Page 116 - Sweet Embraceable You: Coffee-House Stories

104 Jack Fritscher

In Floyd’s piano room a large cardboard box grated heavily
across the gritty floor. Robert heard Floyd say, “Ah, there it is.”
“I suppose they do,” Robert called to Floyd who was dragging
the huge box into the shop itself.
“You suppose who does what?” Floyd panted with the exertion,
but his face was triumphant.
“I suppose they do put out their own kids’ eyes.” Robert had
read more than he even wanted hanging out in libraries, slicing
pages out of magazines. “There’s all those operas about Greek plays
where the kids get turned into mincemeat. Some parents kill their
young. Maybe they’re no more cruel than nature is cruel. People
wouldn’t pay good money to go see that sort of thing if they weren’t
natural ly interested.”
Floyd began to dig into his box. “Now, don’t you laugh at me,”
Floyd said. He was matter-of-fact. “I have these treasures I don’t
share with everyone.”
“I understand,” Robert said. But he did not under stand as
much as he thought he did, and he was about to understand a
whole lot more.
The box was neatly packed with magazines, picture albums,
and loose photos of the kind most adult men keep to themselves.
At first glance, Robert Place knew, almost faster in his groin than
his head, what kind of illustrations these were. They were the kind
Robert had tried all his life to avoid, but could not. They were the
kind who called to him, from the flat pages of magazines, to breathe
into them his life. They were seductive, attractive, flowers of evil.
They were, somehow, an occasion of sin. They were young men
more stripped than dressed who posed as sailors and athletes and
construc tion workers. They were the kind of pictures of men Robert
had sliced from certain physique atlases in St. Louis bookstores to
take home to lay with him on his bed, until he blacked out, saying,
“Whoever you are, I want to spend eternity with you,” waking up
as if coming to, jumping from his bed, furiously destroying the
evidence of his love for this kind of thing. He would crush the

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