Waltz of Shadows Read online

  “No.”

  “Mrs. Maude Page.”

  “The heiress?”

  “Yeah. Remember, she was murdered? Pushed down a concrete embankment about a mile from her house. The house was burglarized. Happened a year ago.”

  “I remember something about it. But why is her picture in here? Wait a minute! I know. This is a book of shots from the newspaper morgue. Or more likely the police morgue. Somebody is collecting this stuff. A ghoulish personality. Maybe had a contact at the police department. Gets them to steal the stuff for them… Isn’t you, is it?”

  “No. That’s not what it is.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “First, will you help me, Uncle Hank?”

  “I don’t know. I’m getting a little nervous here. Tell me how you came by the book.”

  “I been taking a few classes over at the college—”

  “I paid for them, didn’t I?”

  “I’m trying to get an education, Uncle Hank. Do something with my life.”

  “Like when I paid for that goddamn trucker school for you.”

  “I thought it was a good idea, but those trucks get boring.”

  “You never made a run, Bill. You didn’t even finish the cour Cnisff for se. And remember when you were going to raise those Australian birds? What were they?”

  “Emus. There’s a growing market moving into East Texas. Ten years from now everyone will be eating Emu steaks.”

  “Not raised by you.”

  “Want to hear this or not?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Tell it.”

  “I guess it begins with Sharon.”

  “Figures. A woman.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed, shook slightly, as if chilled, got a cigarette out of his shirt pocket, put it between his lips, produced a folder of matches from his shirt pocket, peeled off one, scratched it to life and lit up.

  “Since when do you smoke?” I said.

  “Since a pretty short time ago.”

  He took another deep drag and held it in for a long time before he let it out. The cigarette was burned half way down.

  He began to talk.

  3

  First of this semester, Uncle Hank, when you loaned me the money to start college, I decided then and there I wasn’t going to disappoint you this time. I started going to the University library to study nights.

  Well, all right. I’m not going to bullshit you. It was a place to meet women. I admit it. I don’t think that’s so bad. I was doing some studying too.

  So, I was sitting at a table near the elevator, eyeing the gals getting out of the car, and I saw this good looking blonde step out and start roaming the stacks.

  I made my move, went over where I’d seen her go behind a stack of books, and as I was coming around the corner of the shelves, I came up on her. Just standing there. Not really looking for anything, you know. Just hanging.

  So I keep going down the row, moving my finger over the book spines, working my lips like I’m reading titles, you know, and when I’m kind of close to her, she says: “You don’t give a fuck about books, do you?”

  Well, I look at her with a full view, and man, she’s better yet. The fucking Goddess of Love. About twenty-two, twenty-three years old. Long, blond hair, kind of wavy. She was wearing this short black skirt that made you want to lie on the floor between her legs and worship.

  I said something like, “Beg your pardon.” I don’t remember exactly, because I was, to say the least, startled. She said, “You aren’t looking for a book. You came down this row with one thing in mind. Me. Look at the bulge you got.”

  I swear, Uncle Hank, she talked just like that, and it was turning me on. I mean, I had a dick hard enough to pop a tire off the rim. So I said, “Yeah, you’re right. I thought I could talk to you. I wanted to meet you.”

  She said. “You thought you might get a little jelly roll, that’s what you thought.”

  “That wouldn’t hurt my feelings,” I said, and she said, “Well goddamn it, let’s cut the crap and go over to my place and screw.”

  She had this apartment off campus, The Village Apartments. Nice place. Kind of expensive. We went over there, and I tell you, there wasn’t any shucking or jiving or let’s-have-a-drink business when we got there.

  Inside her apartment she hiked her skirt and got on the kitchen table, spread her legs and said, “Bon appetite.”

  She wasn’t wearing any panties. I mean there was just the ole wet moon pie looking at me. I stuck my face between her thighs and started licking. After that I got her top off and my pants down, put the meat to her right there on the table. Half-hour later we were rubbing salad oil over each other and then we were in the bedroom rolling around on the bed. Fell off the night stand and broke the lamp. I got glass in my ass.

  We finished in the tub, me with my butt in the air, and her getting the glass out of my ass with some tweezers, licking the blood off when she was through.

  We showered and she put a Band-Aid on my ass. We got back in bed and lay there while she smoked a cigarette and poured beer on her belly for me to lick up, and while I’m doing this, I’m thinking: Damn, this is something. Then I’m thinking: Hey, why me? What did I do to deserve a babe like this? And about the time I’m thinking this, she says, “By the way, do you have AIDS?”

  Now, I tell you. I could have gone all week without being asked that. This was the first time in a long time I’d made love without a rubber. Or put my head between a girl’s legs and licked her. I’m not normally a fool, but this one, it was like I was a starving wolf and she was a pork chop.

  I said, “No, I don’t have AIDS. Do you?”

  And she says, very cool like, “Well, I hope not. I’ve fucked six guys this week I’ve never seen before, and you’re the seventh, and I haven’t made a one of them put on a rubber. They had AIDS, good chance is, I got it.”

  So, I’m considering all this, and she says, “Seven is the magic number, though. I don’t have AIDS now, I don’t plan to get it. We do it later, you use a rubber.” She looked at her watch then, which was all she had left on, and said, “Let’s go get some doughnuts.”

  We got dressed, went over to the North Street Doughnut Shop, got a couple doughnuts and coffee. We’re sitting there eating the doughnuts, drinking the coffee, and she says to me, “I’m expecting somebody. Several somebodies,” and not long after that, these two guys and a girl come in and they came over to our table.

  Guys were about her age, nice enough looking, blond, dressed to the nines, well built, athletic. Could have been brothers. Kind of guys you see and think they got it made. Money. Everything handed to them on a platter.

  The girl with them was maybe a couple years older, I don’t know. Pale. Black hair. Gorgeous. Lean. All muscle. Had on those real tight, white, workout pants.

  And Sharon, remember I didn’t know her name then, because we hadn’t bothered with introductions, said to me, “This is Dave and Bob K Da"0e and Carrie.” Then she looked at me and smiled, and I told her my name, and she got around to telling me hers, and that’s how I met Sharon and her friends and heard about the Disaster Club.

  Turned out they were all rich kids, just like they looked.

  We fell in with one another, Uncle Hank. I don’t know why. Maybe there was something there I needed.

  Dumb as it may sound, I was Mr. Well Adjusted around this bunch. Maybe that’s another thing led me in with them. Being the one whose bread is most done in the middle for a change.

  What motivated these people was the adrenaline rush. They didn’t have that, they crashed, like they were on the end of a drug high or something. They told me these things they’d done together. Said they started out doing what you might call pranks. Cheap thrills.

  They put some green dye in the big fountain up by the University library. They put a sack of dog shit on the porch of the college president one night and put lighter fluid on it and set it on fire and rang the doorbell and the president came out stomping flames,
throwing shit all over the porch and himself. They got some dead armadillos off the highway and put them in mailboxes around town. Egged some cars and houses. That kind of stuff.

  After a bit, that business wasn’t getting them where they wanted to go. They decided what they had to do to get the rush they needed, was something dangerous.

  First thing they did like that was go over to the highway at night, hide behind some shrubs, wait until the traffic started coming, then dart in front of cars. Letting the cars get close enough to be scary, but not so close there was no chance of making it across. By the time some motorist dodged all over the place and cussed and got collected enough to call the cops, they were gone.

  Week later, they upped the ante. Took turns blindfolding one another, and the one that was blindfolded elected one of the others as his or her Indian Spirit Guide. Meaning the Spirit Guide was supposed to wait until the cars were close and say when their blindfolded partner should run. The runner had to depend completely on the guide this way. A bigger thrill. And after they’d gone across a couple of times, they upped the ante again.

  They started wearing tennis shoes with strings. Tying the blindfolded runner’s shoe strings together so he or she had to short step and hop across. Sharon said they all looked like constipated ducks trying to run like that. Said too that Carrie called a car so close to her once, she felt the wind from it lift her hair up.

  The blindfolded part got picked up by the news. Motorists reporting and all, and the cops got so they were hanging out there by the highway a lot, looking for the culprits. So the Disaster Club, as they began calling themselves, had to back off that idea. Which was okay with them. They were bored by it.

  That’s about the time I came in, and I wish now I’d stayed home from the library the night I met Sharon, watched a little TV and took care of my urges with the old nimble fingers, because, to hear the Disaster Club talk about the thrill they got, the blindfolds and the cars and all, they were so goddamned animated, I couldn’t help but feel the spirit.

  It’s a little like when you’re drivin Kut help g along and there’s a car coming from the other direction, and you realize that car is like three to six feet away from you as it passes. You’re that close to death. It’s kind of creepy—in a pleasant way.

  Pretty soon we were hanging out together a lot, though I can’t honestly say I liked any of them, except for Sharon. And she was hard to understand. Even after I started living over at her place some of the time, she was kind of an ice maiden. Except when we were in bed. Then she’d growl and scream and hump till I thought my heart would give out. But outside of bed, she stood at the window a lot. Stared off into space for maybe an hour or so.

  This Dave guy, he was the ringleader. The one came up with plans. One night we were all over at Sharon’s apartment, drinking beer, and Dave said, “Let’s take a ride.”

  We got in his car and drove out of town, toward Busby, stopped off at that old bridge goes over the highway there. There’s a little road winds up to it, and it’s not easy going. The bridge is a railroad track bridge. We bumped up there and parked by it and got out and Dave said to me, “You want a charge, huh?”

  I wanted to show Sharon I was a hard guy, so I said, cool like, “Sure, let’s do what we gotta do.”

  Dave smiled at me and said, “Not we, motherfucker. You.”

  Next thing I knew Bob was behind me. He looped a rope over my head and got my arms down to my sides with it. Carrie dove down and grabbed my knees from behind so I couldn’t run or kick, then they all brought me down and Dave started helping Bob tie my arms. Sharon unbuckled my belt and pulled my pants down.

  So there I was, in my underwear and shirt, my pants around my ankles, my upper body tied. They carried me onto the railroad track and laid me on my back, my neck against one rail, my legs draped over the other.

  I heard the trunk lid of the car open and close, and Bob came back with a sledge hammer and three of those steel spikes like what were holding down the track. Bob straddled me and Dave took a spike and held it by my shoulder, and Bob drove it into the ground. Then they did it on the other side. Took some more rope and fastened it to the spikes and ran the ends of it through the rope tied around me. That way I was held down and couldn’t roll off the tracks. They got another spike and drove it between my legs and tied my feet to it.

  I was screaming like a sonofabitch while they were doing all this, but they didn’t pay me any mind. Wasn’t anyone around but us and the crickets. And pretty soon I gave up the yelling, tried not to show how mad I was. Started saying stuff like, “Hey, now, this isn’t funny. What if a train comes along?”

  Me saying that got them to grinning, and I began to have a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. Began to think this wasn’t such a big joke. This was well-planned. They were all in on it, Sharon included.

  Bob came back from the car with a video camera and a tripod, and he set the whole thing up on the side of the track.

  Guess I was cussing pretty good by then, but finally I just tuckered out, and Dave squatted down beside me and took a penlight out of his pocket and turned it on and pointed it in my face and said, “You’re about to get a big rush. Biggest y Ksh.ft"ou’ve ever had.”

  He reached in his pocket and got out a piece of paper and said, “I know a guy works over at the train depot. He gave me a train schedule for all the tracks around here. All the trains moving on them. And guess what? Thirty minutes from now, you’ll get to say howdy to one of those trains, a la The Perils of Pauline.”

  He showed me the schedule then, and to tell the truth, I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it. I was too scared to try. I kept telling myself he was funning me, but deep in my heart I knew I was in some serious deep doodoo.

  Sharon stood between my feet, smiling down at me. Carrie brought a boom box over and turned it on. Sharon started stripping off her clothes, slow-like, to this tune that was playing, and I tell you, even under the circumstances, I was getting a boner. I’m not talking battering ram material here, but there was some action going on down there at a time you wouldn’t think it.

  Pretty soon she got it all off except her panties, and the panties were wet, man. I could see that with just the moonlight to show me. She’d worked herself up big time, lubricating all over the place. She was twisting around like she was part snake or something. And the moonlight loved her, flowed all over her. I mean, that woman was something.

  The others were taking turns watching Sharon and my face, and after a while, Dave looked at his watch and nodded at Sharon. She eased out of her panties and used her fingers to spread herself and show the pink. Then she was bending down and pulling my shorts to my knees and taking me in her mouth.

  Honestly, now, I like a little kink, but my idea of good sex isn’t being tied down to a railroad track with some gal swallowing my goober to boom boom music while an audience lurks over me with a video camera. Not to mention all that gravel grinding into my ass and my neck getting a crick and my legs starting to ache. Still, I was beginning to forget about the crowd and the camera and the tracks. That tongue of hers was driving me crazy and her pussy was calling my name in sweet falsetto.

  Then, off in the distance, I heard the cold, hard voice of the train. That whistle jerked the iron right out of my Johnson, I kid you not. I went limp as a noodle and came out of her mouth. I began to feel the vibration of the rails on the back of my neck and legs. Dave moved Bob aside and took the camera off the tripod and bent down next to me and smiled and poked the camera in my face and said, “Hey, you hear something, Billy? Like a train?”

  “Goddamn right,” I said. “Get me off here.”

  “That’s the midnight whistle at the Highway 59 crossing up a ways. Sound carries good from there. Comes down between the pine stands like they’re canyon walls. That ole choo choo is fifteen minutes away.”

  I started cussing him right and left, but he didn’t pay me any mind. He stood up and looked around at everyone and pointed the camera and moved it a
bout slowly, getting us all in. I had the sensation he was pulling our souls into that video box, locking us away until he needed us later.

  He finished up, said, “You want off these tracks in time, you want to get Sharon off these tracks in time, ’cause, man, she just don’t care, you got to do the job. Got to get off, and you got to get Sharon off before tha Kff imet ole choo choo gets here. You don’t, they find you tomorrow, or a week from now, they’re gonna discover you got this locomotive and a string of boxcars stuck up your ass. Hear me? You do this right, though, we can all watch this on the set later, eat a few chips, drink some beer, cheer you on.”

  Any idea they were kidding was gone. I knew they meant it. And Sharon was lost. She was caught up in the idea of death, and she was loving it. She was trying to get me hard again and inside her, but there wasn’t anything fearfully frantic about it. She just wanted it.

  That cold rail throbbed against my neck, vibrated my legs, and I could hear crickets in the weeds, playing their fiddles, and in the distance, down near the creek, I could hear a big bullfrog croaking. I could hear better than ever before. Cars off in a distance, racing along the highway. A dog barking.

  The sky was rich and black above me and the stars were brilliant and the moon was shining bright through the tops of some tall pines. I could smell those pines and the sour weeds that grew along the track, the bittersweet aroma of Sharon’s pussy.

  Everything. Sight and smell and sound were magnified. I realize this more thinking back on it, because at the time I was terrified, but it was being scared that heightened everything. Made it hot. Made it glow.

  And God, Sharon was beautiful. Her breasts goose bumped. Her nipples dark and hard like chocolate drops. Her knees straddling me, my rod in her hand, trying to get me inside her, doing all this with her eyes closed, maybe thinking about the train coming, like it was entering her instead of me, maybe just thinking about death. I don’t know.

  When that goddamn train tooted the next time, I closed my eyes and got down to business, started working my hips and thinking about one thing and one thing only, popping my cork, and Lord, but Sharon was working me, helping me, and that train and Dave and Bob and Carrie and the video camera went away, and there was only me and Sharon, and after a while, just me, working for the moment.