“Son of a bitch, “struggling with the bent edges of a microwave dinner, unable to separate foil from plate. “I’m sorry. I’m listening.”
“What if,” grinning, palms flat on canted hips, and certain of applause, “what if we put a camcorder down the Funhole?”
My fork was bending against the foil. I smiled, at a loss. “Sounds good.”
A chilly look, not entirely dimming her cool wattage but certainly a pall. “Think about it,” in a tone suggesting that though this might be beyond me, it was still my duty to try. “You’re the one who gave me the idea. An eye, you said, and I thought, right: a camcorder. Turned on, recording everything. Everything. It’d be like going down there yourself, almost. Almost as good.”
I shoved the dinner into the microwave, turned it on, sat across from where she stood. “Nakota, it’s a good, it’s a great idea, but we don’t have a camcorder, and we can’t—”
“Two words,” holding up two fingers, slim as candles.
I waited.
“Video,” bending one finger, “Hut.” The other.
For once, I argued. I mean really argued, which at first genuinely surprised her, then angered her to a high cold pitch I had rarely seen. We went through all the steps: I couldn’t do it, they’d find out, I was a worse thief than a liar and I was a lousy liar, she knew that. “They’re paranoid about their camcorders,” I told her. “There’s only two to rent, there’s no way one wouldn’t be missed. This isn’t some big chain store,” trying not to yell, again, “this is Video Hut for God’s sake, they bought those damned things with their own money, they take them home on weekends to take pictures of their kids!”
“Borrow one then,” but I had an answer to that, too, imagine me as the answer man: the upfront rule was No Borrowing.
“Then I’ll do it myself.”
“Nakota, no.”
“I can’t believe,” her voice low and slow and venomously cold, “that you’re not with me on this, that you can worry so much about getting caught, about that shitty two-bit job—”
“I have to eat,” I said. “Every day.”
“I’ll do it,” she said again, “myself..Or,” more coldly still, “I’ll do it without a camcorder.”
She said this like a duelist with the laughable advantage, but oh yeah, I am stupid, it took me a second or two to figure out what she didn’t mean —a camera—and then what she did. And that she did. Explicitly.
I said absolutely nothing, stood there with my mouth still open on my next brilliant point, looking into those eyes that looked into mine with the calm confidence of the winner, because either way, either way she had won. I still said nothing but she saw somewhere in the slump of my features my acquiescence, and as soon as she saw it she did not smile but gave nie a nod that was almost worse.
“Let me know,” she said, “if you need me to help.”
In the end it was almost stupidly easy, fitting I suppose for someone as clumsy at larceny as I am—I was never even a shoplifter, for God’s sake. The. late-night Saturday shift was universally despised; it was no trouble to volunteer, and best of all I could do it on paper, penciling in my guilty initials beside the perennial request.
When Saturday came it was no trouble, either, to volunteer to count out drawers: I was assistant manager after all. I counted each twice, nervous, irritating Nakota, who stood, camcorder in hand, hip-cocked and sport-coated in the fluorescent radiance of the back room. The rest of the store was near dark, small pockets of security light here and there, except where they really needed it, right?
“I’m not taking this,” over my shoulder for the hundredth time. “We’re gonna do this, and get it over with, and bring it right back.”
“Yes, Mommy,” but distracted, without any real heat, she was too excited. When the drawers were counted out and locked in the safe, I turned out the back-room lights, stood blinded in the sudden absence of dazzle, she beside me more blinded still.
“Ready?” impatiently, but she squeezed my arm, not even, I thought, a sop but genuine excitement, wanting to share it with me, coconspirator and part-time stooge. Locking up, her hand still on my arm, in her pocket—I saw this at a red light—three oversize Hershey bars, stolen from the fake concession-stand display. She saw me looking at them and smiled, big mock shrug.
“Want one?” It was good, too.
Back home she ran up the stairs, literally, soundlessly, as I trudged one floor past, leaving her to it. Your show, Nakota.
It seemed a very long while to me, ensconced in the bathroom, taking a much-deserved shit, and suddenly her pounding on the dpor and me yelling how it was open and there she was in the bathroom, holding the empty carton of a videotape.
“Rolling,” she said, and for a moment we said nothing, only looked at each other, imagining the red idiot eye staring down into all that dark, awaiting whatever sea change was inherent in the trip.
“Beer,” she said, a quick positive nod and for once it was an idea I could agree with, wholeheartedly, even while shitting. She stood there, leaning against the damp-bubbled wallpaper that depicted sick lavender seahorses at play in a sleazy gold-leaf sea, her eyes almost closed, lids minutely twitching as if she dreamed.
All at once a distraction, in the form of me standing, postwipe, pants around my ankles and with her eyes open she knelt right there on the bathroom floor and took me in her mouth.
Oh did she feel good. Bony hands cupping my balls as she worked me, hair swinging in hypnotic rhythm and I grabbed that hair, that head, pulled her tight to me, her nose, I felt it, softly bending against my body, my breath rising, groaning hard and quiet when I came. Slow, slow she pulled away, wiped her slick mouth like a fed cat. I leaned against the sink, puffing out a spent breath, and saw her lean elbows-over the toilet and expertly expel a milky stream of semen, gazing up at me as she did and daring me with that gaze to complain.
“I can’t stand that shit,” she said when she was done. An almost smug smile. “Nothing personal.”
Yet she was almost burlesque in her—nice-ness? Nakota? She went out as promised for beer, came back with a whole case, whuffing as she humped it inside. She wouldn’t let me help. Or pay.
“My treat,” she said firmly.
She even drank one, sitting next to me, cozy on the open couchbed, reading aloud from Flan-nery O’Connor and laughing in the least appropriate spots. I patted her skinny thigh, listening to that charmingly artificial reading voice, a schoolmarm voice I told her and she smiled, nodding, not displeased by my comparison.
We got almost all the way through “The Enduring Chill,” my head nodding like a baby’s, sweetly drunk and her voice a serenade and I woke up with a start, terribly thirsty, all alone. But I heard the toilet flush and saw her come out, wearing only panties, groping a little even in that familiar space to find her way back; she had dismal night vision. She climbed beside me, * under the blanket but sitting up, and I felt without thinking that she tolled the hours like a human alarm clock, waiting for her video to ripen.
“How long?” I said, guttural beery voice, and she said, “Pretty quick now,” and next I knew I was alone again, and she up and dressed and nervous, fiddling with my balky VCR, the camcorder safely propped against the couch-bed. “Here,” I said, muzzy in the midst of a hangover, my descending foot disturbing a small phalanx of empty cans, too many beers. “Let me.”
“Hurry up.”
She couldn’t even take the time to sit. Staring at the screen and me trudging back to the couch-bed, wanting water but wanting to wait, just a minute, see what was up; I get curious too.