Prelude to a Scream Read online

  The wipers clicked across the windshield and stopped.

  Her hand arrived at his groin and covered the handle on his Friday Night. “Please, Officer,” she whispered.

  “Please,” he repeated, “—Officer?”

  “Don’t bust me,” she pleaded, barely audible.

  He wanted to let it pass, figuring that, if he thought about it, he’d have a difficult time getting aroused by someone dumb enough to take him for a cop.

  But then another angle occurred to him, and he said, “How’d you make me?”

  She worked the hand.

  Steam rose from the hood. The guy with the crutches carried them back the other way, putting plenty of weight on the bandaged foot.

  “I’m nobody. Really,” she said, using the hand.

  “I know it,” Stanley said, as if world-weary. “There’s real criminals out there to think about.”

  “Truly, Officer.”

  “Motherfuckers.”

  She worked the hand.

  “I’m not busting you.” He looked at her. “Just do a good job.”

  She looked at him. “I got smoke, too.”

  “Anything else?”

  “That’s all.”

  “That’s all?”

  She shrugged. “Ludes,” she said. “Dude don’t want no ludes, on duty and all.” She unbuttoned his fly. “Does he?”

  The cross-street’s light turned yellow. Next to Stanley’s truck a faded Plymouth suddenly jumped the still-red signal. A Mercedes pushing the downtown light slid at an angle into the intersection and stalled a foot short of broadsiding the Plymouth, the distinctively unpleasant Mercedes klaxon piercing the night.

  The Plymouth continued north up Polk Street, as unperturbed as a fish drifting over a sunken wreck.

  The light turned green. The driver of an old Datsun, facing south on Polk, blocked by the Mercedes, stood on his horn.

  Behind Stanley, a car horn sounded insistently.

  Stanley turned right onto O’Farrell.

  A double-parked tour bus, two stories high, was disgorging Japanese tourists, all men, in front of the Mitchell Brothers Theater, beneath a marquee that invited them to come in and shower with live nude girls. Attendants held umbrellas over the file of customers.

  Stanley piloted the pickup around the idling bus and continued east, back into the Tenderloin. By the time they got to Stockton Street, he’d know whether or not to head for the freeway.

  The girl lifted the bottle with her free hand and had a swallow.

  “What about that smoke,” he said.

  “Got it right here,” she said. “Sense. Twenty bucks a gram. Free to you, of course,” she added quickly. “But first things first.”

  He fished the folded twenty out of his shirt pocket, slid it down the front of her blouse, and put Andy Jackson’s side-whiskers to sanding a nipple.

  “You don’t have to pay me,” she said sweetly. “Bail’s a hundred.”

  “I know it.”

  “I come out eighty bucks ahead.”

  “Maybe I’ll take that nickel change,” he said.

  She smiled that distant smile, and let Andy do his thing.

  “Aw,” she said, in a voice even more remote than the smile, sliding closer to him, filling both hands now. “Ain’tcha gonna tip me?”

  He showed her the folded twenty, turning it in the uncertain light, before replacing the bill into his shirt pocket. “No,” he said.

  “Oh, Officer,” she said. “I’m so grateful for my freedom…”

  She filled her mouth with whiskey and went down on him.

  Chapter Two

  FIVE BLOCKS AWAY AND TWO HOURS LATER, STANLEY WAS THREE drinks into his evening at Saturnia, an empty Bar and Grille.

  He was appreciating the fact that the first twenty dollars worth of tonight’s fun was going to be compliments of a hooker dumb enough to have taken him for a cop, when a woman took the stool to his right.

  He thought it must have been a woman, but he didn’t look at her to confirm it. A scent came with her, and the whisper of textiles—accoutrements, to his mind, of femininity. A certain skepticism is incumbent, however, in Saturnia as in life, upon him to whose engine gender makes a difference.

  She placed a green butane lighter stamped with the brass logo of a South Tahoe casino atop a pack of brown 120 mm cigarettes, slid the stack into the easement between her and Stanley’s elbows, and ordered a Tom Collins.

  “Oh,” said the bartender, not moving, “bust my balls.”

  “Anytime, sugar,” the woman said.

  “I got no limes, too.”

  She plucked a lime from a pocket of her jacket and showed it to him.

  “Now what’s the problem?” she said.

  He stared at the lime.

  “Five bucks,” said the woman, in an aside to Stanley, “he blinks first.”

  Stanley said nothing.

  The bartender blinked.

  “Aha,” said the woman. “The day I meet a man who can stare down a lime, that’s the day I get married again.”

  With a sigh he took the lime, dropped his foot off the sink, and began opening and closing doors behind the bar.

  “Hey,” Stanley said to his drink. “Where’d you get that lime?”

  She shot him a glance. “Off the family tree. What’s your excuse?”

  “Oh…” Stanley said, not looking up. But he didn’t finish the thought.

  “That’s what I like,” she said, looking away. “A lightning bolt for a mind.”

  Except for the bartender, who was whistling because he had something to do, the bar went silent again.

  After another while the woman said, “I know that tune.”

  The bartender stopped whistling.

  What tune, Stanley thought to himself. That was a tune?

  “What the hell’s taking so long?” she snapped.

  “We got a highball glass around here somewhere,” the bartender said deliberately. “I saw it just last week.”

  “Bars these days,” the woman groused.

  The bartender retrieved a spoon from a coffee cup and inspected it by the red light of the Coors sign. He wiped the spoon on his vest and inspected it again.

  “You want a mixed drink,” the woman continued, “better get the parts and take them home and mix it yourself. Bars these days, they want you to swill the straight sauce or go for the exotic homebrews with names like Devil’s Quench or Crepuscular Bollard. One or the other or you’re shit out of luck. There’s no in-between.”

  “We’re of the former persuasion,” the bartender said.

  She ignored him. “I remember Christmas, last year, when some idiot with a hydrometer and a copper tank put out his annual Rinse of Christfest. The gimmick, see, is every year the Rinse of Christfest tastes different than last year. Since the customer is into the shock of the new, he waits for the Rinse of Christfest like the wise men waited for the star.” She flicked Stanley’s arm with the back of her hand. “You see the title for the sermon last week on the board in front of Saint Paul’s on Gough? Says, ‘There is a Light, and it’s not a beer’? Ahhh, ha, ha, ha…”

  Nobody laughed with her.

  “Goddamn atheists,” she said. “So last December, here comes the Rinse of Christfest. I’m a game girl. I love a change, if not a shock. So I spring for a bottle.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “So, somebody might ask, What’s it taste like?” she finally said. “It seems like the next logical question.”

  She turned to Stanley.

  Stanley watched his drink.

  She looked at the bartender.

  The bartender cut the lime.

  She turned around on her stool.

  “Eggnog,” she said loudly to the empty bar. “The goddamn Rinse of Christfest tasted like goddamn eggnog.”

  “You’re telling us this was deliberate?” asked the bartender, dealing half the lime off his knife.

  She turned back to face him. “What the hell do you mean
, deliberate? I told you it was for Christmas, didn’t I? You want to drink beer at Christmas, it’s got to taste like eggnog. Where have you been, darling?”

  “With — what’s that stuff? — nutmeg?”

  “Nutmeg? What about the cloves?”

  The bartender made a face.

  “Yep, they had the works. It was a beer, it had bubbles, it tasted like eggnog. One sip and you were ready for Easter.”

  The bartender considered this. “I knew a guy, once,” he said thoughtfully, as he squeezed the juice of a quarter lime into the glass. “He lived in the country and had piles of old tires in the weeds around his place. Every Christmas Eve, he’d go out and dip the rainwater out of a tire casing into a fruit jar. Said a thimbleful of that tire-water made the best eggnog. Said it was aged just right. He showed me the thimble.”

  “A thimble,” said the woman.

  “Just one.”

  “Just the one thimble.”

  “For flavor.”

  “Flavor.”

  “Said the hard part was to be sure to get at least one or two mosquito larva in each thimbleful.”

  “Mosquito larva.”

  “Said they were wholesome.”

  “As opposed to nutritious?”

  “Oh, he was a dedicated man, so far as his guests went. Nothing was too good for them.”

  “Sounds to me like everything was too good for them.” The woman turned suddenly on Stanley and barked, “What are you, an anthropologist?”

  Stanley closed his eyes and said nothing.

  The bartender looked over his shoulder. “Care for a cherry?”

  “Only if it’s glistening with Red Dye Number Two.”

  “Eggnog beer, huh?” said the bartender, dropping a bright red cherry into the glass. “A lot of malt, too, I’d guess.”

  “I guess,” the woman sighed.

  “I was in detox last Christmas,” the bartender said matter-of-factly. He poured gin until his jigger overflowed, dumped it into the glass, and did it again. “In any case, I missed the eggnog beer.”

  “You didn’t miss a damn thing,” the woman said.

  Stanley had been keeping his eye on the family of wet benzene rings engendered by the arrivals and takeoffs of the bottom of his whiskey glass as it periodically made the round-trip from the bartop to his mouth. “Now,” he said, almost to himself, “what’s in a Tom Collins?”

  The woman cast a glance at him, looked to see what it was that he might be studying in the bartop, glanced again at him, and finally looked away. “Nothing you’d notice.”

  “Maybe you should drink something stronger,” Stanley suggested to the hexagons. “So I’d notice.”

  Over the years, Stanley had learned better than to posit drinking benzene to a woman he hardly knew, not only because it might put her off, but also because, if it didn’t put her off, she might take him up on it.

  But now, inexplicably, with an unaccustomed temerity he would never, in retrospect, comprehend, he had uttered the deliberately provocative, “So I’d notice.”

  She turned to look at him. “I hardly ever notice the company I keep. Although,” she added thoughtfully, “I do sometimes notice its money.”

  Stanley now looked at her for the first time. He was surprised how attractive she was.

  She beamed him the smile that said Buy a girl a drink; expertly enough to tag its interrogative with the equally silent appositive, sucker, slyly enough to leave its determination ambivalent. The smile hung in the air between them like a banner strung carelessly from opposing windows of the Boredom and Quickfuck buildings, facing each other over an alley called The Straits of Messina. Buy a girl a drink? Now, this moment, the future is in Stanley’s hands. But, until just Now, a future was something Stanley wanted nothing to do with. Up until Now Stanley was just fine, with the one future he’s had for a long time, his future as a relic of his own past, which always neutralized his present. Now, right now, here before him perched an alternative: opening this door instead of heading for that other door that’s ever-ready for Stanley, the door to his past, the one he always walks through this time of night. Let him try this other door. It might go somewhere. Who knows? The price of a drink might make a sucker out of him, or, though it seems incredible, it might make a winner out of him. After all, that these barroom situations almost never work out only makes it more probable that, sooner or later, one of them almost has to work out satisfactorily. The price of a drink seems little enough to risk. This perfect smile, the product of a moment, promises nothing while it promises everything. Where, oh where, would a girl learn such a smile? When, oh when, would a man learn to mind his own business…?

  She had black hair and lots of it, waved below the shoulder and cut in bangs that fringed bright green eyes. Stanley had been about to glance away, reflexively, as he always did when a woman looked him in the eye and dared him to bore her. But he didn’t look away. He couldn’t. Instead, he stared at her. She returned the stare. He’d never seen such eyes. Behind the black bangs they looked like caged radium.

  The bartender came up to clear the glassware and pass his rag over the bartop, obliterating the damp geometry in front of Stanley. He deposited a napkin in front of the woman and centered on it a tall, slender glass, into whose cloudy fluid disappeared the shank of a fine, red straw.

  “We ain’t got no umbrellas,” he said sadly.

  Stanley fished the twenty out of his jeans and handed it over the bar. “So give us a discount. I’ll cover hers and have another myself. You never make mine that big,” he added ruefully.

  The barkeeper snatched the twenty. “I’m watching out for your diabetes. The same?”

  “As before.”

  The bartender moved down the bar.

  Raven-tress thanked him, and helped herself to a demure straw-sip. Interesting lips. A mouth of considerable pulchritude.

  Stanley returned to a self-conscious tracing of the memory of a benzene ring on the bartop in front of him, acutely aware of the three whiskies he’d nursed over the past hour. While not enough alcohol to allow him to blurt suggestions of questionable taste, as it were, concerning the drinking of benzene or the comeliness of a stranger’s lips, it was, however, enough to make him question his wit, as it were, dulling it in any case, since drinking benzene was the only thought, funny or otherwise, lingering in his mind since he’d noticed those green eyes. On the one hand he resented this, because he’d always been of the opinion that to pursue one’s wit, wherever it led, was to step effortlessly from one bleak pinnacle of inanity to another, as Shelley once, almost, put it. But to check the suggestions of one’s wit is to stifle the impulse altogether. Wit is a chain reaction, or, as in Stanley’s case, and he’s not alone, a chain of blurts. Having stifled one impertinent remark, suppressing a blurt from a paucity of blurts, Stanley could not reasonably expect another immediately to surface—not so soon as to salvage the present conversation, at least.

  Also he was always shy in the presence of an attractive woman, unless he was paying her to be there, in which case he could screw up the courage to make demands of her. Commerce rules, and that’s a verb. Even the grocery wholesaler’s logo on the door of his pickup truck gave him a place to hide, socially speaking.

  These thoughts, confronting her lips and eyes, caused his face to burn with shyness.

  “Ahem,” said Green-Eyes, after a protracted silence.

  Another moment spasmed and died. She shrugged, turned away, and lit a cigarette without so much as bothering to wait for Stanley to finish evaluating his impulse to light it for her. Leaving him to flounder in and finally resent his own excruciation, she exhaled a column of smoke toward the Olympia waterfall twinkling over the bottles behind the bar, and observed, “I think it was Cocteau who mentioned the Angel of Silence, who passes over a gathering of three or more every fifteen minutes. Wasn’t it?” Silence. She waved the smoke away from her face and muttered, as if to herself, “The little s.o.b. must have crashed and burned in this dump.�
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  Stanley blushed crimson as the bartender returned with a whiskey on ice. Before the glass had settled onto its coaster Stanley snatched it up and threw back half the drink.

  “I’m sorry I stared at you,” Stanley stammered, as he carefully set the glass back on the bar.

  “I’m used to it,” the bartender said.

  Stanley’s eyes flashed up to the bartender, then quickly to the woman. They were both laughing. Stanley was mortified. When they saw the appalled expression on his face their laughter redoubled. Stanley looked back down at the bar, in rage and amazement. How could they possibly know he wasn’t the kind of guy who’d go out to his car and return to shotgun the whole place for such an insult? Or, if he could break the rim of his glass just so, he could gouge the four eyes out of the two of them… But that would waste what remained of the whiskey. Better to finish it first. Revenge is best tasted cold. He set about sending an impulse to his hands, instructing them to quit shaking and raise the glass to his mouth.

  A hand with finely boned fingers and unlacquered, long, neatly trimmed nails covered the two of his hands and the glass quivering between them. Stanley twitched like he’d received a kiss from an electric eel.

  “Hey, Jack…” she said. “Take it easy.”

  “Yeah,” began the bartender. “Relax, buddy.”

  “I’ll handle this,” she said firmly.

  “Sure.” The bartender went away.

  “The, the n-name …” His throat constricted his voice. He inhaled and exhaled before he managed to say, “The name is Stanley.” Even to him, his voice sounded as if it were coming through a wall.

  “Stanley,” she said gently. Her touch suffused his entire being, depriving it of a quantum of tension as neatly and accurately as if his soul were a guitar string suddenly, with great precision, by her sure hand detuned an entire octave and stroked there, satisfyingly on pitch. He might have explained it, if he’d cared to, by admitting that this was the first time he’d heard a woman utter his Christian name in perhaps a year, or been touched for free in even longer a time. But he didn’t care to. He hadn’t wanted to explain anything for a long time.

  The ring on her middle finger looked fake. It had a small, faceted stone, translucent green set with four tiny diamonds in yellow wire, very fine, very discreet. Still, after a half minute of looking at the finely boned ring finger and its mates, with the two sets of his own blunt digits beneath it, he found in himself the courage to look up and into the eyes of its owner.