“Why not?” She looked at him candidly, without artifice. Norman was the only man she had known sexually in her entire life, and he was not the sort of man who got hot simply because you touched him there through his pants. Sometimes-increasingly, in the last few years-he didn’t get hot at all.
“Because I won’t be able to stop without suffering a most severe case of blue balls.” She looked at him with such frowning, earnest puzzlement that he burst out laughing.
“Never mind, Rosie. It’s just that I want everything to be right the first time we make love-no mosquitoes biting our butts, no rolling in the poison oak, no kids from U.C. showing up at a vital moment. Besides, I promised to have you back by four so you could sell tee-shirts, and I don’t want you to have to race the clock.” She looked down at her watch and was startled to see it was ten past two. If they had been sitting on the rock and making out for only five or ten minutes, how was that possible? She came to the reluctant but rather marvellous conclusion that it wasn’t. They had been here for half an hour at least, maybe closer to forty-five minutes.
“Come on,” he said, sliding off the rock. He grimaced as the soles of his feet splashed into the cold water, and she caught just a glimpse of the bulge in his pants before he turned away. I did that, she thought, and was astonished at the feelings which came with the thought: pleasure, amusement, even a slight smugness. She slipped off the rock next to him and was holding his hand in hers before she realized she had taken it.
“Okay; what now?”
“How about a little walk before we start back? Cool off.”
“All right, but let’s stay away from the foxes. I don’t want to disturb them again.” Her, she thought, I don’t want to disturb her again.
“All right. We’ll walk south.” He started to turn away. She squeezed his hand to make him turn back again and when he did, Rosie stepped into his arms and slipped her own arms around his neck. The hardness below his waist wasn’t gone entirely, not yet, and she was glad. She’d had no idea until today that there was something in that hardness a woman could really like-she’d honestly thought it a fiction of those magazines whose main job it was to sell clothes and makeup and hair-care products. Now she knew a little more, perhaps. She pressed herself firmly against that hard place and looked into his eyes. “do you mind if I say something my mother taught me to say when I went to my first birthday party? I was four or five, I think.”
“Go ahead,” he said, smiling.
“Thank you for a lovely time, Bill. Thank you for the most lovely day I’ve had since I grew up. Thank you for asking me.” Bill kissed her.
“It’s been nice for me too, Rosie. It’s been years since I felt this happy. Come on, let’s walk.” They went south along the shore this time, walking hand in hand. He led her up another path and into a long, narrow hayfield that looked as if it hadn’t been touched in years. The afternoon light lay across it in dusty beams, and butterflies skittered through the timothy grass, weaving aimless courses. Bees droned, and off to their left, a woodpecker tackhammered a tree relentlessly. He showed her flowers, naming most of them. She thought he got a couple wrong but didn’t tell him. Rosie pointed out a cluster of fungi around the base of an oak at the edge of the field, and told him they were toadstools, but not too dangerous because they were bitter. It was the ones that didn’t taste bitter that could get you in trouble, or get you killed. By the time they got back to the picnic area, the college kids Bill had spoken of had arrived-a van and a four-wheel-drive Scout full of them. They were amiable but noisy as they went about carrying coolers filled with beer into the shade and then setting up their volleyball net. A boy of about nineteen was carrying his girlfriend, clad in khaki shorts and a bikini top, around on his shoulders. When he broke into a trot, she began to scream happily and beat the top of his crewcut head with the palms of her hands. As she watched them, Rosie found herself wondering if the girl’s screams carried to the vixen in her clearing, and supposed they did. She could almost see her lying there with her brush curled over her sleeping, milk-stuffed cubs, listening to the human screams from down the beach, her ears cocked, her eyes bright and crafty and all too capable of madness. It knocks the dogs down quick, but a vixen can carry it a long time, Rosie thought, and then recalled the toadstools she’d spotted on the edge of the overgrown meadow, growing in the shadows where it was damp. Spider toadstools, her grandmother had called them when she pointed them out to Rosie one summer, and while that was a name that must have been special to Gramma Weeks-certainly it was not one Rosie had ever seen since in any book of plants- she had never forgotten the somehow nasty look of them, the pale and waxy flesh swarming with dark spots that did look a little like spiders, she supposed, if your imagination was good… and hers had been. A vixen can carry rabies a long time, she thought again. It knocks the dogs down quick, but…
“Rosie? Are you cold?” She looked at him, not understanding.
“You were shivering.”
“No, I’m not cold.” She looked at the kids, who did not see her and Bill because they were past the age of twenty-five, and then back to him.
“But maybe it’s time to go back.” He nodded.
“I think you’re right.”
The traffic was heavier on the return trip, and heavier still once they left the Skyway. It slowed them down but never quite stopped them. Bill darted the big Harley through holes when they appeared, making Rosie feel a little as if she were riding on the back of a trained dragonfly, but he took no unreasonable chances and she never doubted him, even when he took them up the dotted line between lanes, passing big semis on either side, lined up like patient mastodons as they waited for their turn to go through the Skyway tollbooths. By the time they began passing signs which read WATERFRONT and AQUARIUM and ETTINGER’s PIER amp; AMUSEMENT PARK, Rosie was glad they had left when they had. She was going to be on time for her shift in the tee-shirt booth, and that was good. She was going to introduce Bill to her friends, and that was even better. She was sure they were going to like him. As they passed beneath a bright pink banner reading SWING INTO SUMMER WITH DAUGHTERS AND SISTERS!, Rosie felt a burst of happiness which she would remember later on that long, long day with sickened horror. She could see the roller coaster now, all curves and complicated strutwork silhouetted against the sky, could hear the screams drifting off it like vapor. She hugged Bill tighter for a moment, and laughed. Everything was going to be all right, she thought, and when she remembered-for just a moment-the vixen’s dark and watchful eye, she pushed the memory away, as one will push away a memory of death at a wedding.
While Bill Steiner was negotiating his motorcycle carefully up the lane leading to Shoreland, Norman Daniels was negotiating his stolen car into a huge parking lot on Press Street. This lot was about jive blocks from Ettinger’s Pier, and served half a dozen lakeside attractions-the amusement park, the aquarium, the Old Towne Trolley, the shops and restaurants. There was parking closer in to all these points of interest and refreshment, but Norman didn’t want to get closer in. He might feel it necessary to leave this area at some speed, and he didn’t want to find himself mired in traffic if that turned out to be the case. The front half of the Press Street lot was nearly deserted at quarter to ten on Saturday morning, not good for a man who wanted to keep a low profile, but there were plenty of vehicles in the day- and week-rate section, most the property of ferry customers who were off somewhere up north, on day trips or weekend fishing expeditions. Norman eased the Ford Tempo into a space between a Winnebago with Utah plates and a gigantic RoadKing RV from Massachusetts. The Tempo was all but invisible between these big guys, and that suited Norman fine. He got out, then took his new leather jacket off the seat and put it on. From one of its pockets he took a pair of sunglasses-not the same ones he’d worn the other day-and slipped these on, as well. Then he walked to the rear of the car, took a look around to make sure he was unobserved, and opened the trunk. He took out the wheelchair and unfolded it. He had pasted the bumper stickers he’d bought in the gift shop of the Women’s Cultural Center all over it. They might have lots of smart people giving lectures and attending symposia upstairs in the meeting rooms and the auditorium, but downstairs in the gift shop they sold exactly the sort of shrill, nonsensical shit Norman had been hoping for. He had no use for keychains with the female sign on them, or the poster of a woman being crucified (JESUSINA DIED FOR YOUR SINS) on Golgotha, but the bumper stickers were perfect. A WOMAN NEEDS A MANLIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE, said one. Another, obviously written by someone who’d never seen a bimbo with her eyebrows and half her hair singed off by a malfunctioning crackpipe, read WOMEN ARE NOT FUNNY! There were stickers that said I’M PRO-CHOICE AND I VOTE, SEX IS POLITICAL, and R-E-S-P-E-C-T, FIND OUT WHAT IT MEANS TO ME. Norman wondered if any of these braless wonders knew that song had been written by a man. He bought them all, though. His favorite was the one he had carefully pasted in the center of the wheelchair’s imitation leather backrest, next to the little customized holster for his Walkman: I AM A MAN WHO RESPECTS WOMEN, it said. And that’s true enough, he thought, taking another quick check of the parking lot to make sure there was no one observing the cripple as he climbed spryly into his wheelchair. As long as they behave themselves, I respect them fine. He saw no one at all, let alone anyone watching him specifically. He pivoted the wheelchair and looked at his reflection in the side of the freshly washed Tempo. Well? he asked himself. What do you think? Will it work? He thought it would. Since disguise was out of the question, he had tried to go beyond disguise-to create a real person, the way a good actor can create a real person on stage. He had even come up with a name for this new guy: Hump Peterson. Hump was an army vet who’d come back home and ridden with an outlaw biker gang for ten years or so, one of the ones where the women have only two or three very limited uses. Then the accident had happened. Too many beers, wet pavement, a bridge abutment. He’d been paralyzed from the waist down, but had been nursed back to health by a saintly young woman named…
“Marilyn,” Norman said, thinking of Marilyn Chambers, who for years had been his favorite porn star. His second favorite was Amber Lynn, but Marilyn Lynn sounded fake as hell. The next name to occur to him was McCoo, but that was no good, either; Marilyn McCoo was the bitch who had sung with the Fifth Dimension, back in the seventies, when life hadn’t been as weird as it was these days. There was a sign in a vacant lot across the street-ANOTHER QUALITY DELANEY CONSTRUCTION PROJECT WILL GO UP IN THIS SPACE NEXT YEAR! it said-and Marilyn Delaney was as good a name as any. He would probably not be asked to tell his life’s story by any of the women from Daughters and Sisters, but to paraphrase the sentiment on the shirt the clerk in The Base Camp had been wearing, it was better to have a story and not need one than to need one and not have one. And they would believe in Hump Peterson. They would have seen more than a few guys just like him, guys who’d had some sort of life-changing experience and were trying to atone for their past behavior. And the Humps of the world, of course, atoned the way they had done everything else in their lives, by going right to the firewall. Hump Peterson was trying to turn himself into a kind of honorary woman, that was all. Norman had similar scagbags turn themselves into passionate anti-drug advocates, Jesus freaks, and Perotistas. At the bottom they were really just the same one-note assholes they’d always been, singing the same old tune in a different key. That wasn’t the important thing, though. The important thing was that they were always around, hanging on the fringes of whatever scene it was they wanted to be in. They were like tumbleweeds in the desert or icicles in Alaska. So yes-he thought Hump would be accepted as Hump, even if they were on the lookout for Inspector Daniels. Even the most cynical of them would be apt to dismiss him as no more than a horny crip using the old “sensitive, caring man” routine to get himself laid on a Saturday night. With just a smidge of luck, Hump Peterson would be both as visible and as little noticed as the guy on stilts who plays Uncle Sam in the Fourth of July parade. Beyond this, his plan was simplicity itself. He would find the main concentration of women from the group home, and he would watch them as Hump from the sidelines-their games and conversational groups, their picnic. When someone brought him a hamburger or a corndog or a slice of pie, as some helpful cunt undoubtedly would (you couldn’t propagandize their deep need to bring food to the menfolks out of them-that was instinct, by God), he’d take it with thanks, and he’d eat every bite. He would speak when spoken to, and if he should chance to win a stuffed animal playing ringtoss or Pitch Til U Win, he’d give it to some little kid… always being careful not to pat the rugmuffin on the head; even that could get you busted for molestation these days. But mostly he’d just watch. Watch for his rambling Rose. He could do that with no problem at all, once he had been accepted as a valid part of the scene; he was a champ at the art of surveillance. After he spotted her, he could take care of his business right here on the Pier, if he wanted to; just wait until she had to use the potty, follow her, and snap her neck like a chickenbone. It would be over in seconds, and that, of course, was just the problem. He didn’t want it to be over in seconds. He wanted to be able to take his time. Have a nice, leisurely chat with her. Get a complete rundown on her activities since she’d walked out on him with his ATM card in her pocket. The full report, so to speak, from chowder to cashews. He could ask her how it had felt to punch in his pin-number, for instance, and find out if she’d gotten off when she’d bent down to scoop the cash out of the slot-the cash he’d worked for, the cash he’d earned by staying up until all hours and busting scumholes who'A do anything to anybody if there weren’t guys like him around to stop them. He wanted to ask her how she’d ever thought she could get away with it. How she’d thought she could get away from him. And after she’d told him everything he wanted to hear, he would talk to her. Except maybe talk wasn’t exactly the right word for what he had in mind. Step one was to spot her. Step two was to keep an eye on her from a discreet distance. Step three was to follow her when she’d finally had enough and left the party… probably after the concert,but maybe earlier if he was lucky. He could ditch the wheelchair once he was clear of the amusement park. There would be fingerprints on it (a pair of studded biker gauntlets would have taken care of that problem and also added to the Hump Peterson image, but he’d only had so much time, not to mention one of his horrible headaches, his specials), but that was all right. He had an idea that fingerprints were going to be the least of his problems from here on out. He wanted her at her place, and Norman thought he was probably going to get what he wanted. When she got on the bus (and it would be the bus; she had no car and wouldn’t want to waste money on a cab), he would get on right behind her. If she happened to spot him at some point along the line between Ettinger’s Pier and the crib where she was turning her tricks, he’d kill her on the spot, and devil take the consequences. If things went well, though, he’d follow her right in through her door, and on the other
