He had hooked into that; she was holding to voracious sex at the time, out of some recent desperateness, but the conventional devouring was soon exhausted, and as the pathetic integrating had become concretized she had begun to think of herself as “kinky”; anything in any way different in sex defined her. Finally she had come to think of herself as what she called a “kink,” and whenever he battered her, she thought she became who she was. She thought she liked the whipping because it was odd and different; he knew better. But though, as he thought, he insulted her about it often, above her intelligence, playing with irony, it was a weak game, and he did not care to try to deal with her mistaken sense of herself. He liked her the way she was. She had whipped him, and he had cried out “Mother, Mother,” and then he had often beaten her, heavily, pounding her with the sand sock and wet towel. And it was true that there were other ways of living going on around them the interstices of which they came into, but not often. And when they did find themselves in situations, he smirked inwardly to himself about them and pointed out their phoniness to her; that way, though at different levels of consciousness he thought, they both shut them out. And perhaps the largest irony was that, for both of them, it was within the parameters of what might be called the conventional, where the deep and real unknown abided, that the thing feared at its very roots was incomprehensible to them because it was not grooved for them and was beyond their context. But such quality of fear was beyond their articulation also; so, they did not know of it.
At certain angles the water beat into his chest as if he were a hollow gourd, the tight skin over his muscles a drumhead.
He turned to feel an individual jet bite into his nipple, scalding him though the water was cool. He thought of the image of the slab of stone on his chest, his stepfather standing over him with the sledge, the heavy, concussive thud as the sledge dropped, the veins in the muscles bursting, the way a rib broke from his sternum and dove into his heart, the deeper and more satisfying pain as he was cracked and split open. He smiled under the spray. He knew all about it: the systems of psychology, the old marquis, the sickness in the smiles at pain. Her whipping him had been really the last thing that had lifted him up, and that had not been successful for him for a number of years. The image of his stepfather with the sledge coming down on the stone was a toying, a distance in history. It did not move him. Nor did the sex, the risk of selling drugs, the chances taken on the Harley, the occasional busts, the intimidation of the narcs.
She was lying in the other room on the bed, waiting for him. Soon he would go in there and fuck her; that was the only way he could now think of it, and there would be nothing new or imaginative to it. She had little imagination, of this he was sure, and if he just wore something, a piece of her underwear, some lipstick or eyeliner, it would lift her. She would say when she saw him coming, “That’s kinky,” and she would be moved some when he entered her. But he had gone the limits of his imagination with her, and many times what he had proposed and accomplished was well beyond her. She would just stare at him then, not under — standing, and so he would whip her again, and she would like that and call it kinky. For him she was now like a strip of rag, some half-rotten piece of fruit, and he would gain little pleasure as he ripped into her, pounded her, and the only thing that would keep him in anyway erect would be the very slight pain of the loss of desire in giving and taking pain, and even that would be fading.
He had thought recently of killing her. He had never killed anyone, and she was still close to him and was appropriate.
The killing would have to be right, because it would be near the end, and he would have to plan how he would get himself killed afterward. He had begun, casually, to think of a possible plan for it. They had seen some snuff movies, and she had been dimly interested in them. They were kinky she thought, but she had been heavily zonked on scag at the time, and she could not really see through to the fact that that would be the final kinky act. Whatever else she was, she was a survivor in her passivity. This he saw clearly and had he ability to do so, he would have admired her for it as he might have admired her for other things beyond his image of her. With him it was more ironic; he survived in spite of himself. He was too smart to get caught seriously in the web of pain that he found ways of arranging. The drug deals with the vicious, desperate Mexicans in Ensenada, his cheating them on their own turf, his touches with the more dangerous big buyers in West L.A. — whatever net he got himself into his intelligence forced him to solve and get out of. He had the pleasant bruises and the rushes of danger to remember, but he had stayed alive.
He stepped back in the stall a little, letting the water strike down against his penis, hit into his testicles, and hurt them; it made him a little harder. He would go into her soon and do the thing, be done and finished with her for now, in that way at least. In the morning the two of them would get up early and get ready to leave. He felt good thinking of the new start. He would go East, beyond even Detroit where he had come from. Maybe it would take some time. But he would find and then he would kill his old friend Allen, who had cheated him. He knew that Allen’s wife was from that Cape out there, and he would take his time and would probably find them there. He would kill him not so much for the cheating but for the surge of it and the pain that would follow, possibly a new kind of pain, a mix of what they would do to him when they caught him and the hurt that might come a little from the loss of Allen. He had not been at all desperate or unhappy; he had been numb and bored. He knew he was close to burned out at thirty-three, but now he would be alive again for a while. Maybe this fresh feeling would get him up enough so that he could visit his mother in Detroit on his way East. The fact that he had arranged the drop at her place, and the pain in having involved her in his life again, gave him some little hope that it might be so. The way she would look at him and the way he would behave with her stirred in him a bit.
He turned the shower off and let the water run from his body, down through his creases. He waited while he drained, and then he stepped out of the stall, took a towel from the rack, and began to dry himself. He rubbed each muscle that he could identify individually, dabbing at his chest and his angular face. When he was finished and while he was splashing cologne on his inner thighs, he heard her voice, whining he would have called it, from the other room.
“Come on, Daddy, come on.” She sounded bored and a little flat. It was as if her voice and its performance could make the desire real, the request urgent and sincere, though it was incapable of that.
He reached up and took the watch cap from its place and put it on. Then he hung his thick chain and medallion around his neck. Then he soaked his towel in the sink and rang it out into a wet, thick rope; he tested it by slapping it into his leg. Then he checked to see how he looked in the mirror. He was fine, he thought, if a little uninteresting. He was getting older, he thought, but most of him was hard and firm.
“Time enough,” he said softly, “time enough.” And then he turned from the mirror and went in to her. It was dark in the room, and he could not see her very well. But he knew she was ready and waiting. Outside, the sad and injured walnut trees, as if from a kind of instinct, reached out and fought against their peace.
Melinda