Frenzy

wonderful between them now.

'What?' She laughed.

'Can't you understand English, girl?'

'No. Not when you're talking into my belly button, I can't.'

'Hello,' he said. 'Anybody home?' he said to her navel.

'Yeah, I'm home.'

'Uh huh. Me too.' He kissed her stomach tenderly and along her tanned rib cage.

'Ah! That tickles.'

'Hah,' he said, licking her side and making her laugh. She couldn't believe how beautiful he was.

'You're my movie-star hunk, you know that.'

'I've got a hunk for you, all right.'

'Now be a good boy and don't talk dirty,' she said as he started working his way up her chest again. Nuzzling, chewing, licking, taking her in his teeth very gently. Blowing his hot Hollywood breath over her, bewitching her with his soap-opera eyes and his magic tongue. Working her. Playing her the way you tire a fish before you net it, keeping his rod stiff and high, taking his time, playing it out, never losing his patience, making the act a little art form all its own.

'Ummmm.' He kissed her hard on the mouth and said softly in his super-con voice, 'Oh, baby, we could like be skiing the advanced slope and then we go back to our little ski chalet, our cabin on the mountaintop, a Swiss lodge like in the movies, and like we get snowbound and just make love for weeks on end. Lay in a nice supply of goodies and get in a big old fur coat or some-thin' and snuggle down in front of the fire' — and she kissed him on the mouth as he spoke '— get logs once in a while, and sip some brandy and toot a little stuff and, um, you know, just watch the snow fall.'

'Watch the snow fall,' she said, a twinkle in her eye.

'Does that sound good?'

'It sounds wonderful, Greg.'

'Yeah. It sounds good to me, too.' He kissed her very gently, kissing the corners of her mouth and then below her nose, then in the hollow of her chin, then in her dimples, and then boxing the compass around her lips and then letting his long, Harry Hollywood tongue dart between those lips, and even her mouth tasted wet and hot like a warm honeypot.

'Oh, Greg — I want you now.' She was breathing her hot breath against his throat and cheek and her eyes were closed.

'Oh, yeah? Let's just see about that.' And he touched her. 'Baby. Ouch. You burned my hand.' And she said something he couldn't catch and he let his hand go back in again and said, 'Hey, you're all wet down here. Did I tell you to get all wet like that?'

'I couldn't help it. You make me that way.'

'Do you really want me, Tiff?' He was watching himself now as he always liked to do, chumping some little bitch off with his slick-stud number, not looking in a mirror but going off somewhere in his head and watching his performance. Pimping a girl off. Getting her off with his Charlie Charm shit. Smooth as stuff and double tough as Memphis Garrett Snuff. Run that game right down her throat, understand? Oh, he liked it when it was like this, when he could play the girl like a musical instrument, make her hum and sing. Make her jump and shout and knock herself out. It was making him so hard to watch himself inside his good-looking head and he held himself on his elbows right over her. 'You really want me, baby?'

'Yes. Yes. YES.'

'Ask me nice, then. Beg me for it if you want it.'

'Please.'

'What?' He let the head go in, it was already slick and it seared him with her cherry-red fire.

'YES, YES, YEEEESSSSSS.'

Don't ever doubt there are some boss players out there who know how to take a little girl and make her a love slave. Just 'cause a few of 'em are thirteen, fourteen, don't think they don't got the ole diamond-cutter's touch for the big O. Cold got to be. Down, Jim. He could see himself getting her off now and hanging in there where a lesser stud would let 'er buck and kick loose. Hanging in and gritting his pearly whites in concentration, Stayhard Incorporated, and if you think I'm sexy, if you really, truly DO want my body, come on, girl, and tell me about it. Tell me more. Work with me, Annie.

'Nnnnnnnn,' she responded to Dr. Feelgood's teen romance.

'Yes,' he said, twenty-four hours a day and we're up all night.

'Uh.' Slick as seals.

'Yeah.' Fall in love with some of this. And Fourth of Julysville.

Oh, my. This is what they were talking about at school. Oh. No wonder. God. Oh. Oh, yes. Greg. Oh, you sweet, you perfect . . . oh . . . OH GOD . . . OOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHH!

It's all he can do to make himself stay in her and keep the kisses going, a little soft reggae posturepedic boom-chickaboom-chickaboom-and TCOB, the doctor is still on the job, a few little gentle nuzzlings into the sweaty shadows, an endearment or two. Nice J.O.B., he thinks, and he's up and away and off chopping up some Hollywood high on the Formica.

'Let's do some lines, angel.' Superstud.

Spain's first nightmares are gentle and deceptively lacking portent.

Even though it was only a nightmare, he saw it clearly, brightly, transcribed lucidly on the dream screen of his mind, a vivid and incredible scenario that was remarkably detailed and agonizingly real. And because of the absence of threat, it was all the more frightening to him. Unlike a dream where you're pursued by bad guys through a temple, jump into a waiting car, and just as you speed off down the hill, you run out of gas, and the nightmare comprises those seconds of fear as you hope the car's momentum from the downhill slope will carry it over the top of the hill to safety, but as it reaches the last few inches, the car begins to inch to a stop then starts rolling backward and the dream is your struggle to get out of the car as it rolls back toward them . . . unlike that sort of a dream, the nightmare he sees carried no overt threat. And later, when the violent dreams begin to assail him, he will remember this dream as benign and harmless, but when he has this dream, one of his first bad nightmares, it shakes him to the quick.

Here is the dream: it is afternoon. He is the sports-caster on a local radio station. No, he doesn't know why either, he was never on the air in his life and has little interest in sports. He is the color man, half of a famous color-and-play-by-play team, and the radio station is in the basement of a large metropolitan bank. The walls of the studio are lime green. He is quite successful and popular, and he enjoys a reputation for being adept at baseball, excellent at basketball, and the number-one color man for football games. These are all well-delineated details.

He is on the air. It is halftime at a big game. Saturday afternoon, and he can smell the smoke there in the hot, sweaty pressbox of the ball club.

The roar of the crowd.

'Unitas drops back,' his play-by-play man says, 'he's going to throw the bomb! Three seconds to half-time on the clock, Frank.'

He responds without a trace of a lisp or hint of a stammer as he says, 'That's right, Gil, three seconds and Unitas is in trouble, he's got to let it go now or — WOW! There it goes! What a cannon! Johnny Unitas gets off a perfect, textbook-classic spiral, what a gorgeous ball, and . . . unbelievable, Raymond Berry's got it in the end zone! A ninety-five-yard bullet out of the Unitas rifle and the Baltimore Colts end the half with a six-point lead over the Green Bay Packers as the gun sounds, twenty to fourteen.'

'Into the spot, and you guys are sounding good in the truck,' the voice says over the nightmare intercom. Dream logic confuses television and radio, but Spain is unaware of this and dreams on.

'Telegram, Frank,' an engineer says, handing him the yellow Western Union envelope. He opens it and reads:

FRANK YOU ARE A WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT. I WISH YOU WERE DEAD. And it is signed Sylvester P. Landis III, and there is an address.