“Hey, there,” GAG said. She began to rub his back where he sat, her breasts pressing. “My name’s Sylvia.”
“My name’s Jeanie,” said the other. “What’s yours?”
Hudson couldn’t resist. “How about . . . John?”
The two women looked at each other, stalled, then laughed aloud.
“I like this guy!” said GAG. “And we were wondering . . .”
“Yeah,” said DO ME. Her hand rubbed his chest, and when the keep disappeared in back, she smoothly rubbed his crotch. “Ever had a doubleheader?”
Hudson was taken aback. “Uh, well—”
GAG’S breath smelled like Juicy Fruit. “Ask anyone. Me’n Jeanie do the best doubleheaders. We know all the right stuff guys like—”
Hudson opened his mouth . . .
They both flashed their bare breasts right in Hudson’s face. Four pink, plucked nipples looked back at him. Hudson got drunk just from the sight. A side-glance showed him Fu Manchu and the bald guy both grinning at him, and nodding approval.
The T-shirts came back down when the keep returned. GAG’S lips touched his ear when she whispered, “And it’s only fifty bucks each, plus ya gotta give the—”
“Ten to the bartender.” Hudson finally said something coherent. “Yes.” He felt flushed, prickly. Here goes. Monsignor Halford better be right . . . He looked in his wallet. “I only have sixty dollars on me. Is there—”
“An ATM?” DO ME finished his question. “At the bank—”
“—right across the street,” the other hot, wet whisper brushed his ear. “You could be back in five minutes.”
Hudson felt disconnected from himself when he stood up. “I’ll be right back . . .”
GAG gave his buttocks a squeeze when Hudson rushed out. He crossed the parking lot with a drone in his head. Darkness had arrived like an oil spill; the old sodium lights painted glowing yellow lines across the cracked asphalt. His anticipation revved his heart. I’m going to be in the seminary soon, but in about five minutes I’m going to be standing in a dump bar’s bathroom with my pants down in front of two hookers. Oh, God . . .
He quickstepped past a dollar store, then crossed the street to the bank. Six people stood in line before him at the ATM, mostly half-broken rednecks or old people. Come on, come on, he thought, tapping his foot. When he glanced across the street, he saw GAG and DO ME watching him through the glass door. With my luck someone else’ll pick them up while I’m waiting in this line!
Finally Hudson got his turn and withdrew five twenties. He grimaced at the receipt where it read AVAILABLE BALANCE: $6.00.
“Damn it,” he sputtered, and then he stood there for a time, spacing out. Put the money back in the bank and go home! his alter ego yelled at him. You don’t need to do this! Look at yourself! You’re a scumbag! You’re a whoremonger!
But he could, couldn’t he? He looked at the cash. He could redeposit it right now, save it for the things he needed rather than wasting it on this experiment in lust. But—
Instead he put it in his pocket and left the machine.
On his way back his mind was clogged with the lewdest images. Even as the block letters flashed behind his eyes—DON’T BE A CRUMMY PERSON BY PURSUING YOUR TEMPTATIONS. DON’T LIVE A CHUMP-CHANGE LIFE—Hudson couldn’t see them.
The drone dragged him on. He had no awareness of making the mental decision to stop, but when he realized he had, he found himself several yards from the dollar store where a skinny woman in a dirty sundress and lanky hair was having a conniption at the front door. A pair of scrawny little kids with dead eyes stood next to her. “Fuckin’ bullshit! I can’t fuckin’ believe it!” she was yelling at herself. “It’s not supposed to be this fuckin’ hard!”
Hudson wanted to move on, to the tacky delights that awaited. Instead, he said, “Is something wrong?”
“Yeah! Everything’s wrong! I got two fuckin’ kids to feed so I go in there to buy food”—she held up a plastic card with an American flag on it—“and the machine says my food credits are all used up. My fuckin’ husband maxed out the card out before he split yesterday. Instead of paying the power bill, he spent the money on crack; then he maxes out the card and leaves town! Fucker leaves me with two kids and no food, and even if I had food, I can’t cook it ’cos I got no power, so I gotta buy Pop-Tarts and canned spaghetti, but I can’t even buy that ’cos my fuckin’ piece of shit husband MAXED OUT MY CARD!”
The woman looked close to a psychotic break. Meanwhile, her two children looked up at Hudson, stared a moment, then looked away.
The woman’s eyes were red now. “Mister, could you give me five or ten bucks? Please? This shit’s fuckin’ killin’ me.”
“I—” Hudson began but didn’t finish.
“My fuckin’ food card doesn’t renew till the sixth—that’s over a week from now. I’ll have to feed my kids garbage till then.”
“I—” But Hudson thought, I could give her twenty bucks and still have plenty for the whores . . .
“Aw, fuck it!” she wailed. “You guys are all the same! Don’t wanna help anybody. Ya think I’m gonna buy drugs with the money. Shit! Does it look like I’m tryin’ to buy drugs!”
“I—”
The woman shoved both of the kids. “Come on, we’re going home . . .”
“Wait,” Hudson said. She turned and glared at him. Hudson took everything out of his wallet and gave it to her. “This should help,” he said.
She looked cockeyed at the $160. “Aw, fuck, man! Thanks! You saved our asses!” She yelled at the kids. “Come on, you little crumb-snatchers! In the store! They close in ten minutes!”
Hudson watched blankly as she pushed her kids back into the store. The woman fully entered, but then stuck her shabby head back out.
“Hey, man.” She smiled. “God bless you.”
I hope so, Hudson thought. “Good night.”
He turned and headed down the sidewalk. Behind him, from the bar, DO ME and GAG screamed at him.
“What did you do?”
“You ASSHOLE!”
“Scumbag motherfucker!”
Hudson looked at them in the doorway and shrugged. He cut across the sodium-lit bank parking lot, then headed through the alley toward his cheap cinder block efficiency. I guess this is hopscotch of the new age, he thought, taking awkward steps around the used condoms and discarded hypodermics that littered the asphalt. Behind him, in the distance, he would still hear GAG and DO ME cursing. Then he laughed when it fully sunk in:
I almost picked up two prostitutes a week before I enter the seminary and take initial vows of celibacy . . .
A minute later he was home, not really knowing if he felt good or awful.
(II)
Smoke the color of spoiled milk gusted from the intermittent censers as far as the eye—be it demonic or Human—could see. What an interesting color, Favius mused, mystified. He stood on the southernmost ramparts, proud to know that a large part of this security sector was under his command: sixty-six meters of a multiple-square-mile construction reservation recently dubbed the Vandermast Reservoir.
Its depth? Sixty-six feet.
The reason that Favius marveled at the hue of the censer smoke was simply because of the contrast: out here, in the black-sand expanse of Hell’s Great Emptiness Quarter, everything, like the sand, was black. The walls of the Reservoir itself were black, as were the sub-inlets and enormous inflow pipes. The causewalks, too, were black—constructed of basalt bricks—and even the barracks were black. Very little of the scarlet sky could be viewed just then, due to the blankets of black clouds. Favius noted only a single rift in said cloud cover, which revealed a sickle moon.