short story:

Bra / Female, 1 ea.

Mr. Cafferty, who managed the Patio Iguana apartments, thought that old John Ackers was stealing brassieres off the clothes line.

But it wasn’t John, who hadn’t stolen anything since a couple of shoplifting adventures he had before the age of twelve, and who anyway would have thought that stealing under wear was kinky; unless, of course, the thief happened to be a woman and she planned on using them, which would be just being practical.

That morning John wasn’t thinking about Mr. Cafferty or brassieres. He was sitting on the side of his bathtub and watching Glenda eat breakfast in the nude.

Glenda was in the Navy. Every woman, so far as John knew, in the entire pink stucco complex was either in the Navy or married to somebody in the Navy. John’s pickup truck was the only vehicle in the parking lot that didn’t have a base sticker on the windshield.

He had seen Glenda in her white uniform, reminding him of the waitresses at the Night and Day Diner, except for the three red slashes on her sleeve, which John didn’t under stand, because he didn’t keep track of Navy ranks. He didn’t know much at all about the Navy. John wasn’t a military type of man.

He knew her name was Glenda from the mailbox: Glenda Kol wolski/3B. Because of its proximity to the Navy base, the Patio Iguana was a transient sort of place. People didn’t get to know their neighbors. Apartment 3B was a one bedroom on the second floor of the B building, which formed the back connector in the U-shaped Patio Iguana apartments. Imagine: Hotel California in pink.

John had a one bedroom on the first floor of building C, which formed the building’s left leg. His bathroom window looked up toward 3B’s kitchen windows.

Mr. Cafferty told John (treating it like a joke, but John wondered if it was just a ploy to see what he’d say) that a couple of the girls in B building thought it was John stealing the bras. Why? John asked him. Mr. Cafferty said because John was always around, because he didn’t go out to a job, and because he was the only man (besides Mr. Cafferty him self, of course) around the place all day long, because he was divorced and nobody (meaning Cafferty, again) ever saw him dating much, as if loneliness itself could be the root of the crime.

John wondered if it might not be Mr. Cafferty himself making the accusations, that maybe nobody in building B had really ever claimed it was John Ackers doing it. Mr. Cafferty never did like John because from the start John didn’t put up with Cafferty’s landlord shit, and John wouldn’t have put it passed Cafferty to be jealous because John Ackers could make a go of it on his little disability pension and didn’t think he had to go out and make work for himself just to be validated, or something like that. John Ackers figured he had paid his dues in the labor pool: Twenty-two years a lineman for Arizona Power and Light before he took the fall.

John didn’t usually get up so early. What for? It only made long days longer. But, three days ago, awakened by a beer-filled bladder, he was in the bathroom about 6:30 when he happened to look up and see her: Glenda, eating breakfast in the nude. It was astonishing.

John didn’t think much about it then, except to consider it a stroke of luck. Naturally, he found himself looking up that way whenever he went to the bathroom. Anybody would, he figured; it’s only natural.

The next morning, there she was again. And then the next.

John could see her clearly. She was seated at the table. Reading the paper. Eating from a bowl of cereal. Kellogg’s Raisin Bran. She had juice and coffee. Two, sometimes three cups. He could only see from the stomach up. But he wasn’t complaining. Her hair was still damp and her skin just a little pink. John guessed she had come from the shower.

Glenda’s breasts were awfully pretty. Big for her general size. Bountiful, came to John’s mind. Although big didn’t have to mean pretty. Often it didn’t; John thought about the cow udders on some women. Glenda’s nipples were bronzed, round, and large, about like a burnished peso, parked right in the middle where they were supposed to be; the genuine article, John decided. The curve of her breast seen from the side and below was the softest line John could imagine. It weakened him, to tell you the truth.

That morning a fog came in. It rolled down the street from the base main gate like something alive. You couldn’t see the tops of the palms, or the streetlights. Because of the fog, Glenda had turned on the light. Back lighting made it seem like there was nothing between her and her embarrassed but excited admirer.

All that stuff going on about stolen underwear made John wonder what size Glenda’s bras would be? Would they be grey, like a battleship? Would they be identified in some military code? Maybe stenciled inside: Bra/female, 1 ea.?

He watched her get up for another cup of coffee. Now he could see the athletic line of her thighs, the dark swatch of pubic hair, the utility of her wide hips, her flat stomach, earth mother breasts, and her oval, cameo face. She walked to the stove, allowing him to study her back. Her ass was a little whiter than the rest of her skin. The residue of a tan, he supposed. Although she was pale for southern California.

She picked up the paper and unfolded it to an inside page, then refolded it and looked at something while sipping the fresh coffee. She didn’t sit back down, seeming to be impatient, as if running late. John glanced quickly at his watch and saw that it was twenty to seven. Yesterday, she stayed until seven, then he saw her leaving for work, or whatever it was Navy people did behind those big fences.

Finally, she turned and walked out. If her apartment was laid out like John’s, she went into the bedroom.

John had only seen her like this three times, but he already missed her when she left for work, and found himself wondering about her through the remainder of the day.

Watching Glenda eat breakfast in the nude was the most interest ing and unusual thing to happen in John’s life in a long time. What did that say about John? On the other hand, what did it say about Glenda? John wished he could get to know her better; which meant to get to know her at all, since they were strangers.

It was not impossible to imagine that John had fallen in love with Glenda. There were times he had dates with prettier women, not so long ago. He was divorced by a prettier woman, although she would never have eaten breakfast in the nude. Not even in windowless room. Glenda was the paradigm of boldness and freedom. He would like to suck those attributes from her from her marrow. Feed his deficiencies.

Since John didn’t know Glenda, he could not separate how she made him feel sitting naked to eat breakfast from whatever she might be, actually.

It dismayed him! Feeling like that about Glenda; thinking that he was falling in love with her just because she ate break fast in the nude, behind windows where anyone could see. It was obvious that there must be twenty-five or thirty years between their ages.

But in fact, he would like to have a piece of Glenda’s under wear. Her bra, he decided. Why not? The rumors of an underwear thief were what made him think that way. It had never before crossed John’s mind to possess a woman’s bra.

He wondered what it would be like to have Glenda’s bra? To keep it in a secret place. To know it had haltered those breasts, her breasts. It might become a conversation piece, especially if it were stenciled with some Navy jargon: That is, if John were not to remain so much in love with her that to show her bra would be to desecrate it, and Glenda. But wasn’t that a painfully silly notion?

*

The fog hid John, making him feel like Jack the Ripper prowling behind building C. He considered what he might say just in case someone caught him, but there was no thing to say. If it looked dangerous, he just wouldn’t do it. It wasn’t that important. It was just a notion, a little itch of curiosity.

He walked nonchalantly around the trash dumpsters in the alley, then ducked quickly, unseen, through the back entrance. The few things hanging on the line looked, in the fog, like apparitions; a white uniform shirt (with two blue stripes) made him think of Casper, the Friendly Ghost.

He pressed himself against the alley wall and filed down the laundry line to the opposite end. To get out of there he would have to backtrack to keep from going through the complex courtyard, where he’d likely be seen.

It occurred to John that he could have done this better had he given it more thought. He could have brought down a basket of his own laundry and mixed her bra up with his stuff. Nobody would have been suspicious if he were spotted.

But he was already there. And no one had seen him. He would just stuff her bra into his shirt, or down his pants. She had only one bra hanging out. There was also a pair of jeans. They would be damp all day if the fog didn’t lift. Although this late in the fall the fog usually lifted pretty quickly. The sun would be out in an hour, John was willing to bet.

He eased by a blouse, a pair of white panties (that seemed awfully big), and a khaki shirt he had seen Glenda wearing when she washed her VW Beetle on Saturdays. He stopped by the bra. It was white, not grey. There was nothing stenciled on it that he could see from that angle. There was a tag he could barely read. Leaning forward, his face almost touching the thin, nearly transparent, material, he could now see that it said: Warner’s My Skin, fits sizes 36 C,D.

It felt like dry, cool skin. Smelled like fabric softener. He wanted to put it over his face. He wanted to wear it on his head and dance for her. Make her laugh.

He was holding the bra against his cheek when she came around the corner with a pair of damp blouses and some other items in her hands. There was a plastic bag of clothes pins dangling from her teeth, which fell when she opened her mouth. The bag clinked when it hit the concrete.

Glenda didn’t say anything, she just looked at John. Sadly. Her eyes heavy.

He let go of her bra, but it hardly mattered at that point. He might as well have taken it. He ducked beneath her clothes and jumped over the low gate into the courtyard.

Behind him Glenda called out: “Hey! You asshole!”

But he was running as fast as his bad leg would let him, through the shallow fish pond, through Mr Cafferty’s new hedge, and out to the street. The Patio Iguana began to fade into the fog. A sailor honked and swerved around John as he darted across the street and ran, bent and sideways like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, toward the ocean.

*

The knock on his door came from a policeman. John hadn’t finished supper; the solitary microwave plate on the table embarrassed him. There was a beer bottle in his hand, and he had an impulse to hide it behind his back when he saw the police officer.

“Yes?” John said. The cop had a piece of paper in his hand. The patrol car could be seen out front. A second officer was coming from the area of the parking lot to join the policeman at John’s door.

“John Ackers?” He read John’s name off the paper.

“Yes. Is something wrong?” Of course John knew. His stomach had known all day. He had already vomited with fear.

“There’s been a complaint filed, Mr. Ackers, regarding some incidents stealing articles of intimate wearing apparel. Women’s under garments, to be specific, Mr. Ackers.”

“I’m sorry?”

“We’re not here to get an apology,” the newly arrived officer said.

“I meant to say, ‘excuse me’ . . . that is, I’m not sure I understand this.” John felt weak in the knees, light in the head, heavy in the heart.

“You’re going to have to come with us,” the first cop said.

“But . . . “ John was afraid he would cry. He noticed that both the officers were putting on rubber gloves, and he couldn’t keep his eyes off the gloves.

“Do you have any open sores, cuts, anything like that,” the second officer said, coming into John’s front room, putting his hands on John’s shoulders from the back. “Give me your hands.” But he didn’t wait for John, the cop just took them, jerking them behind John’s back and wrapping them in a plastic band.

“Needles, razors in your pockets?” the first cop added as the second turned John to face the wall.

“Needles? Ah … .”

“Don’t make it hard for us, Mr. Ackers, and we won’t make it hard on you.”

“Yes, but … .”

They patted him down quickly and took him out, making sure the door locked behind them.

“You have the right to remain silent … .”

The two girls who lived below Glenda were standing by the laundry room door, baskets in their arms, watching John being pushed toward the patrol car. Mr. Cafferty was standing in front of his manager’s apartment with his arms crossed over his chest. Loud enough for everyone to hear, Mr. Cafferty said: “I knew it, knew it from the start. Could of told you.”

*

They took John Ackers down to the small station house and booked him in front of everybody. They told him he was being charged with Petty Larceny, Lewd and Lascivious Behavior, Prowling, and Public Indecency. It was obvious how people at the police station felt about perverts and sex offenders. The female dispatcher kept staring at him, giving him dirty looks.

They put him in a holding cell with two illegal aliens from Mexico waiting for an INS pickup, a drunken driver (who had puked on the floor and was now sleeping in it), and a sailor off the Ranger picked up last night for Drunk and Disorderly and Carrying A Concealed Weapon (a Buck knife).

John didn’t know any lawyers, and he only had his small pension, so they said he could have a Public Defender. It was Saturday. John might get a hearing on Monday. They’d see about getting a lawyer in before that. The booking officer told John: “Sit tight and think on your behavior.”

John took a seat on the concrete bench built out from the wall. The two Mexicans sat on the other end and ignored him. John buried his face in his hands and considered his behavior; but he had only — and even that was a big maybe — been going to steal a bra. What could one of those things cost? He was sure he had never been prowling, even if he didn’t know what it meant to prowl. What had he done that was lewd? In his thoughts, yes, maybe, sometimes, but since when can they charge you for thinking something?

The sailor off the Ranger, who smelled like kerosene and rusting metal, sat down next to John, touching shoulder to shoulder, until John raised his head.

“Want a first class blow job?” the sailor whispered, smiling, as he took out his false teeth and mouthed a grin.

“No. I sure don’t.” John stood and went to the bars, where at least he could yell for somebody if he needed to. “Please leave me alone,” John told the sailor, who was putting back his teeth.

Pretty soon, John had to urinate. There was a toilet in the cell, a lidless, stained, stinking piece of tin bolted to the concrete floor between the slab benches. John would have to stand there in front of everybody. He’d rather have his bladder blow up and burst.

An hour later, two INS officers came for the Mexicans. An hour after that, the drunk driver’s twenty-four hours were up and they let him out.

“I can’t stay all night in here with him,” John whispered to the officer who brought two small pillows and two small blankets to John and the sailor from the Ranger.

“Can and will,” the officer told John, and pitched their bedding onto the nearer slab.

Then John had an anxiety attack. He couldn’t get enough oxygen, although in fact he was getting too much, and his heart beat so hard and fast that he thought he could see it bulging out his chest wall. His brain sent panicked flight messages to all John’s muscles and nerves, but there was no place to fly. He paced hurriedly, almost at a run, back and forth across the small cell, right at the edge of the bars.

“If you’re going to do that, man,” the sailor called out from under his blanket, “at least take off your goddamn shoes.”

John wanted to cry for help. But who was there to help him? He took off his shoes and paced like a starving, broken animal for five hours, until exhaustion slumped him to the floor and he wrapped the blanket around his cold shoulders before falling into a deep sleep.

Sometime while he slept during the next three hours, John’s bladder let go and he pissed all over himself and the cell floor, where it remained like sticky stigmata.

*

The lawyer, who looked like a football player, wasn’t too thrilled with being called out on Sunday, especially for some thing as trivial, nay, as stupid as John Ackers’s charges. Prowling, for Chrissakes! There was no such thing. The booking officer just said it was a mistake and took it off.

John begged the lawyer to find a way to get him out of the cell. He explained about the sailor’s offer. The lawyer said he’d say something about the sailor, but John couldn’t get out until bail was set, and that wouldn’t happen until Monday. Too bad they picked you up on the weekend, the lawyer said.

“But look,” the lawyer added, “this is a nothing deal. If, as you told me, you never actually took any of the clothing, and unless they got a witness saying you’ve been walking around there with your pecker hanging out, the most you’ll end up with is a small fine and maybe six months probation. I don’t think you’ll get on the sex offender register.”

“Sex offender? But I didn’t do anything,” John protested.

“Then we’ll just prove that and the charges will get dropped. Don’t worry about it, Ron.”

“John.”

But the lawyer was already on his way out.

*

They let John go after his hearing Monday morning. The unnamed witness to John’s lewd and lascivious behavior refused to appear and press charges, and they were unable to connect John with any of the previous clothing thefts. They turned him loose to walk home, with a final warning from one of the arresting officers: “We got your number, bud.”

John sat in his apartment, surrounded by the liquor boxes he had gathered up to pack his things. There was nothing to do but go. Where? He didn’t know yet. He liked the beach town. He even liked the Patio Iguana. He had always dreamed of living in a Hotel California sort of place, like the one in the Eagles song.

Back to Phoenix, he supposed. He could take the heat; he’d done it for half his life. Twenty-two years a lineman. Twenty-two years climbing poles. He felt like a hot wire hit him, sort of the way it felt the day 50,000 volts knocked him off the pole.

He never blamed Glenda, it wasn’t her fault, John still liked her.

Glenda was there, eating breakfast in the nude again when John woke up that morning and went to the bathroom. No, it wasn’t her fault. What else could she think? John knew it was purely stupid for him to have even considered stealing one of her bras, so when you looked at the whole thing objectively, John had brought all this trouble down on himself. There was nobody to fault but himself.

At first, John wouldn’t let himself look up toward Glenda’s kitchen windows. He kept his eyes down on the toilet bowl as he stood before it in his pajamas. But he had seen her in a single glance when he first went into the bathroom, standing with her naked back to the window, making coffee at the stove.

Pretty soon, John’s head began to slowly come up, his eyes raised to the top of their lids, and Glenda came into view. She held the bowl in her left hand, and spooned cereal into her mouth with the right. The newspaper, which John could not actually see, must be laying on the table, for Glenda looked down intently at something there.

Glenda kept her plain brown hair cut short. When wet, it curled around her ears in dozens of tiny ringlets. John’s view was so clear and unobstructed that he could count the rings; he could see her tongue reach into the left corner of her mouth to nab a droplet of milk. He could see the soft, bulging curve of her left breast and ache over it.

Something moved low and to his right, catching his eye, and John turned to see Mr. Cafferty, tool box in hand, walking along the sidewalk between B and C buildings. If only he looked up, John realized, Cafferty too would be able to see Glenda. It felt like, John realized to his dismay, being cuckolded.

But Mr. Cafferty seemed to be in a hurry and did not look up.

John didn’t look anymore, either. It simply wasn’t the right thing to be doing. He finished his business at the toilet, flushed it, and left the bathroom without another glance out the window. In fact, he closed the blinds tight. He had packing to finish if he was going to be on the road by Thursday, the day his rent was paid up to.

*

They didn’t find Glenda Kowolski’s body until early Thursday morning, which was how long it took for the Shore Patrol to send somebody around after she was reported AWOL for not showing up at work on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Glenda had been killed Tuesday morning, as best the medical examiner could determine. She had been stabbed repeatedly with a Phillips screwdriver, which had been left sicking in her chest just below the breast plate. Her body was nude and she had been raped, both before and after.

Mr. Cafferty told the investigating officers that the yellow handled screwdriver, which had the initials JA etched into the handle, looked like the kind one of his tenants, John Ackers, had in his truck’s took kit. And interestingly enough, Mr. Ackers had just that very morning taken off in his truck, pulling a U-haul trailer, headed east. The same John Ackers who had spent the previous weekend in the city lockup accused of sexually-oriented crimes of some kind involving the very same naked corpse Mr. Cafferty, who was called in for identification, could not now keep his eyes off of.

They picked up John Ackers on a warrant for suspicion of first degree murder Thursday before noon; he was driving his pickup and pulling a small U-Haul trailer eastbound on Interstate 8, just on the California side of Yuma.

John had no alibi. In tears and shaking like he’d just contracted Parkinson’s, John told the police that he had spent Tuesday and Wednesday gathering boxes and packing. But he couldn’t tell them why he was in such a hurry to leave. He didn’t know. How could he tell them he was just embarrassed.

They took the tool box from John’s truck, but many of the tools were missing, including his yellow handled Phillips screw driver. All John’s tools had his initials etched into the handles, since the time in Phoenix his tools were stolen. John was sure he had loaned some of his tools to someone a while back, but he couldn’t exactly remember who; he was too scared to remember anything. Maybe it was Mr. Cafferty that time he was replacing all the window screens in the complex. But Cafferty said he never borrowed tools, he had all the tools he needed supplied by the Patio Iguana’s owners.

This time they put John in the County jail to await his hearing. The Public Defender told John that it didn’t look too good, but on the other hand, John’s fingerprints weren’t found in the girl’s apartment, and there were no witnesses placing him there. It was all circumstantial: The prior arrest on sex charges involving the deceased’s underwear, for which the deceased had reported him; the fact that an initialed screw driver like the murder weapon matched the tools in John’s kit, and his happened to be missing, the fact that John could not account for his time on Tuesday, combined with his running away the day Glenda Kowolski’s body was discovered.

“Okay,” the PD told a distraught John Ackers, “so you’ve got motive and access, that doesn’t make the whole package. If worse comes to worse, we can always cut a deal for second degree and get you off with twenty. You’ll be out in six.”

John had a devastating anxiety attack and had to be medicated to keep him from thinking himself to death, from unconsciously willing his heart to stop.

The police didn’t think much of John’s anxiety attacks, and after the third one in three days, they just ignored him. But the other prisoners sharing the overcrowded holding cell weren’t so generous. They got tired of his incessant pacing and his continual mumbling; it was almost as if John was jogging around the interior of the day room while reciting some montonous jibberish about his innocence.

“The man just won’t stop,” a black man with blue tattoos complained to the guard. “Give him a day or two,” the guard said, “his battery’s bound to run down.”

But somebody couldn’t wait and decided to pull the plug. Early Sunday morning, they found John Ackers dead in his bunk, apparently asphyxiated, probably with a pillow over the face.

*

A long time later, it was more than a year, an 18-year-old female sailor was raped and stabbed to death with a knife from her own kitchen at the Patio Iguana. During a search of Pat Cafferty’s apartment, police found a drawer in his bedroom dresser containing more than 100 assorted brasseries, along with 174 pairs of panties in various sizes and colors. In Cafferty’s tool box, they found a pair of pliers, a yellow-handled straight screwdriver, and an adjustable wrench, all etched with the initials, JA.

But there was no evidence connecting Cafferty to the murder of the teenaged sailor and he was not charged.

Last week, Cafferty moved to Las Vegas, where he’s managing the Roulette Wheel Apartments.

first published here: http://doniganmerritt.typepad.com/donigan_merritt/2009/08/bra-female-1-ea.html