masochist. They had pounced, Futzy had let them pounce, and from that moment his house had become an abattoir of love.
Drive to school.
Bark admonitions and orders over the PA system.
Preside at assemblies where he would introduce a speaker and sit there despising the wretched rabble.
Cuff, swat, batter, and smack the foul little shits sent to his office for misbehavior.
The weary round had been enough to satisfy. That and a properly distant commiseration every year with the dead promgoers’ parents, a perfunctory few phone calls between the slaughter and the futtering.
As he listened to their sobs, their quavering pride in son or daughter, he wondered if they felt one-tenth of the agony he, in renewal, felt every time he made such a call.
He would go home, post-prom, and let his wives rip into him, savage pain doled out, pain that often involved neither lobes nor gens.
But this year was different.
The Ice Ghoul had somehow fit perfectly into the underseas theme of Kitty’s prom. For hours, the creature of tin foil, mesh, and papier-mache had towered over the slain couple. Icicles thrust into his little girl’s eyes had capped the hidden mayhem of her death.
Year after year, in deference to Futzy’s feelings, prom planners had shied away from the Ice Ghoul as a centerpiece, even as the tradition of using him to scare the vinegar out of incoming Corundum High kids caught hold.
But the world had darkened.
Devolving breeds of senior had turned more cruel.
Futzy peered into Kitty’s eyes. Innocence. Kindness. Nothing like that existed any more at Corundum High.
This year, over Brest Donner’s objections, the student committee had in defiance chosen the Ice Ghoul. They had even appropriated an area of the cool room, among ineptly butchered haunches of beef and pork, Lily Foddereau’s senior projects, to store ice sculptures of the monster for a late-evening contest.
The little shits were not going to get away with this outrage. They would pay in spades for this nose- thumbing.
Futzy had shone no upset. He had remained a miracle of calm. At tonight’s prom, he planned to continue in that vein, at least at first.
“Am I doing the right thing, sweetheart?” he asked his daughter’s portrait. “Is Daddy on the right track?”
Typhoons of assent raged in his head, as they did whenever he posed the question. Over Kitty’s permed helmet of auburn hair, from the strands of which peered a baby-soft right earlobe, a diffuse halo of light shone.
Yes, he would sour their evening.
Soon, though not soon enough, they would wish they had kept their Ice Ghoul as nothing more than a joke to frighten wide-eyed tenth graders with.
Futzy recalled Kitty’s mothers, a rising duet of wincing squeals as he whipped them, the joyous anger that billowed inside him as he meted out their begged-for punishment. Hen scratchings. The nertz of a gnat at the ear. Nothing compared to the rage now astir in him, a rage he thought had dissipated in the years since Kitty’s death, but which, it was now clear, had only lay dormant, waiting for its main chance.
He gripped the knot of his tie. Too loose. He tightened it.
This, thought Futzy, was going to be one humdinger of an evening.
Rhythming behind the wheel of her high-tuned piece of crap, Altoona tooled down the main drag of Corundum, Kansas.
The radio blasted slap’n’smack, tweedling her ears straight down to the lobes. Ballsy Pink Lady rockers scalloped out come-need there. Inside her leather pants, their voices tweedled her gens.
Zipper teeth, sewn along Altoona’s labia at Easter and bunched up now like a slumped toddler’s jacket, spit fire across her vulval gap.
She prided herself in being able to sing and sway and pummel the steering wheel with rhythmic slams of her right palm, even as she obeyed every damned traffic law on the books.
Sheriff Blackburn passed Altoona going the other way. In response to her cheery wave, he glared and made an abrupt turn-it-down gesture.
Huh. Blackburn.
He was cool though. It didn’t tear her. For reasons beyond her ken, Blackburn had chosen to play a stern- daddy role. But inside, he was a good and fair humper of his mother.
Not like some of the geekoids she and Pimlico had had to teach how to behave.
Chub jokes and female-threesome innuendoes rolled off their backs. The Mathers twins, for instance. Less than head lice they’d been in their attempts to draw verbal razors across the girls’ brains.
But as soon as she and Pim heard how Ig and Opie Mathers had bullied Nils Fancher, they invoked their November pact, secured the testimony of reliable witnesses, tracked the slugnuts down, told them what was about to happen and why, and flogged the living shit out of them to within a hair’s breadth of what the law allowed.
Ig and Opie’s flesh had sizzled beneath a white-hot brand, high flutes of pain issuing from split lips as U for Unkind seared deep into their foreheads.
It had been nothing like the violence normal people dole out to remind one another that life is cool, that they’re alive, and that they have “a whipped kind of love to share,” as the Pink Ladies so righteously belted out on the radio.
Altoona sang along.
Nearly too late, she spied the street sign. She turned wide on a screeech -what the hell, nothing coming her way.
Pimlico’s house was five down on the right, where Stardust Place teed in. She roared into the driveway, jerked up hard on the brake, and killed the engine.
The sound of her black leather skirt shifting over the seat was covered by a vigorous shake of trees outside the car. That and the blare of a TV inside Pim’s house turned the night as crisp and alive as cathedral air.
On the umpteenth ring, one of Pim’s moms came to the door. It was the scraggly one, whose hair reminded Altoona of tossed straw.
“Oh yeah, right,” she said, “come in.”
She was thin and naked, fresh welts raised across her belly. Dark puffy bags slung beneath her eyes-not the morning hangover ones that fade with coffee, fresh air, and locomotion, but the sort that endure and define. A hastily pulled-up lobebag hid her lefty.
In the vestibule, the straw-haired mom angled her head back as if readying a sneeze. Her mouth widened. ” Pimmie! Your date’s here! ” A wasted gaze at Altoona. “She’ll be down.”
“Thanks.”
Pim’s pop shouted from the TV room, ” here! ” Nola was already on the move. “I’m coming fast as I can, buttfuck,” she mumbled, casting an all-men-are-scum look toward Altoona.
Pim yelled, “Be right down!”
“ going?” Again the man’s voice, apparently to Pim’s other mom.
Altoona had never met her girlfriend’s father. All she knew about him was that he cared not the whit of a shit about his daughters.
From the TV room, Pim’s kid sisters made gross-out sounds. Altoona recognized the political spot. Oink- oinks blared from a hefty porker. Its throat caught on something. Then a blurt of spew hit an empty trough, replay, replay, replay. The camera jittered through a series of ugly jumpcuts as a stern DoleMoreCrap announcer intoned Fenny Boyle’s sins.
And it was only primary season.
Things were certain to heat up, the vitriol eating away at an already frayed political fabric, from now to November, Jesus God!
