The Warm Glow of Happy Homes Read online

  The Warm Glow of Happy Homes

  Andersen Prunty

  Copyright © 2012 by Anders en Prunty. All rights reserved.

  Cover photograph copyright © 2012 by Michel Omar Berrospé

  1.

  “I’m not a thief, Alex.”

  Joe sat on the couch looking trapped by Alex’s proposition. Alex’s cat, Vonnegut, sat on the coffee table in front of Joe, staring at him with the one eye that worked.

  Alex turned his stereo on so his roommate couldn’t hear what they were talking about and rolled a joint. The music started, warm and bassy with no words. It made Alex think of taking a subway through the middle of the sun. Cheerful and brain melting.

  “I wouldn’t say I was either.” Alex sat on the soft chair next to the couch and sparked the joint. “Actually, at this point, I’m not willing to say I am or am not anything. For guys like us, things are going to fall apart every five years whether we like it or not. It’s out of our control.” He held the joint out to Joe. Joe shook his head. “Seriously?”

  “I want to be clearheaded to fend off your arguments.”

  “No arguments. We’re having a rational discussion.”

  “Okay, so we’re poor, but we’re free. As in not in jail. We do something like this and get caught, that changes. And then we get out of jail and we have a record and then we can’t even get jobs as good as we have now.”

  “I’m telling you, this guy is out of his head. I don’t know if it’s drugs or brain damage or what but I’ve been watching him the last three weeks. Ever since that time in the rose garden. It would probably be a month before they even noticed. Nobody’s seen the parents since the beginning of summer.”

  “Yeah yeah. Let me just sit and think about it for a second. You’re busy anyway.” Joe gestured to the joint currently going to waste between Alex’s fingers.

  Joe and Alex worked for HappyLawn. Not the best job in the world but they got a lot of rain days off and drew unemployment in the winter. Alex had developed this scheme when they were doing some yard work for the Kings on Lennox Court. He was out weeding in the Kings’ rose garden when their son came out. The son lived in the guest house, which was roughly twice the size of most normal houses but about a quarter the size of their main house. He came up to Alex and started yelling about the band the New Kids on the Block, his eyes went blank, and he looked down at the ground and made these clicking sounds. Then he looked up at a nearby tree, screamed, and ran as fast as he could back into the guest house. Alex initially felt like he should be concerned and went to go check on him. He knocked on the door and there wasn’t an answer so he turned the knob and it opened. He didn’t go inside because they were always told by their superiors that they were invisible, only there to do their jobs, and shouldn’t meddle in other people’s affairs. This was theory only. Policy. Something to be invoked only when it made their job easier. Most of the guys he worked with, himself included, had fucked at least one of the housewives whose yard work they were supposed to be doing. So he’d watched and listened to the son and, more importantly, had run into the maid at a bar one night and started hanging out with her. She told him about the parents being gone for the summer and that the son was planning some kind of party. There was a safe in the guest house and she knew the combination to it if it was actually locked, which it usually wasn’t. She could deactivate the alarm before she left for the day. She knew the code to that too. They could be in and out within a half-hour. Easy.

  “Come on!” Alex said. “You’re always talking about how much you hate the rich shits we work for. You’re a smart guy. You probably even have some theory to make it make sense or something.”

  Joe nodded.

  “So come on. That fucker’s watch probably cost more than we make in two years.”

  Joe sighed. “I don’t want to do this. I would rather be poor for the rest of my life than go to jail for a month. Besides, it’s not like we’ll be able to quit working with what we pull out of this spoiled shit’s safe. What about cameras?”

  “This is the beautiful thing. They have them in the main house but none in the guest house. From what Ibbie says the kid’s probably a creep and cameras would just mean evidence in some kind of law suit.”

  Joe leaned back on the couch and looked at the ceiling. “This can’t just be about money. What’s the real reason you want to go through with this? We’ve been doing this job for years and you’ve never actually been serious about something like this. Besides, I don’t know if I can do it if money is the only factor. Is it Ibbie?”

  Alex leaned forward and roached the joint in an empty ashtray. He looked at Joe with reddening eyes and said, “Pretty astute.”

  2.

  Barton King stared out one of the large windows in his bedroom studying the way the light fell on a particular section of lawn. He stared for a while but couldn’t figure out why until he saw a small portion of the blue sky above the abundant and mature trees in the back yard ripped open and one of those enormous birds fly out. He didn’t know what this particular bird was called but he’d seen more and more of them lately. They were always carrying something dangling from their beaks. He didn’t know what it was. Something like meat. Since they had to tear the sky open to get here, he assumed they came from space.

  He pulled his phone from his pocket to take a picture of the bird but it was already gone so he stripped off his shirt, wandered around the room until he found lighting that made him look really ripped, snapped a few photos of himself, scanned through and scrutinized them until he found the most flattering one, and uploaded it to Facebook.

  If Jayne knew what was good for her, she would leave a positive comment within a half hour.

  All this activity exhausted Barton and he lay down on the bed to wait, his head reeling. Sometimes when the room and the house were quiet like this he thought he could hear sheets of paper being ripped in half in a distant room. Maybe one that didn’t exist.

  The maid came in. Barton had his eyes closed and opened them just long enough to see that it was the young, attractive one, not the huge older one who was probably her mother or something. All those people were related. Barton adjusted his recumbent pose to be more statuesque. He could feel her eyes running all over his body. This thought – the thought of being somebody else with the ability to look at himself from the outside and feel that sense of aesthetic pleasure they must feel – aroused him. He checked Facebook on his phone and thought, Fuck it. That bitch is never going to comment. He considered going to his profile and updating it to say they were no longer in a relationship but his penis was painfully straining against his underwear and someone was ripping pages furiously and he thought of a dark and distant planet in space, all of those birds flying around with hunks of flesh or something, and then he heard the shower curtain draw back and the toilet seat being flipped up and he hastily scrawled an entry in his journal his father insisted he keep, even if it wasn’t necessarily true.

  He wrote: I FELE BRAIN DIED

  He slowly rolled out of bed, took a couple of deep breaths, and went to stand in the bathroom doorway.

  The maid was bent over the toilet and Barton traced the line of her underwear through her one-piece uniform.

  He moved behind her and put his left hand around her throat.

  “You can scream, but there’s no one else here,” he said. “So don’t. Just let me do what I want to do and I’ll make it up to you.”

  He still felt all of her muscles drawn tight against him like she wanted to scream or run or both. He tightened his grip to remind her how fleeting life was and her muscles relaxed somewhat. He put both hands on her shoulders and forced her to her knees. He got on his knees behind her an
d lifted the hem of her skirt to her waist. He unbuttoned and unzipped his pants and pulled them down with his underwear, freeing his painful erection. He pulled her underwear down and spat in the palm of his hand and rubbed it up and down his penis. Using the excess spit, he put his hand between her buttocks and worked a finger into her anus. He thought she was crying but he couldn’t see her face so he couldn’t be sure. They would have to make it quick so she could continue putting poison down the drains so the rats wouldn’t eat Barton in his sleep. Now he was pretty sure she was crying. He tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Miss, could you please stop crying? It makes me sad.”

  Maybe she stopped and maybe she didn’t. He couldn’t really tell. He worked his penis into her ass as far as he could, which wasn’t very far. He pushed harder. He worked himself in and out and it got a little easier. Beside the toilet, he noticed the toilet brush she had carelessly laid there. He picked it up, grabbing it midway down the plastic handle. He pressed the handle into her face until she opened her mouth. He forced it into her mouth until she gagged. Every time she gagged, her asshole tightened around him. He liked it. He wanted to see if he could come this way so he kept sticking the handle in her mouth.

  After a few more times, she vomited into the toilet. This excited Barton even more. The bathroom filled with the stink of the vomit and he thought of this Mexican cunt, leaning over the toilet and vomiting gallons of semen. He closed his eyes to take in the stink and think about that image and he thrust into her so hard it almost felt like something tore and then he was finished. She collapsed onto the floor and he took the toilet brush handle and stuck it into her ass and then her mouth and back and forth. She was definitely crying now, despite his warnings, but he decided he kind of liked it.

  “I wish I could pay you for this,” Barton said. “But it’s illegal to pay for sex. I’m sure you won’t tell anybody. If you did, they’d probably find out you’re here illegally and deport you. Maybe even all of your friends and family. Who knows?”

  He lifted her up by the hair until she was on her knees.

  “Comma sta telephonio.” He made a give me gesture with his hand. She didn’t give him anything so he reached into the bulging pocket of her skirt and pulled out her phone. He dropped it into the toilet and flushed it.

  “I’ve gotta go get ready for a party I’m having tomorrow. I really need to pee but I’m afraid a rat will leap out of the toilet and bite my dick.” He laughed. He stuck the tip of his penis against her lips and smacked her on the cheek until she opened her mouth. He launched his stream. She kept most of it down.

  3.

  He went back into the bedroom and checked his phone and noticed Jayne still hadn’t commented on his picture. He went to her wall, wrote “BITCH! BITCH! BITCH! BITCH!”, went to his profile and severed their connection. He wanted to smash his phone against something. Instead, he threw it savagely against the plush bed and looked down at his shriveling dick. Blood and shit were drying to it. He felt dirty. He hadn’t seen the maid leave and didn’t want to wash in a dirty shower so he decided to go soak in the pool instead.

  He didn’t bother putting any swim trunks on.

  4.

  The sun was disgustingly bright and he wished for like the millionth time his parents would spring for an indoor pool. He took off running from the sliding glass doors and leapt at the edge of the pool, pulling his knees up to his chest and shouting, “Cannonball!” as he hit the chilly water and let himself sink to the bottom. When he bobbed to the top a few minutes later he laughed uproariously and climbed out of the pool. He squeezed a generous amount of sunblock into his palms and slathered it all over his body. He looked at the pool and thought it would be better if it was filled with dead dogs. He would have tweeted that but his phone was still in the house and he thought he could see a dead rat that must have fought its way out of the filter floating on the other side of the pool and the truth about his image of the dead dogs was a little too chilling and close to home. He collapsed into a chair and let the sun dry the moisture on his body basking in the sterile scents of the chlorine and sunblock and the heavily fertilized lawn.

  The main house sat closer to the road, way across the pool and another expanse of immaculate lawn. For a second, he forgot why he was sitting by the pool and then he remembered the maid in the bathroom. The more he thought about it, the more he was beginning to think maybe it wasn’t the young maid. He wanted it to be the young maid, but she actually seemed to be pretty careful about being alone around him. He assumed this was because she had a jealous boyfriend or something and someone with Barton’s obvious assets was a great temptation to her and, therefore, a serious threat to her relationship. The wetbacks seemed to stick to themselves. This made him think maybe she wasn’t cleaning his house at all. If that was the case, he’d have to bring it up to his parents or maybe William. One of them would deal with it. Tomorrow he’d be over at that house. He’d invited nearly 200 people and expected about 75. That was how these things usually worked. He’d started receiving the cancellations via email and text earlier in the week and had to take more pills than he usually did. And the pills really just helped curb the anxiety and anger. If he wanted to sleep he still typically needed to drink about a bottle of booze a night on top of the cocktails he enjoyed throughout the day.

  His skin started to feel stretched and dry. He liked it. It made him think he was made of plastic. Not indestructible but with absolutely no feelings. No insides. It made him think of Mexico. He went down there a couple times a year to help out in the offices of his father’s factories but mostly to vacation. Sometimes William went with him but he usually went alone. He liked to go places alone. Sometimes. Other times he wanted to be surrounded by people. Happy people. Fun people. Party people.

  He looked up at the sun and saw three of those space birds circling it. One of them broke away from the other two and came toward him. He stayed in the chair until he could see that something dangling from its beak and then his heart started pounding and he had to get up and go inside, hit the wet bar, and pound some Grey Goose.

  Now he felt moderately freaked out so he went back into the bedroom, picked up his phone, noticed three more cancellations along with a Facebook message from Jayne he’d have to come back to. He dialed his mom’s number and it went straight to voice mail. He couldn’t remember where they were vacationing, not that it really mattered. After the voice prompt, he said, “Do you remember when the butler’s head turned into a balloon and he floated away?” Then he thought he heard a piece of paper ripping from their end of the phone so he terminated the call as quickly as possible.

  He went back into the bathroom and the maid still lay on the floor.

  “Hey, babe, you’re gonna have to get up soon. I’m gonna need to shower. And I have to shit.” He nudged her with his foot. Her eyes were open and her body had a kind of rag doll look to it. Now that he stood over top of her and looked at her face, not at her ass, he could tell it definitely was not the young one. He decided he would either tell his friends he’d fucked the young one or maybe tell them they wouldn’t believe what an amazing ass this one had. Of course, if she was dead, he’d have to not say anything about it. He’d have to do something with the body. Or pay William to do something with it. It was amazing what most people would do for money.

  Looking at the maid made him think of Mexico again.

  That made him think about tacos and piñatas.

  Piñatas made him think about his party.

  And candy.

  He was going to the store to get some candy.

  He pulled on some “casual” clothes he kept in a pile on the floor of his closet because that was where he assumed most poor people kept their clothes. A royal blue wife beater and cut off denim shorts cut short enough to allow just a portion of his scrotum to dangle free. He kept other accoutrements in a basket and selected a wig and a large pair of aviator sunglasses. People in this town were really close-minded and he preferred no one recognized hi
m. He slid on his flip flops, grabbed his wallet and some cash and walked to the main garage, to his white Nissan Versa disguise car.

  5.

  Once he pulled out from the neighborhood and onto the state route, the booze and pills and sun hit him pretty hard and he had to slow way down. He closed one of his eyes so he could read the speedometer and stay on his side of the road. He thought maybe he forgot to shut the gate so he viciously jabbed at the remote control and hoped for the best.

  One of those gross birds sat on the hood of his car so he turned on the windshield wipers.

  He made it to the outskirts of town and decided he would just go to the Mexican store that was on this end. That would make it more authentic anyway. Maybe they could go with a Mexican theme. He could call the caterer and cancel the existing beer order. Maybe just get Corona. Maybe like ten kegs. And a bunch of those red cups. Then it would be just like the fraternity too. Double theme. Double fun. Double awesome. Potential name for a banner: MEXICO FRAT FUNLAND. And then maybe a subtitle: Take It Off!!!

  Genius.

  He had to pull the car to the side of the road so he could think about this for a couple of minutes. He wished Jayne hadn’t turned out to be such a bitchy slut or he would have called her to tell her about it.

  When he felt like he’d fully processed this change of plans and had a clear vision of all of his friends wandering around in Hawaiian shirts and cargo shorts, carrying red plastic cups, wasted on cheap tequila and Mexican drugs, all the girls with their tops off and their breasts flopping around, he pulled back onto the road and drove the remaining block to the corner store.

  Getting out of the car he wished he’d worn his black wig so he fit in better. He felt so alienated being the only American there, not to mention the only one who spoke English. He walked in and the middle-age man behind the counter said, “Hello.”