Florida Heatwave (4 page)

Vince stares down at the bloody nothingness that had been his lover. He communicates no feeling. He just looks like he wants to be sick.

Debbie and Bradley aren’t looking at Carlotta at all, because they’ve already seen the monstrosity hiding in that pitiful rubber suit. They’re looking into each other’s faces. I’ve looked at that still shot a million times, and I still can’t tell whether their eyes are communicating love or fear or loathing. I’ve come to think that murderers aren’t capable of love or fear, not really. Every emotion for them is some form of loathing.

And where did my gaze turn in that stomach-churning instant? My eyes aren’t focused on Carlotta or her killers. They’re not focused on anything in range of the camera. I’m looking past the cameraman, down the boat’s long deck where Louise just fled from the sight of death. I’m looking for the only woman I have ever loved.

I did get my dream career as a screenwriter, though I can’t say it was completely on my own merits. It never hurts to be the spouse of a bankable star. Though Louise never displaced Esther Williams as queen of the movie mermaids, she was always bankable. And she was always lovable. When she turned those wide blue eyes on the camera, her sweet nature showed through, and movie audiences loved her almost as much as I did.

Her acting coaches drummed the rural Florida accent out of her, but she can still turn it back on for me. She knows how much I like to hear her say, “Ah love yew, darlin’.”

And I answer her, in my flat Tinseltown tones, saying, “I love you too, darling. And I always have … ever since I first saw you wearing that stupid rubber monster suit.”

BY JAMES W. HALL

Johnny Fellows
discovered the naked woman standing on a precipice when he was eight years old. She filled an entire page in the photography magazine, a perfectly focused black and white shot artful in its simplicity. Voluptuous nude woman poised on a stony perch.

Johnny found her in the basement among a stack of his father’s photo magazines. Photography was his father’s hobby, a laborious and chemically messy activity in those days of 1955, requiring a cramped darkroom, trays of dizzy smelling liquids, a clothesline where the drying prints hung, and long hours working alone in the red-lit darkness.

In the back room of the local barbershop, Johnny had seen bare-breasted women in
Playboy Magazine
but their crotches were airbrushed clean. On the walls of the gas station where his father, Arnold, took his car to be serviced, pin-up pictures of sexy babes were plastered everywhere, their crotches hidden behind feather dusters or conveniently placed objects. And he’d seen a few generic girlie magazines passed around at school. But none of the breasts Johnny had seen, or the sumptuous hips or graceful legs compared to the brazen nude in his father’s photo magazine.

The woman on the rock was tall with loose, luxurious black hair that fell down her back. Her arms were poised slightly away from her wide hips as if she meant to take a swan dive into some unseen canyon. Her breasts were full and round, her nipples as dark and taut as fresh raisins. A tangled thatch of pubic hair formed a mysterious shadow a few inches below her navel.

He studied that bush for hours when his father was away on his business trips and his mother was upstairs relentlessly cleaning the house.

His parents didn’t question Johnny’s long absences in the basement for they believed he was engaged in a constructive hobby. In one corner of the basement he had cordoned off a workshop area where he fashioned model cars from kits. He specialized in Ford hotrods, the ‘32, the ‘40, which he modified with his X-acto knife and soldering iron. Johnny chopped and channeled their molded bodies and customized their interiors with corduroy and other fabrics that he glued to the bucket seats to replicate rolled and pleated upholstery. Then he delicately placed screws that allowed the seats to swivel outward. His creations had even won trophies at local contests.

It was the first pubic hair of Johnny’s life. Lush and snarled like a nest that some strangely beautiful creature had woven and left behind in the branches of a tree. Hiding inside that mat of hair was some unimaginable bliss that weakened Johnny’s knees, flushed his cheeks, and tensed his breath.

While he listened to his mother’s tread on the floor above, he held the photo up to the light, cocked it at different angles, even used a magnifying glass. Still he could not penetrate the dark wooly triangle.

Months earlier while exploring his father’s stash of magazines, Johnny had first discovered the photograph. The page was dog-eared, a small fold in the corner as if something in the photo had caught his father’s attention. Arnold Fellows was a plain and colorless businessman who neither cursed nor boozed nor sinned in any way that Johnny had ever noted. He wore dreary suits and seemed more pale and quiet than the other fathers. So Johnny was certain he’d marked the page only because the photographer had employed some arcane technique that his father was trying to master.

Johnny, however, was struck dumb by the eroticism of the image and returned to it again and again, lured from his glue and spray paint and his modified antique Fords. Drawn to the cabinet where he knew she was standing on her rock, everything exposed. Her dark hair, her deep navel, her swollen hips, her faultless breasts.

She became for him, during those hours when he stared at her, the guiding image of his adult life, his anima, his secret touchstone for sexual thrill. The woman on the rock in black and white with the shadow of her perfect body flattened on the cliffside to her left. The incalculably deep cavern that opened before her was beyond the frame of the photograph. But he knew it was there. She had that look on her face. The expression of someone teetering on the edge of an abyss.

He called her Myra. He didn’t know why he chose that name. To his youthful ear it sounded vaguely exotic. When he considered Myra later, and the role she would play in his adult life, he could never sort the chicken from the egg. Had his fascination with the photograph of Myra, the long hours he’d spent gazing at her, implanted that image of a dark goddess in his psyche? Or was that image preexistent in his sexual genome, and Myra simply became the first and clearest manifestation of what was already lurking within him?

After graduating from college, Johnny married a thin blonde, whose body type and complexion was similar to his mother’s. He loved Candace in a clear-cut, uncomplicated way. He found her familiar and easy. Like Johnny, she worked in the public schools. Candace taught math to the brightest high school kids, while Johnny was a guidance counselor in a nearby junior high, which meant he spent most of his day dealing with children who were failing in every imaginable way.

Candace and Johnny had half a dozen friends they met for dinner now and then. On school nights in the evenings while she graded quizzes, Johnny watched TV and nursed a single glass of wine. He read an occasional novel, whatever was popular at the moment. It was not a challenging life. Nor was it tumultuous. None of the prickly rancor he’d witnessed between Candace’s parents, none of the strained indifference he’d observed between his own.

They had a child, a son named Jason who resembled his mother, thin and tall and blond. Though he was a bit of a loner, Jason never acted out, and seemed a happy child. He did well in his studies, won a scholarship to a state university and found a job teaching math in a junior college in Georgia. Once a month they talked on the phone, and visited on the holidays. He had a girlfriend and it looked serious. The Fellows genes were going to pass on.

Over three decades Johnny and Candace fell into a satisfying routine in the bedroom. Saturday was their sex day. Her orgasms were reliable and definite and afterwards they smiled at each other the rest of the afternoon. They rarely argued. They made decent money, had solid benefits. Politically they were nearly in full agreement and the areas where they disagreed caused them to have a few spirited debates, though nothing acrimonious. Before he married Candace, Johnny had slept with five college girls. Since their vows, Johnny was absolutely faithful to her and he was certain she was to him. By all the customary measurements, their marriage was nearly perfect.

However, the woman on the rock who he’d last seen when he was eight, never left him for long. It was as if Myra was lodged in an essential vein restricting the normal flow to his libido. She was always there, poised to dive. Daring in her nakedness. Dark-skinned in his memory, perhaps tanned from the sun, perhaps from some ancestral strain. She might have been from gypsy stock or Mediterranean. Sometimes when he was walking through crowds at the mall, he saw fleeting fragments of Myra. Her dark hair kicking up across the shoulders of her blouse. Her strong nose. Her hourglass body with black sand tickling through it continuously.

At times when he and Candace were making love, Johnny had closed his eyes and Myra appeared before him unbidden, her wide, welcoming hips, her ravenous appetites. Lusty and primitive, a mystery he’d never solved.

At fifty-eight Johnny retired. Together he and Candace decided she should keep working to retain their health insurance and because she claimed she still enjoyed the students.

Johnny decided he would try to write a book, a collection of anecdotes he’d been filing away for years. Some funny, some sad, some tragic. An insider’s guide to the silliness and outrages of public education. Candace rooted him on.

At home alone for the first time in his adult life, Johnny fell into a routine. For an hour or two in the morning, he piddled with his manuscript, wrote a few sentences, maybe even a paragraph or two, then he reread his efforts, saw nothing but flaws, wound up deleting every word he had written, and drifted to the Internet.

Without ever consciously deciding to do so, he began to search out porn. He wasn’t horny. Even after thirty years, Candace never failed to arouse him, and he seemed to have the same effect on her. Theirs was, by any textbook definition, a sound and healthy marriage.

Yet, there he was, utterly unfettered for the first time since childhood, and Johnny Fellows found himself surfing madly through the most obscene websites imaginable. He explored every fetish he’d heard of and many new to him. Lesbians with strap-ons, golden showers, women having sex with horses and other barnyard creatures, men with other men, women drenched with the sperm of a dozen men in leather masks. Men with silicone breasts, dressed as slutty women, showing off fully-functioning cocks. Old women screwing teenage boys. Teenage girls giving head to granddads, women dressed as nuns pleasuring themselves with gigantic, multi-headed dildos. It was all just a click away. He took the free tours, never subscribed, never used his credit card number. He just browsed and browsed and browsed.

After weeks of that, well into his first free semester in over fifty years, he began to circle in on what he’d come to consider his own domain. He found he liked to look at hirsute women, Earth Mamas, Hippie Goddesses, Hairy Honeys. Johnny was drawn instinctively to women with mounds of pubic hair like Myra’s.

Finding images of such women was more tricky than he might have expected. While Johnny hadn’t been paying attention, apparently the fashion of sexual display had altered, and women began to coif their pubic patches, trimming them to narrow strips, or manicured valentines, or most frequently, to shave their mons pubis bare.

Johnny assumed the style grew out of one of the modern age’s last taboos. The forbidden allure of prepubescence. Fully sexualized women simulating innocent girls.

As the raunchy pictures filled his computer screen, Johnny felt no urge to masturbate. Instead, what he experienced was a persistent and cavernous yearning. While his eyes roamed the bodies of anonymous women, he suffered a vast ache in his soul. An absence that yawned within him as large and unknowable as that bottomless canyon that opened below Myra’s bare feet.

In early October he realized one morning that he’d been obsessing over surrogates for Myra, and that’s when he decided to hunt for her.

It seemed to John Fellows that the Internet had absorbed most of the tangible world and nearly everything that once existed in three dimensions was floating in cyberspace, if only one had the skill and resolve to search it out.

Within a single day he located a site that trafficked in old issues of
Modern Photography,
the magazine she’d appeared in. Many of the pages within the magazine were reproduced and viewable online, but to his irritation, he could not locate Myra’s picture among them. Unsure of the exact date of the magazine he had spent so many hours absorbed in, Johnny ordered every issue from 1954 and 1955. Furthermore, he paid an outrageous sum to have all twenty-four of them delivered the next day.

That night in a fever of expectancy he sat on the couch and pretended to be alive. Candace was watching their favorite sitcom and giggling along with the laugh track. Johnny held himself still, feeling the fracture lines branching through him as though he might crack apart right there and spill out a grim confession to his sweet blond wife, reveal that he had sinned against her, that he had betrayed her, that indeed, their whole romantic life together had been one long sham. For half a century he had been furtively in love with a woman named Myra. A ghostly being who haunted his reveries, whose perfumed breath whispered into his dreaming mind, and even now in his deep middle age, this seductive mistress had more than once materialized in his sleep to harden his cock, make him grind against the mattress until he released a flood of nocturnal emissions into the secret flesh behind Myra’s nest of hair.

“Is something wrong?”

He made himself breathe. He made himself look at her.

“No,” Johnny said. “Why do you ask?”

“You’re so quiet.”

“I am?”

“Yes,” she said. “Very quiet.”

“It must be the writing,” he said.

“Not going well?”

“It’s harder than I imagined. I’m just preoccupied.”

“When are you going to show me something?”