Waist Deep

47

I sat at RogerJackson’s dining room table and drummed my fingers.My options were running out.I could leave now and clear out of the second burglary I’d committed in as many days.Or I could wait for RogerJackson to find his way home and get what I needed from him.

With a sigh, I decided to wait.Like I told Adam, in for a penny, in for a pound.

I stood up to wander around Jackson’s house some more, taking time to open his fridge.A whole row of Heineken’s were in the door, but I dismissed them and grabbed a Coke instead.

Maybe I wasn’t so pathetic, after all.

The fizzy liquid splashed down my throat.I was surprised at how thirsty I was.I drank half the can in one long swig.Then I wandered aimlessly through the rooms, listening and waiting.

As I walked and drank from the Coke can, I thought about Gary LeMond and Yvette.I heard his lesson on “society’s bullshit” again in my head and wondered if it were true what he said about taboos.I knew there was at least a kernel of truth to it.Most societies slowly became more and more liberal as they went along, so taboos weakened and fell.Take interracial marriages, for instance.Or gays.Just a hundred years ago in America, both were certainly spurned, and sometimes worse.How many people were beaten up or even killed simply because of who they loved?

I smiled slightly.I was starting to sound a lot like Marie Byrnes.

I rifled through Jackson’s medicine cabinet, found some Tylenol and took three, washing them down with the last of my Coke.I tossed the can into the bathroom trash.

LeMond had used oral sex as his example.I didn’t know if he had his history right on that one or not.I grew up in the 80s and there was nothing taboo about a blowjob then.But he might’ve had a point.I’d thought the same thing about pornography.While I was growing up, there were books and movies available, but you had to go through a little work to get them.At the grocery store, you had to ask the person at the check stand to hand you a Playboy or a Penthouse.If you wanted anything harder, you had mail order it in a plain brown paper wrapper or head down into the wrong part of town to the dirty book store.It took a little deliberate effort.Now, with the advent of the computer and the Internet, all the porn a person could want and a lot that they didn’t was two mouse clicks away.

I’d never wondered what kind of an effect that had on our society before, but now I was face to face with it.I wasn’t sure, but it seemed to me that it wasn’t a very positive effect.Not if girls Kris’s age in cities like River City could get involved.

A wave of guilt passed over me as I thought of Yvette’s body in LeMond’s hot tub.What if I had seen a picture of Kris without knowing she was sixteen and Matt Sinderling’s daughter?What if it had been a nude picture?Would I look away?I didn’t think so.I’d found it difficult to look away from Yvette when I was at LeMond’s.

She was seventeen.Just a few months from eighteen, is what LeMond had said.An arbitrary date, a line in the sand that somehow made it different for him to be sleeping with her.At least as far as society was concerned.

Of course, my guess was that she was one of his students, too, and there was a different set of rules and laws there.

Still, what was the difference between Yvette now and Yvette in May?

I shook my head.It was wrong.Anyone with sense knew it and all the fancy, liberal intelligentsia arguments couldn’t change that.It wasn’t society’s bullshit.It was LeMond’s bullshit.

Where was Kris?I kept coming back to that as I paced through RogerJackson’s square, neat house.Where was she and, more importantly, how was she? What had she gotten herself into?

I went back downstairs and into RogerJackson’s office.I didn’t know much about computers, but I guessed that his computer was on because he was running a server.And that the box of electronics underneath the printer is what ran that server.Or was the server.However it worked.Either way, the copies of Videomaker magazine on the shelf and the editing software in his desk drawer told me that Jackson wasn’t just running a website.He was in on the movies, too.

I went back upstairs and replayed the phone message again.The voice didn’t sound like it could belong to Kris.Her words were clear, though, and so was the intent.She was coming over for some filming and it sounded like the agenda was girl-on-girl.Perfect for “Barely Legal Beaver.”

The clock on the living room wall read 1:30.I’d been inside RogerJackson’s house for over two hours and what had I really done but walk around his little square, neat floor plan like I was Bill the security guy protecting the property of the mighty filmmaker, RogerJackson?

I stopped walking.

Floor plan.

A square floor plan.

Goddamn, I was so dense.

I turned tail and headed back downstairs.