The Outlaw Album: Stories

            Mary wants to kiss, so I do, and she wants some sort of familiar caress, one that suggests we know each other’s bodies like favorite getaway places we’ve come to own, so I put both hands to her butt and pull the cheeks spread a little bit, lift her. Mary has a small beer pooch underslung from her lower belly, but is elsewhere lean, skinny, even, and I can about feel the bone under her butt with my fingertips. She’s got pale hair and a few freckles that seem to be forever fading from her face but never go away.

            In the living room she right away wants me to get naked. Ma’s bed is downstairs so she can be near the john, and she lays snoring in the dining room, just around the corner. The TV is muted but on, throwing a headache light across the room, throbbing between near dark to suddenly glaring, with many skittish flickers between. I know I’m supposed to want this, what she offers, so I try to recall how it goes when this is something you want, crave, gotta have, can’t do without, might kill for, die over, mourn when it’s gone.

            Somehow my clothes come off, drop to the floor, first frost stripping a tree of its last clinging leaves.

            “Such a tight, smooth boy,” she says. Mary is pushing nine years older, and unlike most women would do she apparently enjoys reminding me I’m way younger. It somehow stokes her needs and juices her good to say it aloud. Whenever she says it she sighs soft and looks like a crouched cat studying songbirds in a low bush. “Lucky ol’ me. Lucky, lucky.”

            All Mary does is scoot from her moccasins and jeans and blue undies. She keeps her shirt on and buttoned, the tails hanging over that pooch. Her lips get around on me some, visiting here and there, then I bend her over the couch, knees to the carpet, and slam her the doggy-way she wants it most times. Slap her ass as she has taught me while I slam, slam and slap, and she snickers, snickers, moans into the cushions. Fresh rug burns get added to the old on my knees and I collapse backwards after, stare at the ceiling, count the cobwebs and get the same tally as the visit before.

            She says now I’m home for a while we should get married, and soon, before they send me back, but has only ever one time asked me about over there, how it was, what details I needed to get off my chest, what memories I might want to share with her, and I said, It’s all real sandy. Sand blows into everything. Makes soup even turn crunchy.

            That’s it?

            I think I miss the crunching.

            “Put this in,” she says before my breathing is even righted, and tosses the movie my way. She raises herself to sit on the couch, then uses her blue undies to mop herself dry, catch my come seeping, and stuffs them dampened into her purse. “It’s got that guy in it I like.”

            Somewhere in the flick I fell out of interest. It wasn’t funny, and the guy she liked so dodged bullets slower than pigeons and cracked wise at death, which never happened to him or his, and I yawned and went away. On the porch I stared up at the big oak in the yard. Tree frogs honked their raspy honks in unison, and fat brown bugs battered the porch light behind me. Mary’s car was under the spread limbs, and I saw that the windows had fogged. I crossed the dirt yard, opened the back door, and there slept Joe and Nora, undressed for bed but without a blanket to cover them. I pointed a finger and wrote Mary’s name in the fog above them, then rubbed their used wet breaths onto my face. They’d been there since she left the trailer and hit the first bar, and were probably asleep by the second roadhouse or the third. I picked both up at once, an arm under each, and neither child woke as I carried them inside. Mary looked over from her movie as I laid the kids on the empty end of the couch. She was smiling with her chin down and her eyes wide, and said, “See? I told you you loved them kids.”

* * *

            In the story that happens to me so often, asleep or wide awake, I had got down on my hands and knees to collect red and white parts of Lt. Voorhees, from when his brain-housing unit came apart in his quarters, skull chunks denting the ceiling, teeth and ears splatted to the walls, brains a clotting spray—a story that happens to me whenever it wants to, and I can’t shunt it aside or stuff it in a box, but can only accept the sunken feelings it deals me time and again. A few times Dad showed up to help me collect the cracked bone and stringy glop, clumped hair, kneeling beside me in a foreign place, calling me “son” while we raised a wet pile. Some days I start hearing the final words Lt. Voorhees said before closing his door that night spoken over and over, at different volumes in my head, all day long, low to loud, Hope I dream about daylight again.

            Hope I DREAM about daylight AGAIN.

            HOPE I dream about DAYLIGHT again.