forthcoming discharge. I told her calmly, “You can take that hypothetical three hundred and—”
On her back, where I had tumbled her, she laughed at my nicety. “Stuff it,” she finished for me. “Go ahead,” she teased. “Do it, you old fart.” Pronounced “faaht.” She spread her legs a bit; her thighs were paler inside than out. “But not up my ass for less than three hundred. Those membranes are delicate. That’s how people used to get AIDS.”
“Shut up about your ass all the time. Your cunt will do fine. I’m not one of your sicko pervert customers.”
She was heavily furred, her forearms swirling with dark down. Her pubic hair was so oily it would have been iridescent in a stronger light. So she could wear a thong bathing suit, she had shaved all but a central strip, which stood straight up like an old-fashioned typewriter brush. I imagined I saw a gleam of responsive moisture between the elephant-gray lips of her vulva. Her cool fingers seemed to be guiding me in but in fact held me off, even as I crouched to thrust home. Deirdre murmured into my ear, “Hey wouldn’t you like me to sit on your face? I could do that and blow you at the same time. For only a hundred extra—I’l give you a deal.”
“You bitch, will you shut up about money?” But I hesitated. Her offer was tempting. She knew her man.
“But not so much that I come,” I bargained. “I want my seed inside you. You money-grubbing cunt, I want to prong you up to your eyeballs.”
She shuddered under me involuntarily. Her face like the face of a girl being mussed in the backseat of a family Chevrolet was built all of shadows, a ruin of little slabs. “Jesus, I hate men,” she said, conversationally, as if I had become a disinterested anthropologist. “You’re all so fucking proud of nothing—just nothing.”
“Oh yeah?” I said, pronging her. “That nothing?”
“Nothing,” she said, stiffening like a scared child beneath me.
“How about that?” She was young and slender and unex-cited, with a virgin womb and a never-distended cervix. I knew I could hurt her, and gave a pelvic thrust that pinched my old prostate gland; it, too, wanted to retire, after pushing toxic effluents through its knotty core for fifty-plus years.
Her dark eyes widened and went watery in the shadow my head was casting. Her face sank a bit deeper into the black nest of her widespread hair. “Ow,” she did admit, sweetly.
After Deirdre left, bounding down through the woods with her lifted tail showing more white than anyone could expect, I noticed that Gloria’s silver quail were gone from the dining-room table. One bent down pecking; the other lifted its beak. I had given them to her on a bygone Christmas, on a lower limb of the thick gray tree of the branching past. Heavy silver—one had to be careful setting them on the table, lest their feet scratch the finish—they would melt down to a lump worth a few lousy welders, a bargain quickly struck with some cheating fence. The nether world preys on its own. I felt deeply ashamed, as though cancer had invaded my body. I would beat the thieving slut black and blue next time, tying her wrists and ankles together with pieces of the waxed cord that I had once bought to replace the rotting sash cords of the old house, and which I thought was still in the cellar. I would screw her until she squealed for mercy, and toss her out naked into the snow, and not pay her a red cent. If she beat sobbing on the door, I would pelt her with golf balls.
With Gloria gone from my side, the bed seems huge and cold at night, and the house reveals vast creaking depths as the unsated February winds whistle and roar outside. I have been taking Sominex to get me through the empty hours of the night, but then, fearful of becoming an addict, I abstained last evening. Sleep came with a satisfyingly dull and solid book on former President Gore—I never read fiction; after all its little hurly-burly what does it amount to but more proof that we are of all animals the most miserable?— but then I awoke in the whining, spitting dark. Furtive footsteps were detectable below and beyond me, faint as thumbprints on black glass.
In the breakdown of order, the criminal element has proved to be the only one with the resources and