Randy White: Night Vision

Squires doubted that but didn’t want to piss off Frankie by voicing his opinion. So he told her he’d never played a role in killing anyone before. And he didn’t want to get in the habit of doing it.

That wasn’t exactly true, although Frankie didn’t know it. No one knew, and sometimes even Squires wasn’t convinced it had happened.

Once, only once, alone with a pretty Mexican woman, Squires, naked, had taken the chula from behind, lulling her body into a thrashing silence, his hands around her throat, his body finishing and the chula ’s life ending at a precise, constricting intersection that was euphoric beyond any physical sensation Squires had ever experienced.

He had been too drunk to remember details, though. And by the time he had sobered, the woman’s body was already gone-into the lake near his hunting camp trailer, he guessed later-so it was as if he had imagined the whole damn thing.

But it had happened. The event-that explosive physical rush, a sensation of ultimate power-had rooted itself in Squires’s brain. Occasionally, the memory flooded him with a horrifying guilt, which he mitigated by telling himself that it had only been a dream.

When he was blood-drunk on steroids, though, the roots of that memory propagated in the man’s head. They snaked deeper into his brain, germinating into a fantasy that had become an obsession.

If he ever got the opportunity, if he ever got just the right girl alone, Squires would make that dream happen again.

Frankie had laughed when he had balked. “We’ve got nothing to feel guilty about. The stupid little whore did it to herself. It’s one less stupid chula in the world. Good riddance. No one’s gonna miss her and no one’s gonna care. Now, do me a favor, clean up around here ’cause I’ve got that appointment in Orlando tomorrow. Make sure she’s gone by morning-and you’d better never goddamn mention it again.”

Which meant that Frankie was leaving the dirty work to him. That’s just the way the woman was, and Squires had to wonder sometimes if Frankie’s love of crazy, wild-sex kinkiness was really worth all her crazy, wild-bitch meanness.

For the first couple of years, it had been a toss-up. But now Harris was tired of the woman-a little frightened of her, too-and he was looking for a way out.

The reason had to do with something else Squires had been wondering about: How had he gotten himself trapped into a relationship with a woman who reminded him more and more of his abusive, bullying mother?

Like his mother, Frankie had a nasty streak in her, particularly when it came to other women. Because of this, it was sometimes hard to tell if some of the things Frankie did were accidental or intentional. For instance, it wasn’t exactly true that the Mexican girl had overdosed herself. Frankie had done it.

Frankie had dropped extra Ecstasy tablets into the girl’s drink, doubling the dose she usually used when they happened to pick up a Mexican chula who was camera-shy and needed some loosening up.

This particular girl was unusually cute, with a sleek, sensuous body. When Frankie’s hands were on a girl like that, her face flushed. Her body shook. It was a response that was part passion, part jealousy. It was like she never wanted to let the girl go. So maybe Frankie had decided to keep the chula by dropping in those extra tabs.

To Squires, it made what had happened seem less of a crime, the fact that a woman had done it to another woman. But that didn’t stop him from going almost crazy with panic when he finally realized the girl was dead. Maybe he had killed that Mexican girl or maybe it was all a dream, but he’d never had to deal with a dead body before. Not sober, anyway.

They had a corpse on their hands. And they had to get rid of the thing without the Mexican gang leader, or the cops, finding out.

Not they, actually. Him. Frankie, who was sixteen years older than Squires, and a lot more experienced, would have nothing to do with getting rid of a dead body.

It wasn’t the first time that something like this had happened while Squires was around, but it was the first time a girl had ended up dead instead of puking her guts out while Squires tended to her.

That’s what really pissed him off when Squires took time to give the subject some thought. When would he learn not to leave Frankie alone with girls that were younger and prettier than her? And even if the stupid chula had done it to herself, who was going to believe it?

No one, that’s who. Not with at least one eyewitness, maybe two, who had seen him drag the girl’s body into the lake.

Now, though, Squires’s future seemed to be improving, judging from what he could hear and see, out there on the lake, which was that Fifi had snatched one of the eyewitnesses, old man Carlson, into the water.

Fifi. That was the name of the twelve-foot gator that he and some buddies had trucked in from his hunting camp, east of Immokalee, way back off County Road 858.

Squires could see it happening and he liked what he saw.

The gator had that nosy little turd in her jaws and now looked like she was swimming him back to some dark hole where she could drown him. That’s what gators like Fifi did. The ol’ girl would probably leave the mouthy asshole underwater to tenderize a bit before finally chowing down.

No way could the cops blame Squires for something an animal did. It was perfect.

Squires wasn’t sure if Carlson had in fact been an eyewitness, but, if he was, Fifi was now providing the solution. It had been a smart thing to move the gator here, where she could harass the Mexicans instead of the hunting dogs they sometimes used at his camp.

Squires’s hunting camp-well, actually, the property belonged to his mother-was a big place, four hundred acres of cypress trees and saw grass that opened into flats of oaks and pines where feral hogs liked to feed. And where sometimes they’d kill deer and an occasional bear, too.

Once, in that same area, Harris had gotten a clear shot at a panther, but he’d missed.

Harris Squires loved that hunting camp as much as he hated tending his mother’s three crappy little RV parks, this one, Red Citrus, being the only one even slightly fun. Red Citrus, at least, had girl tenants who weren’t redneck hags with silver hair, big asses and little old titties shriveled like raisins on a vine. Brown girls, true, but at least they were young.

In Squires’s mind, the younger the girl, the better-not something he would’ve admitted to Frankie, who was now in her forties-like the weird little chula who’d been pretending to be a boy and called herself Tulo. What was she, twelve, maybe thirteen years old? He’d been pretty down the last couple of days, but surprising “Tulo” in the bathtub had lifted his spirits.

Until that moment, Squires had been confused about how to handle the situation. Seeing the girl’s body, though, all water slick and smooth, had changed that. It caused his secret fantasy to bloom bright in his mind.

He’d drive her to the hunting camp and show her around. Just him, alone. At the hunting camp, there’d be no one around to hear or see what he did. Not on a Tuesday night. It was a comfortable spot, private, with a big RV braced up on cinder blocks, generators, a cookshack, a shower and a wide-screen TV for video games and porn. A perfect place for a guy like him to make his fantasy come true with a little wettail.

Wettails, that’s what Squires called them. He and Frankie had entertained a bunch of them out there at the camp, which was really more a second home than a camp. The place was comfortable enough to be fun but still wild enough for an ol’ boy to get away, spread his wings and do just about any crazy thing he wanted without worrying about some cop or asshole ranger cruising by, asking questions.