“Bring me your gift,” he mutters, no longer knowing what he is saying, “your one true gift, and make me always this…always so…I pray…I…”
And then the pleasure crests into orgasm, blasting his mind into void, his head and self and entire beingness a perfect blank as he thrusts deeper into her and deeper still…
Eyes closed, spasming, he luxuriates in the moment; and then he feels a lurch, and it seems to him that he is hanging, head-down, although the pleasure continues.
He opens his eyes.
He thinks, grasping for thought and reason again, of birth, and wonders, without fear, in a moment of perfect postcoital clarity, whether what he sees is some kind of illusion.
This is what he sees:
He is inside her to the chest, and as he stares at this in disbelief and wonder she rests both hands upon his shoulders and puts gentle pressure on his body.
He slipslides further inside her.
“How are you doing this to me?” he asks, or he thinks he asks, but perhaps it is only in his head.
“You’re doing it, honey,” she whispers. He feels the lips of her vulva tight around his upper chest and back, constricting and enveloping him. He wonders what this would look like to somebody watching them. He wonders why he is not scared. And then he knows.
“I worship you with my body,” he whispers, as she pushes him inside her. Her labia pull slickly across his face, and his eyes slip into darkness.
She stretches on the bed, like a huge cat, and then she yawns. “Yes,” she says, “You do.”
The Nokia phone plays a high, electrical transposition of the “Ode to Joy.” She picks it up, and thumbs a key, and puts the telephone to her ear.
Her belly is flat, her labia small and closed. A sheen of sweat glistens on her forehead and on her upper lip.
“Yeah?” she says. And then she says, “No, honey, he’s not here. He’s gone away.”
She turns the telephone off before she flops out on the bed in the dark red room, then she stretches once more, and she closes her eyes, and she sleeps.
CHAPTER TWO
They took her to the cemet’ry
In a big ol’ Cadillac
They took her to the cemet’ry
But they did not bring her back.
—OLD SONG
I have taken the liberty,” said Mr. Wednesday, washing his hands in the men’s room of Jack’s Crocodile Bar, “of ordering food for myself, to be delivered to your table. We have much to discuss, after all.”
“I don’t think so,” said Shadow. He dried his own hands on a paper towel and crumpled it, and dropped it into the bin.
“You need a job,” said Wednesday. “People don’t hire ex-cons. You folk make them uncomfortable.”
“I have a job waiting. A good job.”
“Would that be the job at the Muscle Farm?”
“Maybe,” said Shadow.
“Nope. You don’t. Robbie Burton’s dead. Without him the Muscle Farm’s dead too.”
“You’re a liar.”
“Of course. And a good one. The best you will ever meet. But, I’m afraid, I’m not lying to you about this.” He reached into his pocket, produced a newspaper, much folded, and handed it to Shadow. “Page seven,” he said. “Come on back to the bar. You can read it at the table.” Shadow pushed open the door, back into the bar. The air was blue with smoke, and the Dixie Cups were on the jukebox singing “Iko Iko.” Shadow smiled, slightly, in recognition of the old children’s song.
The barman pointed to a table in the corner. There was a bowl of chili and a burger at one side of the table, a rare steak and a bowl of fries laid in the place across from it.
Look at my King all dressed in Red,
Iko Iko all day,
I bet you five dollars he’ll kill you dead,
Jockamo-feena-nay
Shadow took his seat at the table. He put the newspaper down. “I got out of prison this morning,” he said. “This is my first meal as a free man. You won’t object if I wait until after I’ve eaten to read your page seven?”
“Not in the slightest bit.”
Shadow ate his hamburger. It was better than prison hamburgers. The chili was good but, he decided, after a couple of mouthfuls, not the best in the state.
Laura made a great chili. She used lean-cut meat, dark kidney beans, carrots cut small, a bottle or so of dark beer, and freshly sliced hot peppers. She would let the chili cook for a while, then add red wine, lemon juice, and a pinch of fresh dill, and, finally, measure out and add her chili powders. On more than one occasion Shadow had tried to get her to show him how she made it: he would watch everything she did, from slicing the onions and dropping them into the olive oil at the bottom of the pot on. He had even written down the sequence of events, ingredient by ingredient, and he had once made Laura’s chili for himself on a weekend when she had been out of town. It had tasted okay—it was certainly edible, and he ate it, but it had not been Laura’s chili.
The news item on page seven was the first account of his wife’s death that Shadow had read. It felt strange, as if he were reading about someone in a story: how Laura Moon, whose age was given in the article as twenty-seven, and Robbie Burton, thirty-nine, were in Robbie’s car on the interstate, when they swerved into the path of a thirty-two wheeler, which sideswiped them as it tried to change lanes and avoid them. The truck brushed Robbie’s car and sent it spinning off the side of the road, where the car had hit a road sign, hard, and stopped spinning.
Rescue crews were on the scene in minutes. They pulled Robbie and Laura from the wreckage. They were both dead by the time they arrived at the hospital.
Shadow folded the newspaper up once more, and slid it back across the table, toward Wednesday, who was gorging himself on a steak so bloody and so blue it might never have been introduced to a kitchen flame.
“Here. Take it back,” said Shadow.
Robbie had been driving. He must have been drunk, although the newspaper account said nothing about this. Shadow found himself imagining Laura’s face when she realized that Robbie was too drunk to drive. The scenario unfolded in Shadow’s mind, and there was nothing he could do to stop it: Laura shouting at Robbie—shouting at him to pull off the road, then the thud of car against truck, and the steering wheel wrenching over…
…the car on the side of the road, broken glass glittering like ice and diamonds in the headlights, blood pooling in rubies on the road beside them. Two bodies, dead or soon-to-die, being carried from the wreck, or laid neatly by the side of the road.
“Well?” asked Mr. Wednesday. He had finished his steak, sliced and devoured it like a starving man. Now he was munching the french fries, spearing them with his fork.
“You’re right,” said Shadow. “I don’t have a job.”
Shadow took a quarter from his pocket, tails up. He flicked it up in the air, knocking it against his finger as it left his hand to give it a wobble that made it look as if it were turning, caught it, slapped it down on the back of his hand.
“Call,” he said.
“Why?” asked Wednesday.
“I don’t want to work for anyone with worse luck than me. Call.”