Johnny Temple - USA Noir - Best of the Akashic Noir Series

Guy followed Jumpy over to a makeshift bar, a long picnic table laid out with iced buckets full of longnecks and pints of gin and bourbon. Jumpy mixed a gin and tonic in a clear plastic cup and handed it to Guy.

“Relax you, put you in the mood.”

He made his own drink, then held up the plastic cup for a clink.

“To improving my grade,” Jumpy said.

“To creating credible characters.” Guy wasn’t backing down on his values for some quick tour of a sleazy hashish den.

Jumpy gulped his drink and Guy followed suit, mano a mano.

Jumpy led Guy deeper into the house, down a long narrow corridor. This was architecture Guy had seen in dozens of Florida tract homes built in the ’60s. Three bedrooms down that tight corridor, a single bath. Sliding doors on the closets and hard surfaces in every direction. He had never considered such spaces forbidding, but given the present circumstance Guy held back a few paces behind Jumpy, and started to consider his options for escape.

At the end of the hall, the music had softened to a thudding growl. Jumpy halted before a closed door and tapped four times and a voice answered from within.

Jumpy opened the door, then looked at Guy hanging back. “You wanted to meet my people, right? Get down and dirty. Isn’t that the idea?”

Guy felt his fear collapsing into something more extreme. A dark knot of dread. He was not up to this. He felt suddenly trapped, cornered by Jumpy. Conned into deeper water than he’d bargained for. A wave of paranoia rolled and crashed in his gut.

“Philly, meet Guy. Guy, Philly.”

The man was bald and short and his stomach was as tight and perfectly round as a bowling ball. He wore striped undershorts or perhaps pajama bottoms, but was otherwise naked. The room was lit with a vague blue light as though rare mushrooms might be growing in long trays somewhere nearby. It was the master bedroom and was probably half the size of the living room. Its sliding glass door had a view across the canal, looking into the patio of a house where an elderly couple were slow-dancing under paper lanterns.

Philly shook Guy’s limp hand and stepped back to size him up.

“This is Mr. High-and-Mighty? Pardon me, Jump, but he looks like a fucking twit.”

Guy was turning to leave, to run back the way he’d come, jog all the way home if it came to that, when a hand touched his bare ankle, the fingers sliding around the knobby bone and taking a strong grip.

Down in the blue haze on the bedroom floor he saw the girl, naked, with enormous breasts. Her wispy red hair was tangled and dirty, and there was a sloppy grin on her face as if Mindy Johnston had finally entered the gossamer stratosphere she was always writing about.

Guy staggered away from her touch and lost his balance. He shot out a hand to steady himself, but the wall beside him moved away. As Guy lurched toward it, the wall moved again. He flapped his arms like a clumsy tightrope walker, and after another moment found his equilibrium.

The gin and tonic was spinning inside his skull.

“You son of a bitch.” Guy turned and stepped into Jumpy’s face. “What the fuck have you done?”

“Hey, professor, come on in, the water’s fine.” It was a woman’s voice he vaguely recognized.

He turned back to the mattress and saw beside Mindy was Paula Rhodes, a new grad student who’d been struggling to find her place in the program. A bit more mature than the others, a woman who’d written for New York travel magazines and already had a Master’s degree. She, like Mindy, wanted, for some ungodly reason, to write poetry. To sing the body electric.

She had risen up to her knees and was reaching out to Guy with her unloosened breasts wobbling and her eyes on fire with some chemical enthusiasm. Around the room, he made out at least four other students from the program, all of them tangling and untangling like a nest of snakes.

“Hey, I want to thank you, professor,” Philly said. “You got us hooked up with a better class of consumer than we been seeing lately. I owe you, man.”

Moon, the bull-necked gatekeeper, appeared in the doorway. He too was now wearing only his underwear. Saggy white briefs with dark hair coiling out around the edges. In one hand he was holding a silver tray with syringes and rubber straps, and an array of other nefarious equipment that Guy didn’t recognize. In the other he gripped the barrel of the SAW. Eight hundred–meter range, lightweight, just over twenty pounds with the two hundred–round magazine.

Moon presented the hors d’oeuvre tray to Guy, poking him in the sternum with its corner.

“A little hit of research, Guy?” Jumpy said.

The walls of the bedroom were breathing in and out and the lights had invaded the interior of Guy’s chest.

“You used me. You son of a bitch, you used me to take advantage of these kids.”

“I used you , Guy? I fucking used you ?”

Mindy Johnston’s hand snaked inside the leg of Guy’s trousers, her fingers trickling up his calf. Her voice a swoon.

“Come on, professor. Come on, it’s fun. It’s so wild.”

Guy looked across the canal and saw the old couple still fox-trotting to some melody that didn’t pass beyond their walls. He thought of Shelly, his wife of ten years, the way they used to dance in their own living room. Languorous steps, drifting around their barren house for hours at a time.

Jumpy edged to the door, slipping past Moon into the hallway. Moon slid sideways like the bars of a cell locking into place between Guy and the world he’d known.

“Hey, Guy, enjoy yourself, man. Moon’ll show you the ropes, won’t you, big fellow?”

Moon had stashed the tray and gun somewhere and now had a grip on Guy’s right bicep and was injecting some clear solution into a bulging vein in the crook of Guy’s arm. The room was bigger than Guy had originally thought. The ceiling was no ceiling. Where the roof should have been, there were stars, whole galaxies exposed, comets shooting from left and right. A cool solar wind swirling down from the heavens.

“This is what you wanted, right?” Jumpy said from the hall. “Up close and personal.”

There were bare hands on his ankles drawing him down to the quicksand mattress, down into a pit of flesh and crazy-colored lights, a world he’d written about before. But he’d gotten it all wrong. All completely wrong.

Cunningham said that he had set up the reform school on Penikese Island so we could have a clean break with our pasts. We couldn’t walk home from out here in the middle of nowhere Buzzards Bay. Couldn’t hitch or swim here, either. Even boaters considered the currents dangerous where we were, twelve miles out from the Cape, past the islands of Nonamesset, Veckatimest, Uncatena, Naushon, the Weepeckets, Pasque, and Nashawena, just north of Cuttyhunk. There was no Cumbie Farms, no Dunkin’ Donuts, no running water, Internet, or cell service here. Not even any trees. Just a house made from the hull of an old wooden ship that had run aground. Me and six other guys, all high school age, who were lucky to be here instead of in some lockup, lived with Cunningham and the staff, most of whom were also our teachers. The school had a barn, chicken coop, woodshop, and outhouse. The only other things were the ruins of a leper colony, a couple of tombstones that Cunningham liked to call a cemetery, and the birds. Lots of birds. Seagulls, all of them, that hovered over this place like a screeching, shifting cloud that rained crap and dove at our heads all day.

This was our clean slate, a barren rock covered in seagull shit.