Snuff

26. Mr. 72

The stopwatch girl lets me come back, on account of I have to give Mr. Bacardi something important. She leads me back down the stairs, to the waiting basement. The smell of baby oil and cheese crackers.

The minute Mr. Bacardi sees me, he presses his cell phone to his chest and says, "You kill her?"

The Dan Banyan guy says, "Or, worse. did you say you loved her?"

And the stopwatch girl says, "Gentlemen, may I have your attention…"

When a guy goes up there to be with Cassie Wright, he might as well be visiting her in the hospital. They got her laid in a white bed with white sheets and pillows, laying with her legs open, sipping orange juice from a glass through a plastic bendy straw. Her bottom half covered with a sheet. The lights shine on the bed, hot and bright as an operating room. And when the girl with the clipboard brings you in, Cassie Wright might as well be a lady in bed waiting for some nurse to clean up her just-born baby so Cassie can feed it.

Crowded around the head of the bed, they got flowers in vases and wrapped in bouquets, roses and roses and roses. Every different kind, but all roses. And standing up, on the tables beside her pillows, they crowded greetings cards, frilly with lacy edges and sparkling with glitter. Cards tucked in bouquets. Cards knocked on the floor and printed with the dirty tread of somebody's shoe stepped on them.

All those cards, Mother's Day cards. "To the World's Best Mom!" And "To the Best Mother a Boy Could Ever Have!"

The stopwatch girl brings you in, tugging by one arm, and she says, "Ms. Wright…" The girl points at the flowers I'm holding and says, "We've brought you another son…"

In the waiting basement, afterward, the Dan Banyan guy says, "Your mother is such a hoot!" He says, "You think, if I asked, would she go out to dinner with me?"

Yelling into his cell phone, Mr. Bacardi says, "How can you say that?" He yells, "I have the deepest, most even, darkest, best tan in the industry!"

Crowding the room for the movie set, folks with their clothes on, they were balancing cameras on one shoulder, or holding and watching the slack cords that snaked from each camera to plug into some power boxes, to wall outlets, to other cords. Other folks waved sticks with a microphone dangled from one end. Folks leaned over Cassie Wright with lipsticks and combs.

They monkeyed with the bright lights and tinkered with shiny silver umbrellas that bounced the light to land on Cassie in her bed.

The whole family of them, laughing, their eyes bloodshot from staying up all hours, waiting for a baby to be born. People with pretty Mother's Day cards stuck to the underneath of their shoes, tracked around the little room. Rose petals were scattered everywhere.

The stopwatch girl steers you in through the door, pinching you by the elbow, and a guy holding a camera says, "Crimony, Cass, how many kids did you have?"

Folks laugh, everybody but me.

That whole family you're being born into.

Talking around a lipstick stuck in her mouth, sunk in her bed, Cassie Wright says, "Today, I've had them all."

Back in the basement, Mr. Bacardi tells his cell phone, "My best work is not behind me!" He yells, "You know, nobody does a better split-reed standing anal with an on-demand hands-free pop-shot release."

And the Dan Banyan guy looks up at the TV screens and says, "You think she'd marry me?"

Kicked against one wall of the set, the three Nazi uniforms sat in a pile, dark with sweat. The stopwatch girl said the crew stopped using them halfway through, to go faster.

A guy held the glass of juice close enough Cassie Wright could make her lips go around the straw. As she sucked some orange juice, the guy looked at me and said, "Come on, kid. Climb on top." He said, "Some of us want to go home tonight."

Cassie Wright pushed him away with one hand.

With her other hand, she waved me closer, she scooped that hand under her breast, and stretched the nipple toward me, saying, "Don't take his shit. He's just the director." Cassie held out her breast, saying, "Come to Momma…"

Her left breast, the better of the two. Same as I had at home. Used to have. At the house where I used to live, before my adopted folks changed the locks.

Mr. Bacardi on his cell phone says, "Twenty bucks? To drop by and dip my wick for thirty seconds?" He looks over at the Dan Banyan guy and says, "Are you sure you don't mean fifty bucks?"

Still squinting at the monitors, the Dan Banyan guy says, "The queen of porn and the king of prime-time television, getting married." He says, "We could have our own reality show."

On the television he's watching, it's not even Cassie Wright. The movie's showing some in-between shot of a bulldozer dumping dirt into a dump truck.

On the set, one step closer, rose petals stuck to my bare feet, I knelt down next to her big bright bed.

The only folks watching looked at us through the camera or faced the other way, watching us on a video screen, hearing us talk through wires inside their headphones.

And me kneeling next to the bed, Cassie Wright scooping one breast into my face, I asked, did she recognize me?

"Suck," she said, and rubbed her nipple across my lips.

I asked, did she know who I was?

And Cassie Wright smiled, saying, "Are you the one bags my groceries at the supermarket?"

Blinking and squinting at the TVs, the Dan Banyan guy says, "We'll get hitched in Las Vegas. It will be the media event of the decade."

Yelling at his cell phone, Mr. Bacardi says, "My fans don't want any new face. My fans want me!"

I'm her son, I said to Cassie Wright. The baby she gave up for adoption.

"Told you so," said the guy holding the juice.

I've come here because she wouldn't answer my letters.

"Not another one…" said the guy balancing the camera, his voice buried behind the metal and plastic of it, his lens so close in my face I could see myself talking, reflected in curved glass.

Recorded. Being filmed. Watched by people, forever.

When I opened my lips to speak, Cassie stuffed her nipple in my mouth. To talk, I had to twist my head away, saying, "No." The taste of salt on her breast skin, the flavor of other men's spit. I said, "I'm here to give you a new life."

And the stopwatch girl lifted the clock from around her neck and with her thumb pressed the button on top. She said, "Go."

How I feel is how the sex surrogate looked with all her air leaked out. Flat. Crumpled. Before my adopted mom shook the pink skin in the face of my adopted dad and both of them shook her in the face of Minister Harner, turning my secret, most favorite love into what I hated most in the world. Not my adopted dad's tiny, hand-detailed crack whores, or my adopted mom's cherry-vanilla-frosted pussies, it's my pink shadow showed to everybody.

The only thing that made me special, now my worst shame.

To prove I'm me, I showed Cassie the gold heart Branch Bacardi wore. Undoing the chain from around my wrist, I pried open the heart and showed her the baby picture of me inside. The cyanide pill, I dumped into one hand and made a fist around.

Cassie Wright's smiling face—looking at the baby picture, her face got old around her eyes and mouth. Her lips went thin, and the skin on her cheeks sagged to bunch against her neck. She said, "Where'd you get this?"

Irving, I told her.

And Cassie Wright said, "You mean Irwin?"

I nodded yes.

She said, "Did he give you anything else?"

My fingers fisted tighter around the pill, and I shook my head no.

That's me, the baby inside the heart, I told her. I'm her son.

And Cassie Wright smiled again, saying, "Don't take this too hard, kid," she said, "but the baby I gave up for adoption wasn't a little boy." She snapped her heart shut, taking the locket and chain. Cassie lifted both arms until her hands met at the back of her neck. Clipping the chain, she said, "I told people it was a boy, but she was a beautiful little girl…"

The stopwatch click-click-clicking to make minutes.

The camera lens reflected me so close up all I could see was one big tear roll down from my eye.

"Now," Cassie Wright said. She pulled the bedsheet off her bottom half and said, "Be a good boy, and start fucking me."

In the basement waiting place, the Dan Banyan guy says, "So what did you do with the cyanide pill?"

I don't know.

I put it in the crotch of my shorts. First wadded on the floor. Later, for safekeeping, held under my balls.

And the Dan Banyan guy makes a face, saying, "How can you expect anyone to put that in their mouth after it's been in your dirty shorts?"

"It's cyanide!" yells Mr. Bacardi, holding his phone to his chest. He says, "A little sweat and smegma is not going to make it any more poisoner."

Punch-fucking Cassie Wright, hard, one leg bent back so far her knee's in her face, I heard the stopwatch girl say, "Time."

Still fucking her, rolled over and nailing her on her side, her legs jackknifed, I heard Cassie Wright say, "This kid fucks like he's got something to prove."

Stuffing her doggy style, on all fours, my hands grabbed full of her wet, loose ass-skin, I heard Cassie Wright say, "Get this little bastard off of me!"

Hands came around me from behind. Fingers dug my fingers out of her thighs. Folks were pulling me back until only my dick was still touching her, my hips still bucking until just the head of my dick was inside her, until I popped free, my 'nads jumping out ribbon after ribbon of white ooze across her butt.

At the far end of her, Cassie Wright's mouth said, "You guys getting this?"

The director said, "This is one for the trailer." He sipped orange juice from the cup's bendy straw and said, "Careful, kid, you're fixing to drown us."

Cassie Wright said, "Somebody wipe me off." Still on her hands and knees, she looked back over one shoulder, saying, "Good to meet you, kid. Keep buying my movies, okay?"

In the basement, a voice says, "Number 600?" A girl's voice. The stopwatch girl says, "We're ready for you on the set, please."

Into his cell phone, Mr. Bacardi yells, "I made your lousy agency." He yells, "It's not the money, it's the disrespect!" But he starts toward the stairway, the stopwatch girl, the set.

Before Mr. Bacardi can head up the stairs, I reach into my shorts, feeling between the tight elastic crotch and the baggy folds of my ball skin. I say to wait. And, fingering my nuts, I jump the one, two, three steps up to where Mr. Bacardi stands.

I say to kill her. Kill the Wright bitch. To murder her.

"You can't kill her," says the Dan Banyan guy. "I'm going to marry her."

Mr. Bacardi folds his phone shut, still saying, "Twenty lousy bucks…"

Just how he planned, I say to fuck her to death. And I drop the pill into his hand.