Slice

STOBAUCH

With the injection of sex into their bizarre relationship something else changed between Daniel and Sissy. He began to notice her for the first time. This, in itself, was not good. He was beginning to notice that she was THERE, a human presence where for so many years there had been nothing. He had never tolerated proximity of any kind, even slammed down tight behind bars he was the classic example of a con doing his own time. Daniel was a loner.

Now he would come “home” after his days of exhausting work and be vaguely irritated that someone was there waiting for him. And one day he noticed something that would completely alter his life. He almost never spoke to Sissy anymore, and of course from the moment they'd begun having sex the whole Hollywood and model fantasy had been dropped. Neither of them ever spoke of it again, almost as if by mutual consent.

Neither of them spoke about much of anything. She had tried to initiate conversations but even Sissy ultimately caught onto the fact that her man was neither listening nor responding to anything she said, so she settled for what he gave her, which proved to be a warm place to stay, a roof, a sufficient amount of caloric intake to stay alive, a TV set, animals to play with, the odd moment of brief sexual usage, and no further demands on her physically or intellectually.

He had lost an enormous amount of weight already. The first week alone he knew he had dropped over twenty-five pounds just in water. Although he was too heavy to be weighed on ordinary scales he could easily estimate his own body weight and calculated he'd lost between sixty and sixty-five pounds and it was still melting from his hugely corpulent frame. The thing is, he had noticed something that had all but turned him around. His stomach was getting smaller, but hers appeared to be growing larger. At first, without consciously thinking about it, he'd assumed her weight gain was due to a totally sedentary life. Then, as he made more new holes in his belt, cutting more excess leather off the other end and cinching up the baggy pants he was wearing, it dawned on him that he'd impregnated her.

“Why didn't you tell me you were pregnant?” he said suddenly, confronting her outside the shack. He towered over her like a grizzly.

“Umm. Well. I wasn't sure at first."

“But you're sure now?” She looked up at him and smiled. She nodded and blinked her eyes, waiting for his reaction. There was none. He walked over to the Caprice and got behind the wheel, noticing that the steering wheel didn't wedge against his gut quite as much as it had, and motioned for her. “Come on—get in.” He drove into town to the local one-doc clinic and had her examined. She seemed to be healthy, and about ninety days along.

The doctor had regaled them with stories about all the women who went three and four months without a period, and made sure that Daniel understood, ahem, that his weight on top of her after a certain point, cough, might cause discomfort. Checked out her plumbing. Gave her two aspirin and a pat on the head and told her not to smoke or drink too much caffeine.

“How do you feel?” Chaingang asked later, paternally.

“I have to pee bad,” she said, completing one of their typically crisp exchanges of dialogue.

And he went back out into the fields with his special, blacksmithed weed slinger and worked until he could no longer see, smashing out at the stubborn and infinite vetch again and again, the sharpened blade slashing into the obstinate weeds, the smoothly welded brass straps helping the fiercely slung tool cut a path through the overgrown meadow. Ten with the right hand, ten with the left hand, ten with the right hand, over and over and over, the rhythm never slackening, never changing, the man showing no signs of tiring, of ever stopping. He kept swinging his blade of vengeance, chopping at the vetch like the Grim Reaper, relentlessly hacking his way through this vast acreage of Mother Nature unattended, slashing through Mother Nature rampant, defying her with every brutal blow. Weeds, grass, vetch, all the thick stuff flying into the air, sometimes over his shoulders, showering his head, coming down on his back, the strong man oblivious to everything as he concentrated, swinging the cutting tool, slashing hearts, ten with the left, ten with the right, ten more, ten more, each vicious swing in heartbeat tempo, fuck Mother Nature, fuck Mother Nature...