This was what was going to happen. He would take off his work boots, his socks, his cutoffs, cross the patio while she was swimming the other way, lower himself in the pool, and just stand there in the shallow end, waiting for her to bump into him on her way back. Surprise. But a nice surprise. She’d look up, eyes wide, mouth opening, then see who it was. The expression on her face would change in some exciting way, and she’d say, “I was just thinking about you,” or maybe something subtler, like “What a coincidence.” Yeah, that would be it: she was subtle, educated, rich. Freedy remembered the money in his pocket and felt a little badly. No reason he couldn’t toss it back in the Benz later.
Freedy reached the corner of the house and stopped. He heard rhythmic splashing sounds, and one soft, female grunt. He peeked around the edge of the wall. Just as he’d imagined. Bliss-right name, in terms of what was going to happen… not psychic but some word about the future like that-naked in the pool, swimming her laps, tan all over. This was happening. It was just like porn, except he was in it. Freedy started to get hard right away, really hard, andro hard. He had an important thought: this is going to be the best experience of my life, so far. That meant he should make it last, appreciate it, savor it. Savor: what a perfect word, a word most people wouldn’t have come up with at a time like this, but he knew it well, from the cooking channel. He was intelligent. He had eyes like whatever his name was who had played Sherlock Holmes, according to his mother.
His mother would be five or ten years older than Bliss Sherman. Had she ever had a body like that? Not even on her best day. But enough about her. What the hell was he doing thinking about his mother right now? His mother’s face, Bliss Sherman’s butt, the spinning furry thing: he shook his head to clear away all that confusion and moved silently across the patio. Silent, not to scare her or anything; he just didn’t want to spoil the surprise.
Freedy slipped into the shallow end. The water was cool and clean, made him tingle all over. Of course it was clean: he’d cleaned it himself. He’d made his bed, in other words, and now he got to lie in it-an expression one of his high-school teachers had liked using on him. Look at me now, teach.
He stood in the shallow end, up to his waist, eyes on Bliss Sherman’s ass, curving up out of the water as she touched the far end, turned. He saw she was wearing goggles; he hadn’t imagined goggles, but they made it better somehow, like high heels on a stripper. Another sign of his intelligence, to make that connection. And now, with Bliss almost upon him, just two or three strokes away, he recalled a fragment of a strange cartoon he’d seen on TV, late-night Mexican TV and him maybe tweaked a bit on crystal meth, which was probably why it was no more than a fragment. Some cartoon animal, a duck or a cat, was swimming in a pool like this one, when all of a sudden from the filter outlet came slithering the arm of a giant squid, wrapping round the little critter in coils that left nothing but the webbed feet sticking out. Must have been a duck, then.
Freedy put his hands on his hips. Bliss took one last stroke, then touched. But she didn’t feel that cold tile at the end of the pool, oh no. Her fingertips brushed his dick instead. Couldn’t have been more perfect. Life was full of fascinating shit, if you just made a little effort. Forget about porn. This was better than any porn he’d ever seen: and he was in it!
Her head jerked up then, and as he’d imagined, her eyes, behind the goggles, opened wide, and her mouth opened wide too, and her face went through exciting changes. Everything as he’d foreseen. Freedy started to smile, a friendly, manly smile, as though they were sharing some mutual joke. Like: hey, you were in the middle of daydreaming about ol’ Mr. Dick here, and now-abracadabra. That kind of joke. Sophisticated.
But she forgot to say what a coincidence, or even the less stylish I was just thinking about you. Instead she sprang back quickly into deeper water, deep enough so that her breasts floated on the surface, and sounded almost annoyed or something when she said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Sharing your dreams, babe.” Now if that wasn’t smooth, if that wasn’t cool, what was? Freedy knew very well it was the kind of remark that made women melt. He had said something like it to Estrella on their date last week, and she had melted, by God.
But Bliss didn’t melt, at least not in any way he knew about. She raised her voice, not a pleasant voice to begin with, he now realized, and said: “Get the fuck off my property.”
Women were crazy and men were stupid-where had he heard that? Hard Copy, maybe. There was some truth in it, but not all men were stupid. Some were just the opposite, some knew that female craziness could be controlled by the use of the right physical… something. He couldn’t come up with the right word, but he knew the right physical something to use in this case. Besides, he liked when women said fuck.
Bliss had moved back quickly, but it wasn’t what would be called quick in terms of what someone like Freedy could do. He was quick on a big-league scale, quick like one of those NBA guards. And he was a man, after all-with andro and crystal meth in reserve-and men were plain quicker than women in the first place, weren’t they?
They were. Or at least this man was quicker than this woman. Before she knew it, even before he knew it, to tell the truth, Freedy had closed the distance between them and grabbed one of those floating breasts. Not grabbed. Wrong word-it was much gentler than that, more like the kind of semirough stuff that drove Estrella, for example, wild.
At first Freedy thought it was having the same effect on Bliss, from the way she was screaming. That was the freaky thing about Estrella, or that other girl from Riverside, her name escaping him at the moment. They flat- out screamed with pleasure. But this scream, Bliss’s scream, went on a little too long, and there was nothing pleasant about it. She really had an irritating voice. And what was this? She’d bit his arm or something? Bit him? Not a sex kind of bite, but a hurting bite. Like she was resisting. Like she hadn’t been dreaming the dream.
And also this funny taste. Blood in his mouth? Meaning he’d bitten her back? Yes, her tit was bleeding, but not much, not much more than Estrella’s when they were having a little fun that night after the Marilyn Manson pay-per-view.
But this woman, this woman with the name that didn’t fit, was no Estrella, and that screaming was horrible. Freedy did what the hero always had to do to stop hysteria, swatting her a crisp one across the face.
Didn’t work. Bliss kept screaming, higher and higher, making him want to shut her off immediately, the way he would if he’d been flicking the remote and come across one of those opera singers with the screeching voices. Freedy reared back to give her another one, and would have, but someone yelled, “Stop.”
A third person. Woman, also with an irritating voice. Freedy looked around, spotted her on the second-floor balcony of the house, a younger woman, his own age or even a few years less, wearing boxers and a sleeveless T- shirt. Dynamite bod, better than Bliss’s but a lot like it at the same time. Hair all rumpled, like she’d just got out of bed. And the part that didn’t fit: a gun in her hand. Not a little toy, either, but a fucking monster. What was wrong with these people? His hard-on, which had been throbbing underwater like some kind of pumped-up eel, failed completely.
“Stop,” said the woman on the balcony again. Her gun hand was shaking, but the gun was on him, more or less.
Freedy put his hands in the air, not high, but visible. “Everything’s cool,” he said. “Just a consensual misunderstanding.”
Bliss, crying, or sobbing, climbed out of the pool, her naked body all exposed as she hoisted herself over the side, but not a turn-on at all, maybe even the opposite, in a funny way like those naked Auschwitz people.
“What should I do, Mom?” said the woman on the balcony.
“Don’t let him move,” she said, her voice now up in opera territory. Hysterical, no doubt about it. “Don’t let the pervert move. I’m calling the police.” And she stumbled across the patio and into the house.
Freedy looked up at Bliss’s daughter. “This is way overblown.”
“You’re moving,” she said. “Don’t. I took marksmanship at camp.”
Freedy nodded, kept moving, angling toward the corner of the pool nearest the house. At that end of the patio stood a table shaded by a big umbrella. If he could get out of the water, get behind the umbrella, at least she wouldn’t be able to see him. Then somehow to cross the open space between the umbrella and the corner of the house. Okay: that was the strategy.
“You’re moving,” said the girl.
Freedy held his hands higher now, palms open. He gave her his best smile: he had big white teeth, a dazzling smile, like a movie star, but all natural. “I’m not. Honest.” He kept moving.
The gun went off; Freedy couldn’t believe she’d actually fired it on purpose. Something smacked the water right beside him at the same moment. Then he was on the patio, running low behind the umbrella. A stupid time to get stung by a bee, but he felt it in his thigh. Then he saw the rip in the umbrella, heard the pop of the gun. Or maybe he’d got it in the wrong order. Didn’t matter; in a few strides he was around the house, had scooped up his boots and his cutoffs, jumped in the van, goosed it. And zoom.
