Mangled Meat (5 page)

“Hey,” she greeted.

Heyton’s eyes struggled for a place to look first. The rotundity that replaced her lap told him she was well into the third-trimester—his favorite, for the closer they were to term, the most extreme the image, the same way a donut-addict would pick out the cream-filled with the most bloat.

“Oh, shit, don’t tell me you’re one of those screwballs who never says a word...”

Heyton snapped back. “I’m sorry, hi, er—” the words tripped around in his mouth. “You caught me by surprise—” and then he flinched when a horn brayed behind him.

“Light’s green,” she said.

Mallet-head!
Now the rearview showed him a Yellow Cab, and an irate Pakistani shaking his fist. Heyton trounced the gas. “Sorry.”

He detected more than saw her smile. Pretty scents began to intoxicate him; usually streetwalkers didn’t smell good, but this one could’ve just stepped from a lavender bubble bath. She also dressed quite smartly for her kind: beige cargo shorts and a cranberry scoop-neck maternity t-shirt. The clothes augmented her pregnancy rather than covered it up. Nipple-tips the size of thumb-ends tented the cranberry fabric which stuck finely as tulle to the engorged orbs.

Heyton’s palms grew slick on the wheel.

“I saw you drive by couple times,” she said, adjusting her girth in the seat. “You gotta be careful doing that—it flags the cops.”

Heyton knew the scene all too well. Nothing close to solicitation had taken place yet; if the john wasn’t the first to speak up, the girls would be worried about entrapment. “The cops, yes, well, I’m not a cop, if that’s what you’re driving at. I’m a software salesman from South Dakota.”

“Cool. I knew you weren’t five-oh, could tell by the look in your eyes.”

Heyton found the comment intriguing. “Oh, yeah?”

“Sure, man. Dudes into pregnant chicks all look the same: suits, rental cars, middle-aged but in good shape, and the same something or other in the eyes.”

“Really?”

“Um-hmm. Then I was positive when I saw you giving Tracie the once-over.”

“Huh?”

“That knocked-up junkie pipe-cleaner you were eyeballing back there.” She flipped down the visor mirror to finnick with her hair. Heyton liked her nonchalant attitude. “Shit, man, don’t EVER pick that bitch up. She’s crazy from AIDS, carries a box-cutter. Beats the shit out of me how a chick that fucked up can even
get
pregnant. Usually smackheads miscarry mid-term. That walking piece of trash’d shit her kid into the sewer, then keep right on turning tricks she’s so low down.”

The rough talk rolled so smoothly off her lips, Heyton didn’t even flinch.
And she tagged me right away,
he reminded himself.

The “look in your eyes,” she’d said.

Finally she examined him, with bright blue eyes in a cheerleader’s face, a creamy white complexion bereft of blemish.

Oh, yes. This one was perfect.

“So what do you want?”

There.

“How much for all night?”

The query seemed to catch her off guard. Ninety-percent of a streetwalker’s business was quick car-tricks, usually of the oral variety. Heyton needed the
image,
and he needed it to be
sustained.

She tried to sound casual. “Shit, man. That takes me off the stroll for the whole night. I can make a lot of money overnight.”

“I’ll pay a thousand,” Heyton said.

Dark, perfect brows popped up. “Gotta see it, you know?”

Heyton gave her the roll. Her thumb riffled through it like a Bicycle deck, then she stuffed it into a wrist purse. “All right. Let’s go.”

***

“Nice and cool in this dump,” she said and sighed. “Usually the a/c’s for shit in this motel.” Heyton locked the door and closed the brass slide. He was already so aroused by the sight of her he could only think in snippets.
Remember. She’s a whore. She’s a criminal. Oh, God, she’s so beautiful. Just. Be. Careful...
She carried all eight and a half months quite gracefully, sauntering to the bathroom.

Quick.

Yes, one always had to be careful. He took down the preposterous manatee painting, behind which he’d already hung a plastic bag. In the bag he placed his wallet, car keys, and cell phone, then had the painting back up in seconds. “You got anything hard to drink?” she called from the bathroom. He could hear a tinkle.

He was already pouring himself one. “Just scotch.”

“I’ll have one, on ice.”

Heyton poured a second. He noticed his hands shaking; he couldn’t recall anticipation so potent. Excitement dried his mouth out until the sharp liquor replenished it.
Jesus...
He sat down to steady the shaking; his armpits felt sodden.
Christ, I hope I don’t stink. I’m sweating like a pig.

The door clicked. “You in a rush to get started? If you are, that’s cool.”

She’d exited the bathroom nude. Heyton could’ve been a wide-eyed wooden Indian at the first’s bed edge...

She crossed the room like a spotlight. “Huh?”

“Oh, no—” Heyton gulped. “There’s no rush.”

“Good. Lemme sit down a minute. We got all night.”

She sat on the edge of the opposing twin bed, and reached for her scotch. Without looking at him, her bare foot gently planted itself between his legs.

Heyton’s entire psyche seemed to inflate.

“Thing about Florida is it’s so damn
hot.
Sometimes we gotta stroll fourteen, sixteen hours just to get what we need.” Her small-talk ensued oblivious to the lewd attentions of her foot. Heyton hoped his teeth weren’t chattering.

“Ruh-really?”

“Oh, sure, man.” Her tongue sucked up an ice-cube, rolled it around, then let it back into the glass. “I’ve tricked all up and down the east coast.”

Heyton’s brain split, one half focused on her raving image, one half trying to stay linear. “Why work here then? It’s got to be cooler up north, just about anywhere, I’d imagine.”

She snorted, looking around the room. “Yeah, it’s cooler, but you don’t live as long. Johns are more whacked out up there. New York, Baltimore, Boston—holy shit. Some real sick pups looking for girls up there.”

Heyton scarcely heard her. He was staring...

Her nudity didn’t seem brazen at all, nor trashy, just natural—a woman’s beauty in extremity. He could’ve moaned at the spectacle of her breasts: the size of melons but white as whipping cream. It wasn’t a milk fetish with him (lactophilia was the name for that one), it was the overall fullness: breasts full of milk, belly full of baby, blood and brain full of hormones—full to bursting. The end-phase of fecundity, one human life stuffed with another, and that same fullness forging the image he’d become addicted to just as surely and hopelessly as these nocturnal urchins were to crack.

It was that indefinable stark raving
image...

Rose-pink areolae were stretched by mammiferousness to the circumference a beer can top. More imagery, more of that heady contrast: the sharp delineated pink against the snow-flesh breasts. Heyton’s gaze shimmied down, over the magnificent belly stretched pinprick-tight, the inverted acorn of a navel. Lower, she’d shaved herself quite meticulously. Heyton thought of an adorable tart of flesh.

She lit a cigarette now, and sat to let the edge of scotch take away the undoubted need for drugs. “Bet you wouldn’t think I get more tricks when I’m pregnant.” She seemed to catch herself. “But, no, I don’t mean I let myself get knocked up on purpose, fuck no—that’d be sick. I just mean there are a lot of guys like you out there.”

The foot continued to work his groin. “There’s, uh, actually a name for it.”

“Huh?”

“Sexual...attraction to...pregnant women. It’s called cyesolagnia.”

She looked cockeyed. “Whatever!”

“I guess,” he almost stammered, “we all...have our weaknesses.”

“Well, yeah, I sure as shit do, but I figure if it doesn’t hurt other people what’s the big deal?” Then she looked down at her belly as though just noticing the hypocrisy. “Oh, sure, man, I know what you’re thinking. I’m hurting this kid, yeah—”

“That’s not what I’m thinking—”

“—but I don’t mean to. Cigarettes? Booze? That ain’t shit. You guys all know damn well I’m gonna buy crack with the money you give me, right?”

Heyton nodded..but couldn’t take his eyes off the raving flesh.

“And I know the shit I do is gonna hurt the kid, I ain’t lying. But I can’t help it, and—man—I didn’t
ask
to get pregnant. I could get an abortion, sure, I could get one for free.”

Even in his angst, and the mounting sensations, Heyton had to ask. “Why didn’t you?”

“‘Cos if I
didn’t
get pregnant, the kid wouldn’t have been born anyway. But I
did
get pregnant, either ‘cos some johns rubber busted or I was too fucked up to make him use one anyway. And, yeah, I know the shit I do’ll probably screw the kid up in a bunch of ways, but you wait twenty years, and no matter how fucked up that kid is, you tell him, you say, ‘Hey, kid, you were a trick baby and you’re all fucked up ‘cos your mother smoked crack. Would you rather she had an abortion?’ You ask him that. I’ll bet he says no.”

Then she shrugged.

It was an interesting point, however off-beat, but in truth, Heyton didn’t care. He philosophized that other people’s problems—as well as their mistakes—weren’t his.

All he really cared about right now was the lust that her presence was stoking in him.

He noticed a tear in her eye now, and was thrown for a loop.
Shit!
He leaned behind and extracted a box of chocolate. “We don’t need to talk about stuff like that,” he urged. “Here, have these. I bought them at the Dallas Fort-Worth airport.”

The cheerleader face beamed at the Godiva name in foil. “Wow, man, thanks. I haven’t had these in...well, ever!”

“They’re very good,” he said, then excused himself to the bathroom.

She was too beautiful, the ultimate in what he craved. He hoped he hadn’t been shaking in front of her.
Calm down!
He leaned over the sink and simply breathed.
A cyesolagniac? My God! Whoever heard of such a thing? Why can’t I just be like everyone else?

But he
wasn’t
like everyone else. Just as the girl had been saying earlier.

She didn’t ASK to get pregnant,
he thought to the mirror
. But she did anyway, so she’s stuck with it.

And I’m stuck with this.

More long slow breaths. He splashed cool water to his face. Simply sitting across from her on the bed had been excruciating. At any moment he could’ve wept, could fallen to his knees before her: a lambent deity, his swollen goddess of the new dark age.

I’m a pervert in a dirty motel room,
he thought when he looked back up into his eyes.

Verity in self-revelation...

The vision of her dragged him back out. He sat down next to her this time, his heart racing up again. He downed half his scotch in one swig, a nervous wreck.

“You’re nicer than most johns,” she commented while her fingers unbuttoned his shirt.

“That’s good to know,” he breathed. He wanted her to think of him that way. A pervert, yes, but at least a pervert who was decent to her.

“Lot of ‘em act nice at first, then they show their true colors once they get you in the room.” She’d opened his shirt and was smoothing her hands over his chest. Finally she grabbed his hand and put it on a milk-sodden breast. Heyton at once felt swoony.

Her breath became a hot whisper behind the smile. “Go ahead and touch,” so he did, and now his eyes wanted to roll back when his hand lowered to the hot, stretched belly—a bloated wonder. He could feel tiny, mysterious things beating within.

Now he was hugging her, cosseting her, indeed, almost like a child yearning to touch its mother. Notions stirred in the back of his head—behind his lust. Yes, a
decent
john. Surely many were not; she must have untold nightmare stories to tell. He tried to actually consider her plight: the travails of addiction, an undoubtedly catastrophic childhood laden with abuse, and the utter self-contained terror of being young and pregnant and alone on these streets.

“Thank God,” she whispered in his ear, fondling him in return now. “In my business you really never can tell about people.”

“You’ll never have to worry about me,” he promised, almost teary himself. His knees were knocking when she began to unbuckle his pants.

“That’s what they all say,” she said.

What?

The jolt of scotch was buzzing him hard. Her comment left him confused but somehow unable to calculate a response. Was she afraid of him, even now?