Creamy Bullets (7 page)

Flying Horses

I
got off my horse and watched the burning body. A fireman approached me with a cup of hot coffee. He gave me a photograph of a naked boy with a large sexual organ. I stuck it in my mouth. He sipped his coffee loudly without looking at me and then excused himself to disconnect a hose. I picked up a five dollar bill that he seemed to have dropped on purpose and stuffed it down my pants. Something seemed to drip from my mouth.

A well-dressed man came up to me and asked about my dark glasses. I rubbed the top of my head and made my hair stick up, imitating the flames. The real flames were being fought by fire fighters. They were coming out of an old lady’s mouth. Her teeth popped loudly. I got the feeling the fire fighters weren’t trying very hard to stop it.

The man who was talking to me tore off my glasses and ran toward the burning lady. I stood frozen, half-asleep, half in shock. He threw the glasses at the flaming body like someone pitching a ball in cricket. The body looked lifeless, sort of like a statue. The man then picked up the glasses and tried putting them on the woman’s face, but he had a hard time getting around the flames. The fireman who gave me the photograph, then tackled the man roughly.

Moments later, a pizza deliveryman arrived on the scene to feed everyone. The fire spread to four or five nearby houses. I found a bench to sit on. A female fire fighter sat next to me and started talking.

“Your Heaven looks just like my Hell,” she said.

“What?” I said.

She gave me a sad look, took a bite of pizza, and with her mouth full, began to tell me about Pac-Ten colleges. I watched the burning lady collapse and listened to the female fire fighter. About ten minutes later I noticed we‘d somehow gotten closer to the still-burning body. I turned around and discovered the man who had taken my glasses was slowly and quietly pushing our bench closer to the flames.

“You stupid little monkey,” the female fire fighter said to him. “Why don’t you just go home and adjust the insurance policies like you’re supposed to.”

The man clenched his fists and fidgeted with his facial expressions, like he was trying to decide if he should hit her or not. I got in between them and offered the man five dollars to go away. He raised it to six and we settled. All of a sudden he looked at ease and even extended his hand to shake. Before getting into his car he stood with the driver door open, laughing repulsively until the fireman threatened to tackle him again.

“You’re a one-eyed fool,” the female fire fighter said to me.

The rest of the fire fighters were struggling with several powerful hoses while eating pizza at the same time. The water was spraying frantically into houses that weren’t even on fire.

I was getting ready to ride my horse back home when I noticed the old lady who had been on fire was standing up and brushing ashes off of her tattered clothes. She seemed to be fine. I almost wanted to help her but felt embarrassed about the cowboy suit I was wearing. She looked nervously at the clumsy fire fighters as she crouched behind a car, and then ran into one of the burning houses without anyone seeing.

I walked over to my horse and untied the rope. I patted her muscular neck and brushed the rough patches of hair on her side. Her silhouette looked awesome in the firelight. I whispered into her ear and let her run home by herself. I felt good despite my blurry vision.

I made my way to the backyard of the burning house that the lady had entered. I found an immaculately mowed lawn next to a large swimming pool and a full-length basketball court. The formerly burning lady was doing lay-ups there. I noticed it was very quiet as I climbed the ladder to the swimming pool high dive. Once on the diving board I noticed she was practicing free throws. Some kind of noise began to emerge from the sky, like a slow helicopter. Beams of light shot across the backyard in every direction. Now, the lady was shooting 30-footers, swishing every time. It was an amazing sight.

After what seemed to be several hours of stunning athleticism, the lady looked up and saw me sitting on the high dive. She made a few last three-pointers before finishing the display with a vicious slam dunk that shattered the glass backboard. Then she threw the basketball precisely into my hands with stunning ease. She walked over to a suitcase by the side of the court and took a clean white piece of paper out of it. She sat at center court and slashed her left wrist several times with paper cuts. When her hand fell off she finally began to bleed and slowly thereafter, she died.

I stood up with the basketball and bounced on the board until I began to feel the tension leave my body. Then I dove. But I can’t remember if there was water in the pool or not.

I Rest Between Them

I
t started at the merry-go-round. I’m not sure what drew me there. I had no kids and I wasn’t a babysitter. I guess it was the novelty of having this big carnival relic inside a fast food restaurant.

I’ll go ahead and say it: I was at a Burger King.

Maureen had been running the merry-go-round a long time. It was passed down to her from her father. I didn’t ask how it ended up here, at the home of the Whopper. But she charged the company for her services, her machine, and that’s how she made her living. It was an attraction. People came from all over the county to see it. There were days when the engine would start to overheat and she’d have to shut it down for a couple hours.

I’d go there on the slower days, sit with Maureen and talk about life. She had been engaged before I met her but she broke it off so she could live with her mom and take care of her. She wore a dress shirt and a tie when she worked the merry-go-round. I figured she was trying to cultivate a formal air, of nostalgia and family fun. She was thin and had a nervous energy like she couldn’t wait to get on with something else. She had brown, medium-length hair and eyes that always looked a little stoned. She was fourteen years older than me.

I was on a break from a relationship, meaning I would probably get back into it after I saw how other people felt about me.

Kristi was the girl I was on a break from. We worked at the newspaper together. Not as reporters or anything like that. We worked graveyard shift on the production line, slipping color ad inserts between section B and C before someone else bundled them all up for the vans to deliver to the paperboys. We were one step above the paperboys. Maybe even one step below.

Kristi was the only reason I worked there. I met her on a smoke break three nights in and she kept touching my legs as we sat on the back dock. She started calling me her boyfriend after that and we went out for nine months before she freaked out for good.

“Wanna have lunch with me?” Maureen asked as she started up her ride for a dozen kids.

“Oh, uh, sure. You want a double cheeseburger meal?”

“No. I meant lunch somewhere else. Like O’Connors or something.” She gave me a little jab, to seem casual.

I said it sounded like a good idea. We watched the kids going around in front of us, all smiles except for one. There always seemed to be one who wouldn’t smile, as if she’d been forced onto the white horse when she wanted the black horse or the ostrich. I kept watching this one unhappy girl hoping she would grin or do something indicating fun. She kept looking at her parents with that look on her face:
Get me off this thing
.

It was strange to see Maureen outside of the Burger King. She looked better in these surroundings. Neon beer lights brightened her cheeks and gave her figure some shadowy angles. Her tie was off and I could see her bra through her shirt. Our conversation seemed to toggle back and forth, her talking about something in the seventies, me talking about something in the eighties. We seemed a little off, our chemistry tethered to poles far away from each other. Still, she ate her onion rings and drank her iced tea as I picked apart some mysterious sandwich. I couldn’t remember what it was I had ordered but it was falling apart badly, the bread a little too BBQ soggy, the crispy fried meat (chicken?) too awkward and slick. I got sauce on my cheek and I didn’t have a napkin. I used a french fry to squeegee it off. She saw what I was doing and gave me her napkin. I self-consciously put the fry back on my plate. I realized we were eating the same sort of things we would have eaten at Burger King. I felt a sense of futility about this and started to slouch in my seat.

“I think I’m going to take the rest of the day off,” she said. “This is fun.” I waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t say anything for about three minutes. “I need some new shoes,” she finally said. “Let’s go to the mall.”

I couldn’t handle Kristi’s mood swings. When we first started going out she’d try to hide them from me. But about four months in, she finally burst. She said it was PMS. All the women in her family had it bad, apparently. Her older sister couldn’t keep a job or a boyfriend and her mother had been divorced three times before she even had kids. I said I would try to help her but I wasn’t up to the task. I often felt verbally abused and we’d break up almost every month for three days. “We have to talk,” she’d say, and my heart would turn to steel. She’d eventually let me know she was better by pinching my butt at work. Or she would walk up to me and simply say, “I suck.”

One time at work, we went to my car and made out for twenty minutes. It was about three in the morning; the sky was totally black and draped in humidity. Somehow I was able to bend over enough to put my mouth between her legs. She braced herself against the dash, with her sweats just below her knees, listening for anyone who might walk across the gravel toward us. I tasted her blood and she started to cry. It just made me want her more.

When we went back inside to work I could swear that we stank. But I knew the other people there were not as happy as we were at that moment. They would look out into the sky as it changed color and they wouldn’t see what we saw. They wouldn’t feel what we felt. Patty Loveless played on the radio and everything was good and comfortable as we slipped the coupons in, just after the box scores and before the obituaries, our eyes looking up and connecting every few moments until the vans pulled up to the docks.

Walking in the mall with Maureen didn’t make me feel less self-conscious about being with her. I remembered the days when I actually used to hang out in the mall. Back then, who you walked around with was a sign of your status. If I were seen with one of the popular girls, the other guys would be jealous and maybe give me some respect for a few weeks. But if I was caught shopping with my mom, or some girl from marching band, it was like it went on my permanent shame record.

“I’ll make this quick,” Maureen said, steering me into a store full of sneakers. She had grabbed my arm for a couple seconds when she said this and it made me think, automatically and uncomfortably, about what it would be like if we were ever a couple. I fell deep and troublingly into this cloudy thought and didn’t say a word the whole time we were in the shoe store. It was like I was with a different person all of a sudden. Instead of a person running a merry-go-round, eating French fries, and talking about her favorite Jackie Chan movie, she was just another girl dying for a new pair of shoes. She must have sensed my uneasiness. She settled for a pair of brown suede Converse One Stars. She changed into them once we got out of the store, sitting on a stone bench amid the people passing by. I noticed for the first time that she had nice feet. She flexed her toes and looked at me. “I just wanted some good supportive shoes,” she said. “You want me to buy you some shoes?”

“No, it’s okay,” I said, my voice dry and cracking. She smiled and started to slip the second shoe on. “Wait,” I said. I touched the heel of her foot and wondered if she was ticklish. Inside my head, I was still thinking too much, internalizing and overanalyzing, but touching her foot, at least for the moment, made me aware of my hand. “Oh,” she said. “That feels good.” She closed her eyes. I closed my eyes too. “I’m glad we’re friends,” she said.

Kristi spent every Wednesday morning with her mom, running errands and sometimes drinking Bloody Marys. We had Wednesdays off together and she’d let me sleep until late in the afternoon before she came over and let herself into my apartment.

She woke me up on one of these Wednesdays and put her hand in my boxer shorts, trying to arouse me. I turned over and away from her, not ready to wake up. She exhaled loudly and left the room. I fell back asleep but she kicked open the door ten minutes later.

“I know why you don’t want to have sex,” she said tightly.

I woke up immediately. I tried to remember what I’d been looking at earlier in the day, when I woke up around noon, when I surfed the Internet, image after image, trying to find just the right one. I never knew when I’d find it but I always did, even if I had to look at dozens of women. It was something I did sometimes several times a week, a few private moments of fantasy. Sometimes, after I’d emptied myself of these urges, that hollow space would fill with shame.

She left my place angry and calling friends on her cell phone. I hated to think what she was saying and what they would say back to her.

She called the next day and we talked more. She was still shook up by the whole thing. “I’m taking some more days off,” she told me. She was being very stern. I imagined her standing very stiffly somewhere, close to a highway, her eyes rimmed red, staring at a mountain far away.

Somehow, Maureen and I found ourselves at a jazz club where one of her friends was playing. Some of her other friends were there, too, and I got this weird feeling that they were treating us like we were a couple.

“At first I thought you were her younger brother or something,” her friend Scott said to me. His hair was mostly gray with some red. His mouth seemed involuntarily wrinkled into a frown. I swallowed some beer and tried to tell him we were just friends, but he interrupted me. “My first wife was ten years younger than me. Not to say that’s a bad thing. I was in heaven for six months.” I asked him what happened and he looked at me as if I was getting too personal. “The life experience just isn’t there yet. I got tired of being her teacher.”

“Are you talking about Mandy again?” Maureen asked him. She grabbed my arm and held on. “Stop telling your horror stories. Are you trying to scare my date away?” I experienced a strange mix of feelings then—I felt defensive about my age and my “life experience,” but I was also unexpectedly thrilled that Maureen had called me her date. It was like I had permission to play a role now. I didn’t have to be an individual among strangers. I could scoot closer to Maureen and blend into her. I could let her talk and only offer a comment if she asked me herself. It was easier this way. I kept drinking and felt my nerves unwind. The jazz started to sound good as I held hands with Maureen and tried to play footsie under the table.

I told Kristi that I thought I was a sex addict, that I felt the need to ejaculate every day. I told her that I had worried about it for a long time—worried about things like becoming sterile or mentally ill—but the habit had become a part of me. Even if I had sex with her every day, I’d still have to masturbate sometimes. Anything could trigger it. Anyone. It wasn’t a matter of her not satisfying me, because she did. The images I looked at weren’t competition. But everything I said sounded unfeeling and terrible. Words were dumb.

It’s a desire to please myself. To be able to do it whenever I wanted. Without ceremony.

She asked if I’d see someone about it and I said I would. Still, she saw it as a betrayal and couldn’t stop imagining me, sitting at my computer, looking at other women. It made every part of her burn.

Maureen came over to my apartment after the jazz band finished that night. My neighbor, a college dropout named Larry, made small talk with us for a little while outside. He was cooking hot dogs for himself on a little barbecue and he kept looking at Maureen like he was trying to remember where he knew her. “Oh wait,” he said. “You’re the one who runs the merry-go-round at BK.” We all laughed and Maureen said quietly that yes, that was her. “I did that too for a while,” Larry said. “Down at Oaks Park. I was always nervous that people were falling off.” He laughed by himself this time. “It’s hard to see around the whole damn thing, you know?”

I told Larry goodnight and he seemed surprised when Maureen and I headed into my place together. I hadn’t told him about Kristi yet. “Have a good one,” he said.

When Maureen sat on my couch in the front room, I kneeled on the carpet in front of her and held her in an uneven sort of hug. I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted. But I did want to feel her body against me. It was so different from Kristi’s. She was smaller but not as soft. Even her head seemed different, and smaller. My mouth felt too big for hers. Her hair was short and dry in my hands. Her neck seemed too thin, and dangerous.

The couch was noisy, even though we were moving slowly. We slid to the floor and she took off her shirt. I kissed her arms, her chest, and her back. I found myself staring at her shoulder blades as if I couldn’t tell what they were. They stuck out of her skinny frame almost alarmingly, like wings. I rested my face between them.

Outside we heard Larry putting out his barbecue, the water on the charcoals. We could smell the smoke in the air. Maureen tugged my clothes away. She stood up and took off the rest of her clothes. “I have to go home and check on my mom,” she said, then she got back down on the floor with me.

The next night I went back to work and my boss called me into his office. He gave me an envelope and told me that Kristi had switched to another dispatch. He said he couldn’t tell me where. Inside the envelope was the extra key to my apartment, a bunch of photos, and a note.
Since you like pictures more than the real thing
, it said.