Evil at Heart (41 page)

           
Archie lifted his head again. Jeremy was partially aroused. There was a sturdy-looking pipe overhead. Two ropes dangled from it. Jeremy stepped on a child’s plastic step stool, attached the ring around his testicles to a hook at the end of one rope, took the other rope in his hands to control the weight, and then kicked back, so that he was dangling from his genitals. His testicles stretched eight inches and Jeremy slowly leaned back, letting go of the safety rope. He dangled there, hung from his groin, red-faced, his back arched so that his head and feet were at the same level.

           
“There are easier ways to punish yourself, Jeremy.”

           
After a few minutes, Jeremy reached up and took hold of the rope he was hanging from, and used it to sit up enough to grab onto the safe rope. He swung his feet back down to the step stool,

           
unhooked his testicles, sank to the floor, curled on his side, and started masturbating. He did not seem to be aware of Archie anymore, did not seem to care that he was there. He was neither performing for him, nor being exactly discreet.

           
When he came, his body shuddered and the ejaculate shot several feet forward, before it landed, a milky glop on the concrete floor.

           
This kid was more fucked-up than Archie thought.

           
Jeremy laughed. “You should try it,” he said. He rolled onto his back and wiped his hands on his bare thighs. “You’ve never felt anything like it.”

           
Gretchen had done a number on Archie. But she’d outdone herself with Jeremy Reynolds.

           
“When did you start to remember?” Archie asked him.

           
Jeremy stared up at the ceiling. “When she took you,” he said. He waved a hand in the air. “All the press. It brought back memories. Flashes at first. But they filled in.”

           
“That must have been horrible,” Archie said.

           
Jeremy rolled his head over and looked at Archie. “You understand, right?”

           
He did understand. At least he was in a unique position to imagine. But then again, Archie thought, you don’t see me hanging by my scrotum.

           
“She killed your sister,” Archie said. “You need help. There are people who can help you. I’ve been helped.”

           
Jeremy stood up and lifted the robe back over his shoulders. “You can help me,” he said. “And I can help you. Because we know, don’t we?” He put his lips next to Archie’s ear. “We know her. We know pain and pleasure. The whole universe is just an immense, inexorable torture-garden. Blood everywhere.”

           
“O-kay,” Archie said.

           
Jeremy gave Archie a little push, and he swung forward and back. “How do you feel?” Jeremy asked.

           
“Like a marionette,” said Archie.

           
Jeremy reached above him and pulled the rigging, wrenching Archie upward.

           
Archie steeled himself, balling his fists against the pain. And then it settled.

           
“Exhale,” Jeremy said.

           
And Archie did.

           
Jeremy moved his mouth to Archie’s ear again. “Do you know what I think about?” he asked. “When I’m hanging there and my balls feel like they’re going to explode?”

           
Archie had the feeling it was a rhetorical question.

           
“I think about you fucking her,” Jeremy said. “I think about her hurting you, making you do things, and then I think about you on top of her forcing her, fucking the shit out of her, so that when you come, it’s so hot and hard it’s like a fist inside her.”

           
Jeremy’s eyes were closed. It was all fantasy. He couldn’t possibly know that Archie and Gretchen had had an affair.

           
“Doesn’t being upside down like that make the blood rush to your head?” Archie asked, changing the subject.

           
“You get used to it,” Jeremy said.

           
C H A P T E R 48

           
Leo Reynolds pulled his Volvo into the parking lot of a club called George’s Dancin’ Bare, directly across from a thirty-one-foot-tall painted plaster statue of Paul Bunyan in the Kenton neighborhood of North Portland.

           
The statue had been erected in 1959 to greet visitors to the Oregon Centennial Exposition and International Trade Fair. He was dressed in belted and cuffed dungarees, six-foot-tall black boots, and a black and red checkered shirt, and he was leaning on a giant axe.

           
The sun was coming up and the peach sky made the Dancin’ Bare’s plain tan façade look especially forlorn. Paul Bunyan leered at them from across the street.

           
Archie was with Jeremy and she was going to a titty bar.

           
Susan looked skeptically at her phone. It was 5

           
A.M. No bar was open this late.

           
“Private party,” Leo said, getting out of the car and heading for the club’s front door.

           
Susan followed him. An orange and black plastic sign very

           
clearly announced that the club was closed. Susan was just about to say something like “See? I told you so,” when Leo pulled out his BlackBerry and punched in a number.

           
“It’s me,” he said. “I’m outside.”

           
The door opened almost immediately and a man stepped halfway out, his hand on the inside door handle. He was huge and bearded and wore a checkered flannel shirt. Susan turned around and glanced back at Paul Bunyan. Then back at the man.

           
“I get that a lot,” the man said to Susan. He smiled, revealing a gold front tooth, then put a meaty hand on Leo’s shoulder. “How ya doing, Leo?” he said, and he opened the door and gestured them inside.

           
The door opened onto a narrow wood-paneled entryway. Posters for amateur night and offers to meet this girl or that girl “up close” plastered the walls. Paul Bunyan stayed behind, taking a seat next to the door and going back to reading a library copy of The Sheltering Sky.

           
Like every strip club Susan had ever been to, it smelled like sweat and cigarettes and beer. The carpet was a ratty brown. The walls were stained with decades of cigarette smoke. There were only a few patrons—two middle-aged guys in sweatshirts at the bar, and two more at a small stage, where a woman danced in a pair of black flouncy underpants. She had massive breasts and huge wine-colored nipples. Her nipples were bigger than Susan’s entire breasts. They lunged and swayed as she moved. Susan was fascinated. The song “Milkshake” was blasting over the speakers. A busted subwoofer made the bass notes tremble. No one seemed very happy. For a private party, it didn’t seem to be a very festive event.

           
Leo didn’t stop. He took her hand and led her past the bar, past several tables, to another part of the club. This was where the real action was, apparently. There was a big stage, complete with a brass

           
pole and a fully naked woman. Several men sat smoking at the stage’s rack. A waitress in short-shorts and a yellow T-shirt leaned up against a wall.

           
She smiled when she saw Leo.

           
Just beyond the big stage was a third stage, near the back of the bar. This one had a rack all the way around it, but only one patron, a twentysomething black man who sat, looking gangsta, with a stack of bills and a beer in front of him.

           
The dancer on this stage was completely naked. Her breasts were of a more normal proportion, her body was lean and firm, and she’d been fully and effectively waxed. The hair on top of her head was so blond and so long and lush and gently curled that Susan thought it might be a wig. There was a brass pole at the center of the stage, and the dancer leaped, straddling it four feet off the ground, and spun, back arched, one knee bent, painted toes pointed, her hair flying out behind her, her breasts sitting at attention on her chest. Ha, Susan thought. Implants.

           
“You’re staring,” Leo said.

           
Susan colored. “I like her hair,” she said.

           
Leo led Susan over to the stage. She tried to stand up straight, so that she’d seem taller, and arched her back so her 34As would poke out a bit. When they got to the rack, Leo dropped her hand and tapped the gangsta kid on the shoulder.