'Not if you don't want me to.'
'Good.'
It was then he took the pocket knife from his jeans. It was a Boy Scout knife with a black handle. He opened the longest blade.
As they'd been kissing, he'd been aware that his groin was dead. A lot of times, just lying on his bed and thinking of this girl or that, he'd get so aroused, he'd have to leap up, put a chair up to the door so nobody could break in, and masturbate. He'd close his eyes and imagine the girls he'd glimpsed in Playboy, those swaying breasts and mounds of pink buttocks.
So, he should have been doubly aroused with a real girl in his arms, even if she was only twelve and his next-door neighbour.
But he hadn't been aroused, and he knew that something was wrong. He thought of his father.
'How come you took out your knife?' she said.
'It was kind of poking me in the leg.'
'You want me to kiss you again?'
'Do you want to kiss me again?'
'Guess so.'
'You'll have to say it better than that.'
'Guess I'd like to kiss you.'
'How about 'Jesse, I'd really like to kiss you.' '
'Okay.'
'Will you say it?'
He shrugged and said it.
She smiled, and he put his arm around her again and kissed her.
This time he pushed his tongue into her mouth. He felt himself begin to tingle. Breath coming a little faster. But still-nothing in his groin. Nothing. Was he going to be impotent, too?
His hand cupped her breast. He felt silken flesh and a little nub of nipple.
But nothing in his groin; nothing.
He wanted to be an animal and run away. Fast. Far.
And then his hand found the knife and almost without realizing it he… cut her and he… pulled the knife a quarter inch down her arm.
She cried out, pushing away from him, furious and baffled and terrified of him now.
'What're you doing?' she shouted, scrambling away backward. 'What're you doing?'
It wasn't much of a cut, really. You could get a lot worse than that just getting scraped by a branch.
But it had worked.
At sight of her blood, his crotch had swollen and pained him with a monumental erection.
At sight of her blood…
'It was an accident,' he said.
'An accident?' But she was crying then and barely coherent. Somehow she sensed what this was all about, and there was frenzy about her…
He went over to her and sat by her and began to stroke her. Once he had hurt her, once he could see blood, he could be tender with her.
He took her in his arms and held her until her crying stopped, until she turned her face up to his and they kissed again
He was never to see her intimately again. Apparently she never told anybody about that afternoon, because her parents never said a word to him. In the autumn she fell in love with a boy she would ultimately-after breaking up and making up many times-marry and have four children with (this was after the whole family moved away when she was a junior).
But he never forgot the afternoon; nor did he forget the lesson. The sight of dark red blood on soft white flesh, dark red blood on the soft golden down of her arm, dark red blood…
Stu Foster recalled all this on the way over to Brolan's place. When he looked back, there was a direct line running from the afternoon with Jessica to how he'd treated certain women all his life. Certain women. There was a euphemism for you. Whores. Those were the 'certain women.' He had married well, a really darling if plump girl who'd been a Tri-Delt and a beauty queen runner-up, and whose father had made and lost a fortune in petrochemicals down in Kentucky-and of course he kept his preferences secret from her. Oh, once or twice he'd been tempted to hurt her a little-disguised, of course, as playfulness-during their lovemaking. But he'd been afraid he couldn't stop. So, he'd visited whores. The late sixties and seventies had been a boon for people like him. Sex was everywhere. Everything from weekend clubs to outcall massage parlours, when you were in a strange city and didn't want to leave your hotel room. And almost always when you explained to them what you wanted, what you really wanted, you paid them a little money, and there you were. Commerce, just like anything else. Commerce.
Only once had there been real trouble. New Orleans, it had been. Too much rich food, too much hard liquor, too many women who gave you the impression they'd do absolutely anything if you had the good green Yankee cash. A mulatto woman asked him if he'd ever shaved a woman down there before and he'd said no, that he hadn't really even thought about it. So, she gave him this straight razor and a shaving mug and brush and she lay back on the bed and spread her legs and told him to go ahead. She had some kind of blues on the radio, and she was smoking a joint, and she closed her eyes as if he weren't even there at all. And there he sat on the edge of the bed, looking at the juicy pink meat between her legs with a bone-handled straight razor in his fingers, and then a darkness came over him, and he wasn't even sure what he'd tried to do. All he knew was that soon she was screaming and holding her hands over her sex, and that there was blood, blood streaming between her fingers.
…And he was apologizing and saying he was sorry-'My God, listen, I'm really really sorry; I'll leave you extra money; so sorry; just drunk; please, please just take this money and quit screaming, please.' And for a full year he'd been afraid to go back to a hooker. Afraid of what he might do.
But then, the following spring, he met some hookers in Des Moines who knew how to deal with men like him-who knew how to let him get his kicks without ever going too far…
In the backseat, in a brown paper bag, were the clothes he'd worn with the whore Emma and with the whore at the piano bar the other night. You could still smell the blood. A kind of steely tang. Also in the bag was the knife he'd used. Same knife on both occasions.
As he approached Brolan's street, he thought of how his partner had looked when he saw the detective waiting for him in the reception area. The thing was, he didn't really dislike Frank Brolan. So, he'd felt a little sorry for him, seeing that Brolan realized that he was trapped, that forces beyond any of his powers were working against him.
He took the alley. Given the time of day, there were no children around playing.
He drove to Brolan's garage, got out, grabbed the bag, and carried it quickly inside the garage.
Even in winter the interior smelled of car oil from stains on the floor. Sometimes Frank liked to putter around on his own car, finding such work relaxing.
The garage was orderly, almost empty. On one wall hung a manual lawn mower, three rakes, and a lawn seeder. Against the opposite concrete block wall was a tall stack of corded firewood, a kerosene heater, an aluminium stepladder, and several fifty-pound bags of salt for ice. None of these lent themselves to his purposes. He looked around, finally raising his eyes to the two-by-fours that criss-crossed the ceiling. A few pieces of plywood had been laid across the two-by-fours so that things could be stored up there. You could see where the plywood sagged in the middle from the weight. This would be an ideal place for what he had in mind.
He went over and got the ladder and carried it to the centre of the garage. He took the paper bag with the clothes and the knife in it and took it up the ladder. He set the bag far back on the plywood, as if somebody had tried very hard to hide it up there, and then he came back down the steps.
That should work.
