Calamity (3 page)

She turned back to Tyler. “I’m glad you asked me out.”

“Me too,” he said.

“You’re a sweet guy.”

A sweet guy who has masturbated to thoughts of you for almost nine months
, he thought and immediately scolded himself for being so perverted. If she sensed his longing, his desperation, she’d end the date right now.

The websites stressed that women wanted “action” as much as men did, but women were always turned off by desperation. If a guy wants a woman too badly, the woman will often turn him down. Women want to know there’s interest, but they also want a challenge. A website also recommended jerking off before the date to help calm anxiety. Tyler found his favorite porn site and started but his father kept walking back and forth outside his room so he stopped. If Sasha went down on him, if that was even a possibility, it wouldn’t take long to finish.

“There’s a place near my house where we can hang for a bit, if you want. Then you can drop me off.”

Tyler nodded because he couldn’t swallow the lump in his throat to speak. He paid the bill, left five bucks on the table, and let Sasha give him directions to their next stop.

Sasha lived in a mobile home that had been converted into a somewhat normal-looking two-story house with a concrete front porch and an extension off the back, which served as a game room and her mother’s bedroom. Two large perfectly pruned bushes stood guard on either side of the porch. A light was on upstairs and another, a red one, flickered in a downstairs window, probably from a TV.

“Nice,” Tyler said and hoped he didn’t sound surprised or sarcastic.

“Nice bushes, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind.”

The house was one among hundreds in the Hidden Hills community, a name contradicting the numerous hills and valleys that comprised the individual properties of the mobile homes. The kids at school called this place Trailer Trash Town, the homes Trashy Trailers. Even the students who lived here, and there were more Tyler suspected than those who admitted it, used the term. Better to acknowledge the shitty choices your parents made than to delude yourself into thinking you were normal.

“Keep going,” Sasha said. “I don’t want my mother to see us.”

They drove down a steep slope that curved to the r moved to ight so suddenly that Tyler almost crashed into a pickup truck parked in the road. He narrowly missed an oncoming jeep and then rode his brakes the rest of the way down the hill, which reminded him of water swirling down a funnel. The mobile homes (
trashy trailers
) were set at odd angles to one another and ensconced into hillsides like pieces of litter in clumps of mud. Some of them hadn’t seen a moment of handyman attention in decades while others could have passed for pleasing, though small, additions to the community his parents had chosen: Sky View Estates. It was a gated community where Mexicans cleaned the streets weekly and repainted the homes every other year.

Sasha directed Tyler to a small, empty gravel parking lot overlooking a lake. A sagging, rusted fence boarded two sides of the lot. Tyler pulled to the edge, facing the lake. On the other side of the dark water, the lights of more mobile homes glowed like tiny eyes on the hulking humps of hills. Those hills comprised a giant beast, a malicious creature forever guarding the still waters of a man-made lake--like in that Lovecraft story Mr. Stein had read to them. Tyler wished he could cover his windshield.

“Beautiful,” Sasha said. She undid her seatbelt. Was that an invitation to make a move?

“Sure,” Tyler said after a moment. He turned to her, barely aware that he was making a move; something inside him had seized the controls and wasn’t going to let him delay any longer. “But not as beautiful as you.”

She smiled for a moment and then burst out laughing.

Tyler turned back to the hundred-eyed monster. What did its laughter sound like?

“I’m sorry,” Sasha said through dwindling chuckles. “You don’t have to try so hard.
I’m
the one who brought us here, after all.”

“Sorry,” he said, though unsure why.

“What about some music?” she asked.

Tyler turned the car battery on and the receiver started with the last song that had been playing on his iPod: “Stay Don’t Go” by Spoon. She hadn’t made any comments about his music during the drive and she didn’t now. Did she hate it? Did it matter?

“So?” she asked.

“So?”

She smiled again and moved toward him as if gliding like a ghost. Without barely any time for his brain to register what was happening, Tyler moved toward her, closed his eyes, and met her lips halfway across the car. The kiss lasted only a few seconds but it was long enough for Tyler to taste the Caesar dressing from her salad. She broke the kiss and sat back in her seat. Tyler stayed for a moment in a slant, his seatbelt stretching across his chest.

“Why do you like me?” she asked.

Tyler sat back, unfastened his belt. Though a smile still lingered on her lips, Sasha had turned more introspective all of a sudden as if the kiss had pried something lose in her mind. How was he supposed to answer this question? What did she want to hear?

The song changed to “Paper Tiger.” Tyler said, “What do you mean?”

“It’s not a hard question.”

“You’re . . . really cool and pretty and . . . I don’t know.”

“It’s just that you’ve barely ever said anything to me. Did you think I’d be easy or something?”

In the faint glow from the radio receiver, Sasha’s eyes glimmered green and small shadows accentuated her pointy nose ant ginty nod the curve of her upper lip hiding that snaggletooth. Her pale skin absorbed the light and gave her a faint seasick aura.

“I just . . . like you.”

“You’ve been with many girls?”

Tyler shook his head. Her breasts were ready to break through her shirt. His hand twitched. Just a touch, a caress, a suck.

“I know what people say about me,” she said. “About my mother.”

“I haven’t heard.” He thought of Aaron’s period-blood rumor.

Tyler had only had one girlfriend prior, and that had been three years ago at science camp. He had experienced his first French kiss but nothing else. He didn’t think he was unattractive or weird or anything. He just never handled himself around girls the way he wanted. Paul had known this is what he needed. Tyler knew it, too. And now she was getting all serious.

“I don’t care what people say,” she said. “I don’t. People are assholes.”

“They are,” he said.

The song changed to “Back to the Life,” opening with a maniacal laugh. Her eyes went to the receiver, on which the song title was spelled out, and Tyler’s eyes went to her breasts. The heavy beat of the song unleashed something inside him, something like instinct, and he moved in for the kill.

Their lips met again, softly at first and then he pressed harder and his tongue found its way into her mouth where it slipped over and around her tongue like two slugs mating. Her snaggletooth pressed against his teeth like a popcorn kernel, but the discomfort only spurred him on. His hands groped at her back, found the edge of her shirt and pulled it up all the way to her chin. Then his hands were on her breasts, caressing them, squeezing them. Something red and hot burned inside him and grew hotter and hotter. He went for her bra strap with both hands, just to be sure, and unclasped it almost immediately. The excitement at this accomplishment pushed his tongue more forcefully against hers and he lifted her and shifted so that her head lay against the door and her legs tangled with his around the shifter.

He tore her bra off and finally broke the kiss. She gasped for air as if she had been under water. Her breasts were even larger than he had hoped. He grabbed one and began sucking forcefully on the other. Still, the red hotness burned, throbbed, screamed inside him. This is what he had wanted for so long, so fucking long, oh how fucking wonderful. Her hands grabbed at his hair and tugged playfully. He shook them off and sucked even harder on her breast until her moan morphed into a cry of pain. He pulled off of her breast, tugging at her nipple, and stared at her for a moment. The shadows had shifted on her face and now made her appear younger, smaller. She started to speak, and Tyler suffocated her words with his mouth.

Women love being dominated, a website declared.

His hands found the edge of her jeans and tore open the fly. The hot redness burned hotter and hotter and
hotter
, screaming for him to keep going. This was going to be wonderful, so fucking wonderful. He slipped one hand behind her and shifted his weight to that arm while his other hand jumped onto her crotch. Her panties stuck to her groin in a patch of moisture: she wanted this just as much as he. This was too wonderful to believe. He found the seat lever and yanked it almost hard enough to snap it while he picked her up again and flopped her down on the seat, forcing it backwards, nearly flat. The part of him that would have stalled the engine of his passion had fallen off somewhere and now stood back, shocked and delighted.ould delig

Another deep-probing kiss later, Tyler pulled off her jeans and let his fingers explore her most sensitive of areas. She moaned and repeated his name again and again but he barely heard that over the monstrous pounding of the screaming red inside him. It could have been an alarm shouting
FIRE! FIRE!
but it only pushed him farther. He undid his own fly and pushed his pants and boxers past his knees and wriggled them to his ankles. Her moans grew louder and her hands grabbed more roughly at his hair and arms. He drove his tongue against hers once more, her snaggletooth crushing his gums, and then he went for everything in one quick gesture--he pulled her panties to the side and slipped the head of his penis into her where her muscles stopped it and her fingers clawed more desperately at him and then he shoved all of himself into her as he released a powerful grunt of pleasure. The hot redness hollered louder and louder still until his entire body burned with the screaming lust. And when he released that hot redness inside her, Tyler finally noticed the tears on her cheeks, green in the light, and heard her begging, “No, stop, no, stop, Tyler, stop,
stopstopstoppleasestop!
”

He slumped back into the driver’s seat without bringing up his pants. Sasha curled into a fetal position on the passenger seat and sobbed. Across the lake, a giant monster watched it all through a hundred glowing eyes.

2

The knock at the front door pulled Anthony’s attention from the eggs quickly cooking in the pan in front of him. Brendan was already up and watching a cartoon about two bunnies dressed as Mexican lawmen (complete with bandoliers) hunting for a third, presumably evil, bunny that had stolen a supply of carrots. The animation in the show shuttered like the light from a strobe and the show jumped from scene-to-scene at such a frenetic pace that the few times Anthony tried to watch the show with his twelve-year old, he always left the room before his burgeoning headache evolved into a migraine. And yet, Brendan could watch hours of similar-style animation without the slightest apparent damage. Except, of course, for the ADD, which, as good parents, he and Chloe tried to keep under control with the little white pills Dr. Carroll prescribed. Those pills were best taken with food and Brendan’s favorite Saturday morning meal was scrambled eggs and bacon, eggs cooked in the bacon fat.

The knock came again. Whoever it was standing outside on the front porch, their knock suggested neither aggression nor impatience; it was a simple declaration of presence. Even so, Anthony didn’t want to leave whoever it was stranded outside when that person could clearly hear the cartoon bunnies galloping after the evil bunny and shouting,
Badges? We don’t need no stinkin
badges
in a mockery of a Mexican accent.

He thought of telling Brendan to answer the door but that was an invitation for trouble, something newspapers would tout in giant headlines after some escaped sex offender made off with Brendan after the innocent boy answered the door.
FATHER TOLD BOY TO ANSWER DOOR. Father claims he was too busy “cooking eggs” to see who the stranger was himself. Now, the father is on a hot-plate of his own as accusations of bad parenting and suspicions of the father’s complicit role in the scenario play out across the country. Did Anthony Williams not only know his son’s kidnapper but actually broker the deal as a way to pay his mounting drug debts to a secret Mexican cartel? While the father denies ever suffering any kind of drug addiction, his wife, Chloe, 39, admits that Anthony was a heavy pot smoker in college and that behavior might have served as a gateway to more dangerous drugs and aas drugs secret addiction he hid from his entire family.

Would Chloe sell him out that quickly? A mother’s love was stalwart. For the drug angle to work, though, the newspapers would have to believe that a man who never takes anything stronger than aspirin could somehow get wrapped up in the underworld dealings of Mexican drug trafficking, and all from his humble home in Sky View Estates in Orange County, New York. If anyone was going to go under the microscope of drug use it would be Chloe. Her pills were best taken with food as well. She preferred her eggs sunny side down. How appropriate.

He pushed the scrambled eggs onto a plate and dropped three pieces of bacon next to them. He set the plate on the kitchen table and, as he passed through the family room, told Brendan to get his breakfast while the bacon fat was still hot and tasty.

Anthony opened the front door. A tall man in a black suit had his hand raised to knock again. He slowly brought it down to cup the Bible held in his other hand. His suit was freshly pressed and tailored perfectly to his thin frame. Another man, shorter, though bulkier, like a lineman, also dressed in a black suit, also well-tailored, stood next to the first. This man’s suit was clean, but wrinkles weaved over the pants and jacket like varicose veins. Nearly identical smiles emerged on their faces like the multi-toothed grins of sharks breaking the water’s surface to snatch unsuspecting birds.