Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

The air had cooled noticeably, and the days were starting to get dark earlier, with people breaking out Windbreakers, and the first pumpkins appearing on windows and stoops. It was pitch-black outside, the dead of night, and Lincoln came home to the usual locked bedroom. He headed to the guest room and tucked himself underneath the covers, and, beneath him, he felt… these… these… things, all this fur moving, slinky and squirming. There was hissing. Lashing. Must have been, Jesus, twenty cats in there. “Fuck.” Lincoln leapt off the bed pronto. He went banging on the door of the bedroom he'd paid for. He demanded to know what the sam hell was going on. After a time the door opened. Lorraine was groggy; but even newly awake, she was matter-of-fact. She told him about the animal refuge. Saving all the poor stray kitties.

His wife was hurting real bad, anyone could see this; even in his rage and his own grief Lincoln felt for her. She needed to cry? He gave her his shoulder. Needed space? He gave her space. Needed to lock him out of his bed and then transform the room where he slept into a wildlife preserve? Needed to watch that morbid video from the pizza party until she wore its film into mulch? Needed to turn what was already a nightmare into this living goddamn horror that Lincoln could not even begin to figure out how to address? He sludged downstairs. He tried to get comfortable on the couch in the living room. The truly ridiculous thing, he told himself, was this was the closest he'd been to pussy in quite some time.

Didn't he have needs? It wasn't anything he could talk about; there wasn't anything to say, really. Lincoln shut up and went to work and went through the motions of his life. He lost five and ten and fifteen minutes at a time, slipping into fugues for which there was no accounting or explanation. A good chunk of one afternoon got wasted typing the names of former teammates into a search engine. The rest of that afternoon was spent doing the same thing with former girlfriends. Every single day he emptied his mailbox of electronic solicitations and just about every day, he quote unquote accidentally clicked on one, and then, each and every day, his next half hour was devoted to disentangling himself from the loops of interconnected pop-up advertisements. One moment Lincoln would be constructing a point-by-point response to some preliminary draft; in the blink of an eye he'd be registering for a three-day trial membership to an adult website, clicking the button that confirmed the discreetly billed charge of four dollars and ninety-five cents on his Bank One Platinum MasterCard. He'd be entering a six-letter password that started with N; opening the photo sections, perusing thumbnail galleries, and clicking on pictures he wanted to magnify to full screen size. Since the Khan had one of those networks where its computers were always online, Lincoln could just click back and forth between his reports and the photos. Blondes were his thing, mostly. Strong-legged blondes. Full round breasts. Childbearing hips. Lincoln wasn't so far gone that he was about to masturbate in his office in the middle of the workday. Basically he ogled, spending less time at his voyeurism than McKagan down the hall devoted to finding weekend police auctions to attend. Moreover, Lincoln made sure to cancel his trial memberships before their regular costs — thirty dollars a month — kicked in. He made sure to download the most attractive photos into the ACCNTNGMEM.EXE file of his hard drive. And then Lincoln would turn his attention back to his memoranda, to preparations for his next meeting, to revisions of that Power-Point presentation, to piles of never-ending, unfinished bullshit.

Toward the end of October, at the end of an unnecessarily tense day, a few of the guys from the department were on their way out for a few beers, heading to this little dive. Lincoln offered to tag along. It was a short drive. A dark hole in the wall: mostly empty, a television above the bar switched to a fishing show on one of ESPN's lesser channels; a half-naked woman on a raised platform, swinging upside down from a pole. She seemed bored, maybe because there wasn't much of a crowd to dance for, and her movements were careless. Even so, there was a certain adjustment to having a live topless woman that was not your wife of twelve and a half years pole dance in front of you. A guy might sneak peeks at nakedness on the Web, but live nakedness was a different story. Lincoln bought the first round. Table conversation quickly turned to the stripper's breasts, a scale of one to ten. By the next round, talk centered on whether the stripper was worth taking home. Two of the men at the table were in their twenties, divorced, and if Lincoln remembered correctly, had kids. One guy wasn't thirty-five and was on his third marriage. Lincoln's coworkers loosened their ties. Lincoln sunk into his chair. He brought the screwdriver toward his mouth and tried not to be too obvious about staring at the stripper. Apparently he didn't succeed at this, because the stripper stopped dancing and came over. Putting her arm around Lincoln's shoulders, she asked if he liked what he saw. She mussed Lincoln's hair and said he was sweet and blew into his ear. Her body was warm against his and oh mercy was she built. Have a little fun, his coworkers urged, and sweet chariot mercy, could Lincoln have used a little fun just about then.

But the boy was going to be found. His marriage was going to recover. There was work to be done, yes, and it wasn't going to be easy, no, but the work would get done, Newell would be found, and then this here situation, it was going to normalize. Lincoln had faith. Addressing the stripper by her first name, he bid her good night and thanked her for her attention. He purchased a round for the road for his coworkers and signed off on the entire bill, leaving instructions with the waitress for a gratuity that was generous indeed. Lincoln Ewing knew how to take care of people, yes sir. Sometimes, though, he wondered if the people who were supposed to take care of Lincoln Ewing did not know how to take care of him. If maybe they did not know how to take care of themselves. Maybe Lincoln had to take care of someone by going and finding his missing little pubescent ass himself and dragging it back home. Lincoln maybe had to take care of someone else by giving up his bedroom and giving her enough space so she could grow into an understanding of his devotion. However you wanted to cut it, a man did not bitch or make a production of his suffering or take the easy way out. A man did what he was supposed to do. In this case he left the Paradise Club, drove down Industrial a bit, and then made a turn and pulled his sedan in behind that cinder block wall. He entered the store through its side entrance and thought that by now the immigrant behind the counter must know his face.

He settled above a particular box cover that had been handled more than a few times. Its cardboard was thin and indented along the bottom, where thumbprints smudged the blue backdrop. Lincoln grabbed those same areas. He paid cursory attention to the title— Temporary Positions, screaming across the top of the box. Rather, the platinum blonde was his focal point. Shapely. Lithe. Visibly young, yet old enough to know what she was doing, this particular young woman looked like she really knew: her lips moist and cherry-red, parted just so, the temple of her eyeglasses sitting suggestively between her biting teeth. She wore a businesswoman's blouse, which was opened at the throat, its gap trailing downward, revealing just enough of what seemed to be two lovely handfuls, the outlines of nipples suggesting a chilly day. One eyebrow was cocked, and she was staring at whoever thought he was man enough to pick up her box, defiant, daring that unknown person: take her on, be man enough to watch.