The Blue Hour

Eight

Colesceau sat on his stool behind the counter and looked out the dusty window. He read the words off the glass for the billionth time in his life and looked at his watch. Twenty minutes. He could hear Pratt and Garry out back with the Shelby Cobra, and the occasional cackle of Pratt’s wife, Lydia. Every day, half an hour before closing they’d start drinking beer and Colesceau would hear the rising pitch of their conversation punctuated by the cchht, cchht, cchht of the cans popping open. All Pratt and Garry talked about was cars and the body parts of women.

His job was to count and bag the money at closing, so he counted and bagged it. There was $14 in cash and $220 in checks. He noted the amounts and check numbers on the deposit slip and added the subtotals twice before writing down the total.

“Hey, hey, Matty.”

It was Lydia, sneaking up behind him again, hanging her hand over his shoulder like they were on the same football team or something. She took liberties with his first name, which he had clearly explained was Matamoros or Moros for short. But Lydia was always playing with words and had called him Matamata for a while. According to a library encyclopedia that Colesceau had consulted, the matamata was a “grotesque” river turtle of South America that caught prey by distending its huge lower jaw and sucking unwary animals down its gullet along with the water. He had asked her not to call him that any longer and she had not.

“How did your interview go?”

“Very well.”

“They’re not going to rat you out to your neighbors, are they?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well,” she said, hand resting on his shoulder again, “I hope they don’t. It’s hard enough to get on in this life without the cops stirring up the water every place a man tries to go.”

He wondered if this water metaphor was a veiled reference to the grotesque matamata, but with Lydia you couldn’t say for sure. “I hope for the best.”

“You’re an optimist. I admire that. You carry the weight for yourself. You’re the only one around here isn’t always complaining.”

“You don’t.”

She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “I can keep my own counsel.”

With Lydia, it was always between you and her. She would be vague and playful, then pointed and prying, all in one minute. But she had never betrayed a confidence to her husband or Garry, at least Colesceau had never caught her at it She had this way of pairing off, of making you think that somehow she was in this with you.

She stood beside him now. With him sitting on the stool they were the same height Her breasts were heavy and low in the tank tops she always wore and she had a way of brushing them against his back when she did this teammate thing. She ran her fingers over the duct tape he wore around his body, casually scratching it through his shirt, like it itched her as much as it itched him.

Months ago she had gotten him to admit that he wore the tape to hold down his budding breasts. That he folded squares of toilet paper to go over his nipples so they wouldn’t get pulled when he removed the tape.

He had been livid at her lack of manners and at himself for making such an admission, and at Holtz and Pratt for their big gossiping mouths, but to his surprise Lydia had never made reference to the tape or his breasts again. Other than the light fingernail scratch she offered without comment every time she let her hand rest on his body.

“You let me and Pratt know if we can testify or anything,” she said.

She always called her husband by his last name instead of his first, which was Marvis. She always wanted to help. Like a mechanic/ex-car-thief/beer guzzler or his wife were going to make you look good to the parole board, he thought. She had a thin dark body and lank dark hair with ears that showed through it and a little nose that stuck more up than out.

“Yes.”

“How’d we do today, Matty?”

He told her. It surprised him that for such a dusty, poorly stocked, out-of-the-way place, Pratt Automotive managed to take in close to two thousand a week. And the heart of the business was the custom work that Marvis and Garry did in the back. That made some bigger money and he never saw so much as a dollar of it. It was a cash thing between car lovers and he was told from the first that there were really two “operations” — the store and the custom work — and Colesceau was to mind the store. Only. He knew that Pratt was in cozy with AI Holtz, which is why he was offered the job here. And Pratt was also in cozy with a lot of custom car and biker types and Colesceau wondered if part of Pratt’s deal with Holtz was an occasional betrayal.

“Why don’t you go ahead and split,” she said. “I’ll take the bag to the bank.”

This was no surprise because Colesceau, though trusted with the handling of cash and checks during his workday, was never asked to make the nightly deposit. He assumed this was some furtive directive passed from his PA to his boss. Colesceau had long since lost his amusement over how Holtz demanded his trust but wouldn’t trust him back.

He thanked her and went to the back to say good-bye to his boss. Pratt stood in the high bay behind the office, his arms crossed, looking down at the brilliant yellow Cobra with the black hood and the chrome roll bar and headers. It was an $80,000 car, Colesceau had heard. Four hundred fifty horses, top speed up near 180 mph. You had to register it in Nevada because it wasn’t quite legal in California. Colesceau had a brief vision of himself at the wheel and his lover beside him, peeling across the lawless American desert at top speed, outrunning the world. Garry came from the refrigerator with two more beers. Cchht. Cchht.

“Next week we’ll crack one for you,” said Pratt.

“I haven’t had alcohol in seven years.”

“All finished up next week, aren’t you?” asked Garry, though Colesceau knew he already knew the answer. Garry was a man who pretended to be stupid. He believed that you would tell him things because of that. But Colesceau had been around him enough to understand that he was as quick and self-serving as a dog.

“Yes, next week.”

“Here’s to you, my friend.”

Garry tipped his beer at Colesceau and took a sip.

“Five hundred and four dollars today, Mr. Pratt. And the Ford dealership says the EGR module for the Bronco will be here tomorrow morning.”

“Thanks, man.”

Back in the store he saw that Lydia was outside smoking. In spite of the strong smell of machined metal, motor oil and solvent, Marvis Pratt forbade his wife to smoke inside the establishment. She’d put a wrought-iron patio table and two chairs out there, her smoking area. Pratt had donated a ground-out piston head for an ashtray, but the piston head was full and the ground was littered with her butts.

Colesceau searched under the counter for his lunch box but remembered he’d left it in the back. He was going through the short hallway that connected the retail store to the work bay when he heard Garry say something about tits, then the low-pitched, wicked chuckles.

Colesceau pretended he hadn’t heard, and grabbed his lunch box off the counter above which hung the centerfolds of beautiful women in bathing suit bottoms and no tops. Today he’d put his lunch under a brunette with a gorgeous smile. His heart was beating hard and he could feel it against the tape. There was a heavy, clumsy silence as he nodded to the men and headed out again.

He stopped in his driveway at 12 Meadowlark in the Quail Creek Apartment Homes and used the remote to open his garage door. The faded little pickup truck chugged at idle while he waited. A moment later he was inside the cool of the garage and the door was coming down.

Inside the apartment Colesceau moved in the dim light. Lights off, drapes drawn. He was a pale man who preferred a little shade with his sunlight, a little dampness with his day.

The California sunshine didn’t want you to have secrets like that: just look at what those people had done to him yesterday. How is your libido... erection and ejaculation... physical sexual arousal... do her with a Coke bottle or your fist?

Amazing, he thought, just what people in the government would do to a man. Humiliation. Control. Chemical castration. No better than the state police who had executed his father, really, just different methods, slower rates of extermination. And no dogs, so far.

On the way past the bookcases he glanced at the scores of eggshells, his mother’s treasures. Most of them were pastels — baby blue and pink and pale yellow. Sickening, infantile shades he thought. The ones with the little skirts of lace and bric-a-brac and lace were by far the worst. In his mother’s hands, egg painting wasn’t so much a noble Romanian folk art as a garish display of inner imbalances too acute for Colesceau to ponder.

He didn’t linger on the eggs however, because he knew that a twenty-six-year-old man must have more to think about than his mother. Not for the first time he wished she lived just a little farther away. The idea that she might move in with him was distressing.

He went into the kitchen. Colesceau knew for a fact that if the police exposed him and the neighbors rallied to have him removed, then his mother would move in to protect him. It would be her duty. She would fight them like a bulldog. He shivered and felt the tape up tight against his breasts. Thank God he’d looked ahead, seen the possibilities, made arrangements.

He made a very strong Bloody Mary. The vodka was in the freezer and the mix was in his refrigerator. He loved his drinks cold. But he liked them hot, too. So he ground half a teaspoon of black pepper, shook four jets of Tabasco and three of Worcestershire sauce into the jar, then broke off a stalk of celery and stirred it. It cooled and heated his lips at the same time. Nice.

After dinner and two more drinks Colesceau dialed Al Holtz’s office number. He knew the fat PA would be home by now, but he thought he might sum up his case for mercy with a brief message on Holtz’s machine. He always saved a little bit of old-world formality for law enforcement:

“Yes, hello Mr. Holtz, this is Matamoros Colesceau. Moros. I want to say thank you for the interview of yesterday. I will successfully satisfy my parole next week. I hope that you will allow me to maintain my life and privacy here on Meadowlark. I will continue to live up to my obligations as in the past I have done. I will never again harm any person. Thank you very much. I look forward to talking with you. Good-bye.”

When Colesceau hung up he was already brooding about women and his sexual capacity and he could feel the faint stirrings of desire down in his pants. It was difficult for him that his thoughts about sex were linked to his thoughts about castration, but the two went everywhere together, like twins, one beautiful and one ugly. Castration. The word sent a chill through his nervous system. It was one of the few English words with the power to do that.

Colesceau had done his research into chemical castration. In fact, he liked to think of himself as a detective who went and found things out. Depo-Provera was a brand name for medroxyprogesterone acetate, a chemical reproduction of the female hormone progesterone. Injected into males it was a hormone inhibitor, and it affected people differently. In some males it nearly eliminated the sex drive; in others it diminished it; in still others it seemed to have little or no effect. Recidivism rates were between 3 and 8 percent, depending on who you believed. It encouraged breast growth, hair loss and a loss of overall energy and strength.

Only some of this was disclosed in the State of California Department of Health protocol agreement between Atascadero State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and committed patient Matamoros Colesceau.

Since he’d been released three years ago, they’d injected the stuff into him at the end of his counseling appointment every week. What a strange feeling to sit there and watch that swarthy female nurse jab the needle into his arm and make small talk about sports or the weather while she pushed the plunger down: all this to remove from Matamoros the keen fury that brought such pain to women and such pleasure to himself.

What he discovered was that the people giving him this drug had no firm idea of what it would do to him. Which was why he got a special deal for joining the protocol — a slightly early release from Atascadero and parole terms rather lenient for a twice-convicted violent sex offender. The privileges of the lab rat, he had thought.

But the larger reason he was chemically castrated was because there was no more space in the mental hospitals, because his prison term was satisfied, because he needed — according to current budget-tightening policy — to be “reintegrated into the community.” So they’d given him a choice of castrations: chemical or surgical. The chemical was temporary; the other permanent.

Now that was funny. Which one would you take?

Infuriating, too.

In the upstairs spare bedroom he took off his shirt. He hated the way the silver duct tape cut red furrows into his side. He hated the way the edges became slippery after only a few minutes — sweat and adhesive oozing down his ribs. He hated the smell. He’d actually tried a corset but it made him feel more female.

But what he hated even more was the way his breasts stuck out after just six months on the Depo-Provera, and the way his complexion became smoother. He couldn’t do much about his skin, but he could do something about the tits.

Three full wraps, all the way around. Through his shirts, you couldn’t even tell, he was pretty sure.

But he could certainly tell now, as he pulled off the tape and watched his skin peel away and then sag back, reddened, to his body. As the tissue fell to the floor, his pubescent girl’s breasts jiggled into view. He knew there was something not completely usual about this thing he was forced to call himself.

In fact, there was something drastically not usual about it.

He saw all this and he thought about what had been done to him and it made him even more furious than he’d been to start with.

Colesceau had learned one more thing about Depo-Provera as a castrator. It might be 92 % effective 100 % of the time, or 100 % effective 92 % of the time. But it wasn’t all effective all the time. Because sometimes, although not often, his rage and his lust would join fists like in the old days. Every couple of months, say.

Sometimes it would only last ten seconds. Sometimes a few minutes. Nothing like before, when he could sustain himself at peak levels for hours at a time then go again with only a little rest.

But that was all right, because Wednesday he’d be through with this hell on earth and on to the next destination, whatever that might be.