Raoul's First Murders Ch. 02

Or he might've just been thinking about the money, calculating the possibility that the girls would never have made that much for him anyway.

Regardless, he eventually blinks.

"Shit, son, you give us eight grand, cash, them bitches are yours."

"I'd like one of those flags too." With his chin Raoul points at the Khan Nation flag on the wall behind Jerry's desk. "Throw in one of them for me?"

"Fuck out of here, boy," Jerry laughs.

Raoul reaches into his pocket, drops the envelope on Jerry's desk.

"Well, I'll be a son of a bitch," Jerry says, fingering the bills. "I bet this ain't a penny short of eight grand."

"Not a one," Raoul affirms, standing up. "Gentlemen, I hope this is not the end of my association with the Khan Nation."

"Why would it be?" Jerry says, shaking his hand. "Your money's always welcome here."

"And your fists," Scott says, slapping him on the back. "Boss goddamn Badoss. I'll be goddamned. Six guys in one fight. Took about five seconds. Never seen anything like it."

"Scott here's gonna miss the little Oriental one," Jerry teases. "We'll have to find him another one of them."

"She's a great cocksucker," Scott shrugs. "But she's all yours now, Boss. Hope you get your money's worth."

"I'm gonna try," Raoul smiles.

—————

Leaving Easy Riders, Raoul feels so much better that he rides all the way back to his house to see his family. After giving them all a hug, he'll go to Sophia's for the night.

Six men, he smiles. I killed six men with almost my bare hands.

He supposes some of them had families, kids, girlfriends, wives, who'll grieve.

Too bad for them, he thinks, remembering how he felt when his parents died.

He knows he should feel worse about that, and maybe he will someday, but for now — whew!

No cops, no law, no trial, no prison — no problem!

He rides through the cool, fresh Pacific air, a free man determined not to get in any messes like that again.

———————

Raoul gets back to Sophia's house in Compton a little after midnight, but no one comes out to meet him until he's almost on the porch, carrying a bedroll. No matter what he said earlier, he does not intend to sleep directly on the floor.

"Shhh. The baby's asleep," Sophia tells him, opening the door of the trailer. (Until then he'd been too distracted to notice that the screen door is missing.) He bends down to kiss her and then Emma on their foreheads.

"Is that yours?" Emma asks, pointing at the van.

He nods. It won't be convenient for his family, but he didn't want to park his Harley in Sophia's yard overnight.

Stepping inside, he sees that they've prepared a Vietnamese smorgasbord of meat, seafood, vegetables, soup, sauces, and rice. Obviously he'd eaten at his own home, but being an eighteen-stone man means never having to say no to a second dinner.

"Shoes off, Asian style," Sophia instructs him.

"You and Emma take them off me, Asian style," he says loudly, intending to wake the baby — because he's not going to sneak around a house when he's paying the bills. "When you squat down to unlace them, I expect to see sweet smiles and lots of cleavage. And then bring me a beer. "

"Are you okay?" Emma and Sophia look at him, scared by his tone.

"Boots, smiles, boobs, beer, food, and then talk."

The girls hustle over then, one to each boot.

———————

A few weeks after Amy passed away in her hospital bed, Raoul left Thorney College. He hugged her parents goodbye — to Raoul, her father was Master Robb, his personal mentor, Thorney's chaplain and boxing coach, member of the Scottish martial arts team that won the All Styles championship in 1973; her mother was made of sugar — and leaving Thorney forever, he headed for what turned out to be the final Stonehenge Free Festival.

That was 1984, before anyone understood AIDS, and people were still sharing heroin needles and enjoying loads of unprotected sex. Raoul of course had a great time, and he somehow fell in with a group of people that intended to go to Tanzania to see lions on the Serengeti.

The party lasted almost all the way to Lascaux, where they were going to see the newly opened replica of the famous caves, but tensions had been rising for several weeks by that time. They'd begun as five ladies and two gents, and Raoul joined them as the third gent — and the tallest, handsomest, strongest, most famous (at that time for playing young Arthur and young Mordred in Matter of Britain) and by far the most confident in a physical confrontation — far more welcome to the ladies than to the first two gents. They all appreciated his financial contributions and (when they'd crossed the channel) his knowledge of French, but only the five ladies appreciated his other contributions.

The lads dropped passive-aggressive hints to the effect that Raoul should scram, but in addition to everything else Raoul had seen an Algerian whore beat one of them up and pee on his face in the middle of a Paris street, so he felt comfortable ignoring their pathetic hints.

The night before they were supposed to visit the replica of the caves, they'd stopped in a park somewhere just outside of Limoges. Raoul never knew or cared where they were, or where they were going, or why. They had deep intellectual and cultural conversations that he admired indifferently, nodding or snorting when any of the girls seemed to have said something clever. He was just along for the debauchery, trying to get as far away as possible from the pain of losing Amy, which had also reopened the wound of losing his parents a few years earlier.

The eight of them traveled in two ratty old Adolfswagen vans, and for some reason the sleeping arrangement was that each of the original lads slept in one of the vans and Raoul slept in a tent and the ladies slept wherever they pleased — which, as time went on, was increasingly with Raoul, regardless of how crowded they were in his little tent.

Sometime in the middle of that night outside Limoges, one of the women stumbled over his tent, falling on him and the three women already in it with him. Within a few moments the shouting outside revealed that one of the lads had actually shoved her into it. The other lad was up too. Everyone was shouting.

"Pack it in!" Raoul barked, assuming it was an accident in the dark, and for about a minute he just listened, initially considering the fight none of his business.

But then he realized that one of the lads, angry that he'd caught her on her way to join Raoul and his group, had actually slapped her.

For some reason, that's one of the things that's always set off Raoul. Even as a child he'd appointed himself defender of all his sisters and female cousins, and when he was only nine years old he'd nearly murdered an eleven-year-old — chasing and then tripping him down a flight of stone steps, so that he needed facial reconstructive surgery — who'd been bothering Amy. That was actually when Amy began to like him.

Raoul has enjoyed a lot of good things in his life, but nothing feels better than the violent triumph of righteous rage. Just beating the living fuck out of some asshole who's mistreated a woman — like the heart-healing satisfaction of feeling the bones of Phil's face shatter and his body go limp, seeing hs head bounce on the floor.

So that night in the dark, besides being angry about being awoken that way, he wiggled out of the tent and, with the light of the full moon shimmering on the beautiful Vézère in the background, grabbed the lads by the necks and smashed their heads together three times, harder each time, dropping them unconscious on the dewy grass.

The shouting stopped and everyone stepped back.

"Now that's a proper conkin', that," commented one of the girls.

The next morning, the lads threw all the girls' stuff out of the vans and drove off, leaving them stranded there with Raoul. They'd also accidentally thrown out one of their own bags, which turned out to be full of interesting books.

It took the ladies a few days to make new travel arrangements. They eventually pooled their money and bought another old van, a little Voiturette into which they could just barely squeeze themselves — Raoul and six women, having now picked up an additional one in Limoges — and Raoul spent those days missing smack, guzzling coffee, and browsing those books.

On the first day, while the girls hitched back into Limoges to see what they could do for transportation, he read Darwin Richard's The Selfish Phenotype and found for the first time that biology really could explain the world a little bit.

On the subsequent nights and days he read Goran Scheller's Serengeti Lions, especially the passages that describe coalitions of male lions fighting each other to the death, taking over prides of lionesses, and killing the cubs of the defeated males. Bemused, he read similar passages in Wallace France's Primate Politics, about male chimpanzees forming alliances to monopolize sexual access to the females in their group, and conducting ruthless warfare against the males of neighboring groups.

He thoughtfully browsed Wellington Shagnon's book on the Yanomamö people, Neil Williams's Power, Technology, and Society, Stephen Kaczawa's The Inevitability of Male Domination in Human Society, and Will O. Edward's Human Nature. He read Alex Pleasure's classic Sexual Delights very carefully, and of course he attended to every detail of Nancy Saturday's My Forbidden Garden.

Much of what was in those books was beyond him at that time — he was fifteen and he'd been high and knackered for weeks, grieving the loss of everything he'd loved while discovering the consolations of free love — but he was ripe for some of the ideas, having always loved violence and competition, having attended Thorney (an elite boys' military school), having been the princely only-son and only-grandson in a patriarchal family of neglected and underappreciated daughters and granddaughters.

By the time he and his six women finally reached the cave, he'd begun to formulate what we can call his first theory of human gender. As he saw it, men gain status among other men by displaying physical power and prowess and by confident and inclusive leadership. Implicitly or explicitly, a man's social status mostly derives from perceptions of how formidable he'd be in a melee. (He was not at that time accounting for wealth or titles.)

The men with the highest status, he figured, are most attractive to women because they are most likely to be able to protect them and their children from other men. Lower ranking men join them in coalitions, and are thereby also able to provide protection to women.

Of course women also value men who will contribute to their own and their children's well-being in other ways, such as by bringing food. With this, he was beginning to distinguish between women mating for genes and mating for commitment.

Women, on the other hand, gain status among other women by being attractive to high-status men: the women favored by the highest ranking men become the highest ranking women, because low ranking (i.e. unattractive) women want to do whatever it takes to gain access to the genes and protection and resources of the high ranking men.

We are all free to disagree with his ideas, and after all, he himself amended and adjusted these thoughts throughout his life, but that's what he was thinking about when he stood there in the darkness of the ersatz Chamber of Felines, contemplating what ancient men and women must have felt when they observed huge, almost omnipotent lions tearing each other apart with thunderous roars.

Sleep-deprived, high on caffeine, emotionally shattered by the impermanence of love, thrilled by the kaleidoscopic sexual opportunities in the world around him, pondering the meaning of human life, the significance of the fact that he found himself in a powerful body that delighted women and intimidated men, he felt there in the cave a communion, a oneness with those lions, the violence of the natural world. He became the wasp that stings the caterpillar, the snake that sinks its fangs deep into the flesh of its prey, the chimpanzee that murders a rival.

He felt there in the cave a communion with the violence of the human world, with the men who'd painted and worshiped those lions, and with all those men who for hundreds of thousands of years had banded themselves together to protect each other and to prey on less formidable bands of men.

And ultimately he felt there in the cave a communion with the physical universe itself, the unfeeling violence of the particles colliding mindlessly, annihilating each other, asteroids smashing each other to dust, continents scraping past each other, comets careening into planets, black holes swallowing galaxies.

The god of all this violence, the god of the male lion rampant, the god of the battle fury, possessed him there in the cave, and he looked around at the women following him and discovered that he was Ares and that Aphrodite eternally pursues Ares.

The ghost of Amy left him then, like Diana fleeing, her goodness and decency finally too weak to constrain him, and he realized that the meaning of his life would be to bring reasonable men into alliance with him, with them to subdue unreasonable men, and above all to enjoy the abundant sexual rewards of his leadership and prowess.

———————

Two and a half years later, supporting nearly twenty women with his careers in modeling and acting, a star student-athlete at one of the most elite high schools in the world, and having murdered six men with brass knuckles during a brawl in a strip club owned by an outlaw motorcycle gang, Raoul finds himself sitting in a tiny mobile home in a weedy lot in Compton enjoying a Vietnamese feast that three women prepared for him, which he paid for with money Shirley X stole from her husband so that he'd fuck her daughter so that her daughter wouldn't tell Mr. X husband that Shirley sucked him off in one of their bathrooms.

Just like in the books.

He gives a terse account of his conversation with Scott and Jerry:

"Everyone was fine. They all got up and walked away eventually."

"Including Phil?" Emma asks.

"Yup. All of them."

"Damn. I was really hoping you'd killed him."

"Well, you're clear of him now. I'll be getting you all a new place in Little Saigon tomorrow and he'll never see you again."

"God, I hope so."

"I paid your debts."

"They let you do that?"

He nods with a mouthful of food.

"How much was it?"

"More than you said," he points chopsticks accusingly at Emma and Sophia.

"I'm sorry, Raoul, we really didn't know. They keep all the records."

"Well, they said you belong to me now. Told me to keep you in line with a clothes hanger."

He watches the girls flinch, sees that they're familiar with Jerry's clothes hanger. It apparently wasn't just a figure of speech.

"You won't need a clothes hanger to keep us in line," Sophia appeases him, sliding her little hand up his thigh. "Not with a hammer like this."

———————

After the food is eaten, the girls do the dishes and Sophia's mother goes to sleep in the small bedroom, the big bedroom having been given to Raoul and his "honored concubines."

By the time Emma puts her daughter by some other man to sleep, Sophia has ridden Raoul like a bull, taking a bit of his edge off. She's cuddled up against him, her leg across his stomach when Emma tiptoes in.

She lays down on his other arm and teases his nipple.

"Anything left for me?" she whines.

"Who's the dad?"

He feels her freeze. Not a conversation she wants to have. Nor one she can escape — literally, as his arm is over her. She couldn't fight her way free if she wanted to.

"I don't know."

"Lying bitch, don't piss me off," he snaps. "Who's the fucking dad?"

"Just some guy I knew from school. Shane Parker. Don't hurt him, Raoul, he's not a bad guy."

"Does he give you money?"

"No. He told me to abort it. But I didn't want to. I was just so lonely. I needed someone."

"Well, two things. First, he's going to start giving you money. I'll see to that myself if you won't. I'm not supporting his kid all by myself. And second, if you want me to keep supporting you at all, you're going to have two kids for me."

"What?"

She seems genuinely not to understand what he's said.

"Two. It's not going to be equal. You can keep his little bitch, but mine are to be the majority, the priority."

"I would love to have a baby for you Raoul —"

"Two babies."

"Two babies for you, but do you know how much —"

"I don't give a fuck. You give me two kids, or I'm out. You can go back to the Khans. Or Phil. Or whoever the daddy is. I don't give a fuck. Two babies or I'm out."

"Are you going to take care of them?"

"That's the fucking point. But I'm not going to take care of you if you don't give me two babies."

"I just can't believe you want to have a baby with me," she giggles. "Are you going to live with us?"

"No, but I'm going to pay the fucking bills."

"Oh."

"You want your bills paid or not?"

"I can pay the bills."

He snorts. "Living with Phil's mom? Borrowing money from the Khans? You'll wind up in a shelter, beaten and raped and dying of AIDS. What happens to little Julia then?"

"Raoul, why would you say that?"

"Because it's the fucking truth. And you need to face it. And here's another truth you need to face. Like Jerry said, you belong to me now. Unless you find another man to pay your bills, you need my money, you need it for yourself and for little baby Julia, so you're going to have as many babies for me as I want you to. As long as I'm paying your bills, you'll spit another one out every nine months if that's what I want. That's the standard deal between men and women, and you can take it or leave it. I'll never beat you or abandon you, which is probably already a better deal than you'll get elsewhere, but I'm a fucking man and I'm not going to support some other asshole's kid just to be nice."

"Okay, I get it, you're right. Let's make a baby."

She begins to slide down his body.

"Not tonight."

"What? What do you want, Raoul?"

She's confused, almost crying.

"First thing Monday, you get an STD test, and you better hope it comes back clean."

"Or what?"

"Or we have to wait till you get cleaned up. I'm not putting my babies in some clappy snatch. Between now and then, darling, we're sticking strictly to condoms."

He jostles Sophia.

"I know you're awake, too. This all goes for you too. No skin on skin until your tests come back clean. And you can have a baby for me too, if you want. You'll be popping them out soon enough anyway," he teases, "might as well be mine."

"All I want to do is have babies for you," Sophia coos, petting Raoul's chest. "If you promise to take care of me too."

"I'll take care of both of you, and your mom and your baby, as long as you treat me right."

"Of course we'll treat you right," Emma whines. "But can't we at least suck your dick tonight? It's not fair that she got to have you to herself."

"It's fair because she isn't asking me to support another man's baby. But don't worry. I promise to take care of both of you for the rest of your lives if you have babies for me."

"Does that mean I can suck your dick?"

"It means you'd better suck it. But let me see your tits first."

Emma sits up, kneeling next to Raoul's shoulder, and pulls her shirt over her head. Then she reaches behind her to unsnap her bra, and it falls away, revealing her little white breasts, like scoops of vanilla ice cream with little drops of strawberry topping.