Magic Street Page 0,26

stalked through his house late at night, flipping lights on and off and cussing under his breath about how it didn't make no sense that he feels like he's got to pee but he can't get anything out. And when Curtis says to him, Daddy, that means you got to get your prostate checked, Daddy just looks at him and says, You think I'm going to let some doctor stick his finger up my anus and smear jelly all inside my rectum? You get your ass reamed out, you think it's so fun. You the crazy one, not me, sleeping on a water bed like a yuppie, you need your head examined, don't go telling me to have my ass examined, at least my head ain't up my ass like you. And then he laughed and kept saying to anybody who'd listen, Curtis gone to the proctologist to have his head examined, cause you got to go through his ass to get to his head.

Curtis lay there on the bed, wondering if he really had to pee so bad he couldn't just go back to sleep, cause if he got up then when he got back to bed the sheets would be cold and clammy unless he stayed up long enough for them to get dry and then...

Something bumped him.

Bumped him from underneath.

He was out of that bed in a second, standing beside it, looking down. It was still undulating from his getting up. But Sondra lay there peaceful as could be, snoring just a little the way she did, even as she rocked slightly from the bed's movement.

I'm going crazy, thought Curtis as he stumbled to the bathroom. Either that or the chemicals in the bed ain't doing their job and the algae gone and growed into the Blob. Now that's the kind of nightmare would have kept him awake all night, back when he was a kid. Except they didn't even have waterbeds then. No, wait, yes they did. There was that 1970s movie where the cop - Eastwood? Some white cop, anyway - busts into some black pimp's room where he's lying with some girl on his waterbed, and when he's done asking questions the white cop shoots the bed for no reason at all, just to be mean and make it leak all over.

When he was done he didn't wash his hands, because he was tired and he hadn't got any on himself and besides, urine was mostly uric acid so it was cleaner than soap, or that's what that guy said at that spaghetti dinner at the Masons' house on Memorial Day, so it didn't matter if you washed your hands after you peed, you could eat a banana with your bare hands and be perfectly safe. It was wiping yourself that made it so you needed to wash, that's where diseases came from. Little-known facts, Curtis said to himself. That's all I got in my head, is little-known completely useless facts.

He padded down the hall to look at the kids' rooms. The boys had kicked their covers off and Quon, as usual, was asleep with his hands inside his underpants, what were they going to do with that boy, couldn't stop playing with it like he thought it was made of Legos or something. Tamika, though, her covers were all piled up on top of her. How could she sleep like that? Too hot for that, she was going to sweat to death, if the pile of blankets didn't smother her.

He pulled the blankets back and she wasn't under them.

He looked around her room to see if maybe she had fallen asleep somewhere else. He went back into the hall and she wasn't in the kids' bathroom and she wasn't in the kitchen or the living room and then he knew where she was, he knew it was impossible but didn't she say she wished she could live underwater like a fish, live there all the time?

He was halfway down the hall when he realized that he'd need something to cut through the plastic. He ran to the kitchen, got the big, sharp carving knife, and ran back to the bedroom and started yanking the sheets off the bed.

"What you doing, baby?" said Sondra sleepily.

"Get up," said Curtis. "There's something inside the waterbed."

She got up, dragging the top sheet with her. "How can there be something inside there? You sleepwalking, baby?"

His only answer was to plunge the knife into the plastic - but near