Bentley Little
SWF, college graduate, N/S, enjoys biking, travel, the novels of Richard Ford, the films of Woody Allen, and junk food. Looking for intelligent SM, N/S who appreciates same.
ON ONLY SAW the ad because it was boxed and right below his own, and though he’d vowed he’d never answer another personal—not after the 290-pound behemoth, not after the woman who looked like a man, not after the woman who turned out to be a man—he couldn’t help himself.
For one thing, his ad had been running for three months straight, and there hadn’t been a single bite. None. Nothing. Zip-a-dee-doo-dah.
For another, this ad spoke to him. He knew how pathetic that was. Only a total loser could read meaning into a three-line statement of abbreviated dating preferences, could possibly think that he could discern a woman’s true nature from an anonymous advertisement in the back of an alternative newspaper.
But, hell, why not be honest? That’s what he was. A loser. A failure. Why else would he be completely unable to get a date on his own? Why else would he have to resort to paid self-promotion, the last refuge of the terminally geeky?
He’d been telling himself that he’d shelled out the bucks for his own personal because he’d rather be the one screening replies than one of the hopefuls being screened, and while it was not something he was proud of, not something he’d ever admit to his parents or friends, he had a hell of a lot better chance of finding someone this way than he did hitting the singles bars.
But that was an overoptimistic rationalization. The truth was that he had tried everything else—from asking out co-workers to taking classes—and this was his only possible hope of ever finding someone.
But then he’d been wrong before.
He dialed the toll number at the bottom of the ad, left a short message, hung up, and promptly chastised himself for screwing up what could have been a real opportunity. It was his one-and-only shot, his chance to step up to the plate and dazzle his potential date with wit, charm and intelligence. But he’d sounded stupid. He’d just parroted back her Richard Ford and Woody Allen and junk food preferences, hadn’t really added anything of his own, and no doubt had come across as a grade-A number one doofus. He should’ve written down what he wanted to say, rehearsed it and read it. But no, he hadn’t thought things through, and now he’d botched his opportunity.
She phoned him back the next night.
Her name was Joanne, and, amazingly enough, it was the unscripted spontaneity of his call that had intrigued her, and she said that though she’d already received dozens of replies, his was the first message to which she’d responded. They hit it off immediately, and ended up talking for nearly two hours. Maybe she was a monstrosity, maybe she was a man, but he liked her so much he was willing to take that chance. Of course, the others had had nice voices, too—you couldn’t tell anything from a voice—but somehow he had a good feeling about this one, and gathering up his courage he asked her out on a date.
She accepted.
“The thing is,” she said, “I’m supposed to go off this weekend. Some friends of mine own a cabin up in Big Bear, and they’ve invited me up.” She paused. “They said I could bring someone if I wanted.”
He wasn’t sure how to respond.
“We could make that our date. If you don’t think I’m being too forward.”
“No, of course not.”
But she must have heard the hesitance in his voice, because she laughed. “We could drive separately and meet there, if you’d rather. That way you could bail if I turn out to be heinous or if I start getting on your nerves.”
“What about me? I could be Rondo Hatton. Hell, I could be a serial killer for all you know.”
“Anyone who knows who Rondo Hatton is can’t be all bad. I’m willing to take a chance.”
“Me, too,” he said.
“Then it’s a date?”
He laughed. “It’s a date.”
“Whew!” She let out an exaggerated sigh of relief. “My car needs some work, and I don’t really trust it going up the mountains.”
“No problem. I’ll pick you up at your place.”
They ironed out the logistics: addresses, times, directions, home numbers, work numbers.
“I’ll see you Saturday,” he said, signing off.
“I’ll be waiting,” she told him. “With bated breath.”
Saturday morning, the alarm went off at four. Joanne lived only ten minutes away and he wasn’t scheduled to pick her up until six, but Ron wanted time to shower, shave, make a cup of coffee, and fully wake up before their meeting. First impressions were important, particularly on blind dates, and he wanted to be at his peak.
By five-twenty, he was loading the car. He wasn’t taking much, but as an ex-Boy Scout, he believed in being well-prepared, and he’d packed an overnight bag with clothes for both warm and cold weather, his shaving kit and first aid supplies, as well as a couple of books to read.
He figured he’d better bring some sort of gift for their hosts, and yesterday he’d bought a netted sack of oranges at the grocery store.
He’d also bought some condoms.
Just in case.
Joanne had asked him to bring along an ice chest in addition to his own personal necessities, and that was the last thing he packed. He pulled it out of the hall closet, tossed in two packs of Blue Ice, and carried the awkward bulky object out through the kitchen, closing the door behind him with his foot. Ahead, through the open rear gate that led into the alley, he could see that his Saturn’s passenger side was open and the interior light was on.
He’d closed the car door, he was certain of it, and he was wondering if maybe he hadn’t closed it hard enough and the slope of the parking space had caused it to swing open, when he saw movement through the windshield. He stopped. In the faint illumination thrown by the car’s overhead light he saw a dark silhouetted figure rooting around in the back seat.
A hunchback.
His heart lurched in his ribcage. The hunchback pulled the passenger seat forward, carefully closed the car door and hobbled off, disappearing into the blackness of the alley.
Ron stood there dumbly, holding the ice chest, unsure of what to do.
The natural reaction would have been to yell at the man, to tell him to get the hell away from his car and house, to announce that he was calling the police.
But...
But Ron was not even sure that it was a man. Logic told him that the hunchback was merely a bum or a thief with a tragic deformity, but something about the figure’s movements and actions, and the way he’d slunk off into the shadows, made Ron uneasy, kindled a flicker of fear within him. The time of morning as well, the fact that the sun was not yet up, lent the entire situation a frightening, unreal air.
So he stood there for a few moments more, waiting to make sure that the figure was gone and not coming back, before stepping out into the alley and walking carefully over to the car.
He placed the ice chest on the ground and opened the passenger door, pulling the seat forward and looking into the back, where the hunchback had been rummaging.
He’d left Ron a present.
It was a dead dog. The animal had been placed on the floor of the back seat and inexpertly covered by Ron’s book bag. There was matted blood on the fur, but it was dried and the dog appeared to have been dead for some time. The animal was stiff, the legs folded in on themselves in an almost fetal position.
What was it? he wondered. Some sort of sacrifice?
No.
A trade.
His sack of oranges was gone.
He looked quickly up the alley, then down, half-expecting to see a lurching misshapen form carrying a sack of oranges pass through one of the pools of dim light thrown by the motion-activated security bulbs of various garages. But there was nothing. Only darkness, stillness.
He shivered, chilled by the irrationality of the entire situation.
But he pushed that feeling aside. He didn’t have time for it this morning. Any other day, he would have called his father, called his friends, called the police, gone through the step-by-step processes such an incident demanded. But he was on a schedule, he had things to do.
He went into the garage, found a pair of old work gloves and slipped them on. He was glad he’d awakened early, given himself some extra time. Grimacing, he reached into the car and picked up the dog’s body. It felt heavy in his hands, and this close he could smell a sweetly sick scent coming from the fur. He carried the animal’s corpse around the side of the garage and threw it in one of the garbage cans. After quickly spraying the car’s interior with Lysol and loading the ice chest, he headed off, driving with the windows open and the air conditioner on full blast in order to get rid of the lingering remnants of the smell.
He found her street easily enough, and although he counted down the addresses on the block he needn’t have bothered. While porch lights were lit at nearly every house, hers was the only one with interior lights on.
He pulled into the driveway behind a small Honda and got out of the car feeling oddly nervous—and not just because of what had happened. If before he had worried whether she would be up to his standards, now he was worried that he would not measure up to hers.
The front door of the house was opened before he was halfway up the walk, and a young slim blonde walked out. “You must be Ron,” she said, smiling broadly. “I’m Joanne.”
She was indeed very attractive. Out of his league, he would have said, but he sensed no disappointment in her eyes as she saw him for the first time, heard no falsity in her enthusiastic greeting.
“I just have a few things to pack into the car,” she told him. “An overnight bag and a few groceries. Did you bring an ice chest?”
“Yes,” he said, and she immediately frowned as his voice gave him away.
“What is it? What’s the matter? Oh God, you’re not coming.”
“No,” he reassured her. “Nothing like that.”
And he told her.
He described how he’d been carrying out the ice chest when he’d seen someone rooting around in the back seat of the car. The man disappeared into the shadows and Ron discovered that a dead dog had been substituted for the bag of oranges he’d intended to bring along as a gift for their hosts.
“Oranges?” Joanne looked at him, her eyes wide. “Was it a hunchback?” she whispered.
He felt an involuntary shiver of fear. Why was she asking this? Why would she know anything about it?
“Yes,” he told her.
She started shaking, crying. “Oh God. Oh God.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Oh, God!”
He felt helpless, confused. “What do you want me to do?”
“Yes!” She wiped her eyes, face brightening. “We’ll cut off the dog’s leg,” she said. “And boil it. Then we’ll feed it to my father.”
He blinked. “What?”
“Unless you want your father to eat it.”
“N-n-no!” he said, and his voice sounded to himself like a bad Jimmy Stewart impression.
“Come on, then.” She was assertive and in control, her voice and manner imbued with businesslike precision, her tears gone.
He didn’t know what was going on. He felt stunned, as though he were sleepwalking through water, and when she moved over to the passenger side of the car, he opened the driver’s door and got in.
“Hurry up. We don’t have any time to lose.”
They drove back to his place, and he got his gloves and a hacksaw out of the garage and walked out to the garbage cans, where he sawed off one of the stiff fetally-crossed dog legs.
He tossed the severed limb into the trunk along with the saw and gloves, and in silence the two of them retraced the route back to Joanne’s.
They boiled the leg in a Vision Ware pot, and sat in the kitchen talking about Woody Allen. Ron was struck by the morbid absurdity of it all, but Woody’s films were one of the interests they had in common, and perhaps it was best at this time to build on the things they shared. God knows, he didn’t want to talk or think about what was boiling on the stove, and their trivial conversation served to, if not take his mind off the grotesquerie, at least temporarily divert his thoughts to other, healthier, more normal avenues.
Joanne had turned on a timer, and when the bell rang, startling them both, she got out of her chair and walked over to the stove. He accompanied her. There was fur floating in the water, what looked like hair soup in the pot, and from this disgusting mess she fished out a bare, muscled dog leg.
“All right.” She grimaced. “Let’s take it to Daddy.”
She led the way out of the kitchen and down a short hall to what appeared to be the closed door of the master bedroom.
She knocked. “Daddy?”
Ron heard no response.
Joanne smiled. “He said it’s okay. Come on in.” She pushed open the door, but the room contained no bed, no dresser, no furniture at all save for a single white table. On top of the table was an oversized urn.
Joanne walked across the room holding the boiled leg and opened the urn’s lid. She looked inside. “Daddy? I have something for you.”
She dropped the leg in, and damn if Ron didn’t hear the sound of chewing coming from within the ceramic vessel.
She looked down and nodded, as though listening to a voice. “Oranges,” she said, and for the first time since he had initially told her his story, there was a tremor in her voice. “A hunchback.”
The chewing sound stopped. There was a faint high-pitched whistle, and then an almost imperceptible puff of ash blew up from the urn and settled on the white table top.
Joanne licked her index finger again, swallowing the collected ash.
“Let’s take a walk,” she said.
Ron looked at her dumbly. “What?”
“Walk with me. Just around the block.”
“It’s six o’clock in the morning, a hunchback traded a dead dog for my bag of oranges, we cooked the dog’s leg and fed it to your father’s ashes and now you want to go for a walk?”
“Please?”
Common sense was telling him to run like hell. Jo might not have been fat or ugly or a guy, but this sure as Christ wasn’t a normal situation, and the smartest thing he could do was to get out of here and not look back, write off this whole wretched affair as a loss. And yet...
And yet he didn’t want to. Despite the weirdness, despite the craziness, he liked Joanne, and for the first time in a very long while he’d actually met someone with whom he could see himself having a future.
Yeah. As she fed dead pet parts to her father’s ashes.
Everything was happening too fast. His brain had no time to sort out a proper course of action or even to sift through these recent events to determine what was tolerable and what was completely unacceptable.
“Please?” she repeated, and there was a lost sort of plaintiveness to the request that made him nod his head.
“Okay,” he said reluctantly.
Joanne looked at her watch. “We’d better get going. It’ll be light soon.”
She put the lid back on the urn, said goodbye to her father and closed the bedroom door behind them as they headed down the hall toward the front of the house.
It’ll be light soon? What did that mean?
They walked outside, and for the first time that morning, she touched him, taking his hand. Her fingers were soft, the pressure of her palm gentle, and he was suddenly glad he’d decided to stay.
They went up the street, past one dark house after another. Someone somewhere must have been up because he smelled brewing coffee. From the next street over came the sound of a car starting.
It was a typical suburban neighborhood, not unlike the one in which he’d grown up, not unlike the one in which he lived, but there seemed something odd about it now, something decidedly off key. It could have been that he was seeing everything through the filter of what he’d just been through, but he thought not.
It was the neighborhood itself that seemed off.
He realized that he never walked at this time of morning. He’d driven to work, he’d peeked out his windows, he’d seen occasional jogging fanatics and newspaper carriers, but he’d been an observer not a participant. He’d never been out in it.
Perhaps that was what he was reacting to.
They walked along, and for the first time Ron noticed that Joanne appeared to be on the lookout, that she seemed to be searching for something. She walked slowly, peering into side yards, staring intently at bushes and porches and patios. He didn’t know what she hoped to find, and he didn’t want to know, so he didn’t ask.
They continued on in silence.
At the corner, they turned right. Two houses in, Joanne stopped, her hand squeezing his in an icy grip.
“There he is,” she said, and he heard the fear in her voice.
“There who—?”
And he saw the hunchback.
He was lying on someone’s lawn, next to a row of bushes that separated the yard from the next door neighbors. Only...
Only he wasn’t a he. He wasn’t even human. He was a blob of what looked like blackened mulch and decaying vegetable matter. The rotting materials had been shaped into a human form, the form of a hunchback, and there was a foul stench coming from the unmoving figure that smelled like sewage and human waste.
Joanne swallowed hard. “Pick him up,” she said.
“I—”
“Or help me pick him up.” She looked around, looked east. “Hurry up. It’s almost light.”
Ron was not even sure that they could pick up the thing on the lawn. Unlike the animate and very real hunchback he had seen rooting around in his car, this figure appeared only loosely put together and ready at any second to fall apart.
But when they put their hands under it and lifted, the figure proved to be surprisingly solid. It was also quite heavy, and even with Joanne gripping the front half by the arms, he had to struggle to carry the bottom portion of the body.
It didn’t help that he was trying to hold his breath, and inhale only when he turned his head away.
They moved back onto the sidewalk and Ron started to walk back the way they’d come, but he felt Joanne pulling in the opposite direction.
“We have to go around the block,” she said.
He looked away from the body, breathed heavily through his mouth. “What the hell are we doing?”
“You know!”
No he didn’t. He had no clue. He could not even hazard a guess. But for some reason he had the feeling that he should know, that maybe, deep down, a part of him did know. And that frightened him.
A jogger ran by, nodding to them. “Morning.”
“Good morning,” Joanne told him.
The jogger made no mention of the body they were carrying, did not even seem fazed.
They waddled awkwardly down the sidewalk, the decaying form between them. Joanne was on the street side, he was on the house side, and two yards ahead, he thought he saw movement.
They drew closer. A woman was crawling naked on the lawn, head down, and appeared to be searching for worms.
There was a whole world out here about which he knew nothing, an early-morning universe that existed alongside the regular one, that overlapped it perhaps but was strange and fundamentally different.
At the next house over, an old man was taking down a small cross on which he’d crucified a rat.
Huffing and puffing, unmindful of the smell by now, their straining arms sore, the two of them finally returned to Joanne’s place.
She had become increasingly agitated along the way, and now she was backing up as fast as she could, maneuvering the hunchback’s body into a different position in the driveway.
“Hurry!” she said frantically. “The sun’s almost up!”
“What are we supposed to do?”
“Put him in the car!” There was an unspoken “of course” in her voice, as though he’d asked a stupid question to which everyone knew the answer. “Set him down and open the door.”
The last thing he wanted was that reeking decaying thing in his vehicle—he’d never get the smell out, no matter how many deodorizers he hung from the rearview mirror—and here he almost balked. After everything he’d done and gone along with, this was over the line, this was the last straw.
But he didn’t have time to object. Joanne, grown increasingly desperate, let go of the arms, opened the car door, and tried to lift the body up again and fit the head and upper torso into the car.
“Push!” she ordered.
Dumbly, Ron pushed. The hunchback’s head snapped under the body, and the entire figure flopped over the hump between the bucket seats and landed half in the driver’s chair.
“Shouldn’t he be in the back?” Ron asked.
“Doesn’t matter.” Joanne looked quickly over her shoulder at the lightening sky in the east and slammed the door.
All of a sudden, there was movement in the car. From behind the closed windows, Ron heard a muffled cry, a word that sounded like “Detente,” and then the sun rose, a single ray of light beaming cinematically onto the passenger window as though programmed to do so by a Hollywood special effects shop.
There was a whirlwind in the vehicle, a small black tornado that plastered rotting leaves and what looked like a blackened chili pepper with a human eye to the windshield and side windows.
And then it was gone.
Joanne opened the car door.
All that remained was a netted bag of oranges.
“Thank God!” she breathed, and he heard real relief in her voice. She kissed him on the lips, quickly, gratefully, and he smelled cinnamon, tasted sugar.
“What—” He cleared his throat. “What do we do now?”
She put her hand on his, and her touch was soft, smooth. “We can go,” she said. “If we hurry, we can be in Big Bear by lunchtime.”
He thought about what had just happened, then thought about how hard it was to meet someone, even through a personal ad, and he looked into her eyes in the orange light of the rising sun.
He took a deep breath. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”