“I don’t need a lecture, Phil,” she said wearily.
“You need something,” he pressed. “As long as you’re running with Natter and his crowd, you aren’t going anywhere but down.”
“Don’t you think I know that!” she almost yelled. “Don’t you think I know what’s happened to me! My whole life has been shit since the day you left town ten years ago!”
“Calm down,” he said. “I just want you to start thinking about things a little more, about what you’re going to do with your life. And you can’t blame me for your problems. Yeah, I left town, that’s true, but I’m not the one who puts coke up your nose and makes you turn tricks at a strip joint.”
“I know,” she said much more quietly.
Phil got off her case and let her collect herself. Then he asked, “So where was Natter last night when all this shit was happening with the three bikers?”
“He was out. Somewhere—don’t know.”
Yeah, well I think I do, Phil felt sure. I think maybe your darling hubby was sending his Creeker boys out for a little party in the woods. Killing Eagle. Trying to kill me. But, of course, he couldn’t tell her anything about that…
He let more silence pass, looking at her. He felt helpless. She wasn’t part of his life anymore; nevertheless he hated to see her like this. He hated what Natter was doing to her. But what could he do to help her?
Nothing, he concluded. The only person who could help her was herself
“Look, I’m really sorry about dumping myself here,” she said. “I didn’t know where else to go. I better leave now.”
“Stay here,” he said. “Sleep on the couch. Get some rest for now. You can figure out what you’re going to do later.”
“Thank you,” she whispered. Her voice was trailing away. “Thank you…”
Then she was asleep.
Phil turned off the light, drew the shades, then quietly undressed and got into his bed. In minutes, he too was fast asleep.
And dreaming.
— | — | —
Twenty-Five
“Look-it, look-it,” Dawnie urged, hunched behind him and pushing at his shoulders.
Phil’s ten-year-old eye opened wide over the first keyhole. What he saw at first was just a stark, white glare; his eye, going from the hot dark of the third-floor hall to such glaring whiteness, needed time to adjust. But eventually his vision focused, and he could see.
He could see what was inside the room…
It was like a hole in the wall to hell.
In the room lay a sunlit bed. It was big and white. And on the bed lay some weird kind of motion Phil couldn’t figure out at first.
Shapes.
Shapes the color of skin.
One shape was a bearded man with a big hairy belly. He had long hair and was buck-naked.
“Suzie, Suzie,” he was saying.
Then Phil noticed the other shape on the bed. A woman—
“Suzie, Suzie…”
She had hair on her head that was blacker than Phil’s aunt’s fire hearth. Her skin was whiter than their front yard the time last winter when it snowed.
Then Phil realized what she was doing to the fat, bearded man.
Jesus to Pete!
Her head was positioned between the fat man’s legs. It was going up and down, and what she was doing, exactly, was—
Jesus to holy Pete!
—she was sucking the fat man’s thing. Her mouth was going up and down over it, slow at first, then faster, then real fast.
Just like Eagle said they do. She’s trying to suck out his baby-juice!
Then more of the scene came into focus, and Phil almost upchucked when he saw the rest…
The woman had a butt and hair and bubs just like most women. But it was what she didn’t have that hit Phil in the face like someone’s big fist.
She ain’t got no arms or legs!
She had stumps but that was it. The stumps ended where her elbows and knees should be.
“Suzie, Suzie…” Phil jerked his face away from the keyhole.
“Neat-uh, huh?” Dawnie said.
It was not neat. It was gross.
But it all added up. It was just like what he and Eagle had heard Uncle Frank talking about that night they stayed up late to watch The Alfred Hitchcock Show when the lady killed her husband with a frozen leg of lamb and then cooked it for the police.
This was a whorehouse.
A Creeker whorehouse, where men paid to do it with Creeker girls who were all messed up on account of their fathers did it with their sisters and their mothers did it with their brothers and stuff like that.
It messed up their genes.
Dawnie tugged at his Green Hornet shirt, pulling him toward the next door. Phil didn’t want to see stuff like this anymore, but something made him put his eye to that next keyhole anyway. He couldn’t help it. It was like a ghost or something grabbed the back of his head and made him look.
A big naked man was tying a girl up on the bed with rope, stretching her out. Then he began to crack a leather whip across her thighs and belly.
Crack! crack! crack! went the whip.
It left marks on the girl’s skin that were so red. Almost like she was bleeding…
She was crying and shivering.
Then the man’s thing went up…
And when the girl lifted her head to look at him, Phil saw that her head was huge.
It was big as a watermelon!
“Here, here-uh,” Dawnie said next. She was pulling him to a door on the other side of the hall.
“No, Dawnie, I don’t wanna look no more,” Phil begged her.
But Dawnie didn’t seem to care what Phil said, and she was strong, stronger than most girls. She pulled him over and slammed him back down to his knees before the next door.
“Look-it.”
Phil’s head was hurting bad, and he was sweating so much his Green Hornet T-shirt was fully wet but still he felt cold and shivery. His stomach felt bad too, worse than the times in the past when he’d eaten his aunt’s stuffed peppers. His head felt lighter than a birthday balloon.
“Look-it…”
Inside the room another man had his face between a girl’s legs. She had a big black plot of hair there, and the man looked like he was licking at it. Phil couldn’t understand why anyone would want to put their mouth on the same place a person goes to the bathroom, but this man was doing it sure as hell and making more noise than heifers eating. The girl’s white legs went up into the air. Phil could see her feet. She had what looked like ten toes on each! And her hands were the same way, more fingers on ’em than two people, and they were running in and out of the man’s wiry hair.
Then Phil noticed her legs…
He couldn’t do anything but stare.
