Chapter 2

Steve Atkins felt he had had a very good day in the woods, three rabbits and one pussy. He grinned and swung the dead animals by their hind legs, thinking that he had swung the redhead by her hind legs, too. All soft furry little creatures were basically alike; a combination of fear and timidity, like the rabbit, and the dangerous, hissing frenzy of the bob cat. The trick that all smart men knew was to play one set of characteristics against the other. The result was an ability to handle women, get them to do anything you wanted them to do.

Steve had a philosophy worked out. Most men got into trouble because they allowed the rabbit characteristics to become intermingled with the bob cat characteristics, and every trapper knew that rabbits and bob cats were two entirely different prey. You caught one with one set of traps and bait, and the other with another set. If their characteristics should be combined, you wouldn't know what in the hell to do, right? Right!

It was the same with women; don't let them become too complex or they'll win. Keep 'em simple and one-dimensional and the male wins every time. Most men, Steve had observed, were defeated in the end by their pipe dreams. They started out with a good lay, but they couldn't let well enough alone and allow her to remain a good lay and nothing else. They began to sleep the whole night with her, instead of getting up and going home where they belonged. Result? The good lay invariably got up and cooked breakfast, and like every woman, she was anxious to show that she could do something else besides screw. So she cooked up a storm and made eggs Benedict, grilled baby tomatoes, poached kippers and God knows what-all, when all the man thought he wanted was a cup of coffee and a Danish. But he got to like that delicious breakfast, and started spending more nights with the lay. Naturally, she bought some extra-nice towels for his shower, and started keeping extra clothes for him. And you could bet your balls she ironed his shirts better than she had ever ironed a stitch of her own clothes, to prove that she could do something else besides fuck.

Result? The man gradually got lazy and let other characteristics develop in his good lay. Her good fucking wasn't enough anymore; now he loved her for her cooking and her ironing and her housekeeping. He started depending on her for things that any hash house or laundry could do for him. Result? He starts thinking that she's the answer to every prayer, every problem; after all, she can do anything, can't she? The rabbit and the bob cat intermingled. Then the poor dumb slob finds himself either married to her or living with her, and one night when all he wants is a little pussy, she pushes him away and screams "You think that's all I'm good for!"

Result? Poor dumb slob thinks to himself: Gosh, women are complicated.

Poor dumb slob never realizes that it was he who made her complicated in the first place.

Steve's mouth curled in superior contempt. It worked the other way, too. A man picked out a nice girl to marry, married her, and then found out she left something to be desired in the fucking department. A bomber, a real dud in the sack. So what does he do? Buys her black nighties, gets her to take a little snort before bedtime, maybe takes her to the skin flicks to get her hot. Result? Not surprisingly, she does get hot. Starts to fuck like a mink, really loves it. Poor dumb slob thinks: I've made a complete woman out of her, I brought out things in her she didn't know she had!

Result? He comes home to a pad that looks as if the Public Health ought to put a sign on, containing twenty pounds of dirty laundry, a cold stove and a hot wife. As she drags him into the bedroom, poor dumb slob says "Honey, can't we have dinner first? I'm starved." Whereupon Salome of the Seven Veils hits the ceiling and screams, "You think I'm just a housewife!"

Result? Poor dumb slob thinks "Gosh, women are complicated."

Steve shook his head and gave the dead rabbits another twirl. He had learned the basic fundamentals of handling women by studying his father, a poor dumb slob if he had ever seen one. The old man had messed things up so thoroughly that he got neither good cooking nor good sex from his wife. Steve's mother had done nothing, absolutely nothing, except sit on the stoop with other Bronx housewives and exchange tidbits on how much they hated their husbands. What woman wouldn't hate a man who confused her? One minute the poor dumb slob wants a meal and a clean shirt, the next minute he wants a lay. No wonder women talked about not having any identity!

After what he had seen at home, Steve at first had tried the old trick that so many men swore by: Treat the whores like ladies and the ladies like whores. But that didn't work, either; it only contributed a different kind of confusion to the battle of the sexes. From what Steve had seen of women, ladies damn well expected to be treated like ladies and whores thought you were a queer or a cop if you treated them like anything except the whores that they were.

For a professional cunt russler, con man and convict, Steve had some pretty conventional and even old-fashioned ideas in a way. He divided women strictly into two groups: nice girls and bad girls. Never the twain must meet; if it did, the poor dumb slob was a goner. Steve had no use for nice girls because of the business he was in, but he was damn glad they existed-because of the business he was in. If all women liked the stick and gave their men a piece on demand, how could anybody make money selling cunt and skin flicks? Yes, nice girls were the staff of life, there was no doubt about it. He wanted them to stay as sweet as you are, baby.

He also stood four-square behind the institution of marriage, legal marriage, with babies to wrap it up good and tight. There was nothing like lawful monotony to make men long for variety and surprises. Steve was all for people having children, lots of children. The more children that were crammed into a house, the less moans, groans and screams a woman could let loose with while fucking. After awhile, a man longed for a wild bobcat of a lay, and Steve would duly provide him with it-for a price.

So, poor dumb slobs, be fruitful and multiply.

He went through the prison yard and swung the rabbits in greeting to the guard, who grinned and waved him in. He delivered the game to the kitchen and hung around while the cook expertly decapitated them and began to gut them. When he cut the third one open, the old French-Canadian made a sound of surprise and crossed himself. Inside the stomach were six little round balls of gelatinous fur with tiny pinpoint eyes and the bumpy beginnings of ears.

"Ah, pauvre p'tite! She was enceinte, hein?"

The cook looked horror-stricken and on the verge of tears, although he had used the same kind of cleaver on his wife thirty years before. And why? Steve wondered, his mouth twitching, for he knew the answer. The cook's wife had had a habit of saying the Rosary while they were fucking, and cookie wanted her to relax and enjoy it. Of course, she had to be a good cook, wife, housekeeper and mother too, as well as a good lay. All cookie wanted was a lady in the parlor, a cook in the kitchen, and a whore in the bedroom. Mrs. Cookie couldn't divide herself into three parts, so her husband had divided her into sixteen parts.

The easily emotional Gallic face gazed up at Steve.

"It does not seem right that we eat a mother," the old man sighed.

"Nope, never muff-dive on a mother," Steve laughed. "It just complicates things."

The cook brandished the cleaver in sudden shocked anger, then laid it down to cross himself again.

"Salaud! Do not talk feelthy about the word mother! A mother is sacred!"

"If you'd taken your own advice thirty years ago you wouldn't be here today," Steve said dryly, getting lazily down from the table. He liked the feel of his balls inside his pants, pressed against the hard surface of stainless steel made warm from the kitchen heat. It had been a long time since his balls had felt so heavy and loose.

He cut across the recreation yard, where another guard waved at him, and checked himself into his cell block after chatting with the warden on duty at the desk. It amused him to see how much the prison officials liked and admired him. He was well aware of the secret envy they felt, and was sure they had no idea just how unsecretive it was. They all wished they could be in his shoes, even though they were free to go home each night and he wasn't. Free! To go home! His lip curled with scorn. Go home to what? They wanted what they knew he had had-women, plenty of them, and most of all, control over women. The official line, particularly from the prison chaplain, was "go straight" but all of the guards knew that Steve Atkins would go right back to his former ways, and they wished they could tag along with him. Former ways, former lays and all.

He was let into his cell by the floor keeper who handed him a dollar, the result of a game of dominoes that they had played the previous night. Steve tucked it between the page of one of his books, All About Witchcraft and Demonology. He looked at the title a moment and smiled strangely before he replaced it on the shelf that the carpentry shop had so kindly provided him with. That made him laugh. A custom-decorated cell! Maybe such niceties only occurred in low-crime states like Maine but Steve figured there was another reason why he had gotten the shelf.

Because of good behavior he had been allowed to join one of the new occult book clubs that had sprung up lately. The fact that he had gotten so interested in reading had delighted the social workers, visiting psychologists and the chaplain so much that the shelf magically appeared one day, as though it had been built by the shoemaker's gremlins. The chaplain-who either did not notice that his books were all on witchcraft or was too dumb to realize the obvious conflict of interest-made a little speech about "you've found that good that lies in the worst of sinners."

Bullshit, Steve thought darkly. There was another example of how people complicated things. It wasn't only men who complicated women, but people who complicated people! There was no intermingling of good and bad, Steve thought. It was either one or the other, and he was bad through and through. The chaplain had taken as evidence of respectability the fact that he wanted to read books. Nice people read books, bad people did not, so saith the chaplain.

Steve lay down on his bunk and smoked a cigarette while he thought of the redhead in the woods. He knew who she was, of course. Lorna Perkins, wife of that do-gooder and daughter-in-law of the judge who had sent him up. Steve remembered reading of the marriage in the papers just before he was arrested. He had chosen not to let on to her that he knew her identity, however. He was out to make a profitable bad woman out of her, which was what the Lord intended her to be, so it would have been foolish to say, "Aren't you Lorna Perkins, the judge's daughter-in-law?" That would have reminded her of her respectability.

Don't confuse the girl, she's confused enough already, Steve mused. His job would be to un-confuse her. It was apparent to him that she had been struggling for years against the demands of proper marriage versus the demands of her very improper body. She had that look about her that he could spot so well, the whore-within look. He could not explain to anyone how he knew, nor describe anything about her eyes, but it was there.

From his reading he had become convinced that he was psychic. He had found that there are certain people in this world who just know things, just know. . . .

Excitement churned in him. Power had always been important to Steve, but until now he had counted only the standard earthly powers as important-money, control, women, intelligence-thinking that if a man had those things he had everything he needed. But there was another power, something feral and primitive, yet a power that bespoke the furthest reaches of the human brain. That power was ESP, and he had that, too.

He had not known it until he began reading. Before, he had thought of it as savvy, something he undoubtedly had been born with. Savvy meant an ability to smell out trouble or a bad apple; to know just when the cops would raid; to spot the bimbo who would go ape over one of her customers; to case a neighborhood in a flash and realize that too many old people around meant too many people who had nothing to do but sit and look out the window.

All of this was par for the course of a con man-so he had thought. It was just business, just common sense, just savvy. But it was more than that, it was a sixth sense-literally.

Steve blew a smoke ring and watched it narrow into an oval before it disappeared. It looked like a cunt.

Lorna Doone, a sweet cookie. He would make it a gourmet delicacy before he was through. That babe wanted out, and he would get her out. Besides, it would be a good revenge on Judge Nathaniel Perkins.