Sacred Monster

Flashback 1

Frank William Pal, Jr., known as Buddy, smiled at Wendy and backed out of the car. With the door open, the interior light had come on, and Wendy shielded her eyes with a pudgy-fingered hand. Supine on the backseat, blue jeans and panties in a snarl around her right ankle on the floor, sweater and bra bunched up to her armpits, she was less pretty but more provocative than when seen in the corridors at school, prancing along, eyes wise with knowing sidelong glances, lips full and mouth pink when she laughed. Now she breathed in little gasps, her pale belly contracting, and her voice was hoarse as she said, “Ow. Shut the door, willya?”

“I’ll send Jack over,” Buddy told her, and shut the door, killing the light. It was a soft and humid spring night, and the car windows were all steamed on the inside, making them opaque in the darkness. Buddy, a skinny six-footer of sixteen with nondescript brown hair, took the roll of paper towels he’d left on the car roof, ripped off a few, and put the roll back on the roof. After using the towels, he pulled his pants up, secured them, stepped into his loafers, and walked away from the dark and silent Buick, down the dirt road among the pine trees in the dark.

Jack Pine stood nervously walking and skipping and kicking at stones about a hundred feet down the road. He too was skinny at sixteen, his brown hair less controlled than Buddy’s. They were similar in looks and build, enough so that people sometimes thought they might be cousins, but they were merely best friends. Their differences were not in their features, but what they did with them: Buddy’s expressions were confident, amused, aware, while Jack’s face mostly mirrored doubt and insecurity. Between the two, Buddy seemed the older, the more mature. He came strolling down the dirt road, smiling, hands in trouser pockets, and softly called, “Dad? You there?”

“Buddy? Here I am!” Jack’s voice, anxious, was too loud, the words too jumbled together.

Buddy found him in the dark, and squeezed his arm. “Take it easy, Dad.”

“I’m fine!” Jack told him, smiling maniacally though they could barely see each other. “Is Wendy—?”

“All softened up for you, Dad.”

Jack swallowed. “I just... I just go over there?”

“She’s waiting, Dad. You know what I mean? Waiting.”

“But — I don’t know how to...” Jack’s hands fluttered in the night like moths. “How to act. I don’t know how to act.”

“Act like me, Dad,” Buddy told him, grinning as he presented the gift. “Just go over there and be me.”

Jack’s eyes widened. He looked at his friend as though for the first time. “I could,” he whispered, awed by it.

“Sure, you could, Dad. Go on, get over there before she cools off.”

Buddy gave him a little push, and Jack stepped toward the unseen Buick, tripping but recovering, moving on. In the dark, his movements were like Buddy’s, gliding, insinuating, certain. Then he stopped and looked back. Above, clouds shifted, and the sheen of perspiration on Jack’s face suddenly gleamed pale in moonlight. His smile was one he’d never owned before. “Buddy?” he called, transfixed, spotlit by the moon. “Thanks!” And he turned away, sliding Buddy-like through the dark.

I smile at the sky, remembering that incredible moment, that instant when I opened the Buick’s door and the light went on — like a movie starting, like a curtain going up on a play — and there she was, like nothing I’d ever seen before. And she held her arms out to me....

I held my arms out, up, to the sky, the way I did when I played the Aztec prince. Red. There’s blood on my hand, my right hand. Dried, dark, dull. I put my hand to my mouth, I lick the blood away. All gone. No evidence left. No matter. I forget all about it. “That was something,” I say, living nothing but that first moment so long ago. “It was so exciting. My very first time. I just lost... I just lost all control. It was like an explosion. That’s when I really and truly came to life.”

From the corner of my eye, I see the interviewer make a note. A sexual suggestion, but just a hint, will get into his copy, past his editor. It’s all good for my image. Then he looks at me and says, “Buddy Pal was there even back then, was he?”

“Oh, yeah,” I say. “Buddy Pal’s not only my best friend in all the world, he’s my oldest friend in all the world. We met in nursery school, man. We ate sand together. And on to college.”