The Night Listener : A Novel

my place, okay?”
    “You mean…you live around here?”
    “Up there.” He cast his eyes skyward, as if I were about to be ab-ducted on a UFO.
    I looked up and saw the cab of a truck, a metallic red cubicle with someone’s name—his, presumably—painted primly on the door in tiny silver letters. My first reaction was to smile, remembering a long-gone bathhouse in New York called Man’s Country where—somehow—the management had installed the cab of an actual big rig on an upper floor, so that horny chorus boys and ribbon clerks from Bloomingdale’s could enjoy in relative safety the vivid archetypal experience of being fucked in a truck.
    “You’re kidding,” I murmured.
    He looked right and left, checking for witnesses, then scrambled up and unlocked the door. “C’mon,” he whispered, and I obeyed without a word, curiously flattered but sane enough to feel anxious.
    A headline formed in my head—GABRIEL NOONE FOUNDDISMEMBERED IN WISCONSIN WOODS—as I reminded myself that this was the state that had given us Jeffrey Dahmer. Not to mention Ed Gein, the real-life inspiration for Norman Bates.
    But once inside the cab I found comfort in the prosaic: a cardboard air freshener shaped like Santa Claus, a dog-eared copy of Field and Stream , a photo of a woman and several children tucked into the visor. It was almost cozy up there, pristine and well padded and lofty enough to be private. Behind the seat lay a rectangle of foam rubber onto which we spilled in a ridiculous jumble of limbs.
    We kissed longer than I’d expected, sparring with our tongues as we lapped the warmth from each other. I reveled in everything: his flat little nipples (as inexpressive as his dick was eloquent), the musty pucker of his butt, the satiny slap of his meat against my face. We ended up side by side, jerking off together, and I found myself laughing out loud as I came, a guttural volley from the back of my throat that shoved out my last ounce of breath. He smiled at me sleepily, then swiped at my come with his forefinger. “Daddy,” he murmured, and slid the finger into his mouth.
    I lost track of time. I was already in that place where just the heat of someone’s leg across your own seems to contain everything extraordinary that came before. I was struck by the sense of relief I felt, the feeling of having come home again to my own body. I’d been sleeping alone for less than two months and would never have guessed how deeply I’d missed the sound of another heartbeat so near, this warm, entangled, animal reassurance. What I had here wasn’t a disembodied voice on the phone or a distant building winking in the fog; this was the real goods, however casual or anonymous. Everything seemed possible again—or at least redeemable.
    “Should I be going?” I asked.
    “That’s okay.”
    “To go or to stay?”
    He chuckled quietly, lumbering to his knees, his tackle dangling clumsily between his legs. Then he pulled a paper bag from the corner and began—rather earnestly—to search for something. For one blood-chilling moment those headlines started up again, predict-ing a grisly end for our visitor from California. Then Mr. Dahmer-Gein exhumed a couple of family-sized Snickers bars and handed one to me.
    “Hey,” I said. “Dinner and a movie.”
    “No…sorry. I don’t have a VCR.”
    I didn’t bother to explain my flimsy metaphor, just tore into the candy bar as he slid in next to me, warming my side again.
    “Is that your family?” I asked, nodding toward the photo on the visor.
    “Yeah.”
    “Nice-looking.”
    “Thanks.”
    One of the kids in the picture was in his early adolescence. His head was partially in the shadows and covered with a baseball cap, but there was something about the line of his cheekbone and the light in his eye, something about that crooked little Bart Simpson smile…It was impossible, of course, and utterly absurd, but the more I studied the picture the more I toyed with the creepiest idea: What if that actually was Pete up there? And what if somehow—through the wildest of flukes—I had stumbled across his real father, stumbled across him and sucked his cock in the back of a truck?
    Oh, give it a break, I thought. You will not write an ironic end to this, no matter how much it might distance you from your emotions. Pete’s father had been a foreman in a hosiery factory, and Pete had testified against him, for God’s sake. The monster was in a prison somewhere, locked up for