“You're so beautiful,” he turned his head so that Ginger could see the scar that made the left side of his face unrecognizable. She saw nuance, shades of red and pink lush as tapestry in his mottled face. He pushed himself inside her, suspending himself over her. Long greasy strands of hair fell forward, shadowing his features; the silver cross around his neck swung just above her eyes. She helped herself along by thinking of the girl she'd seen in a porno magazine with a shaved pussy and then of certain parts in the Manson book, how during an acid trip Jesus said to Charlie, These are your loves and you are their need. How he'd gone out to the family bus, filled a pan of water and given himself a whore's bath, how when the girls came in he washed their dirty feet, one by one, how the girls in turn washed the feet of their boyfriends, and how suddenly the bus was filled with naked bodies. She saw Charlie balling one girl while finger fucking another. Ted rolled over so she could be on top, but she didn't press herself up, just clung to him. Sex was psychic. His cock inside her. Her cock inside him. Not boy. Not girl. Just frenzied protons in an electrified atom. She squinted her eyes so the light from the tape player looked like a quasar, like the big bang, like God making life out of nothing. The spirit of God hovered over the face of the water and she saw the smashed pomegranate, the figs swollen and split, honey dripping over everything. All the flesh inside her swelled with blood, tightened until it was hard to.tell that they were separate. Come into me, she thought, and he did.
* * *
A few hours later Ginger woke and felt music vibrating the walls of the apartment. She rolled in the sheets to the edge of the bed, then stood and walked into the next room and sat on the floor next to Ted. The duplex living room was sparse; a TV sat on milk crates and Steve's bench press and free weights were pushed into one corner. Death metal riffs blasted so fierce she pressed her spine against the wall, afraid the boom box would crack and the speed metal dragon would burst out, scaly and blue-green as fish skin, its eyes slick as blood, breathing fire from its flaring nostrils, quoting from Revelations in the voice of a God gone bad. It was completely dark outside now, just some murky light in the oven illuminating the gray walls and silver racks, efficient and mysterious as a submarine trawling the kitchen floor. The rectangular window was smudged with meat juice, splattered with particles of petrified food. Dishes were piled high in the sink and a stack of pizza boxes and beer bottles surrounded the doorway. Carpet fibers pushed this way and that, like the coat of a mangy dog, and Ginger imagined them shifting languidly like seaweed caught in currents of windy water.
Steve walked into the room and knelt in front of her, held the plastic mask over her nose and mouth. It was the kind anesthesiologists used in surgery, the kind that gas came through to put you to sleep. He'd made this contraption with stuff stolen from the hospital supply room — a glass beaker with a heating nozzle, rubber hose. She watched him take a bud from the plastic baggy, load it into the copper bowl, and flick his lighter until the flame caught the dried leaves, singed them into red embers. Steve wore rings on every finger, a skull, a glass eye, a crucifix, and though he'd just showered, changed into jeans and a flannel shirt; his body odor hinted of blood.
“Suck up,” he flicked the lighter. Steve was the only child of the county's most volatile couple. Sightings were mythic: the time they'd got drunk in the lounge of the airport Holiday Inn and knocked over the singer's synthesizer, the midnight screaming session in the parking lot of McDonald's, and the car accident, where Steve's mother had crashed into a green highway sign and was found unconscious in her baby-doll nightgown, an open bottle of white wine still locked between her legs.
Steve was legendary for his fights at high-school parties. One second everybody would be standing around sipping from 16-ounce plastic cups of keg beer and the next a strange fusion would go through the crowd and Steve would be going head-to-head in the mud with somebody who rubbed him the wrong way. It didn't matter what it was about; any reason was only a pretense — school loyalty, some half-drunk girl, something somebody said about his favorite band.
She took her hit and handed Ted the mask, but he appeared to be asleep, leaning against the wall with his eyes closed, his head tilted back. Steve took the mask from her, loaded the bowl again, and held it over his own nose and mouth; with his other hand he brought the fire to the green leaves. The flame spread an oval of orange light over Steve's features, which were as even and pleasing as a movie star's. His hair was slicked back, so that shiny cords spread like horns over the top of his head, and under his eyes the lavender skin was delicately veined as a flower. He took another hit, then put the rig beside him and layout on the carpet with his hands folded behind his neck.
“Did you ever think about killing someone?” he asked.
Ginger looked over at Ted, who was stoned, sleeping, or both. “I could see if some guy fucked with me,” Ginger said. “You know, raped my mother or killed my dog. . but I wouldn't just go out and kill somebody at random. That's sick.” Her voice was firm and reprimanding.
“It's just a hypothetical question,” Steve said. “I know it's all a circus of shit.”
The brown dog chained to a tree stump ran at them, raised up on its back legs, and started to bark. Its white teeth flashed in the dark and Ginger saw the furless pink skin of its tummy. Steve and Ted stood on the porch, shoulders hunched forward, hands curled deep inside their front pockets, both shivering. Their warm breath made puffs of frosty steam as Steve knocked again. They waited, listening for the TV or the hippies’ footsteps. Ginger stood in back of them near a swayback lawn chair, picking leaves off a dead geranium in a coffee can. Christmas lights were strung around the little house, but most bulbs on the green wire were smashed or burnt out except a purple and two greens along the gutter and a red one looping down over the top of the door frame. She looked at the ruined garden, the skewed corn stalks, tomato plants reduced to wet heaps, each woven with a strip of stem-securing cloth. The green-pea vines had rotted into the white cord that held them, and the zucchini and squash decomposed to seeds alone. Only the cabbages would grow all winter, ugly as bottom suckers. Beyond the garden, through the thin plot of woods, she saw the lighted windows of Sugar Ridge floating in the branches.
“The fucker is always home,” Steve said, turning to glance back at Ted's car parked next to the hippie's old Impala, then pounding harder with the side of his fist.
“Jesus,” Ted said loudly, “you know he’s in there.”
“Let's go,” Ginger said. “Maybe he doesn't want to see us.”
The old hippie was usually nice. He once gave her tea for a sore throat made of slippery elm and cayenne pepper, but he was also an eccentric guy, swore he cured himself of cancer by eating only millet and tofu. Once he showed them how he'd sliced his finger, then stitched it up himself with a needle and thread. The hippie could be delusional too, talking about his CIA file, how he knew for a fact that the cartels had him on a hit list. Sometimes he'd speculate about future societies, after Armageddon, how the earth would be this utopian place with everybody living in tree houses and eating organic strawberries. Ted's connection to reality was fragile as a spider's web, and it wasn't good for him to be hanging around the hippie. Last time they were here, Ted told the hippie he was growing mushrooms in his room with purple grow lights and plastic trays of potting soil. And after that she'd heard him tell his mother he was going back to school. He even talked shit to her father, stuff about trying to help some poor kids who lived in the low-income housing out by Robert E. Lee Highway.