Making Mozel

Mozel Nash was so pretty it made Sam Shake sick. She’d been cute even in braces back as a boy-crazy thing in junior high, when Shake (a college sophomore at the time) tutored her in algebra. But now Moze was thirty and intolerably hot -- recently divorced due to infidelity issues (her own) when he’d run into her again the previous spring.

Shake noticed her sandaled foot on the gas pedal as she drove his Jeep. Unlike the rest of her, her toes still belonged to the boy-crazy thing in junior high he remembered, rounded and baby-dimpled under the painted nails.

He’d let Moze drive because he’d been drinking when he got the call to go pick up their friend Warren Meek from the Snohomish County Jail and her car was in the shop. Also, Moze made decent money working at Kush Mart -- the little weed shop about thirty miles or so outside Seattle where Shake had reconnected with her that prior spring -- so she was the one who agreed to put up the money for Warren’s bail.

Moze pierced him with antifreeze-blue eyes which nearly matched the polish on her immature toes, shifting them between him and the road as she drove. She seemed to be able to see him flinching inside. She seemed to know the bewilderment she provoked in Shake and see him anticipating it.

“I can’t believe you would do something like that,” she said to him. “I can’t believe you led those poor girls astray. Using their love for their God and their desire to serve and help lead people to Him to feed your twisted libido.”

“Funny, because I found it to be perfectly in keeping with something I’d do,” he said.

Shake had a feeling about Moze. He, in fact, had several feelings about her, and most of them made it hard to treat her with any sort of detachment. But the one feeling in question hit him low like thunder and made him fantasize about things like keeping the shampoo out of her eyes as he washed her hair in the shower -- things he’d ridicule another man for saying out loud about a woman.

Sometimes the feeling he couldn’t name had him wishing to see her hurt and fragile in some way, so that he could be there to dry her tears and bring her solace. At thirty-five Shake was too old to confuse such a twisted feeling with love, but the desire in his blood was insistent and unreasonable. It outweighed any of the feelings of annoyance she inspired, but that weight kept it from floating to the surface as often as the annoyance too.

Moze’s eyes were blazing with indignation as she fixed on him. “I can’t believe it.”

“I can’t believe you can’t believe it.”

“Listen, anyone whose faith allows polygamy is flawed, but that doesn’t mean the misguided should be taken advantage of,” she said.

He’d just finished telling Moze how he’d seduced a twenty-year-old Mormon missionary girl from Arizona. She and two other young women had wandered to his place one afternoon about a week before, doubtlessly intending to show him the same light which inspired them to leave their families in Arizona, Utah, and California for eighteen months to win religious converts in Washington. He told Moze how he’d invited them in to give it their best shot, and how before it was over he’d shaken their faith at its foundations. He got them stoned and then had them violating their vows while away on mission to not read anything but the Book Of Mormon by sharing the “banquet turds” excerpt from Henry Miller’s Tropic Of Cancer with them.

He let Moze know how Arizona girl was visibly less disturbed than her Utah and California sisters when he asked them if they were all virgins. She was the one who came back alone later in the night to smoke more weed and fuck. He told Moze how they talked between fucks about what it meant to be a spiritual soldier in a world of frauds.

Shake took the last drink from the beer he was drinking when they’d left his place and offered Moze a belated reply to her last admonishment. “I’m pretty sure I set them on a superior path, Moze,” he said. “At least Arizona Mormon girl.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re delusional. We’ll see on the day of The Last Judgment,” she said.

“I’m pretty sure we won’t.”

“Didn’t you bother even remembering her name? I can’t wait to see your face when you find out you’re facing eternal damnation,” said Moze.

“Will you weep for me?” said Shake.

“I’ll be trying not to look too satisfied.”

“Won’t Jesus know you’re trying to hide how much my damnation satisfies you and punish you for it?”

“Shut-up, Shake.”

Shake liked to tell himself he could never fall in love with a Baptist slut like Moze. He’d never met anyone whose passions for both Jesus and cocks were constantly competing and surpassing each other for supremacy.

Moze had been sexually unbridled from fifteen or sixteen, but since her reacquaintance with Shake hadn’t proven to be any more conflicted between her carnal appetites and her simultaneous need to save the souls of the men she banged than she’d been as a teenage girl.

Their five-year age difference meant much less now than it did then, but she still wouldn’t bang him, no matter how much Shake hinted around that his soul needed saving. He suspected perhaps Moze knew that being saved was the last thing on his mind. He also suspected perhaps she’d never fuck a man who knew her as well as Shake knew her. Maybe her ex-husband getting to know her too well was what drove her to cheat on him.

Moze looked at Shake again. “Why do you have to talk with such insolence?”

“I was raised by wolves. Very insolent wolves.”

“Heretic wolves,” she said.

“Heretical wolves,” he corrected.

“Don’t correct me.”

“It was a joke.”

“It’s blasphemy.”

“Oh, please don’t go fuck yourself,” said Shake as he so often did when he tired of sparring with her.

Maybe Moze was as pious a fool as she acted and maybe she wasn’t, but it both bothered and tantalized Shake more than any of her other bothersome and tantalizing traits. That she had such blind, idiotic faith both exasperated and made him secretly crave her, and even though it didn’t take much, she often seemed to push him to antagonize her about it anyway.

“You know, if me being blasphemous makes you look this fuckable, we’re gonna have to find a way to bottle that shit and sell it,” he said.

“Stop it. Don’t make me pull over and pray for you.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

Moze pulled over on the shoulder of the highway. She clasped her fingers and sealed her eyes in prayer.

“You know, I don’t think God meant for prayer to be used to annoy people,” he said.

She answered him without opening her eyes or unclasping her fingers. “Seeing as you don’t even believe in God, I wouldn’t consider you an authority on the subject of prayer.”

“You want to know what I believe in?”

“Shut-up, I’m trying to pray for you.”

“The complete DNA software program is called a genome,” he went on. “In a human, it contains about three billion bases and about 20,000 genes on twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. I believe in my genome, somewhere amongst the intricately woven nucleotide strands and base sequences that sculpt my hair wavy and paint my eyes brown, are instructions to trigger arousal in me whenever you get preachy and cross your arms and narrow your eyes at me.”

“Is that why you go out of your way to piss me off so often?”

“It’s really not that far out of my way. Anyway, your phony disgust only riles me up, so --”

“My disgust isn’t phony.”

“Anyway, this 13.8 billion-year-old universe was 9.6 billion years old when -- out of an infinitely ceaseless molecular fuckfest -- a chemical reaction we call life arose on Earth. And recognizing this, all I meant to say was that the concept of a Judeo-Christian God orchestrating the entire symphony is an explanation that reflects better on man than it does on God.”

“Sounds like typical, heathen jabber gibberish. Cursed with the notion you can rationalize your way around the wages of sin when you can’t,” she said before mouthing some final inaudibility to her Lord and opening her eyes. “You’re just gonna excuse your way into damnation.”

“Better than blundering your way into salvation. Heaven must be overflowing by now with idiots who never met a question they didn’t fear to ask. You sure they’ll have room for you?”

“I’m done talking to you.”

Moze shifting the Jeep back in gear and pulling off caused Shake to notice the seams straining to contain the bursting and bumping glory within one of those thin summer dresses she liked to wear. Any man could see Moze was built for pleasure in seismic doses. Distracted by the screaming seams, Shake narrowly avoided falling into her lap.

“You’re drunk. You’re gonna make us wreck,” she said.

“God will protect us. Or do you have to say a different prayer for that?”

“Please don’t go fuck yourself. And give me that joint out of my bag,” Moze said, pointing the clutch purse at Shake’s feet. “You better not have been stepping all over it.”

Shake reached down and picked up the purse. “Why did you ask if I was stoned if you have pot?” She had asked Shake if he was stoned when she first got in the Jeep, adding, “You look stoned” without waiting for a response. It was her typical idea of a greeting.

“What does my asking if you’re stoned have to do with me having weed or not?”

Shake obliged with her joint and a lighter.

Recreational marijuana having been legal in Washington five full years by 2018, shops had sprung up all over the state. They sprang up in numbers that at least rivaled those of automotive supply store chains, if not those of the many bikini barista stands which were scattered along the streets and backroads.

Many fetching young women -- some in bikinis, others fully clothed -- worked in these tiny barista shacks, but Shake could never picture Moze in one. Not proud Moze, smiling and freezing her demure ass off in winter months for the pleasure of bored creeps who would drive up to order espressos and try to get her cell number from predawn until closing. Doing so would’ve made her hustle as common as the rest, although she was more beyond than above being a bikini clerk in winter.

What set the Kush Mart apart from all the other pot shops in Everett (and some suspected was a tactic they borrowed from the bikini barista stands) was its almost exclusive employment of hot young women as salesclerks. Sure, there were a few hipster dudes behind the counters too, and always a burly male working the door to check I.D.’s., but the rest -- numbering anywhere from five to ten -- were all pretty young treats like Moze. Shake never had any illusions about getting any to eventually peel their panties off for him, no matter how seemingly receptive to his advances they acted, but that didn’t stop him from flirting anyway.

Then came the day he ran into Moze. By no means did she come off as easy prey to Shake, fully without a security system to disarm (which would’ve been worse) but the dance with her differed from what it had been with other Kush girls. He was stoned and had already hitched himself to its rhythm a full measure before realizing this song was unfamiliar. She mirrored his wit with what passed for lightning speed in his condition, and she did it without so much as a flinch or an appeasing giggle. He felt foolish hearing her say “I was too” after he stumbled to assure her he was only kidding about something. He spent some stunned seconds searching her patient face as he explained her brain to her. This was not the same teenage girl to whom he’d tutored math. Her antifreeze eyes were a colder blue now.

“I can’t beat you. I can say nothing that will leave you at a loss for words,” he said. “You must be an Aquarius. Did you ever tell me your birthday?”

At that, she flinched because he was right and said, “No, I never told you. And yes, I am.” And so was he. Finding out her birthday was the day after his on February 17th was an extra gut punch.

The Kush Mart was located in a strip mall two doors down from a day labor dispatcher Shake temped for occasionally in the landscaping offseason. To the left of the Kush Mart was a convenience store that sold beer and the usual convenience store junk, along with weed paraphernalia the Kush Mart didn’t carry itself for whatever reasons. To the right of it stood a tiny Vietnamese restaurant, one of many in Everett that specialized in pho noodle soup. Moze turned Shake onto it that day when they had lunch to get caught up.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” she asked after his first spoonful.

“It’s much better than I remember it being,” he said.

“I thought you said you’d never had it before?”

Shake smiled. He wasn’t talking about the soup.

Their conversations ever since had become less cordial.

Moze hit the joint with what was a luscious pucker to Shake and passed it to him. It was nearly done.

“Did Warren tell you what he got locked up for?” she said.

Shake pulled on the joint and let the smoke fill his lungs before answering in a strained whisper, “Something about getting caught pissing on the tailgate of Bink Sennett’s pickup truck in the parking lot of Bruiser’s Tavern while Bink was inside shooting pool.”

“Why would he piss on the vehicle of a man who’s married to a sheriff’s daughter?” she said.

“How should I know? He was drunk. He was Warren. He was Warren being drunk. He knew his wife wouldn’t spring for his bail so he called me, and I called you because you’re the only one I know with that much cash laying around.”

“What about your baby’s mama, Ruth Ann? She must have some money saved up from all your child support payments over the years,” she said. “How old is Ruth now anyway? Wasn’t she the same age you are now when she had Millicent? That would make her around sixty now, wouldn’t it?”

“She’s forty-five now and was your age when Millie was born if that’s in any way relevant to anything at all.”

“Do you still fuck her?”

“Only when she lets our daughter watch us. Millie’s fifteen now and needs to learn firsthand what it takes to pleasure a man from a woman who’s had forty or so odd years of experience,” said Shake.

“It should concern you that I’m not at all sure you’re joking,” she said.

“And yet it doesn’t.”

Moze looked at him in a way that signaled she had just thought of a way to fuck with him. “Sammy,” she said in a clumsily sexy voice, “if I asked Ruth when she was with you whether you had a long, slender dick, or a wide and stubby one, what would she say?”

“I see you’re done being religious. I’m glad you’re in a more vulgar mood now.”

“I’m not a prude,” said Moze. “I just love my God.”