Deeper down, Renny was enjoying himself. He thought Barb watched too much cable. When he had first proposed murdering Victor-just as a hoot, mind you, nothing serious-she burdened him with probable cause and airtight alibis and where-were-you-on-the-night-of. Ridiculous, in a world where people simply dropped off the planet on a daily basis, never again a peep. You break his neck, you dump him in the first available manhole, the sewer is a disposal system, end of story.
Barb had wanted to play faithful and loving right up to the climax of the drama. Loving, hah. Faithful, not since she’d met Renny.
In the end it hadn’t come down to murder, but right now Barb sure was reaping some drama.
Things were so lively right now that Renny had busted a workout sweat and Barb’s vocal cords were rawing. He finally turned around and told her to shut up while what was left of Victor Jacks twitched in a pile on the floor. The business end of the bat was a real mess.
“Is he dead?” said Barb, cowering.
“I don’t think he’s gonna move no more right now.” Renny would have wiped his be-gored hands on his pants; his pants had been off since just after dinnertime. He let his hands hang in the air as he looked around, uselessly. He said sheeeit, slow and weary. It didn’t help.
“How? How did he? He…we…I don’t…it just.” Barb was still having a bit of trouble being coherent.
“Victor was always a stubborn sumbitch, you know that one, babe.”
Barb stood up and risked moving a little closer to what was left of Victor. “Maybe he, you know, didn’t really die. Went into a coma or some-thing.”
“Barb, Victor was dead. He was dead last week and he was still dead when he walked in on us. He is the deadest thing I ever saw.”
“You knocked his head off,” she said, dully.
“Stopped him, didn’t it?”
“What’re we gonna do, Renny? He’s all…ehh.”
“Shush. What we’re gonna do is call the morgue and tell them some pervert snatched the body and mutilated it, and dumped it here as a joke. Some old boyfriend of yours. You can make up a description. Nobody’ll bug us.”
“What makes you so smart?”
Renny had to stop a moment to ponder a good answer to that one.
“I mean, you think they’ll buy it?” There she went again. Barb was one of those people who strolled through life obliviously, thinking a call to the police would sling her free of any sort of trouble. Now she was just as convinced that the Authorities-capital A-would swoop down at any moment to point j’accuse.
“Babe, just dream up a good description. Say he was a Mexican in a green windbreaker.”
“But Renny, I’d never go out with no Mexican, and how come I have to say he’s my old boyfriend? I mean-”
Renny sighed, held her by the shoulders, met her eyes. “We’ll deal. Trust me. Please.” He forced a smile for her. It was like jamming a finger down his throat to chuck up an emotion. He needed to divert her, to say something that would get her mind off police procedure, so he said, “Uh-got any towels?”
Renny mopped off. Barb brought a big Hefty bag. Renny stuck the bat back under the bed. Touching it again made him re-experience the sheer satisfaction of pounding ole Victor right back into death, and this gifted him with a healthy and urgent erection.
Barb glimpsed what was coming up, and managed to finish him off before the police came knocking. Once again she told Renny that she’d never done that with Victor, and Renny smiled and stroked her head, keeping to himself the private notion that Barb could probably suck the stitches off a hardball through a flexi-straw. Victor Jacks would never have hung with a china doll. Renny would never have been tempted by one, either.
Then the Authorities arrived, and Renny and Barb set about making up stories.
Funerals never were much of a hoot. Neither Barb nor Renny had RSVPed many in their combined forty-odd years, but this time they dutifully duded up in basic black, and held hands, and dabbed at crocodile tears as the rearranged remains of Victor Jacks were boxed up and de-livered six feet closer to Hell.
Half an hour after the services, both of them were naked and neither of them was very depressed.
Most annoying of Barb’s bed-play habits was her wont of lighting off to the toilet as soon as…well, right after. Renny had once joked about it: “I make all that effort to give you something, babe, and you just go piss it away.” Barb had made a face. Crude, her face told him. Not funny. Then hi-de-ho, off to the can again.
Fine. Renny grunted manfully and rolled to his right side, his fa-vored side for dozing. Swell.
In the bathroom, Barb watched herself in the mirror for a long time, not quite sure what her surveillance was in quest of. Victor had hit her in this bathroom. He’d also done it to her, same day, in the tub, which was too small for love. Victor’s tendency to boil over all at once was fright-ening, a pit bull on a very iffy leash, thought Barb. Whether it got hos-tile, life-threatening, might depend on a dozen factors. When it last ate. Whether it was pissed off. Whether it liked you. Whether it liked your smell. Victor Jacks had been like that.
But when Victor got to the part where he put his big hands all over her, large, powerful, warm hands, unbuttoning and unzipping her, mak-ing her naked and telling her she was wanted, touching her in places only she touched-curve of ass, inside of thigh, underside of breast, smooth-shaven armpit-oh, my. He made her moist, filled her up; she would practically hallucinate and she had always slept gorgeously af-terward. The sex was never violent between them; only the occasional backhand was.
Barb knew she would never get around to enjoying the way men apologized, every time, after they smacked her.
When she had met Victor Jacks, she was a waitress-newly-turned-exotic-dancer. Petite-chested, with good hips and sturdy, if not long, legs, she figured it was virtually the same aggravation for better tips and weirder hours; she fancied she needed more weird in her life. She got Victor. All he lacked was a puff of smoke to appear in.
When Victor had met Barb, he was comfortably into pharmaceutical dexedrine pops and on the cusp of crystal meth. He made do with the odd frame-weld for RUBs-Rich Urban Bikers-and bashed big-blocks for muscle-car meatheads with too much leisure cash. He paid Barb to table-dance and made her sit, just sit, while he looked at her. Manage-ment did not approve. Victor did not make a scene. He merely smiled and showed Barb’s bosses more money. To Barb, whose concept of fore-play was someone bigger than her saying shut up and lay down, this was romance with a big R indeed. After a week of this bizarre courtship, she went out with him…and he stayed in with her.
When Renny Boone had met Barb, he was so chemical-free you could almost see his halo. To Barb, by this time shell shocked by two years of biker-speed tantrums and eight-ball insomnia, Renny’s well-cut bod and addictionless turn smelled like that myth come true, the Better Life.
“You look like you could use a rest,” Renny had told her, and so tell-ing her, he took her straight away to bed.
Five days later the two of them were still trying to dope out some rationalization that might convince, say, a jury that she, Barb, and he, Renny, were Meant To Be. But Barb lacked the heart to dump someone as spontaneous and romantic as Victor Jacks.
Truth was, Renny preferred Barb as a rental. And that Victor wasn’t such a bad dude. He’d even nailed the chronic carburetor wheeze suf-fered by Butch, Renny’s black ’66 Impala.
Truth was, Barb preferred Victor’s flash-fire spats to shaking her ass for the beery swine who bellied up to the runway at Nasty Tramps.