The Next (28 page)

God, why won’t he show it to me!

I put my entire fist around my cock and squeezed.

“Jesus,” I moaned. “Look up.”

Marzoli redirected his gaze to Layworth.

Layworth unzipped the rest of his pants and let them drop to the floor. Once again he was wearing no underwear. Just as before, he put his hands back onto the window above his head and let his dick bob up and down.

“What else do you want to do?” I asked Marzoli.

“This.”

He reached his hand under his underwear, stretching the band out as he burrowed below his testicles. He tugged down on his sac, still revealing none of his meat.

“And what else?”

Marzoli paused.

Layworth’s enormous rod was growing rock solid and veiny. He put both hands around it like he was straddling a broom. He began to stroke.

“Huh? What else?”

Marzoli stuttered. “I don’t…I…I…”

As fucking curious as I was for him to finish that sentence, I realized his mood was once again shifting to a withdrawn, self-pitying, frustrated place. That couldn’t happen. Not at this moment with Layworth practically in the bag. I had to sacrifice satisfying my curiosity.

“What?” I attacked lightly. “You don’t mix with civilians? Or you’re just too fucking badass for me?”

He slowly grinned and winked. “Your words, not mine.”

That helpless look was once again replaced by that goddamn cock-of-the-walk attitude that made my schlong grow yet another half inch.

Marzoli was snapping out of it; I could see it in his eyes.

I started jacking off inside my underwear. This wouldn’t do. I freed myself. Marzoli glanced down quickly at my member, gasped, and quickly directed his eyes to Layworth. His breath labored.

“Well,” he said “there goes my theory about the correlation of depression and diminutive dicks.”

“Yeah, I’m kind of largish and thickish. Keep your eyes forward.”

Layworth’s stroking was increasingly frenetic. Mine was increasing too.

Marzoli, take your fucking tool out of the tool shed already!

“You going let us see it?” I asked.

“No.”

The hell!

“Layworth’s going to come soon,” he said, once again completely in control of his fucking faculties. “We need him to stay horned up for the next time. He’s got to be out of control.”

I understood. The chances of Layworth hailing Marzoli over would increase tomorrow if he were cut off today.

“But he’ll take care of himself with or without you,” I said.

“Not today.” Marzoli responded, “Look…”

The front door opened as the two kids bounded energetically into the kitchen. Mr. Perfect quickly pulled up his pants, shoved his dick in, and zipped up. He was tenting conspicuously, so he hopped onto the bed and covered his crotch with his laptop. Mrs. Layworth followed the kids through the front door.

As the kids bounded up to their room, she entered the bedroom. The husband and wife acknowledged each other, and he resumed concentrating on his laptop. She, however, stood still, sensing something. She walked slowly to the window and nonchalantly removed her brown pumps, but scanned the courtyard slowly as she did so. Did she really know her husband was at it again? Did she really feel that all was too quiet on the Western front?

Marzoli closed the curtain quickly.

He removed his hands from inside his pants, buttoned his pants, and rethreaded his belt through the loops.

Curtain down, show’s over? What the fuck!

My hard-on was still twitching in the wings.

“Ummm…” I muttered to him, “
We
don’t have any kids coming home.”

“Mrs. Van Buren’s mother.”

“What?” I was hardly in any state of mind for his goddamn non sequitur games.

Why was he so hesitant to go further with me?

“Mrs. Van Buren is one of the precinct’s dispatchers. Her mother is the secretary to a man named Peter Horn, whose wife is the bookkeeper to a guy named Dreyfus, who is a card carrying member of the Tea Party Fundamentalist Coalition. She told me the circumstances that led to Layworth departing the law firm.”

“Oh.”

“I did
not
know Mr. Layworth was our suspect before I met you. I only formed a suspicion the day you let me into your apartment. Remember?”

“I remember. Mr. and Mrs. Perfect were getting ready to go on a trip with the kids,” I replied, impatient with how innocuous this conversation was while my dick was still throbbing in my fingers.

“That’s what
you
saw. What
I
saw was that he kept glancing up at Ruben’s window the whole time.”

“I missed that.”

“It was easy to miss. He was glancing discreetly. It’s natural to glance at a neighbor as he’s moving in. It’s not natural to glance covertly unless you’re hiding something. That’s what caught my eye.”

“He was hiding his attraction for Ruben,” I said, my schlong unchubbing by the second.

“Yep, for the new tenant. So that night I called Mrs. Van Buren’s mother. Do you understand?”

“Actually, no.”

“When I first knocked on your door, I had no agenda to use you to get to Layworth. I am
still
not using you for anything.”

His point landed. On one hand, that did settle some lingering curiosities. On the other hand, his timing sucked balls. I had my penis exposed to another man voluntarily for the first time in my life, and the man was pulling shit out of the air to avoid touching it or being touched by it.

I finally gave up and re-harnessed my dick.

Shitastic.

I’d come so far. The apartment was spit-clean, I felt butterflies for another human in the first time since the discovery of fire, and I had an opportunity to do some good by Ruben and Nathan. As forcefully as it was fighting to take over, I was not going to submit to another extended spell of self-loathing monologues. I needed to communicate. Not hold it in.

I cut to the point. “Why don’t you want to kiss me?”

He stopped everything.

I’d never seen him bite his bottom lip like he did now. What did he need to clamp down on? What shame had he to hide from someone like me?

“Do you…do you even want to?” I pressed.

“Hmm hmm,” he sort of affirmed.

“But?”

“But…it’s the rest that…that I can’t…”

“Do you think it was easy for me to tell you about the fire?”

I said no more and waited. I was well aware I’d pushed the tit-for-tat button at just the right intersection of candidness and necessity, so all I had to do was wait. I knew he would not try to evade anymore. I knew he couldn’t.

Minutes passed. His brow glistened. He stroked his throat upwards with his nails as if guiding the words in the right direction.

At last he put his hand to his forehead. “I told you Nathan’s story?”

“Mom abandoned him when he was seventeen.”

“Hmm hmm,” he muttered, once again hesitating.

Then he turned to face me.

“I was fourteen,” Marzoli continued. “I never really fit in with my father. I never fit in with the north side of Chicago.”

Marzoli unbuckled his belt. I did not understand why, but the last thing I was about to do was interrupt the man.

“It was Sunday supper. Pamigiana di Melezane and chicken. My father looked across the table at me and asked
Are you sleeping with Joey?
Just like slamming me with a two by four, right in front of my mother. Right in front of my brothers. Right in front of Grandpa and Grandma. Christ! I’d barely let him touch me. He put his mouth around me. It lasted all of two seconds. And that was it. We were in the back alley between the garbage cans. I didn’t know we could be seen. But we were. By his mother. She grabbed him by the hair and pulled him inside.”

Marzoli’s face was locked tight in consternation.

“I ran all the way home. I hid in my room for days. Until that Sunday.”

He pulled his belt all the way through his pant loops and dropped it to the floor.

“Joey’s father was my father’s boss at the restaurant. So when my father asked me if I slept with Joey, I was more than mortified. I was
terrified.
All I could say is
No!
But he knew. He was embarrassed and ashamed and furious. He took up the chicken knife, knocked his chair against the wall, and walked toward me.
Sdraiata pervertito! Sdraiata pervertito!
He wanted to kill me. No one tried to stop him. Not one of my brothers. Not my grandparents.”

He paused and looked away.

“Not my mother. She sat there like her mouth had been duct-taped. I knew what she was ashamed of. Herself. She thought it was her fault I was what I was.”

Marzoli unbuttoned the top button of his pants.

“He wanted me dead. Right there at the table. He was that angry. He would have plunged that knife into me, and in that neighborhood it’d be all right if he did. I had to throw the chair at his hand, and I hit it. And the knife went flying. And I think I broke his finger. I don’t know. Throwing a chair is not something you do to your father in the north side of Chicago and live. I ran to the garage. He followed.”

Marzoli unbuttoned the remaining buttons.

“I couldn’t get out of the garage. The door was blocked by the Ford Thunderbird parked right against it. There was a bucket of battery acid on the floor. He picked it up, but he didn’t throw it at me. He had a better plan. He pulled my pants out at the belt and…”

Marzoli lowered his pants all the way to his ankles, with his white 2(X)ist underwear still protecting his package.

From his right knee up his thigh and to his right hip, the skin was creviced and pruned in a permanently scarred landscape. Some patches bulged out as if swollen, other parts were indented as if layers had been dug out and never filled in. The coloring was irregularly blotched in white, pink, and tan puzzle pieces of skin. Raised ridges spider-webbed across his skin. There were long lines as if a candle melted and cords of fleshy wax streamed down from his 2(X)ist to his knee.

“Pretty, aren’t I?”

“Keep going,” I urged.

He closed his eyes, took two sharp breaths, and held them for seconds without releasing them.

“No.”

“Keep going,” I repeated.

“I can’t.”

“Yes.”

“I
can’t
,” he repeated ferociously under his breath, but his voice cracked with shame and sadness and anger and disgust.

I reached for the band of his underwear. He swatted my hand away. I reached for it again. He swatted it away again. He stared directly into my eyes, steely. I lowered myself onto my knees in front of him. He grabbed my hair and yanked my head away from him, but I grabbed my left hand around the back of his right hamstring. With my right hand I reached yet again for the band of his underwear again. He released my hair. I pulled down his underwear slowly. I heard his heavy sad breathing above me.

The white band finally slid beneath his balls, freeing his penis and scrotum.

His left testicle was tender and relatively unscarred, but his right testicle was marbleized with acid scarring, discolored and hard with scar tissue. His shaft had the appearance of random skin grafting, swollen irregularly with the same puzzle pieces of blotchy discoloration as his thigh. He had no pubic hair. It appeared to be shaven off entirely to disguise the fact that large sections could grow no hair at all.

My throat swallowed a lumpy slimy ball. How could any father do such a thing to his kid? I was angry for Marzoli. As I explored his scarred skin centimeter by centimeter with my eyes, a horrifying thought occurred to me. Marzoli would have had very few sexual encounters for fear of disgusting someone with the sight of a groin scarred by battery acid.

It’s possible, in fact, he’d had no sexual encounter ever, man or woman.

My heart broke at the thought of a boy growing to manhood, permanently scarred by his father and ashamed, embarrassed, and disgusted by the very sight of his own organ. How it must have affected every encounter with another. The date that leads to a kiss that leads to some groping through the clothes that leads to desperate excuses to halt everything before the pants came off:

“I want to wait until we’re married.”

“I’ve got to get up early for work so I need to get home.”

“I haven’t taken a shower at all today so let’s hold off.”

I could see the go-go teenager with the hard rippled body in biker shorts and cut-off jeans directing the bills towards his boots rather than his underwear. I could see the man in the gym finding the most remote corner of the locker room to avoid the jeers and stares that would make him feel like a circus freak.

I could see the person who would perfect every other part of his body, brain, and being in order to compensate for the imperfection from his thigh to his belly button: the muscles, the intellect, the nobility, the work ethic, the smile, the charm, and the wrinkleless button down shirt.