Wednesday afternoon at the overseer’s house. Bennie was out shopping. Emily was online, confirming arrangements for their trip to Puerto Rico this coming weekend, for the annual meeting of the Caribbean chapter of the Association of Anthropologists and Archaeologists of the Americas. Phil was at the typewriter again.
After logging off the computer, Emily lugged a footlocker over to the wall and climbed up on it. Phil heard her, turned, saw his wife from the nose up, peering over the wall. “Zeppo, you look like Kilroy-was-here,” he commented. Zep or Zeppo, short for Zeppelins, was one of Phil’s pet nicknames for his wife.
“What are you writing about now?”
“Dwayne.”
“Ah, more smut.”
“Don’t knock it,” said Phil, turning back to the typewriter.
“I’m not-I can’t wait to read it. The last excerpt got me moist.”
“Here, then.” He took the page he’d just finished out of the typewriter, bundled it with the rest of the chapter, and carried it across the room. “I warn you, though-if I hear that vibrator going, I’m coming in there.”
“If you hear the vibrator,” said Emily as she reached over the wall to take the thin sheaf of paper, “I don’t need you.”
Chapter V
By this time it had become obvious to both P and E that the receptive, strictly opportunistic approach they had been using was simply not going to cut the mustard. They had continued to volunteer for night watches at the various hospices and nursing homes in the area, but now instead of waiting for the final breath, which was hard enough to predict, and hoping they were alone when it did arrive, which happened all too infrequently, if left alone with a patient in the so-called “active” stage of dying, they would help the process along.
Eventually, however, they began to get the impression that concerns were starting to be raised about them at the institutions at which they were volunteering. They were left alone with a dying patient less often, and when they were, they often felt as if they were being watched.
With the customary domains of the dying denied them, and serendipities like the homicidal prostitute or the dying medicine woman not likely to present themselves on a regular basis, the couple was in a quandary. But their problem, they came to understand, was rooted not in the suspicions of the small-minded guardians of the dying, but in their own minds. They had allowed themselves to become trapped by their Judeo-Christian cultural assumptions. The customs and superstitions of their own tribe, so to speak.
So if it was acceptable to hasten the imminent, inevitable demises of the hospice and hospital patients, they began to ask themselves, why then was it unacceptable to hasten other demises which were equally inevitable, if not quite as imminent? And yes, that
A daring proposition. Frightening to some, insane to others. But those others had never experienced what they had experienced. It was like the joke about the pope setting birth control policy: you no play-a da game, you no make-a da rules.
So E turned the analytical laser of her brilliant scientific mind to the problem of how to attract, isolate, and overpower subjects. Although as stated previously, neither P nor E could be considered conventionally attractive, E did possess one particular set of female attributes which in the couple’s native culture were valued above all other female attributes: overdeveloped mammaries. Theirs was a breast-ridden society, if one may coin a phrase, and when it came to attracting male subjects and isolating them in conditions of absolute privacy, there was simply no better bait than E’s twin forty-fours. Overpowering the subject, of course, would be left to P.
It should be noted that in these early days, the couple, still constrained to some extent by residuary Judeo- Christian ethics, agreed to confine themselves to subjects they found morally objectionable. Subjects whose hastened demise could do nothing but improve the DNA pool. Subjects like D.
They met D in a working-class tavern in the same city where P had his apotheosis with the homicidal prostitute. They drove to the bar in separate cars. E, in extreme decolletage, played the scorned woman at one end of the bar. P, armed with a snub-nosed revolver, kept an eye on her from the other.
E fed the jukebox. E muttered about the inconstancy of men in general and her husband in particular. D, a swarthy man in his midthirties who’d been ordering shots of cheap Scotch, beer back, all night, slid onto the stool next to her. E allowed him to buy her a drink. She danced with him. He pawed her drunkenly, mumbled filth into her ear. She feigned arousal. The seduction was accomplished with ridiculous ease. All three left the bar separately. E met D at her car and took him back to their house by a route circuitous enough to permit P to get there first.
P hid himself in the bedroom closet. (B was off playing poker at an all-night card room.) The front door opened. He heard giggling, a slap. Footsteps stumbled up the stairs. The bedroom door opened. Peering through the keyhole, he watched E and D disrobe.
E lay back upon the bed. D positioned himself between her legs. P waited for the signal: E was to bring the back of her hand to her brow. She did not signal. D entered her. She did not signal. D began thrusting brutally. She did not signal.
It was clear that E was no longer feigning arousal. Her eyes closed, her wide aureolae puckered and pebbled, her nipples hardened to thimbles. She did not signal. Her knees rose higher. Her heels drummed a tattoo against D’s clenched buttocks. D spewed filth: fuckmeyoucuntfuckmeyoucunt. E commenced her orgasmic moan and locked her legs around the small of his back as she came. D continued to thrust and swear. She tightened her legs around him. He swore, he thrust. She signaled.
The closet was only a few feet from the side of the bed. P waited until D’s head was turned away, then emerged from the closet, revolver in hand. E’s eyes were glazed. The back of her hand still rested against her brow. P raised the revolver, brought the butt down against D’s occiput so forcefully that one of the plastic grips broke off the handle.
D slumped across E. She rolled out from under him. P rolled him over. He had either been feigning unconsciousness, or recovered quickly. He grabbed the gun by the barrel. As the two men grappled, E, thinking quickly, seized D’s scrotum and squeezed. He shrieked. P wrested the gun back, cocked the hammer. D curled up like a pinch bug, holding his privates and whimpering.
P was by then enormously aroused, as much by the fight as by the previous voyeurism. He had never felt so savage, so animalistic, so primitive. He told E he wanted to do to D what D had done to her. She was surprised, as he’d never shown bisexual inclinations before, not even when he and B had sex with her simultaneously.
But she was also aroused. They stuffed one of E’s stockings into his mouth. They rolled him over onto his stomach, tied his hands to the headboard with a rope, then tied one end of another rope to one of his ankles and looped it under the bed and around to the other ankle, securing his legs in a spread-eagled position.
P didn’t bother to disrobe. He just pulled down his pants, then started to pull them back up when he had finished. E stopped him, told him it was her turn, and positioned herself atop D, straddling him with her thighs. Her husband positioned himself atop her-an E sandwich-and entered her from behind. They climaxed together. All that remained now was the dying, and the dying breath….
Once again, Emily finished reading with one hand pressed between her legs. She put the manuscript down, reached into her bedside drawer, took out her lipstick-sized vibrator. She heard a chair scraping the floor in the next room; out of the corner of her eye she saw Phil peering over the wall.
“Oh, oh,” she said in a breathy falsetto. “I think I’ll masturbate now, with my nightgown pulled up to expose my overdeveloped female attributes. I do hope no one is watching.”
4
Sugar Town. Dirt streets and porticoed wooden sidewalks. Women balancing bundles of laundry on their heads on their way to the washhouse, loafers drinking rum on the bench under a Ginger Thomas tree, old men slapping dominoes down on the wooden tables in front of the bars on Wharf Street. Yellow dogs lolling in the yellow dirt, oblivious to the scruffy chickens crossing the road to get to the other side. Young men selling conch out of the back of old pickup trucks, women in bright headkerchiefs peddling eggs, or limes from the public grove.
Vijay parked his patrol car, a Plymouth that had seen better decades, outside the washhouse, and led Pender down a narrow, walled alley. The fences on either side were six to eight feet high, built of various materials-
