“Christ,” she remarked. “This is good acid.”
Next she was standing upright in the wobbly boat, vising each nipple between thumb and forefinger. The most minute magenta sparks seemed to shoot out.
“Yeah, damn good acid.”
“Be careful!” Carol warned. The boat began to rock as Sheree continued to stand, maintaining her footing.
Sheree heard a flitting sound, like baseball card running through the sprockets of a bicycle wheel, as she roved her gaze ahead of her. A great bulk seemed to stand before her. “What’s that?” she half shrieked.
Carol looked behind her. “How do you like that? While we were fucking around, the boat drifted all the way over to the island.”
Sheree saw traces of sparkles seem to crawl up the old wood pilings. The dock shimmered as if made of dark gold.
They both put their clothes back on, then Carol took Sheree’s hand and helped her off the boat. “Come on,” she said through a glowing grin. “Let’s check this place out…”
««—»»
Ashton’s head throbbed like a beating heart on the verge of infarction. When his eyes pried open, at first, all he saw was black.
Then the black was pierced with pinpricks of light: stars.
“Bobby, Bobby!” he shouted, stumbling across the deck to jostle hid brother. One thing he stumbled over was the high white bucket full of several dozen empty Holsten bottles. “We passed out! Bobby! Wake up!”
Eventually, Bobby did. His eyes spread on the sky. “Aw, man. It’s nighttime.”
“Damn right it is!” Ashton bellowed. “Come on! Shag ass! We gotta get back to the Winnebago! The girls’ll be pissed!”
At least they’d dropped anchor, they hadn’t drifted far. Ashton hauled it up and turned on the deck lights. Bob staggered rearward, started the big Evinrude motor.
“Head on back,” Ashton advised.
“Wait a minute,” Bob reminded. “We still have traps in the water, don’t we?”
Ashton thought about it. “Yeah, but—shit we haven’t caught anything all day. Fuck the traps. Let’s get back to the girls.”
Bob sucked on his cottonmouth. He spat, then emptied the bucket of beer bottles over the side. “What’s five minutes? We might as well check the traps.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” Ashton snapped on a flashlight, roved its bright beam across the water. They’d used empty gallon milk bottles for buoys, and there one bobbed just over the side of the boat.
Ashton grabbed it, pulled up the long wet rope. Feels heavy,” he said.
“Don’t say that!” Bob declared. “It’s bad luck!”
Ashton hoisted the dripping trap out of the water, slammed it on deck.
Bob flicked his own flashlight down.
“Jesus Christ in a whorehouse,” Ashton muttered.
The boxlike wire trap was full of Crackjaw eel.
— | — | —
Chapter Nine
“Come on,” Carol urged. Once on the island, they ran away from the pier toward the bait shop, two sprites in the night.
No lights on in the bait shop. Before them the darkness stood, blocked with shapes that were more buildings beyond. The moon continued to hover over them, a limed face.
“What are we doing?” Sheree inquired.
“Just snooping around,” Carol replied. “What the fuck?”
Still high on LSD, Sheree followed. The dark forms around her seemed to percolate, to swell. Anything Carol said back to her seemed to slide out of her mouth like a balloon of faintly glowing oil and wrap around Sheree’s face. Sheree inhaled the liquid words into her nostrils, like gas.
God, I’m fucked up, Sheree thought, wobbling onward.
They stepped across dirt and rocks, hiked over driftwood and washed up pilings. Sheree had no idea what the purpose of this excursion was, and didn’t particularly care. Every step she took forward brought a motion of surrealistic trails. Her footfalls ground up and displayed vaguely exploding shapes before her eyes. The sound of her own huffing breath, too, exuded a shape: like sperm in a pool, she thought.
The darkness was dark light; the moon seemed amplified a hundredfold. As her breasts rode up and down beneath her haltertop, the fabric felt like coarse tongues trying to lick out milk, and the crotch of her shorts was a rough finger.
“Holy shit,” Carol whispered.
Next thing Sheree knew, they were at another shack, deeper into the woods behind the bait shop. Carol was gazing into a lit window.
“He’s…jerking off…with worms.”
With WHAT? Sheree thought. She stuck her face right up to the shack’s window, and what she saw….
The redneck from the bait shop—Esau, she thought his name was. He was lyng back on a stained bare mattress. The foot of the bed pointed toward the window, affording Sheree and Carol about as direct a view as one could want—er, that is if one could ever want such a view. GrrrrrrrrOSS! Sheree thought.
Esau lay naked save for his workboots, his great belly spread like a jumbo white beach ball half deflated. Raisin-sized moles dotted his body along with smudges of dirt, but even grosser and more bizarre was the fact Esau seemed to completely lack body hair. The bottom of his gut rolled down so low that it almost prevented masturbation. Almost. The dirty hairless scrotum bounded below his pumping hand. Not much dick, either, at least by what they could see. But Carol was right about one thing—
He is! Sheree thought in a perverse shriek. He’s jerking off…with worms!
Indeed. It was not vaseline or spit in Esau’s palm, it was a fistful of live bloodworms that he squeezed around his cock as his hand shucked manically up and down. At one point, he stopped, lifted off his hand, and as he did so, the mashed worms on his cock fell in a bloody clump between his rotund legs. Esau reached aside to a coffee can on the floor, lifted out a fresh handful, and was back at it.
Sheree tugged Carol away from the window. “We’re not really seeing this, are we?” she whispered. “It’s the acid, right?”
“No,” Carol whispered back. “Bebo just makes you see trails and colors. Never any heavy hallucinations.”
Sheree felt stifled. “But—”
“Believe it.” Carol giggled. “That fat redneck in there is whacking off with a handful of worms.”
Sheree thought she’d seen it all.
Until they went back to the window.
“Holy shit!” Carl whispered. “Look! He’s only got—”
Oh, GRRRROSS!
Esau, in his lustful angst, had now brought his knees back to his belly, fat jiggling as his hips fidgeted, his buttocks spread, and it was thanks to this gesture that Sheree and Carol noticed three things. One: Esau clearly was not in the habit of using toilet paper. Two: Only one testicle occupied his scrotum, but it was as large as a kiwi fruit. And Three:
Sheree almost threw up when her eyes deciphered the rest. Esau held his cock with his right hand, and very dextrously with his left he was feeding a long, single bloodworm into his urethra with what appeared to be a Q-Tip.
“Oh, man,” Sheree moaned.
Carol grinned over at her. “Isn’t this the freakiest thing you’ve ever seen?”
Once the worm had been pushed in completely, Esau pinched off his glans with left thumb and index finger while his right hand continued to mash the worms back and forth over his penis. Now he was really fidgeting, and through the wall, they could hear him heatedly exclaiming: “Ooo-yeah, baby! Sable! Sable! Gorgeous George! Ooo-yeah!”