Seven
Aunt Bernice was out back hanging clothes on the
line. Wallace snuck Sasha in through the front door and up the stairs,
watching her with absolute adulation as she moved about. She inspected
his room with her hands clasped behind her back, then sat on the edge of
his unmade bed.
"Okay, stud, let's see how much money you got."
Wallace stored his banknote collection between
plastic sheets of a loose-leaf notebook. He set the heavy volume in her
lap and let her thumb through at random.
"How do you know these are really real?"
He sat at her side, extracted a banknote from a
sleeve and held it to the light. "The watermark and the embedded threads
and the fine color engraving are protection against counterfeiting."
"These are all so beautiful. Why are American bills
so plain?"
"I don't really know. We don’t seem to give a damn.”
It was at that point that Wallace found himself
gazing deep into her dark eyes. His next awareness was of a soft body
wrestling beneath him and a patient voice murmuring in his ear to cease
and desist. When he became aware of the bulk of the banknote album wedged
between their lower abdominal regions, he had little choice but to roll
aside to dislodge it. Given that moment of respite, Sasha stood and shook
out her dark mane of hair. She gave him a knowing smile. "Naughty little
boy," she said.
Wallace turned beet red. Before gut-wrenching
humiliation moved in to claim what remained of his self-confidence, Sasha
reached for his hand and pulled him to his feet. She embraced him, and
kissed him ardently.
It was a first for Wallace, clumsy and embarrassing,
but Sasha persisted until it felt right and he lingered.
Wallace lost control again and groveled, satisfying a
long-standing, heart-felt urge to run his hands up the broad sweep of her
hips and verify the reality of the incredible biological architecture of a
woman's body. When she tolerated an exploratory caress of her backside,
Wallace gathered the courage to try for her breasts.
Sasha stepped out of reach and eyed him severely.
"Mother says there's nothing about my body that should be any big mystery
to a boy your age. She says perverts are born of denial and frustration,
that us women have a big responsibility to manage the male sex drive
properly."
Wallace gawked in confusion. Sasha then stepped back
into his arms. "I never said you had to stop."
Tentatively, disbelievingly, Wallace unbuttoned her
blouse and slipped his hand inside, and for the first time, cupped the
naked breast of a woman.
"What's it for, Wallace?"
Wallace drew back slightly and grimaced. "What?"
"What's my breast for? What does it do?"
Wallace groped for an answer. His mouth worked. No
sound came out.
Sasha stepped back out of reach again, and his hand
came free. "You can't touch me if you don't answer my question," she said
gently.
Wallace stared at her breasts showing through the
parted blouse. They were the perfect size and shape, better than anything
he had ever seen in the Playboy centerfolds at the drugstore in town.
"They're for feeding babies," Wallace said in a broken voice.
"Duke touched me once," Sasha said. "He wouldn't be
honest with me. He tried to make fun of it all, of sex, and the purpose
for our bodies. I never let him touch me again."
Sasha smiled at his confusion. "Mother makes me do
it. I promised her. I swore to Allah, even though we don't really
believe in Allah, not like my father does. My father's an absolute
fanatic about Islam, his religion."
Wallace floundered. "Oh, yeah?"
"My father says we're no better than the animals if
we don't use the brains Allah gave us to better manage our lives." There
were sudden tears in her eyes. "My parents worked for the United
Nations. That's how they met. Mom caught me messing around with a
neighborhood boy in Riyadh once and made me watch a tape of a little girl
dying in a field hospital in Somalia. They hadn't been able to feed her.
They couldn't even get a good intravenous drip going. She was just all
wasted away, blind, brain-damaged. But it took her a long time to
die. She tried so hard to keep breathing. My Mom made me watch it until
the little girl was gone and they wrapped her up in her dirty blankets and
took her away."
Wallace was frightened the intensity of her anguish.
"Why?" he asked, horrified that her parents could have been so cruel.
"Because too many unwanted babies are born to people
who just fuck each other for the fun of it," Sasha said, "and Mom doesn't
want that to happen to me. She says I can do it if I want, whenever I
want, if I take all necessary precautions, and I choose a partner who will
be responsible. Most boys don't want to think about babies when they're
having sex, but it's what sex is for. If an unwanted baby is born, we
can't always count on other people taking care of it, or loving it. It
might die like that little girl I watched die, and the responsibility
for its death would be mine."
Wallace was speechless. Unexpectedly, she stepped
back into his arms. She put her arms around his neck and murmured
something Arabic in his ears.
Wallace blinked back tears of penitence. "I'm
sorry?"
"I said thanks for not laughing at me."
He couldn't resist the renewed temptation of her even
knowing she was going to stop him before he went too far. She gave him a
soft, lingering kiss and let him put his hands wherever he wanted. He was
just about to push away from her having taken all he could take when she
ran her hand down his pants leg and gently squeezed.
With his mouth open, his tongue
possibly hanging out, and his eyes definitely crossed, Wallace had an embarrassing personal accident. Sasha
felt it happen. She had meant for it to happen. "We really should be
responsible about such things, you know," she said with a smile.
Wallace croaked awkwardly in protest, half bent at
the waist. Sasha stepped back. "Gotta run for now. Give me a call
later."
She whirled about and vanished out the door.
Wallace stumbled blindly after her, then thought
better of open pursuit. He had a more pressing need for a clean pair of
underwear.
Aunt Bernice called up the stairs. "Wallace, are you
up there?"
"I'm up here, Bernice!"
"I thought I heard someone go out the front door!"
"Just me! I had to go to the bathroom really quick!"
Less than a half hour later, Wallace watched from his
bedroom window as Sasha and her mother left in their battered old
Mercedes. He sat on the edge of his bed, still enveloped in a warm halo
of happiness, already madly in love forever with Sasha Shahar Abdul. She
had tore through his soul like a tornado through a trailer court, and he
was never going to recover.
Memory of the mushroom finally intruded. The whole
world had turned strange on him, first Sasha's wicked behavior, and then a
mushroom ripping off Lewis Carol's Alice in Wonderland.
But the fact remained that the fungus could be
toxic. Whoever, or whatever, phenomenon was responsible for the markings
that spelled out two legible words, there was a risk of someone poisoning
themselves. The woods along the west side of Willington attracted
mushroom hunters from miles around. He had to at least take a run back to
the grotto and assess the extent of the hazard.
He glanced at his watch. Another two hours of
daylight remained.
"Supper!" Bernice called from below.
Wallace went down and ate. Bernice's evening meal
was extravagant as usual. She had her hair done up and she smelled of
fresh soap. By the telltale gleam in her eye, he suspected Brother
Sebastian would be paying a visit after her return from church.
Wallace had heard rumors about town of the affair
between the town's minister and the attractive spinster on Forest Drive.
He would have preferred a sexual liaison to the true nature of their
relationship. In reality, Bernice and Brother Sebastian did nothing but
spend hours kneeling face to face in the dark closet, confessing with tearful
abandon and in intimate detail the temptations that put their immortal
souls at risk. They never touched one another.
Wallace finished his meal still a bit hungry.
Bernice never prepared more food than could be consumed at one sitting,
and she had never fully compensated for his growth and increased appetite
in recent years. Only his monthly allowance from the trust fund and an
occasional Big Mac kept him from wasting away to a physique more in line
with Bernice's meatless frame.
"I'm going to the library," he announced. "Back at
nine-thirty."
"Brother Sebastian will be by," she said, friendly
warning to steer clear until he was gone. In his younger years, she had
sent him off to the movies during Sebastian's visits, and the two had
picked him up in the pastor's car afterward.
Wallace went out the front door, ducked around back,
and jogged down the winding path into the ravine. He selected a well-worn
foot path that followed the bottom of the dry run-off into the densest
part of the woods. His private grotto was nothing elaborate, just an acre
of rich humus surrounded on three sides by a low wall of shale
outcropping. The woods continued on back another mile before opening onto
the new four-lane state highway bypassing Dale City and Willington.
A scattering of mushroom waited for him, each
reading a distinct eat me on their pinkish caps. Wallace had no
interest in a closer inspection. Instead, he followed their trail of
growth, wondering why so many were growing in the dry soil. It hadn't
rained for a week, but this part of the woods was covered with a pink
carpet. He had never seen the phenomenon before. He doubted if anyone
had.
The mushrooms grew all the way to the highway.
There, he found evidence that someone had been picking the fungi. He
stooped and touched the severed stem of a specimen and rubbed his
moistened fingers together. Sometime during the past day a good-sized
patch of the growth had been cleaned out.
Wallace used a cash register receipt and a ballpoint
pen to sketch a rough image of a specimen. He then jogged to the library
in the center of town and thumbed through three mushroom and fungi field
manuals without deciding upon the identity of the species in question.
Trouble was brewing. He could feel its ominous
approach as surely as the cloying aroma of the fungus clinging to his
fingertips. If one mushroom hunter had gone on a picking binge, others
were sure to follow. It seemed inevitable that the woods would soon be
filled with people.
He thought of stopping by the police station on the
way home and giving the authorities adequate warning of his discovery. He
dropped the idea when he rehearsed in his imagination an encounter with
Sergeant Boston at the front desk. "Hey, Sarge, I found this mushroom
that says eat me on it, like in those Alice in Wonderland stories, so I
think you'd better rope off the woods and post a thousand guards until the
Food and Drug Administration approves them for human consumption." And
the Sarge would mutter a derogatory obscenity and remember his
irresponsible story the next time Duke punched him in the face and broke
something truly worthy of a police report.
Wallace went home before Aunt Bernice returned with
Brother Sebastian. It had been a rough day, and he intended to rest for a
few minutes while waiting for Sasha. He always had his window and the
tree to slip in and out of the house unseen and unannounced.
Instead, he fell asleep for the night. He had one
nightmare of being poisoned by the mushrooms on a Swiss steak Aunt Bernice
forced him to eat at breakfast, another of being lost in the woods and
surrounded by a grotto with walls a mile high, and one magnificent wet
dream starring both Sasha Shahar Abdul and her mother, Sylvia, both of them
naked and vying for his attention.
He was sleeping when Aunt Bernice checked his room at
midnight. She stood in the dark doorway staring at him for a time, then
quietly closed the door behind her. Neither of them was among the light
sleepers and early risers about town who heard the sharp, piercing scream
echo in Willington during the quiet hours just before dawn. A brief
thunderstorm at daybreak washed away the pool of blood congealing on a
sidewalk three blocks away.
