“I’m sorry,” he murmurs. “I’m sorry.”
Depot Street is a very short distance. He stops at the corner as she has always insisted. Putting the gear into park, he gets out and helps her out. She holds herself away from him. Behind them, the police cruiser idles.
“Do you want me to carry your things the rest of the way for you?”
Wordlessly, she tugs the straps out of his hands. She wipes her nose on her wrist, smearing a glaze of snot over her chapped skin. Her kohl-ringed eyes are opaque, shining like black mirrors in the streetlight. Grubbing a tissue out of his pocket, he takes her hand and wipes the smear away. She gives him a shy, tired, childish giggle.
“Go on home now. It’s cold.”
She shivers obediently and shoulders her duffel. Sam closes her door. She’s still standing there so he gives her elbow a nudge and she stumbles toward home.
He makes himself move, get back behind the wheel and drive away. Suddenly he’s shaking again, as if he were coming down with the flu. His crotch feels like he’s taken a line drive in the nuts. His fingers close around the wheel and for an instant he wants to tear it from the column and pitch it through the windshield. She shakes her tits at him and turns him into a total hard-on. It isn’t her fault, any more than it’s the basketball’s fault it’s round and orange and slippery. She’s just ignorant and bitched up.
At the town line, the police cruiser’s lights fall away behind the truck.
On either side of the Narrows, the neck of the long narrow lake that hooks southeast to separate Greenspark from Nodd’s Ridge, the water is solidifying in the darkness, shrinking away from the causeway. Sam can’t see it but he can smell it and feel it—the contraction of the water, a long slow tightening, squeezing, hardening up, faster at the edges like a callus. His eyes are scratchy with what feels like crystals forming in his fluids, a microscopic accretion in the clouds of his cells, impurities building infinitely unique and differentiated structures. It is as if some fundamental misalignment is trying to right itself; this sense of shuddering on the edge of coming apart, of being on the verge of blowing a circuit, a rod, an axle, something vital, is what makes him more than aware, makes him feel the complications of his own machinery.
‘god lies. Never wanted to. Who’s he shitting? A stiff prick may have no conscience but it doesn’t lie about what it wants.
That blues song had taken Samgod like a shower of gold, evoking the same intensity he brought to bear at hoops. Being on court focused him, as if somebody was adjusting the picture, sharpening it up, erasing the dim, clumsy ghost of his off-court self. All at once, she had known it was time to show him the Mill, with his own name signed to it like the autograph of some Elder God.
When she found it two summers ago, the loops and curves and swooshes and hollows like a rollercoaster as she traced them ignited in an aurora borealis of colors at her fingertip. At first she thought it was all a blotter vision but the signed plate was still there when she beamed down again. It had been such a great secret to have, of meaning only to her and to him, a deity who hardly knew she existed. The longer she kept it, the more powerful it had grown, so that even in the disclosing, it had worked for her. She could see he was impressed—Samgod! only the most monstrous star in the state—and she wanted to get to him even more.
First it was just a tease, to see if she could get him worked up, but the shit was too good. It made her feel like she could do anything. She just wanted to yank ‘god around, fuck with his head. Turn him on and loosen up his tight ass a little. For once, she’d gotten turned on herself, more than she ever had with anyone else. She’s still all knotted up inside with excitement. He’s so big and powerful, he scares her, like a rollercoaster ride. Like teasing a tiger in a cage. To have him hard for her, totally concentrated on her, in her power—what a rush that was. It would be worth having him treat her like any amount of shit to have that power over him, even once.
As if under the influence of some unfolding spell, the Mutant’s footsteps grow heavy and slower as she approaches home. Tony grabs her as she passes the couch. Judy doesn’t even look up from the tube.
“Hey, hey,” Tony wheezes, “what’s this? Somebody a little wrecked already? How ‘bout that? Bringing the party home to Tony, cookie?”
He doesn’t hesitate to shove his hands under her T-shirts and squeeze her tits right in front of Judy—that wrecked himself already.
The Mutant pulls away from him, stomach churning at the thought J.C. might already have gone out partying, and goes to the phone to call him. When he answers, she can hardly do anything but giggle in relief but she gets it across to him she has to get out. He doesn’t ask questions. She dumps her shit into her room and bolts right back out, flipping Tony the bird as she goes out the door.
“Hey, fuck you, you wasted little cunt,” he bellows after her and laughs at his own incisive wit.
The Mutant floats to the corner to wait for J.C.’s Sunbird. She’s not going to tell J.C., she decides. Her teeth are chattering and her nose is running and she can’t jump up and down fast enough to get warm. Jesus, he’s taking his frigging time.
Jonesy’s pulling Friday night at the Texaco.
“Your dad asked me to cover for him. I don’t mind. Me and Patty weren’t doing nothin’ but renting a movie anyway,” he assures Sam.
There’s not
