“Banged Up” by Kurt Mueller

Rocky Denton likes to fuck in the porta-potty. It might signal a new phase in the cycle of Rocky’s sexual life in which he gives up the donkey punch to spend hours deterging the Internet of its free pornography only to be more entertained with fucking an ugly woman in a portable toilet.

Rocky sucks the left ear of Misty Moore, struggling to keep her upright against the urinal with his arms around her shoulders and his dick inside her. They pound the walls of the plastic shithouse with their bodies and sunlight shines through the slits above their heads and the air coming in only makes the shit and piss and vomit in the hole smell worse. Outside humidity suffocates, July in Illinois is always like this, and Rocky huffs the air, thicker inside. Gear heads have flocked to Ottawa to see the boat races on the Illinois River, and the smell of speedboats burning oil comes into the porta-potty.

Rocky comes inside Misty because he’s finished fucking her and he pulls his dick out, small and pink and coated in her fluid.

“That was great,” Misty says. She lies, and breathes through her mouth not because Rocky was fantastic but because she’s a thick-armed mouth-breather, perpetually sucking air through bucked teeth, and she blows and clears the matted hair from her face. She lies to Rocky for two reasons: she is a liar, and while Rocky generally sucks at fucking, he occasionally hits her just right, like a baseball player who only strikes out or homers.

Rocky feels good about what he’s just done, as he’s prone to believe things. He has believed such lies as, “I just turned eighteen,” “I’m on the pill,” and, “My boyfriend’s out of town.” Someone sticking up for Rocky’s character may say he’s just a victim of love, that Rocky Denton simply has too much love in his heart, but that would be a lie. Rocky’s love lives in his dick. If he can’t fuck it, he’s got no use for it.

“Yeah,” Rocky says. “That was pretty awesome.” He labors to get the words out, arrested by post-coital lethargy, and he sits on the toilet listening to boat motors pumping hard at the water, and a guy in the adjacent toilet pisses hard like his dick’s being aspirated, the fluid falling fast enough to muffle the satisfied groans of the pisser.

Misty leaves without saying anything to Rocky as they don’t usually have much to say after sex and there really isn’t enough room in a porta-potty for two people. Rocky rises and evacuates the vortex of all the bad smells and good times he knows. He steps outside, exposed to the atmosphere of sun and wind and noise, and it’s the sound of suction Rocky likes, the sound of water being pulled from deep under the surface to be driven through the engine, pumping the machine along.

Rocky walks toward the river to watch a race but is interrupted by Darla Mason, the leggy 22 year old harlot with the perfect breasts and the apoca-lips that Rocky wishes he could stick his dick between again, but he fucked her a couple months back, gave her the rear-end treatment she wanted, and he hung around long enough to see that she’s still pretty without makeup, but refuses to call her because he thinks she is a serial swearer. Rocky really fears she may actually like him, and Rocky refuses to settle down. He’s been going to church lately in an effort to atone for sins against womanhood and respectful behavior, but it hasn’t been taking.

“Hey, motherfucker,” Darla says. “I’ve been looking for you.” Darla lingers in Rocky’s personal space, blue-eying him, cleaving him with her cleavage, trying to break him down with the tightness of her clothes.

Rocky resists, comfortable in refractory period, and plays dumb, though really he’s not. Rocky researches and writes briefs for a lawyer in town, does the hard work now because he was too lazy years ago to take the extra three years to go to law school. “What about?” he asks.

“I need to talk to you,” Darla says.

“What about,” Rocky asks.

“I’m pregnant,” she says. Darla stands in front of him like she knows he could run away and she’s prepared to stop it, ready to move laterally, like a little linebacker moving to hit the son-of-a-bitch with her bony shoulders.

“So what?” Rocky says, and even though he’s had enough sex in the twelve years since he lost his virginity at age fifteen to know this would happen, he never came up with anything reasonable to say.

“It’s your baby, dipshit,” Darla says, standing steady with her hands on her hips. “I am pregnant with your child, motherfucker.” Darla pauses, pregnant. “We are having a baby.”

“You’re going to need to go ahead and get that thing aborted then.” Rocky assumes the child is his immediately and that him getting Darla pregnant is a viable thing, avoids the banality of asking if it’s his. “No way can we have a kid,” he says. “I’m too young to have a kid.”

“Come on, Rocky,” Darla says. “Nobody likes a jackass.” Rocky doesn’t make much money, but his position is not caused by poverty and prosperity doesn’t cure it. Rocky Denton is simply a jackass and that’s really why nobody likes him, but women fuck him and therein lies the rub.

Rocky avoids eye contact with Darla, instead preferring to look across the park at people playing Frisbee, people emptying cans of beer and gorging on no-good shit. He watches picnics with a boat race background. He swallows, then spits between the slats of the metal trashcan closest to him. “Can’t do it,” he says. He shakes his head in that way that really means no, not just a cursory no; it means fuck no. “There is no way I can have a child right now.”

“Fucker,” Darla says and mashes her foot into the ground as if to show Rocky what she’ll do to his balls by way of the heel of her left foot grinding the cigarette butts and diaper scraps and whatever else into the ground, into the cyclone of dust and rock that is gravel.

“It was just a one-time thing, Darla,” Rocky says, delivering her the truth she has avoided since the night Rocky fertilized her. That night Rocky smelled of cigar smoke, sweet and noxious like a baby, and given his sincere devotion to self-destruction, Rocky drank himself fully fuckfaced and thus fucked Darla, creating the awkward, ever-widening, dilating situation he currently finds himself in. “What do you want me to say?”

Darla craves an explanation like she will grow to crave pickles and ice cream and scraps of cauterized meat picked up from the carpet still slightly furry, collecting hair like the vacuum should. Darla craves the responsibility a grown man should show when confronted with the force of this. She craves the technology of time travel to enable her to go back and intercept herself that night she desired Rocky; she would go in and pull herself out of that situation before it went too far, before birth control failed her.

Rocky cannot conceive an explanation; to him sex is childish, something purely primal the cold world of adult life has yet to terminate in him and to adult responsibility Rocky much prefers immersion in the tightly moist warmth of a woman. Rocky is a man who, as far as he can tell, has been programmed to expel himself as often as possible; his dick has not been getting hard since he was twelve to type memos.

“Then why do it, Rocky?” Darla asks, though she knows he did it for the feeling a man gets the moment the first of his milk flows from the urethra, when the womb siphons from him an abbreviated version of himself: Rocky in goo form, Rocky as DNA. Passing on the genetic code feels good. “Why sleep with me?” she asks. “Why tell me those things? You said I had beautiful eyes,” she says. Darla is pissed, prematurely terminating her calm. Her voice rises. “You said you liked my hair, you fucker.”

Darla gives in to compliments easily, and her hair looks the same today, brown and red with too much gel in her bangs sticking still to her too-long forehead. Her face reddens at Rocky, disguising the soft cream of it, and she wishes Rocky would have come on her satiny cheeks or satiny sheets or in her mouth or in her eye, or anywhere but where he did, and Rocky has no real opinion on her or anyone else’s hairstyle or the miscarried mascara too heavy on her eyelashes and lids.

“After all that whiskey,” Rocky says, “that stuff made all the sense in the world.” He had, indeed, meant to sleep with her, as it was a bonus beyond the blowjob he coerced her into. Her hair had looked nice to him; Rocky is no liar.

“You fuck,” Darla says, because Rocky is a fuck and has acted like a fuck, and even though people want rivers of blood six feet deep and smug liberal irony and arrogance, Rocky is merely a run-of-the-mill male fuck, and Darla fell for it.

Rocky eagles his arms out from his sides, turns up his palms and shrugs. “Hey,” he says. “I’m not perfect.” He imagines imperfection can eradicate his actions, but really what he’s said is a not-good-enough partial-birth of an explanation.

“You’re a motherfucker,” Darla says.

“Then abort,” he says.

“You cannot bully me into this, Rocky Denton,” she says. “I can have this baby with or without you.”

“Go ahead then,” Rocky says, defensive, and knowing that defense wins championships, Rocky hopes to induce in Darla a change of heart. ‘Come to Jesus’, his body says, ready to accept her and the child within her. “Have the baby,” he says. Rocky has talked women into letting him piss on them, so he assumes a pair of pouty lips and some kind words can get the job done here.

“You can’t reverse psychologize me, motherfucker,” Darla says. She kicks gravel at him, and people look to see the carnage of a man trying his hardest to tell a woman what she wants to hear in order for him to get what he wants, but Darla hears only the rush of a speedboat engine sucking water and the cheers of the crowd.

Rocky feigns a violent streak. “But I can push you down a flight of stairs,” he says, loud
enough to turn the head of old Mr. Broward who’s eating a hotdog a few feet away. Rocky sees Mr. Broward’s three-day beard and mustard-stained collar and, as far as Rocky knows, no matter what the old man thinks of the situation at hand, he’s most likely thinking of the loin of a tender boy and the back of that boy’s throat.

Rocky snaps his chin up at Mr. Broward to let him know everything is under control and the old man turns away. Rocky spits in his direction, his saliva irrigating the weeds growing from under the waste of half-smoked cigarettes and candy wrappers.

“You wouldn’t hurt me,” Darla says. “You’re a pussy. A premature ejaculator.”

Rocky considers himself an occasional premature ejaculator; the pressure to take intercourse full-term is consumed by the ecstasy of expulsion. It feels so good to come; he can’t help himself. But he wouldn’t advertise this.

Darla smells frying funnel-cake and frogs’ legs and the sweat of sex on Rocky. He scans the park, slowly turning his head to an old woman whose saggy gray neck could be sexy if applied correctly, he thinks. He looks down at his pants, too tight on his balls, enough to be stylish, but not enough to endanger his sterility, and the comedy of it forces him to laugh.

Darla asks whether Rocky thinks all of this is funny and he simply shakes his head no, and she suggests they can work something out, suggests Rocky be part of the solution.

“I just can’t see that being compatible with sanity,” Rocky says, and he laughs, impressed with his wit. “But,” he says, “as much as I’d love to talk about this now, I should probably go.”

Rocky taps Darla on the shoulder and walks past her. She turns around and follows him. “You can’t leave yet, asshole,” she says. She catches him and squeezes his hand and leads him to an unoccupied picnic table in the grass under a tree. Rocky sits and looks away from Darla, but sits nonetheless. He looks up into the tree where a squirrel cracks nuts, and he thinks a squirrel’s life is the life for him: busting nuts all day. Rocky Denton is so uncomfortable with the idea of being a father he wishes himself a squirrel.

Darla loves her life, not the idea of birthing Rocky’s child. She works as a teacher’s assistant at the grade school just across the river from the park where here she faces an emotional infant contemplating his role in this gulag discussion. Darla helps developmentally disabled children learn, and they eat glue and crayons and defecate unexpectedly. Everyone’s got a retard story in the Midwest and Darla sits in front of hers, and she understands how women fall into his always smiling mouth.

Rocky looks good. He shares his toothbrush with no one, and Rocky takes care of himself though he was lucky enough to be born of good-looking genes. He looks not necessarily muscular, but trim, and his eyes brown with the innocence of a three-legged puppy dog.

Darla fell in lust with Rocky’s hands, rough but clean with perfectly manicured nails. Rocky fingered Darla briefly after she bought him dinner and drinks that night months ago and Darla would have given Rocky a key to her apartment and her ATM pin number if he’d have asked. But Rocky went and dicked it up.

Rocky relaxes at the table and Darla stands facing him. Neither talks. People play tennis in the court near them and boats are racing, crowds cheering, and parentless children congregate throughout the park to sneak a cigarette or cop a feel or to just hang out and swear.

“I need you to say something,” Darla says to Rocky.

Rocky looks to her and smiles. He takes time with his words, speaking politely. “If it were my call,” he says. “I would have the abortion. Go to the clinic,” he says. Rocky whistles and makes a driving motion with his hand like a hand out a car window flying in the wind. “Have the doctor suck it right out.” He pulls his hand back, the bullshit magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat.

“Crass fuck,” Darla says. She has not made up her mind yet, but hopes to at least get a notice from Rocky that she and the fetus within her exist. But to Rocky an unborn child does not constitute a unique existence and neither does Darla because there is very little chance that he will ever again quiver before her vagina and desire heading in.

Darla spits on Rocky and clenches her fists, but Rocky says nothing. He notices Misty Moore coming at the two from across the park drive, from down where the boats load into the water.

Misty wears the same Skittle green skirt Rocky thrusted under earlier and Rocky thinks the sheen on her thighs is part of him that seeped from her cervix. Misty’s thighs rub lightly as she approaches and a couple inches of sexy stomach die as they hit the air, her embryonic belly growing with cellulite while Darla’s still-strong stomach grows slowly with child.

Misty knows that Rocky impregnated Darla because Darla told her. Misty and Darla are friends. Misty drives the short bus that brings Darla’s students to school. The two of them shop together for clothing and makeup though they have disparate tastes. Misty’s face flakes in the heat from the foundation and eye shadow and other chemical stuff she’s applied to cover up her ugly. She conceals her relationship from Darla because Misty and Rocky occasionally fuck, though it would be no surprise to Darla because Misty occasionally fucks a few different men. Her tubes, however, have been double-tied and sealed off in a nautical knot, and given the wet, sloppy, floppy folds of her labia, it’s surprising she’s not called The Sailboat.

Misty touches her sweaty hand to Darla’s shoulder and Rocky wants to leave but thinks only a professional could get out of this situation, someone like Houdini. He stands, and the three of them are all standing. Rocky thinks it bad that Misty and Darla are together now, and even though he knew the two were friends, he thinks he sees something in the sullen eyes of Misty signaling the termination of his affair with her. Rocky senses the vacuum of two pissed-off women pulling him into something he can only fail at, and he his body shakes internally.

Rocky’s fear of responsibility bubbles within his chest, and because he is not a proud man or a man respected even locally, he turns around and walks, staccato speaking. “I have to go,” he says. Rocky thinks that the trick is to believe the story and after a while it becomes true, and reflex makes him continue speaking. “I’ll call you soon,” he says. “I had a really great time.”

Rocky hurries his pace to a speed walk, his knees stiff, his arms the forceps pulling air out of the sky. He breaks his pace only to hustle his balls and push people out of the way. Darla and Misty follow him without speaking, Misty’s breathing drowning out the boats and the families and the lighter fluid hitting hot coals. The two keep pace, catching Rocky entering his car across the parking lot.

Rocky locks the doors and puts the key in the ignition. Misty stands outside the car rapping her costume-jewelry rings against the windshield, frowning, intercepting Rocky before he can leave.

Misty screams profanities at the car, saying motherfucker quite a bit. The rapping and screaming upset Rocky and he raises the volume on the ZZ Top welcoming him to the cockpit of his escape. Rocky keeps extra condoms in the glove box and center console, but he rarely wears them. The women that have sex in this car aren’t too stringent about condom-use, Rocky has found.

Darla blew Rocky a little in the front seat of the car, and he fingered her a bit, but they went into the house before Rocky went inside her with his business and did the business. Darla kicks the silver door panel of the driver’s side and thinks that if she kicks it enough times Rocky will get out, and if Rocky gets out Darla will kick him in the balls.

Rocky knows that Darla will kick him in the balls if he gets out of the car so he shifts the transmission and engages the driving gear. Misty and Darla feel the car in gear and step back, Misty crushing an aluminum can with her high-top sneaker, the kind out of fashion for all women but Misty’s type.

“Ain’t that a fucker,” Misty says.

Rocky drives the car forward and Misty hops backward again, kicking gravel and the crushed soda can into the car’s wake. Darla walks the twenty-five feet to her car, an old Buick her grandparents passed to her when they gave up driving, and Misty stays still, watching Rocky drive out onto the street.

Rocky thinks he is out of trouble as he pulls out of the parking lot onto the melting asphalt of the road. He imagines himself a free man now, cleansed of the whole situation. He feels how he does when leaving women’s houses in the early morning still drunk but having to leave to avoid conversation with the women willing to have him stay the night. He knows his best option is always to drive away; there is no other way home.

Darla’s adrenaline pulses through her and her muscles tighten in hopes of catching Rocky on the road and kicking in his machinery responsible for her pregnancy. Darla buckles her seat belt and drives her car out of the parking lot, following Rocky. She imagines crushing Rocky’s testicles in her hands, splitting them open with her fingernails and the squeeze of her grip is the only way Rocky can come on her anymore. Darla wants Rocky to crash his car, to lay in the hospital, legs spread in traction for nine months, at least.

Rocky ignores his mirrors and does not know Darla is behind him. He slows and stops for a stop sign. Darla drives her car, now traveling twenty miles an hour, into the back of Rocky’s car, plastic cracking and bending, and the cars break. The Buick has no airbag and the seatbelt keeps Darla’s torso secure in the seat while her head snaps forward, her chin rebounding off her chest.

Rocky pisses his pants, warming the crotch area made cool by his car’s air conditioning. Rocky does not handle accidents well, and he sits in the car, in his piss, uninjured, enjoying the feeling of emptying a bladder under pressure. Rocky enjoys a nice piss.

The child within Darla, actually an embryo since it has been only six weeks since conception, succumbs to the forces of the crash. Darla’s stomach hurts from the impact and the adrenaline dissipates within her blood enough for her to achieve the bleary-eyed lucidity of a crisp hangover and realize what has occurred. She disengages her seat belt and drops her forehead, aching already from the smashup, and immune to motherly feelings, Darla obtains ambivalence.

Rocky turns his head and seeing Darla’s car, seeing Darla’s head resting on the wheel, he starts his car and drives away.

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Kurt Mueller earned his MFA from Southern Illinois University and currently teaches at the University of Wisconsin – Marathon County.