“Mister Burger?”
“You’re too young to use my grown-up name.”
This woman could destroy me. This woman’s hot white teeth could strip the skin from my bones. Dismantle me piece by piece. She could have me begging for that honour. To throw yourself at her is to throw yourself off a skyscraper. Screaming all the way down. Teeth driven into your skull like tent pegs into clay.
“Call me Sunshine. What are you doing here?”
“Paying my respects to the betrothed.”
“Well, the betrothed’s got no idea who in blue fuck you are.”
“You? Hitched to that tall drink of water?”
“The culmination of my every hope and dream.”
Her hubby-to-be’s axe-wound of a face registers pitiful gratefulness that this woman would condescend to entwine her life with his. Sunshine downs her second drink. The ice’s refraction magnifies the scar slit down her upper lip. Her fiancee’s name is Rodney.
“I had a dog named Rodney,” says James.
“He’s my little dog,” Sunshine goes. “My wittle Wodney.” She chucks him under the chin with the edge of her glass. “When hims a bad doggums, hims sleeps in da doghouse.”
Rodney smiles like a man in a tiger cage. Lovestruck sap. His every molecule made of galling attributes: servitude, resignation, bootlicking. As a man I want to slap him around out of pure heartsick revulsion.
Doctor Burger’s cure for the whole maudlin scene? Booze. An oil tanker’s worth. I line up shots of navy rum to fill my prescription. Prognosis: stunningly positive! Rodney’s hand pumps shot glasses into his face with the mechanics of an oil derrick. He tries to kiss Sunshine. She gets her elbow up. His lips meet the knob.
“You’re a slobbery drunk, darlin’. What’s the use getting all lovey-dovey now, champ? Why not save it for when it could be of value?” Stated to nobody in particular: “A wet noodle in the sack, this one. Like to bed down with a hunnert-fifty pounds of cooked spaghetti stuffed in tube socks. Keep thinking the cops’ll bust down the door and arrest me for what’sit? Sleeping with dead things…?”
“Necrophilia?” James offers.
“Yeah!” Her laugh is so profoundly crazed you could imagine it echoing down the austere halls of a funny farm. “On the money!”
How exhausting it must be for Sunshine. Stomping Rodney’s self esteem at clockwork intervals. Rodney’s skull half-squashed from her foot. But then some men yearn to die curled up in a boot-print.
A fuse blows inside my head and when the juice flows again I’m in a pickup between Sunshine driving and Rodney riding shotgun. The Shave-ass Raygull spilled over Sunshine’s jeans makes it look she’s pissed herself. This close she smells of mentholated cigarettes and Noxema. Crazily alluring. Reaching between my legs to downshift, she gives my crotch a cheery honk. Her poor prehensile tail of a fiancée turns from the moon-plated river to face us.
“Nice having you at our party, Fletcher. Sincerely. We made a new friend.”
“Bless your pea-pickin’ heart,” says Sunshine. “You’re too fuckin’ corn-pone to live.”
“Never claimed to be perfect.”
Rodney’s spine must have marinated in battery acid. Strange wonder his ribcage doesn’t sag to his hipbone. Sunshine swings into a gravelled half-moon facing the water. We spill out laughing — Jesus, at what? I’m about ready to slip a dry cleaning bag over my head. I gulp air coming off the river in hopes of oxygenating my rum-soaked cells. I am seriously hallucination-hammered. Sunshine staggers down to the water.
“Got to tinkle, boysy-woysies!”
Rodney’s bellied over the truck fender. His body comes by such positions naturally. Not a single unbroken posture. A cannonball on a chain hooked to his forehead.
Sunshine returns topless. Standing at the lip of the berm with her head cocked. Just… y’know, BAM. All there.
“Look at yous two. Standing there with your teeth in your mouth.”
A body so young taken in by the eyes of a man old as me… lechery only another word for jealousy. I want to eat her skin. She hoists herself onto the hood. Undoes the topmost button on her jeans.
“Put your hands all over me, Fletcher. A real man’s hands, for once.”
She’s crazy. Not in any diagnosable way. Not so much that she’ll bring harm to anybody but herself and those who hie too closely. My hands on her would only be an encouragement of that lunacy but what was my onus of burden? Me, with the lifespan of a fruit fly.
“Sunny, baby. You make loving you hell.”
“I’m just sitting, Rod. If this man’s hands happen upon my body, well, it’s not me causing that collision, now is it?”
The heat of the engine block warms the hood where I set my hand. Moonlight plays upon the water. A vein of white fire snaking through things.
“Go ahead and fuck me.” She pulls the take of their stag and doe from her jeans. “We’ll leave this scratch-ass town. Escape.” Ex-cape. “Just us two.”
Is she purposely degrading herself with those crumpled fives and tens? Her jeans melt down to her ankles. When a woman really wants to shed her clothes it is an act of bodily voodoo. Lips shiny with blackberry Chapstick. She draws down the lip of her panties. I see the definitions of her intimates same way you spot a mouse at the mouth of its hole: by the wet glints of teeth and eye.
I say: “You doing anything about your little sexpot of a fiancée, here, Rodney?”
“He’s my dickless little dog.”
Rodney moans like a sick animal. My hand traces Sunshine’s neck. The panicked thrum of her heartbeat in my fingertips. This expression of fear and disgust skims over her face — fleeting, but it’s all there in that. Sunshine laid open like one of those Dali women with the chest of drawers where her guts should be. My rummaging hands inside. I’ve been wrong from the get-go: believing Rodney lives in wretchedness when in truth he exists in a state of ongoing ecstasy.
“You don’t want me. You couldn’t possibly.”
“Sure,” she say. “Sure I do.”
They love one another. You can glimpse such twisted configurations and acknowledge yes, it is still love. A brutal and excruciating manifestation but unmistakably so. Love as a sickness.
“Fuck me, Fletcher. Take me away.”
“I won’t.”
“What’s the matter with me?”
Turning from her, I offer: “You’re cute enough.”
“I wouldn’t mind,” says Rodney.
Sunshine claws a hand around my hips. That I’m not erect infuriates her.
“Two dickless wonders!”
“I could fuck you, Sunshine, but I couldn’t kiss you.” I’m a brutal human specimen. “Not with your lip like that.”
Retrospectively speaking, I shouldn’t have said this with my back turned.
“Pussyeating dickface motherfucker!”
She leaps onto my back. One mitt’s sunk into my hair while the other lances stiff shots into the veinbunched curve of my throat. The shock of it is quasiparalyzing: the way you’d feel inadvertently catching your mother naked through an open bedroom door. An idiotic sense of masculinity compels me to make like she isn’t hurting me when in fact it hurts vastly.
“Rodney. Please… control your woman.”
By whipping side-to-side I manage to buck her off. She strips off a plug of scalp. I stagger toward the river with blood trickling down my neck.
Zany bitch!
“Stick your pecker in her, y’old buckethead!”
“She’s gonna be your wife,” I tell Rodney. “Do your own grunt work!”
At the lip of the berm Sunshine kicks me in the spine. The spectre of getting an eye poked out petrifies me. Clamp my eyelids tight. Hurts like hell but I laugh a sad bastard’s dirge rolling blindly down. Must have sounded I was mortally injured because when I check up on the lee side their truck motor is gunning into silence.