Candy in the Sack Read online

  Copyright © 2001 K. W. Jeter.

  No part of this document or the related files may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  First published by Foggy Windows Press, Scarborough ME.

  First Printing: February 2001

  Contents

  Note

  Candy in the Sack

  Also by K. W. Jeter

  Note

  A LOT of my fiction deals with sexual matters, usually of a grim and distasteful sort, but this and another story, titled “Layover,” represent my sole foray into humorous erotica. The opportunity came about through a small press publisher which was kicking off an erotica series designed for married or otherwise committed/monogamous couples. This seemed like a good and fun idea to me, and I enjoyed writing them. So in many ways, this story and the other one represent some of my most light-hearted fiction.

  “Candy in the Sack” also represents the most optimistic treatment of a particular obsession of mine, which appears elsewhere to rather darker effect in my stories “Straight Shot” and “Riding Bitch.” Of course, the degradation Hallowe’en, from deep-rooted and marginally illicit folk holiday to tacky commercial marketing opportunity, is a subject covered masterfully by Ray Bradbury, a writer much admired by myself and others. So if readers were to be so kind as to consider this and my other Hallowe’en stories as at least a partial tribute to him, I don’t think they would be far off the mark.

  Candy in the Sack

  “THIS is my least favorite time of year.” He spoke with deep, absolute conviction, as though passing judgment on the kind of criminal that other criminals were likely to beat the tar out of. “The absolute worst.”

  “Mmf?” Sherri looked over at him from where she stood at the bathroom sink, toothbrush in mouth. A white dab of foam showed when she pulled the brush out and pointed it toward him. “That’s because of the light thing. You know, there’s less light now than during summer. It bothers some people.” She leaned toward the mirror, grimacing for a moment to examine her incisors, then rubbed them with the tip of one finger. “Seasonal affective disorder, I think it’s called. I told you to get some of those full-spectrum light bulbs.”

  “I don’t think that’s it,” said Bryan. He stood leaning against the side of the bedroom doorway, watching his wife get ready. Ordinarily, that was a process that he enjoyed watching, even if what she was getting ready for was a three-day, out-of-town business trip. Putting on her clothes including her panties and bra was the last thing she did, which made all the steps leading to it that much more interesting. “It used to be my favorite time of year. If I’m this

  light-sensitive thing you’re talking about, why didn’t it bother me when I was a kid?”

  “You grew into it.” Standing on tiptoe, she opened the medicine cabinet behind the mirror, and reached up to sort through the little bottles on the top shelf. The stretch brought her rounded breasts up higher, which commanded more of his attention than what she was saying. “Maybe it happened with puberty. You didn’t complain about the rest of what came along with that, did you?”

  “No.” Bryan smiled and shook his head. “I just started hunting around for somebody like you.”

  “That’s because you were an evil little boy.” Sherri came out of the bathroom with a couple miniature bottles of shampoo and hair conditioner held in one hand and give him a quick kiss. “Lucky for me that’s the kind I like.”

  He tried making a grab for her, but she eluded him with a quick swerve of her bare hip and padded out to the living room.

  The blinds were open, letting in thin slices of the morning sunshine, but neither of them were concerned about privacy; the house was the last on the cul-de-sac, with the front turned away from the others and no-one across from them. Bryan watched his wife, charming in her nakedness, kneeling on the Indian-print rug and rooting through her open suitcase.

  “Did I already pack my hair dryer? The traveling one, I mean.”

  “Why do you bother taking it at all?” Bryan shrugged. “There’s always one in the hotel room.”

  “It’s a chick thing,” said Sherri. “That’s like asking why do you take your penis with you everywhere you go? Hair dryers are important to us, that’s all.”

  “I’ve never seen a hotel bathroom with a penis mounted on the wall.”

  “Well, that would be a full-service establishment, wouldn’t it?” Sherri didn’t look up at him; her blonde hair tumbled across her shoulders as she continued rummaging amidst folded clothing. “Great for the traveling businesswoman on a tight schedule. I wouldn’t even have to call room service and have them bring one up. Mounted on a bell-boy, of course.” She straightened up, dryer in hand. “Here it is.”

  “Like I’m worried about the bell-boy getting a piece.” Bryan went into the kitchen, poured a cup of coffee and returned to the living room with it. Sherri was just snapping the locks shut on the suitcase. “It’s still my least favorite time of year. And I used to love it.”

  “What was ever so great about it?” She slid past him where he was standing in the doorway, giving him a tantalizing whiff of the floral-scented shampoo she used just a little while ago, and the powder she had sprinkled on after she had toweled herself dry. “It’s like it rains or it’s overcast every other day, the streets are full of wet leaves, and everything in the garden is dead.” She reached into the bedroom closet and pulled out a pair of jeans. “Plus, if you’re a kid, your sorry little ass is back in school. What’s to like?”

  He watched her slipping on a pair of bikini panties from the dresser’s top drawer. “Hallowe’en,” he said.

  “What?” Sherri turned and looked at him in smiling amazement. “Hallowe’en? Are you kidding? That’s the big deal?” She frowned, looking upward as though checking some invisible calendar inside her head. “Is it the thirty-first already?”

  He nodded.

  “Jeez, you sure lose track of these things when you don’t have kids. But anyway, this is something big?”

  “For me, it is. Or it was.”

  “Why? Was going out trick-or-treating the highlight of your year or something, when you were a kid?”

  At the moment, he was torn between two options. Either he could continue the conversation — which didn’t seem to be going all that well for him — or he could do what he really felt like doing, which was stepping from the bedroom doorway, grabbing Sherri around her waist, and toppling with her onto the bed. He figured she wouldn’t mind that, either; there was plenty of time left before she actually had to pull her act together and have him drive her to the airport. Even if she had to take another shower after he got done with her, and her with him. She looked so enticing, standing there in front of him, with nothing on but the sheer blue panties, as if she had completely forgotten to put anything else on. That, to Bryan, was one of the main pleasures of married life: not just that there would be a naked woman, whom he loved and who loved him, standing in front of him a lot of the time, but that the nakedness was, in some ways, no big thing. It wasn’t a matter of stripping off her clothes as a matter of deliberate seduction, so that her nakedness was a matter of intent, something she had planned and carried out exactly because she knew the effect it would have on him. Not that he would have had any complaint about that being the case; he hadn’t complained about it before they got married, when they had first started sleeping together, and then living together. As far as he knew, no normal-type guy ever complained about a naked woman happening in front of him. But still, there was a charm to that unintended nakedness, that came about because women — and Sherri in particular — simply forgot how good they looked that way, and the effect it ha
d on the guy looking at them. So that when it happened, even if it happened just about every day, it was like finding out that you were luckier than you had a right to be, like unexpectedly getting a present on a day that wasn’t even close to being your birthday.

  And if nothing else, putting a tackle move on Sherri and diving with her in a bear hug onto the bed would stop his mind from cranking on about what time of year this was. The rains could spatter against the windows, the winds could drive the yellowed leaves across the dying lawns, and neither one of them would notice. He would be too busy shushing her surprised gasp of laughter with a full-face, open-mouthed kiss, his tongue sliding across hers and tasting mint from fresh toothpaste while inhaling floral scents of soap and shampoo. Skin to skin, one deep breath was like stepping into a sun-warmed garden, eyes closed to make the mingled scents even more vivid.

  But not just that at the same time that he d be tasting her, pinned beneath him on the bed s rumpled sheets, he would let one hand draw lightly across her ribs and then settle upon her breast, its nipple rising and stiffening against the center of his palm. All her laughing would be over then, replaced by the silent eagerness of her mouth parting wider, her bare arms wrapping around his shoulders and pulling him closer against herself. His hand, trapped between their bodies, would press even more firmly against the roundness of her breast; her gasp then would be smothered in a hungrier kiss, her spine arching her trembling form against chest and stomach. He knew, from all the times before, that he would actually have to push her away slightly, one hand at her hip, so that he could slide his hand from her breast, across her stomach, his thumb grazing her belly button as his fingertips moved under the thin elastic band of her panties. The soft hair would curl and twine around his fingers as her legs parted in unbidden response to his touch. Another kiss would greet the pressure of his fingertips, lips softening and swelling as he teased them open, the wetness inside like the sun-hot nectar of a flower in that unfolding garden . . .

  “I had no idea that free sugar was all that important to you.”

  Sherri’s voice roused him from the daydream into which he had fallen. And out of which he climbed with some reluctance: he saw with some regret that the moment had passed. She had already pulled on the jeans, and was now reaching behind herself to close the snap of her bra.

  “Well, it wasn’t, actually.” It had taken a couple seconds to recall exactly what they had been talking about. “Trick-or-treating was for little kids; I mean, I did it when I was a little kid, but you grow out of things like that. And then you’re a big kid.”

  “You’re still a big kid.” Sherri tugged the bra’s cups into perfect position. “You always will be.”

  “Yeah, but I m not getting to do what a big kid—I mean, an adult—is supposed to be doing. I got to do it for a while, back when I was like maybe twelve or thirteen years old. But that s all over with now.”

  “What is?”

  “You know.” He felt a little annoyed that he had to talk about these things at all; maybe they weren’t things that she felt in the same way. And that maybe it was something that made him seem a little ridiculous to her. “Not going out trick-or-treating, but being the one handing out the candy instead. You know, you got the bowl full of candy, all those little Mars bars and miniature Snickers and Butterfingers, on a little table beside the front door, so you can get at ’em easy, every time the doorbell rings. But you gotta go back to the kitchen, where the big bags of candy are out on the counter, and refill the bowl three or four or maybe even a half-dozen times. And it’s like your mom’s biggest Tupperware bowl, and you still gotta keep topping it up.” A flood of memories pushed his words along. “Because there’s like this line of little kids, snaking down the sidewalk in front of your house, coming up the walk to your front door, then back out to the sidewalk and snaking along to your next-door neighbor’s house. And that would go on for hours.”

  “And you miss that?”

  “Yeah I do.” Bryan felt defensive about it. “I liked being the guy on the other side of the door. First, my dad did it, and I suppose his dad did it, and then it was my turn. You know, it’s like tradition, something that gets handed down from generation to generation.”

  “Well,” said Sherri, “I’m sure that America’s manufacturers of cheap candy would like you to think so.”

  “But it was.” Nothing she could say would throw him off track now. “It was a neat thing, and it’s all over now. You had your bowl of candy by the door, and the doorbell would ring and you’d open it and there would be these little clowns and ghosts you know, that their moms had cut up an old bed sheet to turn ’em into and they would have these sacks that were already so full of candy that they could barely lug them around, and you’d throw in a couple pieces more, and they’d run away because they wanted to get to the next house, and all the other houses down the street. And right behind them, at the front door, there’d be a little hobo and a little ballerina —“

  “Ballerina?” Sherri raised an eyebrow, as she buttoned her blouse. “Little girls don’t dress up in ballerina costumes anymore. You’d be more likely to get a little female brain surgeon or account executive, complete with cell phone, on your doorstep these days. And there aren’t any more hoboes, either; if you want to be politically correct, you gotta call them ‘homeless’ or ‘hygiene-impaired’ or something like that.”

  “I don’t have to call them anything,” said Bryan, “since little kids don’t dress up like that for Hallowe’en anymore. Nobody’s come around here trick-or-treating for years. First, there weren’t as many as before, not the way it was when I was a kid, and then there were less and less of them, and then there were hardly any at all. Maybe you got one or two, the whole night. And now there aren’t any. It’s over.”

  “I’m sure kids still go trick-or-treating somewhere.”

  “Well, they don’t around here, and that’s it as far as I’m concerned.”

  “You’ll get over it.” Sherri tucked the blouse’s tails into her jeans. “Someday.”

  “No, I won’t.” He shook his head. “That’s a promise.”

  + + +

  On the way home from the airport, Bryan swung by the local Safeway. He needed a couple packs of the big brown-paper yard bags, to rake up and stuff all the dead leaves into, that covered the house’s front and back yards like an orange-and-yellow tide. All along the street that he and Sherri lived on, the rain-darkened trees stood plucked and skeletal.

  He had thrown some other things into the shopping cart as well, soup and a loaf of French bread, and some deli meats, to hold him over until Sherri got back on Tuesday morning. On the way to the cash registers Brian stopped at the huge display of Hallowe’en candy bags mounded up beneath a grinning cardboard Frankenstein and Dracula. The point of the display had eluded him, except to the degree that it gave adults an excuse for stocking up on junk that they would just wind up eating themselves. He stood looking at the brightly colored bags for a couple of minutes as though having trouble deciding which to choose. Then he picked up a couple—without even seeing what kind they were — and threw them in with the rest of the things in the cart.

  + + +

  The candy sat almost completely forgotten, even before he had clicked on the 11:00 P.M. news. The voices of the newscasters floated through the empty house as he fixed himself a sandwich and brought it out to the living room. By the front door, he had set up one of the folding trays and placed on it the bowl with the candy dumped into it had been hours ago, when it had first started getting dark outside. All the candy was still in the bowl, untouched.

  In the middle of the sports segment, the doorbell rang.

  That woke him up. He had fallen asleep even before the sports guy on the screen had started rattling off the college football scores. Blinking, he punched the remote’s mute button and set the dish with the sandwich crumbs on the table beside the over-stuffed chair. In his stocking feet, he got up and went to the door.

  Nobody was outsi
de. Or at least nobody that he could see. Bryan stood at the edge of the doorstep looking into the night. Beyond the circle of light from the porch, the yard sloped to the sidewalk and the street beyond were all sealed in darkness.

  Something rustled in the bushes at the side of the house. For a moment, his heart ticked a fraction of a second faster not from fear, rather the thought that maybe some of the kids from down the block had actually gotten motivated to do a few Halloween pranks. There was always hope.

  “Pret-ty spooky,” pronounced Bryan in his deepest, sepulchral voice. “I hope there’s nothing too ghastly out here . . .”

  No answer came, not even suppressed, giggling laughter.

  “All right. I’ll make you a deal.” He spoke louder, words fading without echo into the dark. “Don’t do anything that I can’t wash off with the hose, and you can have all the candy you want. I’m pretty well stocked at the moment.”

  Still no answer.

  A thread of worry laced through his thoughts. Knowing the local kids, that should have sealed the deal for them. He stepped away from the door into the cool night air, moving toward the bushes. A probing nudge with his foot sent one of the neighborhood’s cats, a disreputable silver tabby with a torn ear, fleeing across the lawn’s dead leaves and disappearing as though it had been discovered in some desperate act of sabotage.

  That didn’t explain the doorbell, though. As a general rule, cats couldn’t reach that high. Bryan closed the door and returned to the couch, leaving the television muted.

  Less than a minute passed, and he knew somebody was still out there; he could hear the person, whoever it was, creeping stealthily around the corner of the house.

  Again, the doorbell rang. This time, he took with him the iron poker from beside the fireplace.

  “Trick or treat.”

  With his hand on the inside knob, he looked out at the figure standing on the doorstep. “Little late for this sort of thing, isn’t it?” He dryly spoke the admonishment. “Do your parents know you’re still out?”