Free Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die by Charles Runyon Page A

revival then we wouldn’t have stopped sleeping together, and taking baths together, and she wouldn’t have gone through all those changes by herself. Anyway when I heard the door hinge on the old toilet go screeek! I got this feeling of helplessness. Something just got hold of me and dragged me off the couch and shoved my ass out the door and into those honeysuckles. I could see her in there with her panties down to her knees just sitting there thumbing through the old catalog that laid there, then she just sort of stopped and listened and said, I know you’re out there, Danny. She always knew. When I got hit in Nam she was on the phone to the Red Cross all night, and it wasn’t till the next day that even our own battalion Headquarters knew we’d been creamed. So anyway … oh yeah, the toilet. Well if she’d wanted privacy she should’ve locked the door, there was this wooden block with a nail driventhrough it and if you turned it you couldn’t open the door from outside. So I opened and she’s just settin’ there looking at me, sort of passive. I couldn’t talk because of this lump in my throat. I just wanted to get to her by the shortest route, so I pulled off her … ah, shit. I think I’ll skip the sordid details. You know how people fuck, and that’s what we did, Danny-and-Debra, brother-and-sister, getting it on in the old toilet. I didn’t know there was anybody within miles, the old man had gone to town and I didn’t figure he’d be back until around midnight, lushed out of his skull. He’d been doing it for a couple years, ever since Mama died. Whatever it was that held him together just came unraveled. I try to picture how it was for him when he got back from Korea, I guess when you gotta clench up your courage all at once when you’re like eighteen, you get ready to die and from then on your life’s just like one final long drawn-out primal scream, because once you look at death your eyes lock and you can’t ever get your eyes off it. You know what I mean?
    “Anyway I felt this breeze on my bare ass and Debra’s got a kind of fixated stare. Then this big hand grabs my shoulder and I’m jerked out, thrown through the door and out on the grass. And the old man’s walking toward me with his eyes looking liked boiled eggs, and he’s got his fist doubled up and it looks like a cured ham coming at me. He hit me once and I went down thinking, No no man, this can’t be, but then I thought of all the other kids that got beat to death by their loving parents, and I also thought of how the old man’s been pouring down the lush lately, and I see this kind of mad-dog look in his eye that tells me he’s like I was when I got marched out of the house, he can’t help himself any more than I could. I guess the next blow must’ve knocked me out because the next thing I’m laying there and Debra’s got my head in her lap and she tells me to go to the barn and hide in the haymow, the old man’s sleeping now and probably won’t remember anything when he wakes up. So I did, and that night she brought my supper up; she’dtold him I’d gone over to visit my cousins; she gave me my supper and then she said, Let’s do it again …
    “Didja ever hear such a sordid damn story? I know it sounds like a lot of things happened to me but thinking back I guess my main problem was boredom. I just got so damn bored with the people around me, they coasted along in the same old groove and when somebody died they just grabbed a tighter hold on life. I guess it’s like that little bird, if you squeeze it too hard you squeeze all the juice out and then it’s like death. Jesus, I’m getting dry, don’tcha think the damn hospital could spring for a jug of wine to go with these interviews? The touch of your sweet lips would do as well, my love. Did you ever give head? You know what I mean. Go down on your old man? I think I’d better get back to the ward now, before they turn out the lights …”

Five
    Elizabeth