They took his car, drove to the dead-end lane he’d scouted earlier. Earlier there had been another car parked at the lane’s far end, and he’d crept close enough to identify its occupants as a courting couple. He’d entertained the idea of taking them by surprise, and some day he’d have to do that, but he’d stayed with his original plan, and had had the great good fortune to find this girl, and the other car was gone now and they could be alone together.
He parked, killed the engine. He took her in his arms, kissed her, touched her. He noted with satisfaction the quickening of her breath, the heat of her response.
Good. She was turned on. Time now to show her who was in charge.
He took hold of her shoulders, moved to press her down on the seat. She didn’t budge. He put more into it, and she pushed back, and how could such a soft and yielding creature be so strong?
Her lips parted, and he saw her fangs, and got his answer.
Now that might work, if we weren’t up to our tits in vampires these days. The undead everywhere, curled up in their coffins, guzzling artificial blood in Louisiana, being the coolest kids in a suburban high school, so many vampires it’s clear Buffy never made a dent in their ranks.
So what’s left? Werewolves? Cannibals? How many ways can we spin this? And to what end?
Ah, the hell with it. I could go on, but why try to dream up something?
Here’s what really happened:
Her apartment, her bedroom, her bed. Soft lighting, soft music playing.
Soft.
“Jerry? Is there, you know, something I should do?”
Dematerialize, he thought. Vanish, in a puff of smoke.
“No.”
“I mean—”
“It’s not gonna happen,” he said.
“That’s okay.”
“I think that last vodka put me one toke over the line, you know?”
“Sure.”
Dammit dammit dammit dammit...
“But here,” he said. “Let’s see if we can make the magic happen for you, huh?”
“You don’t have to—”
“Please.”
He used all his tricks, his mouth on her, a finger in front, a finger in back. It took time, because his own failure held her in check, but he was patient and artful and he found her rhythm and took her all the way. At one point he thought her own excitement might be contagious, but that didn’t happen.
“That was wonderful,” she assured him, afterward. And offered again to do something to arouse him, but seemed just as glad when he told her he was fine, and it was late, and he really ought to be on his way.
He got out of there as quickly as he could, and on the way to his car his hand dropped to feel the knife in his pocket. Its presence was curiously reassuring.
He drove around, thinking about her, thinking of what he could have done, of what he should have done. He found a place to park and thought of what might have been, if he were in life the man he was in his fantasies. The man who didn’t let his knife stay in his pocket. The man who acted, and reacted, and lived as he wanted to live.
The scenario played in his mind. And he responded to it, as he’d been unable to respond to her, and he touched himself, as he had done so many times in the past, and as he’d known he would do from those first moments in the bar.
Afterward, driving home, he thought: Next time I’ll do it. Next time for sure.
See the Woman
Red light’s on, so I guess that thing’s recording. This whole project you’ve got, this oral history, I’ll confess I didn’t see the point of it. You running a tape recorder while an old man runs his mouth.
But it stirs things up, doesn’t it? The other day — Wednesday, it must have been — all I did was talk for an hour or two, and then I went home and lay down for a nap and slept for fifteen hours. I’m an old man, I got up every three hours to pee, but then I went back to bed and fell right back asleep again. And dreams! Can’t recall the last time I dreamed so much.
And then I got up, and my memory was coming up with stuff I never thought of in years. Years! All the way back to when I was a boy growing up in Oklahoma. You know, before the dust, before my old man lost the farm and brought us here. Memories of nothing much. Walking down a farm road watching a garter snake wriggling along in a tractor rut. And me kicking a tin can while I’m walking, just watching the snake, just kicking the can. Del Monte peaches, that’s what the can was. Why’d anybody remember that?
Mostly, though, what I kept going over in my mind was something that happened in my first year on the force. If it’s all the same to you, that’s what I’ll talk about today.
Now you know I wasn’t but sixteen when the Japs bombed Pearl, and like just about everybody else I was down there the next morning looking to get into it. They sent me home when I told them my age, so I waited two days and went back, and wouldn’t you know the same sergeant was behind the desk. This time I told him I was eighteen, and either he didn’t remember me from before or he didn’t give a damn, and they took me.
I went through basic and shipped out to England, and from there to North Africa, and what happened was they cut me out of the infantry and made an MP out of me. But I don’t want to get sidetracked here and tell war stories. I came through it fine and wound up back here in Los Angeles, and I’d been Military Police for better than three years, so after a few months of beer and girls I went down and applied to join the LAPD.
Now what they would do then, and they probably still do it, is when they were done training you they’d partner you up with an older guy. You were partners, you’d ride around together, take turns driving, all of that, but he’s the guy with the experience, so he’s more or less in charge. He’s showing you the ropes and it’s something you can’t get from a book or in a classroom.
They put me in a car with Lew Hagner. Now I’d heard of him, because he had a big part in the Zoot Suit riots in ’43, and there were plenty of Mexicans who’d have liked to see him dead. And after I was home but before I joined up with the department, there was an incident where he got in a gunfight with three Zoot Suiters or pachucos or whatever you want to call ’em. Mexicans, anyway. He got a scratch, treated and released at Valley General, and they were all dead on arrival. One of them, the wounds were in the back, and the press made some noise about that, but most people wanted to give him a medal.
Lew was fifteen years older’n me, and I was what, twenty-two at the time? An old twenty-two, the way everybody’s older after a war, but still. Plus my old man died while I was overseas, and a fifteen year age difference, plus he’s there to show me the ropes, well, I’m not about to say he was like a father to me, but you might say I looked up to him.
Anyway, we’re two guys in a car. And it’s good, and I’m learning things you don’t learn any other way. All the feel of the streets, and what might be trouble and what’s not. What you had to enforce and what you could let slide. When you had to go by the book, when you didn’t even have to open it.
How else are you gonna learn that sort of thing?
A thing he told me early and often was that domestics were the biggest headache I’d ever have. By that I mean domestic disturbances. You just say domestics, you could be talking about somebody’s cleaning girl.
A domestic disturbance, he said, you got two people trying to kill each other, and you walk in the door and they’ve got a united front. It’s both of them against you, and they’ll go back to killing each other as soon as you’re out of the picture, but for now they’re a tag team and you’re it.