But, Milo noted, Dubya was definitively not clothed. Neither, come to it, was the sloth. Both had their eyes closed tight in a cheesy mime of rapture.
A small crowd gathering outside the cage – Milo noted absently that they were all wearing Sunday clothes, as if they had just come from church – was beginning to roil with livid whispers.
Mothers with net-veiled pillbox hats over their lacquered bouffants were clapping white-gloved hands over the unblinking, bugged-out eyes of small girls wearing white communion dresses.
“First Communion,” croaked Milo. “Perfect.”
He thought suddenly, longingly, of the thermos flask of lime Jello in the backpack he was pretty sure he’d used as a pillow, and resisted the temptation to pull it out.
“Uh, Dubya,” Milo whispered sidelong.
“Yesssssssssssssss.”
“I sure hope you weren’t lying when you said your dad was going to buy himself the governor's job.”
"Huh? Why?"
Dubya was deflating back into reality, but slowly.
“Cuz," Milo continued, gently, "it’s going to take at least that much juice to make all these witnesses permanently shut up and go away.”
Dubya’s eyes shot open and bugged.
Milo got up, dusting reeking straw off his clothes and slinging the backpack over his shoulder. “Gotta go,” he said. “Been pleasant, I’m sure.”
As he squeezed first the knapsack, then his rail-thin frame, between the sloth cage bars, Milo heard someone in the crowd mutter ominously, “Is that a Yankee accent?”
Milo gulped, and ran...
****
Dubya paused before he continued. If silence could be intensified, or stillness made more complete, it was happening. Murder, the Skulls could abide, but this? Public interspecies lust had never before been confessed. The hooded group was so motionless, breathless, that the faint sizzle of the candle flames seemed to roar like Niagara Falls.
Dubya sensed movement very close to his face. He opened his eyes to a slit, dreading the peek, but dreading the unknown more. His mother’s fetid breath nearly decked him, and he instinctively jerked away, startled.
Babs Bush flicked a piece of half-digested macaroni from Dubya's sideburn and moved even closer to his sweat-drenched ear, hovering there for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, tickling his lobe with her moustache, she spoke slowly, three words strung out for maximum effect.
“You lit-tle SSSHIT!” she hissed, her face contorted into a mask of pure iniquity, evil dripping as each syllable echoed around the basement vault.
Dubya felt the wet heat of his mother’s breath, then searing pain as she bit down on his earlobe, drawing blood. He jerked involuntarily, and her face snapped back in reflex, furious expression of a moment before suddenly replaced, impossibly, with an even more baleful blank.
Dubya's ejaculation had been so violent that his sperm ran copiously down both of their cheeks.
Polite applause scattered through the room, the kind you hear on television when a famous golfer birdies on the fourth hole. And somewhere in the hindmost rows of the robed acolytes, a flashbulb popped, and beneath one cowl, a cheerily oily Levantine smile floated briefly in the afterglow. Molina's robed figure stepped after his disappearing grin into dark anonymity, gone completely unnoted.
New Haven, CT, ca. 1968: Part Three
