LORAIN, OHIO

MAY 1965

The third time Sam was paroled, in 1965, he considered himself a twenty-five-year-old virgin, as far as that went, and he didn’t plan to be one at twenty-six. He also knew he didn’t want to go back to the pen.

Though visions of pimpdom still danced in his head, he got a job at the steel plant back home with Henry, fitting pipe. They drove silently to work that first humid morning, the spring blossoms starting to wilt. No sooner had they crossed the bridge when Sam knew it wasn’t for him. This kind of job was its own prison.

He wanted to drive with the windows down, music loud, three decked-out hos beside him, giggling and whispering in his ear. Instead, he trudged beside his grandfather, face impassive. He fitted pipe, bit his tongue, did his time.

He went to the local YMCA, expecting a staircase made of gold. He’d ascend to his rightful place at last. A pimp, a king, a pharaoh, served by an army of servants and fans bearing biscuits and gravy and filthy magazines.

He trained there for a while a few days a week after work, but it wasn’t what he’d hoped. He fought for a space, jostled amateurs in the locker room. Everyone was jealous and jockeying for position. He couldn’t understand why they weren’t giving him the respect he deserved. Even the guards in the prison had given him proper shoes. Here, he was fighting in threadbare Converse and too-small gym shorts.

He didn’t have shit for a corner. When his ragtag gym went to Columbus to fight, a treacherous teammate gave him bad advice. Sam was a knockout kind of fighter, powerful and animalistic. He was the fighter who came out of nowhere with a deadly and unstoppable body combination. Or with such a right cross you might never stand up again if it connected just right.

“Hang back,” said his Judas. “Let him tire himself out.”

Sam’s lip split. It stunned him. Before he knew it, the fight was over and he had never even taken a proper shot.

Another thing he’d never learned during his prodigious prison education was how to lose with grace. He only knew voracious wanting and getting at any cost. Losing takes a different kind of character. Losing feels like shit, but quitting feels ecstatic.

The team stopped at a hamburger stand on the way home. He drank four chocolate milkshakes, and with each sweet mouthful, he swore off boxing—the only thing he had ever loved. He put his gloves in the trash on the way out. He knew as sure as he knew his grandmother’s face, he would never step into a boxing ring again. It was a victory of sorts. If you don’t care, they can’t touch you.

After he took a few days to recover, Mama running up and down the stairs with a cold compress for his mangled lip, he decided maybe he’d try the normal life thing. Four days after he lost his last match, six months after his release from OSR, Sam walked into the medical clinic of U.S. Steel with a wart on the middle finger of his left hand. The receptionist was a big, red girl, easy 275, with a warm smile, a spray of freckles, face pretty as an angel, ass the size of France.

Sam married Jackie Pellerin that August in a small ceremony with immediate family. The rumpus room of Jackie’s mother’s house was nothing more than a furnished basement with forest-green stained carpet and a plaid couch they had pushed into the corner for the event. They’d borrowed folding chairs from the neighbors, heaped the kitchen table with platters full of Mama’s biscuits and ribs. Jackie wore her cousin’s snow-white, too-tight gown. Sam wore Stacy Adams shoes and a suit with pegged pants. He imagined he was starring in a movie. The kind with a happily ever after.

After his sour-faced mother-in-law retired upstairs, Sam beheld his first genuine naked woman. On the pullout couch in the same basement in which he had been married hours earlier, he fumbled his way through. In prison, he had heard enough about sex that he understood the general mechanics. What he didn’t understand was why, unlike the jailhouse braggadocios, in order to climax, Sam didn’t need to think of boobs or asses or pussies or nurses or whores or schoolgirls or beauty queens. He only needed to look at Jackie’s neck and imagine his hand around it.

He felt ashamed. You shouldn’t imagine strangling the good woman who cooked you jambalaya and crawfish pie, folded your clothes, followed you around like a puppy. That wasn’t right.

That first night, he’d run straight out the front door, jumped in Jackie’s robin’s-egg blue ’59 Ford, gunned it, and crashed it into a pole three blocks later. That had been a hell of a thing to explain to his mother-in-law, who looked like she’d sucked a bag of lemons on a good day.

Wasn’t this love? They got a puppy and named him Buttons. They danced barefoot in the kitchen to her mother’s radio. Eventually, he stopped having sex with her entirely, because he no longer wanted to kill her.

Sam catted about, crawling the city’s underbelly after work, drifting from bar to bar looking for weed and women, preferably both. One or two days a week, he didn’t make it to work the next day. He sometimes kept the pink Mercury convertible he and Jackie shared out all night. Her mother drove her to work in the morning.

Jackie’s mom told her again and again, “That man been hit in the head one too many times. Some men just no good. No matter how nice they are to you. No matter how handsome he is. That man is a snake.”

Sam knew Jackie loved the snake in him. He made her laugh and let her mother’s evil eye bounce off his broad shoulders as if they were Teflon. Jackie worked her receptionist job, kept house, hoped for children, though there seemed little likelihood of that, given the infrequency of their sexual relations and the increasing frequency of his all-nighters. When she dared challenge him, he reared like a cobra, his hair-trigger anger a fearsome thing.

One night around Christmas, he slipped out of her grasp and passed under a set of blinking lights, strung across the doorway of a brick box bar called the Pink Elephant, with blacked-out windows. The barmaid, Diane, was known for turning tricks on the side and famous for her fondness for black dick. She lived in an unpainted duplex on Thirty-Sixth, one of only two white women on the street. The other one lived on the opposite side of the duplex, with Sam’s friend Freddy. They called it the country, because that was where the roads turned dirt.

Sam pulled the door against the wind. Four inches of fresh snow had just fallen, and it was already beginning to ice over and crackle under his feet. The bar smelled like Lysol, perfume, beer, and pee.

Diane wore two sets of false eyelashes and was a stout thing, thick calves, around forty-five, with a bottle-blond bob she teased at the crown. Still, she wore her miniskirts and heels with brash confidence and was a popular local character.

Sam hadn’t come there looking for Diane, but the pickings were slim that night with all that snow. Only the diehards were out. Diane handed Sam a beer with one hand while twirling the gold sailboat pendant around her neck with the other. The light spilling from the pool table glinted off the chain, and though this particular neck wasn’t the long, slender stalk of Sam’s fantasies, she knew how to work it.

Sam had a sixth sense about bitches, like he was wearing X-ray goggles from a cereal box and could see through to their souls. He knew that by twirling that necklace, Diane was issuing an invitation to close his hand around the most fragile part of her neck and squeeze.

He wasn’t going to kill her. He’d never do that. Of course. He just wanted to play with her a little bit.

You could find plenty of freaks who wanted you to throttle them, show them who’s boss, straighten them out. Sometimes they don’t even know they want a man to take charge, but that was where the X-ray goggles came in. He could see what a woman really wanted, regardless of what verbiage poured out of her mouth.

X-ray goggles or not, all the really pretty ones—the Carol Messengers, Gloria Ferrys—snubbed him like he was a smelly old dog. The ugly ones needed him too much. If he thought about it long enough, he could start feeling sorry for himself. That night, there was Diane and her necklace, so maybe there was a Christmas angel or two looking out for him.

“You ever been on a sailboat?” He gazed straight at the necklace.

“Nah, but I like looking at ’em out on the lake.”

She cocked her head toward the door, and he returned her gesture. She went to gather her things. When she leaned in as he followed her to the parking lot, he could smell her spearmint gum breath starting to sour, the sweat from a night’s work overpowering her drugstore deodorant.

She smelled easy.

He pulled into Diane’s driveway and prowled behind her as she plucked her high heels gingerly from iced-over snow, making neat tracks that looked to Sam like hoof prints. She hugged her red wool coat tightly to her body and fumbled for the keys in her purse before wrestling the door open and beckoning him inside. They clunked in, half-drunk and giggling. Sam collided with the kitchen table, more drunk from the hunt than the liquor. She dropped her coat over the back of a chair and headed up the stairs without a word. He followed so closely he could see straight up her skirt, could smell the pussy that had been sweating into that turquoise rayon all night.

Her bedroom had a scarf over the lampshade, a wig head on the dresser in the corner next to a bridal magazine, a double bed with a grandma quilt tucked neatly into its sides. She hiked up her skirt, grabbed her stockings around the waistband, and tugged them off, tossing them into a corner.

“Twenty,” she said. “On the dresser.”

Even with the scarf over the lamp, he could now see the alcohol bloat under her eyes, the marionette lines around her mouth. Been nice to her all night, telling her she looked real good. He was only there as an act of charity. Did this old skag really just ask him for money?

“What did you say?”

She watched the charming young man from the bar disappear in a puff of smoke and understood two things. First, he had not asked a real question. Second, she had made a big mistake.

Diane stood, willed the quiver from her voice, and told him to get out.

Wrong answer.

Sam’s hand shot out, propelled her through the air, and slammed the back of her skull firmly against the headboard. She lay stunned as he crawled on top of her and knelt over her chest, clasping both hands around her throat. He could feel the pulse of blood, the sinew and muscle and bone. He was finally doing it.

The panic of being unable to breathe shot through her like a current, and she brought her arms up to scratch him, but they found nothing. He pressed harder. She stopped fighting, her limbs turning to oatmeal. He wished she knew how beautiful she looked at that moment.

He got a hold of himself. He wasn’t a killer. He released her, stood at the foot of the bed, and tucked in his shirt. Diane’s skirt was hiked up and she was naked from the waist down, her shirt pushed up over her breasts. He couldn’t remember when either of those things had happened. He watched as her eyes regained their focus and trained on him with fear so pure he could smell it. He breathed it in.

Diane silently lay back and spread her legs, turning her face to the wall.

“You think I want the clap for Christmas?” he said, his lip curling. “I don’t want that old pussy.”

Driving home, he sang along with the radio.

Come a little bit closer, you’re my kind of man, so big and so strong.

Come a little bit closer, I’m all alone, and the night is so long.

Window open to the freezing wind, he felt deliciously alive. He had finally done it. He had watched as if from somewhere near the ceiling as his body accomplished what up until then, his mind had only dared. He closed his hand around a woman’s throat and took the very breath from her body. He could have crushed her as easily as the stem of a flower. It was stealing, but a hundred million times better. Made his cock hard as a length of pipe. Maybe he’d even fuck his wife with it, just to make the heifer feel good.

He walked in hard and high to find Jackie pacing the living room in her flannel nightgown. Sam’s friend Freddy had called twice already. The police had been by Freddy’s. Diane had reported a rape. She told the police Sam broke in through her window.

Vindictive, lying whore.

“Pack your stuff up, baby. Grab Buttons, and get in the car.”