James Hynes - Kings of Infinite Space

“Do you want to be a galley slave all your life, Paul,” asked the Colonel, behind him, “sweating in an airless hold, chained to your bench?”

Paul turned, breathing hard. “What?”

“You heard me, son.” The Colonel pushed heavily up the embankment and stopped a few feet from the top. He glanced along the river at the bridge, then pulled off his sunglasses and squinted at Paul. “Do you want to end up like poor ol’ Dennis, all alone in your cube, pulling on your oar until you keel over dead?”

Paul looked away at the General Services Division Building, then back at the bridge, then down the slope at the Colonel. “Who are those guys on the bridge?”

The Colonel stood with one foot higher than the other, and he rested his big-knuckled hand on his flexed knee and dangled his sunglasses. Beyond him, across the parking lot, J.J. had thrown his arm around Bob Wier’s shoulders and was leading him into the building.

The Colonel drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. He peered into the distance, then looked up at Paul again with a knowing glint in his eye. “What are you doing Saturday night?”

“Why don’t you answer my question?” Paul insisted. He hated the high pitch of his voice. “Who are those guys?”

“Do you like to sing, Paul?”

“Do I like to what?”

The Colonel stood up straight, swinging his sunglasses from his index finger. “Friday night, Professor. Karaoke night at Casa Pentoon.” He started down the embankment and called back, “And bring that lil’ Oklahoma gal, if you want.” He gestured over his shoulder. “We’ll talk then.”

“What’s Friday night?” Paul called after him from the top of the embankment. “What are we going to talk about?”

The Colonel paused and looked back up the slope. He gave Paul a smile that creased the corners of his eyes.

“The opportunity of a lifetime,” he said.

THAT NIGHT, after a dinner Charlotte couldn’t ruin — no-brand hot dogs on no-brand buns, with no-brand chips and cola — Paul unfolded his creaking sofa bed and turned on his little black-and-white TV. As the air-conditioning unit rattled under the window, Paul sat on the end of the lumpy mattress in his t-shirt and shorts and clicked round the dial in the jittery light from the screen. After fifteen minutes of fidgeting with the rabbit ears, the local PBS station came in the clearest, showing an aggressively vulgar old Britcom from the seventies called ’Ow’s Yer Knickers? about three women in a lingerie shop. The youngest was a scrawny, hawk-nosed punk with piercings and jagged hair; the next oldest was a sour, middle-aged divorcée; and the oldest was a zaftig, sixty-something widow with blue hair like a helmet, named Mrs. Prestoil. Their antagonists were assorted customers — usually stammering, red-faced, clueless men — and Mr. Lancet, who owned the butcher’s shop next door, and his shop assistant Stig, a buck-toothed, pasty-faced lad with a yen for the young punk. Mrs. Prestoil’s shtick was lead-footed double entendre, accompanied by raucous laughter from a studio audience of lubricious Londoners.

“I couldn’t find my pussy last night,” trilled Mrs. Prestoil. Big laughs.

“She couldn’t find her pussy with both ‘ands,” said the punk, in a snarling sotto voce. Bigger laughs.

“What’s happened, dearie?” drawled the divorcée, examining her nails.

“I’m afraid someone’s snatched her,” wailed Mrs. Prestoil.

“Someone say ‘snatch’?” said Stig, sticking his head in from next door.

“Crikey,” said Paul as he sprawled across his rumpled sheets. He concentrated harder on the program than it probably deserved because he was trying not to brood about recent events. Who was Boy G, and what did he want with Paul? And who were the men with him? Surely their saw-blade dentition was the product of Paul’s imagination. And why, thought Paul, shifting restlessly on his groaning bed, why were the Colonel and his dopey little lunch group showing so much interest in him all of a sudden? Had the Colonel really given the three men on the bridge a thumbs-up, or had he imagined that, too? And how on earth did the Colonel know about Paul’s “lil’ Oklahoma gal”?

On the television, smirking Stig slouched into the lingerie shop.

“Someone’s snatched her pussy,” explained the divorcée on the television.

“Is that even possible?” said Stig, goggle-eyed.

Where was Callie? Paul wondered. What was she doing? And who was she doing it with? Even the Britcom wasn’t loud and vulgar enough to divert his inflamed imagination from constructing a detailed picture of Mr. X. In Paul’s head the singer/songwriter from Tulsa was tall and lanky, with sleepy eyes and a sensual mouth and a ponytail, and he looked good in faded jeans and a denim shirt open to the third button, and he stretched out on Callie’s narrow mattress while Callie’s fingers popped buttons four, five, and six, on her way to Mr. X’s big silver belt buckle in the shape of the state of Texas. .

Charlotte interrupted his bitter reverie by prancing along the end of the bed, her spiky silhouette strobing before the TV screen. She gave Paul a chilling look, then curled over herself on a corner of the mattress and began to lick her ectoplasmic privates.

“Subtle,” said Paul, edging away from that corner of the bed.

Someone on the TV was banging on something, but no one in the lingerie shop seemed to notice. The banging continued, and Paul groaned, “Somebody answer the fucking door.” Charlotte lifted her head and perked up her ears. The banging got louder, and a woman’s voice said, “Paul? I hear your TV.”

Paul scuttled to the end of the bed and turned down the television. No one apart from his landlady had ever knocked on his door here, and it wasn’t Mrs. Prettyman’s voice. Kymberly didn’t even know where he lived, and neither Virginia nor Oksana would have bothered to look him up. He lifted his trousers off the chair at his little dining table.

“Coming,” he shouted, hopping into one leg and then the other. He glanced back at the bed. Charlotte’s eyes were round and fathomless and fixed on the door. Paul unkinked the chain and slid back the deadbolt.

“Hey.” Callie hunched in the doorway in sandals and jeans and a tank top. In the long, summer twilight, she was still wearing her sunglasses. “You gonna invite me in, or do I have to stand out here with all these cowboys staring at me?”

Paul looked past her to see more than the usual assortment of Snopeses silhouetted in the yellow light of their doorways or dangling beers off the balcony across the way. The appearance at the Angry Loner Motel of a woman who wasn’t Mrs. Prettyman was something of an occasion. Paul glanced back into his apartment. The dead gray glare of the TV played across the folds of his rumpled sheets, but Charlotte had vanished, so he stepped aside. Callie tilted her sunglasses onto her hair as she entered, and Paul winced at the way she wrinkled her nose at the smell.

“You have a cat?” Callie glanced round.

“Not really,” said Paul. “How do you know where I live?”

“Saw your address when I made your badge yesterday.” She peered into his kitchenette and through the door of his little motel bathroom. “Did the guy before you have a cat?”

“Have a seat.” Paul swung the chair away from his table. He sat on the edge of his bed, tugging on the hem of his t-shirt so that his gut didn’t bulge so noticeably.

Callie swung the chair around and straddled it backwards, leaning her elbows on the back and dangling her sunglasses.

“So,” she said, “how was your day?” She wouldn’t look at him for some reason, gazing at her hands instead, or at the silent television, or over Paul’s head. After a moment Paul said, “My day was peculiar. How was your day?”