Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel (23 page)

“Do you want to be a galley slave all your life, Paul,” asked the Colonel, behind him, “sweating in an airless hold, chained to your bench?”

Paul turned, breathing hard. “What?”

“You heard me, son.” The Colonel pushed heavily up the embankment and stopped a few feet from the top. He glanced along the river at the bridge, then pulled off his sunglasses and squinted at Paul. “Do you want to end up like poor ol’ Dennis, all alone in your cube, pulling on your oar until you keel over dead?”

Paul looked away at the General Services Division Building, then back at the bridge, then down the slope at the Colonel. “Who are those guys on the bridge?”

The Colonel stood with one foot higher than the other,
and he rested his big-knuckled hand on his flexed knee and dangled his sunglasses. Beyond him, across the parking lot, J.J. had thrown his arm around Bob Wier’s shoulders and was leading him into the building.

The Colonel drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. He peered into the distance, then looked up at Paul again with a knowing glint in his eye. “What are you doing Saturday night?”

“Why don’t you answer my question?” Paul insisted. He hated the high pitch of his voice. “Who are those guys?”

“Do you like to sing, Paul?”

“Do I like to
what?”

The Colonel stood up straight, swinging his sunglasses from his index finger. “Friday night, Professor. Karaoke night at Casa Pentoon.” He started down the embankment and called back, “And bring that lil’ Oklahoma gal, if you want.” He gestured over his shoulder. “We’ll talk then.”

“What’s Friday night?” Paul called after him from the top of the embankment. “What are we going to talk about?”

The Colonel paused and looked back up the slope. He gave Paul a smile that creased the corners of his eyes.

“The opportunity of a lifetime,” he said.

T
HAT NIGHT
, after a dinner Charlotte couldn’t ruin—no-brand hot dogs on no-brand buns, with no-brand chips and cola—Paul unfolded his creaking sofa bed and turned on his little black-and-white TV. As the air-conditioning unit rattled under the window, Paul sat on the end of the lumpy mattress in his t-shirt and shorts and clicked round the dial in the jittery light from the screen. After fifteen minutes of fidgeting with the rabbit ears, the local PBS station came in the clearest, showing an aggressively vulgar old Britcom from the seventies called
’Ow’s Yer Knickers?
about three women in a lingerie shop. The youngest was a scrawny, hawk-nosed punk with piercings and jagged hair; the next oldest was a sour, middle-aged divorcée; and the oldest was a zaftig, sixty-something widow with blue hair like a helmet, named Mrs. Prestoil. Their antagonists were assorted customers—usually stammering, red-faced, clueless men—and Mr. Lancet, who owned the butcher’s shop next door, and his shop assistant Stig, a buck-toothed, pasty-faced
lad with a yen for the young punk. Mrs. Prestoil’s shtick was lead-footed double entendre, accompanied by raucous laughter from a studio audience of lubricious Londoners.

“I couldn’t find my pussy last night,” trilled Mrs. Prestoil. Big laughs.

“She couldn’t find her pussy with both ‘ands,” said the punk, in a snarling sotto voce. Bigger laughs.

“What’s happened, dearie?” drawled the divorcée, examining her nails.

“I’m afraid someone’s
snatched
her,” wailed Mrs. Prestoil.

“Someone say ‘snatch’?” said Stig, sticking his head in from next door.

“Crikey,” said Paul as he sprawled across his rumpled sheets. He concentrated harder on the program than it probably deserved because he was trying not to brood about recent events. Who was Boy G, and what did he want with Paul? And who were the men with him? Surely their saw-blade dentition was the product of Paul’s imagination. And why, thought Paul, shifting restlessly on his groaning bed, why were the Colonel and his dopey little lunch group showing so much interest in him all of a sudden? Had the Colonel really given the three men on the bridge a thumbs-up, or had he imagined that, too? And how on earth did the Colonel know about Paul’s “lil’ Oklahoma gal”?

On the television, smirking Stig slouched into the lingerie shop.

“Someone’s snatched her pussy,” explained the divorcée on the television.

“Is that even
possible?”
said Stig, goggle-eyed.

Where
was
Callie? Paul wondered. What was she doing? And who was she doing it with? Even the Britcom wasn’t loud and vulgar enough to divert his inflamed imagination from constructing a detailed picture of Mr. X. In Paul’s head the singer/songwriter from Tulsa was tall and lanky, with sleepy eyes and a sensual mouth and a ponytail, and he looked good in faded jeans and a denim shirt open to the third button, and he
stretched out on Callie’s narrow mattress while Callie’s fingers popped buttons four, five, and six, on her way to Mr. X’s big silver belt buckle in the shape of the state of Texas. . . .

Charlotte interrupted his bitter reverie by prancing along the end of the bed, her spiky silhouette strobing before the TV screen. She gave Paul a chilling look, then curled over herself on a corner of the mattress and began to lick her ectoplasmic privates.

“Subtle,” said Paul, edging away from that corner of the bed.

Someone on the TV was banging on something, but no one in the lingerie shop seemed to notice. The banging continued, and Paul groaned, “Somebody answer the fucking door.” Charlotte lifted her head and perked up her ears. The banging got louder, and a woman’s voice said, “Paul? I hear your TV.”

Paul scuttled to the end of the bed and turned down the television. No one apart from his landlady had ever knocked on his door here, and it wasn’t Mrs. Prettyman’s voice. Kymberly didn’t even know where he lived, and neither Virginia nor Oksana would have bothered to look him up. He lifted his trousers off the chair at his little dining table.

“Coming,” he shouted, hopping into one leg and then the other. He glanced back at the bed. Charlotte’s eyes were round and fathomless and fixed on the door. Paul unkinked the chain and slid back the deadbolt.

“Hey.” Callie hunched in the doorway in sandals and jeans and a tank top. In the long, summer twilight, she was still wearing her sunglasses. “You gonna invite me in, or do I have to stand out here with all these cowboys staring at me?”

Paul looked past her to see more than the usual assortment of Snopeses silhouetted in the yellow light of their doorways or dangling beers off the balcony across the way. The appearance at the Angry Loner Motel of a woman who wasn’t Mrs. Prettyman was something of an occasion. Paul glanced back into his apartment. The dead gray glare of the TV played across the folds of his rumpled sheets, but Charlotte had vanished, so he stepped aside. Callie tilted her sunglasses onto her hair as she
entered, and Paul winced at the way she wrinkled her nose at the smell.

“You have a cat?” Callie glanced round.

“Not really,” said Paul. “How do you know where I live?”

“Saw your address when I made your badge yesterday.” She peered into his kitchenette and through the door of his little motel bathroom. “Did the guy
before
you have a cat?”

“Have a seat.” Paul swung the chair away from his table. He sat on the edge of his bed, tugging on the hem of his t-shirt so that his gut didn’t bulge so noticeably.

Callie swung the chair around and straddled it backwards, leaning her elbows on the back and dangling her sunglasses.

“So,” she said, “how was your day?” She wouldn’t look at him for some reason, gazing at her hands instead, or at the silent television, or over Paul’s head. After a moment Paul said, “My day was peculiar. How was
your
day?”

“Peculiar, huh?” Still she wouldn’t look at him. “What was peculiar about it?”

Paul hesitated before answering. “My three colleagues on the RFP project took me out to lunch.”

“They take you someplace good?” Callie scowled at the glasses in her hands. “Or they take you to Sonic?”

“Headlights,” he sighed. “They took me to Headlights.”

Callie looked at him at last. “No shit!” She laughed harshly. “Hellfire, son, that means they
like
you!”

“That piss you off?” he said.

“Hell no,” she said, a little too heartily. “Just because you went to a titty bar for lunch?”

“Whoa!” said Paul. “It’s not that kind of place.”

“ ’Course it’s not!” Callie waggled her fingers, as if copping a feel. “It’s a
gentlemen’s
club. Bring the goddamn family.”

“A little slack, Callie, okay?” Paul said. “It wasn’t my idea.”

“Course
not. I bet if you was to ask half the guys in Headlights, it was the
other
guy’s idea to go.”

Paul folded his hands in his lap. “You asked me,” he said. “I told you.”

“Yeah.” She dropped her gaze to the floor. “Yeah, I reckon I did.”

She twirled her glasses and tensed her legs, and Paul was certain she was going to get up and walk out, and he’d never see her again. Fuck it, he thought. Let her go.

Callie drew a deep breath and sighed. “Saw Mr. X yesterday,” she said.

“Ah.”

“Didn’t go so well.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

Callie grimaced, as if to say, What are you gonna do?

“Why are you telling me?” Paul said.

She sighed again. “Well, that’s the question, ain’t it?”

“It’s not like you owe me an explanation.”

“I know that. I just needed to tell somebody, and I figured I might as well tell you.”

“Okay.” Paul was pretty sure he didn’t want to hear this.

“Basically,” Callie said, swinging her sunglasses and glancing round the room again. “Basically . . .”

Paul crossed his arms.
‘Ow’s Yer Knickers
flickered at the corner of his eye.

“The sumbitch wanted me to loan him some money.” She looked at Paul, and even in the dim light her eyes looked red from crying. “And he wanted to fuck me.”

Paul felt his face get hot. “Did you?” he said.

Callie’s face flushed and her eyes burned, but she said nothing. She did, Paul thought. She fucked him. Son of a
bitch!

“You got no right to ask me that,” she said in a low voice.

“No? You can give me a hard time for going to a ‘titty bar’ “—he made quotation marks with his fingers—“that isn’t really a titty bar, but I can’t ask an obvious question.”

“Paul—”

“You tell me your boyfriend’s back, you call in sick—”

“Paul, shut up.” Callie gave him a look that drilled right through him. Paul glared back, but his mind was racing. If Callie had fucked Mr. X, then why would she come all the way out here, to the wilder fringes of Lamar, just to tell me about it?

“Nothing happened.” Callie kept Paul steadily in her sights. “With Mr. X. I didn’t do it.”

Paul said nothing. He was astonished at himself, at how badly he wanted Callie to be telling the truth.

“I gave the sumbitch the money he wanted,” she said, “and then I told him to get lost. I figured that was stupid enough. I didn’t have to fuck him on top of it.”

Paul noticed Charlotte crouching in the shadows under the table, gazing wide-eyed at Callie, her tail switching back and forth.

“Callie,” he said, but she cut him off with a gesture.

“You want to know where I was all day?” Her voice trembled. “I was curled up on my bed bawling like a little girl.” Callie stood and pushed the chair away. She fumbled with her glasses. “And then I came out here, like an idiot, thinking that you could . . . that you might . . .”

Under the table Charlotte watched Callie with her furious, hollow-eyed gaze. Callie started for the door, and Paul jumped up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You said you were going to see this guy, and I just didn’t know . . .”

He gingerly laid his hand on her warm shoulder, and when she didn’t pull away, he turned her and draped both arms around her. Over her shoulder he kept an eye on Charlotte.

Callie hunched tensely in his arms. “Ain’t your fault,” she said at last. She relaxed and tilted her forehead against Paul’s. “Ain’t his either, really. I should know by now.”

“Callie.” Paul folded his arms around her neck, and Callie wrapped her arms around his waist. Over her shoulder, Paul saw that Charlotte had disappeared. As best he could with Callie’s warm cheek pressed into his neck, he scanned the apartment for the ghostly cat.

“It’s okay,” said Paul, not certain that it was. “It’s okay.” He wondered what Charlotte would do if Callie stayed the night.

Callie unwrapped her arms from around his waist and fixed Paul with a narrow, meaningful look.

“What?” he said. The hair went up on the back of his neck, and he wondered if Charlotte was doing something behind him.

“Put your shoes on, stud,” said Callie. “Let’s go for a ride.”

C
ALLIE DROVE
. She didn’t say much as they left town, but Paul was satisfied to watch her long fingers grasp the big black knob of the gearshift and ram it from first to second to third. Her whole arm tensed when she shifted, and the strap of her tank top pulled away from her shoulder. Paul wanted to lean across the long, bench seat and lick her collarbone from one end to the other.

Well past Lamar city limits, out beyond the new strip malls and the enormous limestone grocery stores and the new subdivisions of vast, square, luxury homes on little plots of mesquite and juniper, the truck roared and rattled towards the salmon strip of sky where the sun had just set. The big, four-lane state highway swooped around and under the hills, and the wind rushed through the windows, thumping in Paul’s ears and rippling his t-shirt. Even this late in the evening, the air was still hot. “The AC don’t work,” was all Callie had said since they’d left his apartment. “Never did.” But Paul didn’t mind. The hot
wind felt good to him, polishing his skin and loosening his joints.

Farther from Lamar the hills turned black against the turquoise sky. The traffic thinned out. Here and there a faint light shone out of the darkness on one side of the road or the other, but mostly the view was of the pavement bleached by the headlights, the humpbacks of the hills, and the stars starting out of a rich black sky. About twenty minutes beyond the last sign of civilization, a little green sign—
LONESOME KNOB STATE PARK
—pointed to the right, and Callie downshifted just enough to make the turn onto the ranch road in an unholy clashing of gears and a rattle of spraying gravel. This two-lane road dipped and rolled through the dark even more like a roller-coaster than the big four laner, and Paul caught glimpses of bare rock along the shoulder, and stubby cactus, and gnarled live oaks, and, once, down a sudden, precipitous drop, a ranch house lit like a miniature railroad model by its own yard light at the bottom of a steep valley.