Chapter 32. Daphne and the Hanged Man

Detail-Francis Bacon triptyche
despair/disgust

Later that night at the park, Duggie brought Daphne out to the car. Daphne was a very attractive girl but something about her was off-kilter. She got in the back seat with Ed and they got it on right there in the parking lot. I had to stand outside of the car twiddling my thumbs while all this was going on.

Duggie started talking his jive, “Hey, I want to introduce ya to a pal of mine,” he beckoned.

I knew that folks like Duggie aren’t likely to have “pals” of any kind but I was bored. We walked about two or three spaces over and I saw Duggie’s pal in a sedan that had the look of a confiscated undercover narc car. The guy was overly friendly like Duggie.

“This here is Art.” Duggie went on, “and this here is Max.”

I looked into the car. Arty greeted me, “What’s happenin’, Max?” I stepped back to look a little closer at Arty’s face. It was lined, and he looked to be in his forties. There was something about his shoulder length blonde hair: it was a wig, like what you’d get from the back of magazines!

“What’s up?” I glanced around looking to see if there were any squad cars in the lot.

Art asked, “Y’all from ‘round here?”

“We came up from Miami a week ago.”

Art went right to the point, “Duggie tells me you got some good acid.”

I stepped back and looked at Duggie, nodding disapprovingly, and then at Art’s eager, nervous grin. I said, loud enough for Art to hear, but directed my comment to Duggie, “Ya know, they don’t have many snitches in Miami. They all end up at the bottom of Biscayne Bay.”

Turning to Art, I channeled Alfonzo Bedoya’s accent… the Sierra Madres bandito, Gold Hat, “Battery acid? What? Acid indigestion? What acid? We don’t know nothin’ ‘bout no stinkin’ acid. We got no stinkin’ acid! We don’t need to show you no stinking Acid.”

I spun around and walked away, pissed off at myself because I had the aluminum film canister in my pocket with a couple dozen hits in it and wasn’t prepared to chuck it if I needed to. My fingers were plying and twisting the lid to the canister just in case I had to eat the evidence.

Duggie ran up to me waving his arms, “What is the matter with you, Max, that guy’s a friend of mine!”

I turned on Duggie like a cat hissing, “The guy sitting at the wheel had a wig… a cheap fuckin’ woman’s wig! Your friend is a fucking cop and you are trying to fuckin set us up!”

Duggie threw his arms out like he was ready to be nailed to the cross…crucified! “Naw… Naw, Man. I ain’t doin’ no such thing. Arty don’t want anyone to recognize him buying drugs, ya know. It’s a small town.”

I hadn’t noticed before, but my nose was about chest level to Duggie’s. The fucker was tall, and jail-house buffed. Besides, I was holding, and Ted was banging away in the back seat. If Art was a cop, we were busted by now anyway. Who knows how many people we had sold our shit to might have been Eagle Scouts working on a merit badge? It was just a matter of time.

We had the house to ourselves the next few days. The hurricane was making its way slowly in the direction of Fort Walton Beach. Ted spent the day in the bedroom with Daphne while Kenny and I hung out in the living room watching the weather broadcasts on the television.

The TV screen showed a cartoon wheel turning over a chart of the ocean and coast. I was looking forward to the arrival of the hurricane. I loved storms and savored the memories of typhoons in the Pacific. While in the Navy, I was on a small skimmer for a while. We’d go over one seventy-foot wave and ship’s prow would plunged through the next. It was downright exhilarating! I dropped a tab of acid hoping to welcome its landfall. Outside of the cottage it was quiet… no birds… eerily quiet. The sky was grey, and the air was thick, hot and humid. Being in a low elevation area most of the neighbors had boarded-up their windows and gone to higher ground. If the hurricane made landfall, the storm surge would put the whole region as much as five to ten feet under water.

“So, we gots the TV on to see which way the hurricane goes when it gets near Panama City.” Kenny drawled on. “If it turns towards us, we’re fucked. Most likely it will go t’other way.”

“East, you mean?” I wondered, “I mean, how soon would we know?”

“See where that wheel is now?” Kenny was laid out on the couch casually, “If it gets any closer and does not turn we have about a half day, maybe a couple of hours, to get our asses out of here.”

The air… it was the air that was so thick… mopping our brows was our only movements besides lifting cans of beer that had us sweating through our T-shirts like working out in a gym. I hadn’t noticed that Ted and Daphne had come out of the bedroom.

Ted opened the fridge, he said, “Let’s go to the beach.”

Ted cracked a beer, and wrapped one arm over Daphne’s shoulder. I couldn’t tell whether he was keeping her from running or if he was just being affectionate.

“Hell yes, the beach!” I was into it. “Gotta be some great surf, eh?”

Driving through town there wasn’t much traffic. A few people were still boarding up windows but everything else was quiet. Fresh in everyone’s memory was Hurricane Camille smacked the coast very hard in sixty-nine, so people weren’t in the mood to get caught off-guard by this one. Any mild storm could turn catastrophic in an hour’s time. Still, the attitude of our diminished Crew was indifferent.

Ted drove with Kenny riding shot-gun and Daphne wedged between. I was stretched out in the back seat. Daphne wasn’t talking at all and seemed to be in a world of her own. I had liked her look before. She was an attractive brunette with short cropped hair, a luscious body, and a cute enough face. I began wishing I was having some of that stuff. Ted turned to me, “She ain’t never had any acid.”

“No kidding? You want some, Daphne?”

She didn’t answer… looked scared.

“Sure, she does,” Ted spoke for her. “Give her a hit, Max.”

I pulled out the film can from my pocket and held a tab to her lips. She opened her mouth enough for me to put it in. After she swallowed, I said, “Maybe she’s not a snitch after all.”

Kenny looked at me like I said something crazy, “Snitch? What? No, she ain’t no snitch.”

A few minutes later Ted asked her, “Are you getting off yet?”

She drawled, “I don’t feel nothin’ yet.”

 “Have another then,” Ted fed her a hit and beckoned me to pass another one up.

Kenny objected, “She ain’t had time to get off.”

Ted had found out something about her in the bedroom. She must’ve let something slip because this wasn’t characteristic behavior for him. He fed Daphne four or five more hits in as many minutes, as we wound our way around the back roads through the sloughs and across the bridge going west to a deserted stretch of Santa Rosa Island beach. The last couple of hits were literally crammed down her throat. It began my first recognition that my suspicions were justified.

I was disappointed that the surf wasn’t roaring, and the wind wasn’t howling once we got to the beach, but. The air was still and just as hot and humid there, as it was back at the cottage. We did have the beach to ourselves so we all stripped off our clothes and skinny dipped. Tripping, I fixated my attention on Daphne’s svelte body and swam towards her underwater, trying to get close to her. I’d approach, and she’d back off. It bothered me that she seemed, not only frightened by me, but I sensed she might’ve been disgusted too. I grabbed her from behind and cupped her breasts. She pulled herself away and fled towards Ted. He was done with her, so he offered no protection and sent her back with a push. After a few fruitless chases we put our clothes back on and went back to the car.

Driving around the lowlands between the sloughs, we stopped at the only convenience store still open. I went in to get a twelve pack of beer and, when I got back, Daphne was in the back seat. I slid in and pulled Daphne over to me as she tried to twist away.

“Don’t worry, Babe, I’m not going to hurt you.” She glared at me as though she was seeing a demon, I frowned, “So, what do you think, Ted, is Duggie a snitch?”

“Yeh, he was telling me he just got out of jail,” Ted kept driving. I cracked a beer and passed it up to him.

“So, do you figure our little princess here is part of his set-up?”

At this mention I could feel Daphne shrink like she was trying to disappear. She was undoubtedly tripping her brains off by now and must have sensed a horror was about to take place. I unzipped my pants, put my hand behind her head, and pulled it to my lap. She jerked her head back resisting as best as she could… “You are gonna suck my dick, bitch, or you will end up in a slough with the gators.”

The evil had begun. I felt the presence of an untamed blackness that was determined have her any way I could, by force or by fear. I was pissed that she had shrunk away from me more than suspicious she was a snitch. She had done so at the beach and she was doing it now. Was I so disgusting that even this bimbo didn’t want me? “You can’t run from Apollo, Daphne.”

I doubt she understood the mythological reference, and for sure, I was no Apollo.