Popcorn

Chapter Six

The young man and the scrawny girl were still lying on the bed in the motel chalet. Coffee Time had long since concluded and now they were watching videos.

There was a woman on the screen, dancing to the jukebox in a roadside bar and grill.

‘I’m sick of watching the tube, honey,’ the girl said.

‘Quiet now, baby,’ the man replied. ‘This is important. What I’m doing here right now, hon, is researching.’

‘Researching what? You ain’t doing no researching. You’re just watching dumb movies which you seen a hundred times already. I want to go out.’

‘What I am researching, sugar,’ the man said, his tone hardening slightly, ‘is our salvation. Y’hear me now? Because what I have here is a plan to get us saved. You want to be saved, don’t you, precious?’

‘Sure I want to be saved. Everybody wants to be saved.’

‘In that case, honey pie, shut the fuck up.’

He fixed his eyes on the TV and cranked up the volume. Slow, sugary country music filled the room, music recorded thirty years ago, which had been utterly and terminally uncool for every one of the intervening years. Music that had become briefly hip. Everything gets credible if you wait long enough; one generation’s cringe is another’s kitsch cult classic.

The woman kept on dancing. And such a woman. A truck driver’s dream. A cowboy’s fantasy. Poor white trash, but what poor white trash would look like had it just descended from Mount Olympus. Tanned, shapely legs stretching up for ever from the glossy painted toes on her bare feet to the jeans cut down to a tiny pair of shorts that inadequately covered her buttocks. A naked, undulating stomach, writhing to the rhythm. A perfect naval, like a cup, a bronzed abdomen contrasting beautifully with the white cotton of perhaps the smallest vest a woman might wear and still hope to keep her breasts from public view. Breasts which knew nothing of Sir Isaac Newton or his absurd gravitational theories. Above it all a cloud – no, a mane – of impossibly blonde hair crowning sleepy eyes and a fat mouth. A fat, wet mouth that never closed but hung lazily ajar, lips slightly parted, ready, one might easily imagine, for anything.

There is a children’s movement exercise in which the kids are told to dance ‘in the manner of’ an abstract concept, like hunger or the wind. The girl in the bar was dancing in the manner of an orgasm. Her hips, her behind, her shoulders, her bare feet sliding on the floor, all seemed to suggest that dancing on her own to a jukebox in the middle of the day in a shithouse bar was to her the ultimate in sexual excitement. As she danced her hands even stole occasionally to between her legs, brushing at the little concertina of denim that disappeared below the zip of her jeans.

If this woman wasn’t masturbating to music in a public bar she was by way of doing a very good impression of it. An impression that was not lost on the two large good of boy cowboy trucker types who were leaning against the bar resting their beer bottles on their beer bellies. They were, of course staring at the dancing woman, leering in fact. Dribbling would perhaps not be too strong a word. Their jaws were dropping, their erections were rising. Had it not been for the vast expanse of gut between the two, jaw and erection might well eventually have met.

‘Hurrr hurrrr,’ said one good of boy.

‘Hurrrr,’ replied the other and despite the poverty of their language it was clear that they were discussing the young woman’s charms. Perhaps she was flattered by their obvious attentions, because she seemed to be directing her dancing towards them. A rough translation of her body language might have read, ‘Should either of you two gentlemen feel in any way inclined to screw me rigid, you would not find me an unwilling collaborator.’ That, at least, was how the bigger and uglier of the two good of boys interpreted her look, for he released the bar stool that he had clamped between his vast buttocks and, pausing only to spit some tobacco on to the floor, grunted his way towards the nearnaked siren dancing before him.

What a contrast they made. One so beautiful it was almost unbearable, a walking, talking, living doll, a sex puppet, achingly seductive. The other a repulsive slob, beer bottle in hand, so many chins it looked as if he had rested his face on a stack of crumpets, his belly so vast that one side of it was in a different time zone from the other. The woman’s chest might defy Newton ’s laws, but this colossal gut seemed to exercise it’s own gravitational pull. At least, the woman certainly appeared to be drawn towards him, and it was hard to imagine that this had come about through any sort of desire.

And yet everything about her demeanour suggested that it had. It really seemed as if she was attracted to this man. She pouted at him, wiggled at him. His lumpy movements and phlegmy grunts seemed to excite her and spur her on to greater displays of lithe sexuality. She took his beer bottle from him and, even though there was only an inch or so left in it, took a pull. The man had clearly been nursing that bottle for some time and one could only guess how much of the beery dregs was made up of his spit, yet the woman sucked greedily at it, her fleshy lips pouting round the bottle neck as if to say, ‘Normally, of course, I prefer to do this to a fat, ugly truckdriver’s penis.’

The woman emptied the bottle but instead of putting it down she rolled it around on her tummy, apparently so hot that she needed to take any opportunity to cool down. Having rolled the bottle around for a while she turned it upside down so that a small dribble of the remaining foam ran down over her bellybutton and into the top of her tiny shorts, drawing attention (as if this were required) to the fact that the waist button was undone and it was only the zip that was holding the shorts closed.

‘Hurrr,’ said the good of boy, as well he might.

The woman put the bottle down on top of the jukebox and closed the gap between herself and her new companion. Now her body was against his, her hips grinding back and forth. The trucker, clearly feeling that some gesture was required on his part, put his arms round her and in lieu of a formal introduction gripped her buttocks.

‘My name’s Angel,’ she whispered at two or three of his many chins.

‘Who cares what your name is, honey?’ the trucker said. ‘Pussy is pussy.’

He had struck the wrong note. Whatever Angel had hoped to hear from this disgusting man, it was not that. Her mood changed even as he gripped her more tightly.

‘Loosen your grip, buddy,’ she said. ‘I like to keep my tits on the outside of my ribcage’.

Her appeal fell on deaf ears. Digging his huge, fat banana fingers into her behind, he dragged her body harder against his.

‘Honey, if you dance like a whore you’re going to get treated like a whore,’ he growled. ‘Now, how about you pucker up for daddy?’

‘I’d rather kiss the stuff I cut off my dog’s ass,’ Angel remarked in a forthright tone. With that she reached out an arm, grabbed the beer bottle from the top of the jukebox and brought it down on top of her dancing partner’s head, shattering the base of the bottle. This gesture was understandably enough to make the man do as he was asked and disengage himself, but he did it with no good grace and indeed seemed ready to draw back his big pudgy fist and punch the woman. She was, however, ahead of him. There was a heavy glass beer jug on the counter. Somehow or other it got into Angel’s hand and she swung it against the side of the big man’s head. Down he went, semistunned, to the filthy barroom floor, where he lay prostrate in the mud and the blood and the beer. At the bar his pal began to release his stool from the buttockclamp in which his ass held it. Angel dropped the jug and, reaching into her tiny shorts, produced – by some kind of miracle, for it certainly could not have been there before – a little snubnosed pistol.

‘Sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up,’ this woman of strange emotional contrasts shouted, levelling her weapon at the second trucker. You could almost hear the fear as the terrified fellow reinserted the stool into his enormous Tardy backside and shut up.

Meanwhile Angel turned her attention back to her exdancingpartner, who still lay semistunned upon the floor.

‘Cocksucking son of a bitch!’ she screamed in wild, uncontrollable, unbalanced fury, kicking the stricken man in the head and face. ‘Still want me? Still looking for pussy, you goddam faggot bastard? Well, you’ve had your last piece, you rat turd!’

The broken bottle with which she had begun her assault was still in her hand. Dropping to her knees, she rammed its jagged edge into the stunned man’s loins. Blood geysered out of his fly.

The man touched the video remote control and the image froze, the blood stopping in midair as it hurtled towards Angel’s face.

‘I wuz just starting to enjoy that, honey,’ said the girl.

‘Got to take a leak,’ said the man. ‘Don’t you mess with that control, now, girl. ‘Cos’ I’m working here. What I got is a plan.’