Snake Eyes

Snake Eyes
Andrew DeWitt

The new forbidden fruit is the banana.”
That’s what she said as she took a drag from a stolen cigarette and winked at me. I’d almost worn out the tape listening to it. Then, I would have pretended to listen to anything. It must have been something in her laugh. She finished nearly every sentence with it. It should have been a warning. I should have listened to the bells and whistles.
The first time I met Lula was on a dare. I was fourteen and a virgin. We were all virgins actually, even my friend Matt who was two years older than me. He used to lie about it but he was just like the rest of us. It was Matt who came up with the idea. He kept telling us that the key to getting laid was to find a real wild slut. Cue Lula.
She was home schooled. No one knew why but people talked. I didn’t know much about her except that she was loose. When guys said Lula’s name they all kind of blushed. If one of my friend’s parents would hear us mention Lula, they say something like: Oh. You mean that home schooled girl? And then they’d sort of shake their heads and mutter something.
I lost a die roll, which’s how it started. In the basement one afternoon we all sat on the floor and rolled a pair of dice someone had nabbed from a monopoly set. We kept rolling dice to see who would have the lowest roll. For nearly a half an hour we were down in the basement arguing over rolls and picking our noses. Whoever lost had to, under the scrupulous watch of his peers, knock on Lula’s door, present her with flowers and ask her out. That was how one of us was supposed to get laid. To make sure no one pulled any chicken shit Matt had a pocket tape recorder so that the evidence would go on record.
I did my fair share of protesting but I couldn’t put up much of a fight. I remember staring at the two gold dots poking up from the red wooden blocks and I wanted to cry. Snake eyes. Everyone was hooting and hollering. I had the feeling that if that roll had happened to anyone else, they would have been able to brush it off and decline the dare. But I couldn’t. I think that’s why they hooted so loudly, because they knew I’d go through with it.
When you’re fourteen years old buying anything in a store is embarrassing but flowers? Shit man, they might as well have asked me to buy a pair of over sized panties. I walked into the florist’s shop and stood there. I kept hoping my eye would be able to spot a bunch of date flowers, specifically for situations like this, near the cash register. To my horror all the flowers were sealed behind huge refrigerator doors. I didn’t know how to get them out and I didn’t dare touch the door. If that happened I was sure that one of the florists would ask me if I needed any assistance. So I pretended to examine the flowers while I investigated some way to pry the refrigerator doors open. As one of the florists turned to answer the phone I grabbed my chance. I scrambled to get the door open but I couldn’t find the handle. I kept looking around as I shook the entire unit back and fourth. Then one of the ladies behind the counter asked me:
“Do you need any help there little guy?”
Panic. Sometimes panic doesn’t make you act like a wild animal barring its teeth and running in circles. Sometimes panic makes you stand in the middle of a flower shop frozen. And sometimes when panic does this to you it does other things, like reduce your vocabulary to a two-year-old’s.
“Young man, do you need any help? Are you getting some flowers?”
“I gotta flowers for something.”
What was that? “I gotta flowers for something?’ That’s not a sentence; I was on the way down, crashing and burning. Maybe I should cut my losses and just bolt out of the door right now. I couldn’t trust my mouth. I had to make crude gestures like Tonto does when he tells the Lone Ranger something.
“You need some flowers Hon? Is this for a special little lady?”
That did it. I had fought off getting red in the face pretty well until that point. My face turned blood red. Then all the thoughts I had about what the flowers were for, who they were for, and what I might be able to do with that person headed straight for my pants. I could sense a hideous menacing growth springing up in my ragged underwear. I tried to turn my thoughts elsewhere but then the florist leaned down and put her arm over my shoulder. I could feel one of her soft brunette locks spill onto my neck. My dick went wild. It looked like it was trying to reach through my jeans to grab one of the flowers itself. I shut my eyes and tried to muster some kind of response.
“Yes..for ..a girl?”
She tried not to laughed and leaned in closer.
“Was that a question or an answer?”
“Yes. They are for a girl.”
She stepped to the refrigerator and slid the door open. It slides. The door slides, it doesn’t pull or push.
“Well, what type of flowers does she like?”
“Red ones?”
“Roses, the red ones are roses. Does she like roses? That’s romantic she must be a special little girl.”
“Yeah, she likes roses.”
“Well, do you want to give her just one, or does she deserve a whole bunch?”
I checked in my Velcro wallet to see if she deserved a whole bunch. She didn’t. Then I realized in terror that the florist might have seen my hard-on. This thought made things worse and I dropped the wallet on the floor. My hands shook while I was trying to mime that just one rose would be fine on an occasion like this. I don’t think my sign language was very clear. Finally, after I had managed to purchase a flower and spill the tip cup trying to leave my change in it, I headed out the door. The lady said she would take care of the spilled change for me.
But it wasn’t over. Surviving the flower shop had been a hollow victory. I still had to go to Lula’s and ask her out. And this time I’d have an audience. My friends were waiting for me in the woods a little bit off the road from my final destination. They had spent the afternoon guerrilla tire ambushing. That’s when they hide in a ditch or behind a mound of dirt or leaves and wait for a car to drive by. Then they would chuck three or four bottles at the ground right before the car drove by. We never really did it anymore. Being outside in general was childish, unless we were smoking or someone had a stolen bottle of liquor. Well, we never “stole” a bottle of liquor from anyone. What we did was take just a teeny tiny bit of every kind of liquor in our parents’ liquor cabinet and put it in a bottle. I now believe that was the single most awful way to catch a buzz ever invented. I was comforted by the fact that while my friends were all playing commandos in the woods like elementary school kids, I was out and about doing man stuff. I was running the kind of errands that would get me laid.
Matt tossed me the tape recorder and told me that I had better get the evidence or I would have to do it again. They were all grinning, but they looked kind of scared like when chimpanzees grin during a scuffle. They were showing a lot of teeth, and everyone was strangely coordinated with one another. They even hooted like monkeys when I caught the tape recorder.
I remember that her porch smelled funny when I rang the doorbell and that they had left out a faded Christmas welcome mat, even though it was the beginning of September. Dogs started barking. It sounded like shitload of dogs. I winced as I pictured her bed monopolized by some huge furry beast guarding her vagina with his life. I couldn’t deal with that. I like a dog. I like two dogs. But I do not like packs of unkempt redneck hounds. I thought about pulling the plug right there, and I would have but I could feel eyes on my back.
Her father answered the door. He looked normal, and sad, not at all what I had expected. I thought he would be some wild hillbilly with a faded blue hat, no shirt and jeans splattered with paint or septic grease or something. Instead he was a small man with glasses and a purple sweater. It still wasn’t cold outside at all but he was dressed for winter. Even his facial hair was ready. He wore a large but meticulously trimmed gray spackled beard on his face. It looked like it kept his face from falling off.
“Um. I’m here ,no wait I mean…my name is Peter Compton, and is your daughter… available for, er, at the moment, if she isn’t, if she’s busy, I would be perfectly happy, I can just, well, I can come back, and I , um, at a more convenient time.”
He shot me the same look the florist did then shut the door and called for Lula. I turned back around and gave a thumbs up to the empty street. Looking down at my feet I noticed her doormat. There was a picture of Santa Claus on it, leading a sleigh, but instead of reindeer they were tiny dinosaurs. In the left hand corner was some text surrounded by holly leaf print. It said, “May this holiday season leave you in raptor.” Jesus. That was terrible. The door opened and I heard her penetrating voice for the first time.
“Who are you?”
I lifted my head and saw her up close. She was pretty, but she didn’t take care of herself. She was wearing old navy blue men’s pants that made me imagine that she didn’t take a bath except for every three or four days and a filled yellow tank top. She had cut off sleeves dangling down around her wrists and a tangled mess of barrettes in her strawberry hair.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Peter, and this is for you and I just came to see, you don’t know me but I came to… well…I wanted… it’s a rose, and I wanted… yes that’s for you…and I wanted to know if you would like to go out with me… on… well, as a date. It would be a date. With me. A date with me. I mean if that’s ok? Is that ok?”
“I don’t know you, I think I should…”
“Wait, listen…”
I turned the tape recorder off and got ready to lie.
“My friends put me up to this, they all think you’re like the prettiest girl on the block and I said I had balls enough to come and ask you out, but they didn’t believe me so I bet them fifty dollars that I could get you to go out with me. They’re actually a bunch of pricks and I’d really like to show them up, just once.”
“Alright… For half the winnings.”
“Could you verify that on record?”
I pulled out the tape recorder and timidly edged it toward her face. She smiled with delight at how stupid I looked with a flower in one hand and a camouflage colored pocket tape recorder in the other. She kept her eyes locked with mine and pulled my hand up to her curled mouth. A line of sun freckles stained the bridge of her nose and made a crescent opposite the shape of her smile.
“For half, right?”
“Yeah. For half.”
“Twenty-five bucks?”
“Yeah.”
Now this was going to cost me twenty-five bucks and another trip to her house. She pulled her front door shut with her left foot, hooking her sneaker into the brass door handle. I was still holding the rose up stiffly waiting for her response.
“Is it on?”
“Wait, yeah, it’s on now.”
“Well sure…”
She mouthed “what’s your name?”
“Peter.”
“Sure PETER, I’d love to go out on a date with you.”
She clicked the tape recorder off and winked at me, pulling me off the porch and around her driveway. The dogs were still barking inside the house. We headed around her parent’s Plymouth Voyager and to a little bike path that connected different areas of the neighborhood. I was still holding my flower in the locked upright position, like a robot who used to be evil but has been reprogrammed to love, or bake cookies, or decorate the house, or something lame like that.
“Um, where are we going?”
“We’re going on a date, like you said.”
“All, you had to do was, I got it on tape recorder, we don’t have to actually go out on a date.”
Maybe that was the wrong thing to have said. She jerked her hand away with a “suit yourself” gesture. We were heading down the bike path into the woods, the leaves hadn’t turned yet and it was bright outside. The light spilling through the empty places in the leaves made little patterns on the ground, they looked fake, like stage lights set on “forest” mode.
“Here this is for you, you know.”
“No thanks. I don’t like flowers. The smell gives me a headache.”
She put a slight singe on her voice when she said that. I found myself getting upset even though I didn’t know her. I knew I needed to make up some ground. I could have lied to my friends all I wanted after her bringing me into the woods, but I also wanted something real to happen to me.
She lead me off the bike path nearly forty yards and I kept having to put my arm over my face to deflect the branches she was catapulting my way by going ahead of me. We came to tree with a hole in the trunk, but the hole was facing up so the tree looked like a giant bark toilet. She hopped up on it and sat down. From her greasy pants pocket she pulled out an old Altoids that she kept cigarettes in. She lit a cigarette, and tilted her chin up exhaling smoke as she began to speak.
“Want one?”
“Yeah, sure, thanks.”
“You know what I call this? I call it the ‘Shitting Tree’, you know like the ‘Giving Tree’?”
“Heh. That’s funny, I like that book. Uhm… do you ever…”
“Fuck yeah I do, if you can find a tree shaped like a toilet in the woods, you owe it to yourself to use it.”
“So, you’ve…number one or number two?”
“Wanna watch me take a leak in it right now?”
“I uh, are you going to right now?”
“You’ll get to see my pussy.”
When she said “pussy” she raised her eyebrows a bit as if she knew it was the last thing from being a big deal to her and a huge deal for me. I didn’t say anything I just sort of smoked my cigarette out of the side of my mouth as fast as I could and tried to look casual. She stood up on the tree, balancing herself over the huge hole in the trunk and unzipped her pants. I tried to act like I didn’t want to see her do it. But I watched every nanosecond of her pealing off those filthy thrift store slacks as if I was watching a space ship landing in front of me. Her hands got her pants down quicker than I had hoped.
“Just a little peep of pussy.”
She made a clicking noise with her mouth and grinned.
Her face got a tiny bit red as we listened to the pee run down the inside of the trunk. She looked away from me as she tried to finish and then took a rumpled blue Kleenex out of her pocket to dab off with. Then she yanked up her pants and lit another cigarette.
Lula had a singsong mock in her voice that made me feel like my penis was two inches long.
“Well, how was that? Was it everything you dreamed?”
She hopped of the tree and squatted down in front of me, looking me over.
“I bet you heard I’m crazy. Wanna know something? I hear voices.”
“Where? Should we hide?”
“No, I hear voices in my head. Like Joan of Arc. She heard voices in her head.”
“Shouldn’t…are you for real?”
“How do you know if something’s wrong or not? I bet if Jesus was born today,
they’d have him in a psych ward somewhere.”
“What do the voices tell you?”
“That I’m the next Virgin Mary.”
She cracked a smile as if she knew it sounded ridiculous but there was something else, a fanatical fire behind her eyes.
“Uh huh, anything else?”
“The new forbidden fruit is the banana.”
Her eyes were wild and she laughed as she said it reaching out pinching me too hard on the chest. She grabbed my hands and flopped them against her knees like a bored child. There was something reassuring in her manner. It was rough, but not malicious, like a park ranger or a farmer.
She rubbed my hands on her knees, smoked, belched, and pinched me, not necessarily in that order, but a random combination of these. Sometimes she’d lay back against the floor of sharp dead leaves and dirt and I’d lean my head against her chest methodically nuzzling my way to her tits. It’s an escalation of affection that only happens to young people, when they think they’re connecting about “deep” things. Like “life”. I don’t think she ever really listened to me. She only laughed if I mentioned boners or farts. But I didn’t care. Watching her piss was the furthest I had ever gotten with a girl. When I told her that she rolled on top of me and started kissing me forcefully with her dry lips. It was my first kiss, a crazy girl as part of a dare was my first kiss. We’d been talking so long we had run out of spit and every time we pulled away from each other our lips would stick together. We kept at it any way. I didn’t blink for five minutes. I just kept watching her move her mouth over mine and tried to copy her. Our breath smelled like burritos and ashtrays. I would have to stop every now and then because I had trouble breathing out of my nose. I’d take a breath and then she’d go back into a rant.
“Did you ever…like when you were in Sunday school…You’re not Jewish are you?”
“Uhm, no.”
“Ok, so you know in Sunday school around Christmas time you learn about Mary and Joseph and how the angel came to Mary and told her she was gonna have a baby? God’s baby, you know? Wouldn’t that bother you? I mean that’s it. That’s your life right there: To be a slave for God. And she was what like twelve or fourteen? Come on! That’s terrible. It would be a nightmare like a for real living nightmare. That would be the scariest shit ever. Wouldn’t that bother you? I think God’s a misogynist. Do you know what that means?”
“What? God’s …What the fuck? No. I mean, what’s a misogynist?”
“Do you think I’m crazy? It sounds fucked up doesn’t it? Sometimes I don’t think that I can do it you know?”
“Huh?”
“I mean her. Sometimes I think, why her? It’s not really that fair, I mean I know how awful this sounds but she would never get to have her own life. She probably wasn’t even used to having periods and then ‘boom’: ‘Thou must caryeth mine seed, little girl!’ Can you imagine…uh! I’m sorry but fuck that. Fuck that!”
“Relax; you’re not going to have anyone’s baby.”
She didn’t respond but instead looked down at her belly.
“How scared do you think she was?”
“I don’t know much about the bible, sorry.”
“Do you think she ever wished she wasn’t who she was? I bet no one believed her. They all probably thought she was screwing around on her husband.”
I wasn’t listening. This was the most action I had ever gotten in my entire life. I just let her touching or my touching drown out whatever she was trying to tell me. As I got bolder I would kiss her as soon as I thought she was about to say something else because if she ever got it out, it made me feel sick, like I was making out with a retard. She broke away, holding a finger up to reassure me and waddled with her pants down around her ankles behind the Shitting Tree. She pulled out a magazine in a freezer bag and smiled ear to ear.
“This is a porno mag. I found it hidden in my dad’s fiber cereal box. I always wondered why he would snack on cereal while he was taking a shit.”
“Oh shit, your dad hides pornos in cereal boxes?”
“Fiber cereal boxes. You wanna look at it while I jack you off?”
“Hell yeah. Get over here.”
“Yeah right! I don’t even know you.”
That stung and my hopeful bravado leaked out into a kind of wimpy despair. She could tell that my young male ego had been cracked a little. She affectionately rolled her eyes and squatted down beside me.
“You can to come over to my house tomorrow while my parents are gone. But just to hang out. I don’t want you coming over with a hard on expecting something.”
That was as good as done. I zipped up my blue balls and headed back with her to the house. Then I headed home in the pure glow of victory. I didn’t bother to tell my friends about it. A real man doesn’t have time to provide commentary.
The next day she left the door unlocked for me. The dogs weren’t barking, just lying under tables and in corners whining. The house was still when I came inside past the dinosaur Christmas mat. Her father’s papers were scattered around the downstairs like the leaves we had been rolling around in yesterday. I headed upstairs to her room. The door was cracked open and my heart raced when I could see her naked leg lying across the bed. Maybe I was going to get laid today. I threw the door open with a macho gesture and then I almost vomited. She was lying across the bed with her pants off and the broken shard of a mirror in her hand. She started to get up, as if she didn’t expect me to be there. Her face was slick with tears and her eyes were nearly sealed shut. She wiped at her face and cleared her throat like she was just waking up. Blood was running down the end of the shard and dripping over the porno mag on the floor. As she rose I was struck by the distinct impression of a woman kneeling in mourning framed by the shattered one by two mirror at her desk. The rift in the mirror had caused a “Jesus Fish” bumper sticker to be torn in half and the material hung lewdly on the remaining jagged edges.
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry Peter. I completely forgot about you coming over.”
I couldn’t say anything as I was struck by the oddity in her statement. Her legs were slick with blood and seemed to wink reflective light. She stumbled over to her wardrobe, shivering, and clawed at a cup of water. As she went to drink it her knees started to vibrate and she collapsed half clothed on the floor. She dropped the cup as she buckled. The water escaped across the beams of wood on the floor, slithering under her bed and making the drips of blood cloudy and pink.
“I couldn’t do it.”
“Jesus Christ? What the fuck did you do?”
“I couldn’t have the baby. It was too much for me.”
“What baby? Oh Jesus. You were pregnant?”
“I…I cut it out. I took stole some of my mom’s old pain killers. I’m so stupid. There was more blood then I…I didn’t know what I was doing. It hurts. Shit, it really hurts.”
“I should call for help.”
“No. I just, I couldn’t do it Peter, come here.”
She forced a smile and extended her hand to me.
“I wanted to be normal. To have my own life, don’t tell my dad. If I don’t bleed to death, don’t tell my dad.”
“You’re fucking insane.”
“No, I just wanted my own life. I mean, yes I’m insane. This is insane. Oh God, what did I do?”
“Why did you drag me … You need an ambulance, you…”
“They’ll understand, wait a second don’t leave. Please, just come sit by me for a minute. Give me that blanket, I’m cold and I need to stop the blood. Hurry…I think I’m going to….”
I backed out of the room watching her. The light from her bedroom window was making her hair singe yellow and shine like glass. An arc of sunlight bent across one of her tangled locks and rushed in a semi circle across her head. She was still holding out one of her hands to me as her eyes rolled back into her head. She collapsed backwards allowing the dull glow of the window to peak in brightness and then fade from her hair. I thought about calling an ambulance. I should have called an ambulance but I was too scared. The whole room had an aura of foulness about it that I had to escape. I felt a dirty gnawing deep in my core as if a child had just ran down the stairs Christmas morning only to learn that Santa Claus hadn’t come. I felt like a holiday was lost. As I backed out of the room my eye was drawn through the thin glass of her bedroom window. I noticed that someone, her father maybe, had left breadcrumbs out for the birds. But it looked like it was never touched. The thick crusts of the bread hung inside of a tiny pot filled with water, uneaten and rotting.