Giles Blunt - No Such Creature

“Sorry,” Owen said. “I didn’t expect you to believe me-I’m just getting you back for telling me you were a lesbian.”

“So it wasn’t twenty-eight?”

“No. If I tell you how many, will you lie back down?”

“How many?”

“It’s only been two.”

“Really?”

She lay back down and he held her close-there wasn’t much choice in the narrow bunk. They twined themselves together, and he felt the heat of her skin down to his toes, the heat of her breath on his neck. He was now aroused as hell, but also feeling tender in an unfamiliar way, and in no hurry; he wanted this to last. He kissed her cheek, and it felt like the softest, warmest thing he had ever touched.

“Two,” he said. “Pretty pathetic, huh?”

“You think I’d be more impressed with ten? That a high number would make you more manly?”

“Seems like it’s supposed to.”

“Being more manly is not something you have to worry about, Owen.”

She kissed him, reaching under the covers, and soon he wasn’t worrying about anything at all.

Afterwards, when they had lain in silence for a while, Owen sighed and said, “That was amazing. Astounding. That was really, really-I don’t have words for it. I feel-I don’t know whether to shout or cry.”

“I know what you mean. Well, maybe I don’t,” Sabrina said, her voice in that silky region between a whisper and full speech. “Why don’t you tell me?

“You mean aside from the fact that you’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever met?”

“Oh, come on. I bet you say that to both the girls.”

Owen laughed. “It just feels so good that you actually know who I am. I mean, you know the truth about me-about me and Max-what we are, what we do. And you still-well, I mean you seem to, at least-like me. Nobody’s ever really known me before. No girls. No guys. Nobody except Max.”

Sabrina touched his lips with a finger. He took hold of her hand and they lay side by side for a long time, talking quietly, sharing their memories of growing up in households where the money came from crime.

“The thing is,” Sabrina said, “living with a criminal-or being one-is like living on the Titanic . You just know it isn’t going to end well.”

Stu Quaig was staring into the mirror on the open closet door, checking out his hair for the forty-seventh time, it seemed like, pinching and prodding it into artful little peaks. Clem had to admit the colour looked good, some kind of mustard yellow highlights he’d had added to relieve the monotony of brown.

“Did I tell you how much I hate my haircut?”

Clem picked up the May issue of Handyman and thumbed through it. “Why, no, Stu, you didn’t. Please go ahead.”

“I hate my haircut.”

“There, you feel better now?”

“I told her a quarter inch, no more.” Stu held up thumb and forefinger to show him what a quarter inch looked like. “And she says sure. Starts off fine, cutting the back, the top, I don’t see anything wrong. Then she gets to the front, I’m seeing two-inch hunks of hair falling into my lap.”

“You should of stopped her.”

“It was too goddamn late to stop her. What am I going to tell her, put it back? Reattach it? Hey, Ming, you think you could graft that back to my head so I don’t go out of here totally fucking bald?”

“I hope your dissatisfaction was reflected in the tip,” Clem said, flipping pages.

“Tips are how they make their living. I’m not gonna cut off her income over it.”

“I’d have given her nothing. Asians don’t feel pain like we do.”

“She holds up a mirror to the back of my head, where there used to be hair, and says, ‘What do you think?’ and I say, ‘I think you cut it too short.’ And she says, oh, she had to do this and that to make it sit right. I expect to come out looking like Jude Law, instead I’m sitting here with a head full of nubs.”

“So why go to Sassoon?” Clem said. “You spend like eighty bucks or something and you’re coming back in tears.”

“Because they’re the best, that’s why. They have a training program. It takes time to become a Sassoon stylist.”

Clem tossed his magazine onto the floor. “I been going to the same barber for twenty years. Mikos. Eight bucks, I get a great haircut and Mikos is happy with a two-buck tip.”

“Yeah, but your hair looks like shit.”

“It suits me.”

“Let me tell you,” Stu said as he shut the closet door. “A total makeover would not be wasted on you, Clem. You could stand a little improvement in the presentation-of-self department.”

“At least I don’t got a head full of nubs .”

There was a sound of rattling chain from the bathroom. “You ever try Hairlines?”

“The dog is speaking again,” Clem said. “Shut up in there, Rover!”

“Hairlines. Small chain out of New York. You get the best of both worlds. Trained stylist, but they don’t charge you Sassoon prices. I’ve been going there for years.”

Stu stepped back into the bathroom for a second, looking down at Roscoe. “You got good hair,” he said. “What do they charge?”

“Twenty plus tax and tip. And the girls are major cute.”

“Twenty bucks, huh? Maybe I’ll check ’em out. Place nice?”

“Sure. You know, lots of black. Lots of mirrors. Music’s too loud for my taste, but I got sensitive hearing.”

Stu left the bathroom and Roscoe climbed out of the tub. He put the toilet seat down again and sat. It seemed like a year he’d been chained to the bathroom sink in this motel. According to the soap, it was a Motel 6. He had to sleep in the bathtub, and every time one of these bastards took a dump, he had to be in the damn bathroom inhaling it. At least the one called Stu had the decency to pull the shower curtain shut.

He looked at his bare feet, the two gauze bandages where his baby toes used to be.

“Hey,” Roscoe called out, “he claimed to have shot forty-four men with his Colt Thunderer before he himself was shot in the back following a barroom altercation in 1895.”

“Who the fuck knows?” the one called Clem said. “Theodore fucking Roosevelt.”

“Was it Billy the Kid?” Stu said.

“John Wesley Hardin. Known as the Fastest Gun in the West. There were several songs about him, none of them true, however. Bob Dylan, you have to wonder if he did any research whatsoever.”

“You really get a bang out of this trivia shit, don’t you?” Clem said.

“It passes the time.”

There was a long pause after that. Just the sound of the television as someone flipped channels, and magazine pages turning.

“So, you got any more questions for us?” Clem said.

“Yeah, how about you unlock this chain and let me out of here.”

“No,” they said.

The theatre department at the University of El Paso was planning a production of Lady Windermere’s Fan , and Max took the opportunity to provide them with several high-quality wigs. It was not a huge sale, but it was excellent cover, and the university itself was quite entertaining, having been built for some reason in the manner of a Tibetan lamasery.

After that, he drove over to the hospice affiliated with Thomason General, where John-Paul Bertrand, alias the Pontiff, alias Sabrina’s father, was dying on the third floor. Sabrina and Owen were sightseeing. Even at his age Max found it difficult to believe someone so young and pretty could be so heartless.

The Pontiff lay in bed in a wash of sunlight, a shrivelled, shrunken thing. His previous address had been the Huntsville state prison, and usually inmates put on weight from the lack of activity combined with a steady diet of television and candy bars. Either that or they inflate themselves into rippling muscle-men by relentlessly pumping iron. But the shape under the sheets was scarcely more substantial than a child’s.