Harmless (20 page)

“Piston-fuck that mouth!” a boy called out.

“Respect!”

Respect?
Had a word ever become so utterly unmoored from its meaning?

The camera pulled back, revealing the actor as the boy with the faux-hawk and silver thumb ring. He appeared younger onscreen, and like any actor he didn’t like watching himself. He turned his head until the camera returned to the oral sex, the prolonged blowjob clearing the room of joshing and high-fives.

“They
made
this movie,” Joseph whispered. Yes, he’d jerked off to softcore skin mags at sixteen, but
this
—thank God he’d been spared the temptation.

Another cheer went up. Only the chubby boy kept his hands fisted and out of his pants. Joseph knew his type: the sensitive bruiser with a crush on a girl way out of his league—in this case, the film’s younger and possibly drugged starlet. The story was there in his wincing face: his crush dating back to the girl’s incarnation as a pony-tailed, school-activity keener with a rough home life, when he was so far off her radar he could only bow his head when she passed in the halls. His desire deepening and darkening the summer she “went bad”—her range of backseat activities earning her pride of place in the pantheon of bad girls. How he watched silently as she was passed from the top bad boy to his right-hand man to the third in charge and on down, her first onscreen blowjob consigning her to permanent slut status without knocking her from the lonely boy’s pedestal. When the boy stared at the screen, he still saw the straight-A student, the notebook doodler, the shy girl playing at porn actress.

The camera shifted as another boy stepped into camera range, his muscular body shaved from knees to nose, his 1970s white-boy afro and hairless skin putting Joseph in mind of a best-of-breed poodle primped for a show. He too was sitting on the shack floor, rhythmically moving his hand inside his pants. Onscreen, the first boy moved over and motioned the girl to follow as the afroed boy kneeled behind her, his bigger cock needing no fluffing as he guided it toward her ass. Feeling its touch the girl looked up and mouthed “no,” as in
No, I won’t do anal
. No one cared what she wanted—not caring was the point, that and the stuffing shut of every vulnerable hole with male meat. The first boy grabbed her head and put her back to work, and the afroed boy buried himself in her ass and didn’t clean himself when they did the switcheroo. When a third naked boy walked onscreen the boys in the shack shouted, “She’s working for her protein shake!” The girl was gagging, the boys were laughing, onscreen and inside the shack—even the big sensitive lad, who now had his hand down his pants, working on his cock with all the joy of a father suffocating a deformed son with a pillow. The camera zoomed in on the girl’s face. She was crying, but the tears were as mechanical as sweat. This was the money shot—her pain, her humiliation, her vacated face.

That poor girl. She was still a child. Joseph pressed up against the window, not caring if he was seen. He wanted to get closer to her. She was crying for real now, her sobbing face familiar to him. He reached for the knife, his hand brushing up against the rifle barrel. He pushed his face harder against the glass, daring it to shatter.

The girl was pushed onto her belly. The boys in the room started laughing, triggering a sharp snap inside Joseph’s skull, like a high-tension cable torn by a heavy load.

His vision went red.

He grabbed the rifle and smashed the window with the butt end.

“That’s my daughter!” he screamed.

Inside the shack: absolute mayhem, boys rolling on the floor, tucking their cocks back into their pants, the big kid a human battering ram aimed at the door.

“That’s my daughter!” Joseph screamed again, the word
daughter
rising out of him in a geyser of wrath and love. “You fucking animals!”

He aimed the gun at the low ceiling and fired, and it was as if a bus had roared by and clipped him at the shoulder, the recoil throwing him onto the bikes stacked beneath the trees. Gunpowder stung his eyes. His right hand was numb. Alex took the rifle and mumbled—or maybe Joseph couldn’t hear over the ringing—then he ran toward the front of the shack. Joseph sprung to his feet, his right arm hanging dead at his side, and followed Alex into the clearing, where the last boy was running into the trees near the path.

“You’re fucking dead if I catch you!” Joseph yelled, wielding the knife with his left hand. No one had ever run away from him with such desperation. It felt good. He reached the path and took a few steps down the hill. Those fucking animals. He was going to do what their fathers should have—teach them fear, teach them the pain that comes of misusing their power, teach them what it feels like to have a stick shoved up their asses.

“We’re going to waste you, man!” one of the boys shouted.

Maybe Joseph wasn’t completely deaf. “Come on, tough guy!” he shouted back. “Maybe you want to come back and fuck
my
ass. Let’s see how that goes down!”

“We saw your face, man!”

The boys kept running, smashing through branches and cursing. Joseph laughed. The terrible pain in his arm didn’t bother him as he gazed at the silent, tall trees, his back straight, feeling like he’d just conquered a high summit.

Where’s Alex?
he wondered. They should be sharing this triumph.

Alex
—the name induced a tingling sensation between Joseph’s shoulder blades, as if he were being touched under his skin. He heard a metallic click behind him, raising the hairs on his arms and neck.

He took a deep breath, then turned around to see Alex, ten feet up the hill, pointing the rifle at him. Alex was going to kill him.

H
e waited for the gunshot. Another second passed, empty of thought and as vast and looming as a cathedral ceiling. Only two details showed in the dim light: Alex’s lips curled up tight with rage, and his shaking hands. He’d barely stopped himself from blowing a hole in Joseph’s chest.

“I thought you were one of those kids,” Alex said, lowering the rifle. He sounded genuinely shocked, even remorseful, too stunned to try for a more convincing lie.

“Yes.” Joseph was unable to take the sentence further. He tried to smile but his mouth kept slipping back into a grimace, like a lock of hair that wouldn’t stay parted. A casual shrug was defeated by his injured arm. He’d give himself away if he didn’t speak soon. He had to play dumb, a game well-suited to his skill set. He finally got the smile in place and walked up the path, his eyes fixed on Alex, who smiled back just as eagerly.

They were both in on the game now, but only one knew the rules.

Joseph put the knife back in his jacket pocket, because that’s what a man who trusted his companion would do. The egg in his pocket was broken. Touching it was like dipping his fingers into a tiny body cavity, sticky with mucous and thin shattered bones.

“You see those little fuckers run?” Joseph said, pushing out the words.

“They got what was coming to them. If I’d watched much more of that movie
I’d
have fired a shot, and not into the ceiling.”

The rifle was now pointing at the ground, the butt inches away from Joseph’s good arm. Did he have it in him to wrestle the gun from Alex? He hadn’t been in a fight for at least twenty years. He also had a concussion and a twisted ankle, and his right bicep felt Popeye-sized, but with none of the sailor’s strength. You imagine yourself in these situations, battling a villain in the scaffolding above a vat of molten lead or disarming a terrorist in a 747 cockpit, but your borrowed arsenal of fighting skills and tag lines—“Thanks for flying with us!”—no better prepared you for the real thing than sexual fantasies made a virgin a good lover.

As if reading his intentions, Alex lifted the rifle off the ground with a swift, natural motion and clutched it to his chest. The gun wasn’t going anywhere.

“We better get going,” Alex said. Was he playing with Joseph, like a cat with a mouse? Did a cat really toy with a mouse before killing it? The “Man versus Man” segment of his Grade Nine English class had insisted that only humans took pleasure from killing.

Joseph bit down on his bottom lip.

Get a grip!

He focused on the map of pain zones that now composed his body, moving from his head to his arm to his ankle.

“It won’t be long before those kids come back.” Alex was a good liar—men with strong convictions usually are. “We have to keep going.”

Until you find a better opportunity to kill me?
Joseph considered saying it out loud. It probably couldn’t make the situation any worse, but he had to aim higher. He had to take action.

The name of action
—where had he heard that before?

Joseph slipped the flashlight into his right hand, which still functioned just enough to hold the light in place. He couldn’t let Alex know about his injured arm.

“I need to do something,” he said, nodding at the shack’s door, obeying a dim intuition that he’d be safer in the shack’s vicinity, as if Alex
couldn’t
shoot him in there.

Alex shrugged, unconcerned about time. He was not only less agitated than he’d been all night, he looked relieved—his back and shoulders unburdened of a physical weight. Maybe he was in shock, the magnitude of the aborted murder numbing his senses. Joseph stepped past him, running with this hypothesis, then rejecting it, embracing it, rejecting it again, fighting the panic by focusing on the pain, telling himself to breathe, to
think
.

Inside the shack, the flat light turned the space into a two-dimensional surface. The room smelled like beer, mould, and sweat, and with the elation of his averted murder passing, conflicting thoughts came flitting in and out of view like bats trapped in an attic.

What did he
know
? Alex wanted to shoot him. He could have gotten away with it, telling the police that Joseph fired the rifle into the cabin, then dropped the gun when he chased the boys. Alex grabbed it and followed, and in the chaos of shouts and threats, a man brandishing a knife stepped onto the path. One reflexive squeeze of the trigger and Joseph lay dead. A terrible accident, but who’d question the motives of a father searching for his missing child? Joseph would have believed it if he hadn’t seen Alex’s face and shaking hands. But
why
did Alex want to kill him? Joseph was no worse than most men. He was even better read and took the right position on the issues close to Alex’s heart. Sure, Joseph had failed to live up to Alex’s expectations from day one, but why try to kill him tonight?

“You installed a new skylight,” Alex said, pointing at a triangular hole in the ceiling.

Joseph prodded the damaged plaster with his left hand, leaving a smudge of fingerprints that would place him in the shack, a detail that might incriminate Alex later. He walked to the pole-dancer poster and traced the pole with his finger, then laid his palms flat on the table, transferring prints onto the surface.

Alex didn’t seem to care. He leaned the rifle against the wall and joined Joseph at the table, leaving four steps between himself and the gun. Joseph would need at least five to get there. Alex laughed as he poked at a flame-stained glass pipe lying beside an empty baggy, then he picked up a hand-carved pipe with a bowl in the shape of a skull and dropped it onto the floor. The neat pile of
DVDS
was next. He lifted one from the stack and smirked. The
cheap, photocopied label showed a blurry nude stepping from a limo with
Gents Klub II
stencilled over the image. Alex laughed again—his daughter had been abducted by deranged vets and he’d nearly murdered a man, and the fucker was
laughing
.

“Her classmates and half their fathers probably preordered copies.” He gave Joseph a bitter smile. “Still, that was priceless.
That’s my daughter!
” He rolled his head into his cupped hands and moaned and faked a barking sob. “That’s my daughter! Turn it off! Turn it
oooffff
!”

Joseph didn’t get the joke.

“Hardcore,” Alex said.

“Porn?”

“
Hardcore
, the movie. With George C. Scott.”

Joseph remembered the bare details: a small-town patriarch’s daughter runs away to L.A. and gets caught up in the porn industry. The dad hires a detective to find her. He and Alex probably saw it together at one of the rep theatres back in the city.

“The scene where George C. Scott is shown a porn film starring his daughter. He says, ‘
Turn it off. That’s my daughter!
’ You shouted that before you fired the gun.”

Joseph let him think the reference was intentional, and maybe it was, the buried celluloid memory breaking through his paralysis.

The big video screen was now leaning back against the wall at a skewed angle, transforming the porn film into a kid’s show about a bubble-gum-pink fish exploring a bed of pale sea sponges, where it was swallowed by a shimmering orange blob. Joseph pushed the screen back onto its base,
and squinted to bring the girl’s face into focus. He knew now why she’d looked so familiar: she could pass for Franny’s sister. Same big almond eyes and flat face, same cute pixie nose. The girl’s eye makeup was streaked to Sad Clown grotesque. The boys had cum all over her face. Poor girl. Poor boys. Poor Joseph—he’d weep for the world if he could.

To keep the mood going he turned and did his impression of George C. Scott’s General Patton: “Son, thirty years from now, when you’re sitting with your grandson on your knee and he asks, ‘Grandpa, what did you do in the great World War Two?’ You won’t have to say, ‘
I shovelled shit in Louisiana
.’ ”

He got the laugh. A vague plan was forming: keep Alex talking until he gave himself away.

“Her dad must be a real bruiser,” Joseph said.

“Why?”

“The boys wouldn’t have run like that if her dad was the local minister.”

Alex smiled wider. “No, think about it: the mild-mannered father
pushed to the edge
, with nothing to lose. How many times have those kids seen
that
movie? Well played.”