was the third. Triplets. By operation and the choice of my parents, I lived, and they died. They were misshapen. I was the easiest to save. I am one of three and I am all three. Sometimes, late at night, I can almost feel the hand at my chest, squeezing, trying to drive its fingers through my chest, angry I survived, wanting to mash the life from me. And the scar on my hip. It heats up, pains me. When it’s cold especially. Other nights, the scar and the hand are companions.”
“You were Siamese triplets?”
“Incorrect term, but as I said, I was one of three. I am still one of three. You can not create one by destroying two. Had my parents chosen for them to survive, they would have been my brothers.”
“You couldn’t have lived a normal life.”
Frost readjusted his clothes. “True. But there’s very little normal about wearing the wounds and remains of your brothers. To know I survived because I was in the middle, easier to save because my heart was stronger and my appearance normal, it has its burden.”
“They didn’t look right?”
“They were misshapen. Prunish is the word used to describe them. Shriveled up like little mummies. They wouldn’t have grown very large, either of them, but I would have grown to the size I am now, carrying them with me. One clutched to my chest like a nursing baby, the other hanging to my hip like a pet monkey.”
“Shit, you’re lucky,” Bill said. “You’re alive and they’re dead. That’s no burden.”
Frost’s face took on a sardonic air. “You think so?”
“Take it from someone who doesn’t have any luck. You’re lucky.”
“I suppose it’s all in the way you look at things. Do you have more to tell me about why you’re wandering about in the woods, hungry, worn out, and mosquito-bit?”
“I don’t guess so,” Bill said.
Frost studied him. “Well, I trust my instincts. You don’t look like a murderer.”
Bill thought: No, I look like someone with a million mosquito bites.
“I suppose you have your secrets and your reasons. You’re welcome here. You may sleep in my place tonight. Tomorrow night, you wish to stay, we must find you another bed. When you feel stronger, you may leave.”
“I’m much obliged, Mr. Frost.”
“That’s all right, Bill. That’s quite all right. I’m always glad to help a man that’s down. Especially one I can see needs the help. If there is one thing I believe, it is this. Man is meant to help man get along in life, and that is our singular purpose on this earth.”
“Thanks,” Bill said, and thought: Boy are you a dumb shit.
Ten
“We got to sleep on the couch while a guy with a fucked-up face we don’t even know sleeps in our bed?”
“Just for tonight. Must you curse?”
“Must I? No. But I want to.”
Bill could hear them talking at the other end of the trailer. They were trying to be quiet, or at least Frost was, but their voices carried clearly into the bedroom.
Bill lay there listening to them because he couldn’t sleep. He had slept too much already. He thought that was sort of funny. Just a short time before he couldn’t get enough sleep, now he was wide awake with his hands behind his head looking at the ceiling, listening to the beautiful blonde tell Frost she wanted her bed back.
Bill was considering all this, pretty amazed. How in the world had this hot blonde hooked up with that freak, Frost? Frost was a nice enough guy, but that hand on his chest, that scar on his side, it gave Bill the willies.
After listening to them awhile, Bill showered and the warm shower helped him become sleepy again. He went back to bed and fell asleep right off, but he didn’t stay that way. He awoke to the door opening. He turned his head and saw framed in the moonlight the blonde. He could not really see her face, but he knew it was her because he could smell her. That wonderful smell of wet pussy and men’s cologne.
Her hair lay tight against her head, and there in the shadows, except for the moonlight on her face, her shape seemed inhuman. When she turned to look in his direction he could not see her eyes, and the shadows gathered about her in such a way as to make her appear tentacled, like a great squid wearing a cap of white gold. The tentacles roiled and writhed and she shifted and the moonlight brightened as it lost a wreath of clouds and came more clearly through the windows. Suddenly she was clearly outlined in the doorway and her smell came to him more strongly than before.
She stood there for some time. He could not tell if she could see him looking at her or not. Finally she turned and gently closed the door.
Once again, Bill heard them speak. Frost called her to bed, and she said, “You done what you’re supposed to do?”
“It’s not necessary,” said Frost.
“It is to me.”
“Just this once we do different?”
“No.”
“I can do it afterwards.”
“There isn’t going to be any afterwards, you don’t do what I want.”
“Very well.”
A moment of long silence, then Frost again. “Now come to bed,” and Bill heard movement in there, the sound of clothes dropping to the floor, a body climbing onto springs and cushions, and Bill thought: Jumpin’ Jesus. She’s gonna screw the freak, then he heard muted breathing, a grunt and a groan, a squeak and a cry, then all was silent and the night passed on, deep and dark and still, passed on gently into a gray morning with muted sunlight and the sound of a gentle but persistent rain tapping on the trailer.
As he lay there, wide awake in the morning, he heard movement again in the other room and he knew from the sounds that they were at it again, and Bill wondered if it was the hand on Frost’s chest that turned her on, wondered if while Frost screwed her with his heavy body she would reach up and touch the little amputated hand, run her fingers over the smooth gray fingers and over the throbbing veins, and perhaps with her other hand she was reaching out to hold the scar ridge on Frost’s hip.
Considering all that, Bill began to think of himself as the hand, and the thought of the blonde beneath (or above) Frost angered him, and he, the hand, began to turn his fingers down and thrust them deep into Frost’s chest and grab hatefully at the old man’s beating heart until it gave up its blood like juice from a mashed plum.
Eleven
Early morning Bill examined his face in the bathroom and was amazed at it. He washed it and went outside and moved about between the trailers, the rain splattering down on his head and spreading his hair and coating his scalp. It felt cool and good on his hot mosquito-bit face.
He was dressed in the clothes Frost had left for him. They fit him big, especially the pants, which he had cinched up in the waist with a belt, and shortened by rolling the cuffs slightly. He began to realize that Frost was much taller than he looked, and the old man’s shoulders were wide and his chest thick. Bill wore his own shoes, and as he stood in the rain he bent his head and watched the rain clear the mud from them. When he tired of this, he watched the gray morning lighten.
As he walked among the trailers looking at the brightly painted signs on their sides, the rain went away and the sun came out and the day immediately grew hot and sticky as the crack of a fat man’s ass.
Bill walked aimlessly about, came to the trailer with the picture of the Ice Man on its side. He stared at the painting for a long time, at the gnarled-looking body, at the thick black hair on the head, face, chest, and crotch. The crotch had been cleverly painted so that you could see black pubic hair, but where the tallywhacker should’ve
