Homicide My Own - Anne Argula [31]
And was I trying to help him? Da frick.
“Jeannie can’t wait to give up her virginity. Her boyfriend, for whatever reasons….let’s take him at his word…won’t deliver. If she went to another boy, everybody would know it before the end of the seventh period. I think she’d go to an older man, someone who could teach her and keep his mouth shut.”
“Yes,” he said. “She used him, thinking that would be all right with him, with any older man. Have you ever used a man just for sex, Quinn?”
Why deny it, there were a lot of men in the late sixties, early seventies, just because I could, the right had finally been seized, including one memorable one-night stand with a Japanese akido instructor, but I had always had some mutual connection beneath the skin. Maybe not the things sonnets are made from, but nothing so simple as using someone to satisfy a need.
“No,” I told him. “I never have.”
“Being used, that could be a motive for murder.”
“If he, you know, fell in love, or something. If he lost his mind.”
“Like Houser,” said Odd.
“Good example.”
“She never expected that would happen. How could that happen? She thought she was choosing someone safe, someone older, someone who would walk away and keep his mouth shut, someone who would have to keep his mouth shut.”
“Someone married?”
“Yes. Or a friend of the family…a teacher…someone who had something to lose if he talked about it.”
“A teacher makes sense, married or not. If he’s discovered, he loses his career. A teacher, because what was she after, really, besides knowledge? Carnal knowledge, the great mystery explored with a seasoned guide.”
“Is that what you did?” he asked.
“I wish. Me and ‘Our Johnny,’ both of us stumbling terrifed sixteen year olds in the back of his father’s station wagon, scared to death. I didn’t know it would hurt so much, when he started. After, the condom was wet when he took it off—duh?— and he made us both terrified it had broken on us. Other than that, it wasn’t half bad.”
“What happened after that?”
“We didn’t do it again for two months, and then we did it again, and after that we didn’t do it anymore ever.”
“We’re all pretty stupid, aren’t we? I mean, that first time.”
“Then I don’t want to be smart. At least there was passion, loss of control, eyes closed and labored breathing, sighs and cries and tingles, and I miss it all, I miss it so much, skin, sopping wetness, handfuls of tightly clutched ass.”
Odd’s head came forward, then turned toward me. I looked him right in the eye and confessed, “The last time I got off was a date-rape with myself. That’s when I gave it the nickname, ‘Little Sahara.’”
11.
The wipers were on intermittent because it started to drizzle again. The radio was off, the digital clock read 2:48 At the fireworks stands a slow but building trade was gathering.
We were on our way to the Tribal Headquarters, to check with Shining Pony on the condition of our boy Houser.
“I don’t know what made me say all that, Odd.”
“Maybe you thought we were having a girl gabfest,” he said.
Sometimes you just have to laugh, ain’t?
“Do you know why?” he asked me.
“Why what?”
“Why that suddenly happened to you.”
“It wasn’t all that sudden.”
“You ought to know, Quinn, all the guys think you’re pretty hot.”
“All the guys… I’m used up, buddy.”
“That’s not true. A woman doesn’t get used up, I don’t care what age she is. How old are you?”
“I’m forty-nine.”
“Forty-nine. That’s not even old. That’s only…that’s how old Jeannie would be if she lived.”
“So she never knew what she was missing,” I said, the bitch back in my voice.
“Forty-nine is not old, not even,” he said.
“There’s no reason in God’s world for any man to come into me again.”
“It’s not God’s world, it’s yours.” For Odd this bordered on irreverent outrage. For the moment, he was like the rest of us. “He may have made it but He doesn’t live here any more. Quinn, I’m disappointed in you, man, you’re a tough chick. I can’t believe you’re