The Bone Parade (19 page)

I wait until early evening. I want the light that dazzles the eyes, that softens the vision with dusk.

She looks up as they all do when I descend the stairs. They will work out in about six hours, all but Her Rankness; I won’t waste precious workout time on her. For the first time, Diamond Girl will know when she settles on that stationary bike that it’s the middle of the night, because in a few short minutes she will discover that it’s early evening.

Her Rankness “demands” to know what I
“think”
I’m doing.

My head shakes. It’s all the response she’ll get. More than ever, I’m comfortable in the knowledge that I’m saving some poor slob a life of hell with this woman. To think of the accolades I would receive if the world only knew the service I provide, not only with Her Rankness, but with most of the subjects who end up here.

I wave them back as if I have the gun, though I don’t and have always been extremely careful about bringing it down here. The gun is absolutely necessary for June or Jolly Roger’s workouts, but less for Sonny-boy or Diamond Girl. The knife serves them well; they have both felt the blade, and the ease with which it cuts through a panty, or pricks the skin.

At this point all of them are sufficiently cowed as to require little coercion, and even Her Rankness joins the herd as it retreats numbly to the back of the cage. Only Diamond Girl remains by the door, assuming correctly that I’ve come for her. Indeed, I think she’d be disappointed if I hadn’t.

She kneels once I have locked back up, and accepts the collar as easily as a cleric would accept his.

I lead her on the chain in the proper “heel” position, as I would a canine. We climb both sets of stairs to the guest quarters. Now I tell her to disrobe, and she complies with only a slightly amused expression.

Once naked, I hand her the box and tell her to open it. She does this with childish expectancy.

“Plaid?” she says when she sees the skirt. Then “pantyhose?” as an obvious question, which I don’t deign to answer. She shuffles through the rest of it and says “Whatever” as joylessly as a wife whose birthday brings yet another gaily wrapped gift box with a pushup bra.

I’m tempted to warn her about her attitude, but my excitement is flowering, and as soon as she’s dressed I hand her a page of written instructions.

Still holding her at chain’s length, I watch her sit on the edge of the chair, as instructed, and cross her legs. The skirt, short by design, rises even higher until she’s all legs and panties and hose.

Do I dare permit touching up here where windows could be broken, and doors could be opened? The question becomes moot. The dusky light itself begs a whole series of brazen revelations, and I am fighting far too hard to ever hold back. My hand retreats from my pocket, from the feel of the knife, from the bold grip of all that is hard. I never take my eyes from her. She watches me too, and washes away my last few grains of control as she moves down the list of instructions with the deliberateness that I demanded. To stand here and stare at her is to know without any uncertainty that she is every disturbance of every element that has ever passed through me. My urge to touch is no longer mere feeling, it is frenzy.

Afterward, she gathers up her hose and panties, skirt, blouse, and bra, and folds them up neatly, perceiving as she must that this is exactly what I expect. Then she sits at the kitchen bar, upon whose hard surface we finished, and drinks the water I have given her. She is naked, as am I. The collar and chain lie across the room, where they were flung in our fever. There are kitchen knives within reach. Her eyes, though, have not strayed from me. She has a look that pierces, and I realize that I’ve seen more warmth in the eyes of the dead.

For all the chill, I still find myself burning with the one question that has plagued me: When she had the knife, the keys, she didn’t release herself, her parents, or Sonny-boy. Why not?

“Why not?” She mocks me when she repeats my question, and her head moves heavily from side to side, as if belabored by the obviousness of the answer. Still, I persist,

“Yes, why not? You could have.”

“You might as well ask who I am, if you’re going to ask that.”

She is right, and I recognize this instantly, because only by knowing who she is can I possibly fathom the brutal beauty of her act.

“Okay,” I say with a jauntiness that I do not actually feel. “Who are you?”

She taps her fingers on the bar, and I’m reminded of a prostitute I met several years ago in Harry’s New York Bar in midtown Manhattan. She had the same bitter impatience when she realized that I wasn’t going to be a paying customer, that my only desire was to talk, to probe, to furrow her brow with my questions.

But Diamond Girl’s fingers stop their dancing quickly, and she is unflustered when she speaks,

“What you really want to know is, did my dad fuck me?”

She has brought me quickly to this question, directed us there as swiftly as a ship’s captain navigates a dangerous but familiar crossing. It was the very first question I ever had of her, and the one to which I had planned to return. But the journey she made was much faster than the one I had in mind. My impulse was to thread my way slowly among the rocky shoals, but she’s having none of it:

“That’s it, isn’t it? Something simple that explains everything you ever wanted to know about Diamond Girl. It’s that her dad fucked her. See, there you have it—Diamond Girl, The Whole Story. Then it’s on to the next one, since she’s all figured out.”

She flips her hair over her shoulder, “That’s stupid.”

She stuns me with her judgment, for its biting accuracy, and I’m left to watch her eyes, lest they lead her hands to a knife. But they don’t stray, and remarkably I’m the one forced to look away. To admit painfully and without words that she is right: I do want the quick and easy answer. Now I know that she’ll never give it. But I’m wrong again.

“Okay, my dad fucked me.”

She lets the silence settle between us, and I feel a tinge of guilt for having taken her sexually after that lout downstairs has had his way with her. He
will
die slowly, even more slowly than the rest. So deep is my hatred of child molesters that I’m inspired to go to greater lengths than ever before to find an extraordinarily excruciating demise for Jolly Roger.

“Actually, he didn’t. I fucked him.”

I lean back. My surprise must be evident because she inches forward, as if to keep the distance between us stable. “The same as it was with you. He couldn’t resist.”

She chooses that moment to lift her feet up on to the stool so that when I look down I see her swollen sex staring back at me. It isn’t until I begin to talk that I realize she’s in the perfect position to kick me with both legs and send me flying. I grip the bar.

“But he’s your father.”

“Maybe,” she snaps.

“Maybe?” Is she gaming me, even now?

“I came home from school early one day and found my mother doing the UPS guy. So who knows?”

I stare at Diamond Girl and wonder if this is true. She doesn’t look at all like Jolly Roger, but who does?

She squeezes herself. “Now if I tell you I’m lying, would you believe me?”

“What?” I feel like an idiot, and none too patient with her game, if that’s what it is.

“If I tell you I’m lying, would you believe me? Come on, think about it. Can you really see me fucking Jolly Roger?”

I smile at her use of his name.

“Yes,” I tell her, “I can imagine it. What about your mother and the UPS guy?”

“What about my mother and Jolly Roger? Can you believe that too?”

“You’re not as smart as you think, Diamond Girl.”

“And you know what? Older men always say something like that just when they’re starting to feel really stupid.”

“So you think I’m stupid?”

“Do I think you
feel
stupid?” She looks up at the high ceiling after correcting my question. “Yes.” Her eyes fall back to me. “But I don’t think you are.”

She’s thrown me a bone. I know this, but still I am grateful. I
want
her approval. This is insane. I know this too, but consciousness does not equal cure. Consciousness equals only insight, and only sometimes, and insight itself can be madness. Whoever thought otherwise was kidding himself, Dr. Freud.

“What about school,” I ask.

“What about it?”

“Do you like it?”

“What is this, a job interview?”

“If you like.”

“Look, I’m fucking you because I want to. Okay?” She releases one of her legs slowly, drapes it over my knees. I stroke the inside of her thigh, and she adjusts to accommodate my apparent intentions. Then I quickly realize that they are not my intentions as much as they are her own because she takes my hand and draws it to her. She is moist, as moist as a warm sponge.

“School?” she muses. “I’m in accelerated classes. A college-bound girl,” she says softly, but it’s pure affectation. A deaf and blind man could tell. Even with my hand resting on her sex, the distance between us is that distinct. “Next year was going to be my senior year. I was planning to take a few hours at Washington State while I finished up. Nothing but four point O’s. Does that surprise you?”

“Not at all. I would have been surprised if you weren’t working up to your potential.” I hate myself for saying this. I’m starting to sound like her father. Or
a
father (I distance myself immediately from Jolly Roger). I try to recover with some bromide about how it must be a good school, but she surprises me all over again.

“Yeah, you think so? Some of my friends carry guns to school every day. What does that tell you?”

“It tells me that your friends are thugs.”

She laughs. It’s the first time I’ve heard her do this, and I am shocked by the depth of her amusement. She laughs so hard her legs shift, and my hand falls away. The air feels cool on my wet fingers.

“You? You’re calling
them
thugs?” This starts her up again. Her whole body shakes with laughter, and I find myself smiling awkwardly.

“No, I don’t think so,” she trills. “You see, there are some real creepy people out there. You have to protect yourself from them.”

“From me?”

“Yeah, that’s right, from you. But you know what?”

“What?” I look at her closely and spot a slinky disturbance in her eyes.

“You’re not the only one.”

When she says this it sounds so juvenile at first, a child’s attempt at one upmanship, that it takes me a full moment more to understand that she has threatened me. Or more precisely, that I feel threatened. See, even here I can’t be sure of who is the actor, and who is the play. But I will never let her know this. She can sense and suspect, but she is sixteen and doesn’t really know anything for certain. She’s good at this game, and it will keep her alive; but the time is coming when my breath will no longer seize at the sight of her, and the burden of her body will be lifted from me forever.

I tell her to fetch her collar and chain, and she climbs down off the stool and retrieves them as dutifully as a dog.

L
AUREN
HAD
TO GET TO
Moab. Her sense of urgency had only grown in the days since her chance encounter with the department chair. To hell with him. If he was determined to make her life miserable, let him find a teaching assistant to cover her classes. She needed to join the search, do whatever she could for Kerry. Unfortunately, getting out of town with Bad Bad Leroy Brown had become quite the task.

In the midst of keeping up with a crowded class schedule, following news reports about Kerry, and playing telephone tag with Ry, she’d gone ahead and had Leroy “fixed,” though she doubted her dog viewed his loss so benignly. She’d planned on transporting him to the airport in her VW Bug for this morning’s flight to Salt Lake City. True, she had considered boarding him, but had no idea how long she’d be gone, and little confidence that a minimum wage employee of a kennel would carefully administer his schedule of medication, particularly if her dog turned irritable (always a possibility, given the cause of his grief).

During a dry run late yesterday, she found that she could not cram his huge, convalescing body into the Bug, not even the front seat. It wasn’t the most capacious of cars, and Leroy, God knows, wasn’t the most nimble of dogs. After her lone attempt to load him, he staggered and collapsed under the influence of doggie downers. The only other obvious option—mass transit—would have demanded a white cane, dark glasses, and more gall than Lauren could ever muster, especially with a dog that looked no more alert than his favorite fire hydrant. Worse, none of the airport shuttles or Portland cab companies were willing to transport a rottweiler, a breed whose reputation really did precede it.

“Try Oregon Armored,” cracked the dispatcher at Yellow Cab.

“But he’s sedated,” pleaded Lauren.

“Why’s that?”

“He was neutered.”

“So he’s in a
really
good mood.”

That clinched it. Early this morning, in a fit of frustration, she finally called Alamo, which didn’t know any better when they leased her a white Chevy Impala, a full-sized barge for a dog that took to its broad back seat as naturally as a pasha takes to a pillow.

She pulled up to arrivals, hauled the huge dog carrier out of the trunk, and tried to rouse the drowsy Leroy.

“Come on, boy,” she stroked his thick muzzle, “it’s wake-up time.”

Leroy lay as still as an artist’s model.

Now she tapped his jaw with her hand, as you might gently slap a loved one’s insentient face. Leroy moaned. The skycap who had just walked up reared back.

“He’s harmless,” Lauren said, not knowing exactly what Leroy was like in such an intoxicated state. Would his real self emerge? Would he be a barrel-chested, two-fisted bar brawler of a dog? Or might he be a sweetheart, happy to cuddle and riffle his rubbery flews with sighs of pure chemical contentment?

She’d heard that the best possible test of a man was to get him drunk. Then you’d see what he was like in his heart of hearts. Did he turn into a loudmouthed braggart ready to do battle with the world? There’s your guy. Or did he slur sweet nothings in your ear as he rested his sloppily arranged body next to yours?