SIREN

by J. L. Comeau  

Precision German motorcars tend to die hard, and Oliver Parrish's custom 911 went down screaming.  When she heeled up sideways on a wet patch of fallen leaves, Oliver slammed into third gear and sent her into a dead spin down a dark, twisting tunnel of Alabama back road.  In an ashen-faced frenzy of mortal terror, he cranked the steering wheel left and right, somehow managing to regain control. 

Fright instantly mutated into stark, venomous fury.  "You bitch!"  he bellowed, ramming the gearshift into first, forcing the car to strain against her own wailing guts.  Oliver drove the Porsche as if it were a reticent beast, whipping the engine to a winding shriek of top-end redline.  When a brutal hairpin curve opened out into a long lowbelly straightaway, he howled a madman's laugh and smashed the accelerator pedal to the floorboard.  The Porsche leaped out of the turn like the thoroughbred she was and blew her clockwork brains out at twelve thousand RPMs.

With a clatter of grinding metal, every warning light on the dash glared red. Sheared bolts and hot twists of aluminum spewed out from under the car as it faltered to a stop on the roadside shoulder.  The dying machine shuddered once, twice, then fell silent.  When the headlights blinked out, Oliver Parrish found himself surrounded by a magnitude of darkness he could hardly believe existed.   

He keyed the ignition.  Nothing.  Not a click, not a spark.  "Shit," he whispered, pressing his forehead against the steering wheel.  "Shit."  Oliver leaned back and let out a long sigh, flipping open the utility console and reaching for his factory-installed cellular telephone, knowing full well the phone was useless without a functioning power source.  Dead.  Cold as stone.  He fumbled in his pockets for his portable digital phone, knowing full well he'd sent that ahead with his extra luggage.  He pulled a long sigh.  "Shit." 

He peered down the desolate ribbon of road stretching out before him and considered his situation.  It was one o'clock in the morning in the ass end of nowhere and he hadn't passed another car since before midnight.  The way Oliver saw it, he could sit inside his disabled hundred-thousand-dollar automobile and wait for some roving band of maniacal hillbillies to rob him and eat him for barbecue, or he could get out and walk.

  Oliver decided to walk.  Perhaps he would find an emergency telephone or a gas station just up ahead.  Alabama wasn't a wilderness, he reasoned.  He was still in America, after all, and Americans require telephones. 

He stepped out of the car and stood staring at the glittering golden hide of the sports coupe his wife Helen had presented him on their fifteenth wedding anniversary.  Oliver couldn't help feeling his troubles were partly Helen's fault for not giving him the Mercedes he'd requested.  A Mercedes was a real workhorse, not a sulky prima donna like a Porsche.  If he'd gotten what he'd asked for, he wouldn't be stranded in the hindmost part of hell in the first place.

"You bitch!"  he shouted one last time, and kicked a dent in one glossy fender.

 As he struck off into the black Alabama night, he peered into the towering black walls of pine forest looming on both sides of the road and wondered what kind of creatures were capable of producing such menacing noises.  Honks and snorts and twitters and squawks rose up from the sultry gloom surrounding him, certainly none being sounds Oliver could recall ever having noticed in the vicinity his Foxhall Road estate in Washington, D.C. 

Shallow puddles of water stood in potholes and ruts all along the roadway and dirt shoulders, and a pale miasma of ground fog swirled and eddied across the tarmac in smoky wisps.  Oliver walked for miles, swatting at mosquitoes and longing for the simple comfort of street lights.  He'd never realized the night possessed such varied depths and textures in hues of utter darkness.   

He purposely steered his thoughts toward the lavish party he'd been given in New Orleans the previous night to kick off his ten-city book tour.  Champagne, caviar, and the most creative two-grand-a-night hooker it had ever been his pleasure to bed.  He was heading for the top of the bestseller list and he hadn't even written The Masculine Imperative himself.  He'd engaged a ghostwriter to research the popular men's movement books written by Bly and Gillette and all the rest, then had him ghost a similar treatise combining those philosophies--adding one essential new element: the substitution of all that drum-beating and male bonding crap with sex and sports.  Within a week of its release, The Masculine Imperative had hit the New York Times charts at sixth place and was climbing fast.

But it wasn't a merely a quest for cash motivating Oliver, no; his scheme to marry Helen DuPont Keyes had already made him one of the wealthiest men in the country.  Yet, to his everlasting disappointment, the money had lost most of its appeal very quickly.  It was personal notoriety he craved now,  acknowledgement for something he'd accomplished besides having wed Helen. He'd never truly loved her, it was true, but marriage to Helen hadn't been all that bad, really.  She was a rather shallow and frivolous creature, but passably pretty and endlessly forgiving.  Helen knew how to manage a household staff and hostess elaborate parties, and she'd given Oliver three beautiful daughters whom he truly cherished.  Diana, Jessica, and Angelique, his three beauties, his treasures.  Just thinking of their coltish preadolescent poise and shy laughter made him feel less adrift and alone.  

Oliver still maintained his Georgetown law office, mostly for appearance's sake, occasionally representing Helen's friends and acquaintances just to have something to do.  Yet he'd found he needed more, and so he'd contrived a method to make himself famous.  The multimedia interviews scheduled to promote The Masculine Imperative would make him a star:  Oprah, Rosie, The View--Oliver's face was soon to be pressed into the mass memory of America's collective consciousness. 

Pondering his imminent fame to deflect his thoughts from topics such as man-eating grizzly bears and bloodthirsty hillbillies armed with shotguns, Oliver Parrish walked on, weary and footsore and soaked with perspiration.  The forest seemed only to become denser and darker and exponentially more sinister as he trudged along the winding roadway.  His anxieties about air travel now seemed trivial in comparison to his forced march through the desolate back woods of Alabama.  He resolved with grim determination that henceforth his travels would progress by jet exclusively.

More than an hour later, Oliver spotted an indistinct pink glow somewhere out among the trees up ahead.  He stepped up his pace, keeping the pale pink shimmer in sight, and presently arrived at a dirt track that veered off the main road into the forest.  Oliver followed the twin ruts of what appeared to be a well-traveled pathway, noting that he seemed to be getting closer to the source of the mysterious pink light.

When he emerged around a sharp bend, civilization in the form of a rakish, eyelid-batting pink neon cat wearing a top hat affixed to the dilapidated facade of a rural backwater saloon burst forth from the primeval darkness.  THE TOMCAT CLUB, a blinking display above the winking feline declared. 

Oliver's body slackened with relief.  A roadhouse!  At last, at last, a human outpost, no matter how crude.  Food, water, shelter.  And a telephone.  Oh Jesus, yes, a telephone.

He stumbled toward the swaybacked old building, giddy with gladness, thankful for this meager port in a bleak and uncultivated wasteland.  Then he noticed a jacked pickup truck and a trio of Harley hogs parked in a nearby gravel lot. 

"Ah boy," he said to himself, lurching to a stop.  Just his luck.  Bikers. Homicidal bikers, probably, with guns and knives and a penchant for slaughtering itinerant strangers wearing expensive Italian suits.  But what was he supposed do, turn around and leave?  Head back to that endless strip of Twilight Zone roadway and stagger another hundred miles? 

Oliver slipped off his Rollex and dropped it into his trouser pocket.  With a mighty sigh of resignation, he headed for the rough plank door leading into the roadhouse.  It was all in the attitude, he assured himself, affecting a severe and stalwart demeanor.  He pushed into the roadhouse with a chest-forward posture and stood just inside the door, eyeing his surroundings with what he hoped was a stony appearance of rugged fortitude.

Hank Williams moaned a cuckold's lament from an ancient, tobacco-grimed jukebox that stood at the far end of the ramshackle plank and cinderblock room.  A shabby rustic bar tilted toward the left-hand wall and three dirty wooden tables crowded together beside a pool table where four large leather-clad men sporting stringy hair and greasy beards stood staring at Oliver.

Oliver nodded once and elected to take a seat at the bar, scanning the room for a telephone and spotting an old wall-mounted unit with more than a little relief. The men around the pool table turned back to their game.  Still, Oliver detected an almost tangible threat of peril hovering in the dim atmosphere along with the combined reek of stale beer, sweat, and cigarettes.

"Pardon me," Oliver called to a crouching figure sorting stacks of paper napkins behind the bar.

When the woman rose and turned toward him, Oliver's breath caught in his throat and he found himself unable to utter a sound.  She was the most beautiful creature Oliver had ever beheld, a goddess in cut-off blue jeans and a skimpy black halter top.  A flawless complexion.  Sable cascades of glossy tresses swept her creamy shoulders.  But mostly it was her eyes, bright emerald lanterns that seemed to burn with an incandescent inner glow, that rendered Oliver speechless.  She gazed out at him from beneath a lush sweep of lashes.  She was perfect, beyond divinity.

The young woman smiled, arching the plush rosy cushions of her lips.  "Can I help you?" 

Oliver blinked, trying to respond.  "I, uh...I--" he stammered, feeling like a doltish adolescent.  "C-could I have some change for the phone, please?"  His face flamed with embarrassment.

The girl touched his hand, sending an electric shock directly to his brain.

"Course you can, darlin'," she said.  "Don't know that it'll do you much good, though."

  "W-why not?"  Oliver could not stop staring at the girl.

 "Storms earlier this evening knocked the lines down.  Happens all the time. Probably be morning before a crew gets here.  We're used to it.  How 'bout I fetch you a cold brew?"  She drew closer, making Oliver's heart buck against his breastbone.  "You look kinda thirsty."     

 "Uh, okay.  A beer, yeah,"  Oliver managed to respond, feeling artless as a schoolboy.  It had been a long time since a young girl's charms had undone him so completely.  "What's your name?"  he asked when she turned away.  The urgent tone in his voice disturbed him.

  "Charise," she called over her shoulder as she leaned over and dug into the icy belly of a rusty metal cooler.

Oliver couldn't help ogling the ripe curve of her posterior, silently chastising himself for behaving like a horny high school kid.  She was just another barroom bimbo, he told himself.  But when she turned back toward him, his worldly insight seemed to melt away.  Charise.  The name seemed to float like gossamer in his burning brain. 

"So Charise," he said, having regained some modicum of composure.  "Do you live around here?"   Charise swayed back toward Oliver carrying a Bud longneck, which she placed before him.  "Sure do," she said with a heavenly grin, folding her arms on the bar in front of Oliver.  She hooked a thumb toward a closed door behind her.  "I live right back there."

Oliver's eyebrows shot up.  "You live here?  In this roadhouse?"

  "Yep," she said, nodding, making her black hair shimmer in intoxicating undulations.  "I have my own room and everything."  She slid a coy sideways glance at Oliver.

Oliver took a long, sweet pull on the Budweiser, wondering what the hell a gorgeous girl like Charise was doing stuck out in the boonies tending bar for a bunch of ignorant yokels.  She seemed bright enough, although he knew a beauty like her wouldn't require a Phi Beta Kappa key to make good in this world.  Her looks would take her anywhere she wanted to go.  But maybe she'd not yet discovered the intrinsic powers of her bewitching sexual appeal; she looked awfully young, maybe nineteen or twenty.  The notion that Charise might be so deliciously naive--or perhaps even a virgin--elicited such a strong response from Oliver that he found himself in a state of concupiscent discomfort he'd not experienced since college.  He would have this girl, he concluded, or he would surely perish from unfulfilled desire.

Charise sidled closer to Oliver, humming and wiping the fractured surface of the bar.  She stopped and gazed up at him from enchanted emerald depths, darting a pink tongue across the tender swellings of her lips.  Just as she opened her mouth to speak, the door behind her banged open.       A haggard elderly woman wearing a faded cotton dress emerged and shuffled up to the bar.  A black stump of a crooked stogie cigar dangled from the arid slit of her mouth and she clutched the knobby shaft of a tattered straw broom in one gnarled fist.  She ferried a thick hump of flesh atop her gaunt skeleton's shoulders as she crabbed along sideways in a wretched contortion of twisted spine.  One orbless eye socket formed a puckered void in the eroded landscape of her face, but the remaining eye darted pale and keen as honed steel.

Hideous.  Oliver could think of no better term of description.  His priapic discomfort promptly reversed itself at the sight of her. 

The old woman stopped and cranked her head toward Oliver,  riveting him with a glittering blue eye, skimming a hasty glance across the gold wedding band encircling his left ring finger.  She jerked her mouth into a toothless parody of a smile, then resumed her tortured progress toward a muck-encrusted manual cash register resting on the end of the bar.  Oliver watched her paw through the bills and coins in the cash drawer, wondering at her ugliness. 

"Who's that?" he asked Charise.

Charise studied Oliver with an amused grin.  "That's Miss Willa.  She owns the place."

 "She lives here, too?"

  "Yeah, her and Jobey."

Oliver felt his prospects for bedding his luscious maiden dwindling.  "Oh? And who's Jobey?"

Charise writhed inside her halter top and picked at a fingernail.  "Jobey Hunt, her fiancé.  They got engaged forty years ago, but never got married."

  "Where's he?"

Charise twisted toward the doorway.  "He's back there somewhere, I guess.

He does the cleaning and scrubbing around here.  He's pretty old now, so he don't get nearly as much done as he used to."

Oliver glanced around at the dangling cobwebs and dusty counters behind the bar.  "That's fairly apparent." 

He asked Charise for another beer and allowed himself to enjoy the beguiling configurations of her splendid torso as she completed her appointed task.  But he couldn't shake the disquieting notion that the old woman was secretly laughing at him.  Every time he looked in her direction, she pulled a weird grimace that sent icy needles coursing through his arteries.  Old bitch, he thought silently as he sipped his brew.  Mind your own damned business.

A flashing movement burst from the doorway behind the bar, startling Oliver so badly that he let out a little yip of fright.  A cat.  Just a damned stupid cat, Oliver realized with red-faced disgust when the sudden yellow blur materialized atop the bar in the form of a corpulent, raggedy-eared feline of the alley variety.

The old woman seemed genuinely pleased by Oliver's annoyance, baring shriveled brown gums in ferocious delight as she hobbled toward the preening golden-eyed beast.  

Oh Christ, Oliver thought miserably, trying to ignore Miss Willa's approach, praying she would not attempt to engage him in conversation.

"This here's a good old cat," she rasped, dragging knotty fingers along the animal's back.  In response to her tender ministrations, the cat whirled with a hiss of displeasure and clawed four vicious lacerations in the papery flesh of Miss Willa's hand.  Miss Willa, apparently undaunted by the cat's demonstration of vile temper, grabbed the snarling cat by the scruff of its neck and shook it several times.   "You ornery old devil!"  she admonished with a mirthful bark of laughter.  "I oughta cut you up for stew meat."

Oliver regarded the old woman's torn and bleeding hand, noticing that both her arms were crosshatched with dozens of pink and white scars of similar configuration.  "Why do you keep such a mean animal?"  he asked.

Miss Willa clutched the growling cat to her cavernous breast despite its angry flattened ears and whipping tail.  "Oh, I guess ol' Tom here has a perfect right to be a little bit mad at me."  She grabbed its thrashing tail and proffered the animal's hindquarters for Oliver's inspection.  "Fixed him, y'see,"  she declared with a croak of hilarity. 

Oliver stared at the barren locus where testicles should have been and involuntarily winced in sympathetic dismay.

"Yep," Miss Willa said, puffing mightily on her stogie.  "He's been right upset about it ever since." With a shrill yowl of fury, the cat twisted itself out of Miss Willa's grasp and disappeared into the murky dimness beyond the bar.  "He's kinda testy for a namesake mascot, ain't he? He's why I named this place The Tomcat Club,"  Miss Willa said with a cackle.  "That ol' tomcat,"  she muttered, taking up her broom and sweeping between stacked boxes behind the bar. "He's a hateful old devil, he is."

When Miss Willa had moved out of earshot, Oliver smiled and remarked to Charise, "Now there's a strange relationship."

Charise gave him an odd look.  "Stranger than you'd think," she said, fluttering long, ebony lashes at him.  "But I'm sick to death of Miss Willa and her stupid old cat.  Tell me a little about yourself, Oliver, like where you're from and what you do.  I'll bet you're rich as Rockefeller, aren't you?"

Never the shy one when it came to matters of self-promotion, Oliver launched into a lengthy monologue regarding his fortune and impending fame as an author. Charise leaned in close and drank in each word, her emerald eyes glinting with curiosity and awe as Oliver expounded upon his bold exploits in the treacherous labyrinths of business and publishing.  He regaled her with stories of his business acumen and shrewd instinct for accumulating wealth, carefully avoiding all mention of his wife's inherited fortune. 

At last, Oliver got down to the one possible sticking point of his revelation, offering up a sad, world-weary expression he'd honed to a knife blade of authenticity over time:  "My wife is very ill,"  he lied with shining eyes.  "Mental problems."

Charise's expression softened and her lovely mouth twitched into a charming moue of empathy.  "How terrible for you, Oliver."  She reached across the bar and placed her hand atop his.  "Bless your poor little heart."

A spark of pleasure at her touch ignited a wildfire of lust in an area somewhat south of Oliver's heart, and he congratulated himself with a mental high-five. Charise felt sorry for him, and sympathy was always a surefire indicator of imminent success.  Once you had a woman's sympathy, it was never long before you had the rest of her.  "It's difficult, of course," Oliver related mournfully.  "But we do have three wonderful daughters.  I try to hold things together for their sakes."

Charise's exquisite face seemed to light up from within, and her green eyes glinted with similar interior radiance.  "You have three girls?  How old are they?"

That sure seemed to fire her up, Oliver thought as he dug in his jacket pocket for his wallet.  "Here they are," he said, holding out a photo he'd taken of the girls together in front of the fireplace just last Christmas.  "This is Angelique, 7; Jessica, 9; and Diana, 11."

Charise stared at the photograph the way a starving dog might stare at a rack of lamb.  "Oh, they're just gorgeous!"

Oliver tugged the photograph from her fingers and replaced it in his wallet. "They keep me going," he said, offering Charise a brave smile.  "If it weren't for my girls..."

Charise moved closer and stroked his cheek with an enticing satin palm.  "Oh, you poor man," she cooed.  "You poor, dear man." 

It was all Oliver could do to keep from whooping aloud.  Victory was at hand.  He could almost feel Charise melting in his arms.  "You're a sweet girl," he said.  "So lovely, so--"

A wracking explosion of phlegm-choked coughs halted Oliver's endgame in mid-pitch.  Goddamn it, he fumed inwardly as a rattling scarecrow of a white-haired old man limped out of the back room wiping his mouth with the back of one hand. What now?

"Hey, Jobey," Charise greeted the stooped old man, who seemed composed of little more than gristle, bone and grizzled whiskers. 

The man looked up with dour, rheumy eyes and nodded as he shuffled toward the cooler and dug around in the ice with one ropy paw. 

"That's Jobey," Charise told Oliver, who was beginning to wonder if the Tomcat Club was a roadhouse or a facility for terminal geriatric patients.

"Miss Willa's fiancé, right?"

Charise nodded.

"Lovely couple."  Oliver nursed his beer and sulked.  Maybe he should simply offer to pay one of the bikers for a lift to a working telephone, and to hell with Charise and her elderly chaperons.  The siren song of a few greenbacks was usually enough to gentle the most dangerous brutes.  Surely one of them would be willing. 

Oliver twisted around on his barstool and discovered that the leather boys apparently had taken their leave while he had been occupied with seducing Charise.  He was now the Tomcat's sole patron.  "Shit," he hissed. 

"Pardon?"  Charise asked sweetly. 

Oliver turned back to face her.  "Tell me, honey--do you think you could give me a lift to a service station?  I'd gladly pay you for your trouble."    

"You want to leave?"  Charise pooched her lips into a captivating little pout. She looked down at the petite white blossoms of her hands.  "I was hopin'... "  she began demurely, "I was hopin' you might stay awhile, Oliver."  She looked up at him with a wistful expression of disappointment.

Oliver felt his resolve weakening.  "Well, I..."

"Aw, come on,"  she said, wriggling and squirming with raw sensual allure. 

Oliver's mind whirled with sweaty carnal fantasies.  "I'm awfully tired," he told her.  "I could really use some sleep.

"Tell you what," Charise said pertly.  "You have yourself another beer while I finish cleaning up back here, then you can take a nap in my bed.  How does that sound?"

Better than I could have dreamed, Oliver thought.  He said, "Oh, I don't want to impose..."

"Don't be silly," Charise told him as she set another Bud before him.  "We'll lie down together for a while, okay?"

Oliver had to make a conscious effort to keep his mouth from gaping open.

"Well, I, uh..."

"Then it's settled," she said with a smile, moving away from Oliver with a seductive little twist of her silky bare shoulders.

Oliver sat back and sent an chilly gout of beer washing down his suddenly parched throat.  He looked around for Miss Willa and her decrepit fiancé, Jobey, wondering how they'd react to his crawling into bed with Charise.  He found them hunched together clearing off the table where the bikers had left the flotsam of their earlier patronage.  Were the old folks related to the girl in some way, perhaps her guardians?  Wouldn't they oppose the idea of his sleeping with the girl?  He pondered the idea for a moment, then dismissed it as irrelevant.  If it had been a problem, Charise wouldn't have invited him to stay.  But the two old fossils kept glancing in his direction, making him feel...well, lecherous.  He remembered the way the old woman had eyed his wedding ring.

Too bad, he told himself, and promptly discharged Jobey and Miss Willa as meaningless considerations in matters pertaining to his personal activities. Opportunities like this one didn't roll around every week.  If they don't like it, too bad.  Oliver was wondering if the condom in his wallet was still in working order when Charise began to chatter, breaking his train of thought.

"Like I said, we don't get too many interesting customers around here," she prattled.  "Workmen and drifters mostly."

"Mmm," Oliver interposed to give the impression he was contemplating her narrative.  In truth, he was busily ravaging her with his eyes, devising fervent strategies for exploiting every nook and crevice of her savory young body.

"Lester Crimmons stopped in for a beer one night," she said, turning to face Oliver with an odd little smirk.  "Ever heard of him?"

The name trickled through his memory like a drop of acid.  Lester Crimmons. Oliver recalled the name from the network news a couple years back.  "Yeah, wasn't he some kind of rampaging lunatic or something?  Killed his family and a bunch of other people?"

"That's the one.  He had two little girls of his own."

Of course.  Now the story returned to Oliver in a rush:  the poor children had been raped and tortured by their father before he cut their throats one by one, their mother having been forced to witness the entire horrifying crime.  Then he'd gone after his wife with a meat axe. 

"Yes, I remember,"  Oliver admitted with a shudder. He couldn't help but think of his own darling girls.  "He was one sick bastard."  Oliver took a long pull on his beer.  "He was here?"

"Yep," Charise replied, nodding slowly.  "He sat right there where you're sittin' now.  The trackers caught up with him the next morning less than a mile from here and the police shot him down like a dog."

"Good riddance, I'd say,"  Oliver said, disliking Charise's sympathetic tone. Empathy was all well and good, but not for maniacs like Crimmons.  It occurred to Oliver that perhaps the girl had a slight mental deficiency; she didn't seem quite right to him somehow.  But maybe Crimmons' appearance at the Tomcat Club was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to a poor country girl, and she just enjoyed talking about it.  Best to humor her, he decided, lest he sabotage his invitation to sleep over.

"So what was Crimmons really like?"  he asked, feigning interest.

Charise frowned and shrugged.  "Seemed okay to me," she said, then turned back to her stacking and sorting.

Oliver watched the girl with the rapacious vigilance of a hunting hawk and sucked off the last of his third beer, feeling mighty good.

"Come on," Charise said at last, inclining her pretty head toward the doorway behind the bar.  "Let's go."

Oliver fairly leapt from his barstool and followed Charise's swaying buttocks through the doorway and into the most squalid surroundings he'd ever beheld. Naked light bulbs suspended from frayed wires illuminated tiny, trash-strewn compartments separated by unpainted plywood dividers.  Ancient threadbare furnishings huddled in dusty corners and a filthy relic of a toilet stood cloistered amongst the stinking clutter, unadorned by so much as a curtain for personal privacy.

Oliver hesitated, thinking of his little girls at home.  What kind of animal would bed a strange woman in a place like this, then return home to the trusting embrace of innocent children?  He paused and took one backward step.

"Come on, darlin'," Charise crooned, turning to pull him into her bedroom, a stark but orderly little area dominated by a narrow ironwork bed.  She pulled Oliver down onto the squalling springs and covered his mouth with hers.     

"You're mine, all mine," she moaned, then tongued an exquisitely tender area just behind his ear.     

At that point, Oliver realized that resistance was futile, and he willingly surrendered his momentary vacillation to Charise's urgent caresses.  She turned out to be quite the little drill sergeant in the sack, rough and tumble in approach and completely uninterested in preliminaries.  Less than twenty minutes later, Oliver unhaltingly descended into the deepest, blackest river of exhausted slumber that had ever claimed him.  As he spiraled down and down, he thought he heard the sound of his own laughter and wondered what the hell he thought was so damned funny.

Oliver awoke in a slanting stream of smudgy daylight, rolling over to find himself alone in Charise's bed.   Good, he thought with relief.  A clean escape was at hand.  He'd gather his clothes, look for a back door exit and skulk away like the scoundrel he was.  He'd rather try his luck hitchhiking out on the road than risk facing Charise when he used the phone in the bar.  Oliver always felt contrite on the mornings following an evening's debauchery, and wondered if he shouldn't leave some money on the dresser on his way out.  Poor kid could probably use a few bucks.

He scanned the room for his trousers, trying to recall where he'd dropped them. He checked the floor all around the bed, then the dresser, then the ladder-backed chair in the corner.  Nothing.  No trousers, no jacket, no shirt or shoes anywhere.       

And no wallet.

"Damn."  Oliver rose on one elbow.  So that was the game: the cheap little tramp had ripped him off.  Or maybe she'd just hidden his clothes so he couldn't sneak off without saying goodbye.  Either way, Oliver was not pleased.  

Something tickled his shoulders and he reached up and scratched.  "Ow!" Sharp.  His fingernails were--

"Oh Jesus!" he cried, bolting from the mattress.  His hair...it lay long and black against his shoulders.  And breasts. He had breasts. Oliver whirled and stared into the mottled dresser mirror.

He screamed.  It was an alien high-pitched squeal.  A woman's scream. 

In the mirror.  A woman.  Charise.  Green eyes.  Screaming.

Oliver fell silent.  It had to be a dream.  A nightmare.  This could not be happening.  He was Oliver Parrish.  A man. A man! 

He clamped his eyes shut and counted to ten.  Wake up, wake up, wake up, he chanted inside his head.

He looked again.  Charise stared back. "No, no, no," he whispered in a trembling falsetto, grabbing the sheet off the mattress and winding it around his...her body.

He slogged through the dim clutter of the backroom living quarters in a daze. Drugged, that had to be it.  Charise had drugged him and now he was hallucinating. Oliver slammed into the barroom.  He was going to choke the life out of that little--     

"Good morning, Miss Charise," a raspy voice called out from behind the bar. Miss Willa laughed at the sight of Oliver.  "You ought to put some clothes on, girl." The old woman poured herself a steaming cup of coffee. 

"I'm not a girl,"  Oliver shrilled. 

"You sure look like one to me."  Miss Willa sipped her coffee, apparently unconcerned by Oliver's plight.

"This is insane," Oliver wailed.  "What have you psychopaths done to me?"

Jobey Hunt sat at one of the scarred wooden tables holding the yellow cat, stroking the animal's sloping back with one ancient, vein-roped hand.  Both Jobey and the cat stared at Oliver with blank, dispassionate expressions.   

"We ain't done nothing to you," Miss Willa said. 

Oliver felt as though he were drowning.  It couldn't be happening.  Easy, easy, he told himself.  Let the nightmare or the hallucination or whatever it was play itself out.  "Then what's going on?"  he asked as calmly as he could, although the sound of Charise's voice coming out of his mouth made him want to scream aloud.  "LSD, right?  I'm tripping?"

The old woman twisted her head toward him and studied him with her single gleaming blue eye.  "I got nothing to say to you, mister," she said, then turned back to her coffee.

"Mister!" Oliver shrieked at Jobey Hunt and his cat.  "See there?  She called me mister!  She knows something!  Did you hear?"  Oliver fell into the chair beside the old man.  I'm losing it, Oliver told himself.  I'm coming apart.

Jobey shook his head.  "You made the mistake of your life last night," he said in soft, melancholy voice.    

"What do you mean?  Sleeping with the girl?  What did she do to me?"

"She didn't do nothing to you."  He glanced up at Miss Willa, who was shuffling toward the table carrying her coffee cup.  "It was her."

Oliver was unable to forestall an onrushing torrent of tears.  "Oh, Jesus.  I'm losing my mind.  Please, somebody tell me what's happening."

"Hush that snivelin', girl.  It won't help," Miss Willa barked as she eased into a chair on the other side of Jobey.  "You just got what you deserved is all.  Now you got to make your choices."

"What choices?"  Oliver whimpered.  "I don't understand."

"What's been done is done and that's that," Miss Willa told him. 

"That's what?"  Oliver felt light-headed, unmoored.

"She's hexed us," Jobey said. 

"Hexed?"  Oliver was having great difficulty absorbing the meaning of the word.  "Hexed?"

"She's trapped us all in this godforsaken old roadhouse."  Jobey's statement was a bitter rumble of hatred aimed at Miss Willa.  "You can get out, but not in Charise's body.  You have to take another man's body the way the other one took yours."

"What one?  Who took mine?"

"The man who was in Charise's body last night.  The one who used your body to get away.  You can't leave the way you are now.  You have to take someone else."

Oliver's mind reeled with the unreality of his situation.  It was madness, it was...  "What do you mean I can't leave?  I can leave any time I want."  Oliver rose on tiny pink feet.  "Watch me."      He padded to the door.  He would go outside and get a breath of clean air--that's what he needed to clear his mind.  He pushed through the doorway and out into the light of day.

The outside air struck him like fire, burning, searing, driving him back, back. Charise's voice shrieked in agony as he stumbled backward into the roadhouse and pulled the door shut with a bang.

"See?  I told you," Jobey said.  "You can't leave that way."

Miss Willa cackled with amusement.

"I've got to get out of here," Charise's voice said in a breathy, feminine whisper.  "I have appointments, meetings, things to do.  My girls..."

"Oh, Oliver is already gone.  Left during the night,"  Miss Willa told him. "You're Charise now, remember?  All you got to do is serve beer and clean up around here.  No hurry.  You got all the time you need."

A towering black rage rose in Oliver.  "I want to know what's going on!  And I want you to tell me right now!"

  "I got ways, Mr. Parrish,"  Miss Willa taunted.  "I got ways about me you ain't never thought of.  You think you're so dern smart, leaving the little wife at home while you roam the countryside sniffin' after other women like some lowdown mongrel dog.  Jobey was like that too,"  she glanced at Jobey and the cat.  "Oh, my Jobey here was a hound all right.  On the very night before we were to be married, I caught him out in the hay barn with Charise, and I fixed him good."

"With Charise?"  Oliver knew the old woman was lying now.  "Charise is just a girl.  You must be--"

"Ninety two,"  Miss Willa finished.  She paused and lit a black cigar she pulled from the pocket of her apron.  "When it happened, I was seventeen and so was Charise.  The difference is that Charise is hexed, and I ain't."

"You hexed Charise."  Oliver wasn't buying.  Miss Willa was as crazy as he felt. 

The old woman nodded, puffing on her stogie.  "Yep.  My momma was a conjure woman, like her momma before her and on to the end of my line.  We know the ways, and I used 'em to jerk that evil girl's spirit right out of her pretty little body and put it in a place where it deserved to be."

"Where?"

The old woman looked over at Jobey and grinned.

"So Charise's spirit is inside Jobey's body?"  Oliver glanced at the old man, who looked back at him with a forlorn expression of utter hopelessness.  Oh god, Oliver thought, beginning to believe.  Oh god.  "Then where is Jobey?"

Miss Willa reached over and grabbed the cat by the scruff, twisting it around to expose its neutered rear quarters.  The cat yowled and struggled, spitting and swatting at Miss Willa's face.

"I told you I fixed him, didn't I?"  Miss Willa tossed the growling cat to the floor and rocked with laughter.  "I fixed that Jobey real good, all right.  Now he can look at Charise's lovely young body for rest of his life and remember what it cost him.  We'll all live until the day I die, and my kind live a long, long time." 

"Then I'll kill you,"  Oliver said, meaning it.  "I'll twist your ugly head off your neck right now."

Miss Willa chuckled.  "You can't kill me, you stupid girl."

She was right.  Oliver couldn't lift a hand against her.  Just the thought of harming the old woman made his limbs feel like lead.  Hexed.  It was true, then.  He was hexed. 

Oliver began weeping anew.

"Didn't I tell you to hush that snivelin'?"  Miss Willa croaked with disgust. "You got choices."

Oliver could not stop sobbing.

"You can leave here whenever you like," she told him.  "Sakes, I'll be glad to get rid of you and your bawling.  All you have to do is take another body and walk out that door."

"How?"

"The same way the other man took yours last night."

"Sex?"  Oliver was aghast.  Is that how it happened?

"That's what did it," the old woman acknowledged.  "At the moment of satisfaction, you swapped bodies.  That's how the spell works."

"You mean if I sleep with some strange man, my spirit will get into his body and I'll be able to leave?"

"That's what I'm sayin', girlie."

A sudden terrible thought struck Oliver.  Whoever possessed his body now had his keys and a wallet containing Oliver Parrish's identification.  And who would know the difference?  The imposter could walk right into his house and--

"Wh-who..."  Oliver's mind reeled around a single question.  "Who was it that walked out of here this morning?"

     Miss Willa's sole eye sparkled with glee.  "Let's see now.  His name was Lester Crimmons, ain't that right, Jobey?  'Course we called him Charise.  Lester stayed with us a good long time, too, waitin' and waitin' for just the right feller. Most of 'em leave right away, and I reckon there's been hundreds.  But Lester had nothin' to lose, he used to say, and everything to gain."

Jobey looked away.

Lester Crimmons.  The name turned Oliver's mind to ice.  Lester Crimmons, the maniac who'd butchered his own little daughters!  Of course, of course.  The bastard had even teased him with the information last night, while all along-- Oliver's heart froze when he remembered pulling out a photo of his daughters to show Charise last night.  Charise had seemed so interested...

"My girls!"

"You got some girls, do ya?"  Miss Willa jeered.  "Well, Lester sure did have a thing for young girls, yessir.  I'll bet he'll be real interested in meeting yours."

Lester Crimmons had Oliver Parrish's face and identification.  And address. He was probably on his way to the house right now.  Oliver had to stop Lester before...

"Please," Oliver beseeched the old woman.  "I have money.  I'll pay you anything you want.  Please, please, fix things.  Put them back the way they were and I'll give you everything I've got.  I swear it."

Miss Willa chuckled and puffed on her stogie.  "Spells only go one way, little girl.  You can't take back what's done.  And as far as payin' me...  Well, you ain't got no money, darlin'.  All you got is your pretty body and your girlish charms, and you better think about usin' 'em if you want to catch up to Lester Crimmons before he makes you famous."

And so Oliver Parrish thought about it, thinking of nothing else, listening to the phantom wails of police sirens screaming toward his house.  He sat motionless for hours, until the sun was sinking low behind the Alabama treeline and Miss Willa had begun setting up for the first customers of the night.

At sunset, Oliver stood and walked woodenly to Charise's bedroom where he pulled on a pair of high-cut shorts and the black halter top that had so effectively drawn his eye the night before.  When he walked back into the barroom, he saw the four bikers from the previous night were already gathered around the pool table. Oliver evaluated the big one, a hairy, tattooed beast of a man with hands like shovels.  Hands that could snap an average man's neck, a medium-sized neck like the one Oliver used to have.  The neck Lester Crimmons had now.

Oliver hesitated.  The thought of a repugnant embrace from that sweaty, stinking ape made him sick with disgust.  Everything was lost: his wealth, fame, any kind of benevolent future.  Everything.   Why must he submit to the ultimate degradation?  And afterward...  Afterward he would be forever trapped within the insufferable confines of that brutish body.  No.  Impossible.  He couldn't do it.

Couldn't.

And then he thought of his three little angels--Angelique, Jessica, and Diana--waiting for their daddy to come home again.

Oliver Parrish took a deep breath and, with swaying hips and a lusty smile, approached his chosen quarry.  

# # #

  ©2004 J. L. Comeau