Kissing Carrion

Four years. It was a milk run, pure career P.R.: Do your superior a solid, and move on up. Eugene Silas, career Narco snitch, twenty years departmentally connected—gave up the straight line, time after time, on anybody dumb enough to try for a crossover market in weed, pills, H. Main hobbies included whores and wife-beating, up until Mrs. Silas went suddenly missing. Instant recipe for dinner party disaster, right there; shaky host, no hostess.

So: Silas called the Cap, Beck and me caught the squeal.

We met at the Silas house, traded coffee for a wedding photo two-shot—Mrs. S., dark-haired and delicate in off-white with pearls, pancake makeup layered on over what looked like fresh welts.

“I ran the initial interview already,” Beck told me. “No prior skips, no relatives in town. No friends—or boyfriends—he knows of, though I suspect that doesn’t mean much.”

“Gumshoe shitwork,” I said. “Better wipe your day-planner for the next week or so.”

Beck shrugged. “Maybe not.”

Easy call—some meter-reader made Silas’ car an hour later, parked outside the Temple. Cyprian for Cyprus, birthplace of the Greek love Goddess Aphrodite, lez poet Sappho’s favorite patron. This according to Beck, who did enough degrees (Eng. Lit, Crim. Psych, Anthro) to quote me in detail more books than I ever had time to read. Like so:

Nothing is left of me each time I see you . . . tongue numbed, arms, legs melting, on fire . . .

I took a pull off my paper-bag bourbon breakfast, absorbed this. “And the moral is, thinking with your dick rots your brain.”

Beck’s crooked smile, the sardonic version: Oh, you big lug! “Sappho didn’t have a dick per se, David.”

“Yeah, well—whatever.”

Another pull. I offered Beck the next; he passed, like I knew he would. Never saw him drink once, on the job or off.

Not even . . . later on. When I—

But anyways.

The Cyprians worshiped Love with a capital L, that catch-all cheat of a concept. Intimacy, affection, loyalty. Lust. Ideal into intent: The generative and the destructive. The spiritual lighter-flick at the heart of every secret thing.

Or, as Georgia puts it:

I touch your lips, and all at once the sparks go flying . . . .

“So they shack and fuck, and call it a religion,” I said, slugging the bottle dry. “So Mrs. Silas likes a little ceremony with her extracurricular cock. She’s over eighteen.”

“Silas wants her back—what happens after we drop her off is their business. Besides, laissez-faire only goes so far, when some cult leader’s busy making bucks from whipping his followers into an erotic frenzy. Love’s a pretty volatile emotion at the best of times.”

“And you’re brown-nosing for a rank raise. Get it straight, Beck—not everything’s a favor or photo op.”

Coolly: “No. Just the things that matter.”

Two days before Valentine’s; I Luv Eazy-Rock from every passing car window, rising candy-apple stink. Scarlet sans-serif magazine covers, blaring bad advice. TEN SEX SECRETS MEN FLIP FOR! WHAT WOMEN REALLY WANT! LONELY HEARTS ASK: “HOW WILL I KNOW?”

“Love,” I said, “ain’t nothing but sex misspelled. To lift a well-worn phrase.”

“Why, David, I never knew; you’re a genuine romantic.”

“Just a realist, college boy. Strip away the fancy rhymes, it all comes down to this—nobody ever said ‘I love you’ for free.”

. . . for though it burns me and it turns me into ashes, my whole world crashes without your kiss of fire.

* * *

I can still remember not loving Beck—not liking him even, all that much. Me, Big Dave Proulx, slow-track shithouse uniform loser. Bruiser, cunt-hound, borderline crank-junkie: Bad attitude personified. A string of formative moral clusterfucks had left me disappointed with the world, so I made up for it by toiletizing my own last chances, one by one by one. Spent my shifts getting high and wasting time, cruising for trouble in bad neighborhoods, waiting to get insulted and go ape on some (mainly) undeserving repeat offender.

Officer Beckwith Lookinland was the only one who ever trusted me to do more than lose my temper and botch my collars. A prodigy, Cap’s pet pick for surrogate son: He’d done his research, heard about a couple of righteous busts I’d done Year One, wanted to know more. He chatted me up, drew me out—sat quiet with me whenever I showed up to work with the cold sweats, three days no sleep, all bed-stink and bad breath. Covered my procedural blank spots. Wouldn’t leave me alone.

And after the brass implied he could basically name his own partner, he asked for me.