The Hinky Bearskin Rug (5 page)

Turning, she
saw the long front steps were empty, the exit for Roosevelt Road empty, Lake
Shore Drive empty and bleached white by road salt. The breeze picked up and
blew cold salt into her eyes until they watered.

The door
opened behind her. Gratefully, she went in.

Somehow she
was on the second floor mezzanine, looking at the Malvina Hoffman bronzes of
primitive man, as they called him back in the thirties, from around the world.
The bronzes were her favorites, all rich red-brown and naked, every one seeming
at peace in a world that made sense to them.

She reached
out and rubbed the shiny bronze nose of a Podaung Burmese woman, proud in her
rings and rings of necklaces, her eyes downcast as if saying,
See how much it’ll cost you to marry me?

One gallery
was lit.

She wanted to
keep walking around the second floor, visiting her old friends the Hoffman
bronzes, but the light pulled her.

She walked
under a marble arch and was instantly in warmth and light, in a long gallery
she’d visited before, with glass cases in a rick-rack pattern that made nooks.

In the first
nook, behind glass, Liddy stood, his old tweed jacket slung over his wrinkly
birthday suit. His lawyer-briefcase hung from his hand, one shoulder lifted
higher than the other like always, and he smiled that old sweet smile that
said,
Wanna make trouble?

Her heart
caught. Her belly went cold. Her eyes met his. She saw that he was twinkling at
her.

He was alive
in there.

Her chest
tightened. She backed away. For a flashing instant she dreamed she was running
down the cavernous dark halls, screaming for a guard.
Didn’t you know he’s still alive?

But she didn’t
run.

Feeling
horrible but unable to face Liddy any longer, she moved to another nook. Here
was a guy she’d dated in college. Smart-mouthed grad student from her dorm
who’d thought that women got turned on if you insulted them. He stood naked in
his glass case, prouder of his erection than he should have been.

She walked
past.

The next case
held another naked guy from college, a face only faintly familiar. His lips
shaped her name.

Alive in there.

In the next,
the pledging class from the Phi Kap house posed like so many statues of horny
bare-assed Greek athletes. They grinned at her. Behind them stood cheerleaders
all in a row, naked except for their pom-poms, giggling and shoving.

Oh,
yeah, the cheerleaders. Lot of punch at that party.

The itch
between her legs was turning hot and hard.

She walked
faster.

Every case
held somebody she’d dated.

There were
dozens of them.

They were all
alive.

This gallery
had to end sometime. She knew it did. For one thing, she’d quit dating last
year and spent six months in celibate hell. So this had to end somewhere.

She broke into
a trot.

There, an
opening at the end of this row. She ran toward it and found herself at the
bottom of another long gallery just like the other one, full of glass cases
full of naked men. They were all alive. They all looked at her. Beckoned to
her. Showed her their rampant dicks. Some were crying. Some threw themselves
against the glass and slobbered on it, beating it with their fists, yelling her
name.

She picked up
her feet and sprinted.

She burst out
of the exhibit onto the mezzanine and bolted for the stairs. There was a
uniformed guard at the corner of the stairs, well, finally, and he turned
reproachful eyes on her.

Not a guard. A
Chicago cop. One of maybe forty she’d dated.

As he reached
for her she jinked past his outstretched arms, skidded, and leaped down the
stairs two at a time, past marble statues that came to life as she passed.

Sobbing for
air, she vaulted the turnstyle and escaped into the freezing evening air on the
front steps. The lake spread out before her, frozen, flat, and still. A full
moon rose, splashing orange light over the ice. Untouched snow lay on the
steps. Orange moonlight seemed to skip over the snow.

Someone stood
on the verandah with her, half in the moonshadow of a big pillar, naked and
shivering. His back was to her. He was watching the moonrise.

She breathed
more slowly. Panic left her.

Okay,
okay, I get it. They never go away.

He didn’t
move. He said,
Have you ever wondered
what my gallery might look like?

No. Aren’t you cold?
she said.

He didn’t
answer.

Her body
steamed. She took a step forward on the verandah. Snow melted under her foot.

He didn’t turn
when she slid her arms around him, but his shivering stopped.

She touched
the front of her burning body to his back. His flesh felt chilled through.
Pulling him back against her, she tried to pour her heat into him. She stroked
his face and down over his cold, bare body. When her hands reached his groin,
she found all his heat.

He knelt, and
she knelt with him, never letting go. Side by side they lay on the cold stone,
the snow going to puddles under them, and she stroked him and pulled him warm.
When she thought he would climax, he turned in her arms.
Finally.
She was aching for penetration. But he rolled over her
until she was spooned, her back to his hot chest, looking out on the frozen
lake, and he worked her with his hands while his schlong branded her back like
a hot poker and the moon rose higher. His fingers dipped into her, penetrating,
teasing, withdrawing, and extra hands tickled her nipples, and his teeth
nibbled both her earlobes at once and his tongues licked into the hollow of her
collarbone. She squirmed,
no, please,
please fuck me,
and he flicked her clit with his thumb in a slow rhythm
that made her arch like a fish. The moon seemed to swoop down out of the starry
sky.

Now, for God’s sake!
Her eyes closed.

And in he
came, long, thick, impossibly long, because he must be bending clear underneath
her bottom, his chest pressed against her back.

With that deep
penetration she heard a crackle like thunder. Her eyes flew open. The sky was
sapphire clear. The moon pulled at her blood.

Please,
she begged.

One more time,
he did the impossible. Inside her his cock swelled, moving ever so slightly,
not
hard
enough, not
far
enough. She arched again, squirming
against his belly, whining. Then he shrank a bit,
oh, God, no.
Then his cock swelled. And shrank. She felt herself
stretching, felt the blood pulse in her temples, felt her eardrums pop, as he
pulsed larger and smaller, beating like a heart inside her, until she tightened
around him.

Oh boy. Here
it came.

Just as she
was about to beg, his hot hand settled over her mound. A clever finger pressed
down on her trigger.

She spasmed.
His cock pulsed inside her. Thunder crackled, and a hundred miles of frozen
lake convulsed, sending shards of ice high into the air, then falling, and
frozen moonlight melted in slivers all over her thawing heart.

o0o

Afterward
Jewel lay on her back, feeling the throbbing sink and fade while sweat dried on
her skin.

Randy seemed
asleep.

Reluctantly,
she thought about his suggestion.

Was that
really why she’d started her rowdy college fuck-a-thon? Because Liddy had died,
abandoned her, just like her parents and her grandparents? Would she have
horndogged through the past seven years if he hadn’t taken her to bed? If the
family lawyer had been a woman? Would she even have sold the farm?

Maybe not. She
might at this very moment still be wearing out her strength trying to keep the
damned thing going, her back sore, her hands cracking from the contact with wet
steel and the teets of stupid, needy cows.

To be fair,
would Liddy have been able to distract her with anything besides sex?

She smiled at
memory. He was so dry and funny, and he had enjoyed her youth and her smart
mouth so gaily. He took this shell-shocked kid and coaxed her back into her
humanity.

Randy spoke
critically of a “price.”

But Liddy
hadn’t made it seem like payment. He’d reminded her how to be alive. He taught
her to feel her own pulse pounding and the sap rising in her veins. He’d told
her to live gratefully.

Don’t you ever do it for anything but
the joy, my girl,
Liddy
had said.
The world runs on sex. There’s
no life without sex. Make sure you have fun at it.

Liddy had
taught her everything she ever learned about sex, the good parts anyway.

Until Randy
came along.

She listened
for Randy’s steady breathing, felt his dense body weighing down the mattress
beside her, and thought,
What the hell
have I gotten into here?

Twelve
extremely irritating hours later, while she was at BB wrestling with a copy
machine the size of her car, Ed phoned her.

“Heiss, get
your ass up to the Kraft, right now. And call your partner.”

“I’m in the
middle of copying these damned proposals. Eighty pages, double sided, two
hundred copies, collated and stapled. Oh
shit,
another misfeed!”

Just then
Maida Sacker walked past, holding a coffeecup as if it were the Sunday offering
basket. As Jewel’s cussword rang out, her head swivelled. She leaned into the
copy room and shook a finger. “Language, Ms. Heiss.”

“Myeh myeh
myeh,” Jewel muttered after her.

“I’m not
kidding. This is an emergency.” Ed sounded upset.

“Okay, okay.
Let me get this d-arned thing piled up so I can figure out where I left it when
I come back.”

“Now. I need
you here an hour ago. I need you yesterday.”

“Okay!”

“Bring your
driver.” Ed ended the call.

Jewel frowned
at the dead phone. In the three months Randy had been around, this was the
first time Ed had expressed a desire for his company. “Why do I think this is
not gonna be good?”

o0o

Clay and Randy
met Jewel and Ed in the basement of the Kraft Building.

“What is this
place?” Randy said.

Jewel never
came down here. The basement was used as a lair by the kind of departmental
retirees who had no life to retire to.

Clay wrinkled
his nose. “Funky smelling.”

“It’s the
locker room of the old cop shop,” Ed said. “Ain’t been PD property since before
the Kraft was demolished. We kind of took it over.”

“Not me,”
Jewel said, looking around fastidiously. The walls were painted that
turkey-turd tan you always saw in cop shops, and the ranks of tall, battered
lockers were bilious green. Flyspecks dotted the flickering fluorescent lights
overhead. “Do you suppose this grime is from, like, all eighty years before the
Kraft came down?”

“Gross,” Clay
said.

“Never mind.
Take a look at this.” Ed led them to a corner in front of a mangled locker
door. He paused dramatically, looking over his shoulder at them, his black
caterpillar eyebrows working. Then he opened the locker and leapt back as if it
were full of rabid weasels.

Jewel came to
stand next to him. “What—?”

On the floor
of the locker was a pile of magazines.

The top shelf
was packed full of crumpled white paper bags.

And in
between, gyrating slowly like some kind of X-rated ballerina in a music box, a
small, glistening, naked female figure danced, wiggled, simpered, beckoned, and
silently giggled, like a burlesque movie with the sound turned off. She stuck
her forefinger in her mouth and pulled it out slowly, sucking on it with pouty
red lips. She raised one knee and stroked herself against her other thigh,
arching her back, lolling her head, swinging her wheat-blonde, old-fashioned
curly mane so that it played peek-a-boo with her heavy breasts. She had
Marilyn’s lush figure, and apparently a complete lack of shame. She was
eighteen inches high.

Jewel was
shocked, but it was actually kind of sweet. There was something hilariously
wholesome and innocent about her sexual gyrating, as if the girl next door had
just found out what sex was for and couldn’t wait to show her boyfriend.

Clay whistled
behind Jewel. “What is it? Three-D projection?”

The girl in
the locker seemed to hear him. She cocked her head, looked straight at Clay,
and laughed, shaking her mane at him, dipping and wiggling her breasts as if to
say,
You silly boy, come over here and
stick a twenty in my—

“Holy. Shit.”
Ed sounded flabbergasted.

Jewel said, “It’s
a poppet. You get ’em in the really bad places.” She’d never seen one this
close before.

“Pittsburgh,”
Clay said.

“Shit,” Ed
repeated.