Читать книгу Drag Thing; or, The Strange Case of Jackle and Hyde: A Novel of Horror - Victor J. Banis - Страница 6

CHAPTER THREE

It was a contradiction, of sorts, but it was at times like these—in the wake of some action on the street—that Teri felt most like a woman.

“It was really something,” she told Peter, her voice vibrant with excitement. “These street toughs flagged us down, two of them, they’re part of a trio who call themselves The Moes. I’ve tangled with them before, and usually they take off running when we come around, you know, and here they were tonight, jumping up and down and waving at us. And when I got a look at them, they looked like they had been through a war zone. One of them had to be taken to the emergency room, even. His leg was messed up.”

Teri’s dark eyes flashed with eagerness as she undressed. Action on the job never failed to turn her on sexually, and this time was no exception. Her fingers fairly flew over the buttons of her uniform. In a moment her tunic was gone, and her bra after it. She tossed them aside impatiently.

“Street toughs,” Peter said in a puzzled tone, running his fingers through his rumpled hair. “The Moes, did you say they called themselves? You know, it’s funny, but, I had the strangest dream earlier, there were some guys like that in it, too....”

He had awakened only minutes before, sprawled naked across the bed and with the most overwhelming headache he had ever in his life experienced. It felt like all the hangovers of the world rolled into one monstrous one. But, why would he have a hangover? He couldn’t remember drinking anything. In actual fact, he rarely drank more than a single beer or a glass of wine, and never on work nights.

“And here’s the really crazy part, they hadn’t even been in your usual street fight with another gang,” Teri said, shedding holster and gun, “They said it was just one drag queen who had worked them over. Can you imagine, one little drag queen beating the crap out of a gang of tough street punks. Well, not so little, I guess. They said she was enormous. Eight feet tall, if you can believe them, which is probably an exaggeration. I mean, they wouldn’t want to admit they had been worked over by someone normal sized, would they? And she called herself Drag Thing, they said. Isn’t that funny? Usually, you know, they give themselves women’s names, Delora or Angelina, something like that.”

The name seemed to ring a bell in Peter’s mind, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. “Drag Thing? What...what kind of a name is that?” he asked. “It sounds like someone was pulling their legs.”

“Someone pulled one leg, that’s for sure,” she said, “Pulled it right out of a socket. It had to be reset.” She dragged her trousers down and kicked them aside. “It was for real, though, that name I mean, because just a little while later we got a call on a break-in a few blocks away, and someone had cleaned out a shop window, For The Girls, it’s a specialty shop for drag queens—you know, shoes, makeup, the works—and the perp left a sort of I.O.U. written on the glass in lipstick. Signed it Drag Thing.” She rolled down her panties, threw them aside too, and grinned excitedly at him. “Guess what I want to do?”

“Uh, you just got home,” Peter said, his head still pounding from his mysterious hangover. “Aren’t you hungry, honey? Don’t you want to eat something?”

“You bet I do.” She grabbed him by the arm and hurried him toward the bed he’d just gotten up from. For the moment, he forgot his headache. Teri could be very persuasive when she was excited.

* * * *

Later, freshly showered and smelling of Chanel Number Five, Teri sniffed the air and followed the scent of bacon frying. She found Peter in the kitchen at the stove fixing her breakfast. He was still naked except for a frilly little apron he had tied on that left his backside enticingly bare.

“What’s this?” she asked. She held up a large piece of blue-and-white fabric.

Busy flipping slices of bacon, he said, without turning from the stove, “I don’t know; where was it?”

“On your sewing machine.” She came and kissed him on the back of the neck and gave one of his naked buns an affectionate pat. He slipped the spatula under an egg to flip it and glanced at the dress in her hands.

“Oh.” Something totally weird flashed in his mind when he saw it, and was gone too quickly for him to seize hold of it. “It’s...it’s a dress,” he said.

“Okay, I can see it’s a dress, but for whom?” she asked, turning it around in her hands. “Or maybe I should say, for what, an elephant? This thing is huge.”

“I, uh, I was thinking of the big girls,” he stammered. “You know, the oversized ladies. It’s a niche market that isn’t very well served right now, it seems to me. It’s just something I was playing around with, an experiment, sort of.”

“Well, you’re the designer.” She shrugged and took the dress back to where she had found it at the sewing machine. She could not help being just a little curious about it, though. He had never before mentioned doing dresses for the oversized market. She knew that for his designs he really liked the model-type figure, long and slim, skinny, actually. Even she was too full figured to be the kind of pencil thin fashion model for whom dressed designers generally designed their dresses and who wore them on the runways at the fashion shows. She could not imagine Peter even being interested in designing for big women.

Halloween was only a day or so away, however, and she might have supposed that he had made the dress as a costume for himself, if it were not so obviously too large even for him.

Although they had never discussed it, she knew that he was attracted to women’s clothes—designing them, of course, but she suspected there was more to it than merely that. More than once, she had looked in one of her dresser drawers and saw that he had been surreptitiously handling her under things. Once, a pair of her panties in the laundry hamper had what she would have sworn were semen stains. She had never questioned him about them, but she was certain that he secretly longed to “dress up,” and one time she had realized that he was wearing some of her Chanel Number Five perfume.

The funny thing was, she had not yet come up with any tactful way to let him know that the idea appealed to her too. The Chanel on him that one time had acted as an aphrodisiac on her. Drag in and of itself did not, probably because in her mind she generally associated it with gay men, even though she did know, from reading those advice columns in the papers, that there were lots of men who were entirely heterosexual but who nonetheless liked to cross dress.

It was not that she had anything against gay men either. She had any number of gay friends, including their downstairs neighbor, Lee, and she truly treasured her friendships with them, but those men did not, however, turn her on sexually.

Peter did, and she knew without a doubt that he was not gay. For one thing, he was the best partner in bed that she had ever known. He seemed to know merely by instinct what to do to make a woman happy, and no one could be homosexual who was turned on the way he was by a woman’s body, although she suspected that his actual experience with them was not very vast. She had an idea, in fact, that he might even have been a virgin when they met, though she had not been.

His heterosexuality, however, only made the thought of his dressing up like a woman just that much more of a turn on for her. The idea of picking out dresses for him, of helping him with bras and panties and stockings, even putting on his make up, stirred her sexually. Maybe after breakfast....

Unfortunately, though she had made some subtle comments now and again, she had not yet managed to get her message across to him. She could see that it was a sensitive subject for him, one that embarrassed him, even—probably, it was that suggestion of homosexuality attached to it that bothered him—and she wanted to find a way to bring it up that did not make him uncomfortable. A woman could not just say to her husband—especially to a husband that she could see was shy about the subject—“honey, I would love to see you in a dress.”

Grimalkin, who was invariably miffed whenever she and Peter had sex, came to her and rubbed jealously against her leg. She picked him up and gave him a quick hug. “Cats are supposed to be psychic, aren’t they, Grimmy?” she asked. “Couldn’t you hint to him about dressing up for me?”

Grimalkin sniffed and gave her a searching look, as if there were something he thought she ought to know.

“See what you can do, won’t you?” She kissed his nose and put him on the floor. With a muted meow, he turned his back on her and marched disdainfully away, tail aloft. People, he seemed to say with scorn.

Back in the kitchen, Teri poured herself a cup of coffee and sat at the Formica topped table. Peter come from the stove to set a plate of bacon and eggs, cooked exactly the way she liked them, in front of her.

“Dig in,” he said.

“Umm, looks great.” She took a bite and added through a mouthful of wheat toast and eggs, “By the way, you look really cute in that little apron, honey.”

The apron was not one of those “man-in-the-kitchen” jobs either, but definitely a woman’s apron, pink and white and ruffled all over—as close, she supposed, as he had yet gotten to dressing as a woman, and he did indeed look cute to her in it. She chewed her toast and when he turned back to the stove, she looked at his naked derriere and thought seriously about biting into one of his shapely little buns.

“Well, gee, if you say so.” He blushed all over, even his buns turning pink, but she could see that the remark had pleased him. He looked over his shoulder and flashed his especially adorable shy grin—the one that started slowly at his mouth and took a moment to reach his eyes—before he turned back to the skillet and his own eggs.

It was a start, she thought. Today, aprons, tomorrow, fish net stockings. She began to eat her breakfast with the hearty appetite she always displayed after their sexual episodes.

“You know, Bunny,” she said—a nickname generally saved for their most intimate moments—“You are the best little hubby any policewoman could wish for.”

Grimalkin had followed her into the kitchen. He rubbed impatiently against her bare leg, as if he had something on his mind.

* * * *

It was Grimalkin who later led Peter to the outlandish collection crammed into the laundry hamper. The Siamese sat on the floor and meowed repeatedly at the hamper as if trying to tell him something.

“What’s up, buddy?” Peter asked and lifted the lid on the hamper. He gasped at what he discovered there: an enormous length of garish floral patterned drapery, a silver blonde wig, high-heeled shoes covered with sequins, a red purse which, when he hastily opened it, turned out to be stuffed full with make-up—lipsticks, perfumes, rouge, mascara, liner. His head swam as he stared at purse’s contents.

That dream he’d had...he flashed back on that. It had been a dream, hadn’t it? Surely that could not have been real. But if it was not real, if it was only a dream, then how had these things come to be here, in the hamper? And hadn’t he dreamed, too, about filling a purse with make-up? It was all kind of vague, like one of those conversations you only half heard on a bus or in a bar.

“Honey, I’m going to do some laundry before I go,” Teri said from the bedroom. Peter snatched the clothes and the purse from the hamper and threw them behind the shower curtain and pulled the curtain closed. The lid of the hamper dropped with a bang, making Grimalkin jump. He swished his tail angrily and stomped out of the bathroom. Things were going very strangely around here, it seemed like to him.

Teri stepped over the disgruntled cat as she came into the bathroom and picked up the hamper. “Funny,” she said, giving it a shake, “I would have sworn this was heavier when I picked it up earlier. Oh, well. Might as well get it done anyway.”

“Leave it, why don’t you. I can do laundry later,” he said.

“Oh, I’ve got plenty of time. You work on your designs.”

She took the hamper with her, paused in the kitchen for the detergent and bleach, and blew him a kiss as she let herself out the door.

When she was gone, Peter frantically snatched the things from behind the shower curtain and looked at them with a mounting sense of panic. What was he going to do with all this? He couldn’t leave it here, that much was certain. Teri would be sure to find it sooner or later.

He went into the bedroom, dragged a big battered backpack off the closet shelf, and carried it hurriedly back to the bathroom, where he stuffed the wig, the fabric, the shoes, and purse into it. As an after thought, he went back to the living room to fetch the dress that Teri had found earlier on the sewing machine.

He had only given it a glance before. Now he held it up to look carefully at it. It was a beautiful fabric, a sea blue silk with a delicate white floral pattern running through it. He remembered the fabric all right. He had gotten it just a week or so ago, but the last he remembered, it had been neatly folded on his fabric shelf in the closet.

How on earth had it found its way to his sewing machine, and practically finished as a dress? Teri was right, too: it was huge, too big even for the women who constituted the “full figure” market, despite what he had told her. It might have been made with a drag sumo wrestler in mind. A particularly large sumo wrestler at that, he amended.

It was all too much for him to comprehend. He went back to the bathroom with the dress and stuffed it into the backpack with the other things and hid the backpack well behind his clothes in the closet. He would have to take it with him to work and try to find someplace there to hide it. Or, maybe he could just toss it all somewhere—say, in a dumpster between here and there. He was pretty sure there was one behind the Safeway store.

What had happened to him? He thought back over the previous night, but his memories were only a blur. He’d had those bizarre dreams, and had awakened with a splitting headache just before Teri got home.

But wait, now that he went back over them, not all of his memories were so fuzzy. He could remember the early part of the night clearly enough. He remembered arriving at work and feeling sleepy, and bored; nothing unusual about that. And he remembered, too, the laboratory, and—it came back to him in a flash, like a picture on a screen—the vial and the syringe he had found on the counter.

The syringe with the vitamins. Yes, that was it. It was after he had accidentally injected himself with that Alley Thing vitamin B12 that everything had gone blank.

He looked at his hands. The puncture wound from the syringe had vanished altogether. Even the marks where the cat had bitten him had healed up completely. There was no trace left of either of them. Whatever was happening to him, it was not the result of an infection, then, at least not from either of those. Actually, he had never known wounds to heal so completely so quickly. Still, he had to assume that the gap in his memory somehow connected to the syringe with the vitamins.

What if...? The thought sent a shiver up and down his spine.... What if that hadn’t been vitamins in the syringe? What if it was...? But here his mind balked. What on earth could it have been if not vitamins?

Alley Thing. He puzzled over the name. What could that mean? As far as that went, what were “alley things?” Rats, of course. And Cats. Homeless people and muggers. How did you put things like that into a syringe? And why?

Muggers. His mind circled back to that thought. Street toughs. Like the ones in his dream. Like the ones Teri had mentioned. The Moes, she called them. Could there be a connection? But what, and how?

One thing he knew for sure: he needed to talk to those women scientists at Wald Med. They were the ones with the answers.

Holy Moley, he thought with mounting dismay. What have I done to myself? Something really weird was happening, that much was obvious.

* * * *

He was just too weird, in her opinion. Gladys Kravitz sniffed and averted her eyes when Lee Appel came into the laundry room. It was not that she exactly disapproved of homosexuals, not really. Live and let live, was her motto. After all, she was a medical professional. She had seen it all in her forty-plus years as a registered nurse. People were just people, she liked to say to the other nurses.

On the other hand, male people of that persuasion did not have to flaunt themselves, did they? And a man dressing as a woman—which Lee tended to do a lot when he was not working—was definitely flaunting himself, in her opinion.

It especially galled her because he was a nurse too. It might have been different if he were, well, a civilian, so to speak. But, a nurse.... She regarded his habit of cross-dressing as a slap at the whole profession and maybe even at all of womanhood as well. If nothing else, it was undignified for a trained medical person.

Worse yet, he didn’t even go to the trouble to try to make himself look like a real woman—not that he would have fooled anybody, but still the attempt might have evidenced a little sincerity on his part. His beard, full and bushy, just looked bizarre with the housecoats and peignoirs and frilly dresses that he favored when he was off duty. Say what you might about sexual tolerance, and it was no kind of bias on her part, but she felt most certainly that a man with a beard just looked silly the way he was dressed this morning, in a muumuu and mules.

“Good morning,” he greeted her cheerily. As always, he seemed to be entirely oblivious to her disapproval. Which only irked her the more. The very least he could do was act repentant.

She sniffed again and nodded without speaking or even looking at him. Thankfully, her laundry was all but done. She folded the last of her husband’s boxer shorts, hoping fervently that Mister Appel was not paying undue attention to them—Abner most certainly would not want his most personal items ogled by a man in a muumuu, she felt sure. He might not even want to wear them after they had been contaminated like that, and who could blame him? She gathered up her things and went to leave, and nearly bumped into that Warren woman, the policewoman, coming through the door just at that moment with her own basket of laundry.

* * * *

“That woman is not a happy camper,” Teri said, setting her basket on the counter.

“It’s my costume,” Lee said with a shrug. “Though I can’t think why she should object to it. It’s such a nice print, really. I like the colors. Green and blue. Sky blue, as a matter of fact. And it’s from Macy’s, it’s not like I got it at Ross or some outlet store.” He glanced down at himself. “Maybe it’s the green. It is kind of olive-ish, isn’t it? Does it make me look sallow, do you think?”

“I think it’s lovely,” Teri said. “She is probably just jealous. I mean, the woman wears chenille. Puh-leeze.”

Lee giggled. “Really. Puh-leeze. And speaking of women’s wear, how is our favorite designer?”

Teri began sorting her laundry into piles. “To be honest, I’m not sure,” she said thoughtfully. “He seems to have something on his mind. Something troubling him, you know what I mean?”

“You are surely not thinking that he is straying? I mean, men do, of course. They’re like a bunch of tomcats, most of them, aren’t they? But not our Peter, surely.”

Teri did not miss the faintly hopeful note in Lee’s voice. She understood perfectly. She knew full well that Lee had a major crush on her husband. Far from disconcerting her, it made her feel sympathetic. She knew just as well that his chances of ever consummating that love were non-existent.

Anyway, how could she blame anyone for adoring her Peter, cutie that he was? She was happy to know that Lee and Peter were good friends—and nothing more. She even allowed herself to hope that someday Lee’s penchant for dressing up in women’s clothing might wear off on Peter.

More than once, she had thought about enlisting Lee as an ally in her plans to get Peter into a dress, but, really, it was her hope that the idea, when it came, would be Peter’s alone—well, with maybe just a little nudge or two from her in that direction, but without outside prompting. When it happened, she wanted it to be utterly intimate, something private to be shared by the two of them alone. With Lee involved, it would be more of a camp thing; funnier, but less sexy, somehow.

“No, nothing like that,” she said. “It’s just...I don’t know. He seems worried about something, but he keeps insisting everything is just fine.”

Lee shrugged. “I could stop by later and visit. Maybe it’s one of those guy things, you know, that men are embarrassed to talk about with women.”

“I don’t know...,” she said hesitatingly.

“And I am a guy, you might have noticed, despite the muumuu.”

“You may be right,” Teri said with a sigh. “Would you mind stopping by, just to see if he has anything he wants to say?”

“No problema.” Lee was always happy to stop by for a visit with Peter. He knew that his crush on his neighbor was hopeless, but that didn’t hinder him from engaging in his fantasies. Anyway, Peter was a nice guy, and he genuinely enjoyed his company. And he did design the most divine frocks. Once, he’d actually made a special gown for Lee, which was his all time favorite. It was so deliciously tacky. You just couldn’t find dresses like that in the catalogs.

“How’s the writing coming, by the way?” Teri asked.

“Oh, writing.” He shrugged. “It’s like taking a piss in a windstorm, you know: you put a lot out but when you’re done it seems like there is not much to show for it. I’m doing an article on Halloween in the Castro, for the Bay Area Reporter. Yawn.”

“It will be fun, I’m sure,” Teri assured him. “I always love your pieces.”

“Can I help?” Lee asked, indicating the laundry she was sorting. “I’m all finished with mine.”

“Oh, no....” Teri hesitated. She had put Peter’s jockey shorts and the jockstrap that he wore when he jogged into a separate pile. “Well, you could put those in washer for me while I finish sorting out the rest.”

“Gladly,” Lee said with genuine enthusiasm in his voice. He scooped up the pile of dirty underwear. Teri discreetly turned her back while he loaded them into a washer. If he were going to do anything kinky, like sniffing them—which she had been known to do a time or two herself, all those raunchy male scents—she thought she would just as soon not see. What she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her any.

At the washer, Lee paused to take just the quickest, tiniest sniff.

* * * *

“He’s wearing a muumuu today,” Gladys told her husband when she got back to their apartment.

Abner Kravitz harrumphed his disapproval. “Damned fruits,” he said from behind his newspaper. “Maybe it is time we moved. There’s too damn many of them around here, if you ask me. Him downstairs, and that fairy dress designer next door, and....”

“Peter Warren? But he’s married,” she said, opening and closing closets and dresser drawers.

“To a dyke.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Come on, a woman cop? Of course she’s a dyke. It’s one of those marriages of convenience you read about in the papers. Some jobs you got to keep up a front.”

Gladys frowned while she put shirts on hangers. She could not think why a dress designer would need to keep up a front. For that matter, in San Francisco, it did not seem to her like a policewoman needed to worry over much about that sort of thing either. Didn’t she read that the San Francisco Police Department actively recruited from the gay community?

Besides, that nice Mister Warren next door was so polite. And so cute, too. She just could not imagine anyone that attractive being homosexual, not when he could have his pick of women. Even older women, if he was so minded. The other nurses said that young men often liked older women. And the way he sometimes looked at her, she could not help wondering. Really, she wasn’t that much older. And she was a nurse, a professional woman...Men liked a woman they could respect.

“She just needs a real man, is all, that’s all any of those women need to straighten them out,” Abner said. His newspaper rustled as he turned a page. He segued back to his earlier comments. “The problem is, where would we move to in this town? They’re all over the place. You can’t get away from fags and dykes, everywhere you turn. Like flies on garbage.”

“Oh, that reminds me,” Gladys said, slamming the last drawer shut. “Don’t forget to take out the garbage.”

* * * *

Later, when Gladys, dressed in cheery flowered scrubs and sensible nurse-shoes, had gone off to work, Abner remembered the garbage. He tugged the plastic bag from the can and stepped out to take it to the chute at the end of the hall, and there she was, the dyke cop, just getting off the elevator with her laundry.

As he strolled down the hall in her direction, a sock fell out of her basket. She set the basket down on the floor and bent to pick up the sock. Her curvaceous rump made a target too tempting for him to ignore. Abner slid a hand quickly and lightly over it as he passed.

“Whoa!” she exclaimed, straightening and turning towards him. “What’s with the hands, Buster?”

“Sorry,” he said, smirking and looking not at all apologetic. “I tripped. Kind of lost my balance, you know?”

“You know, you can be arrested for sexual assault, Mister Kravitz.” She gave him her cop-glower.

“Look, it was an accident, okay, don’t get your drawers in a knot,” he said sharply. He went past her toward the garbage chute.

“Well, you want to be a little more careful,” she told his back. “People can get hurt in accidents. Real bad.”

“Yeah, I’ll watch myself,” he said without looking back. Like, he was worried about a dyke cop. What was she going to do anyway: tell her fag husband? Who’d probably come over and beat him with a powder puff.

He laughed aloud to himself at that idea. A powder puff. Might be kind of fun, if you thought about it. “Here, hit me here, please, Mister Fag, oh, again, please.” He laughed again.

* * * *

Peter was furious when she told him about the incident. “That creep,” he said angrily. “I ought to go over there and punch him in the nose. Teach him a lesson.”

“Don’t you dare,” she said. “You’d just get yourself arrested for assault and I would have to come bail you out.”

“Maybe. But it would be worth it.”

“Forget it. He’s not worth it. Besides, you know what he thinks. Dyke and fairy. There’s no cleaning up minds like his. The best thing to do is just to ignore them.”

“I guess you’re right, but it does tick me off. One of these days,” he said. He picked up his backpack from the floor by the door.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Oh, just stuff,” he said. “Some shirts I’m going to drop off at the Salvation Army box on my way to work.”

“That’s a bit out of your way, isn’t it? Here, I’ll drop them off.” She reached a hand toward the backpack.

“No, that’s okay,” he said quickly. He gave her a hurried kiss and was out the door before she could argue.

He practically ran to the elevator. He just hoped those women scientists were still at the lab when he got there.