Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

The room was cool and empty. A rag on the floor proved on closer examination to be a rat, long extinct, bringing him briefly back to encampment days. An overturned milk crate sat in the center of the room, where he had last left it, like a prop on a stage. On top was a junky file cabinet drawer; and within, the leather-bound record of his itinerant education. He used to sit in this sanctuary and write down his thoughts, but had soon stopped all that, overcome by the Laocoönean struggle of daily life.

He reached through a spiderweb and took up the volume, opening its cover:

… Hereafter follows the book itself which is called News from Nowhere, or An Epoch of Rest & is written by William Morris.

Jane visited a clinic that she thought would rid her of the child but was told it was too late. And still no one knew, no one but (horror of horrors!) Please-Help.-Bless. For they had been intimate and he had caressed her belly as Jilbo had done, and licked every place with his tongue. The baby became a third party to their intimacies; he said he could change the features of its fetal face with the tip of what he had between his legs (he never tired of dispensing this bit of folk wisdom). He went roughly in both holes, and even Jilbo had not done that. The only thing that kept her from coming completely undone was that she had not yet been with her William in a lover’s way, not for lack of desire but because of his courtly, thoughtful manner. She did desire him (there would be time enough for that when they married), but for now did him the favor of forbearance, one William returned, for it was the most beautiful, refined favor, built upon Godly love. If they had been together as such, and she with the demon Please-Help.-Bless after —why, then Jane would already have thrown herself in front of a big Blue Bus! For how could she have lain with her gentleman again, after being sucked and prodded by that diseased, invidious harpy, that snide and limping carbuncle, the wheedling agent of her precious William’s destruction?

The gimp had one day followed her, pinning her to a wall; though thin and rickety, there was strength in him too and what he had to say nearly crippled her.

“I know yer boy!” he rasped. She smelled the stink of his purulent gums. “I know yer boy Topsy from Adam! From day one! I seen you with him. He was a good boy once — helped with my sign. Then got kinked —like his friend with the tore-up dawg; got ridda him , too. Ain’ none of ’em right in the head, jus’ like you! Come down to the beach and shave that big beard , he did. Don’t wear that fancy suit no more so no one’ll find ’im. So what. So shit what. I find ’im. I know yer boy. He fuck the kiddies, that’s what he do. Kill some lady too, thas right! They lookin’ fer him — I’m tight with who’s lookin’, all right? Man with a gold shield. Ahm tellin’ you this is serious shit — Gold Shield gave me the hewhaw to help find ’im. ’Cause I know the streets . Gold Shield ain’ gonna rest ’fore he find yer boy! They look to me , all right? An’ there I walks straight into him! An’ him, with you —he’s yer boy! Fuckin’ you too, huh? Fuckin’ an’ suckin’ you an’ the kiddies, tha’s right.”

She was crying; he knew she was his.

“Throttle back, baby — s’all good. Didn’t know that, did ya? Didn’t know yer boy stole a li’l girl, that’s what he did. Cleaned her pussy real good with his tong. Made it bigger too — li’l girl like uh elephant now! Slap slap slap slap slap . Wet wet wet wet wet. Bet chew tight. Bet chew tight like that li’l girl used to be. You looks like a cow, but ahl betchew got a seven-year-old girlie hole! Betchew gotta hole like a calico cat ! Best let me at that hole or yer boy’s goin’ down , unnerstan’? They killim! Killim in jail! Killim! Killim! Killim!” He bit her neck and dug at the crotch of her donated skirt. “Gun let me fuck you? I likes big girls, ooh! Gunna haff to take them hearing aids out to do yer ears! Make you heer again! And I likes you ’cause you cain’t talk, ooo! Gunna do yer mouth, ooo! An yer ass, ooo! Gun do that li’l calico cat pussy, ooo! ooo! ooo!”

He had gambled and won — he owned her now. Like a hunter, he’d watched the couple stroll the Promenade arm in arm, Jane with curls and tendrils piled atop her head like a loopy career girl, Topsy smoking his Rite Aid pipe. The beggar snarled at the domesticity of it, wondering what exactly was between them. When he first had his big idea, he wasn’t sure she’d believe his accusations or his threats — that he was the only thing that stood between her boyfriend and jail — he only knew he wanted her bad enough to play it out. Gut have that deaf-dumb cow . And it made perfect sense when she heard it, because Jane had always seen that her William’s eyes shone with something more than the brushfire flames of now diminishing hallucinations; but rather, with the awareness that someone, some thing , was after him — on the trail of the man she dared call husband. She had misread whatever it was William saw gaining on him (his old life); regardless, Jane Scull would let no harm come to her man, and it was upon that sentiment Please-Help.-Bless preyed.

More than any of it, she felt the awful familiarity of this monster, who was, alas, a member of her tribe, and began finally to consider that the Lord might have made her for such men. Yet along with the shame and agony attending such a realization came a measure of peace.

While the currents of our main story pull inexorably toward the tributaries of denouement, it is an opportune moment to look in on Mr. Dodd Trotter, whose fortunes this week have fallen, bidding him to flutter from his perch on Forbes ’s global tree of the “world’s working rich,” and comfortably resettle five or six branches down. As to the wisdom of our timing, opinions as usual may vary; yet each player asserts himself in his own way, with his own urgency.

The day before his mother’s eviction from chez Pullman and subsequent hospitalization, Dodd was finally on his way to meet Dr. Melvin Janklow, the genial Beverly Vista psychologist who had once talked him through the hard times of his youth. (In the few months that had elapsed since that first phone call, their dinner date had for one reason or another been postponed.) He’d flirted with the idea of Trader Vic’s before discarding the Polynesian-themed restaurant as too kitschy, regardless of all the fond boyhood associations. He had Frances-Leigh make reservations at Michael’s instead, at the beach.

Dodd’s jet landed around six o’clock at the Van Nuys airport. He had spent the day in North Carolina, touring a private school. The Cary Academy had been built a few years before the millennium by his friend Jim Goodnight, co-founder of a data warehousing software company; Jim only had about $4 billion but, as Dodd used to joke, “that didn’t make him a bad guy.” The complex sat on about fifty acres — ten times that of the current BV “footprint” but only twice the size of the extended parcel that Dodd envisioned once surrounding homes and apartments were razed. The dogged CEO had built Cary from the ground up; its design technologies and dedication to learning were superb. Seeing what a determined man like Jim could do in such a short period of time absolutely impressed and inspired.