Evil Companions Read online

  “Well? I can always ask one of these guys, you know.”

  “Sure. It’s okay with me.” I looked down at the crew of hopefuls—seeing them in a different light. Learning what they were doing there put pockmarks on them, made them seem yellow, and their skin papery. I walked away from their hungry little circle and began to look at Lionel’s sculptures. They were cruel, those metallic birds and monsters, full of sharp edges and unexpected angles. Out of the corner of my eye I could see him talking again with Anne. Occasionally one of them would glance at me, as if I were a sacrificial victim they were trying to keep the bad news from. I felt a heaviness between my legs, as if my phallus was the only thing I possessed of any value.

  I stood in a forest of metal objects, some mounted on wood, some lying on the floor, like driftwood or washed-up bodies on some lonely shore. Each object resembled a body in one way or another. I felt a kinship with their wrecked hardness.

  Then there came a soft knock on the metal door to the loft. Lionel opened it immediately. Our client was wide and very soft, with the lidded, scared look of a sheep straying into a wolf’s den. Lionel pulled him inside enthusiastically and led him straight to Anne, who stood blocking their way. She didn’t acknowledge his greeting, didn’t say a word to him. It was what she did with her eyes, raking her victim with them as if they were hot coals, or whips. If he was soft when he came in, he became softer the more she stared at him. Lionel came to get me. He took my arm and just dragged me over to him, introducing me as “Ricky” to Mr. Purdom. Mr. Purdom smiled nervously, apprehensive again. He obviously wanted Anne; she had him hooked. Me, he could afford to evaluate.

  “You seem like a nice boy.”

  “Everyone says I am. My mother liked me.” I threw in my mother as part of my permanent attack on her. I hoped to erase her. I believed that if I talked about her enough in circumstances she would regard as evil, I could obliterate her image in me.

  Mr. Purdom seemed to approve of me, though; he insisted on taking each of our arms so that we formed an escort for him as he left. I looked back at the others still sitting around the fire; someone was passing around a hash pipe.

  He took us in a cab he had waiting to a luxurious uptown hotel. Although we both looked like ragamuffins next to our client, no one gave us a second glance. We were in his suite in no time, and drinks were zipped up to us by room service. Anne sat very primly in a straight chair by the door, while I sat on a sofa some distance from her, watching the two of them. He was obviously a pretty experienced debauchee, the old pig; he moved around Anne like a tiger around its prey. He didn’t smack his lips, but he was the lip-smacking kind.

  “You’re a mean one, aren’t you?” he said to Anne, smiling when he said it. So that’s why she was acting so strangely, I thought to myself. She knew what he wanted the moment she saw him. Of course, it could also have been that she didn’t feel like acting any other way. She never did anything other than what she chose to do, a royal attitude that often succeeds with people who would rather be ordered than order—the lazy ones.

  Anyway, she had him in thrall, as the Victorians would have said. He brought a chair up and sat beside her, trying to get her to talk, I suppose.

  “How old are you, Anne?”

  Silence. I even felt sorry for the old bugger, but he was getting exactly what he paid for. He took her hand and started licking it, with his short pig’s tongue. His tool would be short and thick, like a spade. She let him lick her arm clear to the shoulder, and then took it away, with a disgusted look on her face.

  “You haven’t paid for that yet,” she told him.

  “But ...” He got ponderously to his feet, knowing it was no good to argue. He took out his wallet and handed her two twenties, which she just stared at. He added another twenty, and her hand closed on the money. Then she called to me: “Come and take his clothes off. Get him ready. I don’t want to touch the motherfucker.”

  He stood up obediently enough when I came up behind him. He raised his arms like a child with his mother, and I removed his suit coat, unbuttoned his shirt, took off his tie, until his white chest was exposed. His breasts were bigger than Anne’s. At no time during the disrobing did he open his eyes or offer to touch me. In fact, he kept his eyes screwed tightly shut. I stood back after taking off his shoes, waiting for Anne to undo his belt and finish stripping him.

  She went to it like a viper winding itself around Adam in the Garden. When he jerked involuntarily because she had tickled his bare flesh, she raked her nails down his arm, causing the blood to flow. He giggled but didn’t protest. When she cleared his thighs of his shorts, she laughed aloud at the sight of his turniplike penis. He opened his eyes wide, but he didn’t speak. As soon as he was stripped and obviously at her mercy, Anne began to spank him until his buttocks were fiery red. He broke up his pleasure only to suggest, in a very calm voice, that we all move over to the big bed. He landed nose down on it, bouncing with a ferociousness only children have. It colored what happened later, because it made me feel protective toward him.

  In bed, he was likable. He wanted to play, and rolled around like a six-year-old being tickled. Anne sat primly on the side of the bed, her blouse unbuttoned. Since she never wore a brassiere, her little dugs poked out at us.

  “Let’s play a game,” he said. Anne paid no attention to him, so he turned to me. “Let’s play a game.”

  “Aw, cut the crap, man.” I said something like that, at least. Sometimes the way I speak is so determined by a specific theatrical situation that I can’t believe myself. How I snarl.

  “No, I want to play. Now I paid, you have to play!” he pouted. Well, it was his party.

  “What do you want to play—patty-cake?” He thought about it for a while. And the thing was, he was really thinking, you know, what kind of game he wanted to play with his two hired playmates. I had a vision of him as a rich kid always standing treat for the other kids, so they’d play with him.

  But he didn’t want to play kissing games. “Let’s play mudpies,” he said brightly, after thinking it over for a while.

  “Now how are we going to do that?” I asked. For all I knew, he had all the makings for a mudpie factory stashed around someplace. He smiled at me again. I should have guessed what was on his mind.

  “You have a do-do, don’t you? We’ll use that.”

  “Oh, shit.” My face must have fallen to the floor.

  “Come on. It won’t be hard, for a big fellow like you.” I was disgusted, but his zeal intrigued me. I looked at Anne, and she shrugged.

  “No, man. That wasn’t part of the deal,” I said, or something like that. He looked disappointed. We all sat for a while, while he fumed. Then he said, in his normal pig’s voice: “Then I want my money back.”

  “What?” Anne snarled.

  “You heard me. I want your boyfriend to cooperate, or we can just forget about it.”

  “You act like a snotty-nosed kid,” Anne told him. He sniffled. It was obvious he wasn’t going to have anything less than his own way.

  “All right, what the hell, I’ll do it. I guess I could use a good crap.” Really, like I said, the idea fascinated me. “What do you want me to do?” He had already brightened up.

  “Just take down your trousers and do your business.”

  “Right here on the bed?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “I bet you don’t.” You’ll have to admit, it had its comic aspects. Even Anne was paying attention, her eyes daring me to go through with it. I rolled my trousers off and kicked them into the corner, then squatted in the middle of the bed. He crawled over and cupped his hands under me.

  “Like the goose with the golden egg, huh?” I talked like a fool to cover my embarrassment—and my interest in the proceedings. I didn’t look at Anne, but I knew she was watching me. In no time at all, I had turned my insides out and produced two brown specimens.

  “Beautiful!” He was ecstatic. I used my handkerchief to wipe myself, unreasonably proud
of my small accomplishment.

  “I never thought I’d see the day,” Anne giggled. Our client looked as intent and abstracted as a boy with his first hard-on. His hands began to shape the soft substance. He put it on the bed in the shape of one big mudpie, arranging it carefully, a baker careful of the edges of his crust. Then his eyes invited us to partake.

  “No. That’s as far as I go.”

  “Oh, come on. Please. Let me get a spoon for you.” He hopped off the bed and went for a drawer. He brought back spoons, all right, and gave one to each of us. He squatted before it, his belly hanging out, looking like an insane Buddha in a hotel room.

  Anne was an unwilling novitiate; I could see that she wasn’t going to take it very well. He was about to take the first bite when she clouted him across the ear with her open palm, causing him to choke. It started out being funny, but she kept it up. I’m sure she couldn’t have been hurting him, but he began to howl, stretched out on the bed. She beat him red; he howled. I began to giggle. Since meeting Anne, I had been doing all kinds of unexplainable things, like a boy in love.

  “Harder!” he yelled, and she stood on the bed and kicked him in his doughy ass, her big toe angling for his balls. Suddenly he arched his back and began ramming his hips into the bed spasmodically, then collapsed with a sigh into it, his arms stretched out, his legs tensed, toes arched; he rolled over, his prick and midriff caked. The smile on his face was blissful.

  “You shit-licking pervert!” Anne hissed at him. She motioned for me to get my clothes on. But it wasn’t finished yet. He stood up and walked—dazed—toward me, his arms open as if he wanted to hug me. I backed away, but he kept coming on.

  “Get away from me!” I demanded, but he wouldn’t. Something panicked me. I stood in a corner, and when he got close, rubbing his hand on his belly, holding it out to smear on me, I kicked out and hit him in the knee. It was a light blow, but it made him go down. I stood over him and he looked up at me, his eyes sick with love, begging me to hit him again, the insatiable little bastard. His eyes were diseased, and they wanted to infect me.

  He screamed in little gasps as I worked on him with my knife, cutting out the area of skin that was covered with shit, but even after the infection was out, the patient died.

  Anne looked at me with new respect in her eyes. “I liked that; I really did. Let’s go home. I’m hot.”

  Chapter Four

  ___________________ The Burning Bed

  Anne crawled in close to my ear for the story. I wanted to hear it. She had given me the needle with a little tap, a dexterous flick of the wrist that sent shock waves all over my body. She had a viper’s wrist.

  “You cut him so well. You have the touch of a surgeon. Why, I’d let you operate on me. I just couldn’t believe it when you took that knife out. Couldn’t believe you were so wicked.”

  We stayed up all night discussing it. Each cell in my body danced a little tune, to a mean Monk solo. Murderer’s music, but I was romanticizing it. I thought my little act meant something, that it signaled a liberation. But Anne reminded me who I was. She had decided to become my mentor as well as my mistress.

  “You haven’t even begun, my baby. I’m going to teach you how to pull pain from people like teeth. Murder is so empty, unless you know something about pain. The same with sex.”

  Being held in her arms was the most pleasant experience of my life. I’d never experienced such strength, such comfort. I wanted to open her veins and suck.

  There was a white telephone next to the bed which she used to call a friend of hers late that night.

  “Hello, darling, so good to talk to you again. How have you been?” They talked on like that, quite a normal conversation, for half an hour or so. I paid attention to the ceiling, on which she had pasted little stars on an otherwise black surface. I made out my own constellations, and wondered what star I had floated down from. I’ve always believed that the star pattern above is somehow the original of the insides of our own bodies, even if the stars are false. In my case, it may be that my insides are false, too.

  When Anne hung up, she snapped me to attention by announcing that Tina would be over in an hour or so.

  “In the middle of the night? Are you crazy?”

  “I want to see Tina. I want Tina to see you,” she answered pettishly, like any other female for a moment.

  “Who is she?”

  “Tina’s an old friend. She’s black and soft. You’ll like her.”

  That’s all she’d tell me. She liked surprises, and I did too. She decided that we should spend the time while we were waiting for Tina playing her games. I was tired of games. I thought I deserved a good, long rest.

  “Come on, get off your fat ass.”

  Unwillingly, I got up. She took a small whip from a drawer and began cracking it.

  “I don’t feel like this crap,” I said.

  “Get undressed,” she ordered.

  Wearily I shucked my clothes, bored with the idea of providing a show. We’d been through it a few times before, her idea of stimulation when nothing else would work. She’d lay a few on me and then we’d collapse together on the floor in a giggling fit.

  I knew the rehearsals were over when I had to yell after the second stroke.

  “Hey! I’m bleeding!” My fingers were covered with my own dark blood. I jumped away from her, still yelling.

  “I’m tired of playing these games,” she said. I expected her to grin at her own solemnity, but she was serious. We stood facing each other across the narrow bedroom, panting and watching for the first jump. I pointed out to her that we were acting like children, but I should have known that wouldn’t make a dent in her intentions.

  “If we were really acting like children,” she said, “You’d be trying to kill me, because that’s what I’d be doing to you.”

  “But why?” In my own way I was acting like a child. My own way, of course, was ignorance.

  “I didn’t think you were that fucking dumb,” was all she’d answer then, although we were to talk about it later.

  My first impression of Tina, who appeared in a very short time after the call, was that she would eat me. That was to come later, too; she had filed her teeth, she wore bones in her ears, and against her blackness, her nightness, they gleamed. Her whole being was teeth.

  Immediately she huddled with Anne, this cannibal whore.

  I lay in bed and listened to them bring each other up to date. Anne mentioned me with a snicker, but then there were a few more words, and significant glances. Tina flashed me a smile, and I sank back at the sight of those points. After that, as they talked (their voices grew lower and lower) she kept looking at me, an amused look in her eye.

  “Your woman say you’re some buster, man,” was the first thing she said to me. Anne stayed on the couch where she was, watching, while Tina sat down beside me, reaching out to put her hand on my knee. It jerked a little; I couldn’t help it. I was afraid of her. She was a black witch, straight from the jungle.

  “She said you hunted a head the other night. She said you did pretty good.”

  “She talks too much.” She moved in on me until I could smell her musk, a bloody, sharp smell.

  “You like the way I smell?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Good. Cause I want you to lick me.” She said it warmly, breathing on me the hot breath of a lioness. I turned my head away, and somehow it ended up in her armpit.

  “You’re gonna be an angel child, white boy,” she whispered, moving her hand up from my knee to rest between my legs.

  “Got some nuts I’m gonna crack. Bet you got nice juice. You believe in voodoo?” Her voice promised razor blades and ninth-wave orgasms.

  “I believe,” I had to say.

  I was afraid to move, and didn’t want to, anyway, despite the fact that my position was uncomfortable, and it was getting hotter. Anne moved over on the couch, and put some music on the stereo—drums.

  Tina’s teeth started clicking, and
she started humming, a low, deep noise in her throat that must have been what a crocodile sounds like yawning. Her hand rustled around the lap of my pants and I felt air on my legs. She had slit my trousers with a razor blade held between thumb and finger.

  “Just hold still. You’re gonna make me happy in a little minute,” she said. Her hand clenched my testicles, and I braced myself for pain, my feet jammed against the floor.

  “Loosen up a little,” she urged. She began to pet me like a child, grabbing my prick at the root and pulling it up, stretching it in a milking gesture that made me remember she had the center of my body in her hand. It grew, of course, a beanstalk with a burning at its tip. Her hand knew my prick better than my own hand did. She had me cradled in one arm while she masturbated me. I watched the ceiling, and her hand, the brown monkey climbing the leaning tower and descending again, and then Anne was kneeling before me, on her knees, watching. “He likes to be treated like a child,” she said from far away. I composed an answer, a rationale for the pleasure I was receiving, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

  Then Anne put her head between my legs and began licking my ass like a cocker spaniel I once had. I’d smear some meat-paste around down there, and let him go to town, in one of my early experiments.

  Did I like being treated as a child, or was I trying to be a child? I didn’t know and didn’t really care to speculate. Sensation is the only currency in human life I’d go so far as to try to counterfeit if I couldn’t get the real thing. Children are creatures of sensation.

  They worked on me as thoroughly as two wombless mothers could, though, licking me, petting me, affording my body a kind of primal satisfaction that’s hard to beat even in fucking, although it’s less intense.

  Finally, they stretched me out on the floor. The dirty rug irritated the skin of my naked back. I wondered why they wanted me on the floor, but I didn’t want to spoil it by saying anything. All they did was to remove the mattress, exposing the springs. Then Anne fetched a wastebasket full of paper towels and set it on fire, placing it under the springs and letting it burn. I knew then, I suppose, what came next, but I was too curious to let it worry me. If you believe in sensation, you can’t afford to pick and choose.