Anna gathered her clothes and began to walk back to the party. She pulled her cloak back on over her naked body and adjusted the mask. Stacey was in a compromising position in front of the fire, a man was behind her thrusting, and she was face down moaning just a few feet from the flickering. Stacey’s mere acts of fornication belittled everything the tradition stood for. Her party guests slammed into each other like grotesque beasts with human flesh. The dank sweat and sex odor assaulted from all sides, compounded by the intense heat of the fading pyres.
“Anna! Get out of here, before Mom and Dad kill me!” Stacey yelled, still in the throes of passion.
“Sorry, Stacey.” Anna said as she scurried into the house. Anna did not look up again until she was inside the house, from there she watched where the party was, and occasionally glanced in the distance where Jimmy and her consummated.
A faint smile crossed her lips, she would miss him.
EDDY
H.H. Shullith
Preferring to talk to animals and not people, H.H. Shullith lives in a bohemian loft in the northwest, where she writes novels and delights in showing visitors her collection of fully functional diesel-powered chain-driven sex toys.
***
Lomax was a prosecutor for Multnomah County and the terror of the city of Portland until he found his true calling. Time after time the conservative, capitalistic and callous Benson Lomax would swoop into a courtroom and somehow convince a mostly Democratic, extremely liberal jury plucked from liberal enclaves like Hawthorne or Multnomah Village that the accused was dangerous, unrepentant and a risk to public safety and had to be locked away. He won almost every case and took great delight in the fact that he was known in the public defender’s office as the ballcrusher.
Lomax didn’t care about anything but money and power and what they bought him; property, prestige and pussy. It wasn’t until he was forced to appear at a benefit for special needs foster children that he realized how empty his life was and what good he could still do with the years he had left.
He never dwelled on his sudden conversion, and didn’t attribute it to conscience or God. He tried not to think about it, afraid he might jinx the joy he found in his new life.
Lomax retired. He cashed in his chips and bought a huge spread in Montana. Once a working ranch, the Big Sky Estate became a haven for foster children who could not fit in anywhere else, children who had been shunned, locked up, and abused.
Lomax was once razor sharp and whippet thin, as keen and dangerous as a honed blade, and just as heartless.
Lomax was older now. He was fatter, gentler, easy to laugh, full of love and fiercely protective of the six children who were now his children.
Lomax had lost his edge . . . at a time when that edge was needed most.
“You sure you got the right fuckin road?” Brenda was in the back seat of the old Chevy, behind Patty, who was driving.
“I’m sure,” Patty said. She was usually too timid for Brenda’s taste but she knew how to handle a car. Driving was why she had been locked up.
She drove getaway for a boyfriend with two bad habits; a meth addiction and a compulsion to rob banks. The fact that the dumb shit panicked on their last job and shot an off-duty cop who tried to defuse a tense situation didn’t help.
Patty had expected to spend the rest of her life in prison thanks to Benson Lomax, a horrible man who had seemed to enjoy ruining her life, until her sentence was reduced on a legal technicality from homicide to attempted robbery, with time served. She had gone into prison at nineteen, and had turned twenty-three the day she was released.
Brenda looked at Liz, who sat across from Patty in the driver’s seat.
“You sure you know how to read a fuckin map?”
“Don’t be such a bitch,” Liz said. Liz was tiny and lovely and looked much younger than thirty-six. She had been an accountant in a law firm until her boss had grabbed her one evening, called her his little China doll, and tried to kiss her. Liz had reacted by grabbing a letter-opener on her boss’s desk, one that looked like a tiny ceremonial sword. As her boss had breathed cognac-scented breath in her face and asked if her tight slant-eye slit was getting wet yet, she stabbed him in the groin and cut him from nuts to navel.
“I’m Vietnamese, you pig,” she’d told him them. He bled out and died before anyone could even call 911. In court, Liz tried to argue that she was only defending herself. The prosecutor, that cold bastard named Lomax, brought up her history of failed relationships and made her look unstable and dangerous. She was put away for ten years.
“Why don’t you lick my cunt?” Brenda was a big woman in her early fifties who often said, “Yeah, I’m a fuckin dyke, you got a problem with that?” She had beaten a man to death in a bar with her bare hands after he had seen her kissing her girlfriend at the time and had said they were the most ass-ugly rug-munchers he’d ever seen. Her lawyer was able to argue diminished capacity, Brenda was utterly shitfaced at the time, but Lomax had still put her away for twenty years.
“That’s my job, bitch,” Marisa said, her accent heavy. Marisa was twenty-eight, unspeakably beautiful, and unspeakably mean. She was also a former member of the Norteños who had been locked up for assault, arson and grand theft. The three strikes Lomax used to send her to prison were finally reduced to one after his retirement and after she spent a year sucking off two public defenders, a local representative of La Raza who publicized her mistreatment under the law as racial injustice, and a Ninth Circuit Court judge. She was sitting in the back seat beside Brenda. Her shoes were off and she had her feet in Brenda’s lap. Brenda kissed one of her toes, and she squealed. “Ayyy, mami!”
All of them had met in the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville. The women thought they had been screwed by Lomax. All of them thought Lomax should be made to pay. Brenda and Marisa were the most aggressive on that final point, they wanted to tear Lomax’s balls off and make him eat them. Liz was on the fence, but wanted the chance for a face to face with Lomax to plead her case and point out that he had been wrong, as pointless at that would be. Patty was just following in their wake.
She had no friends or family and nowhere else to go.
“Here’s the turn,” Liz said, pointing to a narrow road on the right.
Patty turned off the state road and onto what was not a road at all, but the five mile driveway to Big Sky Estates.
Marisa offered Brenda another toe for the kissing.
Brenda smiled and looked down the road. “Get ready, Lomax. The Fingerbang Quartet is coming, and you are going to pay, you son of a bitch.” Lomax had dressed after his morning shower, tied his shoes, huffing with the effort to reach past a gut that hadn’t been there ten years ago, and then looked at himself in the mirror.
Christ, he thought. I look like my father. He turned sideways.
Welcome to Gut City. Then he raised his eyes and looked at his own face.
There was a time when he avoided his own eyes in the mirror; there had been a hardness there that he really didn’t like. Now that face was gentle.
Open. Friendly. He smiled, and the smile came easily.
He patted his gut. A big belly for an easy smile. “Fair trade,” he said, and went downstairs where his rambunctious brood was already running amok, the big screen TV blasting Saturday morning cartoons.
Lomax went down the hall to the back door. He opened the door and peered through the screen. Lying on a plastic mat Lomax had put down were three prairie dogs, a skunk, and a porcupine. All of the animals looked vital and alive; their necks had been snapped so fast they had not time to react.