The problem was, he'd been raised to be accountable. It was his pleasure. And it was dirty. Sniggering about boobies and panties after school was one thing. This was different. Staying late after baseball was his fault. And taking pleasure, that was really his fault. They were gonna bust.
In the initial moments of stripping him bare, the witches had ripped his shirt, shredded it. Evan couldn't reconcile that. It was a new shirt, and the destruction scared him more than their animal strength or the hunger they'd gone at him with. His mom and sisters were forever mending clothes and ironing them. They would never have ripped a shirt to tatters and tossed it in the dirt. Or done these other things. Never.
He didn't know exactly what was happening to him. It was the dirty thing you weren't supposed to talk about, that was plain enough. Copulation. But what precisely the act consisted of, that was the mystery. In daylight, he could have seen what was involved. This was more like wrestling with a blindfold on. So far, most of his information had come through touch and smell and sounds. The newness and power of
the sensation confused him. He was ashamed to have cried out in front of women, mortified that it involved his unit.
They'd done it twice now, like milking a cow. The first time, Evan had been alarmed. There was no fighting off the bodily release. It felt like heat shooting out of his spine. Afterward, the mess lay as hot and thick as blood on his belly and chest.
Afraid they'd be disgusted with him, Evan started to apologize. But the whole bunch of them had thronged around him, dipping their fingers into his wet spots. It was almost like church. But instead of crossing themselves, they smeared it between their legs. So that's how it's done, he thought.
It went beyond his whole world of knowledge. For some reason, Evan was reminded of a science video he'd seen, in which a praying mantis female ate her mate when the act was over. That was reproduction. Until now he'd been mystified by the terrible consequences of doing it. Now the notion of punishment following the sin made perfect sense. No wonder people did it in the darkness.
Evan wanted them to quit, but secretly he didn't, too. Certainly the cluster of night women wanted more. After the first time, thinking it was over, he'd asked, 'Can I please go home now?' His words had agitated them. If grasshoppers or beetles could talk, this was how they'd sound, clicking and muttering and smacking their lips. It didn't make any sense to him, but he got the gist. He was staying. They went at him again. And again.
This third time was proving troublesome. Maybe an hour passed. Their rubbing and yanking and spitting on him didn't seem to be working. He sensed their frustration. The one holding him from behind went on with her singsong chanting and rocking.
'I'll be a good boy,' he assured her in an exhausted whisper. She patted his cheek with a callused palm. It was like being petted with a stick.
Evan genuinely wanted to help out. What they didn't know was that he had an arithmetic test in the morning. He was supposed to be studying.
Gradually his eyes adjusted to the night. Their pale skin took on a faint glow. He could begin to see them. He and his buddies had all seen TV shows with bikini girls, and several had big brothers with Playboys. It wasn't as if he had no clue what a woman's body looked like. But these women had no sunshine in them, no joy. They were all business. Evan felt like he was the center of a farm task, like the cow. Or like the hogs his dad butchered each winter. Like a beast at harvesting. They'd been at him for hours.
There might have been five of them, or as many as a dozen. They kept leaving and returning. The witches moved with watery grace, close to the ground, as if the sky were a weight. The cornstalks rustled. They orbited him like bleached white moons. Their stench ebbed, then surged.
They took turns, arguing over him in insect syllables. Each seemed to have a different idea about manipulating him. Evan had grown used to the one by his head. She seemed to be the oldest. Her chest wall had the feel of a washboard against his ear. Evan grew passive against her, and the arm relaxed. She wasn't unkind, just firm. Her skinny arm was a marvel, a few sinews covered with skin, but as strong as baling wire. When some of the others slapped or prodded him, she clucked at them, annoyed. One, smaller than the rest, was taking lessons from the others. Evan decided she was the youngest, maybe his own age. They urged her to mount him a couple of times, but she was awkward and Evan didn't know what was expected of him. She seemed as frightened as he was. He gravitated to her in his thoughts.
He couldn't see their faces exactly, and didn't want to. This way he could imagine himself surrounded by neighbor ladies and his teachers and some of the girls at school. He added the pretty waitress at the Surf and Turf downtown. He attached familiar masks to these benighted faces looming overhead, and it consoled him. It let him have names for each.
What ruined his conjuring was their smell. Even Mrs. Peterson, the halfwit who sat in the park all day, would never have let herself get foul like this. These women stank. They were rancid and unwashed, and smelled worse than a stockyard. The dung crusting their flanks had the grassy sweetness of cow manure. When they muttered at him, he could smell deep inside their throats.
He was greasy with their juices and saliva. That was another shock, how wet they were between their legs. Nothing in his friends' centerfolds had prepared him for that. Or for their greed and hunger. Periodically one dipped her head, and it felt warm and soft down there, like the hot compresses his grandma used to make.
Their hands and fingers were as dry as lizard skin. They'd rubbed him raw, but the hurt was largely numbed by his fatigue. He lay in their center, and it seemed the stars wheeled in a great circle over him.
Crickets sang. An owl swooped by. Evan suddenly wondered if the witches might be the reason so many dogs and cats had disappeared over the last month. Maybe the animals had run off. Another thought came to him. What if they'd been eaten? A gust of wind rattled the corn rows. He shivered.
The witches entered a rhythm around him. It was like a dance, though they were kneeling or hunkered down on their heels. He set himself adrift on the pulse of their motions, the chant, their hands and mouths. Evan grew hopeful when several whispered approvingly. All at once he found himself approaching that same loss of control as before. He tried not to grunt, but it was too much.
Abruptly the blood heat of liquid spattered across his chest. Evan winced at the salty spray. Tasted it. And frowned.
This time it was the heat of real blood.
In the same instant, a rifle shot ruptured the quiet. Something, a body, flopped heavily across Evan's thighs.
'Evan, boy,' a voice commanded across the corn rows. His father! 'Lie down.'
The sky cracked open. A ragged volley of deer rifles, shotguns, varmint pistols, and old revolvers shattered the constellations. Bullets slapped apart the corn leaves. The gunfire rattled like popcorn.
Evan lay still on his back. It was like drifting on a raft. Staring up at the Milky Way. What he would remember most was not the shooting, or the men yelling, or the witches scattering. Not the headlights careening through the walls of green corn, or the pitchfork lifting that young hadal girl into the wildly lit, raddled sky, where he saw the slight stub of a tail on her rump and her grub-like pallor and her face, the chimp's eyes, the yellow teeth. Not the rack-rack of shotgun shells getting chambered. Not his father standing high overhead and lifting his head up to the stars to bellow like a bull. No. What he would remember was the old woman by his head, how just before they shot the bones from her face, she bent down and kissed him by the ear. It was the kind of thing a grandma did.
The Aztecs said that... as long as one of them was left he would die fighting, and that we would get nothing of theirs because they would burn everything or throw it into the water.
– HERNAN CORTES, Third Dispatch to King Charles V of Spain
17
FLESH
West beneath
