HELLz BELLz (12 page)

“You get her feet and I’ll get her head,” Joe told Suzie as he bent down to slide his hands under Sara’s head and shoulders.

“Wait.” Suzie was on her feet, stepping around the bundled body on the floor. Her fingers slid around Joe’s elbow and raised him up. There was something in the gesture that reminded him of a holy person raising up a lowly sinner, an odd ceremonial solemnity to her bearing.

“What?”

Her hand found his and interlaced their fingers. She pulled him toward the bathroom.

“I’ve got to clean up that cut. The blood’s bothering me, okay? Won’t take but a minute.”

“It’s fine, it’s not—”

She touched a fingertip to his lips. “Shush.”

“But Sara’s—”

“She’s fine. Snug as a bug in a rug. Come on. Take your medicine like a big boy. I’ll be gentle.” She flashed him a smile that might’ve been lascivious—he no longer trusted his ability to read gestures, smiles or the subtler nuances of interpersonal interaction.

Each knell of the distant bell seemed to subtract another portion of his self-control and further undermined his orientation to reality. A death knell? Certainly there was an aura of death and dying in the air tonight. A sense of something dying and of something else being born. But exactly
what
was dying, he couldn’t say. All he had were questions without answers. And an ominous sense of dislocation. Even the familiar rooms of his home felt alien to him now. That was his wife bundled on the floor, but he was emotionally estranged from her—maybe even from himself. Unlikely events and sinister vibrations were overtaking reality and restructuring it from the bottom up. Or so it seemed. How could he trust his perceptions with that goddamn bell banging like a battering ram on the gates of his besieged consciousness? How could he do anything but let the young woman in the red halter lead him into the bathroom and yield to her tender ministrations?

She opened the medicine cabinet over the sink, took down a bottle of rubbing alcohol, tore off a handful of toilet tissue and saturated it with the antiseptic liquid, then gently wiped the abrasion over his eye. She pursed her full lips, rose up on her tiptoes and blew her warm breath on his cut, speeding the evaporation of the alcohol and creating a burning/cooling sensation. It was the most erotic thing Joe had ever experienced. Her lips only inches from his face, pursed like a crinkled rosebud, blowing smoky breath from inside her, from her lungs, washing his flesh, her full attention on him, on giving a part of herself to him, some of the air that had been filtered and biochemically exchanged
inside
her body. The intimacy was overwhelming.

His pulse thumped in his ears. His penis stirred to life, blood diverted from its usual course to facilitate engorgement of complaisant muscle. His breathing picked up the heart’s allegro tempo. His hands trembled as they found her small waist.

The womb-like coziness of the bathroom somehow made it feel right. But…

“I…”

She leaned into him and lightly touched her lips to his. It was a soft, silent kiss. A tender little nip.

“We…”

She smiled. Silenced him with a second kiss. Parting her lips this time, and slipping the tip of her tongue past his lips. Tongue tips meeting, his sliding beneath hers and entering her mouth while hers stayed inside him, insinuating the unthinkable. Daring the unacceptable. Drawing him into taboo territory.

His hands migrated to her breasts and cupped the generous mounds. Her nipples were hard little buttons pressing against his palms. His erection pushed against her lower belly. She ground her hips into him, moaning in his mouth. She reached behind him and dug her fingers into the cheeks of his buttocks. She pulled him tighter against her.

She withdrew her tongue and lips and gasped: “Oh, God.”

Then she unbuckled his belt and unsnapped his pants. The zipper went down with a metallic rasp, and she reached inside the slit in his undershorts and closed her fingers around his rock-hard cock.

His breath caught in the back of his throat and he shuddered and twitched.

“My wife…” he panted.

Suzie closed the bathroom door with her foot. “She’s not even there,” she whispered, tightening her grip on his vein-ridged erection. Her fingertips bore into the underbelly of his penis, just below the helmeted glans, and he thought he was going to explode in her hand.

“Jesus,” he gasped.

“Yeah,” she whispered in his ear.

He unknotted her halter-top and peeled it away from her shoulders and breasts.

She let go of his cock and used both hands to yank his slacks and shorts down to his ankles. She had to squat to get them down, and his penis was in her face. She looked up at him and smiled that same lascivious smile, then she licked her lips, widened her mouth and took the head of his cock into it and began to suck, softly at first, then with maddening force.

Suddenly dizzy, Joe swayed and leaned his lower spine against the edge of the sink for support. He held her head between his palms and closed his eyes.

“Joseph?”

Was he hearing things, or was that Sara calling out to him from the bedroom? She never called him Joe. Joseph or sometimes Joey, but never Joe.

“Joseph?” Definitely Sara’s voice. No doubt about it.

He opened his eyes and looked down at the top of Suzie Shrimpton’s head. He could see the dark roots where her dye-job needed retouching. “We have to stop,” he whispered.

She looked up at him, half of his cock embedded in her mouth, and shook her head: No.

He tried to pull out, and she responded by clamping her teeth on his penis, just hard enough to cause sweet pain.

What if the bell has finally gotten to her and she decides to bite off my dick?

Sara called again: “Joseph, why did you tie me up? Get in here right now and get me out of this thing.”

Joe tried once more to free himself from Suzie’s mouth. She bit down harder, letting him know that she was in the catbird seat now and that he was completely vulnerable and at her mercy.

“We need a flashlight,” said James.

“We need a fucking gun,” said Josh, wiping sweat from his forehead as he ogled Brenda Butts’s tits.

“Well,
I
need something to drink,” Brenda said.

“Yeah, me too,” said Barbra, jamming her hands in the back pockets of her cutoff jeans and making her breasts stand out under her cotton shirt. “It’s too damn hot.”

“Somebody should stay here and keep an eye on the church in case whoever’s in there comes out.”

“What if somebody does?” Josh scrunched up his face. “What then?”

“Then we’ll see who it is,” James answered as if addressing a simpleton.

“Big fucking deal. Who cares? Probably just your moms,” said Josh, using the black vernacular for
mom.
It sounded ludicrous on his whiteboy lips.

“You stay,” James told him. “We’ll be right back.

“Shit. All right, but bring me something cold to drink. A beer, if you got one.”

Josh parked his ass on the hood of the Butt Sisters’ car and folded his arms across his chest. James and the twins crossed the street and went in the front door of his house. The tolling of the bell followed them inside and seemed to lend a gothic air to his home’s interior.

“There’s Evian in the fridge,” he said, pointing the girls toward the kitchen. “I’ll be right back.”

Brenda and Barbra sauntered into the kitchen with the leather soles of their sandals slapping torpid time on the tile. James cut through the den where his mother would usually be found at this time of night, ensconced in front of the TV in her favorite chair, but she wasn’t there and the TV screen was black. He went to the stairs and paused with his hand on the newel, wondering if he should find his mother. He wanted to know that she was all right—that the onerous effect of the bell hadn’t led her to some domestic disaster—but, on the other hand, he didn’t want to have to explain what he was up to, that he and his friends were about to go across the street and enter the condemned church to see who was skulking about there and to find out what the hell was up with that frigging bell. He gazed up at the darkened stair steps, sighed, and began his ascent.

The higher he went, the hotter the indoor air became. The upstairs rooms would be cool enough, but there were no vents to blow the air-conditioner’s cool breath into the hallway, and the day’s heat had collected out here and now simmered like arid soup, absorbing the stray scents from all the rooms of the house—chief among them was the old-lady scent of his grandmother. Her cloying perfume, lotions and medicinals didn’t mask the aroma of old-age: the miasma arising from dry, yellowing skin, sickly urine, worn-out feet, and brittle old bones. It was the heavy musk of a life winding down, and it saddened James to have to breathe it, knowing that the day soon would come when the old lady would be gone forever and that her scent would remain long after her passing, haunting him like a vaporous ghost and reminding him daily of the sad fact of human mortality. He shuddered in the thick heat on the second-floor landing. He walked softly past the old lady’s room and stopped at the darkened doorway of his mother’s lair. He rapped softly on the door frame, then reached in and flicked the light switch. The overhead light came on and illuminated her empty, unmade bed. He crossed the room and checked the adjoining bathroom, which was likewise empty.

Where the hell was she? Her car was parked in the driveway and it wasn’t likely she would’ve gone for a stroll on such a sweltering night. So where the hell
was
she? A sour knot of dread formed in his stomach. There was a definite
wrongness
in the enclosed atmosphere, a sinister skewing of normality. Or was it nothing more than the effect the endless tolling of the bell was having on him? He’d wrecked his car, nearly been killed by a psychotic ice cream man, and had seen the town’s inhabitants rushing toward total anarchy, so of course things felt fundamentally wrong. How else could they feel? It didn’t necessarily follow that something bad had happened to his mother.

James shut off the light and walked with stealth to his grandmother’s room. She was on her bed, apparently asleep. The TV was tuned to the History Channel and Adolph Hitler was addressing his militant multitudes. James stood at the edge of the bed and softly called: “Grammy?” He felt ridiculously immature calling her that, but at the same time he felt the weight of his lifelong affection for her. True, she had become increasingly ornery and cantankerous in her twilight years, and of late, she seemed to enjoy nagging and bickering with her daughter, but she hadn’t yet turned her hostility on him—except for the occasional sarcastic remark concerning his style of dress or his taste in music.

She didn’t respond to his voice. For an alarming moment, he thought she might’ve passed away in her sleep, but then he saw the slow rise and fall of her thin chest and sagging breasts and relief stayed his reaching hand. He didn’t see how she could sleep with the bell raising hell right across the street, but he wasn’t about to disturb her now. He crept quietly from the room.

As he went down the stairs, it occurred to him that his mother might’ve gone next door to visit Mrs. Randall, and his sense of wrongness and dread abated. Sure, that was probably where she was. Why hadn’t he thought of that before now? Because of the constant tolling of that fucking bell. Why else? Fuck it. It was time to get over there and see exactly what the hell was going on, and to put a stop to the goddamn racket.

Barbra was crunching a nibble from a celery stick, and Brenda was finishing off a bottle of water when he rejoined them in the kitchen.

“Thought maybe you fell in,” Brenda said.

“Huh?” He looked at the wet spots on her shirt where she’d dribbled water on her breasts.

“Never mind. Can we go now? I’m getting bored.”

Barbra giggled, apparently at some private joke.

“Yeah,” he said. He opened the cabinet door over the microwave to get the flashlight. Standing beside the Rayovac were two cans of spray paint, one metallic gold, and the other red. He grabbed the flashlight and the can of red paint, then said, “How ’bout a little graffiti action to relieve your boredom?”

Brenda shrugged. “The church? Sure. Why the hell not?”

He clicked on the flashlight to make sure the batteries were still good. On impulse, he put the beam of light on Brenda’s chest.

“Hey, what—” she started.

“You spilled water on yourself,” he said, suddenly self-conscious and masking it with a weak smile. He moved the light off her chest.

“Pervert,” said Barb, biting off another piece of the celery stick and tossing the remainder in the garbage can.

“Can I use your phone?” asked Brenda, eyeing the wall-phone above the bread box.

“Knock yourself out.” James switched off the flashlight and opened the fridge to get bottles of water for himself and for Josh.

She lifted the handset from the switch-hook prongs and said, “Have to check in with Mom and let her know we’ll be a little late.” She held the phone to her ear and frowned. “It’s dead. Can’t get a dial tone.” She toggled the switch-hook. Her frown deepened. “Yep. Dead as hell.”

Barbra touched James on the shoulder. “Hey, you weren’t shitting us about the town going nuts, were you? About your car and the ice cream man and all?”

“No. I swear.”

“And now the phones don’t work.” She turned to her sister. “I think we should go home, you know, to make sure Mom’s okay.”

“She’s fine,” insisted Brenda. “I doubt she can even hear the fucking bell. You know how loud she plays her DVDs. You could drop a bomb in the front yard and she’d think it was part of the movie.”

“Let’s turn on the TV,” suggested Barb. “If something’s really going on, the local station would have it.”

“The mighty W-DHX?” James scoffed. He set the bottle of water and the can of spray paint on the counter. “They never have shit.” Then he amended: “Or shit’s all they have.”

“I’m gonna check it out,” said Barb. “Where’s your TV?”

“In the den,” he said, pointing the way.

She went into the den and turned on the television. James and Brenda went after her, and they stood shoulder to shoulder as the picture tube lit up with a crackle of static electricity and formed an image of a car on the brightening screen. Giant ants were pursuing the car.