A Mutual Friend Page 11

  The guy fell to the carpet like an abandoned marionette. Flannery stepped aside with no concern, and I followed his gaze. Lily had found the semiautomatic.

  Twinkletoes sat in a lotus position, gazing up at Anton with admiration. “That was some cool stuff, Father. You’ve done this before?”

  Anton shrugged. “I was an exorcist for the church.”

  My own pride was funneled through Twinkletoe’s beaming face. “You think everything he said was real?”

  Again, Anton shrugged. “Real enough to him. It’s obvious to me he’s not making it up. He’s seen something, and in more detail than we’ve seen.”

  “So far,” I said.

  “So far,” Anton agreed. He took a deep breath. “And yes, Flannery, I want to admit I was playing tonsil tennis with this fine upstanding American worker, King. I fully admit I’m a flaming faggot. We were hand-fucking each other and it was divine. So if you have any further remarks to make, remember, I’m gay and I’m proud of it.”

  I knew Anton was redeeming himself for not having stood up for his former lover in front of the church. Maybe standing up in front of a poisonous Aryan Nation guy was nearly as bad. I could agree with that. But Flannery’s reaction was almost as inconceivable. The guy just stared numbly at Anton, his jaw slack, the gun in his hand. He continued to blindly drop the magazine and rack the chamber, but he seemed to have no more choice words for Anton or me.

  “You tell ‘em, Father,” said Lily. “This is not a choice. We were born this way. And men are juicy and delicious pieces of ass.”

  I had to be bold, too. “Yeah, yeah,” I agreed, standing. I gestured at Anton. “Particularly this one. Think about it, Flannery. Stuck on a desert island. Wouldn’t you want this one sucking your wang?”

  “I, uh,” said Flannery. “I’ve never thought about it.”

  Lily looked sideways at the hulking, inked guy. “Oh, yes you have,” she muttered.

  I took Anton into the hallway. “What’d you find?”

  He withdrew a folded Ziploc bag with tattered duct tape still fluttering from it. The heroin bag. The guys who had jacked my rig had been Death Squadders too, Thalhammer maybe one of them.

  “This was in the trash can.”

  I ran my forefinger across the plastic and tasted it the sticky stuff. “Yup. Black Tar. That was mine! I mean, the Bent Zealots’.”

  Anton nodded. “And now it’s gone.”

  M

  I

  t was beautiful getting away from the noxious office building.

  There was a brief, violent downpour just as we left on my Softail. I heard King behind me, clutching my waist, laughing almost maniacally. Couldn’t blame him, after what we’d just been through. And when the enormous hammerheaded nimbus cloud blew west, King continued laughing, wearing my only helmet.

  We confessed our sins at a Catholic church in Needles. I don’t know—maybe I thought the one in Lake Havasu was too close to home, too likely to know who Barclay Samples was. The long arm of the church might smite us down in our lover’s nest. Por favor! How am I to know the psychological workings of the inner mind? I am a priest—or was. We do not psychoanalyze people, just pass judgment. Or absolve, as the case may be. And this particular father absolved me with a few Hail Marys.

  Maybe because I didn’t tell him about the mutual frottage of that morning. I did not tell him how King and I had laced our legs together, rubbed our penises together—jacked each other’s penises. I didn’t mention how I’d reveled in the splash of semen against my throat and chest, how I’d rubbed it into my skin, how I’d tasted it off my fingers, sucking and even biting each one like little churros. No, I mentioned none of this to the padre.

  I just talked about poor misguided Barclay, taken over by an inhuman demonic spirit. You have to go beyond science books to comprehend these unnatural phenomena, and this man just wasn’t getting it. He kept asking if we thought there were “spooks” or “ghosts” inhabiting our house, and his voice had an amused edge. I did not admit I’d renounced my vows, nor that I was a demonologist. But I’d been trained to trust implicitly in the absolution of priests, and I figured his penances were better than nothing.

  Out to breakfast in a diner, King said sheepishly, “I talked to the father about us.”

  My eyebrows shot up. “You did?”

  He frowned. “You mean you didn’t? What the hell, Anton? I thought your big issue was that you never admitted to the church you were gay?”

  Just the term gay didn’t even sit right with me, saying it aloud like that. Was I really? Gay? Noel had used that term many times, but I hadn’t. “Joder!” I said. Fuck! “We’re focusing on Barclay, aren’t we? I told him about the infestation and how it’s affecting Barclay. What did you tell him about us?”

  King grumped a little. In retrospect, I can’t blame him. “I told him we were engaged in a homosexual affair.” It stung that he called us an affair, but what else was he supposed to say? A love affair would’ve been better. “I told him that we engaged in mutual masturbation the night before.”

  Mutual masturbation, now I liked that. I warmed to the subject. “What else?”

  “Well, that’s about all we did, wasn’t it? I told him how much I enjoyed it, and how I thought I was going to do it again. Except more, maybe. More than just jacking each other. I hope for more, anyway.”

  “So do I,” I admitted heatedly. I put my fingertips on his forearm as he shoveled hashed browns into his mouth. “A lot more, King. That was amazing last night, or should I say this morning. I’ve never been so horny in my life. I’ve never seen another man so . . . well-hung.”

  King gulped his potatoes and grinned. “I can tell you, the father was into it.”

  “You’re kidding.” I had heard homosexual confessions in my time, but I could honestly say none of them ever turned me on. I was personality-centric. I had to know a man to be attracted to him. Random people talking about cocks didn’t do it for me. Although I admit, Pornhub had done the trick for me on more than one occasion. Daddy Dom things, where I imagined Noel as the daddy. “How could you tell?” Now I had to eat my over easy eggs, or they’d get cold.

  “Oh, you know how you can tell.”

  “No, I don’t know.” I knew. I’d seen my fair share of pedophile priests in my time, or even men who went for other adult men, using the canopy of the church to hide their shame. A few had yielded it as a weapon—threatening to spill secrets if the men, oftentimes married, didn’t acquiesce to having their penis sucked. Once payment was exacted, the business deal was transacted, and everyone parted in silence. Their hypocritical stance against overt homosexuality was not the only reason I’d parted ways with the church. But it was a big part.

  King shrugged, toying with sausage he’d cut up. “You know. He started heavy breathing. Wanting to know more details. Whether it turned me on to rub my dick against yours.”

  I had to grin, knowing my honest lover’s answer. “Did it? Turn you on?”

  “What do you think? So I had to admit yes. I thought that was part of our deal, Anton! Being honest at every turn! We tell the priest our true sins, or what they think of as sins, they absolve us, and Barclay can’t use it against us anymore.”

  I pointed at him with my fork. “So when you admitted it turned you on, did he want to know more?”

  “Oh, you know it. He wanted to know if we ‘ejaculated.’ Funny term to use.”

  “I like it. It’s sexy.”

  “It is? Okay, I admitted I ejaculated all over your buff, swarthy chest.”

  “So I’m swarthy now. I like that.”

  “Well, anyone’s swarthy compared to me, right? I’m so white I could make it a religion. Well, to be honest I think he ejaculated after I left. He wanted to know if we’d done anything even more sinful. He was oddly specific about it.”

  I forgot to chew. “Like what?”

  “He wanted to know if we’d tasted each other’s seed, because apparently that’s worse.”

&n
bsp; “It is. And?”

  “He wanted to know if we had ‘tongued’ each other. He seemed disappointed when I said no.”

  “We can remedy that.”

  “Oh yeah? Who’s going to suck on who? Who’s the Dom here, anyway?”

  “We both are. We’re switches, remember? What else?”

  “Whether we’d entered each other. He actually asked me why not. He was really getting amped. I told him we had no rubbers. He seemed satisfied.”

  “Maybe he already came. Well,” I said. “There’s no rush. I enjoy taking my time with you, King. We can make the decision to enter each other after we visit FacialBook today.” For we’d decided to replace my shredded dildo with a fresh one and were visiting a sex toy shop in downtown Needles. King was “oddly specific” about wanting it to be penis-shaped and the same size as me. It made me hot beyond belief to think of penetrating him with it, perhaps while he was handcuffed, so I had a mental list of other items to pick up. Or hell. He could handcuff me.

  “That’s our next stop? What about Mencken?”

  “We can do Mencken after. Didn’t Barclay say his father paid for his Mencken stay?”

  King said, “He said his dad paid his bills and his rent at the Nichols building. But there is no rent, so who knows?”

  “Right,” I muttered thoughtfully, taking my last sip of black coffee. “Barclay isn’t known for his firm grasp of reality.” If no one could be found who could afford Mencken, he’d have to go into a state-run facility. I had a feeling Barclay’s issues didn’t solely stem from the demonic possession. Turk had told me that around the time of the Mormon Lake incident, when a ranger had stumbled on Barclay with a barrel of animal’s blood in the back of his truck, a high school acquaintance had also come to Turk with a disturbing report.

  The girl reported running into Barclay in a mall parking lot. Clad in a bloodstained shirt with a yellow crust around his mouth, she didn’t recognize him at first. Barclay asked if she’d been in the bike crash that had killed her ex-boyfriend. She said no and tried to sidle away. She had the feeling he would’ve reached out and grabbed her, kidnapped her or worse. He followed her to her car and tried to get in. Luckily she had time to lock the locks and speed away. But the most disturbing thing, this woman told Turk, was that she read in the paper a couple days later that someone had broken into someone’s house a few blocks away exactly half an hour after her encounter with Barclay. Their dog had been decapitated and some organs were missing.

  That was the start of the Bent Zealots’ mistrust of the Prospect. He was an odd duck, they knew, but murdering dogs was not in their wheelhouse.

  “How many Hail Marys did the father give you?” I asked after we paid our bill for breakfast.

  “Twenty.”

  What? He’d only given me five. I guess being acquainted with someone who was possessed was much less sinful—or fun—than someone who liked penis.

  And penis was all I saw at FacialBook. There was a gay hombre behind the counter, a very flaming fellow. King admitted he’d never been into a sex toy shop so I took the lead, wearing a T-shirt that advertised Metallica. It was part of an armload of T-shirts given to me by Lock Singer. I guess T-shirts were given to Prospects so they didn’t get the wrong musical idea. I’d be hailing Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Muddy Waters, and AC/DC. “What’s this doing in here?” Lock had asked rhetorically, tossing a Grateful Dead shirt into the trash.

  “This one is very popular,” said the hombre, who actually wore a stereotypical Mexican woven, fringed vest.

  “Bigger,” said King, sticking out his lower lip. “Bigger head.”

  The hombre gave me the once-over. “Oh, I see. Well, there’s this Thrilldo. It’s got a circumference of five and a quarter.”

  “Now we’re talking,” said King, taking the box from the guy.

  Since he had the subject in hand, I wandered over to the case where a young hippie woman helped me. I told her I wanted to surprise my boyfriend, and secretly purchased a few items.

  “Where’d you go?” asked King innocently, looking over my shoulder as he put the Thrilldo on the counter.

  “Just browsing,” I said lightly. To change the subject, I said, “You’re going with that one?”

  “Sorry it’s teal. They didn’t have flesh tones. But I swear it’s exactly your dimensions.” He looked from side to side. “I’m going to need practice to take you in my ass.”

  Ay! Take you in my ass? My cock lengthened and plumped just standing at the cash register paying for the damned thing. I’d already paid for my other toys.

  Outside by my ride, I said, “How’s about stopping off somewhere scenic? We could use a break before heading into Mencken.”

  King wiggled his eyebrows. “A break. I like it. Might it involve our new friend?”

  I grinned. “I was hoping so.”

  And King surprised me, literally took my breath away, when he leaned over my bike and kissed me.

  It was a gentle, soul-filled kiss, imbued with innocence. I liked that. Kissing Noel had never been an innocent act. That man was sex incarnate. Kissing was a means to an end—my end. He kissed with lust and groped me like the animal he was! I’d always seen it as turning me on, but now it seemed he was groping me like a player. I knew Noel was no player, but he was blunt, straightforward, a sex machine. King was more complex by far. He took care of his dad and sister, he’d given up his architecture career, and now he kissed a demonologist with the tender care of a teen falling in love. I bit his lush lips, sucking on the bottom one, uncaring who saw.

  Back on 40 South though, the strangest thing happened. The rain had already dried from the asphalt, but I squinted when I saw what looked like a rain funnel emanating from the flat desert road ahead.

  “Do you see that?” I shouted at King.

  “Yeah! Slow down. It’s a fucking rain tornado.”

  “But there’s no wind.”

  It took me until I was almost upon the thing to comprehend its reality. It was a swirling black entity, part of Beelzebub that had followed us. Though I was only going about twenty at this point, and I bellowed out “Yield to God!”, I somehow wound up in a complete tailspin, as though I were doing a donut at a sideshow. My front tire embedded in the asphalt, the rear with King swung round and round like a second hand, enveloping us in burning rubber. We were in the center of the black, sooty whirlwind, pelted with little smelly particles like tar.

  “God, the son, commands you!” I screamed. “God, the Holy Spirit, commands you!”

  Round and round we went, and I knew I had no control over my machine. We were burning out fast, spinning the rear tire with the front brake locked. My rear tire was going to be a bald gumball. My only option was to kill the engine and have us both bail.

  “Can you jump off?” I yelled.

  “I have no choice,” King yelled back. Luckily, he was wearing leather chaps, although as a trucker, he only owned a jean jacket, not a leather one. I killed the engine and we slowed in our clockwork spin. I watched over my shoulder as King put his hands behind his butt, grabbed the seat, then jumped.

  He did it well for a guy with a bad back, jumping outside the twirling black entity. It seemed to have arms that flailed, like a fluttering ballerina. I jumped too. Some of my fairing, my shotgun pipes, and a mirror would be trashed in the process, although I felt that I laid it down as slow as possible.

  I strong-armed King out of the road as we watched the bike and tornado with wide eyes. Would the tornado suck up my bike?

  Since the whirlwind was silent, I told King, “This is a preternatural entity. It’s got negative, diabolical, constant rage against both us and God.”

  “Holy fuck,” was all King could say, hands deeply embedded in his jean pockets.

  Louder, I shouted, “Hear, therefore, and fear, Satan! Enemy of the human race! Source of death! Root of evil! Seducer of men!” I showed my cross. “Behold the Cross of the Highest God! I command thee to obey and begone! Depart from this highway!�
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  The black entity dissipated reluctantly, slowly. I noted that it revolved in a counter-clockwise direction, in violation of physics laws. When it was almost gone, something dropped from its center and hit the road with a plop.

  King said, “It fell in a zigzag. It didn’t just drop straight.”

  Indeed. Joder! No more black specks swirled, so I went forward and picked up the brown paper bag. Our Thrilldo. Would it be burned beyond recognition? By now cars were going around us in the wrong lane, no one stopping to help, so I opened the box and took a sniff. Just smelled like latex to me. No harm, no foul as they said. I had my purchases tucked inside my leather jacket.

  Some fairing scraped against the front tire, but I was determined even more so to toy with King in the great outdoors. So, we got off the highway and headed out on a more serene span of road to a place called Goose Lake, what looked to be a crater lake surrounded by brush, backed by bare steppes that towered in red sandstone. King could easily chop away foliage with his Bowie knife and we could find a private nest, although the idea of public display turned me on too. Noel had once backed me into an alleyway in Queens and fucked me missionary-style up against a very odiferous wall, and the jostling and comments from bystanders turned me on no end. That we both wore our dog collars and robes was beside the point, because apparently everyone thought we were dressing up for some cosplay party. But my bouncing, tortured, unpleasured cock, rubbing between belt buckles, zippers, and Noel’s flat stomach, earned dozens of admiring compliments.

  I was itching to do something like that again.

  As we dismounted in a sandy turnout by the lake, King removed his lid and shook his head. His eyes were wild, confused. They sought me for an answer.

  “The entity,” he said. “It’s following us. Hellaway up here.”

  I had to nod. I couldn’t lie to him. “It resents that we’re pushing back on it.”

  “We could’ve been fucking killed.”

  “It was bound to happen. We’re a threat to it. He’s sworn to loathe God and is terrified of religious objects. I’m going to bless the shit out of that building, regardless of what Mencken tells us.”