“Thank you, sir.”
“You just sold Texas! No one’s been able to do that!”
“Tomorrow’s Florida, sir,” Heyton reminded. “Florida’s not a big interagency state, but they don’t like to be tag-alongs, either. That’s good for us.”
Blocher sounded manic as Al Pacino. “Sell the IAP to Florida and I’ll triple your salary, Heyton!”
“Not to sound conceited, sir, but if I can’t sell Florida… no one can.”
Exhilaration turned Blocher’s voice to a wavering shimmy. “You fuckin’ rock, Heyton! You’ve got confidence and balls! You’re putting my company on the map and making the competition eat my shorts. Sell Florida tomorrow, and—to hell with it! I’ll make you exec VP and quadruple your salary.”
“Mr. Blocher,” Heyton promised. “I’m going to sell Florida.”
Yes, a good business day. Once all those Florida police chiefs heard that half of Texas law enforcement had purchased their processing system, they’d probably all buy it, too. Heyton felt confident. He was a superior salesman.
But he had a problem.
He hadn’t even had to show his ID to check into the room—that’s the kind of place it was. Dirty handprints on the wallpaper tracked over into the mirror his own face now occupied, and more handprints smudged an awful dollar-store painting of a sea manatee which hung crooked over the lumpy bed. The room stank, of course, like a porn parlor. Roaches chittered in a bathroom cornered black with fungus.
It was still daylight; through the closed blinds he glimpsed the shadows passing the window, but none quite possessed the silhouette he craved…
The magazine’s glossy images made his eyes feel lidless. He stared, as someone lost in the desert would stare at a mirage. The letters of the magazine’s title stretched across breasts so swollen they looked fit to burst, and a white belly equally swollen: BUNS IN THE OVEN.
As he proceeded, Heyton couldn’t have felt more ashamed, nor more impassioned.
He was surprised by how often he got lucky. From Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine, from Baltimore to Frisco to Miami to Seattle—there was always some identically seedy thoroughfare peppered with fleabag motels and fleabag people. Crack reigned supreme, a devil’s contract for the new age; there would always be plenty of regrettable women who’d sell themselves for a twenty-dollar “rock.” This was south St. Petersburg; Heyton hadn’t had to drive far in the rental car to know he’d found the right kind of neighborhood: pawn shops, adult book stores, and rundown rowhouses. Perfect, he thought.
The sodium lights on 4th Street seemed to ooze on as the sun fell, painting the street in a glittery glaze the color of urine. Heyton spied stars struggling to wink through the hot, smog-tinged twilight. Monolithic buildings pushed upward past ugly rooftops, a craggy black mesa against a dull sky. Heyton thought of lost worlds.
As the night deepened, they began to appear as if disgorged from the street’s tacky crannies and alleyways: the lost women. Thousand-yard stares propped up over false smiles of wantonness, they began their endless trek on either side of the street, big-eyed scarecrows in high heels and hot pants and tubetops banding fried-egg breasts. Most were emaciated, with mops of soiled hair the color of dirty dishwater—the proverbial crack whores nearing the end of the line. Any city had plenty of them. A few were obese, comically so, waddling the dirty sidewalk on swollen ankles and feet ballooned against flip-flops straps. One, whose face look inflated within a preposterous Benatar shag, beckoned Heyton with a wave of a fat hand, mouthing some carnal promise. Her buttocks in giant jeans looked like a cramed duffle bag. Not tonight, honey, Heyton thought.
He drove to the end and back again, eyeing for police but seeing none. A black woman—clearly not a prostitute—exited an ice-cream shop with a toddler on each hand. She smiled in her routine, clearly a happy mother…
I never knew my mother, Heyton thought.
But it was a self-realization that always arrived via a shrugging objectivity. He’d been raised by a single father. “She died,” he’d dismissed to young Heyton a few times, “a long time ago.” End of story.
Heyton didn’t care. He didn’t feel under-privileged, and he couldn’t discern that he’d missed anything in childhood. His father had raised him well regardless, then Heyton had excelled through life to this point: $200,000-plus per year in a company headed skyward.
Nevertheless, that was the chief reason cited: the lack of a maternal figure during formative and adolescent years.
Thinking back to the last few had him squirming on the LeBaron’s faux-leather upholstery. Kansas City a month a ago, and Phoenix the month before that—both gems. The images—so sharp, so freshly white with ghosts of blue veins beneath ever-so-tight skin—melded with further images from the magazines and dumped a narcotic heat over his groin. Good God…
Cyesolagnia was the clinical term, but he’d also seen others, even more bizarre, like Gravidophilia and maiesiomania—a pervert’s alphabet soup. The standard definition?
“Cyesolagnia: a particular paraphilic symptom of sexual fetishism which involves the urgent erotic obsession with pregnant women.”
Heyton, indeed, had it bad. Never a wife, and scarcely ever a girlfriend. For him, sexual release was impossible without these arcane and decidedly abnormal trimmings.
They had to be pregnant…
And there were never many. The typical red-light district seemed to sport only one or two pregnant prostitutes per hundred—low odds for sure, but that only made the successes more gratifying. But, yes—
They had to be pregnant.
When he introspected, he always deduced, I’m not a bad person. It’s not like I’m snatching children or picking up little boys, for God’s sake. I’m not raping women at gunpoint, I’m not robbing banks or murdering people. All I’m doing is picking up a few pregnant hookers for a mutual proposition. What’s the harm? No one gets hurt…
Hence, his rationale, which was all he had to keep from feeling wholly aberrant. Pickings were always slim, and his trek often ended in frustrating failure, but then there was always that inexplicable edge of excitement, that at any moment a suitable woman would turn a corner or step from an alley and be standing there for him, that one shining needle in this haystack of human detritus.
The sky was black now, pressing down on the sodium haze. Right after another u-turn, his heart jumped when he spotted the proper outline in the distance.
Finally!
The wan figure moved down the street, burdened by the tell-tale swollen belly.
Please…
Then his heart dropped like a stone.
She was pregnant, all right, by eight months it looked like. But… Damn!
This one was simply too far gone, a stick-figure with greasy tendrils of hair and legs smudged flinty with dirt. The stained t-shirt ballooned as she waddled onward; her pregnancy must comprise a third of her total body weight. Giant soul-dead eyes snagged his gaze as he passed, then the parched lips over crooked teeth mouthed “Blowjob?” Another inhabitant of the bottom of the barrel. She likely hadn’t washed in weeks and was probably rife with HIV, abscessed track-marks, and lice.
What a disappointment.
“Oh, well…”
It was getting late—he had his presentation tomorrow. Better get back to the motel… A night’s failure always had at least one consolation: another pathetic release of his own accord, abetted by one of his magazines: READY TO DROP, NATAL ATTRACTION, and his current favorite, BUNS IN THE OVEN. Heyton could take his pick.