The Black Train Page 9

  “Oh, no, call me Justin.” She gets off tomorrow at seven. Ask her out, you pussy! that other voice challenged. But even in his heavyweight-lager buzz, he knew that would be the wrong move.

  “Here’s your check, Justin.” She had his bill in her hand.

  Collier fumbled for his credit card, then exclaimed, “No!”

  She ripped it up. “But this one’s on the house.”

  “Dominique, please, that’s not necessary.” Collier got the same treatment in a lot of pubs, mostly from owners wanting mention on his show.

  “And, don’t worry, I’m not trying to bribe you for a good review. It’s just nice to have you here.”

  “Well, thanks very much. But I’m pretty sure that I want to put your lager in my book, if you don’t mind signing a release form.”

  “Oh, of course I don’t mind, but wait until you get your secondary impression first.”

  What an overtly ethical thing to say. She smiled at him again—a reserved yet confident expression. The cross at her bosom shined like her teeth. “Actually, it was a bribe for something.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “A picture, for our wall.” She pointed to several autographed snapshots: some sports figures, a horror author he’d never heard of, a soap opera star, and, yes, Bill Clinton.

  “I’d be happy to pose for a picture, just not tonight, please. Tomorrow, when I’m sober.”

  “You got a deal, Mr.—Justin.” Dominique glanced aside. “Here comes your charge.”

  Lottie limped back between some tables, the perennial nut-job grin on her face. She’d lost one of the overlarge high heels. What a nightmare, Collier thought. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Good night.”

  Collier rushed to Lottie and turned her toward the door. “This way, Lottie.”

  She objected, pointing behind.

  “No, no more beer for you. Jesus, Lottie, your mother’s going to think I got you drunk.” He shouldered her out the door, an arm braced about her waist. She clipclopped along on one foot bare and one shoed. She appeared to be giggling in silence. Crossing the street was so cumbersome, Collier stopped, pulled off the remaining shoe, and threw it in the bushes. “They’re too big for you anyway. Lottie, you only had one beer! How can you be this drunk?”

  Her finger roved through his hair; then she tried to put the other hand down his shirt.

  “No, no, none of that! We’re going home!”

  In the parking lot he heard from a distance, “Hey, there’s that Prince of Beer guy with that drunk girl!”

  Shit! He fumbled at the passenger door.

  “Let’s go ask him for an autograph!” a woman’s voice shrilled.

  “Get in!” He dropped Lottie in the car like a couple of grocery bags, then huffed around, assed into the driver’s seat, and sped off. He thunked over a curb—Idiot!—then realized he hadn’t put his lights on. He thunked over another curb, then almost hit a corner mailbox searching for the headlights knob. This fuckin’ car! Finally he snapped them on and veered onto Penelope Street.

  Thank God it’s not far…He could see the Gast House all alight at the top of the hill. Nice and slow, he thought, settling down. Just another quarter mile—

  Suddenly Collier couldn’t see. His heart shouted in his chest when the wheel slipped, and he felt the vehicle go off the hardtop.

  Fwap! Fwap! Fwap! Fwap!

  He was mowing down bushes on the roadside. All he could see now were Lottie’s bare breasts in his face. She’d dropped her shoulder straps and was trying to straddle him in the driver’s seat—

  “Lottie, for shit’s sake!”

  One of her hands clamped his crotch and squeezed.

  “You’re going to get us killed!” He shoved her back, and—

  Thud!

  She slid across the dash and fell into the passengerside foot well, flat on her back. Then—

  No movement.

  Collier had managed to stop the car a yard short of the largest oak tree in the front court. He backed up slowly, then realized this:

  That’s the tree Harwood Gast hanged himself from…

  He pulled his eyes off the sprawling tree, then idled to the parking lot.

  No lights lit the half-filled lot; only moonlight traced into the car. Collier let his heart settle down again. In the moonlight, he found both of Lottie’s bare feet in his lap…

  He put his hands on them, paused, then moved them off.

  She wasn’t moving. Christ, with my luck she broke her neck when she fell! He leaned down and felt her throat. Thank God. There was a steady pulse.

  Feeling weird, he looked closer at her, then gulped when he realized that one bare breast was exposed, its nipple dark and pointed like a Hershey’s Kiss. Man…

  The toned legs seemed radiant in the moonlight. Then he looked at her face: serene and peaceful.

  The silly ditz is out cold.

  Then…

  Would it be, like, sexual misconduct if I…

  He couldn’t believe what he’d considered. I wanted to feel her breast…An UNCONSCIOUS girl’s breast…

  He didn’t think about it, or at least tried not to, but then that other voice—the alter ego, the id—seemed to whisper, Go ahead. What’s the big deal?

  His hand reached down without any guidance from his mind…

  He pulled it back.

  What a wuss! Go ahead! Cop a feel! Any REAL man would!

  He ground his fists together.

  Come on! She’ll never know!

  It troubled Collier more than significantly: the amount of time it took to decide not to. I’m REALLY screwed up…

  But then…something else occurred to him as the memory flashed: his keyhole this afternoon, and the immaculate, hairless pubis displayed in it, and the unique freckle.

  It was probably Lottie, and…judging by her behavior tonight, I’d say there’s a 99 percent chance.

  More curiosity, then.

  He already knew that she wore no panties beneath the tight, diaphanous dress…

  I’m just seeing if it was her, that’s all, he thought as if to offer an excuse.

  He raised her motionless leg, angled it away…

  The moonlight didn’t reach that low so, very briefly, he turned on the dome light—thought, Pervert!—and glanced down between her legs.

  Wrong again.

  There was quite a bit of pubic hair down there, a veritable pie wedge-shaped tuft of it.

  He took a breath, clicked the light back off…and found himself shaking slightly.

  The other voice again: Shit, she only weighs a hundred pounds. Take her in the woods and have a go. Who’s going to know?

  Collier could imagine the headlines. TV BEER GURU RECEIVES TEN YEARS FOR DATE RAPE.

  His mind swam. He was mortified that the idea had even occurred to him. Got to get her back in the house. Now.

  Eventually he got her shoulder strap back up, hauled her out of the car, and was trudging toward the front steps.

  Jesus…

  After twenty paces, gravity turned this hundred-pound “pipe cleaner” into an armful of cinder blocks. Collier wasn’t in the best physical shape, and being drunk only compounded his effort. I wish I could just leave her on the damn steps and go to bed. He was tempted. But, no, he’d already been enough of a scumbag tonight.

  He opened the front door—

  Oops.

  —with her head and muscled through the vestibule. A very agape Mrs. Butler sprang up from the desk and came briskly forward.

  “Mrs. Butler, this isn’t what you think,” he started. “She—”

  “Oh, that silly daughter’a mine,” snapped the now-familiar drawl. “She got drunk is what she did.”

  “Yes, ma’am. And only on one beer.”

  “Lottie! What am I gonna do with you!” she bellowed at the unconscious woman. “You’ve embarrassed Mr. Collier!”

  “Oh, no, Mrs. Butler, it wasn’t much of a problem—”

  The old woman p
lucked Lottie from Collier’s arms and threw her over her shoulder like she was a straw doll. Lottie’s bare bottom looked Collier right in the face, then was spun around.

  “Please forgive this, Mr. Collier!”

  “Really, it’s no big d—”

  “I would just die if you went back to sunny California and told all your TV friends like Emeril and Savannah Sammy that folks in Gast ain’t nothin’ but a bunch’a drunks’n crackers.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t tell Emeril.” He struggled for something to do or say, through some sudden obligation. I can’t very well let her old mother lug her back to her room. “Here, let me help you.”

  “Wouldn’t think of it! You been inconvenienced enough! You can bet corn bread to gold doubloons that she’ll be punished rightly.”

  “No, please, Mrs. Butler. She was just trying to have a good time and drank too much—”

  “See you in the mornin’, and please sleep well!” The old woman was already hustling away, her own shapely backside shaking in a loose lavender dress. “And, again, I’m so sorry ’bout this!”

  Mrs. Butler disappeared down a hall beside the desk.

  What a night.

  And it was finally officially over, he realized, when the lobby grandfather clock tolled midnight. He began to trudge up the steps, amused now by the previous debacle. Mrs. Butler’s upset had seemed a bit over the top. So what? Her daughter got drunk in front of a small-time TV star. Not that big a deal. But then he recalled Jiff’s little bit of interesting info earlier. The younger man had literally been trying to set Collier up with his mother.

  The only one I wish I could be set up with is Dominique…

  But how preposterous was that? Just because she didn’t have a ring didn’t mean she wasn’t married or involved, he knew. Brewers, just like cooks or masons, didn’t wear rings for obvious reasons. How could a girl that pretty and that on the ball NOT be taken?

  And why worry about it anyway? His TV “stardom” was at an end, he was over-the-hill, and soured by L.A. and a catastrophe for a marriage. Collier knew he wasn’t exactly the Total Package.

  Back in his room, he dropped his shirt on the floor, stepped out of his pants, and groaned into bed.

  At least the bed wasn’t spinning, and when he burped he did so as the genuine connoisseur that he was. The burp was light and hoppy, and had good “nose.” It reminded him that he’d found what he’d been looking for right away: a preeminent American lager. So even with all of the day’s disasters and absurdities, it had been a terrific success…

  And I got to meet Dominique…

  He felt like his first grade-school crush. But it’s just lust. That other voice crept into his head.

  No, it’s not!

  Yes, it is. All she is to you is what you relegate all women as: a Lust Object, a dehumanized arrangement of sexual parts.

  Bullshit! I really like her!

  You don’t like anybody, you only “use” people for masturbatory head fodder. Just like the old lady, who’s nothing but an ass and a pair of tits for you to stare at. Just like Lottie, and that Wisconsin tramp you were about to screw. Good job, Collier. At least admit it. Dominique’s no different. You want to use her for a roll in the hay, and that’s perfectly fine. Why shouldn’t you? You’re a man, and men are supposed to do that.

  Fuck you! Dominique’s nothing like that! Collier hurled back at his conscience. This is different!

  He rolled over in bed, clenching the sheets.

  Guilt flowed over him like a stinking fog. All humans were sexual animals, one side said, but there was always the other side, too.

  Sexual animals domesticated by a progressive morality.

  You either choose to be good or you choose to be bad. But then he regretted the fact when he considered some of his own thoughts today. Yes, the eyes of his lust had been using Mrs. Butler’s body for a scratching post all day, and even worse were his deeds in the car. As for the Wisconsin woman…

  I came really close, he knew.

  For each hour that he was here it almost seemed like his sex drive was doubling.

  Just go to sleep…

  He thought of Dominique’s lovely face and barleygrist tinged hands, hoping the image would lull him to slumber. The cross around her neck glimmered, a hypnotist’s tool.

  Just…go…to sleep…

  A noise jostled the encroaching REM waves. He sat up, aggravated.

  Did I really hear something?

  Then it resounded again.

  Water.

  Not water running from a tap but…a long splash.

  Like someone dumping water out of a bucket…

  Then he saw the dot.

  What the hell is that?

  There was a dot on the wall, like a dot of light, or—

  A hole?

  He squinted at the wall.

  Don’t tell me there’s a hole in the wall…

  But when he got up, he found this to indeed be the case.

  There’s a light on in the next room, and there’s a hole in the wall, he knew now. The hole existed between the closet on one side and a waist-high vase cabinet with a marble top on the other. As Collier lowered himself to his knees he was vaguely reminded of this afternoon when he’d knelt similarly to look through the keyhole.

  The next room is that bath closet, he thought he remembered correctly. And that’s exactly what Collier saw when he put his eye to the hole.

  Soft yellow lamplight glowed over finished wood-slat walls. Directly in Collier’s view was something he first thought must be a seat, because he noticed the high, curved back swept down to a lower rim with half-circle cutouts. Through his beer daze, then, he recalled what Mrs. Butler had said of this room when he’d checked in.

  It’s a tub for a hip bath.

  He flinched at the sound again: gushing water.

  I was right!

  Through the hole he saw two hands bearing a bucket. The bucket was upended into the tub, then withdrawn. But…

  Who was emptying the bucket?

  He only caught the quickest glimpse, then…

  Silence.

  Next, he heard the slightest clattering, and a few footsteps. Then he saw a blur…There she is…

  It was Mrs. Butler, or at least he thought so. He couldn’t see her face, of course—the peephole only afforded a close perimeter. But now a woman stood before the tub, her buttocks to Collier’s eye. A creped lavender dress jiggled as hands pushed it down by the waistband. Yes, it was definitely Mrs. Butler. I know that dynamite old butt anywhere… Collier’s heart stepped up at the acknowledgment of what was about to happen:

  She’s going to strip and take a hip bath…and I get to watch.

  He’d been lusting after her extraordinary body all day—now came the moment of truth.

  He was looking at a pair of white cotton panties stretched out by the preeminent derriere. The view crawled up the lines of her back to her shoulders where it stopped. He could see the bra strap, too. Already, Collier’s loins were tingling.

  Don’t get your hopes up, he reminded himself. She’s an old lady. Just because her body fills the dress right doesn’t mean it won’t be a wrinkled wreck once she’s nude…

  The panties were pushed off and the bra removed…

  And Mrs. Butler’s body was not a wrinkled wreck by any stretch of the imagination.

  Mama mia…

  Now the hole circumscribed an hourglass of plush soft-white flesh. Midsixties be damned, Collier’s eyeball was going dry staring at a rump, back, and shoulders that existed essentially without flaw.

  Not a pock. Not a wrinkle. Not a mole, liver spot, pimple, nor blemish and not a single dimple of cellulite.

  This old lady’s not just a brick shit-house—she’s the mother of ALL brick shit-houses…

  Collier’s arousal was plain at once, even in spite of the influx of alcohol. It wasn’t just the primal sight of this sumptuous bare buttocks just a few feet from his eye, it was the psychological effect:
the anticipation. If he thought this side was good viewing, he could scarcely imagine the other side, and he knew in just moments she would turn around to let him see it all. And there was something else, wasn’t there?

  Collier knew—he felt absolutely 100 percent certain— that when she did indeed traverse her body, his eyes would be wide-open on a meticulously shaved pubis, which would hereby end the mystery of the Keyhole Flasher.

  He felt his crotch without being conscious of it…

  His eye went back to the peephole…

  Mrs. Butler turned around at the exact moment. Here comes the bald beaver, Collier thought.

  He froze.

  Where he expected clean white skin and a pink cleft he saw instead a bounteous quantum of feminine thatch. Another wrong number…

  At one point she appeared to lean backward—to grab something behind her?—which stretched the downy matt almost as if on cue. Collier didn’t see any gray hairs in the mound, but he knew it was her. Then Mrs. Butler lowered herself into the hip tub.

  Holy smokes…

  Above the neck, he could only see her chin and some untied gray hair touching her shoulders. The rest was a vantage shot of her pubis, stomach, and breasts. What she’d reached back for was obviously a piece of the Civil War-era soap called ash cake. It was a grayish color in hand but when she glided it over her wet skin, it sudsed faintly like normal bar soap.

  A voyeur’s paradise now glowed back into Collier’s eye: Mrs. Butler’s hand soaping up her crotch, belly, and breasts.

  Oh, man, this is better than my first Playboy when I was nine…

  The image was so vivid, he thought of the most re—fined pornography. The light and her wet skin conspired to an image that seemed to just keep sharpening. And judging by the motions of her sudsy hand…

  She was doing more than washing.

  Only then was Collier even aware that he’d previously taken himself in hand. By then he couldn’t help it. He felt absurd, yet the idea of stopping was beyond consideration. He kept staring with one eye through the hole, intent on the potent image, yet another part of his consciousness realized the absolute necessity that he MUST NOT make a sound. Mrs. Butler’s slick torso wriggled in rhythmic waves. When her hips began to buck, her orgasm was apparent.

  So was Collier’s.

  He slammed his eyes shut and closed his teeth hard against his lip. The sensation sidled him over on the floor, and there he cringed.