Fiery Rivers Read online

  “You go on now an’ do what you wanta do. You’ve helped me enough. An’ I think you deserve a break for sayin’ those nice things. You’re becomin’ a man quick as a wink. If you don’t go off an’ do somethin’, I might turn around from the table an’ you’d be full-grown. And where would Angie be with you gone an’ married an’ havin’ young’uns?”

  “That ain’t gonna happen anytime soon, but I’ll go an’ work on my models if you really don’t want me to help.”

  “Sure, you go on now. I just got a few more pots an’ pans an’ I’ll be finished anyway. Go on, now.”

  “Alright. If you insist.”

  “I do. Go.”

  Rennie threaded the red towel back through the chrome handle of the refrigerator, walked into his room and closed the door. He turned on the small fan atop the chest of drawers, went to the closet and retrieved the most recent Superman comic book that he had not finished reading. He removed the sales receipt that he used as a bookmark. He did not like to turn down the pages to mark his place. He wanted to keep the comic in as good a condition as possible because he believed that in a few years he would be able to sell his collection and get rich. He believed this to be true even though he knew no one who collected comic books to resell at a profit. He knew he was the only one who had thought of it. He was always a little bit ahead of the crowd, as evidenced by his being the only boy in the neighborhood who owned his own go-kart. All the other boys rode bikes. Although, he had to admit, his father had built the go-kart for him after Rennie had pleaded with him for weeks to build one for him after he had seen a nifty go-kart kit in Popular Mechanics magazine.

  Once he had built the go-kart for him, his father had found the building of it so easy that he had begun buying parts from the junkyard and building go-karts to sell as a way of generating extra income for the family. At least that is what he had told Leona. Rennie knew that it was really so that his father could afford to get a better quality of whiskey at Smitty’s. “No more havin’ to settle for that house crap,” his father had confided to him after the go-karts had begun to sell. “It’s Jack on the rocks from now on.”

  Rennie stopped thinking about his father and became engrossed in the story. Lex Luthor had lured Superman to a cave where he had imprisoned Lois Lane in a cell, the bars of which Luthor had made with kryptonite, the deadly mineral from Superman’s native world, the only substance that could weaken him. When Superman had pulled the bars apart, he was too weak to free Lois from the shackles which bound her legs, arms, and neck to the wall of the cave. Lex Luthor emerged from the shadows . . .

  In the garage, which stood on the west side of a backyard blighted like the front with clumps of grass, dandelions, and weeds, Lemuel, fueled by anger for his wife, who had had the impudence to tell him not to swear, was determined to build an entire go-kart from the ground up, no matter how long it took. “That’ll show ‘er.” He would stay out all night in the garage, hammering and welding. But the effects of the alcohol and meal he had just eaten had enervated him, and after tightening the lug nuts of a tire on the right front wheel of a chassis, he slumped into a metal chair beside the work bench. “On second thought, maybe not,” he said to the vise atop the workbench. The black bulbous handle of the bench vise had not fallen back and was sticking up at a forty-five degree angle. “Ah, thass a better idea.”

  He stood up and turned the deadbolt on the side door, the sole entrance into the garage except for the garage door. He pulled a pouch of Red Man chewing tobacco from a front pocket of his overalls, extracted a wad and placed it between his left cheek and lower gum and then pulled a grey metal box from a shelf below the bench, which he unlocked. He withdrew a couple of glossy magazines, some pages of which had separated from the binding and were protruding from the sides. He turned on the lamp beside the vise and picked up a jar of Goop hand cleanser from the workbench. Then he turned the chair around so that when he sat down the light would fall over his left shoulder. He directed the air flow from the floor fan towards the chair.

  He unscrewed the top from the cleanser, which he placed on the floor to the right of the chair. When he looked at the covers of the magazines he had taken from the box, he moved the tobacco from his cheek to his mouth and started to chew. On the cover of the first magazine, Wet Lips, was a glossy photo of a black woman, her full lips more pronounced because of the shiny red lipstick she was wearing, fellating a white penis, her cheeks concave from the vacuum she had created. The penis bifurcated her large breasts, the protruding nipples erect. He could see she was immensely enjoying herself. On the cover of the other magazine, Naughty Nurses, was a buxom black woman in a white nurse’s uniform fellating a white man. Her eyes were half-lidded with lust, a look that he wished he could see just once more before he died.

  He placed the magazines on the floor to the left of the chair and took off his overalls, folded them, and placed them as a pad on the seat of the metal chair. That would prevent his posterior from sticking to the chair. He took off his tee shirt and underwear and draped them over the back of the chair. He sat down, picked up Wet Lips, scooped out a gob of hand cleanser and massaged it all over his penis, which had become half-erect when he had looked at the cover pictures. The hand cleanser liquefied from the heat. He chewed the tobacco in tandem with his hand movements as he slowly turned each page with his left hand. On every page was a picture of a black woman fellating a white man in various positions. After he turned a page, he would spit a stream of dark tobacco juice into a coffee can to his left. He spent ten to fifteen minutes on each page.

  From an early age, he had learned to manipulate himself almost to the point of orgasm and then to back off to continue as long as he wished. Sometimes, he would masturbate for four or five hours if he was undisturbed. Leona and the children always thought he was hard at work building go-karts. “Yeah, I’m hard at work alright,” he chuckled. “Brrrtt!” He spat a frothy mixture of tobacco juice and saliva at the can, which hit the edge and oozed slowly down the side. “That’d be real pretty if it was one o’ these bitches’ faces,” he thought. He turned the page.

  Inside the house, Leona had moved the fan from the kitchen window to the living room and was sitting on a threadbare yellow sofa crocheting a white antimacassar. Near the front door, Angela sat on the carpet and flipped through The Saturday Evening Post and Life, looking for pictures of cats or kittens. When she found one, she took a pair of scissors with red rubber handles and cut out the picture, being careful to leave no part of the surrounding page adhering to the cat. When she was content that nothing but the picture of the cat remained, she dabbed small amounts of school glue on the back with a small wooden stick and carefully positioned the cat into a scrapbook, alongside other pictures of cats and kittens that she had already pasted. She patted the cat with satisfaction after she had affixed it to the page and then turned back to the magazines to find another picture. Inside her bedroom were dozens of scrapbooks filled with pictures of cats and kittens, for which Lemuel had constructed makeshift bookshelves of cedar planks supported by bricks. The walls of the bedroom were covered with pictures of cats and kittens from the same magazines, for which Lemuel had made frames and hung the pictures on the walls for her.

  Angela had been born deaf seven years ago. After the initial shock, grief, and guilt which had afflicted Leona, she had come to accept her daughter as a true blessing from God. Now she thought of her Angela as her true angel, her waist-length blond hair and cherubic face the perfection of beauty and angelic grace. Rennie, as the firstborn, had brought her happiness, but Angela had brought her bliss. Angela hummed to herself and rocked her body back and forth as she thumbed through the magazine pages. Leona had once asked her through signing why she hummed, and she had replied that she liked to make her heart happy. She closed The Saturday Evening Post and opened Life.

  Leona knitted to occupy her hands, but her mind fretted over the behavior of her husband. He had remembered their anniversary and brought her roses, but then he had
stopped at Smitty’s and gotten drunk, of which he knew she disapproved. He was always sending mixed messages like that. When she looked back at their relationship, however, she realized that he had always sent her conflicting messages. Even during their long engagement he had bought her things in which she had expressed an interest, and yet he had never been comfortable telling her that he loved her. She wondered now if he had ever loved her. When he used to come to her house to pick her up for a date, she had never seen pleasure on his face. Her heart had always soared when she saw him, but she had a niggling doubt that his thoughts were elsewhere, that she was not his true love and he was just dating her because she was better than nothing. She had married him anyway because he had been, simply, the most handsome boy in high school and the quarterback of the football team. She also had enjoyed the fact that all the other girls were jealous and couldn’t understand why he would settle for a plain Jane like her. She had hoped that he would come to love her as she loved him after they were married, but it had never happened. She could not leave now that she had two children.

  She made her antimacassars for the Methodist church bazaar which was held once a month. Sometimes she would sell everything she made, but some months she would bring most of the items home. “The whims of the marketplace,” her father used to say. She wished Lemuel would not spend so much time in the garage and come into the house and be with her and the kids, together as a family. After Angela had been born, he had begun to spend more and more time in the garage building go-karts, and now he rarely ever spent any time with them after dinner. He would watch football games on TV, but he insisted on absolute silence while he was watching, so he might as well have been in the garage. His interest in sports, praise the Lord, was limited exclusively to the football season.

  She knew some wives who might as well be widows as often as their husbands watched all kinds of sports on TV. Colleen once said, “A man’s idea of heaven is to have a beer in one hand and a cheeseburger in the other, watchin’ a football game on TV while he’s gettin’ a blowjob.” Leona had cringed at the vulgarity of the remark coming out of the mouth of a deacon’s wife, but she had to admit there was truth in the statement. She herself was not inclined to indulge in such perverse behavior, but she knew that there were women in the world like Colleen who did. Lemuel had asked her a few times if she would stimulate him with her mouth, but she made it perfectly clear where she stood. Such perversities as stimulation with the mouth or, heaven forbid, anal intercourse (which Lemuel had once not too subtly suggested they do) would have no place in a home that worshipped the Lord, as this one did. They would make love as God intended, face-to-face, with the man on top, lying fully against her, with her arms wrapped around him in a loving embrace.

  Lemuel had once attempted to make love to her by placing her heels atop his shoulders, but she quickly quashed that by telling him that if he made love to her that way, there was no love in it; he was just using her to masturbate. He never tried it again.

  The garage was like a moist, warm womb. Sweat ran in rivulets down Lemuel’s face and chest. The oscillating fan in front of him laved him with caresses of warm air. He was right in the middle of Naughty Nurses when it happened. He arched his back and dropped the magazine. “Mmmmmm! Mmmmmm!” he moaned softly as his orgasm shot like a thunderbolt through his body and he was momentarily mindless with bliss.

  When he returned to ordinary space and time, he slumped back against his wet tee shirt and sighed. “That was great,” he whispered to no one. He leaned over and spat out the cud of black tobacco and juice into the coffee can.

  When he was a junior in high school, he had met a fat black girl after his football team had been defeated by the predominantly black South High School in Springfield. She had been waiting outside the locker room as he and his teammates headed dejectedly for the showers. They had hoped this year to defeat South, but South’s strength and prowess outstripped Middletown’s by far, and they had been humiliated, 23 to 7, as they had been every year since they had begun to play South. She had smiled broadly when she saw him and passed him a note. He did not read it until he was in the locker room. It said: Hi, I’d like to meet you. Give me a call. You won’t regret it. Shadyside 6-8953, Gwen. He had been surprised and flattered by the gesture. A few of the other boys had seen her hand him the note and now ribbed him.

  “Hey Lem, you switchin’ to dark meat?” inquired Jim, the center. “What’s Yvonne gonna say when she finds out?”

  “Aww, cut it out. She’s just a fan,” Lemuel replied.

  “She’s more than just a fan. She’s more like the whole fuckin’ truck engine,” Steve had quipped wittily.

  Lemuel raised his voice in irritation. “Will ya knock it off! I have no intention o’ callin’ ‘er.”

  “How about givin’ me her number, then?” asked Jim. “I’d like to see what those big lips can do.”

  “Go to hell!” shouted Lemuel, as he tucked the note into his leather shoe.

  “Fuck you!” retorted Jim.

  “Fuck you too!” replied Lemuel.

  He had kept the note for a month before calling her, and then he only called after Yvonne had canceled a Friday night date because she wanted to study for a final exam in biology on Monday. “Study on a Friday!?” he had thought. “I’ll show you.”

  He nervously called the number. A deep male voice answered the telephone. “H’llo.”

  “Uh, mm, I . . . mmm. Is Gwen there?” Lemuel stammered.

  “Who wanta know?” the voice inquired.

  “Lem . . . Lemuel. From the Middletown football team.”

  “Gwen!” the voice shouted. “You know anybody name Lem’l?”

  There came a muffled response that Lemuel could not hear. Then a door slammed, and a breathy female voice said excitedly in a high voice, “Hi! How are you?”

  “Good, I guess. How you doin’?” Lemuel asked.

  “Great! How come you took so long to call? I had almost given up hope that you were ever gonna call.”

  Lemuel searched for plausible reasons for not calling, and settled on one that he hoped would not sound too outlandish. “I . . . uh, was helpin’ my dad build a house, an’ . . . he was under the gun to get it done by December. We been workin’ every day, an’ I been too tired to call.”

  “Oh, I see,” Gwen said, with a hint of doubt in her voice. “Didjou get it done?”

  “What? Oh, yeah, we just finished today,” Lemuel answered.

  “So, you wanta do somethin’?” Gwen asked.

  Lemuel’s heart flopped like a fish on the bank of a river. “Sure,” he replied warmly. “What would ya like to do?”

  “Why don’tchou come an’ pick me up an’ we can decide then,” she stated. “You do have your license, don’tchou?”

  “Yeah. I’ve had it for about a year now.”

  Gwen gave Lemuel her address, and he asked his father to borrow the car so he could take Yvonne to the movies. His father handed him the keys and told him to be back before midnight. He promised that he would.

  When he got to Gwen’s, he knocked on the door, and it was opened by a very tall and muscular black man. “You Lem’l?” he grunted suspiciously.

  Lemuel swallowed and said, “Yes, sir.” He stuck out his hand, but it remained in midair as the man took a swig from the Budweiser he was holding in his hand. Lemuel hesitated and then dropped his hand awkwardly. “Nice weather we been havin’ lately, ain’t it?”

  The man stepped closer to Lemuel. His breath reeked of beer. His eyes were bloodshot. “Don’tchou be gittin’ no ideas ‘bout Gwen,” he threatened. “She be a good girl, an’ I aim to keep ‘er that way till she git married, unnerstan’?”

  Lemuel took half a step back and stammered, “Why . . . yes, sir. I . . . we’re just . . .”

  “Lemuel!” Gwen shouted from the top of the stairs. “Just let me put some shoes on, an’ I’ll be right down.”

  “Oh . . . OK, sure.”

  The man grabbed the front of Lem
uel’s shirt and brought his face closer to Lemuel’s. “’Member what I said, boy!” he hissed. Then he staggered off to the right into the living room, where a football game was on the black-and-white TV.

  Gwen came down the stairs slowly, smiling. She wore a tight black skirt and a pink blouse with a plunging neckline. She approached Lemuel and gave him a quick hug. “Where wouldjou like to go?” she asked.

  “She wears too much perfume,” Lemuel thought, struggling to keep his eyes off her cleavage. “I don’t care,” he said. “What kind o’ food do you like?”

  “As you can see,” giggled Gwen, as she turned around to display her ample buttocks. “I just about love everything. Wha’da you like?”

  “You can never go wrong with a burger an’ fries,” Lemuel remarked.

  “Why don’t we do that, then?” Gwen said brightly. “There’s a Frisch’s Big Boy about six blocks from here.”

  “OK, sounds good,” Lemuel assented. “Let’s do that.” He opened the door for her.

  “Bye, Daddy,” she said as they were leaving. “Be back soon.” There was no response from the living room, just the excited voice of the television announcer: “It’s a five-yard gain!”

  What surprised Lemuel, as they ate their burgers and fries, was Gwen’s honesty. She knew that it was taboo for a black girl to be dating a white boy, and yet she said she didn’t care. She liked the way Lemuel looked, and she would buck hell and high water to do as she pleased, other people’s opinions be damned. She also acknowledged that she was fat. That was society’s opinion of her, not hers. She was fine with the way she looked.

  Lemuel immediately warmed to her. He hated to admit it to himself, but he was actually beginning to like her. “If me an’ Yvonne ever break up, I got me a backup,” he thought, as Gwen swirled a French fry in the small pool of ketchup on her plate and stuffed it into her mouth. Suddenly, Jim’s remark in the locker room catapulted into his head as he watched her engulf the French fry with her full lips.