Pursuit Of The Cygnus Thief

Chapter 7 - A Pleasure Most Urgent

Chapter Seven

“A Pleasure Most Urgent” By Roseyone

     Freddy called them ‘piss pellets’ because they were yellow but also because it felt good to think that something so onerously named could be aimed at his Aunt Matilda. The piss pellets were round, soft and easily crushed into powder between the back of a spoon and a kitchen countertop. When dissolved into the second of Matilda’s three habitual brandy nightcaps, the taste of a single pill was undetectable. More importantly, the medication, pilfered from Mrs. Abel’s supply, knocked Matilda down into a sleep deep enough and for just the length of time Freddy and I required to see one another.

     We wasted no guilt on Matilda because we’d spent a good span of our childhoods in her care. Together, Freddy and I could recollect days entirely lost to sleep, of painfully clenched bowels, its fiery inverse and of course, Matilda’s threats to murder everyone we loved with the herbs she cultivated if we told. Whenever one of you misbehaves, whenever I even think you might-both of you will suffer. Not eating? You can’t stay hungry all day. You’ll have to eat eventually. She’d put cups of ice cream, slices of cake and cookies on the kitchen table, whatever she could think of to tempt us into eating when we balked. Neither Freddy nor I proved strong enough to resist at first but over time, we changed.

“She went down easy?” Freddy asked. He’d been waiting in the shadows of the old shed at the farthest end of my backyard. He helped me out of my bathrobe and hung it on a large jagged splinter of wood that jutted out of shed’s delapidated siding. It was cold, my nightgown was thin. I kicked off my slippers rushed into the thick sleeping bag that Freddy had placed on the hardpack and held the flap open for him to join me before I whispered.

“Yeah, she’s out cold.”

     Freddy removed his creepers, bent down and slid into the sleeping bag next to me. We both laid down face up, we held hands and for a few moments we listened to the mormon crickets that chirped around us. We gazed up at the night sky where a full moon beamed down strong and an infinite number of stars twinkled at us from far ago. He smelled like motor oil, cigarettes, road and laundry detergent but when Freddy asked for my opinion I told him he smelled clean. I realized that he’d rushed straight to me from Tijuana where he’d spent another weekend with his cousins, he’d only had time to change his clothing before seeing me. It was 5AM Monday, May twenty-first, my sixteenth birthday. My father would be out of town until noon, Freddy and I had again defied him and leveled a measure of revenge on Matilda in the process.

“I have two birthday gifts for you.” Freddy rolled onto his side, propped himself up with one elbow and smiled. He kissed me for a few moments while I tried hard to conjure feelings out of thin air. I thought that if I could reach up and hold him the feeling might happen but there were strict uncomfortable rules of conduct between us. Freddy had determined that I would remain a lady. So, he kissed me. He embraced me when we were horizontal. Standing gave me a little more volition but not much more. It was artifical, Freddy was the same person that I had grown up with, side by side we'd shared countless adventures and misadventures. Yet those simpler days had fallen away from us, now there was only a stiff compulsory dance fraught with confusing footwork, set to an imposing rhythm, enslaved to a stringent social melody. One false move  and Freddy could  become my enemy, a hero to others, or we could become tethered  forever.

“Where are they?” I asked when Freddy broke off our kiss. He tasted salty and a little sleepy in the mouth but that didn’t bother me much.

“One’s in the car.” Freddy had arrived in my backyard via a serpentine path that started at the McKee silver mines west of town. The path gradually ran east into the defunct Big Road sub-junction where it forked onward north to open desert or further east where it turned into Big Road proper and out of town. To avoid discovery, Freddy would cut off his car engine and coast quietly along as he neared the part of the path that ran paralell to my backyard. He’d park behind a tall pile of rocks on the side of the path, hike a quarter mile through a maze of desert fauna and piles of rock, step over the property line then throw a pebble at my window and wait behind the old shed. Apache Dick, a well-known scofflaw had used the path in his day to circumvent Assumption taxation on his silver ore, while “Pappy” Towers McKee, both sheriff and moonshiner had used the discreet path during Prohibition. Much like his ancestors before him, Freddy regularly used the untitled path to keep his clandestine rendezvous with me. Freddy rolled onto his back, closed his eyes and made a snoring sound until I shook him.