“You awake? Good. I want you to be awake for this.”
“Johnson?” Just a whisper. It was all he could manage. “That’s not really you, is it?”
But now the figure moved a little—just enough to allow the late-day sun to strike
across his scratched face—and Grunwald saw that it was. And what was that he had in
his hand?
Curtis saw what The Motherfucker was looking at, and considerately turned a little
more, so that the sun struck across it, too. It was a hair dryer, Grunwald realized. It was a hair dryer, and he was sitting chest-deep in a hot tub.
He grabbed the side, meaning to pull himself out, and Johnson stepped on his hand.
Grunwald cried out and jerked his hand back. Johnson’s foot was bare, but he had
brought it down heel first, and hard.
“I like you right where you are,” Curtis said, smiling. “I’m sure you felt the same
about me, but I got out, didn’t I? And I even brought you a present. Stopped by my
house to get it. Don’t refuse it on that account; it’s only slightly used, and I blew off all the gay-dust on my way over here. By way of the backyard, actually. Convenient
that the power’s off in the stupid cattle-fence you used to kill my dog. Here you go.”
And he dropped the hair dryer into the hot tub.
Grunwald screamed and tried to catch it, but he missed. The hair dryer splashed, then
sank. One of the water jets turned it over and over on the bottom. It bumped
Grunwald’s scrawny legs and he jerked away from it, still screaming, sure he was
being electrocuted.
“Take it easy,” Johnson said. He was still smiling. He unsnapped first one strap of the overalls he was wearing, then the other. They dropped to his ankles. He was naked
beneath, with faint streaks of filth from the holding tank still on the insides of his arms and thighs. There was a nasty brown clot of something in his navel. “It wasn’t
plugged in. I don’t even know if that old hair-dryer-in-the-tub thing works. Although I must admit that if I’d had an extension cord, I might have made the experiment.”
“Get away from me,” Grunwald rasped.
“Nah,” Johnson said. “Don’t think so.” Smiling, always smiling. Grunwald wondered
if the man had gone mad. He would have gone mad in circumstances similar to those in which he’d left Johnson. How had he gotten out? How, in God’s name?
“The rain shower this afternoon washed off most of the shit, but I’m still quite dirty.
As you see.” Johnson spied the nasty wad in his navel, pried it out with a finger, and flicked it casually into the hot tub like a booger.
It landed on Grunwald’s cheek. Brown and stinking. Starting to run. Good God, it was
shit. He cried out again, this time in revulsion.
“He shoots, he scores,” Johnson said, smiling. “Not very nice, is it? And although I
don’t exactly smell it anymore, I’m very tired of looking at it. So be a neighbor, would you, and share your hot tub.”
“No! No, you can’t—”
“Thanks!” Johnson said, smiling, and jumped in. There was a great splash. Grunwald
could smell him. He reeked. Grunwald floundered for the other side of the hot tub,
skinny shanks flashing white above the bubbling water, the tan on his equally skinny legs looking like taupe nylon stockings. He flung one arm over the edge of the tub.
Then Johnson grabbed him around the neck with one badly scratched but horribly
strong arm and hauled him back into the water.
“No no no no no!” Johnson said, smiling. He pulled Grunwald against him. Little brown-black flecks danced on the surface of the bubbling water. “Us gay guys rarely
bathe alone. Surely you came across that fact in your Internet researches. And gay
witches? Never!”
“Let me go!”
“Maybe.” But Johnson hugged him closer, horribly intimate, still stinking of the Port-
O-San. “First, though, I think you need to visit the gayboy ducking stool. Kind of a
baptism. Wash away your sins.” The smile became a grin, the grin a rictus. Grunwald