Max Collins - Scratch Fever

She stopped dabbing his face with the damp washrag; she pulled back.

“Don’t stop,” Jon said. “Feels good.”

“You got bunged up,” she said. Her tone was strangely apologetic. And almost a whisper. “I was cleaning off the dirt.”

His face did hurt; even without touching it, he could feel the raw patches.

“Go ahead,” he said. “That felt good, what you were doing.”

She shrugged, with her shoulders and mouth both, and started touching his face again. Her touch was gentle. Which struck Jon as weird.

“I... I don’t remember passing out,” he said.

“You hit your head,” she said.

“When?”

“When I tossed you in back of my car, after you tried to crawl off. You hit your head on the door. You got a bump.”

He tried to feel his head, and his hand jerked, like a dog on a leash. He glanced over and saw that the hand was cuffed to the headboard of an old brass bed. His left hand was free, however, and he touched the bump on his head; it was sore, but it wasn’t a big bump. On the side of his head, though, where she’d hit him with the gun barrel earlier, there was a real goose egg.

“You don’t got a concussion or nothing,” she said.

He was beginning to get his bearings. He was on his back, on the bed; his right hand was cuffed, and his left leg was, too, by the ankle. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, tending him. The room was dim: the only light on was a shaded lamp on the nightstand. This appeared to be a room in an older home. There was yellow floral wallpaper, faded, and paint was coming off the ceiling in spots, from water damage. Opposite the foot of the bed was an old dresser with mirror; on top of the dresser was a row of trophies of some sort. There was a door to the right; a window over to the left. It was an average-size bedroom. Nothing remarkable about it.

Except maybe for the pictures. The mirror over the dresser was covered with them, pin-ups taped to it, but not of girls: Elvis Presley, James Dean, Eddie Cochran; fifties teen faves, mostly dead. Some of the pictures were faded pages clipped from old magazines, the Scotch tape yellowed and dried; others looked more recent. It was a mirror you couldn’t look into. But the faces on it looked back at you, peeking over the row of trophies.

She yanked the cloth away from his raw face. “What are you lookin’ at?”

“Just the pictures. On the mirror.”

“What about ’em?”

“Nothing. They’re fine. They’re fine.”

Her face lost some of its nastiness, and she said, “You name’s Jon, huh?”

“Right. And you’re Ron.”

“Yeah. Sounds like a poem, don’t it? Jon and Ron.” She laughed.

He found a little smile for her somewhere and forced something out of him that he hoped sounded like a laugh. God , this dyke is nuts , he thought.

“I’m, you know... sorry about this,” she said. Sullenly.

“Sorry?”

She dragged it out of herself. “I... got nothing against you, really.”

“You don’t?”

“I used to come listen to you. Your band. You guys were good.”

“Thanks.”

“You played too much sixties. I like fifties.”

“Uh, well, there’s lots of requests for sixties stuff these days. But I like fifties music myself.”

She smiled; the sullenness was gone. “I know. I heard you do ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’.’ Anybody that can do Jerry Lee that good is okay by me.”

“I’m... glad you liked it.”

“Look, I know I probably made a... bad impression that time, few months ago, when I got on your case for being with Darlene. I know it’s not your fault. Darlene, she’s always hitting on people.”

He tried to think of something to say to that, but couldn’t. He was trying to stay low key and calm, trying not to scream at her. She seemed relatively calm herself at the moment, and he had a feeling that keeping her that way might be to his benefit.

“Are you hungry?” she asked suddenly.

“I... hadn’t really thought about it.”

“Well, are you?” Nastier.

“Sure. Sure. If it... wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

“Naw! Not at all. How ’bout a ham sandwich and a beer?”

“That’d be... great.”

“No problem,” she said, smiling, rising. She sauntered over toward the door and out.

What a fucking fruitcake! he thought, and began to take toll of his situation. He took a look at the headboard of the bed. He was cuffed to one of its brass posts; there didn’t seem to be any way to slide the cuff off the thing. And he certainly couldn’t pull his wrist through the cuff.

He was able to get into a sitting position, but he could stay that way only by supporting himself with his free hand. It allowed him to see that his ankle (his shoes were off; he could see them over on the floor, by the dresser) was cuffed to the brass end rail of the bed.

For having an arm and a leg free, he was pretty goddamn helpless.

If he didn’t feel so weak, he could try to overpower her; maybe knock her out with a punch when she got close, or kick her in the head or something. But then what?

Then she was there with the sandwich and beer, a Coors.

She’d taken off the leather jacket; she was in T-shirt and jeans now, her smallish breasts poking at her T-shirt in a reminder that she was female.

She handed him the sandwich and a paper napkin and said, “I put hot mustard on it.”

“I like hot mustard.”

“You got beer to wash it down with.” She put the beer on the nightstand, since he didn’t have a hand handy to take it.

He ate the sandwich. He was starving. He didn’t realize it till he got the food in front of him, but he was starving.

She was smiling as she watched him eat. And not at all in a sinister way. The dimness of the room, with its single source of light, threw shadows on her and everything else, but the effect was softening.

When he was finished, she said, “Use another beer to wash that down better?”

“Uh. Sure. That’d be great.”

This time she left the door open as she went, and he could see her going out into the hall and taking a right down some stairs; he could hear her feet on the stairs, and then again, a couple minutes later, coming back up.

She gave him a second Coors; she’d brought a beer for herself, too, but in a glass. She had an empty coffee can under her arm and set it on the floor by the bed.

“What’s that for?” he asked.

“You can’t buy beer, you can only rent it,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Can you reach it there?”

“I don’t think so.”

“With your hand, stupid.”

He reached over with his left hand and could feel the lip of the can.

“Yeah,” he said. “Thanks.”

She sat on the edge of the bed again.

“How old are you?” she asked him.

“Twenty-one,” he said.

“How old you think I am?”

Thirty.

“Twenty,” he said.

“Twenty-five,” she grinned, with a slight foam mustache.

Thirty.

“Fooled me,” Jon said.

“I live right,” she explained.

“Uh, Ron?”

“Yeah?”

“Why am I here?”

“How the fuck should I know?”

“Well. You did bring me here.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Well, why’d you do it? Why am I tied up like this?”

“That’s between you and Julie.”

“Julie.”

“Yeah. I’m only doing this ’cause she asked me to. I don’t get no pleasure out of it.”

“You don’t.”

“Fuck, no. You’re a nice kid. You sing good. I like you.”

“You do.”

She smiled again — a real smile, with some gums showing, and disarming, in a weird fucking way. “Yeah. I don’t always like guys, you know.”

“You don’t?”