Flesh Wounds, page 12
Army Intelligence arrived a mere twenty minutes after the initial explosion, sweeping in from the north in three helicopters, one landing, the other two circling ominously overhead the whole time.
But before any of them had cordoned off the area, Sergeant Willis had gotten in to see firsthand the blackened crater, like some vast burnt-out eye socket in the sand. It wasn’t until he’d stood on the edge of the hole and kicked at the black glass there, that he thought about radiation dangers. He’d quickly retreated to the gravel road where he’d had only minutes to wait for the arrival of the Navy.
He got the story in bits and pieces as he waited beneath a hazier than usual dawn, some from the Navy engineers who knew from their readings that a nuclear device had been detonated, some from the Army’s team when they arrived on the scene. It was he that first linked George Cooper to the affair, by running the license plates radioed in earlier by the first officers on the scene. DMV identified one of the vehicles as a Nissan Maxima registered to Cooper. Once Cooper was identified, the rest came out fairly quickly.
“Willis!”
He turned. It was Precinct Captain Burke, come to see firsthand what had blown out thirty miles worth of windows up and down the Virginia coastline.
“Morning, Captain.”
“Casualties?” Burke asked, with his usual lack of greeting or amenities.
Willis restrained himself from asking where Burke had been while the entire precinct was mourning the loss of two fellow officers. Willis had radioed that information back more than thirty minutes ago. “Two of our own and one, possibly two, civilians.”
“Do we know—”
“Engineer for the Army,” Willis cut in. There was little love lost between the two men. Willis seldom, if ever, let Burke finish a complete sentence. “Guy had terminal cancer. Less than six months to live.”
Burke frowned. “Hell of a way to go out. What’d he—”
“Cooper was his name. Like I said, an engineer. He worked at some top secret Army lab—Army boys aren’t saying much about that yet. Cooper had access to advanced weapons, including nuclear devices.”
Burke’s face blanched. “Radiation?”
“There’ll definitely be some fallout. Army brass is checking it out now. They’ve told me they’ll make a statement before eight.”
Burke looked as if he was going to faint. “I’d better start making some phone calls.”
“Easy, boss. The Army assures me this is not Chernobyl. These PNDs, Personal Nuclear Devices, are designed to deliver maximum concentrated destruction with a minimal amount of residual radiation.” Willis smiled, proud of himself for getting that out as he’d been told it. “Just the thing for wasting an area you plan to occupy immediately afterward.”
“I’ve still got to call the Governor. I’ve—Wait! Who the hell is that down there in the surf?”
“There’s nobody on the beach, Sir. The Navy’s got armed men patrolling—” Willis turned to see what Burke was talking about. The rising sun was orange off the surface of the Atlantic, a rippling cockle shell broken by a man wading out just beyond the foam.
“Shit!” Willis spit. “He tried to get through earlier and I turned him back. Must’ve come up the beach.”
“Who?”
“Some damn marine biologist from the university. Claims to have discovered some new jellyfish.”
“Jellyfish?”
“Yeah. The beach is covered with the little beggars, Captain. Millions of them. I thought at first they were all dead, but then I saw some of them working their way out beyond the surf...”
I Saw What You Did
“Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.”
–Georges Bataille, Eroticism
The sultry summer night held the garden in a skeletal silence so complete that it seemed even the insects were loath to intrude upon it.
As he crept along the wall of the Miller house, Curtis imagined the garden leaning intently forward. Moon-drenched roses. Gardenias and marigolds. Crickets, porch light frantic moths, and insatiable mosquitos. A thousand kindred voyeurs holding their breath as he slipped behind a verdant pine to his accustomed spot at the bathroom window.
In that consummate quiet, Curtis feared Tanya Miller might hear his ragged breath on the window pane, but she was already in the shower.
It was five minutes after eleven. He was late. Steam was gathering on the inside of the glass, a sheen that would quickly obscure the tiny room beyond. Her red and black carhop uniform lay across the back of the stool. Panties and bra lay amid the clutter of makeup, perfume, and feminine paraphernalia beside the sink.
Focusing on the panties, Curtis imagined their heady female musk, the piquant warmth that might yet linger in the narrow band of the crotch. An erection pressed urgently against his 501’s. He undid his pants.
The shower died and the curtain slid back with a familiar screech! that made his penis lurch in his hand. Tanya Miller reached for a towel. Distorted by the steamy glass, she was a flesh-hued ghost, long of leg and dark of hair, glistening a sensuously clean pink. Wrapping her head in a towel, she pulled on a russet bathrobe, briefly studied her face in a mirror she first wiped free of steam, then she opened the bathroom door and was gone, the bathroom light blinking out so abruptly that the insects gathered about the window froze midflight.
Curtis was at her bedroom window before the light even came on. Clear glass. Lacy curtains that always gaped several inches in the center. A room dressed in peach and lavender. The robe hit the floor, revealing Tanya’s firm young breasts, erotic white against the copper of her flat stomach and lightly freckled shoulders. Between her golden thighs there was a narrow triangle of dark hair, still damp from the shower. When she stretched out on the bedspread, the mound of pubic hair lay like a tangle of brush in the shallow valley between her hip bones.
Curtis panted and stroked while Tanya relaxed beneath the cool breeze of the ceiling fan. Everything seemed right to the sixteen-year-old. His fantasy woman lay naked before him. In his hand was the answer to safe sex. The night held him secure, insects watching with dispassionate curiosity, grass and oak leaves chuckling insouciantly in the breeze. The neighborhood was quiet. The dark windows of surrounding homes winked back a silent smattering of starlight, devoid of life at this late hour.
—Except for one window in which there appeared a pale round face. An earnest visage that remained while Curtis stroked and gasped and eventually dribbled his passion there in the grass beneath Tanya Miller’s window.
Curtis found the note between second and third period while exchanging his English Lit book for Trig. Someone had slipped the note through the vents in his locker. I saw what you did last night. It was unsigned.
When the day had finally passed without someone slapping handcuffs on him or stopping before his desk to declare him a perverted deviant, Curtis decided that whoever had left the note had no intention of telling the authorities what they’d witnessed. It was a warning, nothing else, and Curtis had all but resolved himself to finding someone else’s window to frequent. His home was only six blocks away and he was halfway there when Belinda Babbage stepped out from behind a hedge and blocked the sidewalk.
“You got my note?”
Curtis was speechless.
The obese teenager put her hands on her hips. There were several textbooks securely wedged between the sagging flesh beneath her arm and her ample bosom. With her wattled throat jiggling maniacally, she declared, “Curtis Mayfield, you answer me or I’m going to tell everyone I saw you jerking your noodle outside of Tanya Miller’s window last night. And I bet last night wasn’t the first time, was it? You understand me, Curtis? I’ll tell. I swear I will.”
With some difficulty, Curtis swallowed the lump of terror that had lodged itself in his throat. “I... that is, I—What exactly do you want, Beluga?” Oh, God, he’d done it now. Like all the other kids who tormented disgustingly fat Belinda Babbage, Curtis had just used the student body’s official nickname for her.
She pursed her lips and squinted up her eyes. Curtis thought she looked like a constipated sow. “What I want, Curtis Mayfield, is...” Her expression softened. She glanced both directions on the sidewalk and then looked down at the rotund expanse of her gut straining against her shapeless rag of a dress. Curtis thought she might have been trying to look at her feet, but that wasn’t possible. “I want...” she tried to continue, but faltered again.
“What?” Curtis demanded, taking sudden courage from her hesitation. “What the fuck do you want, Belinda?” She spit it out all in one breath, like one mega-syllable word: “I want you to come to my window tonight.”
For a moment, he could say nothing. A street or two over, he could hear the sound of the ice cream man making his afternoon rounds, and Curtis realized he wasn’t really a child anymore. How fun it would be to just laugh this off and chase after the ice cream truck. “You want me to what?”
Now that her request had been made, she was braver.
“I want you to come peek in my window tonight.”
“What the hell would—” He stopped there, remembering what she could do to him. Public masturbation had to be some kind of crime. Hell, this was Oklahoma where it was against the law to get a tattoo! At the very least she could make him the laughing stock of their school.
She pointed a finger at him, stepping forward so that it hovered under his nose like a fat summer sausage. “You come to my window tonight, Curtis Mayfield. Or I’m telling the cops what I saw.”
Tanya Miller’s boyfriend dropped her off from her job at the Sonic right on time. Ten forty-five. At ten fifty Tanya’s bathroom light went on. When Curtis approached no closer than the fence that separated the Babbages’ back yard from the Millers’, Beluga slid up her window, pressed her face against the screen, and hissed, “You get your ass over here, Curtis. Right now, or I’ll scream for my Dad.”
What could he do?
Closer, he could see that she was wrapped in a stained, beige bath robe. Her feet were bare. Her ankles were fat and white. Beluga’s robe was big enough to have served as a parachute for Tanya Miller.
“Closer!” hissed Belinda.
Swallowing distastefully, he stepped to the window.
“Press your face against the screen.”
“Belinda, I—”
“You want me to tell, Curtis? Is that what you want? Is that what you really want? Cause I’ll do it! By, God, I’ll tell. I will.”
He pressed his face to the screen and watched, a sick fascination refusing to let him close his eyes or glance to the side, as she dropped the robe. Her breasts were much, much bigger than Tanya’s. They hung like swollen water balloons, ready to burst. The fat which gathered around her waist looked like rolls of cookie dough. Her thighs were albino tree trunks, dimpled with pock marks of cellulite. The cheeks of her ass hung like sides of pork. Because she was late acquiring her pubic hair, the slit between her legs was indistinguishable from any of her other corpulent creases—until she reached down and pulled apart the folds of flesh, revealing the moist, pink interior.
“Take it out,” she commanded. “Play with it. Do it, or I’ll tell!”
He undid his jeans and extracted his flaccid penis, cupped it in the palm of his hand and tried to squeeze an erection out of it.
“I’ll bet Tanya never let you see her doing this.”
She was right. He’d never seen Tanya insert her fingers like that. He’d never known that part of a girl could be so easily invaded.
“Oh, it feels so good, Curtis.”
He felt himself growing hard.
“Do you like my breasts? Do you like it when I pinch them like this?”
He discovered that he did.
Only the moon watched as the two of them stroked. To Curtis, it seemed as if even the insects had elected not to participate in this latest perversion. Part of him wanted to be sick. Part of him wanted to run. But there was Belinda showing him things he’d never seen before, showing him that girls masturbated too, showing him the slick, pink insides previously only revealed in glossy magazine photos, and he suddenly realized that he couldn’t bring himself to run even if her threats weren’t hanging over his head.
“You can touch it if you want.”
It was their third evening together. Belinda had simply popped out the screen on her window and invited him in. She lay spread out before him on the bed, her legs open wide. Flat out on her back like that, with her normally pendulous breasts laid flat across her ribs and her flattened stomach rolls hid to either side in the folds of the sheets, she wasn’t that bad looking. Belinda actually had a moderately attractive face, he realized.
“Go on. Touch it.”
“I... I don’t know, Belinda.”
“Go on.”
He reached out and put a tentative finger against the soft swell between her legs.
“When we’re married and have kids—”
“What!?” He snatched his hand back.
“I said, when we’re—”
“I know what you said,” Curtis gasped, getting up from the bed. His hands suddenly seemed dirty. He wiped them across his pants as he was pulling them on. “Who said anything about us getting married?”
Belinda sat up on the bed and drew the sheets to her sagging breasts as if she were suddenly embarrassed by her nudity. “That’s what people do, Curtis. That’s what people do after they... well, after they’ve been together like we have.”
Curtis couldn’t help it, he laughed. She was too fucking much. He suddenly realized he wasn’t afraid of her anymore. What was she going to do, tell everyone she’d invited him in and they’d masturbated together in her bedroom? What he felt for her now was pity. But more than that he felt anger, anger at having been manipulated by such a pitiful excuse for a human being.
“You’re full of shit, Belinda. I’d sooner marry a pig at the state fair than a beluga whale like you.”
She gasped.
“The pig would probably smell better,” he added as he slipped over the window sill and out on the lawn. So much for that, he thought.
—Just before her massive weight came through the window and crushed him to the ground.
For a moment he thought he was going to black out. All the wind had been knocked out of him. There was red Oklahoma mud and Bermuda grass in his mouth. One of his wrists felt like it was broke where he’d reached out to break his fall and come up against firewood Belinda’s daddy had stacked against the side of the house. His nose was bleeding and he thought something inside might even be ruptured.
Belinda rolled him over and kissed him. “You don’t know what you’re saying, Curtis. You’re forgetting the things we’ve done together. I make you happy, Curtis. I know I make you happy.” She reached down and cupped his genitals in her hand.
He struck her alongside the head with a length of firewood.
She rolled off him, whimpering and clutching at her head. There was blood, but not much. By the time Curtis got some air in his lungs and got to his feet, she was staggering up off the ground. She opened her mouth and tried to call for help, but she didn’t seem to have the air for it. She drew a deep breath and would have tried again, but he smashed the firewood across her mouth. When she went down, her big breasts slapped audibly against her stomach. The sound sickened him so much that he hit her again. And again.
When she stopped squirming, he stopped.
Trembling, in disbelief, he dropped the bloody length of firewood and ran.
It was the talk of the school the following day. No one seemed to be telling the same story. Someone had beat Beluga to death with a baseball bat. Someone had broke into the Babbage house and Belinda Babbage, who had fought off the prowler, was now in intensive care. Beluga’s father had come home in a drunken rage and murdered the entire family, leaving Beluga’s naked, headless corpse out back on the lawn. While sleep walking in the buff, Beluga had tripped over some firewood in her backyard and broken her own stupid neck.
It wasn’t until noon that the principal made an official announcement. Belinda Babbage had been murdered by person or persons unknown. School councilors would be available immediately, and all students who felt the need to speak with a councilor were to be excused from their classes. Anyone who felt the need to call their parents would be excused to the office to do so.
It appeared that there were no suspects.
When he put his books away to go home, Curtis found a note in his locker.
I saw what you did.
It was unsigned.
She met him out back of her house that night when her boyfriend dropped her off. Curtis noticed that her boyfriend didn’t drive off like he usually did. He sat out there on the street in his red Camaro, the glow of his cigarette alternating from a dull yellow to an angry orange. She was afraid of him. “Are you going to tell?” Curtis asked.
“Not if you do what I want.”
“What do you want?”
Tanya brushed some of her oh-so perfect hair back from her face. “I want to marry Cory.”
“The guy in the Camaro?”
“Yeah.”
She’d lost him. All that beauty and no brains, he thought. But it hardly mattered. Belinda could have been a fucking genius and everyone would have still called her Beluga. Everyone would have still thrown food at her in the cafeteria and tried to trip her in the halls. What counted was looks. Like Belinda, Curtis didn’t have them. He would never be able to do more than fantasize about making it with girls like Tanya Miller. He didn’t have looks, money, or a flashy red Camaro. He didn’t have anything girls like Tanya Miller were looking for.
He realized that Tanya was waiting for him to say something.
“So you want to marry the guy with the car. What’s that got to do with me?”
“My daddy won’t let me marry him.”
He had a feeling he saw this one coming. And he realized that maybe he did have something that a girl like Tanya Miller might want after all.
