James Ellroy - Silent Terror

Thinking style , I shook the male hands and kissed the female ones. The boys guffawed and the girls giggled, and catching a glimpse of Ross petting his shirt, I went warm again. Winking, Ross said, “Mixed doubles indoors and out?” and the kids all laughed at the wit of the man they obviously adored, then dispersed, picking up gym bags and tennis rackets from the floor. They flew out the door in a cacophony of “See you’s!” and “Bye’s!” and “Nice meeting you’s!”; and the entire scene ended so abruptly that I had to blink my eyes and dig my feet into the carpet to get my bearings.

Ross noticed my look and said, “Culture shock. Come on, I’ll show you around the house. We’ve got it to ourselves now.” He stroked the emblem on his chest, and suddenly I knew he kept doing that to keep from touching me. “Show me your room first,” I said.

We both knew what I meant.

Ross touched his chest. “Alice the alligator. The only woman who never let me down, so I keep her close to my heart.” Pointing up the stairs, he winked. Bowing at the waist, I said, “Walk, sweetie,” and Ross unwittingly acknowledged match point by laughing out loud and exposing a tiny flaw in his almost-perfection — poorly capped teeth that were usually subterfuged by tight smiles and mustache bristles. He walked ahead then, and I winced at the lover’s epiphany.

I couldn’t feel my footsteps as I followed him to the bedroom, and when he reached for the inside light switch I could hardly hear myself say, “No.” Ross’s “Bye, Alice,” boomed in the darkness, and then zippers rasped and belt buckles and shoes hit the floor. Bedsprings squeaked, and then we were together.

We held; we rubbed; we kissed. We felt the weight of each other and made friction with our hands. We were impact rather than melding, force rather than softness. Our fever escalated commensurate with the pressure of our muscles. We strained in embraces, each trying to be stronger, and when we both sensed we were equal combatants, all of us went into our groins and we pushed ourselves there until we were done, over, past it and dead — together.

We lay there, gasping and sweating. My lips were brushing Ross’s chest, and he shifted himself so that the contact was broken. I wanted to fuse the bond again, but inside Ross’s fits of breath I could feel him regrouping, rationalizing, running from what it made us, made him. I knew that soon he’d say something quintessentially cool to dilute the power of us, and I knew I couldn’t let myself hear it. Drawing myself into a child’s sleep ball, I cupped my ears and squeezed my eyes shut until I was numb. Dimly I could hear Ross’s heart beating; very dimly I could hear him muttering stylish denials of what we had just done. Though not audible, the words raked my body, and I shut them out with all my power, my muscle, my will — wrapping myself tighter and tighter, until I lost control of my senses — and my control.

Tick/beat, tick/beat, tick/beat, the strange music lilting, its cadence telling me “This is a dream.” Tight in my ball, I know I’m a child, four or five, it’s about 1953 and a different world. I’m in bed, and pressure in what my mother calls “that place” forces me to the bathroom and relief. Footsteps coming upstairs divert me from returning to my ball, and I stand in hallway shadows, hoping to see my mother and father s secret places. When the footsteps reach the landing it’s a man and woman wearing powder-white wigs and costumes out of my kindergarten picture books — clothes like George Washington and the European royalty used to wear in their different world. I smell liquor, and know the man is my father; but the woman is too pretty to be my mother.

They go to the big bedroom and turn on the light. My father says, “She’s at her aunt’s in San Berdoo and the kid is asleep”; the woman says, “Let’s leave the wigs on for kicks, I’ve always wanted to be a blonde.” My father reaches for the light switch, and the woman says, “No.”

Heavy corsets and shoes and belt buckles go “thud” on the floor, and my father and the woman are naked, both with dark hair at their secret places. He has what I do, only bigger; she has just the hair. The light wigs and the dark hair there are wrong, and what I feel there is wrong, but I tiptoe to the door and watch anyway.

It looks ugly and good. My father is fit and strong, with broad shoulders and chest and a trim waist. He’s good, but the woman has fat legs and thick ankles and big horse teeth and a scar on her stomach and chipped nail polish. They get on the bed and roll around, and the mattress goes tick tick tick. She says, “Put it in,” my father does and it looks ugly, so I close my eyes and listen to the tick tick. They both sound good, and I feel good there, better and better as my father grunts along with the TICK TICK TICK. He grunts harder and harder, TICK TICK TICK TICK TICK TICK TICK — and I’m touching myself there too. It feels better and better, and I run to the bathroom because I know something has to come out. Nothing does, but I’m big.

I listen for more ticking to make me bigger, but there isn’t any I walk to the bedroom door and see my father asleep, snoring. The woman sees me and crooks her finger. Proud of what I have, I go to show her.

She’s ugly and her breath stinks, but her wig is pretty and her hand there feels good. I want my father to see it, and I try to reach across the woman. She stops me by putting her mouth there.

Tick tick tick tick tick as she moves on the bed, straining with her lips around me; tick tick tick tick I shut my eyes; tick tick tick tick she’s biting me and I open my eyes, and my mother is there swinging a brushed-steel spatula and frying pan, and I pull away, and the woman is bleeding at the lips. She pushes my mother and runs, losing her wig; my father snores and my mother holds the wig over my face, and I fall asleep pushed into suffocating liquor breath that goes tick tick tick tick.

Then it’s still about 1953, but later. My mother is giving me pills so I won’t remember. The pills come from a bottle labeled Sodium Phenobarbital, and every time she gives me one she puts a note in another bottle. The notes ask God to forgive me for what I did with the wig woman.

Rough hands pulled at my sleep ball, and a once perfectly stylish voice was oozing agitation. “Hey! Hey man! You going cuntish on me?”

I came out of my self-made womb weeping and swinging, and a backhand caught Ross on the jaw and knocked him off the bed. He got to his feet, and I saw that he had already put on his clothes. Naked, I felt at an advantage. Ross stroked his mustache and said, “Better. You had me worried for a while.”

We just stood there. Ross did his number with the alligator, and I confronted what had happened to me thirty years in the past. The heat in the tiny room dried my tears, and the only thing in the world that I knew was that the next perfect human being who crossed my path was either going to die horribly beyond words or walk away unharmed, their death sentence commuted by my mother in her grave and the killer standing in front of me. Putting on my clothes under Ross’s stare, I thought that the only awful thing about the choice of resolutions would be waiting to know. Staring back at Ross, I said, “Thanks.”

Ross gave me his patented hand-in-the-cookie-jar smirk. “You’re welcome. Spartan revelry’s good sport every once in a while. Bad dreams you had?”

“Old stuff. Nothing earthshaking.”

“I never dream, probably because I lead such an adventurous life. If any other man had hit me, I would have killed him.”

“You could have killed me, Lieutenant. You could have killed me and made it look like anything you wanted to, and you could have profited from the act.”