Authors: T. Jefferson Parker
"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 A1 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
your' 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.