The True Detective (6 page)

Getting picked up. Was that a way to get a hold of himself? Go out and touch bottom? Or would it only make things worse? He has heard several times of a place near Ogunquit called The Magnificent Obsession. Was that a way to go? Be indiscriminate? Degraded? Take in something—
suck and fuck, call anytime
—to dispose this awful hurt? Hurt Anthony somehow, if he could?

North of Portsmouth, over the state line, he pulls in and parks on gravel just beyond a portable red-and-yellow electric sign that reads Sex Barn. There is a red barn with a cinderblock extension. In the mid-afternoon shadows, the yellow sign box is lighted; perhaps a dozen cars are in the parking lot.

Once before Vernon has passed time in a porn store, and he pauses here before entering. It is exactly the depression from the other time, in Manchester, that persuades him now to enter. He wants his spirit degraded, he thinks, so he won’t think of other things.

Passing through a doorway, causing a bell to tinkle, he finds himself within an offering of walls of hardcore magazines, glass cases of films, black and pink rubber goods, customers—they seem all to be men—stepping along and looking. He moves along, too, keeps his face largely on what is before him. There is flesh everywhere, in sexual positions and arrangements, and it makes his ears ring with embarrassment and confusion. This part of life is so strange, he thinks. It’s the main force, the need to connect, which is his need, too, but means and end still confuse
him. Men confuse him, really, he thinks, because it is himself he wants accepted, not just parts of himself.

He keeps his face on what is before him and shifts along, not unaware of side-glances being sent his way. His urges remain thin. Anthony would ridicule him for this; frightened of something all at once, Vernon begins to tremble.

Around a corner of magazines he looks on two doorways with white-lighted signs overhead. One, to the left says Peep Shows 25 cents. To the right is a more elaborate sign, black letters over milky glass:

Children in Bondage

Triple XXX

$5 NonStop Movie $5

The idea of the film does something to him, in his nervous state, as if it may be a chapter in himself he has not seen before. Still, it isn’t possible for him to walk over and enter. Everyone would stop and look, he thinks, like the commercial on television. Nor can he afford five dollars, he tells himself.

He shifts along before the walls of color photographs, as do the others. There are sections given to “Leather, S & M, Gay Men, and Lesbians. He notices two women with short blond hair at the glass countertop near the door examining rubber penises, long double-ended devices, strap-on devices; they appear so casual they could just as well be in a department store looking over Rubbermaid kitchen goods.

Vernon looks on magazine covers of women with dogs and horses. Long drooping penises, penises cherry red, carrot-shaped. He moves along. What is he doing? he wonders. Would the movie help him escape? Would it disrupt his hurt? What is all this?

He stares at a glossy magazine before him entitled
Young Cocks/Tight Cunts.
Even though it is cellophane-wrapped like the others and cannot be opened, he takes it up, boldly, to look at its back cover. The couple there, the same as on the front, look to be in their late teens. Replacing the magazine, he moves along.

In another Gay Men section, a cover shows two boys who appear to be fifteen or sixteen, but they do not look happy. They look lost. They look like he feels, Vernon thinks, and he realizes what he is doing. He is looking for a way to make a decision on the five-dollar movie.

He browses the glass case then where a man is stationed at a cash register. He looks through glass at Swedish VCR films in red and orange boxes. On the counter is an unsealed magazine called
The New England Connection,
which he takes up and opens. He turns some pages. There are ads, appeals, dim photographs in black and white. He reads:

Mother and daughter desire discrete feminine games. Mature females only. Only inquiries with photo answered. RL-403.

He is propositioned. Not three feet from the clerk, a man at his side says softly, “Look good?” Vernon glances and the man adds, “Want to meet outside? Motel’s just down the road.”

Vernon turns, steps a step away; in a moment he senses the man moving off.

Of a sudden urge, taking the last step and leaning to the clerk, he says in a near-whisper, “Any younger materials?”

“Nope,” the man says, not raising his eyes.

“Stuff isn’t available?” Vernon whispers.

“I said no!” the man says.

“I’ll pay,” Vernon whispers.

The man looks at him then. “Want me to call the fucking cops?” he says.

Vernon retreats. Stepping past another wall of magazines, he removes his wallet, removes a five-dollar bill as he walks. What does anything in his life matter? he is thinking. What does anyone care what he does or who he is? No one cares. Could it be any more clear than it is here that no one cares?

W
ALKING IN TOWN
, M
ATT IS SAYING
, “I’
D PAY THE PRICE
. I really would. Wouldn’t it be something? Wouldn’t it be great, if
any
band in the world was here right now? And we had tickets. This afternoon. Wouldn’t that be great?”

“Well, nobody is,” Cormac says. “Portland’s the closest place and as far as I know—”

“I know that,” Matt says. “Jesus, don’t you think I know that?”

“I don’t see what’s so bad about
here
,” Cormac says.

“Forget it,” Matt says.

“We can go to my house and watch the tube.”

“Screw it,” Matt says. “I want to
be
a video, not watch them on TV.”

“You’re in a great mood,” Cormac says.

Matt doesn’t reply. Moments later, in Variety Mart, at a twenty-foot wall of magazines, he looks up, though, and there is
Vanessa, the black girl from school. As if on the lifting of a magician’s handkerchief, he is smiling at her, as she is smiling at him.

“Hi,” she says. A black girl beside her looks up.

“Hi,” Matt says. His agitation has flown.

Not light-skinned, Vanessa is chocolate and smooth. Her long arms and legs, her long neck with its scant topping of glossy hair convey to him now a black swan. Looking back to his magazine, seeing nothing, he hears laughter ripple from the two girls.

“Who dat?” Cormac whispers.

“Screw you,” Matt says.

“She’s cute,” Cormac says.

“Up yours,” Matt says. “She’s nice,” he adds, a thrill passing through him. Hearing more laughter from the girls, he says, surprised by his own daring, “Interested in the friend?”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“You’re not serious,” Cormac says.

“Why not?”

“They’re black.”

“So what? Let’s.”

“Let’s what?”

“Talk to them. Do something.”

“Not me.”

“Come on.”

“Jesus, I’m not that hard up.”

“Don’t be such a drag. This town is driving me nuts.”

“Not me. No way.”

“Thanks,” Matt says. Seeing that the magazine in his hand is
Electronic Music
and realizing there is no likelihood of his ever owning anything from its pages, he returns it to the rack. Jerk, he thinks. You have no idea what a jerk I think you are.

Seeing that the girls are moving away, he says, “They’re taking off.”

“Look at this,” Cormac says, his face back in his magazine.

“Who cares?” Matt says.

Cormac looks up. “What’s your problem?” he says.

When they have left the store, however, and are walking along the sidewalk, there are the two girls, returning toward them, and Matt sees at once that he and Cormac are being given another chance in a continuing game. “Look, here they are,” he says. Cormac doesn’t respond.

Laughter is coming from the two girls as they approach. Matt laughs, too, and at a dozen feet, in someone else’s voice, he says, “You came back.”

There is some giggling and tittering, and as Matt pulls up to circle, so do the girls. But Cormac keeps walking, and Matt mutters, “C’mere, Cormac, you idiot.”

“My friend, Barbara,” Vanessa is saying, although both glance at Cormac.

“Hi,” Barbara says.

Matt, too confused to know what to say, says, “Cormac, what’re you doing? C’mere!”

“Nah,” Cormac says.

“Oops,” Vanessa says.

Matt glances from one to the other; there is a flash about Vanessa’s fingers of her gold rings.

“Let’s go,” the other girl says.

The girls are walking away, just like that. Laughter breaks between them all at once, and the way their shoulders move makes Matt wince. He turns away, too disappointed to speak.

“Look, I’m not about to hang out with jungle bunnies right in the middle of town,” Cormac says.

Matt cannot speak. He walks along. What a jerk, he thinks. He will end this friendship, he is telling himself.

“I mean it,” Cormac says.

Matt is still unable to speak.

“Well, do you really—” Cormac starts to say.

“Forget it!”
Matt says, as next to each other they continue along the sidewalk.

T
HE ACTION ON THE SCREEN HAS TAKEN TIME TO MEAN
anything. A young boy and girl dressed in Victorian-looking clothes have peeked for a time through a partially opened door into a lighted room. Vernon has felt like he is coming out of himself, although he hasn’t shifted physically from his withdrawn posture in a seat he has taken near the wall. The boy and girl in the dark hallway are young; however the film may have made its way here, they look to be little more than twelve or thirteen.

His interest has begun to grow. Within the lighted room—it appears to be on an upper floor of a mysterious Victorian mansion—a young woman, naked and heavy-breasted, is tied with leather thongs, arms outstretched, to a wall. Of the two men standing by, one is holding a cat-o’nine-tails, the other a switch. The two men wear Victorian dandy clothes. The two
children, to be sure, Vernon realizes, will shortly be discovered, bound, and similarly punished.

So it follows. First, though, as they spy through the door, the boy and girl become aroused. They rub into each other and utter how warm they feel. The girl asks what the bulge is pressing against her thigh and the boy tells her she will know soon enough. From behind her then, as she kneels on the floor to gaze into the room, the boy lifts her several ruffled skirts onto her back and gets down in a crouch to kiss and caress her openings. Making no move to resist, only to accommodate, the girl asks what he is doing and why it feels so hot down there.

It is after he has lowered his knee-length pants and entered her from behind and they become lost in their passion that their sighs give them away and they are discovered. “Well, what have we here?” one of the men says. Dragged and pushed into the room, the two children are ordered at once to undress to be punished for their transgression.

Vernon watches from his corner of the small cinder-block theater. The boy is tied first, with leather thongs, his wrists tied both together and between ankles, causing him to kneel in an exaggerated anal presentation. The two men all along offer comments and touches. One of the two men undresses from the waist down, removing velvet knee pants and white knee stockings, “to allow freedom of movement,” he says. His own nearly erect penis visible between his shirt ends, he takes up the switch to lay on the first swat.

Vernon stares, aware from breathing and movement that someone not far from him in the darkness of the theater is masturbating. His own desire is to rescue the boy on the screen. He would care for him and make him happy. He knows what it is to be happy. He would give him attention and toys, food and clothes. He would walk with him and listen to him. He would be
his friend. Sensing someone is moving to the seat directly beside him, angered at the interruption, Vernon gets up and pushes his way to the aisle—“Well, sorry,” a man’s voice whispers—and a moment later, Vernon is outside in his car, rolling once more along the highway.

Was he actually in there? he wonders. Was it another time lapse? Was it himself he had run away from? Why was the interruption of his fantasy so maddening?

C
LAIRE AND
E
RIC ARE WALKING
,
SOFT
-
ICE
-
CREAM CONES IN
hand. The chili is delivered and Claire has time to kill before going back to the Legion Hall to pull her shift. Thanking Betty several times, she told her she had to stay and set things up, but it was only an excuse not to impose too much. Besides, she had promised Eric an ice-cream cone for helping her.

They walk along working on the cones. Claire has remarked on what a nice day it is. Otherwise they have hardly spoken. It has occurred to her, though, how much she enjoys having time like this with Eric. He’s her sidekick. They can talk or not talk. She needs to be careful, she thinks, not to smother him, not to love him too much. A boy without a father. If Betty was driving them home, she’d be with Betty. This ways she’s with Eric. She likes Betty, but being with her twelve-year-old son, as Eric would say, is prime.

Meteorologists along the coast often use the term
land air,
as they have today. Compared to air coming in over the water, land air is usually warm and dry. Here she is, approaching middle age, Claire thinks. But she feels young today in the warm and dry air. “It’s almost balmy, isn’t it?” she says.

Eric sort of acknowledges that she has spoken.

They go along. Noting a ghetto fence over a storefront across the street, Claire says, “Things are sure changing around here. Maybe we’ll get mugged.”

Eric says, about as she expected, “Don’t worry. You’re with me, you’re safe.”

She laughs. “It’s how I feel,” she says. “I do feel safe with you.”

“Somebody tried to rob us, I’d just bash in their brains.”

Claire smiles but doesn’t say anything. They continue, working on their cones. She hears Eric say, “I’ll learn karate and all that stuff when I go in the Navy.”