow of his truest feelings and her own eyes misted.

Michael’s washcloth-gloved hand was now on her left buttock. Playfully, she smacked his wrist. “I’m not a baby. I can wash my own bottom.”

“And deny me the pleasure?” Michael laughed.

“Well, if you insist,” Beth felt a warm shiveriness at his touch as though there were goose bumps just beneath the surface of her skin.

“Definitely a lovely ass, my dear,” Michael said. Beth shifted her feet apart and rose up on
tip-toe
, bracing herself with her palms on the tile wall. She pushed her hips back, buttocks tightening, arched toward him.

Michael smoothed the washcloth over the outer swell of her hip. “Rub-a-dub-dub,” he said, and then he was stroking her inner thighs, his fingers a so definite touch beneath the heat-holding wetness of the cloth, moving up
,
touching her, higher between her legs, rubbing.

Beth shuddered with pleasure. She floated into the totality of Now: Michael’s caresses. The water, its feel, the hissing ring of it the only sound in
all the
universe. The simple and magical
niceness
of hereandnow, being clean and naked and steamy with this clean and naked man, who touched her, who loved her,
her husband, Michael…

She lurched away from the wall, turning, to throw her arms around him. She wanted him—wanted him with an achingly intense desire that she’d not known for too long—and she knew he wanted her, felt his want, the rigidity of him that was now between them but that would unite them, make them one, BethandMichael, MichaelandBeth, a completion, much more than the sum of the parts.

They could not make love in the shower.

They did not delay by leaving the washroom, going across the hall to their bedroom.

Naked and wet, the hair on his chest gleaming with water droplets, Michael lay on his back on the large brown oval rug on the tile floor. His arms were out to her. “Come on, honey, yes.”

She lowered herself upon him, guiding his smooth maleness into flesh that was moist with readiness to receive him.

So good,
she thought…
Magic!
The fullness within her was exciting, yet was also somehow sentimentally nostalgic, like a trip home after years of wandering. This was a joining together. This was connection.

Pressing the heels of her hands—on his hipbones, her fingers spread on his lean belly; Beth rocked and felt rooted to him.
We are
One
,
she thought,
no way to tell where his flesh leaves off
and mine begins.

She moved slowly at first, and then, as thinking became unnecessary, then impossible, with an increasing speed. Her heartbeat quickened. Her body found a rhythm of up-and-down and side-to-side that suited it, encouraged and guided by Michael’s hands cupping her buttocks.

Beth neared the peak moment felt its promise warm within her. A rising pressure in her throat became a moan.

And then she was
there,
the
blissful convulsion, the whirling rush into release. It was not a falling into the nothingness of dissolution but a blending—of their selves:
HeandI, BethandMichael…

Michael bucked up hard, his body bridging, lifting her. His climactic pulse—
inside her—
made him groan, his mouth set in a rictus. Then his face lost all expression, became
death-mask
placid as his hips fell and he hissed like a tea kettle.

Beth slumped, resting on him. She liked the flesh-covered line of his collarbone where her cheek lay. She liked his hairy chest tickling her buzzingly sensitive nipples. His breath was a soft breeze around her eyes—
a life breeze from inside him, love him…

Michael said, “I love you, honey.”

She thought, I am so
very
happy now
and everything is so fine and everything will always be fine…

The cold ring of the bedroom telephone seemed to drill into the center of her forehead. She felt Michael start.

She held her breath. She hoped for a wrong number discovered after a single ring, but no such luck.

Michael swatted her, his palm
a damp
spat
on her backside. “I do believe you’re—closer to the phone.”

“I… Damn!”

“Uh-huh, always rings just when you don’t want it to.”

The flesh parting from flesh was too hurried, making them both
say
, “Oh.” Snatching a tissue from the plastic dispenser on the toilet’s flush tank, Beth hurried across the hall.

The call?
Michael thought as he sat up. He realized how unlikely that was. There’d been so many calls since he’d begun the waiting time.
Calls from aluminum siding salesmen and newspaper subscription hustlers and insurance agents.
Calls from Beth’s mother, Claire, who insisted on remaining alive and annoying despite astronomically high blood pressure that should have given her at least one major coronary by now. The pestering, piping-voiced calls: “Can I talk to Marcy?” “Can I talk to Kim?”
The wrong numbers.
The calls from the damned dentist, reminding him his teeth needed cleaning. A call from the Red Cross asking him to be a blood donor…

Never
the
call!
The Call of The Strangers—for The Stranger.

He stood up. He splashed water from the vanity basin—
too cold,
damn it
!—
to clean his flaccid penis and pubic hair, dried himself thoroughly with the big brown towel monogrammed “Dad,” and wrapped it around his waist.

Smoothing back his hair, he studied his reflection in the mirrored doors of the medicine chest. Even after all these years of knowing, it came with the faintest tick of surprise that he was unable to see the aura—
his
aura.
His special glow.
The inner light of the Stranger.

He knew all human beings had auras, variously hued, blue, yellow, green, sometimes utterly clear, sometimes—
so rare
—a deep red, a red that seemed suffused with the thickness of arterial blood, but only a few people possessed a form of—sixth sense, the psychic sight, that enabled them to perceive auras. And of those who had that gift, there were not too many with knowledge beyond the rational logic of accepted science to interpret what an aura revealed about a person. Certainly—Michael sneered—most of the so-called clairvoyants who set up card tables at shopping center “psychic fairs” were frauds or even fools who couldn’t read the “E” on an optometrist’s chart if they’d written it themselves. Yes, he knew that about his head was a writhing red nimbus, and he’d had moments when he’d thought he could literally
feel
it, a force that was his life essence, but he had never seen his aura. Nor had he seen the aura of Vern Engelking, his boss and ally, or that of Eddie Markell…

When he was very young, though, he had imagined he’d seen the corona around the head of Jan Pretre.
Jan… whom he had not seen for so many years.
Jan Pretre, his teacher,
who’d
guided him through his rite of initiation. Jan Pretre who wore the invisible red light crown of the Stranger
and who could see the shining brand on other Strangers.

Others… Michael thought.
John Wayne Gacy?
A community leader, a friendly neighbor, the kind of guy who helped young people, lining them up with summer construction jobs, killing them, entombing their corpses beneath the floor of his modest suburban house in Des Plaines. It was possible.

No, the bathroom mirror reflected no aura. Michael Louden saw only the unremarkable features of an “average guy,” the falsehood as the world saw it.

“Michael?”

He turned. Beth had put on her gold terrycloth robe. She stood at the bathroom door. She might have seen him as he was intently studying what was—and wasn’t—in the mirror…

“I can’t understand it,” he said quickly. “I’m no teenager, so why do I still get blackheads?” He traced a line across his unblemished forehead.

“Brad Zeller’s on the phone,” Beth said. “Dusty got lost. Brad sounds just heartsick.”

“Dusty?” Michael said. “Jeez…”

“I told Brad you’d talk to him, Michael. I know Brad. He’s old fashioned and he feels uncomfortable letting a woman know he’s so upset. I think he needs to talk to you.”

“Sure,” Michael said. “Of course.”

Standing by the night table on Beth’s side of the bed, the telephone to his ear, Michael heard it clearly: Zeller was in a bad way.

He let Brad go on for a minute, savouring the hurt and worry that shaped the words, and then Michael said, “Brad, you take it easy, okay? I’m just out of the shower so give me a couple minutes and then we’ll go on a Dusty hunt together.”

“Michael… Thank you. I need…”

“No sweat, my friend,” Michael said. “It’s not likely Dusty booked himself a flight to Rome. We’ll find him.”

Michael put down the receiver. In case Beth walked in, he turned his back to the door.

He grinned.

Michael put on a pair of jeans and a brown and yellow plaid sport shirt. He went next door. When Zeller let him in, Brad’s face was the color of sooty snow except for the red streaks of broken capillaries on his nose.