4
Good thing was, save for the barking of dogs and the occasional sound of rats running in the streets, nothing at all happened. We found a storeroom in the back and crashed there for the night, sleeping in shifts.
And so the night passed.
When daylight finally came, sweeping the night terrors back into their holes, it turned out that the Army/Navy store was a real windfall. We found another locked storeroom in the basement and it was just full of goodies…once we popped the door with a crowbar. Cartons of military MREs and freeze-dried hiking food, cases of bottled water and packets of water purification tablets. Sleeping bags and flashlights, waterproof raingear and parkas and blankets and first aid equipment. Upstairs there was camo clothing in every size, some of it American and some of it British DPM.
While Janie and I took inventory, Texas Slim and Carl went out hunting a new vehicle. They bickered their way out the door, trying to decide whose mother had entertained more bikers in a single night. I was glad to get rid of them. That shit went on almost constantly, the nipping and arguing and insulting. It was what they did and they enjoyed it, but it got old after awhile.
“There’s a ton of stuff here, Nash,” Janie said, standing amongst heaps of blankets and clothing and green metal boxes.
“We’ll just take what we need.”
That was an unwritten rule these days. No sense being a glutton, no sense being a hog, just take what you needed and leave the rest for some other unfortunate soul. I believed in this completely. I knew others did, too. There were always plenty who didn’t, of course, but I truly believed that karma would sort their asses out in the end.
“What do you think the chances are they’ll get us a decent ride?”
Janie laughed. “Pretty good if they don’t kill each other first.”
“Ah, they’re pretty tight, I think. They just express their feelings for one another in a strange way.”
“Let’s go to the storeroom, Nash. I want to show you something.”
I followed her downstairs and when we were in there, she locked the door.
“What do you want to show me?”
“What do you think?” she said, something blazing just behind her eyes. “You’ve been thinking the same thing I have so quit playing innocent.”
The heat that burned inside her spread out and consumed me. She was beautiful…but still the image of my wife came to me unbidden and dominating as it often did. Shelly. Dear God, Shelly. I remembered the mole on her thigh and the way she laughed and the little notes she would stick inside my lunch pail and the way her hand felt in mine and how she had looked the day we were married and how lucky, how blessed, I had felt knowing that she was mine. And then I saw her, as I would always see her, dying in my arms that night from cholera, nothing but bones wrapped in yellow skin, her chest trembling with each shallow gasp of air, and my own voice saying again and again, this is Shelly, this is my wife, this is how I bleed.
But that was gone.
It was faded with age.
Janie looked at me and something crossed her eyes like a shadow and then was gone and I was with her, losing myself in her.
She came right up to me and grabbed my hands and put them up her shirt and on her breasts. They were hot to the touch. I could feel her heart pounding with a steady delicious rhythm. I kissed her with my lips and then with my tongue and that’s how it started. Later, thinking about it with a warm satisfaction, I thought I actually melted into her. It sounds like something from a cheap paperback romance, but that’s how it was. It was no gentle seduction, there was nothing subtle or soft about any of it…just a union born of absolute need, trembling fingers working buttons and zippers and then I was on top of her and inside her, pumping, and she was breathing hot and heavy in my ear. Moaning. Begging me never to stop. I think I told her I loved her. When we came, we both cried out. It didn’t last long, but what there was of it was completely molten.
Later, still wrapped together in a twine of hot flesh and cooling sweat, she balanced herself on one elbow and said, “You think about your wife a lot, don’t you?”
“I guess.”
“But you never speak of her.”
“No.”
“Why not, Nash? Don’t you think it would be better if you did?”
I pulled away, pain breaking loose inside me. “I can’t. I just can’t.”
Janie didn’t push it, it wasn’t in her to do so. She lay next to me, her skin golden and her limbs long. “Do you trust me, Nash?”
“I think you’re the only one I do trust.” I meant it.
“I want you to tell me about your wife. Not now. But some day. When you do that, when you share it with me and trust me with it, I know I’ll trust you, too.”
The idea that maybe she didn’t trust me, not completely, hurt. I knew the others were with me because they thought I could keep them safe. It was not devotion, really, it was need and maybe it was even fear. Fear of what I could do and what I would call up on the next night of the full moon. That made me somehow omnipotent in their eyes. They respected the power, feared how I wielded it.
They did not fear me.
They feared what I called: The Shape.
But Janie?
No, Janie did not fear me. The connection between us was different, deeper, hard to know or understand. But it was there. It was always there. Sometimes I feared that she would leave and I would be alone. Completely alone and when I woke in the night, shivering and sweating from nightmares, she would not be there to hold onto. Then it would be just me, the memories of Shelly coming in the dead of night and sucking the blood from my soul.
I reached out and touched Janie, loving the smoothness of her skin. And as I did so, that old voice said, Jesus Christ, she’s just a kid…she’s nineteen and you’ll be forty in three years. You could be her father for chrissake. Don’t you see that? And yet you cling to her and you sleep with her, and how do you feel about that? Do you feel dirty? Unclean? But I didn’t. Maybe once I would have but that once was so far gone, dropped into the deepest well imaginable, and I could no longer know what was right and what was wrong. I only knew that it felt right and that was enough.
It was all I had.
I thought I loved her.
And loving her, wished she were dead.
She was just too good to be thrown into the ashcan with the rest. She had morals and ethics. And those things just didn’t have a place now.
“I want you to trust me,” I said. “I need you to.”
“Do you trust me?”
“Yes.”
“I hope so.”
“I love you,” I said.
She laid her head on my chest. “Then I suppose I love you, too.”
“That’s pretty noncommittal.”
“It’s a noncommittal world now, Nash.”
I laid there, feeling her, feeling part of something and more alone than I’d ever felt in my life. There was pain inside for what I had done and what I had lost and what I would never find again. I could feel it in each heartbeat and in the steady flow of my blood. I opened my mouth to tell Janie about it, but I closed it again as I saw my wife’s face looking down at me from some window in my mind.
Yes, pain. Nothing but pain and it did not need to be given a name.
