Husk (7 page)

“
This could be interesting,” he whispered.

The girls’ names were Mystie Valley and Lolita Libido, and they made up just two of the many stars in the adult movie
Pokeherhotass
, which his father had given him at the finale of their weekend visitation.

Tim swallowed, finding his mouth had gone dry during the opening scene. The film began in a rustic cabin with the two starlets dressed to resemble a scantily clad Indian squaw and an equally half-naked cowgirl with short blonde hair. After their initial bout of kissing and rubbing, the Indian girl (who was clearly Latino) climbed atop an old wooden table and allowed her costar to remove the top half of her costume. She wore a tan, buffalo hide skirt with fur tails and multicolored beads tied to the waistline, and those items fell over the dark patch of hair between her legs when she spread them for the camera.

Tim shifted the TV’s remote in his sweat-slick hand. His heart raced.

A turbulent mixture of excitement and shame pulled at his conscience with equal intensity.

He recalled the jaw-dropping moment when his dad first presented him with the DVD on the previous evening, having handed over the graphically decorated case the way one might recommend a documentary on colonial-age lifestyles. Tim had sat in a speechless stupor while his father explained how boys his age developed a natural curiosity about girls, soon realizing the gift constituted his father’s best shot at a man-to-man talk about the dynamics of sex. And if the video hadn’t been embarrassing enough, his dad went on to regale him with stories of his own sexual adventures as a teenager. The awkwardness of the whole ordeal gripped him like a hand around his throat, leaving him speechless, and it didn’t let up until his dad told him they needed to end the outing early.

Now, alone in the living room, with the moans and gasps of the girls on the screen, Tim felt a whole new kind of embarrassment dwelling on his mind.

Originally, he hadn’t intended to watch the movie at all. He knew that if he did, it might lead to other activities, and masturbating to a porno flick would be just another way of reminding himself that real girls weren’t interested in him. Nevertheless, when he arrived home and found the house empty, he couldn’t resist the temptation of playing the video, and the first sight of the women had produced an instantaneous erection.

He looked at the clock. At the drapes covering the front windows.

The cowgirl knelt over the Indian girl on the table now, practically sitting on her face, and when the camera moved around her back, she slipped aside a thin pair of black panties to reveal her hairless vagina.

Tim’s hands flew to the buttons of his fly while the girl being straddled kissed and nibbled at the pink skin that protruded from the bald cleft above her head.

He shucked off his pants, started to pull down his boxers.

And heard his mom’s car arrive in the driveway.

“
Oh,
shit
!”

He staggered forward, hobbled by his own clothing, and nearly toppled headfirst into the television screen. Regaining his balance, he jabbed at the DVD controls, hitting PAUSE, FAST-FORWARD, PLAY, and then STOP in his frantic quest to eject the disc. Contrary to his panic-induced clumsiness, his boner had vanished with light-speed efficiency.

A car door creaked open. Then shut.

He yanked up his pants and redid the buttons.

A key turned in the lock.

Tim switched off the television with one hand and grabbed the movie from the DVD player with the other. He tossed the disc into its case and wedged it into the waistband at the back of his pants to the sound of the front door opening.

His mother walked in. “Tim. This is a surprise.”

“
Hi, Mom.” He remained by the TV and waved like an idiot, too afraid to move.

She kicked off her shoes. “I didn’t expect you back this early. I thought you were going to Valleyfair for the afternoon?”

“
You know Dad,” he replied. “Work came up, and he had to go early. He left me the tickets, though.”

She shook her head with obvious irritation and opened her mouth to say something when she stopped and refocused on him. “Are you okay?” she asked. “You’re all red and you look like you’re sweating.”

“
Me?” he replied, and his voice cracked at the end of the word. He cleared his throat. “Fine. I’m fine. Everything’s fine. We went fishing Saturday, and I forgot the sun-block. Won’t do that again. How was your weekend?”

She left her shoes at the entry and walked past him, toward the kitchen. “All right, I guess. I had two open houses, but only a handful of people showed up.” She paused at the refrigerator and turned around. “Do you remember that man I told you about a while ago, the one who bought the house next to Harry’s?”

“
I think so.”

“
I saw him again at church today,” she said, smiling. “I think he likes me.”

Tim grinned, and his ridged posture melted to a more relaxed stance. Unlike his father, talking to his mom came easy; the divorce had bolstered their relationship in that way, allowing them to confide in one another on almost any topic.

“
Does that mean I’ll be getting a new daddy?” he asked, using the most innocent voice he could muster.

“
Shut up,” she replied, but her words dissolved into laughter. “Seriously. I like him, too, and … Well, you know I haven’t dated much since your father and I split up. It’s kind of scary, thinking about rejoining the singles scene. Cut me some slack.”

He nodded. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist.”

Suddenly her eyes narrowed, and Tim found himself at the target end of a wily stare. “You know, he has a daughter your age. Her name’s Mallory.”

“
Good for him.”

“
She’s a very nice girl,” his mother continued. “And quite attractive.”

“
So you have the hots for her, too, is that it?”

“
Ha, ha, wise guy. Actually, I thought
you
might want to meet her. She’ll need someone to introduce her around, show her the town. Better yet, you have those passes to Valleyfair. You should ask her to go with you. That would be a nice welcome present.”

“
Maybe,” he replied. “I’m not exactly Mr. Popularity, though.”

“
Don’t sell yourself short, pal. I think she’d be thrilled if you asked her. You know what it’s like to be the new kid in town. Think about it. In the meantime, I’m starving. Do you want to help cook up some stir fry?”

“
Sure. Just give me a minute to toss my overnight stuff in the washer.”

He sidestepped away from the doorway so she wouldn’t see the movie sticking out his pants and hurried to his room. Behind his closed door, his face warmed with a renewed flush of humiliation when he extracted the DVD from his waistband, thinking he should take it out to the garage and bury it at the bottom of a trashcan.

Instead, he went to his dresser and pulled the bottom drawer off its runners, dropping the movie into the hollow space beneath it.

Just in case he needed more fatherly advice.

CHAPTER 9

After she’d returned home from church and switched into a pair of running shorts and a sports bra, Mallory headed outside to go jogging. Mr. Fish had mentioned a series of dirt trails in the woods behind the neighborhood, and the sunny afternoon looked like a perfect time to familiarize herself with the area.

She left the yard, cut between the homes in back of her own, and found herself at the rear half of the block. A small path cut from the street into the forest. Leaving the pavement behind, she turned right and began jogging through the woods under a thick ceiling of lush tree branches.

Packed tight beneath the footfalls of countless travelers and worn flat by the abrasive touch of speeding bicycle tires, the ground along the path created a smooth tunnel-like passage beneath the trees. Forks branched from the main trail every so often, but on all sides a dense net of plant life blocked her view of anything beyond.

The close-knit greenery gave her a sense of isolation that she found perfect for clearing her thoughts, a calm she used to ponder the new developments concerning her old classmate, Derrick Nolan. Until last night, Derrick had always seemed unattainable to her, a person she could only dream about. Maybe all that was going to change?

Rounding a small knoll, her train of thought switched tracks, and she found herself wondering what Rebecca’s son, Tim, might be like. What if he proved an even better find than Derrick? It would certainly put a positive spin on the moving experience to find a cute guy waiting for a girlfriend.

Who knows? It could happen.

Lost in thought, it took her a second to notice how the dirt path had diminished to nothing more than a game trail. The forest leaned in on both sides.

Crap, I must have taken one of the forks
.

She slowed down, about to turn back, when she caught sight of something beyond the trees to her left.

An old barn.

Mallory walked off the trail, pushing aside a curtain of ivy to get a better look.

Blackened by fungus and age, the enormous building sat at the far end of an overgrown field, looking dilapidated and on the verge of collapse. A towering concrete silo stood behind it, its dome top peeking over the barn’s sagging roof like an archaic observatory.

“
Cool,” she whispered.

She glanced around, making certain the property was abandoned, then waded through the weeds until she stood before the ramshackle structure. She craned her head upward to take in the sight.

This close, the barn blocked out the sun, and its worn timbers hid in the shadows.

She rubbed her arms to dispel the electrifying chill that arose from her nerves at the thought of seeing a face appear in one of the building’s open windows.

To the left sat the fire-gutted shell of a two-story farmhouse, half-hidden by trees. To the right, a collection of tin henhouses dotted the weeds, all surrounded by the drooping remains of a rusty barbed wire fence.

She noticed spray-paint graffiti decorated the silo’s base with the names of those who’d visited here and felt the need to leave their mark, but none of the writing could keep her gaze from returning to the open front doors of the barn.

Mallory stepped up to the threshold and stopped. She panned her gaze from one side of the open main chamber to the next, sweeping the scene from the dusty floor to the high, hole-speckled ceiling.

She took her first tentative step forward, moving inside as if entering a forbidden tomb guarded by malevolent spirits.

Wide horse stalls took up most of the space to each side of the lower room, their wood walls dotted with insect burrows and rot. High above a wheeled rope and pulley hung from a rusty track along the central crossbeam. It appeared someone had added a new rope to the old contraption and turned it into a ride of some sort, using the wheeled runner to slide back and forth between the two open haylofts at either end of the building.

Uncertain whether the upper levels were safe or not, Mallory stuck to the ground level. She picked her way through the rubble littering the floor, occasionally kicking over a fallen wall panel to see what lay beneath it or prodding at suspicious bits of trash and mentally reconstructing how they had gotten into the barn.

The shadows deepened the farther she went, wrapping her in a cool embrace.

At the rear of the building she found a wooden storage bin in the far right corner. An open metal chute jutted from the wall directly above the bin—
probably connected to the silo
, she guessed—and inside the opening she discovered a host of writing scrawled across the sheet metal in permanent black marker.

Jennifer Johnson sucks dog cocks!

Go Green: Smoke weed.

HB loves JD

After making sure she wouldn’t step in anything gross, she climbed into the empty bin and stepped up to the chute for a closer look. She peered into the dark.

The rectangular passage extended upward at an incline into blackness, with the far end barely visible in the murk. The messages appeared to continue for the full length of the chute, hundreds upon hundreds of them, no doubt left by local teens over the years.

Mallory scanned the writing closest to her, sometimes having to guess at the words where one note overlapped another. She read proclamations of love, giggled at dirty jokes, and frowned at the occasional racial slur or homophobic remark. Drawings accompanied many of the notes, and they sometimes included phone numbers or web sites. She spotted peace signs and swastikas, hearts and skulls, naked cartoon people drawn with oversized boobs or gigantic penises.