Free Contemporary Gay Romances by Felice Picano Page A

and me had rehearsed exactly what I was going to say, like it was a play or something.
    “Are you sure about this?” Sheriff Longish kept asking me, every chance he could get me alone, which wasn’t too often. So I had to reassure him. He didn’t like it one bit, and he was right not to. Not with those stains on even her shoes and fingernails now.
    After they’d all gone, they left me a videotape so Granny-Mama could watch as much as she liked. She thought I was as good as a TV actor-person.
    “Shouldn’t he have protection?” Sheriff Longish asked blondie twice, once all the vans and other TV vehicles had gotten their interview and “statement” from me and were tooling off up the road.
    “You planning on sleepin’ over?” I asked him.
    Blondie and me laughed at the look on his face.
    Nothing happened for two more days and so we moved into what blondie called “phase two,” i.e., getting me out in the public, away from here where Underwear Man would think there were sharpshooters behind every copse of red leaf.
    This was exhausting but kinda fun. “Phase two” made me a celebrity—the psychic kid who knew all about the serial killer. It got me out in a local Wal-Mart, at another, this time higher-end, mall outside of Gainesville, and in a county hall meeting in the First Baptist Church on Highway 225 up near Lawley.
    It was while driving home from that event that I saw Underwear Man for the first time in person. It was outside Dan Deavens Elementary School, and he was the crossing guard for all the little kids. Wearing a pale blue shirt with the white plastic stripes across his chest and his back and a pale blue cap. And of course his stains were all but three-dimensional, they were so many and so strong. I almost gave him away then, laughing at how much sense it all made. What better place to find kids? To find out which ones to take? What better way to gain their trust than wearing that uniform? He was even younger looking and better looking than I’d seen in my mind’s eye. With big blue eyes to match. The kind of boy who’d model underwear for those Sears flyers that Granny-Mama would keep stuffed in her bathroom drawer and think I didn’t know about.
    He was very careful in holding all the kiddies back safely as we passed them by. They all knew who I was by then because of the TV and newspapers and they yelled and waved. And so did he. Our eyes locked as we slowly drove by. “Hello, Underwear Man.” I mouthed the words to him. Then we were gone.
    How he finally got me was kind of a surprise. But by then he’d been on the hunt over a year and seven months, so he’d gotten pretty good at it. I’d been left alone less than a minute in the disabilities restroom the following afternoon, when blondie, who was guarding me, was distracted by what sounded like shots—actually fireworks he’d planned—going off outside the back window, and she stepped away briefly.
    “Your face is very nice, but otherwise you ain’t very pretty!” he said to me, just before he applied the chloroform hanky. That had been my fear, of course, because all the others had been so very pretty, head to toe pretty, pretty like he was, pretty like he must have been as a lil’ child when he was being sexually molested.
    Later on, when we was alone, and he was doing it to me, he kept on saying “So soft! So soft!” about my skin and body. “So soft!” Which was a nice compliment.
    It hurt at first a lot, but then I thought about Sheriff Longish and that made it better. Of course I could have just peed myself all over to stop it, but I wanted to see what it felt like. Sex, I mean—having heard and read so much about it.
    He’d read and heard by then too about the name the F.B.I. had given him and why. So even though he had my underwear ripped apart with his teeth when he began biting me to do his molestation and he was really ready to use it around my neck, he restrained himself. Taking a great deal of effort to do so,