How does a harmless children’s story become reason to kill?
Excerpt
Love Boat
They stepped out of the front door of his stucco-faced flat into the heavy enveloping fog of San Francisco. She, a tall slender shapely brunette of thirty-eight years slowly walked down the last few steps onto a sidewalk wetted by the thick mist which hung about everywhere. He was a tall, slender man in his early fifties who looked younger than his age.
Her 50’s dress accentuated her hourglass figure with a hand-knit warm sweater speckled with bright color highlights only an artist could have put there. He was wearing his usual casual outfit comprised of scandals with socks because of the cold, blue jeans and a splendid silk shirt with loose rectangles of cooperative but diverse colors hosting hieroglyphs – numbers and letters – fragments of an archeological dig, over which he’d slipped a thick wool rich-green sweater, his favorite color.
She hated being out in the bitter cold bite of damp air, because they’d been basking in their love when they got the call. They were resting together on his living room couch, which they called their ‘couch-boat’. Her back was spooning against his reclining body, both cast adrift from the world and its madness into the soothing un-ambivalent comfort of being with someone who loves you, whose body is linked to yours.
Her body had jumped when the phone rang twenty minutes earlier.
“Hello?”
“Rhett? Is that you?” Asked a quivering female voice.
“I wish I could say that it wasn’t, that you have the wrong number, but you don’t. In fact…”
“Oh, I’ve caught you at a bad time,” the voice interrupted without remorse.
“You sure have,” Rhett replied. “But I ask you, what are good friends for? Please consider yourself here with me and Rhona probably for a very good reason.”
“I wouldn’t interrupt you so late in the evening if I weren’t so scared,” the woman said with irritation that erased her quivering.
“The man’s here again?” Rhett queried.
“Yes.”
“Following you again?”
“He’s been tailing me all day! I couldn’t take it any longer and just had to call you guys.”
Rhona nuzzled her back up against Rhett for comfort. She knew who was calling.
“Is he outside now?”
Rhett heard the phone receiver clank down on a table. In the quiet that followed no sound could be heard over the phone line. Her house was alone in the woods.
“Yes, he’s still there. I was sure he still was. But when you asked…I mean you weren’t convinced at all in the beginning. I wanted to be absolutely sure again so I checked. It’s getting really creepy, Rhett. Please believe me!”
“Have you called the police?”
“Yes! But every time they come he manages to be hidden somewhere. It’s really maddening…and very frightening!”
“You’re right. That’s pretty scary.”
“This time you must come out here,” Susan insisted. ”So you can see for yourself how creepy he is!”
She’d been calling frequently about this man. The intruder didn’t go away, nor did he do her any harm. This had gone on for weeks. But Rhett knew the inevitable. Susan was Rhona’s best friend. When she heard he knew they would be going to Susan’s.
“Okay, Susan. You sit tight. We’ll be over just as soon as we can drive there in about forty-five minutes. You call the police again and insist upon their coming out and staying at least until we arrive.”
“They always come, but who knows how long they’ll stay. Anyway, thanks Rhett for coming. And please apologize to Rhona for me. But please hurry.”
“We will.”
“It was Susan,” Rhona said after he’d hung up.
“Yes. She’s desperate.”
“We must go.”
“I believe you think so.”
“You don’t?”
“Maybe. It’s just that this goes on so often. We’re fairly frequently being interrupted by this perpetual emergency. Honey, it really feels good lying together on our Couch Boat.”
“Yes,” she sighed in agreement.
She twisted her body around so she could see his face.
“So I’ll come with you,” she said. “But you better be a whiz at this double-duty, adventuring and making love. I don’t want love to be interrupted just yet.”
How exquisitely selfish, Rhett mused admiringly to himself.
“So you’re coming,” Rhett observed. “At least that’s a consolation prize. Actually now that I’ve said it coming’s a beautiful thought. So hold onto it.”
“I’d rather hold on to what wants to come. Oh he’s very active,” she added feeling his groin harden under her.
“At this rate I’ll come before we get going,” he quipped his member enlarging.
“I think he wants to come too,” she quipped.
“Don’t you think we better vamoose before we let him loose?”
“You’d better stop rhyming or I’m going to start climbing,” she retorted half turning around, lifting her body up closer to his.
“Sweetheart, we’ve got to go. I promised Susan,” Rhett reluctantly insisted.
“Give me your hand and I think I can recommend something,” she cooed.
“The gearshift will soon be needing that hand. So I must retain its command.”
“Your rhyming is declining,” she retorted with mock annoyance.
“You’ve got terrible timing.”
The fog they soon stepped into shrunk the last remnants of love-warmth as they searched through the mist for his car.
Automobiles for Rhett were not just transportation. They were an adventure. He was a driver often mistaken for a professional simply by the skillful way he normally maneuvered a car. His vehicle sported almost three hundred horsepower, 18-inch tires, and was built close to the road with power and aerodynamics.
Rhett wasn’t primarily a fast driver. His goal was resourceful opportunism, taking advantage of open spaces in the freeway lanes. This could make his driving provocative to other aggressive drivers who saw his moves starting a feud. So horsepower was necessary to attain in passing enough momentary speed to give the car he was passing no real opportunity to speed up and prevent him from doing so – usually stopping the feud before it started. Eighteen-inch tires and a low center of gravity gave the car the ability to drive or slide forwards or sideways.
With Rhona in the car he generally drove more conservatively. Though if an easy opportunity arose for get-ahead maneuvering he couldn’t resist. She closed her eyes until it was over, usually for just a few moments.
Rhett was the opposite of Rhona in the way he managed his fear. She was generically phobic and he counter phobic. It was as if life had trained him to be Super Soldier, one always alert to possible danger. Like a crouching marine on Guadalcanal loaded with weapons prepared for an instant killing response, a true story one of his good friends had once told him – a man who’d spent weeks on that hellish place. Rhett’s view of a war zone had been fashioned by his parents fighting constantly and bitterly until they divorced.
Rhona’s presence in his life had already seriously altered him by creating pockets of safety where his danger-alertness could be turned way down. His relationship with her was the first time this had ever happened since he was seven years old. It’s why he felt so hooked to her, rendering her loss irreplaceable.
They crossed the Golden Gate Bridge where the fog was even thicker, and almost missed the first turnoff from the freeway.
“Here’s Susan’s turnoff,” Rhona remarked.
He shifted down as they exited the freeway onto a country road that wound up into the hills. He noticed that his wheel sliding on the wet pavement around sharp corners was making Rhona nervous so he slowed down.
“We’re making great time so I can stop hurrying. Here I’ll turn on the fog lights so you can better see the trees through the mist. I know how much you like to look at things.”
“Thanks, dear,” she replied nuzzling close to him.
The fog had thinned out in Marin County. So the dim shadow of tall pine and redwood trees could be seen lifting their branches into the sky. He turned on his high beams. Together with his fog lamps it lit up a ghostly forest pale white against the deep black sky that haunted from above.
Except for the splashing tires on the wet pavement all that could be heard were the distant foghorns talking to each other warning of too much closeness to avoid collision.
“The thick fog makes the forest look like a graveyard,” he said. “The trees appear as ghosts standing up in their graves, reminding us how little changes over time. And how little time there really is.”
“What a grim vision you have, Rhett. Mine is very different.”
“Maybe it’s this mission that makes me think of apparitions and death. Susan’s been haunted by this man for weeks now. She’s never met or talked to him, or even got very close to him. But he keeps on her tail. She’s right. Now that I’m out here driving in the fog it does feel kind of creepy.”
“I know and agree,” she replied. “But let’s not get to her house before we actually need to. I’m still hovering in the fog wanting to experience it for awhile longer.”
He relaxed.
“Thanks, honey. I’m getting ahead of myself. So tell me, what do you see out there in the fog?”
Vision was the source of her artistic inspiration. She loved to daydream inside of her visual discernments noticing mostly how light and shadow united to create the structure of the forms that we believe are in fact separate real objects.
“The fog softens the leafless forest,” she replied. “Making its stark images tenderize with mist. It’s as if nature were predigesting itself for our eyes, arranging for us to see the shadow of things but not the substance, the structure of nature but not the specifics of its beauty.”
“Oh, you’re a wonder. When you talk like that it always makes me feel sexy. You sound so good I can’t resist you. But I’ve got to. I can’t get lost in you when I know there’s danger afoot.”
“I’m not finished with my vision,” she insisted.
“Oh…sorry.”
“The fog-shroud, like the dark makes the world smaller revealing only what’s close and immediate. Color is muted such that we see only the outline of the trees making everything deeply mysterious.”
“Do you like the mysterious?” He asked.
“Mystery is danger mixed with enchantment.”
“A provocative combination.”
“Sort of like us, isn’t it?” She remarked.
“You mean I’m dangerous and you’re enchanting.”
She laughed.
“If you want to put it that way. The fog renders our surroundings austere and muted, which makes sound seem very haunting and diffuse. But if you stay inside the fog these threatening tones become the sentries guarding the boundary of the safety-tent of our intimate comfort.”
He took her hand and squeezed it.
“Keep talking like that and you’ll get me horny again.”
“That’s the idea, silly,” she kidded…and then realized maybe she wasn’t.
“But we’re on our way to Susan’s.”
“No. Look again. We’re trapped in time-space in this small bubble of fog-consciousness, embraced with the closeness and security we felt on our couch-boat.”
“We are?”
“Yes, you great big eight cylinder man. Stop this car-boat and make love to me,” she insisted reaching for his leg.
“You really mean it, don’t you,” he replied feeling intensely stimulated.
“Of course I do.”
“Rhona, our roles have reversed. I’ve been suggesting Susan exaggerates what’s happening, though of course you can’t be sure. And you were insisting I was a cad to think that way. Now you’re interrupting our rescue trip for lovemaking. What’s happening?”
“Stop this power machine but keep the motor running so it warms the love-bubble that surrounds our coupling,” she said luxuriously, warmly with an alluring tenderness.
This was more than he could resist. Her erupting animal passion coupled with her enormous talents as a woman and painter was an experience of beauty that truly inspired him. The part of him that was hooked to her loving attention erected eager to follow her sinuous inclinations.
He spied a dirt road off to the right and turned onto it, drove a little deeper into the forest, stopped the car, turned off the lights, left the motor running, took of his seatbelt – all in liquid rapid coordinated succession, each step closing the gap between his desire and her body.
As Rhona became sexual her mouth reached out with a hungry surge enclosing Rhett’s opening lips with the passion of an animal in heat. She pulled him into herself.
He swung himself deftly onto the passenger seat as she put his body between her legs, mounting, straddling him facing him sitting across his lap.
“Now isn’t this much better?” She asked.
“The very best,” he insisted with passion surging in his heart and body.
Relieving her generous breasts of their harness he put his head between them and kissed both for a long time. Sometimes he stopped at her nipples gently to suck upon them, his hands stroking the full roundness of her buttocks, the succulent generous container inviting him into the flowered entrance to her inwardness.
Rhett found this caressing deeply reassuring as he did nipple sucking, inhaling the loving presence of this mother-woman.
He started playing with her most sensitive spot as she began to writhe on top of him, undulating with passion, engulfing his member with her wet womb-mouth tenderly coddling and stimulating it into great excitement.
Merged both above and below they began slowly to surge their way toward the fulfillment of a single passion, joined limb to limb as body parts exchanged one for the other – they became one orgasm of pulsating pleasure!
When it was over they relaxed still grasping each other, holding fast to this merging moment.
Suddenly the fog became a magnifying glass beaming the sun directly into the windshield! With horrifying intensity bright light flashed spotlighting each of them! A chorus of men standing in front of the Transam laughed cruelly, jumping up and down in joyful derision pointing shaming fingers!
“Pussy has gotten you killed, sucker! It better have been good ‘cause it was your last pucker, you stupid fucker!”
Read more about AMBIGUITY and Don Fenn HERE.
Copyright 2008 Don Fenn. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
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