At home, supper’s waiting to be reheated and there’s a note on the table saying Reuben and Pearl and the baby are at the farmhouse.
Sam bounds upstairs, drops his junk on the floor. His basketball bounces gently and rolls into a corner. Picking it up, he automatically bops it down again. He’s not supposed to dribble it on the second floor of the house—shakes plaster dust from the old ceilings. He flops down on his back and rests the ball on his stomach.
He doesn’t even like her. She’s a druggie burn and she’s ugly—well, she’s made herself ugly. Have to scrunch up one eye and look at her very closely to see what she could be. She’s a thief. A scrubber. A witch. And he’d been two buttons away from fucking her. Two buttons away from being one of those dinks in the locker room talking about screwing the Mutant. Being a sleaze like Chapin. He hadn’t even been drunk. If Rick’s dad hadn’t turned up when he did—
Eyes closed, Sam rocks the ball over his groin. She is… a cage of bones, a trap. A drowning place.
Touching him. The way she touched him. Jesus. Rolling her fingertips over the head of his cock. Educated fingers; she knew what she was doing. It filled his guts with queasiness to think of it. How many guys? If a tenth of what he hears in the locker room is true—
He sniffs his own fingertips. Her chemicals, salt, copper, something else, he doesn’t know the name but it drives him crazy to remember. The musky tufts in her armpits. Her skin fine-grained as the water of the lake and shockingly cold against his, but her mouth, hot and wet, hard edges of teeth like the ridges of her chains against his face. He can taste the chains still. Smooth and cool as scars, they are also intricately textured and flexible, organs of some strange and wonderful mechanical function. Sweet meringue tits against his face, hard little button nipples rolling under his thumb. Funny little silky pebbly things. She reacts like they’re wired straight to her furnace. Tight little bottom flexing in his hands. Thighs open to him, legs around him. The fleshy heat of her sex against his hard cock, the bump of her clitoris palpable. How two bodies flow and change and rise to meet each other, harder here, softer there, opening up and enclosing, tightening and releasing. So close. So close. Almost there. Oh Fuck Almighty. He squeezes the ball so hard it squirts from his fingers and bounces on the floor.
He wakes up Saturday with a thickheaded cold. Six a.m. in the meetinghouse hall, working on free shots, he is feverish, eyes watery, lips cracking. His head is so clogged he can’t concentrate, can’t think. When the guys show, he can’t get enough oxygen to play for shit and his lungs burn as if he were underwater. Pushing himself too hard, he has a coughing fit and pukes up bile and phlegm in the men’s room. With no appetite, he skips the knife-and-fork workout at the diner and goes straight to work, where he sucks up honeyed and lemoned tea by the quart.
The Attack of the Rhinoviruses does not, unfortunately, distract his congested libido. Weirdly, it makes it worse.
A dark-haired dark-eyed college girl in a little black Mercury coupe—Bowdoin sticker on the rear window—pulls up to the pumps.
“Fill it, please,” she says sweetly.
Watching the swing of miniskirted hip, scissor of mesh-stockinged legs on the way to the restroom, Sam assaults the Merc’s fuel intake with the leaded-gasoline nozzle. That’s why the port’s designed to prevent the entry of the wrong-grade nozzle, he tells himself in disgust as he holsters the wrong gun, yanks out the unleaded one and shoves it into the neck of the gas tank. They know about guys like you.
While he makes out her credit slip, the babe from Bowdoin stands right next to him. She smiles at him and he frigs up the numbers, which he never does, and has to write a new slip, with his face flaming and his mouth open to breathe. And the whole time he’s so grateful for coveralls he could weep.
A logger tips a load of softwood into a ditch halfway down Partridge Hill. Sam and Reuben go out together to help the predictably hung-over Sonny Lunt put the log truck back on the road. Crawling over the turtled flatbed to kick a sapling out from under an axle, Sam finds himself staring at the chains on the truck’s tires, on the verge of caressing the goddamn things.
Back at the garage, he ducks into the restroom. Again. Frantically he shifts through the stack of magazines in the restroom for one that doesn’t have any naked women in it—anything will do, he wants Popular Mechanics, Reader’s Digest, The Watchtower—but first he has to get past the girly glossies—Population Mechanics, Whacker’s Digest, The Snatchtower. Someone has abandoned a People—but it turns out to feature a piece about sexual activity among adolescents which makes it clear nearly everybody except him is getting laid, or claiming to anyway. The article informs him the male sex drive reaches its peak between nineteen and twenty-six. It gets worse? Throwing the magazine at the wall, he locates the Playboy with the tall chesty redhead in it whose every freckle he has already committed to memory.
“You okay?” Reuben asks him when he reappears. “I’m thinking ‘bout charging you roomrent on that can.”
“Tea’s going right through me,” he mutters.
“That’s good,” his father says. “Flush out your system.”
“Right,” Sam agrees.
Late in the afternoon when he takes two hours to run to North Conway to pick up the new high-tops he ordered three weeks ago, he scores some over-the-counter decongestants too.
Waking up is hard to do. All she wants to do is sleep and J.C. won’t leave her alone, he keeps at her, murmuring, making her get up. It takes a
