More than anything else, Stephen Carter wanted to avenge a wrong that had haunted him ail his life ... since they had hooted him out of town. He had acquired a new name, Boy-O, and oh, boy, how he could torture the dames. Ask Jane Cartwright, the impatient divorcee who gave him a lift down the passion pathway. Ask Sam Revere, the druggist who furnished Boy-O's mother with cut-rate medicine. Or Mrs. Jensen ... ask her about Lewis, her son, and Jeanni, her daughter who was known as a successful singer, but was really nothing more than a shameless call girl. Ask Sarah ... who loved nothing better than piling up wanton loads of degradation. Or Jed Crane's trampy red-headed wife, who loved the simple farm life. Then Boy-O discovered love with Jeanni, and was tricked into the fight that led him to his worst shame secret ... the ultimate meeting with his unknown father....
CHAPTER ONE
He stood by the side of the road nonchalantly. The cars passed by him at great speeds along the great highway. Sometimes he watched them approach. In the distance the sun bouncing off their chrome bumpers made them look like great silver stars. And then he would play a game with himself, naming the brand of the car and working his knowledge of the highways to see if he could guess their speed. He crooked his thumb, as if his hand were begging for a ride that the rest of him never would ask for. It might have been his superior attitude about hitchhiking that had kept him standing in the hot sun all morning. Or maybe it was because all the cars that morning had been driven by men.
He stared off in the distance. It was a damn straight road. He could see it draw together in a vee far, far off. When he was a boy he had thought it would be possible to reach that point where the lines meet. He had spent years trying.
A new convertible streaked past him. The brakes slammed on after it had passed, as if the driver had changed his mind after seeing him. It skidded to a stop several feet down the road. The young man walked to the car, slowly as if daring the driver to become impatient and drive off before he reached it.
The woman driving the car was well dressed. He noticed that at first glance. Her clothes were smart, if a little young for her. Aind they were expensive. She might as well have worn the price tag of each article around her neck. Her hair was streaked with hairdresser's blonde and curled pettishly around her face. The corners of her eyes were just beginning to show the strain of opening and closing so many times. Here I am, her appearance proclaimed, forty-but I don't feel it and if you ask me, HI deny it.
Her eyes were a lusterless brown.
The young man leaned, his arms crossed, on the side of the car.
She sighed and smiled at him, then shifted her eyes back on the road. Her thoughts embarrassed her. He was used to that. "What a day. Do you want a lift?" Her voice was a little too gay.
"Maybe," he said slowly. "Where are you going?" He smiled broadly.
"To Chicago."
"That's a long way off."
"Not far enough."
He opened the door and slouched easily in the front seat. It felt good to sit down, to lean his back against the thick leather upholstery and stretch his his legs as much as possible. He almost sighed with relaxation. Almost. He didn't want her to know how great it was to sit down in a fast moving car. Somehow he knew that showing his gratitude would lose him the game.
The car was strictly a luxury job. Leather swam on the dashboard. White leather is only for people who plan to keep their cars only until the next new model hits the racks. It stains too easily for most people. A white dashboard and white seats, but the rug on the floor was bright red. He knew without looking that a fifth of very expensive Scotch was standard glove compartment equipment for this car.
And this woman.
She pushed the gas pedal to the floor and the car roared off to the east. He reached out and flicked on the radio. It was an FM. He switched the dial up and back along the station range, coming finally to the sweet sound of jazz.
"Where are you going?" she asked pleasantly.
"Not as far as Chicago."
"Have you ever been to Chicago?"
"It's a dull town. And ugly. I was there a couple of years ago. It's a real ugly town." He blinked his eyes to rest them. He remembered Chicago all right. What the hell was the name of that chick, his roommate in Chicago? It was getting harder and harder to remember names. He closed his eyes to help him concentrate. It began to come back to him. The cold and the wind and him walking down this empty street in Chicago. Yeah, that street only looked familiar in winter. He'd never be able to recognize it in any other season. His memory led him down that street and into the Victorian palace of an apartment house with the doorman who refused to remember the young man even after it became obvious that he was living there. Then into the elevator and up to the top floor where she lived. Now he remembered.
Her hair was auburn and hung softly down her back, almost to her buttocks. She was long and thin, with neat little pear-shaped breasts and practically no rear at all. Her body had been muscular and when she made love with him, that had always been a battle. Yeah.
He could remember everything about her-everything but her name.
The woman sitting next to him was restlessly searching the radio for another station. She was uncomfortable. What she was thinking had made her very comfortable.
"Turn it off if it bothers you," he suggested.
"There's no decent music on this thing." She turned it off impatiently.
He noticed the ring on her finger. Expensive like the rest of her. It looked as if he had hit an interesting jackpot this trip. Too bad he wouldn't be able to take full advantage of his find.
He looked off to the side of the car, at the scenery repeating itself monotonously. Fields and fields without change. He turned back to her. "What's your name?" he asked, his eyes on her abundant bosom.
"Jane Cartwright, or Mrs. Robert Cartwright. I keep forgetting."
"What?"
"Whether you still use your husband's name if you're not married any more."
"You coming from Reno?"
So that was it. Her problem was due to a newly acquired freedom as well as to the timber line of forty. She was wanting all right, the way she kept glancing nervously at him, never meeting his eyes, looking away as soon as she saw him watching. He looked again at her bosom. A man could lose himself against that. Her waist was so thin it exaggerated the size of her boobs, but he guessed that would change as soon as he got her out of the damned girdle she was obviously wearing. He bet himself that she would try to back down at the last moment. God! When you get to the point where you know exactly what's going to happen before the scene ever begins, you might as well retire to a monastery, he thought. Well, he still liked loving even if that was no longer the surprise that had been when he learned all about that behind his uncle's barn. He liked loving even if that was going to be with a tired old woman like the one beside him.
"Why did you break it up?"
"My marriage?" There was a short silence while she decided whether to commit herself. Then, "None of your business."
He grinned. "That means it was broken up by him. Probably carried on with his secretary, eh?"
She bit her lip nervously. Score a bull's eye he said to himself and laughed out loud. She is wondering how much she should take, he thought. She is trying to decide whether to plunk me right back on the side of the road or whether to pretend that I haven't gotten to her at all. In anticipation of the night.
She'd manage to endure him. Her kind always did. He resisted an impulse to reach out and tweak the end of her breast. He decided that if he touched her, she'd drive the car right up a tree.
The silence that fell between them amused him even more. She's waiting for me to get a new conversation going, he thought. It amused him to play with her. He said nothing.
"And you," she finally. "Where are you going?"
"Back to my home town." he didn't know why he was telling her the truth. "To make the crumbs pay."
He looked at the clock. One o'clock. He was suddenly anxious to get where he was going, do what he had to do, and then clear out for South America or anywhere far away. At the speed this dame was driving he was three hours away from his destination. It could be cut down to two, if he could drive her car. And that last hour was not in the direction of Chicago. That didn't matter. If he played her right, she would drive him all the way. And buy him a meal in the bargain.
"What did they do to you?"
"Plenty." He wanted to get going. He had two scores to settle, two big ones, and a grudge against the whole town a mile wide. "I was the town problem. And my mother was a dirty joke in the bars. She wasn't made to be a tramp. But one mistake and they never let her out of the gutter." He laughed. He hadn't meant to tell her, hadn't meant to tell this foolish middle-aged disaster area on the make. So he had to laugh.
She looked at him again. It was almost embarrassing to look at him. He was too good looking. Not in any pretty boy way either. His features weren't perfect, weren't regular like those of the models in the body building magazines. He had a face that was carved from a rock-granite. He had eyes that were blue not like the sky, but like ice, and glittered calculatingly out of his tanned face. There was a small scar over his eye.
"How long has it been since you've eaten?" She wanted to make him ask for something.
"I don't know. A while."
"Shall we stop and get something to eat?"
He watched her reactions carefully. It was important to earn your meal-ticket, and the kind of control she was working for made the print of her emotions fine and subtle. Desire. That had been there from the beginning. Indignation. Surprise at herself. And shame.
"Will you get into trouble? At home, I mean." She was swinging at him without even thinking, aiming her blows at the only possible vulnerable spot. "Will you get put into jail?"
"I don't plan to machine-gun anybody if that's what you mean. But I'll get them. I'll find out where they hurt and I'll get them good."
A gas station and restaurant stood dully up ahead of them, baking in the sun, smothering in the dust.
"Stop here. I gotta go."
Smiling ruefully, she pulled the car into the lot without comment. He got out and sauntered across the lot to the washroom. She watched him swagger. He carried his manhood like an emblem. Or an advertisement. Stud for hire.
She laughed bitterly. Of course, it would be her luck to pick up the one hitchhiker between Reno and Chicago who had known more women than she had men. More women like her? It was her type of luck.
Luck! It was destiny. She had known as soon as she laid eyes on him that she wanted him for one purpose. And not for company. Well what of it? She had been in Reno for the required time and she had turned down all the offers of all the fake cowboys who lived off panicky divorcees. Why not admit the truth? Why not admit she wanted this hustler? Who was she saving herself for?
Jane Cartwright felt better after she had admitted the truth to herself. She even believed she would be able to let him know that she wasn't afraid to admit what she wanted. And she would let him direct the traffic; he obviously knew how to.
She lit a cigarette and drew deeply on it. She rested her head wearily on the steering wheel, staring down at the red carpeting on the floor of the car. He would make her pay for what she wanted; he would take her for as much as he thought he could get. Well what of that? She was lonely on an empty bed. Besides, in this world, everthing had a price on it. Nothing is for free or for ever.
He opened the door of the car. "C'mon. Buy me a cup of coffee."
"Okay." She got out of the car and walked beside' him. He was twenty or twenty-two years younger than she Was. She ground out her cigarette in the dust. Well, she didn't look forty-five, she told herself, and besides what the hell did she care what other people thought?
The restaurant was done in orange and speckled black Formica with the repulsive taste of chain restaurants. It was virtually empty.
They sat down at the table in the corner. It was the only thing they'd done by mutual consent since they met. There were different reasons though. He went to the rear because the place disgusted him and she, because she wanted to hide in spite of her resolution. It was the first time she had had a chance to examine him closely.
"How did you get that scar?"
"T don't remember. I know the other guy looks worse now and that's enough. When a thing is finished you don't have to remember it any more. Now that's a gas-the end qf something. Two hot dogs and a cup of coffee." He smiled at the waitress, making her blush.
"Coffee," Mrs. Cartwright tried to keep her voice light. "It must be wonderful to live that way, forgetting everything as soon as it happens."
"Not everything. Only the things that are finished." He slouched in his seat. "I'm out of cigarettes," he said.
She opened her purse and threw her pack on the table. She watched him light one. He was graceful, and it was an odd kind of animal grace. He never wasted a motion, but moved only enough to complete the action. His movements were lean and brutal.
"What do you mean, finished?"
"Even." He laughed sharply. "Well, maybe not even, but just so nobody's put anything over on me. Just so I'm ahead."
"It is always. It's you against the world and nobody else. And you've got to see that you always come out ahead if you want to keep your self-respected. Like those lousy crumbs back home. They got to me when I was a kid, and they didn't care. So even though I go where I want, and all, and it's been a lot of years, I can't forget it. The thought of them keeps me awake nights, and it gets in the sunlight on the road. So I don't have a choice. I have got to go hack there and get the score card evened up. Then I won't care; they won't matter." , "And you can forget."
"Yeah. And be free."
"What will you do then?"
"Is that an offer?"
"Will you travel?" He shrugged his shoulders.
His shoulders were broad, she noticed and his chest and his arms were strong. She almost reached out to stroke his hard lean body. Talk, she told herself. Talk. Cover up.
"Aaah-do you travel much?"
"I keep moving. That's important. If I stay in one place too long I don't like it. You know what happens to me?"
She shook her head. His shoulders were broad and his hands were slender with thin tapering fingers. Odd, that he should have such delicate sensitive hands, a stud like him.
"It's funny. I get scared. This creeping frightened feeling goes in and out of my brain." He smiled as he said it. It was as if he grew stronger talking about his weakness. "So when that happens, I move. Quick. And if I can't, I fight. With anybody."
She giggled nervously. "With women?"
He sneered contemptously. "Why not?" What he really meant was "What a stupid thing to say." He shook his head scornfully. She didn't have a chance to redeem herself. His opinion of her was established.
She had to make him like her. "What do you think of me?"
"Oh, for God's sake, let's not start on that too." He got up from the seat. "C'mon let's get back to driving."
"I'm not finished with my coffee." He couldn't push her around like that.
He sat down again. She played with the top button on her dress, fastening and unfastening it. He watched her silently. She can't meet my eyes, he thought. Dumb broad. So she doesn't want to leave yet. Maybe I'll hurry her up.
"I'm getting some cigarettes."
He got up and swaggered to the cashier's desk in the front of the restaurant. The waitress rushed from behind the counter to serve him. Jane Cartwright turned around in her seat to watch him. He was leaning on the desk, smiling and talking intimately to that girl. She reached into the cigar counter and extracted a pack of cigarettes. He didn't pay. He reached out and rested his hand on the girl's shoulder. She giggled shrilly. Jane Cartwright couldn't hear what they were saying but she could imagine. Maybe he's staying here tonight with that little girl.
She got up and walked toward them. When he saw her coming, his grin broadened. She opened her purse and extracted both her wallet and the car keys. She threw them to him and he saluted her in the manner of a bell boy and left the restaurant.
Jane noticed that the pack of cigarettes had been added to her bill. She extracted two bills from her full wallet. Then she looked at the young girl, looked her over carefully. She was pretty in a rather bland way. She probably lived on a nearby farm, and working in the Formica fun house was probably the most glamorous job in town. The little tramp didn't know any more about life than she could learn in a haystack.
The girl fidgeted under Jane's sarcastic scrutiny. It was obvious she had lost her concentration and couldn't figure the change. Her face was red, and her coverup not very good. As she handed the change to the older woman, she said, "You must be very proud of your son."
So that was what he'd told her. And that was his way of staying on top, of teaching her a lesson. Of taking revenge.
She turned on her heels and walked out of the diner.
He was waiting for her, and the grin on his face told her that he liked his victory. She let him stay in the driver's seat, opening the door on the passenger side of the sleek car. As soon as she got in, the car accelerated. It's wheels dug into the gravel and sent-up a cloud of dust as they roared off, faster than the law allowed, down the highway.
They drove for some time in silence. She looked out of her window. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel in time to the pop music on the radio. He concentrated on driving, every bit of his attention focused on the highway. Nothing he did was mechanical. He enjoyed his body too much for that. He enjoyed setting his eyes on the" road, and directing the large powerful car where he wanted it to go. Ten miles back he'd turned off the road to Chicago, and was now bearing south in the direction of his home town.
He wondered idly if the woman sitting next to him had noticed the detour.
One more hour's worth of driving, not even that, and he'd be home. Home. His birthplace, he corrected himself. That had never been his home. Well, he'd come back to his birthplace and wouldn't they all be surprised!
He pulled the car over to the side of the road, and slowed it to a stop. Jane Cartwright turned to look at him inquringly. Her eyes glinting with the confusion of desire and fear. He smiled at her. They were very close now to where he wanted to go and he always paid his debts.
"I'm danged tired of driving," he said carelessly. "Let's get out and stretch our legs."
He watched her seize on his pretense, and go along with that. She stretched in an exaggerated way and said, "So am I. My, we've been driving a long time." She ran her hand coquetishly through her hair. "Do you know where we are?" She was unable to meet his gaze.
So she had noticed when he'd turned off the main route. Noticed and been frightened or too eager to ask him about it. He decided to see how far he could push her.
"On the road to Chicago."
She said nothing.
He surveyed her once again. How many women like her had he known? Hundreds. Attractive and insecure. If she weren't so damn busy trying to give herself away she might have been able to sell what she had for a good price. But they were all running themselves down, the Mrs. Jane Cartwrights of the world always wanting to get kicked around.
That was all right with him. He'd given her what she wanted.
All of that.
That was only fair.
He reached over and flicked the glove compartment open. There it was, just as he'd known it would be. A fifth of very expensive Scotch. Half full.
She looked at him with astonishment. How had he known that? He must have looked through the car while she was in the restaurant talking to that little hussy.
He got out of the car and, cradling the bottle in the crook of his arm, walked to her side of the car. She waited ceremoniously for him to open the door but he just leaned against the hood and waited for her to get out by herself.
"You better bring your pocketbook with you," he said.
"Oh, are we going to walk far?"
"Sure we are, baby. Sure we are."
He pulled the cork from the bottle and gulped down some Scotch. It sang in his stomach. Then he offered the bottle to her.
She smiled a little and accepting it, carefully wiped the mouth of the bottle with a tissue from her purse. Puckering her lips she let a little liquor slide into her mouth. She couldn't help coughing slightly.
There was a path off to the right. It turned quickly into the woods and lost itself from view. The grass was green and the trees were thick with summer foliage. It was a good summer-all the right proportions of wind, sun and rain-and the leaves were dark and shimmering and the good smell of country earth was heavy around them.
He supported her elbow and walked with her. Yes. It was good to be alive, to "be near what was growing with a woman by your side. A woman you didn't know, yet. He cast a sidelong glance at her breasts bobbing along beside him. They were good, full breasts. He wanted to hold them with his hands and squeeze them and touch them with his mouth.
Yeah. The feeling. That feeling that grew and grew until he exploded.
He never tired of that. No matter how often he did that and no matter who he was with, young or old, he liked that. He liked them.
She was talking nervously. He didn't listen to a word she said. He was searching the path, looking for a clearing with soft grass for a blanket. But he enjoyed the husky feminine voice that blended with his thoughts, with his expectations. He liked making love outside. Once he'd loved a tall blonde on the putting green of her private golf course. Yeah, that had been good. On one of the putting greens. He'd never learned to play golf.
He stopped and drank more from the bottle. When that was her turn, she forgot to take her sanitary precautions.
Not a clearing in sight. He scanned the ground beneath them. He didn't want to wait any longer.
Something inside him demanded, throbbed, Nov. And he always obeyed that impulse. He trusted that.
The smile was going from his face. His eyes clouded with desire, as he reached out and rested his arm on her shoulder. He looked at her mouth, then let his eyes drift lower to her breasts. Her breath was coming quick and shallow and her breasts were rising and falling with each gasp.
"Are you tired of walking?"
"Shut up."
"What do you mean talking to me like...."
"Shut up. T don't want to hear that talk any longer."
He grabbed the hair at the base of her neck and tipped her head back. Her mouth opened slightly, and her teeth showed, white and shining. He ran his lips over the outlines of her mouth, against the shining whiteness of her teeth. For a second he poised beside her, just for the space of a quick intake of breath, and then he captured her lips with his.
She pushed him away, panting like a she-goat, "Get away from me," she shrieked. Her breasts were heaving with excitement but she couldn't give up pretending.
He had expected that. He knew what she wanted. His fist flashed across her jaw, throwing her back against a tree. A thin stream of blood gurgled from the edge of her mouth, and her eyes were wide with surprise.
And expectation.
He walked over to her, and reached his hand to the collar of her dress. Her very expensive dress. He ripped the front open and the tear of cloth screamed in the silence. Her breasts were ripe melons, topped with thick nipples. He grabbed one in each hand and squeezed against the soft flesh, watching that spew through the gaps between his fingers, full and rich. He was smiling with that familiar pleasure when he bit at her neck, feeling the flesh between his teeth shiver.
Her nipples were hard against his hands, standing straight and shaking like pencil points. He pinched the ends of them. Her nails were digging at his back, and her body was jumping and flapping.
She was finished pretending.
She couldn't help that. Every part of her body danced against him, begging for him.
He moved his hands lower, ripping the material of her dress away from her body until he could put his hands on the flesh of her waist.
Her knees gave way and she sloped against him. She expected him to fall to the ground with her, but he wasn't ready yet. He was turned on, there was no doubt about that. But he liked to make things last. So he let her slide against his body.
She drew back a little, then her eyes sought his. They were pleading. All he saw of her face was her mouth.
"Kiss me," he said.
She drew back a little. "You stinking...."
He pushed at her. "Shall I give you another taste of your blood?"
He held his fist directly in front of her face. "Or would you like a nice discolored eye to take to Chicago?"
Her eyes glistened with tears and something else besides-excitement. Yes, this was the way she had to have things. She had to be able to think she had been raped; she wanted to be humiliated and forced. That was the whole game with her.
The fear was joking in her eyes as she bent her willing lips to him. She knew what she was doing. She was almost too good.
He shoved her away and watched her fall backward to the grass. Her body was already working against the ground, making a frantic offering to him. He knelt beside her legs. Her hand wouldn't wait. He moved to her, and she began working, groaning.
He closed his eyes and began the familiar tattoo. He worked so hard she cried with pain.
Her cry turned to a constant relentless shriek of pleasure.
"My darling, my darling," she murmured, finally.
He didn't hear her. His mind had turned off and his heart was pumping and swelling. And he knew when she tensed with reply.
Until that final moment when all the world was silent. And her body danced with him. Vibrating.
"My darling, my darling." This time that was a scream of satisfaction. He rolled away onto his back, and lay quietly with closed eyes, listening to his body recover.
"I love you. I love you." Her lips were against his ear and her hands caressed his chest and neck.
He could go with her to Chicago if he wanted. She would set him up for all she was worth, and that was plenty. She would give him whatever he asked for. That might not be toe bad, living the high life with a dame who would be too scared of him to cramp his style much. And she wanted him around.
That was for certain.
He pushed her aside. And reached for the bottle for one last sip of heat.
"I want twenty dollars," he said. "And the car keys."
"What?"
She crawled across the grass to her pocketbook and sat there hugging that to her bosom. "You can't have anything."
"Look, lady, you know I can take whatever I want. I'm only asking to be nice to you. An old broad like you-why the hell else would I give you the works I Hand them over, dollface, and wait till I leave you before starting that tear routine."
She fished through her wallet for a twenty. For a moment he thought he really ought to take more than that. She was carrying five hundred at the very least. He decided against it.
"Please. Don't take the car. How will I get to Chicago if you take the car?"
"I'm going to take the car to give you a chance to think. I'll leave it down the road a mile or two. And while you're walking to it and thinking what a mean louse I am, you keep thinking what I'll do to you if you follow me."
"Uh?" The fear caught in her throat.
"I don't want to see that face of yours again. You hear me, sweetness?" He made his voice harsh. "If you follow me, I will stretch your frame across the highway. You dig?"
She nodded mutely.
He began to walk slowly back down the trail.
"When you follow the road, I suggest you stay on the edge of the wood. Your dress is in lousy shape."
He turned his back on her and walked away. By the time she'd finished moaning, "Don't leave me," over and over he'd forgotten what she looked like.
CHAPTER TWO
Boy-O Carter hooked his thumbs in the hip pockets of his too-tight dungarees. He cocked his head to one side and through half-closed eyes scrutinized the main drag of his home town. "Uh-huh," he said softly. "I knew it wouldn't change."
He set his limber stride going down the street and whistled an accompaniment. He was home, Boy-O Carter, home for a while, hide your daughter, Mother Machree. Women go for Boy-O and he likes that.
Some men can write great books, some men can build great buildings. Boy-O Carter makes the women happy-all the women. He carried no suitcase. Carter roamed the world wide without an extra pair of pants. That's what women are for-to take care of the details.
He sauntered down the street and the women noticed him. They watched him from the corners of their happily married eyes hoping he wouldn't notice them surveying his lean hard body Boy-O noticed all right but he made no sign of recognition. He was used to it.
Young girls giggled nervously when they caught sight of him, not knowing, what it was about the walk of Boy-O Carter that set their blood a-tingle, but wanting, everyone of them, wanting to find out.
Boy-O paused at the only traffic signal in town, at the junction of two highways going nowhere. He slid his hand into his pocket and caressed the twenty that was his whole fortune. For the moment. Across the street was Sam Revere's drug store.
He remembered Sam Revere. He'd carried him around for a long time, that mental portrait of nice upstanding Sam Revere. Revere had seen to it that Mrs. Carter wasted away on cheap medicines because their bill was overdue, and he was too good a businessman to let death come between him and his fifty cent cigars. Well, the world was that way. He had roamed enough to know that the world didn't give a tinker's damn for those who couldn't pay their own way. The world didn't care and neither did Boy-O Carter.
How old was Sam Revere's daughter, Sarah, Boy-O wondered. That crooked Smile plagued the corners of his mouth. Old enough by now, that was certain. Yah, he would go in and have a cup of coffee with twinkly-eyed Sammy. Revere would get all excited to know that Boy-O was back, especially when he found out why.
The drug store had been remodeled since Boy-O had last been there. The smell of aspirins and talcum powder had been traded for cool Formica and help-yourself cosmetic displays.
Boy-O eased his body onto one of the round backless stools at the fountain. '"Coffee," he said, and, "Black."
The seventy-year-old counter boy shuffled off to fetch the fetid black liquid, set on to boil at eight that morning and simmering until now, three o'clock. Boy-O recognized Gus, the fountain boy. Not changed in the thirteen years since Boy-O's uncle had come to take Boy-O away from lonely Swanik's Landing. But Boy-O didn't call out a greeting or acknowledge the pleasantries that Gus tried to exchange with him. There would be time for Gus to remember the Carter family, to remember the tears that had streamed down Boy-O's face that early June morning that (hey had buried his mother, and he, alone, had wept at her grave.
Boy-O Carter, made a man at ten, had been making everyone in sight since.
Boy-O reached into the pocket of his shirt and extracted his last cigarette from the crumpled pack. He hung the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and lit it. Then holding the cigarette in tight lips, his eyes screwed up to narrow slits, he rolled the empty package into a ball and aimed it at the basket at the far end of the fountain. It sailed right in. Boy-O smiled with satisfaction. He liked things to go right. He drew deeply on his cigarette, inhaling with pleasure the strong tobacco smoke and looked around for some sign of good old Sam Revere.
Boy-O realized he would have to lure the pharmacist out from his peppermint laboratory at the rear of the store. He sipped his coffee just a little, then went over to the cigarette counter on the other side of the store. He stood a while at the counter, but no signs of life responded to him. Boy-O didn't like to be thwarted.
"Hey," he shouted angrily. "Cigarettes!"
His eyes were glued to the door of the alcove where Sam Revere mixed his prescriptions. Boy-O heard old Sam climb down off his high druggist's stool, heard the stool being pushed back, out of the way. But it was no old man coming through the doorway. It was no old man walking briskly to the counter.
It was a tall, statuesque babe, whose blonde hair waved around her head like a halo, a sleek well-brushed halo. Boy-O watched her with pleasure. As far as women were concerned he had vision and not even her stiff white sexless smock could hide "those firm high-rising breasts from his gaze. Boy-O Carter smiled his crooked smile. He wished she would turn around so he could professionally assess her rear proportions as well. She had a cat-like walk, a long-legged slinking walk that fluttered even her stiff uniform, and she didn't know it. This was a chick who had definitely not been awakened to her own charms.
Boy-O was pleased. He would enjoy his return to Swanik's Landing.
"Yes, what is it?" Ah, thought Boy-O. The lady didn't like me shouting. Well, she'l! learn to. In time.
He indicated his brand. "A pack of those," he said. He took his time digging in his pocket for his money. Part of Boy-O Carter's charm was based on how irritating he was. It served as a proclamation of his independence: Boy-O Carter would do what he damned well pleased and people could take him or leave him as he was.
"Old Sam Revere," he said casually. "What happened to him?"
"He died last year. Why? What was Sam Revere to you?" She was more interested in Boy-O now. What did a drifter know about....
"What was he to you?" Boy-O like to turn questions around, so that they faced in another direction and bit at somebody's past besides his. Boy-O didn't like to answer questions.
"My father. Sam Revere was my father. So if you have any business with him, you'll have to take it up with me."
"Well," Boy-O said. "Well now. I think I'd like that."
She blushed at the tone of his voice. It was decidedly not business-like.
The silence that fell between them now irritated the efficient Miss Revere as much as it amused Boy-O Carter.
"Well, if you don't wish to state the business you had with my father, I shall go back to my work," she turned away abruptly. What is this, said Boy-O to himself. Am I right? Is the young lady nervous? Maybe Sam Revere got into trouble, maybe trouble with the law. Why else should she be putting up with all the lip I am giving her?
"I want to state my business, all right." Boy-O kept his voice ominously soft. "But not here. Not in a public place."
Her eyes are so blue, thought Boy-O Carter. She is pretending with me now. She doesn't want to commit herself without finding more out. What do you think I want from you, Miss Sarah? Can you guess that I want to undress you? Can you?
"All right," she sighed grievously, the weight of some burden on her shoulders. "Gus, I'm stepping out for a minute. Take care of things will you?"
"Uh-huh, Miss Sarah. Don't you worry." Boy-O could tell Gus was used to visitors like him, and didn't like them, either.
"This way." Miss Sarah, her hands shoved clinically in the front pockets of her white costume led the way out of the back of the store, and down the long alley to County Lane. It all looked familiar to Boy-O. No matter where you go, after you leave the place where you played as a boy, every town, big or small, looks like your home town, he thought. It doesn't even-matter if you hate the place that raised you. They all remind you of it.
The Revere's lived in a big white frame Victorian house, Boy-O remembered. It was set back from the street and practically hid itself behind a hundred green trees. At the end of the alley, if you turned left your eyes would just hit it-the Revere forest.
Miss Sarah turned left at the end of the alley. Boy-O carefully hissed his smile secretly. It was all there. It hadn't changed in thirteen years. But he didn't want Sarah to know he was familiar with the town, or the streets of the town. Not until he found out what had happened to Sam, until he found out what had spoiled his revenge.
They walked up the path to the cool porch of the Revere house. Sarah had been casting sidelong glances at Boy-O all the way. He had pretended not to notice. Boy-O carefully hissed his smile secretly. It was all there.
She motioned him to sit on one of the rocking chairs on the porch. But Boy-O smiled and shook his head. Then he held the screen door open and she silently walked into the house, into the shadowy wicker-furnished living room. She turned to confront him and gasped a little in surprise at the closeness of him.
Sarah Revere realized that she was fighting a battle with this strange man, a mock battle of strength. He had won the first two rounds-she had taken him to her house and into her house and now he was going to try to kiss her.
She looked at his mouth. That was a fine mouth, a strong fine mouth. Her gaze wandered over his face, until their eyes met. His eyes were smiling at her, no, more than that, they were laughing at her. He had won round three, too. He had made her want to be kissed.
Sarah blushed in spite of herself. But she didn't turn away.
She couldn't.
"Now." Her voice, practically a whisper, surprised her. "What exactly is your business with my father?"
Boy-O Carter didn't answer. His flashing eyes smiled at the easiness of this all. Women were so simple to understand and control. Someday he would write a book about them. If he ever stayed in one lousy place long enough. Were all the women in Swanik's Landing as lonely and easy to subdue as Sarah Revere was going to be? he mused. Sarah stood there, waiting for him to gather her up, without even knowing she was waiting Boy-O didn't stop smiling, didn't change his expression one bit. He fastened her gaze with his. Then gently his hands unbuttoned the top button of her thick starched smock.
"No, stop that." Her voice was quivering and the blood, coursing through her body, throbbed in her throat. Boy-O unbuttoned the second button and then the third.
Her hands grabbed at his wrists, making an ineffectual attempt to stop him from undressing her. Oh, she wanted to be naked with him. She held his wrists as Boy-O Carter unfastened the rest of her crisp white buttons.
"My father, what was your business with my father?" Her voice was shaking with fear and anticipation. Sarah shut her eyes. She could not meet his gaze, because she knew that if she let her eyes run loose, she knew they would careen over his body. She didn't know what that was that she was feeling, didn't know what to' expect, but she wanted him. Her arms fell helplessly to her sides.
How could this be true of her? What was he waiting for?
Boy-O didn't answer, but slipped the uniform over her shoulders and watched that slide down her arms to the floor. He unhooked her bra and took that off. Then he stepped back to survey her body. She had a fine body, full in all the right places, and fat and tapered in all the proper ones. And he would be the first to kiss this naked body, he would teach her what life was all about.
He moved closer to her, still not quite touching her and ran his finger lightly down her spine. A tiny frown creased her forehead, a frown of effort-to keep the dream, to keep from pulling him close to her. She wanted to press against him, to be lost with the pleasure of his body.
With the pleasure of her own.
His fingers danced around her ears, her neck. He seemed to be avoiding any real contact with her. This was all a game, teasing her like that. Sarah tried to grasp some of her Swanik's Landing propriety, tried to pull away from him, but her arms didn't push him away. They circled his neck, they pulled his head down to meet her mouth and she moved against his body.
Boy-O laughed with pleasure. He liked to make his women ask for what they wanted, and then give that to them good.
Lightly, provokingly he kissed her neck, her face, urging her on in her demands. She wrestled with his clothing, pulling at his shirt to feel his rugged tanned body against hers without any obstruction whatsoever.
Then, wrapping his hand in her thick golden hair, hr pulled her head back. Her mouth opened slightly and she murmured with, pain. She surged for his lips. She greeted his kiss, lips and fire and wanting him.
She pulled back.
Boy-O smiled again; he had expected that too. That was part of the challenge. He had toyed with her, he had pushed her to demand his body against hers, and now she played with rejecting him. This was a babe who didn't try to back out halfway through.
Boy-O laughed out loud. She was good, she looked good. Good enough to enjoy.
This was not a game to Sarah. She had never felt like this, had never felt her body screaming for another. Love to Sarah was a Saturday night drive down the darkest lane in Swanik's Landing with some frightened kisses at the third bend in the road, and Ben Johnson's soft hesitant caresses. No one had ever made her throb with wanting, wanting something ... what? And this stranger, this mad beautiful young man, was turning her into a shameless tramp, who begged and pleaded and moved against his body.
"Go away," she sobbed. "I'm not like this. I never want to see you again."
He stood there, watching her. His eyes were laughing and he didn't move. Sarah was suddenly embarrassed. The mid-day sun slanting through the parlor shutters slashed ribs of light across her body. She crossed her arms over her full breasts to hide them from his teasing eyes. Still he said nothing. Still he stood there, his mouth curved into a smile that said everything for him.
She knelt, gathering up her clothing and he too knelt. She looked at him, crumpling her white uniform against her breasts, rubbing a little against the starched roughness of the material.
Boy-O moved suddenly. He grabbed the uniform out of her arms and tossed that over his shoulder out of reach. "Go on. Get that."
She paused for a second and then began to move just a little. But he was quicker He moved his'hand to her and pressed.
Sarah gasped and pushed away from him, but she lost her balance and fell backward onto the polished floor. His lips followed his hands, and his teeth, biting and touching and teasing. All that warmth and all that want bounced through her body. She adjusted herself more and more in answer to that desire to help his lips and his teeth and his hands, she let her body go as if she knew, as if she had traveled that road before.
He stopped.
"No, please don't stop, don't stop."
"Don't you want to know my name? Huh, sweetheart?"
Then his face was close to hers and she was kissing him, whispering to him in a language she had never heard, a language that was filled with please and now and sighs as deep as night.
Then sensation was there quickly-ebbing and growing, alternately Sarah gasped with surprise, and then not surprise but anticipation, and sighs and gasps and again crying. "Yes, yes, and yes."
He lay there, on the floor, on his back watching her wander disconsolately about the room, searching for her clothing.
"Get me a cigarette from my shirt pocket, will you, honey?"
She didn't look at him but did as he asked. She drew a cigarette from the pack, and searched his trouser pockets for a match. Then she brought them to him and kneeling beside him offered them to him.
Boy-O smiled. Better start teaching her the score now, he thought, save a lot of trouble later. "No." he said, his hands still resting beneath his head. "You light that for me."
Sarah kept her eyes averted. He was humilating her on purpose. Well, let him. She deserved that. She had never smoked before; her lips clutched the cigarette awkwardly as she brought the match to it with concentration. She coughed a little in surprise at an unexpected intake of smoke. Then she handed the cigarette to him.
Boy-O pulled her to him and kissed her. She moved her lips against his, explored the rim of his mouth. Boy-O pushed her away, and dragged deeply on his cigarette.
"Thanks, hon."
He sat up arid looked around the room. "Yeah, I guess I knew it would look like this."
Sarah got up and began to dress, slowly. Her body had taken on new meaning for her. She didn't feel the same as she had before he, whoever he was, had touched her. "No, don't get dressed yet. I want to look at you."
"Well, I want to get dressed and go back to work. At least in the laboratory I know the names of things and what will happen when I mix the two chemicals together. Besides I don't reallv care what you want."
"Don't you?"
Sarah looked at him. She put her clothes down and stood there before him, naked, desiring him again. "Yes, I care. I care."
"I'm hungry," said Boy-O pulling on his pants. "First you'll cook me a nice hot saucy Swanik's Landing dinner and then I think we'll take a nice hot shower. Together. Then, when the sun goes down and it begins to cool off, you can show me the town." He walked toward her. She opened her arms to receive him and kissed his chest, kissed the rippling muscles in his arms. "You're a good kid," he said. "Now how about some food."
Sarah darted around the rooms, pulling down the shades so that only Boy-O could see her body and not the neighbors. Boy-O watched her sweet breasts bobbing as she rain. She seemed happy. He liked to make people happy. Especially people whose last name was Revere.
Sarah had never been a very good cook. She was inclined to treat the kitchen as if it were a druggist's laboratory. For the first time in her life she was sorry about that; for Boy-O she would have liked to prepare a lavish banquet, to whip up a womanly feast and be complimented for it.
Boy-O never complimented women. Sarah didn't know his name but she sensed that about him. He would accept everything a woman offered him as if it were due him. And indeed it was. So even' woman would outdo herself trying to please him, and never know if she succeeded. Sarah wondered if Boy-O Carter ever stopped smiling. Sarah wondered how she could find out hjs name. She cooked him eggs and ham and toasted his bread and poured his coffee. She wondered if he really had had business with her father.
The phone rang. Boy-O didn't react to it. It was as though he hadn't heard it ring. Sarah thought, watching him. She would learn something else about Boy-O soon-she would learn that no change ever surprised him, no sudden knock at the door would startle him, because at every minute he expected it.
Everything in the world seemed possible to Boy-O Carter-poverty, wealth, sun and rain, change in city or country, change in size or shape, and change of feelings. Nothing ever changed his life, because change was the basis of it.
"Yes, Gus? Oh no I can't now. Tell them I'll fill the prescription first thing in the morning."
Boy-O put down his fork. "No, you won't. You'll go there and do your job now."
Sarah stared at him. Was he always going to surprise her? "On second thought, Gus, I'll be right there." She hung up the phone. "I don't understand. I only said no because you said...."
"But it's not nice to keep people waiting for their medicines," Boy-O-said. He went on eating as if nothing had happened. "Get dressed."
"But, it wasn't an important medicine. I mean I could tell if it was a matter of life and death."
Boy-O didn't answer for a long while. He finished eating while Sarah dressed. They were leaving the house when he said, "Where sickness is concerned, any kind of sickness, it's always a matter of life and death. Even a kid with measles needs to know that he can get his medicine."
He turned and began to walk in the opposite direction from the store.
"Hey." Sarah wished she knew his name so she didn't have to feel she had slept with a stranger. Nothing fit in her life unless she could attach a name to it. He'd sensed that; maybe that was why he hadn't told her.
Boy-O stopped and waited for her to catch up. "Will I see you tonight?"
Boy-O was silent as if pondering the possibility of seeing her again.
"Do you," Sarah began self-consciously, "need any money?" She didn't know why she said that. Perhaps, she thought, I am trying to buy his attention, trying to obligate him to me. Boy-O shook his head.
"I think," he. said slowly, "I think I would Like to explore the town a little I don't know. Maybe I'll see you tonight. Maybe tomorrow. I don't know." You have no hold on me, he was really saying. But saying that gently.
"Well, you'll need a place to sleep." Sarah wanted to hold him, wanted to keep the other women away from him, wanted to make him hers and happy with her. And she would do anything to accomplish that.
Boy-O shrugged and smiled, this time impatiently. He patted her cheek consolingly. "Don't keep those popeyes waiting for their medicine. I'll see you sometime. Don't worry about that." He turned her around and faced her in the direction of the drug store. "Now go on."
Sarah obediently walked away. She was afraid to turn and look back. It seemed to her that if she did, Boy-O would not be there and her whole afternoon and this whole new feeling of her body would be another dream she had acted out in the quiet of her own bedroom.
Boy-O watched her go. Too bad she was Sam's daughter. He almost liked her. But she was her father's daughter. Her wispy golden hair was like her father's. She probably spent hours brushing it, shining it. Her even complexion with a few freckles on the nose was like her father's. And if Sam Revere had had to die before Boy-O Carter could get his revenge, he would just have to take his price from Sam's little girl. There was no helping it, in view of his memory of Revere's face, and his thin moist lips saying, "Sorry sonny, this Will have to do. You already owe me money, more than she'll ever be able to pay." Sam Revere had haunted his mind for too long. He had come a long way to even things up, and he was going to. For his sake. To hell with her.
Boy-O lost himself in thought, but his feet remembered the streets. They took him in the direction of his old home, without even asking his mind if it was interested in a little auld lang syne. The houses got less and less prosperous looking and the shrubbery thinner and less landscaped as the real estate values dropped. Poor folk spend their time working on other's gardens and don't have time to toy with their own weeds. An almost-forgotten accent slipped into Boy-O's reflections.
What had Sam Revere done anyway? That coy old louse. Had he gotten himself mixed up with woman trouble? Not likely. Boy-O laughed lightly to himself. Well, women didn't make the world go round-he would think of that first.
Very well, what else? Cheating on his taxes, that could be it. He'd have liked to cheat uncle Sam out of a little tax, Revere would. What else? It would have to have something to do with drugs and stuff. Two other opportunities danced in Boy-O's head.
Prescriptions. Revere might have liked to do a little doctoring, and he might have known something about that too. Just one or two mistakes, and people would begin to gossip. But what would that have to do with strangers?
Sarah had been taken in, there was no doubt about that. Sam's troubles would have to had something to do with rough trade. Boy-O lit a cigarette and stared at the burning match. It came to Mm. Dope.
That had to be it. Just Sam's speed. Dope. Of course. Swanik's Landing wasn't that far from Chicago and the pushers wouldn't have minded the trip. And a druggist could keep has hands on all the narcotics he wanted-certain kinds anyway. So Revere had helped the junkies. The needle and pop-off to never-never land and everything is fine. And everything gets very expensive and who takes most of the bread? Old Sam Revere.
It was just too good. Boy-O burst out laughing. The thought of all those, poor junkies hooked on their dreamlands was just too funny.
Nothing was too good, was too kind for the daughter of that man.
Boy-O lifted his eyes from the sidewalk to find himself staring at his mother's house. "God! How'd I get here?"
He turned on his heel and headed for another part of town. All of Swanik's Landing is Memory Lane, he thought. I don't need to turn the damned knife in my inwards. Why'd I come back to that house? Walk faster, buddy. Cross back to the right side of town. Where the sitting ducks grow.
As he walked, he planned the ways of his revenge. He was Boy-O Carter full of hate. And the whole town would know it before he was through.
CHAPTER THREE
Boy-O walked through the town, and his eyes were everywhere. He recognized the nice bar where nice boys could take nice girls out for short beers and a dance to the juke box, and Don's Place where the nice boys went after they had taken their nice girls home at a respectable hour. Don's Place where the floor wasn't too clean but the two or three town tramps hung out, and where the nice boys lost their frustrations with the girls they met at Don's.
Swanik's Landing had two of almost everything. It was nice and neat. People were either good or bad, and no gray existed. Except among young men and that was called "sowing wild oats." And laughed about in men's rooms and locker room's and weekly meetings of the Elk's Club.
Boy-O's mother had done things all wrong. She'd fallen in love with the son of the town doctor and that was more than wrong, that was stupid. Because when he'd had his fun he had walked out and Janey Carter with only eighteen years behind her had been finished in Swanik's Landing.
After that, she hadn't been good enough for the good people to hire, no, not even to mop their floors, and the poor folk had had too much pride to pity her. She'd had nerve though. Lots of times Boy-O had thought of her, of how things must have been for her. He didn't understand why she had taken the responsibility for him. Unless it was an odd kind of pride. Like, "I'm not ashamed and I'll stand up for anything I did."
That would have been like her, like his dead mother. That might have been why she didn't ran away from Swanik's Landing and away from all the tiny souls that lived there. Because she wouldn't let them make her dirty.
One thing he'd never been able to understand though was the way his father had backed down. Had acted as if nothing had happened. He didn't care at all about Boy-O, had pretended not to notice that he had a son or a responsibility. Well, that louse would pay too. That was a second score for Boy-O to square.
He walked the streets until the summer sun copped out and the streets went gray. Men passed him on their way home from work. He didn't see them. Women sashayed past him, hoping to catch his eye with their swinging hips, but his eyes were on his past and on the town's past. He gathered to him every piece of gossip his childhood ears had ever heard and mulled it over in his mind, extracting the venom and filing the information. Somehow he would get even with them. Somehow he would make all of them pay.
Soft wind gathered speed somewhere out in the flat farm lands outside town and moved the leaves up and down the prosperous streets. He pretended not to notice and continued his long, lonely pilgrimage.
"Oh me! Oh my heavens!" It was more than an exclamation, it was a cry of dismay. Boy-O turned, jostled from his reverie. "Well now, look what I have done. Look at that mess!"
She was a fat, gray-haired woman, whose face was hidden between grocery bags. She'd been trying to carry three overflowing bags of food and one had slipped from her clutches and spilled onto the ground. Eggs were frying on the sidewalk.
Boy-O took the bags from her hands and set them down, propping them against the base of an old tree. Who' was she? He didn't remember. "Let me help you, ma'am."
"Thank you, young man. I do need some help, I'm afraid. Jed Crane the grocery man offered to drive me home, but I didn't think I needed to put him to the trouble. He's living outside of town now, you know. I guess he's just all excited about getting home every day. Didn't marry a local girl. I hated to take him out of his way."
She didn't stop talking, not when she grunted with bending over, or groaned at the lest eggs or reached out for a rolling orange. She kept up a stream of chatter while she refilled the bag and cleaned off the sidewalk. Boy-O helped her. He. remembered her now.
"Well, now. I think that does it. I don't know why I didn't do the shopping earlier in the day. My children are home on their vacations again and they take a lot of looking after so my whole schedule's off and I spend most of my time trying to catch up with myself. You know how that is, when you always feel late?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Well, I can't imagine anything worse. My husband says to me in the morning. 'Now take it easy, Ethel. No one wants you to run all day.' And every morning I promise him I'll take it easy but I always seem to be behind myself. At least when the children are home. You're new here in town, aren't you?"
"Well, in a manner of speaking."
"In a manner of speaking? What kind of an answer is that?"
"Can I help you home with your groceries. Mrs. Jensen?"
"Why that would be kind of you, young man. What do you mean, in a manner of speaking?"
"I grew up here."
"Let me look at you."
Boy-O turned to face her, a bag of groceries in either arm. She cupped his chin in her free hand and peered into his ice blue eyes.
"Why it's young Carter. Is that who you are?"
"Yes, Mrs. Jensen. It's me all right"
"As I live, and breathe. Why it's been ten years, hasn't it?"
"Thirteen, ma'am."
"That long! It's been that long. Well, welcome home, Stephen. It's good to have you back."
"No one calls me Stephen now, Mrs. Jensen. I go by Boy-O."
"Well, I won't call you that. Why'd you let people call you that in the first place? Boy-O that's not a name, that's ah insult. I always thought so."
"It'll do as well as any other name."
"No, it won't and you don't think so either. You got that name shining shoes and delivering your ma's laundry and it will always mean that to you. It will always be an insult, a way of looking down on you. Isn't that so, Stephen?"
"Not really. When you get used to something like a name, you don't hear it any more."
"Not when you get it that way. I always think a name is an important thing. Somehow, it's a way of thinking of yourself. Now I don't care what you say, I'm going to keep calling you, Stephen."
"Okay. If you want to."
"Are you home to stay, Stephen?"
"This isn't my home. Let's just say that I'm passing through. Nothing definite."
"You're hard, son. You've been alone too long."
"Maybe."
"You know, Stephen, there's something I have been wanting to tell you for all these thirteen years. I think of it every so often. About the way your mother went. So quick and after such a long sickness. Mr. Jensen and I both felt bad that we didn't get a chance to talk with you, Stephen, and let you know that we felt sorry and maybe ease your pain a little. I've thought of that a lot."
"That's all right. Nothing to spend time thinking about."
"No. It was wrong of us. I always felt bad."
"Well, if it makes any difference, I always knew you and Mr. Jensen were kind folk, and I never held it against you that you didn't pay your respects." Boy-O listened to himself falling back into the hick groove of his home town. Mrs. Jensen spoke the dialect of the small town, and she spoke so much that her flavor seeped into Boy-O's own speech. He noticed it with displeasure. But he had always liked the Jensens. Of all the people in that hole of a town, they had been the nicest to him when he'd been a child.
"Will you come to dinner, Stephen?"
"No. I don't think so."
"No? I won't take that for an answer. You know my children are home. Well, I guess they hadn't left when you were here last. But they're home. You know what? Since they have been away I've forgotten how to cook for a family and now that they're 'back I almost always make too much. So you have to come in for dinner. Or they're sure to tease about all those starving Europeans again."
"No, but thank you anyway."
"No anyway about it; come along."
Boy-O followed her. On second thought maybe he could get some information on his father from her, and maybe some confirmation about what he had guessed about Sam Revere.
"Where's everybody?" Mrs. Jensen bellowed as she entered the kitchen. Then turning to Boy-O she said, "I don't know why I bother to ask. I know. Lewis is upstairs with his nose buried in a book and Jeanni is fetching her father from the office. I often wonder if everyone else's children are so predictable."
"Everybody is predictable if you know them." Boy-O hated himself for liking Mrs. Jensen.
"Tell me, what have you been doing with yourself?"
"Nothing much."
"Are you still so angry?"
"At who?"
"At the world."
"That's a waste of time."
"Wasting time has never stopped anybody from hating. I guess you do. I can't say I blame you, but I wish I could make you stop. Shall I tell you something a foolish old woman thinks about living?"
"Sure. I'll be grateful."
"No you won't, but you have decided to humor me. Well, I don't mind. Seeing is a matter of personality. I mean, a person sees what he wants to see. If you want the world to look beautiful, it will and if you want it to look ugly and hate it, it will look ugly. Now what do you think about that?"
"I never think about it that way. You've got to take it as it comes. If it comes rotten, pull out. Split. Change it. Or get even. A man's got those choices."
"Well, think like you have to. I picked some peas from the garden this morning. Shell them for me?"
Boy-O helped her make dinner. He shelled the peas and set the table. He did all the things he hadn't done since his mother died. And in an odd way, he enjoyed it. He liked listening to Mrs. Jensen.
When the front door slammed, Boy-O felt suddenly apprehensive. The family was home. That would be Mr. Jensen and their daughter Jeanni Try as he might, Boy-O could find no memory of Jeanni at all.
She was only a year or two younger than he and built like a dream, slim and boyish with tender button breasts and buttocks that made up for everything. Her hair was soft brown and pulled back sleekly into a bun at the nape of her neck. She was class and looked it. Everything about her shouted class. It was almost too much.
Something was off. Something showed in her eyes. They were a bit too quick, darting around the room, her own living room, in a way that was almost frightened. Jeanni had a secret, Boy-O said to himself. And filed it away in his mind.
Mr. Jensen had hardly aged since Boy-O had last seen him. Still long and lanky, still too tall and thin, his hair a little grayer maybe, but the grin was there and the eyes still attentively twinkling at every joke his wife made. Mrs. Jensen introduced Boy-O to Jeanni and he noticed that her eyes jumped a little. She had heard of him. Maybe Mrs. Jensen had spoken of him in the thirteen years he'd been away. Mr. Jensen shook his hand vigorously and warmly and offered hum a drink before he ate dinner. Boy-O refused. It was what he should do. Nobody drank much in Swanik's Landing, and never before dinner.
"Lewis! Lewis! Dinner's on. Come to table," Mrs. Jensen called at the top of her voice to the second story of the house. No answer. "Jeanni, get your brother, will you?"
Boy-O watched Jeanni as she complied with her mother's request. He saw that she obliged her too readily, that she walked gingerly through the house she'd grown up in. Jeanni has got a hundred dollar secret, he thought to himself and a good hundred dollar body to go with it. Boy-O listened to his boyish body. It wasn't responding in the sure-fire way. For a moment he was almost sorry he'd begun working at Sarah Revere. Life in Swanik's Landing wasn't going to be dull at all.
He turned his eyes to Mrs. Jensen. She was talking again, going on and on about that grocery man, Jed Crane, and his new wife, and his farm, and on and on. He heard footsteps on the stairs at the same time she did. Was he mistaken? Or did he see her shoulders tense slightly. His ice-blue eyes swept across the room to the door.
Lewis Jensen was a parasite. There was damned Ettie doubt about it. Boy-O was almost surprised. If he hadn't seen and felt the tension in the room he might have been caught off guard. Certainly he hadn't expected young Jensen to turn out to be a bum. No wonder the kids weren't at home more. Ma Jensen no wonder she couldn't get through her day. She knew about him too. It showed in the color in her face, and in the frown between Mr. Jensen's deep-set eyes.
He wondered how that had happened to the Jensen's. What had done that? Was that Jeanni's secret?
"Lewis, do you remember Stephen Carter?"
"I don't believe so. Did I know you?"
"Yep. I was two years ahead of you in school."
"I don't know how I could have forgotten." He spoke sarcastically. Boy-O repressed his grimace. He was going to have trouble with Lewis; he could tell by the light in the other boy's eyes. Time to handle that as it came, and it wouldn't be too long coming if he knew trouble makers.
"Lewis, what are you doing now? Your mother tells me that you don't live here in town."
"I'm at the university. But that doesn't make much difference. After school, I won't live in this town either."
"Isn't it funny," Mrs. Jensen picked up the conversation but her voice was too gay. "Chicks always go the other way from their parents. The young people moving into town are the ones who were raised in the cities. Our children all want to go away. I suppose that is the way of the world, but when I was a girl, it wasn't that way. We all wanted to keep our roots."
"Ethel, how about some food, now that everybody is here." Right on cue, Boy-O thought to himself. Mr.
Jensen knows his wife and he knew how to help; when company is to dinner and Lewis is home, the best way to help is to give her an excuse to leave the room.
"I'm sorry, dear. Just be a minute." And she was gone. It was amazing that so much weight could move so fast.
Boy-O felt that he should carry the conversation. Everyone was terribly embarrassed. Everyone but Lewis. He was having a fine time.
"Where will you go, Lewis?"
"New York. That's the only place to be."
"Ever been there?"
The bov shook his head. "Have you?"
"Twice."
"Really?" Jeanni was in the ring now too. Boy-O couldn't help looking at her breasts. "Did you like it?"
"I guess so. It's like every place else. Taller though, but so what?"
"Where else have you been, Stephen?" Mr. Jensen began carving the large roast his wife had carried in from the kitchen.
"All over. This whole country. Mexico. South America for a while."
"Why?" Jeanni's voice was low. Boy-O wished she'd thought up a longer sentence.
"Why not?"
Lewis' strident nasal voice cut through the living room. "Does it have anything to do with being born a scandal?"
The silence was broken only by his mother's embarrassing gasp, "Lewis!"
Lewis defended himself. "I think scandals are boring."
"Only when they're your own." Boy-O kept his voice pleasant. He wished he had never let himself get talked into his dinner. Affection for people always got in the way of things. I deserve whatever I get for liking that old lady, he thought to himself.
"I'm sorry if I offended you "
"You didn't offend me. But tell me why you pretended not to remember me when you came into the room."
"Meeting for the second time is like beginning again. Why not pretend it is the first time and save a lot of uppity small talk about childhood diseases." Lewis was baiting him. Who does he think he is. Boy-O wondered. One more crack like that and I'll sock him into the living room.
"How about you, Jeanni?"
"Jeanne's singing in Chicago. A night club job. Lewis, help yourself to some potatoes. You've got to put some meat on those bones." Mrs. Jensen passed Boy-O the vegetables. "Jeanni and Lewis both want to go into show business. Isn't that odd?"
Boy-O said he didn't think so. And then he said something else. All in all he talked more through dinner than anyone else, but he couldn't stand to see the utter helplessness in Mrs. Jensen's eyes. So he kept the conversation moving and Mr. Jensen helped him. When she cried herself to sleep that night at least the old lady would be able to think she had put one over on Boy-O Carter. And that would make her happier.
Mr. Jensen was so grateful for Boy-O's distraction that he offered him a cigar after dinner, and Mrs. Jensen offered him a bed for the night. Boy-O managed to get out of both.
"I do need a place to .stay, though. Widow Kramer still running her boarding house?"
"Goodness no. She died five years ago. There's a new one though. In the same place and as far as I know, they're never full."
"What about a job, son?"
"Have to find one. Know of any?"
"I can use a good clerk in my office."
"No thanks. I like to work outside. First thing tomorrow I'll look around the farms."
"There's Jed Crane. He fired his handy man last week. Why just today he was telling me that he had so much work to be done on that place that it was doing him in."
"You're fibbing. That's his wife that's doing him in."
"Lewis. Watch your tongue. Stephen, first thing tomorrow I'll take you around and introduce you to Jed. I imagine he's so hard up for a hand that he'll forget to notice how handsome you are and put you to work right away."
"Thanks, ma'am." And thanks, and thanks, and let me out, Boy-O said to himself. He'd had about as much kindness as he could stand for one night.
"Jeanni, drive Stephen over to the rooming house."
"I'll do it, Ma."
"Lewis, I asked Jeanni."
Boy-O was thankful to be spared the drive with Lewis. He had had enough of families for one night and not enough of Jeanni. His appetite for women was returning. He could feel that glowing. She didn't notice, yet. Her whole manner was indifferent. Jeanni had a secret, he reminded himself-she'd notice him. His loyalty to the Jensens didn't matter that much to him.
The family car was a convertible. That was the first thing that was out of character with the older Jensen's.
"This yours?"
"What? The car? Yes, as a matter-of-fact it is. How did you know?"
"Yellow your favorite color?"
"Just because the car is yellow? As a matter-of-fact, no."
He settled back in his seat and looked at the stars. Then turning his' head he looked at her; he was about directly on a line with her small, apple breasts. "It's a nice night," he said. "And a nice view."
She sighed, and made no effort to continue-the conversation. Boy-O was a trifle irked. He was also intrigued. He lit a cigarette and exhaled gratefully in the cool of the night. Never taking his eyes from her face, and holding the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, he laid his hand carelessly and coniidently on her leg. She didn't flinch.
That tells me part of Jeanni's secret, he said to himself.
"Happy?" He kept his voice casual. "Tired." There was no fear showing anywhere. "If I were driving, do you know where I'd go?"
"To a motel."
"No. To the lake. That's always better outside." She pulled her car over to the side of the road. "Look, stud."
"Careful."
She ignored his warning. "Look, stud," repeating the word, she twisted the sound into a curse. He didn't try to stop her this time. "My mother and father are the kindest blindest people in the world, but not me. Not Jeanni. You don't stand a chance with Jeanni, stud. So look around somewhere else, huh?"
She reached for the gear shift, but he was faster then she was. He pulled the key out of the ignition without changing his smile.
"Give me the key."
"What will you give me?"
She opened the car door and tried to leave, but he held his hand on her shoulder. "Shall I tell you about you now, hon?" She wrenched herself from his grasp and' started to walk down the street.
Boy-O didn't know what had happened to him, what it was that made him lose control like that. He jumped from the car and followed her. When he caught up with her he backed her against a tree and held her there until he finished.
"What club do you sing in, Jazzy Jeanni? Do you sing?"
"Club Lido."
"Don't make me laugh. You don't have the style."
She tried to move away again, but still he locked her in his grip. "Be good to me, baby, or I'll find out where you really sing and I'll spell it out on Main Street."
Jeanni's struggling increased; her breasts rubbed against his arm. Boy-O held her tightly against the tree until she exhausted herself. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. "Why do you want me? I loathe you, you cheap crumb."
"Don't call me that."
The smile slipped involuntarily from his lips. She placed one on hers. He mashed his mouth on hers, and slammed his body against her. She didn't struggle.
And she didn't stop smiling. .
His hands pressed her, but she showed no sign of sensation. That was as if she didn't feel his touch.
Boy-O pressed closer to her. The more she ignored his caresses and his kisses the more difficult that became for him to restrain himself. He was afraid he would throw her onto the ground and take her there, in the most frequented part of town, on someone's damned lawn.
He pulled away from her and stood there crouching indecisively, ready to kill her if she made a move. "Can I go now?"
"No!" That was a growl. "You can't go now."
He grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her into the car. Onto the back seat. The worst of that was that she knew how much he wanted her, that she was driving him crazy by pretending to be indifferent.
She let him push her down onto the back seat, let him kiss and caress her breasts and didn't sigh when his teeth bit at her neck.
"God," he muttered under his breath. Every trick he had ever learned he played for her, but still she lay quietly, enduring but not accepting.
His lips tunned to ice and his brain to fire. He was strong. He was ready. He had never had a woman who didn't want him and he was determined to make desire burn this chick.
He pulled her skirt up to her waist and his hands sang along her legs. He was reaching for her pants to rip them off when she suddenly woke up.
She moved against his body. She held him close with arms that pulled his head to hers Warm breath ran against his ear.
"Stop that. Let me...."
Fire and throbbing.
"Stop that," he cried.
But she wouldn't stop. Her breath rushed faster and faster with her efforts and he groaned as his hands tried to disentangle her from him. He pulled at her and pushed her down, and his hands fumbled with his belt and she was at him again. Her teeth played with his ear and her breath enraged his hearing.
Then. Then. The explosion.
She went limp against him and the only motion he felt from her was the movement of her muscles as laughter shook her body. Then she said, "Can I go now?"
He rose from her without looking at her, fumbled his way from the car. He threw her key into the front seat, and walked away.
Behind him he heard the car start. In the street he saw his shadow as her headlights silhouetted his body. The car drew up alongside him.
"Let me drive you to the boarding house."
He kept his eyes on the cement and his feet moving.
"Well, I guess you know where it is. You were born here."
Then she was gone, in a roar of the yellow convertible that caught the light from the street lamps and he was left with the pain in his mind and the exhaust from her car.
Boy-O Carter had roamed the world wide. His good, handsome body had won all the women, all the women that had wanted him.
There were always plenty of those.
So he had never spent any time learning how to woo a woman, or how to make a woman like him. From the time he had been a punk kid, the girls had clustered around Boy-O, fighting over him, feeding him, bidding for him. All he had ever had to do was show them what they wanted and then take their ripe and lovely bodies and embrace them with his. Boy-O Carter had never lost. Until now.
CHAPTER FOUR
Jeannie did not go straight home. She drove her yellow convertible as fast as the wind right down the road and out of Swanik's Landing. It dipped and turned, and soon the air was heavy with the scents of summer trees and grass and countryside. She saw no other car; people went to bed early and rose as early and the only sound beside the roar of her engine was the rushing of a brook that ran somewhere near the quiet lane.
She wasn't thinking of Boy-O Carter. He wasn't on her mind, she told herself. At least, not his man's body or his cocky confidence. Boy-O Carter, she told herself, meant only one thing to her life-he had guessed.
She pulled the car off the side of the road and turned her engine off and sat quietly listening to the air. It was hard, hard to live in her parents' house again. The pressure never let up; neither did the fear.
Fear that they would find out just what she was doing in Chicago.
Every day was a constant effort to keep conversation light and gay, even to throw all their attention in Lewis's direction, so that they wouldn't think to ask her all the silly questions she could never answer. Questions about the Club Lido, about her repertoire of songs or about her boss, or about her salary. She tried to remember all the lies she had told, but the web was three years old and she knew she would have to slip up some time or another.
Chicago.
They had really believed her. Maybe they still did. And that glamorous lie she had thrown at them was only believable if you had spent your whole life in a small town six hours away from the big stinking city.
She lit a cigarette and stared at it, absorbed in the redness of its glow in the dark. Sooner or later they would have to find out what she did in Chicago. Boy-O Carter knew enough. Was he enough of a louse to find out more?
Maybe she would have done better to woo him just to shut him up.
"No." She spoke out loud to the red light of her cigarette. "Let him tell. Let them find out and put an end of this masquerade once and for all. If I'm lucky they'll kick me out of the house and I won't have to lie again. I won't have to go through this again."
When had the lies begum? How soon after she had left home had she started to stop their worrying by all the little lies? And then the big one?
Jeanni Jensen. It's a perfect name for a pop singer. Jean Jensen, a perfect name for a high-class chanteuse in am expensive dinner club like the Lido.
She'd been full of dreams when she arrived in Chicago, kid's dreams and high school dreams and Junior League's determination. The first thing she'd done was get herself a f'ny room that cost more than she had in her pocket. And then she had toured the night clubs, seeking the big bread-winning break.
None of the nice places had even auditioned her.
And even she had had enough sense to keep out of the strip joints. Although looking back she was surprised she'd left that door untouched.
Jeanni had had big plans and big dreams and no experience in going hungry. But that hadn't mattered. It's surprising how fast a person gets used to being hungry.
That's when the lies had started. Letters that had specialized in "I'm fine, folks. Met a man last week who thinks I'm very talented. His name is Tony Craig." She'd just read a name like that in a magazine story, and still thought real people had names that were that perfect. "Tony has connections with the big clubs." Little lies. Hardly worth telling except that they convinced everyone in Swanik's Landing that little Jeanni Jensen's sweet little voice was cut out for the big time. That she was cut out for the big time.
Tony. Tony Craig. She'd met him in her dreams. How many times? Thousands. Well, she had been only eighteen How the hell was she supposed to know the score? It wasn't her fault.
She lit another cigarette from the short end of the first.
When he came along and found her walking the streets again from agency to agency, from club to club, his name hadn't been as glamorous as the one she'd made up to placate her family with. It wasn't Johnny Rocco, or Rocky Johns. It was strictly an ugly name, to go with the short ugly man that sported it. Herman Huston, the man with the connections.
Hermie Huston, the man with the promises.
"You want to get into show business? Kid, you have meet the right man. One thing everybody knows about Hermie Huston, is that he has got friends."
"I've been in Chicago for six months, Mr. Huston, and nothing has happened. I've been to see all the booking agents in town. They're just not interested in new talent."
"Sure they are. But only when it comes recommended. Any of them audition you?"
"No. Only two of them even let me into their offices. Mostly I sit in the anteroom and hope and pray that I'll get on interview. Mostly I don't even get that."
"See, that's the way things are. A hundred girls to listen to, who's going to take the time? I mean, it's like picking a name out of a hat, or the phone directory and asking that alias if it wants a sweet job for a thou a week. Who's going to do that?"
"But that's their job, isn't it? To find new people the public will like?"
"Naw. Their job is to fill the night clubs every night. There are already a million performers with experience who can do that. The thing is, kid, to get an intro."
"How?"
Herman Huston had cleaned his nails with a metal file and the accumulated dust of three weeks fell onto his pin striped lap. Jeanni tried not to watch.
"Leave that to me, kid. Leave it to Hermie."
"Do you think you can do anything for me?"
He had been positive. One thing Jeanni had learned about Hermie was that even when he didn't know what he was talking about, he seemed positive. It was only possible to tell he was bluffing if you learned all the signs, like cleaning his nails-Hermie only cleaned his nails when he was lying. It was a funny way to tell, but infallible. That was why Hermie never played poker with his friends.
At the time she hadn't known that. At the time she knew nothing. So, stupidly, she'd given him her address and phone number and gone home to write all of it in a letter to her mother; and to wait anxiously by the telephone.
Hermie had waited a week before calling. Jeanni had almost given up.
"Listen, kid. I think I got you an entry, as the French call it."
"Mr. Huston, that's wonderful. With who?"
"A big night club owner. Here's the bit. He'll see you tonight. Now I'll be by to pick you up at eight. Look good, kid. Look your best."
Jeanni had spent her last five dollars on a hairdresser and the whole afternoon ironing her only evening gown. When she had finished she looked good; there was no doubting it. Good enough to take to bed, if your taste runs to eighteen-year-old virgins.
"God," Hermie had said. "How old are you, kid?"
Jeanni lied. And Hermie knew it. But he figured if you're old enough to lie you are old enough to take the consequences. Besides, there'd been money offered to him.
The man Hermie had lined up ran a night club. Only that wasn't what the customers called it. Or the cops either. The place always swarmed with cops. They came for their pay-off twice a week and the rest of the time they came to sample the merchandise. The house didn't mind paying the police off, as long as the money went right back into the profits.
Officially the Club Hades was known as a key club. Strictly a membership deal. The men came alone with specifications or they came with a mistress they didn't want their wives to see. Then they wrote the whole thing off on their expense accounts The membership was very select.
That first night Hermie took her to the Hades, Jeanni hadn't believed her eyes. She'd never seen such lush furniture. The cocktail lounge was coated with leopard skin and bright red satin. Every table had its own candlelight. When dinner was over, if the customers wanted privacy they just blew out their candles and no one could tell what everyone's hands were doing. Jeanni had noticed at the time. that there was very little talking in the large room. She didn't find out why until later.
The waiters all looked like Bogart on his bad days or in those movies about prison breaks. All of them were scarred or paralyzed somewhere above the collar but none of them seemed to mind. It was a very close fraternity.
One of them appeared with a message. "He's not ready to see you yet. He says that you should have a drink, but not on the house, Hermie."
"Okay, okay, nobody is asking for a handout. When the boss gets a look at my girl...." Hermie cast a sidelong glance at Jeanni to see if she was listening. She was...."and when he hears her voice, why he'll be sorry he didn't pick up the tab right from the start. This girl is-some songstress."
Jeanni had let her eyes drop demurely to her lap. She was modest. Then. But it hadn't taken her long to learn that men at the Club Hades never look at a girl's face, only at her body, and anything resembling modesty was laughable there.
Herman had bought her a soft drink and ordered a double bourbon for himself. That was like Hermie.
They had sat there for hours. Jeanni's eyes grew accustomed to the dim lighting in the room, but Herman had figured on that and seated her facing the wall. All she'd seen was the leopard skin wallpaper.
"He's waiting."
Another, waiter who had the same face as the first and a voice that announced the same background, led them up a winding golden staircase to a balcony that had one door leading off it.
"Here she is." Hermie led Jeanni into the room. He, tried to manage a swagger for her benefit, but even she could see that he would have rolled a peanut with his nose, if the boss had asked him to. "Well, come in, sister." Hermie pushed her into the center of the room.
It had been the way that Mike Manelli looked her over that had tipped Jeanni off.. It had been his cold black eyes that had told her that she was not in the kind of club her mother would approve of. But running, she sensed instinctively, would get her nowhere.
Manelli had walked around her and his eyes took in every nuance of her body.
"Not had." He'd offered her a cigarette. "How old?"
"Eighteen."
"That's more than I could get out of her, boss." Hermie's voice had pushed that peanut for him. "You really got a way about you. boss."
"Herman tells me that you want to be a singer."
"That's right."
"I've got an opening here, it so happens. Are you any good?"
"I don't know."
"Sing for ma."
"Here? You mean now? Without a piano or anything?"
"Sure. You're a singer. Sing."
Jeanni answered the command in his voice. She was afraid that one of those gangster waiters would come in if she didn't. That was how it had all happened to her. When she could have backed down, she'd been too frightened to try. And when it got to be too late, it hadn't mattered.
She hadn't been in very good old voice. Her first chance to sing for an employer, and fear had shaken her melody and fear had jumped into the lyncs.
She broke off and apologized. "I don't know why I went flat. If I had a piano-"
"Flat? You didn't go flat, sweetheart." Manelli had stood very close to her. "I think you've got a lovely voice." He'd offered her another cigarette. She'd taken it. "Hermie, buy yourself a Scotch. I don't want you around when the little lady and I start discussing contracts."
Herman had vanished.
Manelli had a habit at moments that meant something to those who knew him-he'd run his hand over his thick slick black hair. "Now, Jeanni, T tell you what. I'm going to give you a chance."
"I'm not good enough, I don't think, Mr. Manelli."
"Sure you are. You're fine. You said you were eighteen didn't you?"
"Yes sir."
"Then you're fine."
He'd sat at his desk. "The work is nothing, not hard at all. I think you'll like it. You sing two shows a night to start with. See we have a kind of floor show. And the customers like it to be, you know, varied. I know you aren't actually a polished singer, kid, but experience is all you need. We can give you that. But I don't know why I'm telling you all this. Know what I'm going to do? I'm going to let you start tonight. No sense in wasting a lot of time on descriptions when you'll find out what is expected of you for yourself."
Manelli had come toward her again. Without waiting for an answer he'd taken her by the elbow and led her from the room through a back door that led into a hallway. The corridor was dimly lit, just like the dining room, but the halls weren't papered with anything. These walls hadn't even been painted; they were raw concrete. He'd led her to yet another doorway, but the door was carved wood like the first one. It was reenforced metal. Manelli turned three keys in the triple lock and then knocked twice on a certain part of the door.
And it opened to him.
Jeanni found herself in a small slim room One wall was all curtains and the others were painted black to absorb the light. Manelli cut down on his electric bills.
In front of the curtains stood a microphone, and next to it a table with a control board on it.
"This is it, kid. This is where the singers work from. Now you will see why I didn't try you out with a piano. Cause you wouldn't be working with one. See? Our customers like class, and class is something special. You got to be different to be class. Now what is classier than a lone female voice, a voice streaming out of the darkness with a slow love tune. See?"
Jeanni nodded.
"Okay. Sing." Manelli had seated himself in front of the control board and flicked a few dials. "Any time you are ready, Jeanni."
Jeanni had taken a deep breath, and then she had begun to sing. She'd closed her eyes so that she wouldn't have to look at Manelli and she'd sung softly to herself standing in front of the microphone.
When she'd finished, Manelli had signaled her to pick another song. She had chosen "Melancholy Baby." And then another. And another. For an hour she had stood in front of that microphone in front of those curtains and sung her heart out, before he'd turned off the control panel and conducted her through the locked door way, down the dark corridor and again into his office.
"You've certainly earned yourself a drink, don't you think?"
"I'd like one, thank you."
He poured her a Scotch over ice. Without water.
And she had downed it. She was tired and bewildered but not unhappy. She didn't know what kind of a place she'd wandered into, but she was working. She was singing.
The liquor had had an extraordinary reaction on her. She'd thought she had seen Manelli peel off five one hundred dollar bills for her. He'd waved them in her face.
"This is a little more than your regular salary will be. I mean, you'll only be getting oh, four fifty ordinarily but this is a special bonus for joining up with my staff. Now. Jeanni, I want to give you some advice. I want you to let me ieii Hermie Huston to keep away from you. That guy is a hustler. I know because sometimes I put him to work chiseling for me."
"Do you think he'd take advantage of me?"
"He'd try."
"Then I would be grateful if you would...."
"Get rid of him for you? Okay." Manelli had cupped her chin in his hand. He stared directly into her young face and said, "I like you, kid. We're going to get along just fine. I can tell."
Jeanni had repressed a shudder as she answered him appropriately. Later she found that Manelli had been working her over, had been sinding out just how bad she wanted to work. He'd found out she could be bought. Three years later, when Teanri was older and far wiser, she'd been able to look back and recognize his methods. How else had Manelli gotten to be the boss? She'd liked the money and all of her fears and doubts and suppositions about the special services of Club Hades hadn't been enough to keep her from pocketing the five hundred and not mentioning to her parents in her very, next letter that she finally had a job. Singing.
Things had stayed pretty much the same for a week or two. She'd gotten used to arriving at the club in a taxi, wearing a new dress. A new dress for every night she stood in front of the curtains and sang slow and lovely ballads while Mike Manelli smoked and turned the dials and listened. She relaxed. Singing had become easier and more fluid,' she'd begun to let herself go, to sing and caress the lyrics and her confidence was reinforced. She was good; she had a future.
Jeanni often wondered what was on the other side of that wall of curtains, but she never let on to Manelli. She wondered just who she was singing to. Had she thought she was singing to Manelli alone? Had he made her feel that way?
None of it had made sense but the money was too good to ask questions.
When the dream of Club Hades came to an end, she wasn't surprised. Shock is something different from surprise. It is true she never could have imagined the facts about the club, but somehow she had known inside herself that facts don't count.
She'd sung two or three numbers when Mike had switched the dials off.
"Sweetheart. I think it is time you got to meet your audience and your fans. You may not know it but a lot. of our members are very eager to make your acquaintance."
"All right, Mr. Manelli. "If that's what you want me to do?"
"Yeah. I want you to. Sing me that sultry song, what was it ... heat something."
"Okay, Mr. Manelli."
He sat down at the table again, and his hands twisted the dials that Jeanni had grown familiar with. He looked significantly in her direction and she sang.
Slowly the curtains drew apart and silently crept toward the four corners of the room. Fascinated Jeanni watched them, forgetting for the moment to look at the space they had covered. The velvet curtains had hardly settled in their corners, when she thought to look at the wall.
It was a window.
She was on some kind of platform that extended into a room. She was high above the room, somehow, near the ceiling. It was an odd kind of room, more like an amphitheater, but there were no seats.
At first glance all was activity and movement and she could not make out what was going on. Then that all became clear. The song she was singing died away on her lips, but Manelli didn't seem to mind.
The rows were full of people.
People lying down.
Together.
And they weren't sleeping.
Slowly she began to make divisions between bodies. That wasn't easy. People kept switching. Jeanni moved closer to the window. And Mike Manelli turned another dial, making the sounds of the room below audible to her.
Laughter and sighing and tears. Gasps and groans and curses.
"Oh, give that to me, Harry."
"The blonde. Where's the little blonde I met here last night?"
"Please. Please. Again."
A man lay flat on his back, screaming for a woman and a beautiful brunette materialized out of the darkness and quieted him.
A woman whose breasts were large and naked offered one each to two different men who laughing caught her tips with flashing teeth. She screamed. Bui not with pain.
A young girl knelt before a large, fat man who had no hair on his head and no clothes on his back. Her lips crept along and he laughed with desire. Then he raised her up and sat her on his knees. She screamed But not with desire.
"I got to scream when I love. That's more exciting."
"Oh, kiss me again. Again."
"Yes, yes. yes."
"Where have I seen you before?"
"In the other corner. Earlier." They went on and on. Never stopping. And the cries reached a crescendo that beat on Jeanni's brain.
She couldn't leave and she couldn't stay. And she couldn't look away.
Mike Manelli stood behind her. His hands held her by the shoulders and his mouth whispered close to her. ear. "This is such a sweet little business. Don't you like this?"
She didn't answer. She couldn't.
Mike moved his hands lower, cupping Jeanni's breasts and pinching the ends. They stood taut, quivering. "I make a lot ii people happy. I like to make people happy."
"Close the curtains. Please close the curtains."
"You can walk out. I won't stop you. Leave."
A spotlight came on in the center of the arena. Two attendants carried a straight-backed chair into place and then lost themselves in the audience. A woman walked to the chair. She was blonde and beautiful ... every man's dream. Her breasts were large and pear-shaped and her buttocks a lovely cushion for her to rest on. Some of the men in the audience stepped what they were doing and called out to her. "Shelia. Me, my turn. Remember me, Shelia?"
She smiled at them and with her hands rubbed her voluptuous body all over; she rubbed her breasts, her full pear breasts, together and pinched them. She shifted a little on her chair.
The calls and sounds from the audience doubled. "My turn, Sheila?"
"Let me, Sheila."
Two men rose from separate parts of the room and rushed at the stage, but the attendants materialized from the darkness and shoved them back to their seats. And Sheila continued her lonely rites. She exercised every part of her body while the calls and the anxiety of the onlookers mounted, until she moved on her seat uncontrollably.
"Mr. Manelli. Take me away.': Jeanni rasped.
His hands were his answer. They dropped lower. He kissed the nape of her neck. Jeanni's mouth was dry and she groaned deep in her throat. But she didn't move.
On stage the girl Sheila smiled and then she pursed her lips together and whistled. Everything grew quiet downstairs. Jeanni strained forward to see what they saw, what was out of her line of. vision.
"Look to the right kid. If you want to see all that's going to happen."
Jeanni did.
From a corner of the room, two attendants were leading a hulking man with a dazed, stupid expression on his face. His neck was encircled by a metal collar to which leading chains were attached.
"Hello, Fred. My Fred," Sheila cooed.
She stood and kissed him on his flattened nose. She ruffled the hair behind his ears. Then he sat down.
"Fred. My sweet, sweet Fred. Make me happy. Fred. Make me happy."
The man growled a little. Then he let her lead his head where she wanted that to go. The room grew quiet.
Sheila threw back her head and laughed.
Jeanni turned away from the window. She looked at Mike Manelli. At his mouth. For a moment she poised before him watching him smile. Then she pressed against him and bit his lips. He began to laugh and pushed her down onto the floor.
And taught her. Everything.
Everyone was fine. Fine!
"Club Hades is a big business, kid. We specialize in all kinds of pleasure. For all kinds of people. The biggest wheels in town come here. That's why I never have trouble with the law." Manelli handed her a Scotch. Jeainni drank it down without stopping. It sang in her stomach but the song was nothing compared to the symphony played by her body a few minutes before.
"That room. Can anyone go into that room?"
"Sure. Not everyone wants to. We swing with the customers."
"Mr. Manelli, how did you know I wouldn't run out of that booth screaming. How did you know I'd...."
"Dig that? That's the chance I had to take. You're too expensive as a singer."
Things became clearer. Singing was an art Manelli didn't appreciate. If Jeanni wanted to keep making four hundred a week she would have to learn a different game.
"It's always good to have a sense of rhythm, kid. Your talent will come in handy. T don't mess with any weak sisters here. You stay with me, you get the best. All my girls got class."
She'd hesitated for a moment. A moment was all it took for her to remember the boat ding house and the days without food. "But not in that room. I won't go into that room "
"There ain't nobody who would make you. You ain't ready for that yet anyway. Hell, who do you think I am? Simon Legree? Now listen to me." Mike peeled off her weekly money but added an extra three hundred to the pile. "Get yourself some clothes. Wait a minute, I'd better get a girl to go with you." He picked up the phone. "Find Shelia and send her here. I don't care if she is in the big room. I want her."
Manelli grinned and closed in. "Hey, kiss me, sweetheart." Obediently she reached up and circled his neck with her arms. Her lips had found his. She concentrated on making that a good kiss, an exciting kiss. She was a professional now. She was going to work at her job.
Two years with Manelli had taught Jeanni all that there was to know. She was very successful with the customers, had more requests than she could handle. Once in a while she would sing in the dining room of the Hades and her voice had deepened in the years of her career. It was sultry and low; she made men sweat. She'd gotten everything she'd ever wanted; an apartment so high above the ground she could watch the planes pass, with carpeting so thick it was like walking on your knees; as many clothes as she could fit into her closets and an appetite for caviar. She was the top girl in Hades; Manelli and she got along like pancakes and syrup; and her salary had reached phenomenal proportions. All of it was tax free.
Then her folks had written that they were thinking of coming to hear her sing, and Jeanni had panicked. They had swallowed her web of lies so easily it frightened her. To keep them from going to Lido where she was supposed to be singing, she had returned home for a vacation.
And the simple life had made her guilty. The lies had made her uncomfortable. Every minute threatened her with exposure and now that two-bit stud had guessed.
Jeanni slouched in the seat of her pretty convertible. She pitched her cigarette out of the window and watched it glow itself to death in the road.
Let him tell them, she thought. I'm sick of the whole thing. If they would throw me out, life would be much simpler anyway. Let him tell them.
She started the car, gunning the engine hard and then slamming into first gear. The decision was made for her. Life was going to be much more straight forward.
The sooner she gets back to Chicago, the sooner she would stop feeling cheap. She was what she was. Marriage wasn't for her, and Swanik's Landing was not for her. She was a good pro. What did she care what they thought of her?
As she drove back to town, the wind made tears on her face.
CHAPTER FIVE
Luckily, the Jensen's hadn't waited up and Jeanni was able to get to her room under the eaves on the third floor without an interrogation or a bedtime chat about Lewis. It was all going to be over soon. She was relieved. Probably she would be back in Chicago before the week was run, and all this pressure would disappear and she could be herself again.
Jeanni the pro was who she was, not Jeanni, the blushing soprano of high school graduation. Pretending was a strain, but the jig was nearly up.
Boy-O Carter would do her in. Anyone who believed in his manhood as much as he did was sure to get back at her for having him like that. She smiled, remembering the way his strong lean body had crumpled in disbelief when she had finished him like that. Well, what the hell, that was a degree cum laude from her college.
"Doctorate from Hades," she said to herself and smothered her laughter in her pillow.
But later when the lights were out and she anxiously waited to fall asleep, she thought of him again, and it wasn't that moment of triumph that she remembered. It was the way he had looked when she first saw him. The way he had looked before he saw her and got his ideas. He had been smiling, and his eyes had carried their own light. Boy-O Carter certainly carried an aura around with him, and his hair looked like, he hadn't had time to comb it after bed. There weren't many like him around.
She sighed and watched the moonlight carry on over the ceiling, turning the leaves from the tree outside her window into the faces of everyone she knew, or had known.
Chicago. There was the outline of the North Shore.
And Claudia, there was her face-and her smile-and there in the corner of the room in one of the shadows was her body shimmering. Funny, that she should think of Claudia now.
Jeanni had been working for Manelli for two months or more when he had sprung his first big surprise on her. She had been taught how to dress and how to cater to her customers' desires for a dinner companion or for a willing ear to hear their troubles, for all the fringe benefits that the Club Hades didn't mind offering them, if they were willing to pay the price. Surprisingly, most of them were willing to pay almost anything for what they wanted.
And the way a girl listened to men was a large part of how high-class a price she could get. Bed counted of course, counted a lot and a girl's looks were her living, but the fine touches of her personality lifted her into the thousand a night category, those touches and almost nothing else. Except maybe her ingenuity. That counted too. How many different things she knew and her skill at making them all seem new.
Jeanni had been learning and she was very conscientious about her job. Her initial reservations had been few, and one month on the kind of expense account Manelli provided for his top girls had taken care of whatever regrets were left.
So when he'd called her into his office that day, he'd had a pretty good idea how she would react.
"I've got a date for you, sweetheart."
"Okay, what room number?"
"This is not here in the club. This is a house call."
She'd shrugged. "That's fine too."
"Sure, sure. I knew that would be. Here's the address." He'd handed her an envelope.
She'd opened it. The address had been printed on an index card but there were car keys in the envelope, too. "What are these?"
"Just a little bonus for you, sweetie." He'd lit a cigarette and passed it to her. "If I get a satisfied phone call from that customer I'm sending you to, the car is yours to keep. If I don't, one of the other girls will get their chance."
"Who's the customer? Some monster?"
"You're close. Get going."
"Mike, just how important is it for me to satisfy everybody?"
"Very important sweetheart. Very."
Jeanni had put on her new leopard skim coat and had walked carefully to the door, weighing the possibilities. This might be one of those old types, who had difficulties these days-but she'd had one of those already. This might be someone with habits she'd dreamed of in all those nightmares. Anything was possible.
"Don't worry, Mike. If the car is a nice one, I'll make your customer happy," she said as she opened the door. Then she'd added over her shoulder, "Don't wait up."
The address was in a neighborhood Jeanni wasn't familiar with, but the car was beautiful and a new toy, so she didn't mind driving around in circles. Oddly enough, it was not a high-class street, but one that had seen better days. The brownstones might have been expensive at one time or another but they had about them only an air of faded elegance left and the clotheslines on the fire escapes put the incomes of the natives at a low ebb. Jeanni couldn't understand what a customer of the Hades was doing in a neighborhood like this.
When she saw the house she stopped wondering, but she'd felt less inclined to get out of her new car and risk entering. It was an old Victorian house cut out of a horror movie. It stood alone on a corner lot and was set back from the street a good twenty-five yards or more. All around it was a wrought iron fence. Four turreted towers haunted each corner of the house and the gables were a mixture from other styles of architecture in other centuries. It had fewer windows than walls and the brick was covered with soot.
Tremulously Jeanni passed through the heavy gate that creaked and swung shut of its own accord behind her. She'd advanced slowly up the tree-lined drive, waiting for a witch to fly over her head on a broomstick or at the very least for two or three bats to circle her head. When nothing like that happened to her, she relaxed a little and walked up the front steps to ring the brass doorbell. The doors were carved oak, about twenty feet high and thick as tree trunks.
It was all too much to take. When a butler opened the door, Jeanni knew she'd had it. She wondered if any of Mike's customers were necrophiliacs. If so, he'd have his car back by breakfast.
"Mike wouldn't want me dead," she told herself. "I'm one of his top girls. He wouldn't want me to cop out either."
"I'm expected," she said severely to the butler.
"Yes, of course, miss." The butler was nearly sixty years old and bent in half with twisted aching. "This way."
He led her through a poorly lit hall which held family portraits in oil on both sides. It was a singularly ugly family.
Jeanni sang an unpublished sang under her breath to reinforce her courage. Tentatively she said every foul word in her vocabulary, but repeating them failed to make the hallway less imposing or the portraits less ugly.
She was led into a parlor that was furnished in the style of the turn of the century. It was all very clean and well kept and lived in and all, but that did not alleviate her feeling of walking into a museum or into the past. Ostrich feather cushions and hard-backed chairs, lamps with cut glass and colored shades and a chandelier that was made for candles, Oriental carpets on the floor, and bric-a-brac, antimacassars and distorted looking glasses-it was all too eerie, all too aged, all too frightening.
She'd had it.
Mike could have it.
She turned to go, and saw her client, her pretty feminine client, standing in the doorway, watching her. She was a girl of thirty or so whose brilliant black hair was cropped close and combed like a boy's. She wore Levis and a checkered work shirt and she was slouching against the doorjamb.
"Don't go," she said. "It's easy to get used to my ancestors, and their ancestral acreage. Just ignore k all, and it's rather fun."
"Well, now that I'm not alone, it's not frightening." Would wonders never cease. Jeanni had never imagined that Lesbians would want to hire companions.
Tonight would be a new experience, but she didn't think she'd mind. Especially if that girl was as handsome at close quarters.
"Do you want to drink before dinner?"
"Dinner?"
"Didn't he tell you? You are hired for the night, the whole night. Frankly I'd rather sleep alone than pay for a quickie."
Whoever she was, she had certainly made her peace with the kind of life she liked. Jeanni dug in her bag for a cigarette and watched with the amusement the way the girl leaped across the room to furnish a light.
"What's your name?"
"Butch."
Jeanni laughed.
"You're getting paid. Don't forget that. I don't like to be laughed at." Her voice was controlled, but the fury came through. Jeanni apologized. Butch paced the room. Her strides were wide and boyish. If her breasts had been smaller the masquerade would have been complete. "I want dinner!" She screamed it at the top of her voice. In a moment the door opened, and the butler stuck his head in.
"Did you call, Miss Claudia?"
"Yes, damn it, I called. Where is my dinner, George? Don't you know what time it is?"
"I believe it is eight-thirty, Miss Claudia."
"Well, hell's bells man. That's late, isn't it? Get the food on the table."
Jeanni had all she could do to restrain herself from laughing. Her client was doing a very labored imitation of an English country gentleman, but it wasn't working-she didn't have the age for it, or the build. There was no doubt in Jeanni's mind that half of this dyke's problems came from seeing too many movies.
"I always like to eat on time," she was saying. "A man's-" she looked to see if Jeanni smiled "-a man's got a right to his dinner. Hell's bells."
"Especially after working hard all day." Jeanni would have to pretend that indeed, Miss Claudia Butch was a hard-working businessman.
"Especially you've got a point. Would you care for some sherry? Brandy? Scotch?"
"Scotch will be fine thanks."
"Do you take it neat?"
"Yes."
"That's wrong." She cocked her head and regarded Jeanni through squinted eyes. "Ladies ought to take their Scotch with water. Nothing too strong is good for the feminine digestion."
It was a rebuke. Jeanni gathered that she was to play the shrinking violet all evening. She wondered if she could dredge up a southern accent. She was sure Butch would love one.
Butch gave her her Scotch. Then she lit a cigar, again watching Jeanni carefully for her reaction, but Jeanni was hip. Nothing could surprise her for the rest of the evening anyway. She kept her expression blank. She thought of saying that she loved a man who smoked a cigar, but she decided that would be carrying things too far.
"What do you do, Butch?" Jeanni added, "If you don't mind my asking."
"Not at all. I would have told you anyway. I am a writer of yarns."
"Yarns."
"You know, cowboy and Indian yarns, sea yarns, spy yarns. All that kind of adventure stuff. I specialize in those four types but I'm not averse to doing private eye stuff for a change of pace. I'm pretty popular with the public. Of course I don't make that much. Just enough to support the ancestral acres, here, and pay for some of my-ah-pleasures."
"Well, huh, do you write here at home?"
"Oh sure, I do. I have a wild West room, and a sea room, a Lewis-and-Clark-shooting-the-rapids room, and a Gestapo interrogation room. That's what my stories are famous for-atmosphere."
"I'd love to see them sometime."
"Sorry. I can't give away all of my trade secrets now can I?"
"Oh."
"Well, I mean I can talk about the source of my inspiration but I can't share it. That's one thing that's personal, damn it. I mean if a fellow gives up his inspirations he doesn't have an inch to call his own. Right? Women have got to keep their places."
Jeanni saw by the shift in her client's accent that she was mentally in her wild West room. And so it went all evening. Dinner, which was steak and potatoes, evoked from Batch a string of anecdotes about the settling of Illinois; Jeanni supposed a fish dinner would have made her talk about the capture of Moby Dick. When dessert turned out to be chocolate mousse, Jeanni was deluged with a score of true-to-life escape stories from "The Great War" without being told which war that was supposed to be.
Brandy and cigars were served in the living room. It began to look like she had been hired to be a companion to this strange creature. Frankly that was just as well, Jeanni figured. She couldn't imagine which one of the four personalities Butch would turn on in bed and she didn't think she'd be able to cope whh all of them, even one at a time.
"May I show you the rest of the house?" Butch had relapsed into her English country gentleman routine.
"Please." Jeanni knew that this was the end of act two. The goods were scheduled for delivery. She took a deep breath and accepted the arm Butch offered.
"We won't need you any more, George. Go to bed."
"Yes, Miss Claudia. Thank you."
"Good old George. He came to the family with his father when he was three years old. I haven't been able to pay him a salary for the last five years but he refused to go. So if you're not paying a man how can you call him down for not calling you by your chosen name? It's annoying, if you know what I mean." Butch led the way into the hall, reciting an anecdote about each portraited ancestor as she led Jeanni to the staircase. The last portrait was of a youngish man, who was very thin and frail looking. His eyes were set close together and his lips were full. Nothing in his face had any strength at all, Jeanni thought to herself.
She stopped Butch, interested to know who he was.
"That's my brother, Isaac, the last male in our family. Dear Ikey. He wanted so bad to have his portrait done and that was before I started selling my stuff and we couldn't afford it. So I painted it for him. That's why it's such a bad painting. I didn't capture him at all-he was much handsomer than that. But oh, what a time he had sitting for it. He'd deck himself out in all his favorite clothes, see. Notice how his waistcoat is checked and his tie polka-dotted? That's not because he didn't know that polka dots and checks don't look good together. Ike had much more clothes sense than most people. No! That happened because he wanted to be immortalized in all his favorite things. We'd sit there for hours, me and him. Me in my painting costume painting away, and him on that old chair, not moving a hair, except for his mouth when he talked. Oh, we had a fine time. Too bad there's not anybody around to do my portrait."
"What would you wear if you could have one done?"
"I don't know. To be fair I'd have to wear a piece of everything. You know maybe it'd be fun. I could wear a coonskin hat for the explorer, and my boots for the wild West, and a pea jacket for the sea yarns and a monocle for the spy stuff. It might be fun at that. Do you think George would mind doing it?"
"If he did, you could bring a painter in from outside."
"No, I don't take to most outsiders."
"You took to me."
"Uh," she blushed. "Yes, I guess I did." Suddenly she whirled on Jeanni, "Hey, do you paint?"
"I'm afraid not."
"Shucks. That's too bad. Well, it doesn't matter. My will says the place should be burned down and the real estate given to the city. But the place and everything in it has got to be burned. It is a condition in the will. Got to be. So, when I go up, everything I love will burn too."
She waved her arms around in the air as she said this, and her excitement grew. "That's the way to do. Take everything with you. Nothing left. Not of your life, not of your heritage. That's the way to go all right. That's the clean way."
Jeanni watched her arms flailing the air. There was-she had to be mistaken-it looked like Butch was wearing a wedding ring.
"Butch."
"Yes?"
"Are you married?"
"Not any more. Was once. To my brother. It was his last wish before he died, so George got dressed up in a minister's costume and performed the ceremony. It didn't mean anything of course. He died right after. But it made him die happy, I guess. So I have kept on wearing this ring as a sign of respect. Isaac and I were real close."
Jeanni suppressed a desire to run out the door.
"This here is the master bedroom. Where I sleep."
Jeanni walked into the room. It was dark, lit only by a single lamp beside a mammoth bed. That must have been a triple bed. She didn't know what was expected of her. She supposed the first thing was to take off her clothes. She supposed she had better let "Tex" take the move first.
"Butch, this is all rather new to me."
"I know it is. I asked for a new one. You know, until I find one I like and want to keep on a regular basis, I don't want any hardened woman. You see, in my book, you're a virgin."
"Well, what do you want me to do first?"
"First I watch you get undressed." Butch clamped a cigar between her teeth, and sat on the bed leaning against the headboard. Her legs were crossed.
Jeanni turned to her and unbuttoned her dinner jacket.
"Whoopee! Whoop-whoop-whoopee!" Butch laughed and clapped her hands. "Oh, yeah, take that off. Yeah! Yeah!"
Jeanni couldn't believe her ears. For a moment she stopped and simply stared at this odd girl.
"What's the matter? Go on, go on. Get to the zipper.
It was obvious that the only way to live through the experience was to get into the spirit of things. Jeanni began to hum a song she imagined strippers would dance to. And struggling with the zipper on the back of her dress, she wiggled her haps in time to her singing. If she lived through this, she deserved the car Manelli had given her. "Whooppee!"
The clapping and shouting continued until she got down to her skin. Then suddenly, Butch was quiet. A minute passed in silence. Then the girl emitted a low whistle and said. "Ho, yeah! Most certainly yeah."
"What happens now, Butch?"
"Now you take a bath. And I'll wash you. All over."
Jeanni smiled. The fun and games were over. Butch "Tex" Claudia was turned on.
She walked up behind Jeanni and bent her lips to the back of Jeanni's neck. Jeanni shivered a little. Her touch was so light and so gently. "Through that door," she whispered. "Turn the water on and get in. I'll only be a minute."
Jeanni went into the room. It was as large as all the other rooms in the house. And the bathtub was at least twice the normal size. She hoped the tub was comfortable; she expected she'd be spending most of the night there. The water ran hot almost at once. She filled the bath almost to the top and stepped in.
"Ah, this is the way to spend an evening," she murmured to herself, feeling all her muscles yield, feeling all her tension dissolve with the warmth of the water.
Butch was standing' over her again. "You are beautiful," she said quietly. "Really, really beautiful."
She limberly climbed into the tub beside her, leaning slightly over her. Slowly smiled.
Jeanni was on comfortable ground. She supposed she knew what to do now. That would become a matter of routine.
"Kiss me Butch."
"Not yet. There's time for that later. Later." Butch let her leg lean against Jeanni's lightly. That felt so funny under water, so light and yet, in a way so tempting.
"Talk to me, Jeanni. Tell me about yourself. While I wash your body, your pretty, pretty body."
"There's not much to tell." Jeanni watched the girl lather her hands with soap. She forced herself to keep talking. "I come from a town not terribly far from here." Butch's hands moved slowly toward her shoulders. Jeanni didn't know why she couldn't think of anything to say, couldn't think why she was waiting, almost holding her breath waiting to be touched. "Nothing too much to tell, really. Normal childhood and-ah!" Her mouth was dry as Butch laid her hands lightly on her shoulders and rubbed gently with the scent soap leaving soft white tracks on her flesh. Lightly as Butch ran her hands over her, that felt to Jeanni as if hot coals were raking her. Jeanni's neck and shoulders, and as lightly as she touched
"Tell me about the boys you loved back home," Butch prompted.
Jeanni watched the other girl's eyes devour her body. She looked down at herself, saw how the water made her breasts large and how the light made the water glitter over her body. "Go on, tell me. About your boy friends."
"One was named Johnnie," she heard herself begin. "I bet he was a football player," Butch murmured, catching Jeanni's hand and kissing her on the palm. "Yes he was."
"Describe him to me, tell me what he did for you."
"He was big. He had broad shoulders and his hands were rough with work."
"Did he touch you-here?" Butch laid her hands on Jeanni's bosom and stroked softly. "What did that feel like?"
"That felt good." Jeanni swallowed. Without knowing what she wanted, she raised her body toward Butch's and begged with her mouth for her kiss. The girl caught her in her arms and whispered to her ear. "Tell me. Tell me more."
"He would try to undress me, but I didn't want to let him. Oh, please...."
Butch sent her lips around-the other girl's ear and her breath raced warm in Jeanni's hearing. Lips kissed their way down Jeanni's throat and her pulse pounder' her temples. She swallowed roughly and forced herself to go on talking.
About the men she'd known.
"He would pull my clothes off, even though I would ... I-I...." Lips dancing across her, moving like a hundred fingers across every inch of her. "Even though T begged him, his mouth was hard and he would kiss me, kiss and his lips...."
Lips, a thousand pairs of lips on her, on her legs, on her ripe breasts, lips and hands.
"And he wanted, he tried, he-he...."
Butch threw herself against the other girl and Jeanni groaned and moved against the pressure. Then Butch lay down and the sensations of breasts rubbing against hers sent Jeanni's mouth and hands working.
Their lips met and roughly pressed and moved against each other. Butch caught Jeanni's lower lip with her teeth and bit down; Jeanni's kiss moved to the other girl's throat and then to her shoulder, biting with desire as they worked with each other.
Then that was all hands on her, under the warm water, and more as the pounding in her ears multiplied.
Jeanni raised her body out of the water and pulled Butch to her knees too. She pressed against the other girl and, leaning against the tiled wall, explored with her hands a familiar body.
Butch laughed hoarsely and stopped her talking with her mouth. Until the mounting tension burst into a thousand quivering sensations and Jeanni screamed with that, and bound her body closer to the other girl's.
Butch lit a cigar and settled down on the bed. Her bright wrapper caught the light from the' only lamp in the room and sent that back flowing into Jeanni's eyes. She exhaled a great quantity of smoke through circled lips and said, "You I think I'll keep on a regular basis."
Jeanni smiled. She found herself reaching out to smooth the other girl's glistening hair. "Funny, somehow I feel like I ought to pay you."
Butch burst into laughter. "That's a good one. That's real good. Oh, yeah!"
Jeanni leaned forward and caught the other girl in her arms. She leaned her head alongside hers and kissed her throat playfully. "Don't you want money?"
"I want everything," Butch growled. "And I'm going to get that too." She pushed Jeanni down onto the bed and said, "You're mine for eight more hours and you ain't about to sleep any on my time."
"Are you going to work me, cowboy?"
"Yes, ma'am. On a regular basis."
CHAPTER SIX
BOY-O banged on the door to Sam Revere's house. "Hey," he shouted at the top of his voice. "Hey, Sarah, sweetheart, open up." He noticed with satisfaction that not only did a light go on in the second story of the Revere house but on the second stories of the two adjoining houses as well. They'd all be listening to what went on, every ear perked to catch a breath of scandal. And he would give it to them.
Jeanni had left him in a mood to start wrecking; things. He had a thousand scores to settle, and he might as well begin.
"What do you want? Who do you think you are, coming here at this time of night?" Sarah stood at the front door in a wrapper of some kind. She'd opened the door a crack, just enough to poke half of her face through, and call him down.
"Don't you remember who I am? Uh, Sarah baby? Don't you remember?"
"Of course I remember. But do you have to let all the neighbors in on it too?"
She noticed their audience as well as he had.
Lesson number two had just begun.
"My chicks don't care about their neighbor's opinions. Neighbors are a bunch of...."
"Shh! They'll hear you."
"Good. I hope they do." Then he turned around and shouted in the direction of one lighted window. "Turn off your lights and go back to sleep you nosey crumbs! Give us some privacy for God's sake."
Sarah came out on the porch and tugged on his shirt sleeve. "Please! Please!"
He whirled around and caught her in his arms. "Give me a little kiss, Sarah sweetie. I came back to tell you what my name is."
She pulled away from his embrace, and ran for the door to the house, but he followed her and pushed her aside. "Thanks, I think I will come in."
He walked directly into the front room and settled into the large cane rocker that had obviously been her adorable father's favorite chair. He could tell that by the way it was placed in the room. In Swatnik's Landing the man's armchair was always the most prominent chair in the room. It was a way of announcing the importance of the father and husband-a pretty corny way, but their way nonetheless.
"What do you want? How dare you come here this late at night and raise such hell! T have to live in this town."
"So you do. But I thought you'd be glad to see me. And you are, aren't you. Take your robe off, honey. I want to look at your pretty boobs."
"Look. What happened this afternoon was all a mistake. I don't know what hit me. I've never acted like that before in my whole life. And I never will again." She said the words as if she were reciting an assigned poem in grammar school. Boy-O could tell that she didn't mean a word of that.
"You've seen too many movies, baby."
He got out of his chair and walked toward her slowly with that leering smile on his lips, and the cocky swagger back in his walk. She backed away from him and her admission was in her eyes. "Are you frightened?" he said.
"Yes. You frighten me." Her voice trembled. "And I frighten me. I don't know what's happened to me."
Boy-O was close to her now. She stood in front of him with her arms crossed over her bosom, not knowing whether to run toward him or away from him.
"Don't you want to know my name?"
"Yes. Of course I do."
"It's Carter. Boy-O Carter."
For a moment she frowned. "But I seem to remember that name. We haven't met before, have we?" .
"Uh-huh. We've met." He placed his hands around her back and then grabbed her lovely rear. He pulled her to him, almost lifting, her off the ground as he did.
"Was that through my father? No, if I'd met you that recent-stop that. Please stop that." She pulled her head away from his lips and felt them coolly on her neck instead. A shiver rattled her spine. She wanted to move out of his arms at the same time as she wanted to move closer. His hand teased the bottom of her spine.
Then abruptly he pushed her away from him. "I don't know what I am bothering with you for. I've already had a woman tonight." The lie tasted bitter on his lips. That brought back the scene he had consciously forgotten walking over to Sarah's. That brought Jeanni back to the front of his mind.
He paced the room irritably, waiting for her to make a move in his direction, waiting for her to try to throw him out. Boy-O had decided that he was at Sarah's to stay. That would be a nice scandal to set old Sam revolving in his grave. "It's a pretty funny thing that you don't remember me. I remember you. When I was a kid, my mother did your washing, and I became very familiar with every piece of your clothing. I used to dig looking for your underwear. That was a kind of revenge you know. At school, all the kids would either razz me or snub me, but I was better than them. I had something on them. I knew their panties intimately." He howled with laughter. "I'd walk up to the minister's daughter, see. When she'd dig me coming at her, she'd turn her sweet little back on the town scandal and throw her tiny nose as high in the air as her hairline. But I'd keep going, you know. And then I'd whisper to her snobbish little ear, 'What ones do you have on today, Mary Lou, pink or baby blue?' That little crud would go purple. I tell you that worked every time"
"Now I remember you, of course. Your mother was Janey Carter. Everyone said that you...."
"If you'd listen to what I say, I would have just answered that nasty little question for you." He was angry now. It felt good to be angry at something familiar. He danced closer to Sarah and the look on his face threatened her more than his body did. "Tell me, Sarah, now that you place me do you happen to remember how my mother died?"
"No. But she was sick for a long time wasn't she?"
"Yeah. It was a long slow, painful death my mother died. Of course your father made that as hard as he could."
"My father?"
"Yeah, he gave her the cheapest medicines in his store, damn him. Because he knew she didn't have any money and that she wouldn't live much longer anyway. That was your father, sweetie. The kindest bloody grave digger in the world."
Boy-O watched her shrug. "I know. He was a louse." She caught the surprised expression on his face and almost smiled at it. For once she had won a victory over him. "I don't care about anything you can tell me about him, not anything. I know that he did worse things."
"You mean his dope ring?"
"How did you find out about that?"
"I heard from a couple of fellows."
"Well, he ran a very profitable little business until the police began to suspect. him. When things got too hot he killed himself. Just stuck the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The room was a mess." She ran her hand through her hair absent-mindedly. Then as if waking up, she looked at Boy-O and said, "But you told me you had business with my father. What could you possibly have meant by that?"
"I came again to this hole to get him."
"You mean to pay him back?"
"Better than that. To pay him double."
Sarah yawned. "Do you want some coffee?"
Boy-O shrugged.
She led the way into the kitchen, talking and yawning over her shoulder. "Well, I still don't see how that-oh, wait a minute, yes I do. That's why you made such a racket out there. You decided to substitute me for him. T see." She searched his face for an answer, but Boy-O kept it expressionless. "You decided to ruin my reputation. Well, that's already ruined."
"Reputation was only part of it, baby." Boy-O watched her face. The best part of revenge was making the other person know about it and watching them suffer with it. "I'm going to give you an appetite for me, Sarah. I'm going to make you want me so much and so often you'll do or say anything for me." He laughed. "That won't be difficult. Look at you, you can hardly stand up with your thoughts. And your eyes. Do you have a hard time keeping them off me, baby?"
Sarah turned away from him and leaned against the sink. She ran some cool water over her wrists and pressed some drops to her overheated forehead. He shocked her. The worst of that was that he was right. She did want him, and bad. He could probably do anything he wanted with her, and she'd probably like that.
"And you will be happy," she murmured, "if you ruin what's left of my life?"
"I'll make you happy, dollface. For a while."
"I'm engaged, you know."
"You'll break that off if he doesn't. But he will. You righteous women make me sick. Come here to daddy, Sarah sweetheart."
She looked at him standing in front of her. For a moment she thought of fighting him, or screaming and waking the neighbors and having Mm run out of town. For a moment she imagined him beaten up by upstanding neighbors or at least in jail. And she thought next of how she would spend her night if he left. Alone on that bed of hers, and uncomfortable on the cool sheets and nowhere and no one to turn to for satisfaction. Unless she sent for her fiance. The thought of Ben Johnson made her shudder. Boy-O was different. Boy-O was strong and lean and his kiss could do tMngs for her that she had never even suspected.
"This afternoon I thought I'd never see you again," she said as she walked across the room to him.
"You're going to see a lot of me. I'm going to live here." He smiled and then he shoved his hand against her. He laughed at the dismay and the pleasure on her face.
"Kiss me, baby."
The next morning Boy-O decided to see Jed Crane on his own. He wanted to avoid any contact with the Jensens, wanted to avoid seeing Jeanni and accepting favors. He needed to make some money, and buy himself a suit to wear to the city. He'd decided to make it to a city after finishing his business in Swanik's Landing, but he didn't know which one. It didn't matter really. He would decide that when he set his feet on the highway and his thumb waved in the air.
At eleven A.M. he sauntered into Crane's grocery store.
"Cigarettes," he said, and slapped his money on the counter.
Jed Crane was a stringbean of a man. He looked Boy-O over suspiciously.
"You new here?"
"Name's Carter. Boy-O Carter."
"No fooling. You ain't the little kid belonged to Janey Carter, are you?"
"Uh-huH."
"And are you the one who's taking over Revere's house?"
"Uh-huh."
"No fooling."
"I heard you need a man on your farm."
"And how I do. The barn roof is leaking and the shutters are falling off their hinges, and if I decide to get myself some cows or something, I need to put up fences. T had a man to do all that but he spent all of his time ... well, never mind about that. You won't do neither."
"Why?"
"'Cause you won't and that's all. Why do I have to explain myself when I'm the one who's hiring?"
"Is that on account of your new wife?" Boy-O spat into the pickle barrel and watched to see if Jed Crane would say anything about it. Crane spat in that direction himself.
"Has nothing to do with my wife."
"Oh. Well, I was going to say that Sarah Revere keeps me so busy in that department that I'm looking for farm work to do a little exercise. How's a man supposed to keep in shape with a woman like Sarah on his neck?"
"She wear you out?"
"Keeps me up all night. Always whispering 'please honey' at my ear. I take care of her just to shut her up."
"No fooling. Well, then, Boy-O, I think you're the man for me. Wages are forty a week."
"Won't do it under seventy-five. That was your wife you were thinking of, eh? She must be a good one."
"Don't you mouth about my wife. Say anything about that Revere girl that you want but keep your mouth shut about my wife."
Boy-O smiled. All at once he understood about Crane and his problem. His wife must be one of those women who would be friendly with any man but that wasn't what upset Jed. That wasn't the action he minded, but the gossip. Boy-O smiled and lit himself a cigarette. He got directions from Jed and an advance on his first week's salary and then left the store.
If his first wonderful days in town were any indication, Swanik's Landing was riddled with worn-out men and hungry, hungry, women.
He'd have to walk to Crane's farm. Four miles. That would mean he'd be there about one, and that he'd only have three hours or so to spend looking over the situation before Crane started to close up the store and head home. Well, three hours was plenty of time. Tomorrow he'd start work.
The road out of town was quiet and peaceful and roasting in the sun. The countryside around Swanik's Landing was so beautiful. It was all Boy-O could do to keep from remembering how it had been when he was a kid, running in the fields, rolling in the grass. He stretched his body in the sun, and kept his head down and his feet going.
She was a city pig. Worse than that, she'd probably taken to the streets because she liked men so much she figured she might as well get paid. Boy-O almost burst out laughing at the sight of her. Jed Crane must have been drunk when he married her. He could have gotten her by snapping his fingers. A license wasn't necessary.
"Good morning honey." Her voice was thick with sleep. He guessed a neighboring farmhand had already been by this morning. "What do you want?"
"What are you going to give me?" Boy-O smiled and scratched the back of his head.
"I'll start off by offering you some breakfast." She giggled and swiveled her breasts from side to side. Her dyed red hair glinted metallically in the sunlight. She disappeared into the kitchen. Boy-O followed her. "You're awfully cute for a panhandler, honey," she said, pouring him a cup of coffee. She sat across from him at the table and rubbed her breasts along the edge. Carelessly she opened the top buttons on her dress, and ran her fingers over her skin. "Sure is warm, too warm out here. Was the air as warm where you came from, honey?"
"Your husband hired me to work on the place," Boy-O said. He grinned at her.
"I can't imagine why he did that. Jed is usually so worried about me, he doesn't let a decent looking man on the place. The last one we had was fat and fifty and Jed fired him out of jealousy. Why'd he hire you?"
"Isn't this your birthday?"
She stared blankly at him for a minute, then she got his point and guffawed loudly. She got up from the table and walked to him. "You're not like most of those country fellows. You're quick and I like that. What's your name?"
She had a nice body, big in all the right places. Boy-O wondered whether he would take some of the candy she was offering him. He didn't particularly like to fool around with chicks who were up for grabs.
Except for Margie, that sweet hustler he had known in L.A., all of his own women had been ladies.
"Boy-O."
"Boy-O. That's cute. I bet all the girls in town like you." She sighed enviously. "I wish Jed would take me into town sometimes. I get so bored on this old farm."
She ran her hands over Boy-O's chest. He'd opened his shirt on the road, to let the air to his sweating body. Her touch was heavy and insuating.
"Careful, you're a married lady," he said.
"My husband doesn't mind. He likes to have me fooling around. Can I sit on your knees?"
Boy-O sneered at her. "I thought you wanted me to sit on yours."
"Either way, honey." She reached out and squeezed him. And her breath began to catch in her throat. "Do you want me with you honey, in the barn, or do you want to go with me into the bedroom?"
Boy-O watched her slink to the stairs. Jed Crane had picked himself out a whopper. Of all the ways a man could pick to destroy himself, marriage to a dame like that was one of the quickest. He followed her up the stairs and into the bedroom. She began dropping her clothes the minute he walked into the room. Boy-O peeled off his shirt and watched her. She danced a little around the room to entice him and her bosom jiggled and bobbed as she moved. She was all soft flesh and curves. Quite a sight.
Boy-O walked over to the bed.
"Honey, take off your pants."
She lay on the bed, ready for him. He put his hand to her. She was warm with wanting him.
"That feels nice. You want me, huh? Take off your clothes." She reached out and started pulling on his belt buckle.
He unzipped his clothes and stepped out of them. She ran her hands along his legs, rhythmically caressing.
He laughed with pleasure. This was always good. Even with her this would be good.
"Hurry, hurry," she pleaded. "Please, don't make me wait any longer."
He climbed onto the bed. She was Mother Earth on a picnic. Her breasts received his kisses like a rainfall, and spread beneath his rough hands.
He could see the sweat standing out in beads on her forehead. He watched her eyes cloud with wanting him as he teased and played along her legs. Her nails dug at his back and he could feel .tiny rivulets of his blood run down his skin. Still he refused her, refused so that she would remember him.
He wasn't like the others. He was better. She would know that first.
Her arms curled around him and she pressed so hard against him, moved so excitedly that he held his breath and cursed.
"Baby, baby, now, now."
She looked like she was going to finish all by herself. She wanted him that bad.
"Do you love me?" he whispered to her ear.
She bit his shoulder feverishly and worked against him."
"You pig," he said, and took her. Boy-O found himself caught up by the rhythm and the frenzy.
She dug her nails at the sheet and laughed and cried and begged him. Their sweat bound them together. And then he burst into a thousand aching pieces.
"Don't stop. Please, don't stop."
"Why not," he said, climbing out of bed. "I'm finished." He pulled his pants on and reached across the bed for his shirt.
"But what about me? Don't leave me like this. What about me?"
"To hell with you." Boy-O walked out of the room and started down the stairs. "I was hired to fix the leak in the barn roof, honey. And that's all the fixing I'm about to do from now on."
He walked outside, slamming the screen door behind him.. Poor Crane would be dead before the year was out. He hadn't married a woman; he'd married a perpetual motion machine. Boy-O chuckled to himself. When Crane met her, he had probably been flattered, he thought to himself. Jed probably figured that she was that way because she loved him. Boy-O laughed. Well, he deserved everything he got.
Boy-O laughed again. He, tried to remember Crane from the old days. He'd always been skinny, and he'd never let Boy-O spit in the pickle barrel.
Boy-O rummaged around the barn and found some tools and some shingles. He dragged the ladder outside and climbed up on the roof, pulling the ladder after him, just in case Mrs. Crane should decide to make a pain of herself. He worked for two hours in the hot sun, feeling his body stretch with the exercise-stretch and harden.
Boy-O liked to feel his body, liked to be taut and alive. That was why he was so good in bed. Women instinctively sensed about him a physical awareness that turned them to jelly. And that was also why Boy-O rarely lived off women; that was a sure way to let yourself go soft. Unless they were rich enough to buy him a membership in a gym, or lived somewhere where he could do manual labor in posh surroundings.
When the sun cooled off a little, Boy-O decided to call it a day. He took the things back into the barn and pulled on his work shirt. His flesh rebelled at being covered. Mrs. Crane was watching him from the doorway of the house.
"Don't you bother coming back here tomorrow. I won't let you on the place, do you hear?"
"I'll be back to finish the barn. Don't get in my way or I'll change the pattern of your face. Believe that."
She turned and walked back into the house. She believed him.
Boy-O got a lift into town with a farmer from the neighborhood. He walked down the main drag into the drug store. "Hey," he called to Sarah behind the cosmetics counter. "Bring home some cigarettes. A couple of cartons."
She didn't blush, although she did send her eyes around the store .to see if all the customers were watching her. They were. Then she blushed.
"Hey," Boy-O shouted. "Hey."
He wasn't going to go until she answered him. She sensed that and attempted to smile and wave at him. She knew she was degrading herself in front of everyone in the store, but that didn't matter any more. A quick damnation was still better than having him stand there and shout for an eternity. He waved again and, flashing her one of his most brilliant smiles, disappeared around the corner.
She discovered she was jealous of his destination. It was all she could do to keep from closing the store and running after him. That was part of his plan, she supposed, to make her forget everything for the more immediate reality of his body and what he could give to her. It was all too much for poor Sarah's brain. She gave up thinking about him and went to hide from the stares in the drug department.
Boy-O continued his jaunt down Main Street. The news that Janey Carter's boy had returned and was shacking up with Sam Revere's girl apparently had spread all over town by now. Women stepped aside to let him pass on the streets, and their jealousy of Sarah made them redouble their whispering after he'd passed.
"Hello, Stephen."
"Mrs. Jensen. How're you? Out shopping? Can I carry groceries for you?"
"No thanks, I brought Jeanni along today in case I should need any help. "Hello, Boy-O."
"Jeanni." He searched her face for a trace of sarcasm but it was as if nothing had ever happened between them. She looked more beautiful than ever today. Her dress was simple and clung in all the right places.
"Stephen, I want to talk to you."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Jeanni, go get the car. You're not to listen to this."
Jeanni obliged her mother, again too quickly. Boy-O wondered how Mrs. Jensen could be blind to the fact that Jeanni wasn't a naive Jeanni any longer.
"Stephen, what are you doing to the Revere girl?"
"Pardon?"
"Don't beg my pardon, you know very well what I mean. The whole town is buzzing about your staying there last night. Stephen, that wasn't very considerate of you."
"I didn't mean to be considerate."
"You could have stayed with us if you had nowhere to go and no money or anything. There was no need to stay there. Now, I know you're a nice boy, Stephen, and I know all that mean gossip is just empty talk, but you must realize that people are that way. Most of them."
"Mrs. Jensen, you are a dear lady and I am very fond of you but even you must be able to see that I am not a nice boy, just as I'm not Stephen. I'm Boy-O Carter and I don't give a damn for any talk in this town and I don't give a damn about this town and I especially don't give a damn about Sarah Revere or her reputation."
"Stephen!"
"Don't be shocked, ma'am. Don't pretend. I know you're unshockable. You've had to be. Now, I don't want to be rude, but I am going to walk away from you and protect your reputation." Boy-O smiled and turned sharply, walking easily away from his last friend in town.
The yellow convertible pulled up alongside him, and Mrs. Jensen stuck her head out from behind bags of groceries. "Stephen, is there anything I can do for you?"
"Yes ma'am. Is my father practicing in his father's office or did he move to another town?"
"Your father? What do you mean?"
"My mother told me who he is. I've always known. Ma and me had secrets. I just want him to know that I know. Can you tell me where the old man is living?"
As Boy-O walked away he heard Jeanni say, "He's worthless, Ma. Leave him be."
"No he's not, dear," Mrs. Jensen answered. "But it looks like he'll make himself worthless if he keeps on this way."
CHAPTER SEVEN
Baby, I itch. Scratch for me."
She reached along him and her fingers searched and rubbed.
"Not there. Further along. Riglit at the end. Ah, you got the place." He laughed. "Now kiss me."
He watched her draw closer in the dark. Her lips were gentle. That was what bugged him about Sarah. She was too gentle. He had made a lot of progress with her. He had gotten her to the point where she would have crawled across the floor for him, but he hadn't made her hard. Still he had done a good week's work in three days. He'd punched holes in her, and he'd even begun to turn the screws.
"Get me a cigarette, honey."
Obediently she crossed the room, and extracted a cigarette from his pack. She lit it, but this time she didn't choke on the smoke. She was used to it.
"May I have one?" He shrugged.
Boy-O looked at Sarah's body as he watched her cross the room to him and lay down close to him on the bed. Hers was a beautiful body, a beautiful womanly body. He'd had all of that he wanted and more was his when he wanted more. So why should he spend most of his time thinking about Jeanni Jensen? Just because she hadn't wanted him? Ridiculous. Boy-O wasn't the type to go in for races. Maybe because she had outsmarted him. That was more like it. Boy-O was the type to bear a grudge. Or maybe because he had sensed that Jeanni Jensen knew what life was all about, and small boobs don't matter when the technique is there. Maybe that was why he thought about her so much.
And why he had never gone back to the Jensen's after that night.
Boy-O got out of bed and prowled restlessly around the room. He looked out of each window and handled each piece of bric-a-brac. Then he said, "What time is it?"
"I don't know."
"Then find out." He snapped his fingers impatiently-
Sarah hurried to do his bidding. He frightened her. He frightened her because she was afraid of what she felt for him, and what he could make her do because of that.
"It's eleven-thirty."
"Gimme five. I'm going out."
"Shall I come too?"
"No. Stay here and wait up for me. I mean that. You be waiting in the parlor when I come back."
She fetched five dollars from her purse and brought it to him. He smiled as he took it from her. Then he slapped her across the mouth. "That's so you don't forget to wait up." He dressed quickly and left the room, clattering down the stairs moodily.
"Please. Don't be mad at me," Sarah called down the staircase. "I didn't mean to ... "
Boy-O's grin was visible in the grayness of downstairs. "What's the matter sweetheart? Afraid you're beginning to bore me?"
Boy-O hooked his thumbs hi his hip pockets and slouched his way down the street. Eleven-thirty and the whole town was shut up tight. The local bar was good for another half hour and then nothing. Absolutely nothing. Swanik's Landing where the good folk get up at six and bed down by nine. It was a repulsive way to grow old. He'd do better to finish his business here in a hurry and head for some city. Maybe New York would be next or maybe New Orleans. Any place where there were lots of people and lets of action.
Something very important was going wrong in Boy-O's plans. He didn't know why revenge tasted so bitter to him. Sarah had been so easy. He had scandalized the neighbors by moving in with her and living off her. She would let him do anything he wanted to her, and he would do everything. Sam Revere was probably revolving in his grave at the loss of everything he'd held dear-the money she was giving him and the reputation she'd thrown away on a Carter. All of it was down the drain. And Boy-O's pride should have rested, at peace. He should have been gratified.
Instead there was only this gnawing restlessness in his stomach. This unceasing desire to go back to the highway and beat it the hell across the country.
Don's Place again was quiet. Thursday night and no high school kids. The town drunks sat soppily at one end of the bar. Some farm hands from nearby talked noisily at a table. And the driver of the only cab in town was bending Don's ear about the price of gas.
"Give me a beer." Boy-O let one foot rest easy on the bar rail.
"Coming up, buster."
"The name is Boy-O, mister. Remember it or I'll ruin your face."
"Okay, take it easy Carter. Take it easy."
Boy-O drank the beer in one quick gulp. "Again."
The tramps were missing. Martha and Esther, both of them must have customers. Boy-O looked around. He wondered who the big livers were who could afford a girl on a Thursday night in this forsaken hok of a town.
"I want my money back."
All heads turned in the direction of the shout. It had come from the men's room. The room got suddenly very quiet, making the sound of the television eerie, like a lonely voice in a ghost town. As the patrons of Don's Place listened hopefully, the thud of a body falling against the door rewarded them. They sat in their places waiting to see the winner-and the loser.
A whine seeped through the cracks around the door. "Don't hit me again. Please don't."
Boy-O was the only one in the room to recognize that voice. For a moment he considered going into the men's room and rescuing Lewis Jensen from the attacker. But before he could do anything, the men's room door swung open and Lewis was hauled out by a hired hand who held him by the collar. Lewis's eyes was already closing with the bruise and blood trickled from the side of his mouth down his throat.
"Hey, Don. Since when do you let this dead beat in?"
"What did he do to you, Ed?"
"He conned me out of a whole week's pay." Ed hurled Lewis at the front door but the boy slouched to the floor. "You make me sick. You college crumbs! You lazy bums!" Ed was getting ready to kick Lewis in the stomach when Boy-O surprised himself by stepping between them.
"If you want to fight, try me."
"Hey, Don," Ed shouted. "Is this another college punk?"
Boy-O smiled. "That's funny. You've a sense of humor, friend. Repeat that." He squared off for the fight. A little excitement was just what the doctor ordered. But something in his manner intimidated Ed.
"Forget it. I've had my exercise for the night." Boy-O picked Lewis up and sat him on a bar stool. "You all right, kid?"
"No. I think I'm going to throw up."
"Not on my new bar, kid."
"Shut up and give him a shot of something. Make it brandy."
"Sure, sure. On the house."
Lewis leaned weakly on the bar, blotting his ripped mouth with a handkerchief.
"Thanks, Boy-O. He would have killed me if you hadn't been there." Boy-O listened to the phony eastern accent disappear from Lewis's speech. He was much more a scared nineteen-year-old kid now.
"You ought to know better than to try and con one of those guys. From now on, stick to the ones who don't earn their money."
Boy-O lit a cigarette and passed it to Lewis. Then he lit one for himself. "Can you make it home all right?"
"Sure. I guess so."
"Are you sure you don't want to call your sister and ask her to pick you up?"
"Huh?"
"One good turn deserves another."
"Sure. I get it. Sure."
The boy got up and stumbled to the telephone booth. Boy-O watched him in the mirror of the bar and, affecting a natural pose, strained to hear the interchange. The television got in his way. He almost shrugged, but realising nobody was around to pretend for, he stopped the shrug in mid-air and slugged down the rest of his drink.
"She's on her way."
"One more question, kid. Know any Lesbians in this town?"
"Are you kidding?"
Boy-O shook his head.
"What do you want to know for?"
"My business."
"Sorry I can't help you out. I don't know anybody in this town any more " He added, "Obviously."
"You want to know something, kid? You want to know what the trouble is with small towns? Even the town tramp has scruples. No, I'm not putting you on-that's the truth. Pros in small towns get infected by the thinking of righteous majority there. They'll only take their love a certain way. The nice way. Now what kind of an attitude is that for the local madam?"
Lewis laughed, more to join Boy-O in something than in appreciation of the joke.
"Hey. Tell me something, Lewis." The thought of Jeanni was making Boy-O expansive. "Why are you the way you are? You ever earn a buck yourself?"
"God, no. Work scares me to death. I don't know how that happened. I guess I just got used to the folks putting out for me, always coming through with a little more to get me out of scrapes. But summer vacations are strictly terrible. I mean, how bored can a guy get, when he's supposed to be on his good behavior?"
"Drop it, drop it. I didn't mean to ask you for the story of your life."
"Hey, here comes Jeanni." Lewis and Boy-O both turned and watched the yellow convertible streak to a stop in front of the bar. She had come in a hurry. Lewis started to get up and go for the door, but Boy-O laid a restraining hand on his shoulder. "Let her come in and get you."
Slim Jeanni came racing into the bar. Her hair was flowing down her back and she carried a glow with her that reminded Boy-O again of the feel of her against him; he remembered how much she knew and what she'd done to him that night. Now he knew why he couldn't get her out of his mind. Jeanni was his kind of woman.
She looked at Lewis, her hand went to the side of his face and stroked him gently. "Are you all right?" Her voice was soft and affectionate, a caress for her brother, and there was no room for condemnation nor any pretense of surprise.
"Almost." He smiled wanly, and Boy-O thought he might not have been able to make it home on his own after all. Or maybe the consolation of female sympathy made him weaker than he had been before.
"Can you walk to the car?"
"Let him walk." Boy-O's voice was firm. "Come on, kid. Get up and walk out of here with some self-respect." He couldn't stand to see Lewis babied like that. Tough broads are always suckers for parasites he commented to himself. And then he slowly admitted to himself that he was jealous.
Boy-O walked out of the bar with them and helped Lewis in beside his sister. Then he let the door slam shut. "Good night, all."
"Hey! Aren't you coming?"
"No. You're all right now. Think I'll walk home."
She didn't even look at him, just turned the motor over and streaked off in that yellow car, leaving him standing in the dust of the road for the second time.
Boy-O smiled at himself and turned toward Sarah's house. For the first time since he could remember, he was hung up on a woman and he didn't stand a chance in the world. Boy-O Carter had been around long enough to know that a man's chance of success with a woman faded the minute his interest was more than bedroom oriented. Once things like feelings got in the way, everybody was the same sucker. Funny, he'd come home to square the ledger and he was going to have to leave with all sorts of imcomplete desires.
He was even beginning to feel a little sorry for Sarah.
There was only one thing to do. First thing in the morning, he'd decide what to do about his old man, and when that was over, he'd split. He'd get the hell out of a bad luck town like Swanik's Landing before he got stuck by it forever.
The streets were quiet and empty. And silent. There was nothing to do but think and walk, and nothing to think about but bitter things. And no one to watch him swagger.
The yellow convertible drew up alongside him. He was almost surprised.
"Let me drive you home."
He looked at her, checking on the invitation. It was real all right, even though she was smiling. Was she going to pay him off for keeping her little brother's hide intact?
Boy-O smiled at the sour taste that left in his mouth. One thing about Carter, he got endless delight in his stupidity. It was something the rest of the world really didn't understand.
"If you're going to drive me home, don't bother. But if you want to take a ride somewhere outside of this town, thanks."
"I told you...."
"Forget about that. I want to ride fast. I want the feeling of going somewhere. That's all."
"Okay. Get in."
The car started moving before he got the door closed. It roared in a U-turn down the street and back toward the highway. Boy-O threw his head back and watched the stars, but their action was too slow for him so he turned his head slightly and caught the lacy blue blur of trees flying against the wind. He held one hand outside the car and felt the wind push at it and stream through his spreading fingers.
They rode like that for miles, neither speaking, each of them waiting. For what? For the first insult.
"What happened back there?" she said finally.
"Didn't he tell you?"
"No."
"He told you. You may know a lot about men, Jeanni baby, but you're still a lousy liar."
"So he told me. Thank you. I was just trying to lead into the gratitude casually. Thanks for helping my little brother out."
"Forget it. I didn't do it for him any way. I just felt like a good good fight tonight, that's all. I didn't get it either. The jerk backed down."
"Do you often feel like fighting?"
"Look, Jeanni. Don't come on with me like you belong in this town. I mean, I know better and you know better, so you can stop lying and relax for a minute."
She laughed. "Got a cigarette?"
He gave her the pack and waited for her to ask him for a light. He was curious to see how far he could let himself go in the wooing game. It wasn't his style to light women's cigarettes. But he'd never met a girl like this one before.
She pushed in the lighter on the dashboard.
"You've had a whole three days to tip my parents off."
"Have you been counting?"
"Why didn't you?"
"That's not my type of revenge, sweetheart. If I wanted to do you in bad enough, I'd find some public way of doing it, so you could watch them suffer while the nice people turned their backs on the Jensens."
"I see. That's real smart of you."
"But don't worry. I won't. I owe your parents a favor."
"For what?"
"For not spitting on me when I was a kid."
"Why did you come back to this place if you hate it so much? Did you just get bored with bumming around the country? Or did you run out of lonely ladies?"
"You're cute. You're real cute."
"Sorry."
"I came back to...." Why didn't he finish? Why didn't he tell her that he had come home to pay off the lousy crumbs? Why did it seem suddenly like a gigantic waste of time?"
"When I was a kid, this town was mean to me. Man, this town was a closed door to me. And it was Boy-O this and Boy-O that, and fetch this and do that. They spit on me every way they knew how to and all so righteously, it makes me want to throw up. You want to know something? You want to know what my old lady said to me just before she kicked it?" The anger was coming stronger and he wasn't going to hold it back this time. "My old lady turned to me and said, "Don't feel bad, sonny, this is the luckiest thing that ever happened to me.' Can you beat that? My old lady was glad to die. Glad! She was delighted! They rubbed her nose in it. And they did it through me. God, they knew my old lady had too much guts to let them make her feel like dirt. So they had to hit me to get at her. And when she died she actually thought she was doing me a favor."
He clenched his fists and looked for someone to hit. Then he drove his hand home against the dashboard. The pain was pleasant.
"What happened then?"
"Nothing. Everything. What does it matter?" He smiled. , "It matters to you. They won, you know that as well as I do. You do think of yourself in their terms. Dirt." She laughed. "You see that, don't you?" She looked at him. "Oh, you sell yourself for a high price, I bet. Well why not? But studding for you is just proving that you are what they think you are, and that you like that. But you don't; you're not cut out for that."
"Tell me more, doctor."
"If you were what you pretend to be, you'd have taken a free punch at the guy back there. Instead of playing Sir Galahad."
"Are you a Lesbo?"
"What?"
"Come on, answer me?"
"Not me."
"Then why do you get such a kick out of putting me down?"
"Is that what I've been doing?"
"Are you going to pretend you don't know it?"
She shrugged.
"I'm going to tell you why you do it. It's because you want me, Jeanni baby, every bit as much as I want you. But you're afraid to admit it. For some reason you don't want to make out with a man you dig.
You're frightened. That's it. You're scared stiff. FH bet you've never made out with a man. I mean really made out. I bet that's only a business for you. Uh-huh. You know every trick in the book. Because that's good business."
"Don't be silly."
"That's why you put me down. Cause that makes you feel safer." He laughed, because he knew he would have her sooner or later, and knowing that, he could wait.
He watched her driving the car. Her hands curled casually around the steering wheel, but he felt them around his neck, felt those long thin fingers run down his back. He looked at her long slender neck and resisted an impulse to sink his teeth into the white flesh and feel the skin quiver beneath them. And he knew that she felt his glance on her body like a kiss. She shifted a little on her seat. His eyes swept down to her legs. They were strong muscular legs, and her hips were lithe and trim. This was going to be one hell of a ringding. He decided that he would leave the lights on, when he made her, so he could watch her face when she found how good that was.
"You want to drive a while?"
He wasn't going to fall for that. She wanted him to drive so he'd have to keep his eyes on the road. She liked having him look at her, but not too much. She was afraid. It was as simple as that.
"No."
"This is all a game, isn't this?"
"What?"
"This. Us. You and me. Oh, Stephen, why must...."
"The name is Boy-O."
She refused to notice his correction. "Why must we play games. Why can't we just trust one another. All right, I want you. Does that make you happy? And I am afraid. And I have never made out with a man. I always thought I was too wise at-you know-how to make them make out. Now you know all that and what are you going to do?"
"There's a motel two or three miles down this road. I passed it coming into town. Drive."
"And are you going to make me suffer because I told you that? Are you going to hate me like you hate that poor stupid girl you're living with? Is this going to be just another victory, in just another place?"
"I don't know. But with me, there's only been one rule. If you want something go after that, and if you're afraid of wanting that, go after that twice as much. Cause fear stinks. And it makes you a slave. Hey, dig me," he laughed. "Well, why shouldn't I come on like the old man of the mountains. That's true. There's nothing like being afraid of something to ruin it all."
"You didn't answer my question. What will you do afterward?"
"I don't know. How should I know? All you can do is take your chances and play it by ear. I do what I feel like, and I never know what I'm going to be feeling."
She turned to look at him, one searching glance to see if he was making fun of her. She couldn't tell. She had no way of knowing. For a minute she thought of Manelli. He'd have a god-awful laugh at the way she was carrying on; she was acting like she was eighteen again, and a virgin and not one of the most expensive pros in the country. And the funniest part of this was that someone from her home town had made her feel this way. That was the funniest part of all.
She pulled the car into the motel. Boy-O got out and winked at her. "Don't drive away while I'm inside there, you hear? Cause if you do, that won't change anything. This will happen anyway, and I'll be waiting."
She smiled at him. "We're running out of cigarettes. Get some more?"
He pointed his finger at her, and smiled again. Then he disappeared into the small office. Jeanni played with the dial on the radio. All the local stations were off the air except one, and that was playing mushy junk. She humed a sweet trumpet tune and looked at her hands. She was nervous and jumpy. She could imagine him with her already, and she knew she was going to Kke him.
"Number eight. The one at the end." He sat beside her again.
Without looking at him, she gunned the motor and threw the car into gear. She started and the tires dug into the gravel. She drove too fast for the short distance and the stop she made nearly threw them both through the windshield.
"Take that easy, Jeanni baby," he hollered. "You don't want to kill me before I have you, do you?"
"That would be a nice way out."
"Man, but wait till you know what you would have missed." He laughed again, and taking her hand helped her out of the car on his side.
The room was small. But the bed was nice and large. The owner obviously knew his clientele.
Boy-O turned on the lights and locked the door. He drew the curtains on the windows and then he turned to face her. She was standing just where she had when she came into the room. Her eyes were on the floor and a faint redness colored her cheeks. He walked over to her. One arm circled her waist and the other fell lightly on her rounded buttocks.
"Kiss me Jeanni baby, will you?" His voice was gentle.
She looked up at him, at his smiling lips. Carefully she ran her fingers through his hair. Then, closing her eyes, she let her mouth find his.
His lips were gentle as they traced the outline of her mouth and touched the soft opening of her lips. He glided slowly across the outline of her mouth and then kissed her deeply, teasing her to play with him. She sighed and pressed closer to him. Then she responded with her mouth.
He pulled her even closer to him. His hands teased their way under her sweater and unsnapped the clasp on her bra, then they ran freely on her back, feeling the smooth skin under them dance with the touch. She shivered in his arms.
He caught her up in his arms and carried her to the bed. He laid her on that fully dressed and sat beside her, looking at her body. She waited for him, smiling like a fat cat at what she knew was going to happen.
"Take off your sweater," he said. "Let me watch you."
She undid the buttons slowly, taunting him and laughing happily. His hand swooped down onto her breast and felt that quiver beneath him. He didn't want to wait any longer and he didn't want to have her yet, either. He tore at her skirt and her pants and her hands aided his, unbuttoning and unzipping as he pulled. And removed.
She was warm. His hands and his lips liked the feel of the soft skin. She cried out at his touch.
"Love me. Lie with me."
He stretched his body beside hers and his mouth bit at her pointed shivering breasts. They seemed to grow larger with each of his touches, growing and blossoming.
Her thin fingers circled and squeezed him and one of her arms wound around him, helping her to be closer against his body.
"Oh Boy-O, Boy-O." Her lips at his ear begged for what he wouldn't give her. Yet. "Yes, you're good. You're good."
"Sh, Jeanni. Quiet. Not yet. Make this last."
She grew quieter. He rolled onto his back and she kissed her wandering way along his body. He ran his fingers through her softly flowing hair.
"Go on. Don't worry. Oh, I won't yet"
"You don't have any hips," she laughed as her lips traced.
She was good, almost too good.
He pulled her to him by her hair and kissed her lips, her red full lips with all the force of denying her. Still denying her.
They rolled over and over, pressing their taut bodies against each other. He raised himself slightly, and smiled into her face. Her eyes were closed, her mouth slightly open and her breath fast as she gulped air. For a silent while they both waited, listening to the sounds of heartbeats. Then he took her and she sighed and her hands streamed through his hair. He watched her hard-breathing face, her smiling face, and then he too closed his eyes and moved again.
"Don't ever stop."
She worked with him and played every moving trick with him she'd ever learned, but with more pleasure than ever before, because that was good for her. That was better than that ever had been for her.
They found their rhythm together, each as good as the other, together and mounting and climbing, they pleased each other and faster and faster.
Until she screamed with the pleasure of that and then they hit the moon together and still not stopping worked through the vibrating fury. And. And still. A-gain. And again.
"Boy-O, kiss me. Don't ever stop. Don't ever leave me."
"Jeanni, baby. This is what this is supposed to be like. This is what they sing about."
"Sing to me, sing to me."
He sighed as she held him. He didn't leave her but held quietly, waiting for that to start again. As that would. As that had to.
When they left the motel the sun was up.
He drove her car like the wind to the edge of town. "I'll get out here. No sense in giving them more scandal about the Carters than they already have." He looked at her. She was more beautiful than ever. There were the softest circles under her eyes, the kind women get when they haven't slept the whole night. He kissed her on the tip of her nose.
She smiled. But she was holding her breath to see if he would say something about seeing her again.
"Don't worry, baby. It's all right. I just have got to finish off some things here. That's all. I've just got to finish my business."
"See you around."
"Sure. See you around."
CHAPTER EIGHT
Boy-O languidly walked to Sarah's house. THE town was still quiet, but not for much longer. Mornings in summer before the sun turned itself loose were nice. Boy-O promised himself that he would get up every morning and walk the streets before they got cluttered with people. Then he laughed at himself. I'm in love, he thought. It was more than foolish, it was idiocy. Love. He'd laughed at it, envied it, but never had it-Not even with the chick who relieved him of his virginity. From the start it had been Boy-O Carter on the make and anything outside the bedroom stood for nothing. Then when he was sixteen and had found that the easiest way to make yourself at home in a strange town was to make one of the local sisters or mothers or maiden aunts, even the bedroom backed itself into a box marked business. Love was strictly for the people who couldn't spell "bed."
And now here he was promising himself that it was the morning that tasted so good to his senses and not the memory of the night before.
And it was a lie.
The truth was Jeanni. The truth was that Boy-O had lost any desire for any woman but Jeanni. It began to look like even Sarah Revere was going to get off easy. He wasn't hungry for anything any more, except a place where he and his girl would make out from one side of tomorrow to the other.
Immediately he began to plan where he'd take her. Chicago was the nearest big city that sounded appealing to him. That was out. He didn't want to put her anywhere near her past. Come to think of it, it might do some good to put some distance between him and the women he'd known. What stinking city in this country had he skipped over? Not Frisco or Baltimore, Boston or New York, not Detroit or New Orleans, Philadelphia or Cleveland. Everywhere his mind turned, it uncovered some cast-off mama who would be panting in her shower over Boy-O Carter.
He began to panic. There had to be somewhere he and his chick could start clean, where she could wash the hustler off and he the smell of pay-as-you-go stables. There'd be somewhere, there had to be, where he could claim his freedom.
Boy-O hunched his shoulders over the problem. He started by states to remember the country, and the sidewalk under his feet turned into a map of the states with X's through the towns he'd studded in.
Which is why he wasn't prepared to find Ben Johnson's rough farmer's hands on his shoulders, blocking his path to Sarah's
"You ain't going in there."
Boy-c looked up quickly at the fat frowning face of Sarah's fiance. She'd described Ben to him and with that fat face it could be nobody else. "Who are you?" He stalled for time. He didn't think Ben was alone but he didn't dare shift his eyes around the shrubbery. Ben couldn't know that Boy-O was the least off guard. He'd try to back them down first.
"Sarah's boy friend and future husband that is who I am."
"Oh. Well, you're a lucky man. She's a sweet kid."
"Not any more she ain't. Not since the day you came to town. What made you think you could just undo a girl, like that?"
"Now Ben boy, don't jump to conclusions. How do you know I've been fooling with your girl? You aren't taking the word of the neighbors. Why they're so hard up for scandal, they'd steal from their own grandmother to stir things up."
"It ain't just gossip. You told me yourself." So Mrs. Crane had talked to her husband, and Jed had come along for the ride. Boy-O took the opportunity to look quickly through the bushes. Two more pairs of shoes crouched behind the fir tree.
Four of them. The odds were a little unbalanced.
"Come on, boy," he said to Ben Johnson. "You aren't taking brother Crane's word for this, are you? Not knowing the problem he's got with his wife. And you know about that, don't you Ben? Because I passed you in the morning yesterday and you were hot-footing away from his bed at the time."
It was a chance. Still, Boy-O knew that the Johnson farm was not far, and in all likelihood Ben had sampled Mrs. Crane's wares.
"Huh?" Jed didn't know which way to look and Boy-O could see the same confusion seep into Ben's face.
They were a hell of a pair.
"Don't let him stop you, Mr. Ben." So one of the lurking sons of Main Street was old Gus. The odds were looking better and better. One punch for Gus and a shove for Jed Crane and Boy-O had only two of them to contend with.
"Go on, Mr. Ben. What about Jeanni Jensen? Didn't we just see her drive by? Didn't he just ruin her reputation too?"
"Yeah," said Ben Johnson.
"Yeah," said Jed Crane.
Things weren't looking good. Boy-O was running out of time and he couldn't discover who the other assailant was. Well, he'd have to take his chances.
He didn't really feel like fighting. The suckers had picked a good time to get at him. Make love the night long, he told himself and take the consequences.
"You're fools to tangle with me," he said, backing himself into a better position. "I used to be welterweight champ of the West Coast. I'm murder in a fight."
"Yeah. I don't believe a word you say."
Okay, Ben you're first, Boy-O thought to himself. He held a tight and extended arm. "C'mon Ben, let's call this off."
"Ben, don't you dare," Jed Crane said in a shrill voice."
Ben looked at Jed and that was Boy-O's signal.
His left flashed in the morning light and caught Ben in the soft stomach. Boy-O moved in close and raised his knee at Johnson. There was a soft squashing sound as he connected. Boy-O stepped forward neatly and pushed Ben onto the sidewalk.
Then he danced free, side-stepping lightly in a crouched position. City fights have it all over these lawn games, he said to himself, careful just the same to keep his attention on the spot where the feet crouched in the bushes.
"C'mon Jed. You're next aren't you? You want to join your friend Ben in the gutter?"
Ben was vomiting and groaning, his face hanging into the gutter.
Jed backed away and Gus pushed him forward.
"Look, don't push me," Jed cried. "If you're so anxious, you go fight him."
The one in the bushes came forward then. It was Ed, the joker from the bar. What in creation is he doing here, Boy-O asked himself.
"Stand back boys. Looks like I got to finish this one off."
Boy-O laughed. "Get finished, you mean. Come on, Daddy, come to mama." He slammed his fist into his hand and the smacking sound bounced off the wall of Sarah's house.
Ed advanced slowly, imitating Boy-O's stance, and letting his hands hang loose.
"You're a punk," he said.
Boy-O flexed his lithe muscles and kept circling. Suddenly Ed reached out and pulled Boy-O to him. Boy-O got there first with a right in the middle, but it was a bad punch that carried little weight and didn't even throw Ed off his aim.
A fist bit into Boy-O's jaw, sending him reeling back a few steps. But before he could recover Gus and Jed had latched on to his arms and were pinning him in place.
That was the plan. And it had worked.
Boy-O didn't have time to free himself. Ed moved in again and sent his farmer's fists tearing into Boy-O's middle and then they loosened his teeth and connected with his eye.
He twisted in his captors' arms but he was too weak to offer much resistance, and again and again his body was barraged with blows.
They left him in the street, picked up Ben Johnson and began to carry him to the car they had parked around the corner. Boy-O raised himself onto one arm and wiped the blood streaming from his mouth. He tried to get up, but his legs wouldn't work. And he couldn't catch his breath.
His right eye was almost closed and his left one had begun to swell at the forehead. That old cut had opened too, the blood gushed down his face. He didn't see the yellow convertible pull up at the curb, but he heard the car door slam and he turned his head in her direction.
"Jeanni, for God's sake, get home. I'm all right."
"You are not. You are a mess." She knelt beside him and peered into his face. "Can you walk? I'll take you inside."
"Get out of here. Leave me alone."
"Okay then. We'll aim for the car. You wanted to see your father while you were here. We'll get him to paste you together."
"Jeanni, please."
"Lean on me, darling. I'm afraid you've got no other choice."
Boy-O muttered under his breath, but he had to do as she said. All his efforts to rise on his own had failed. He leaned against her and she half dragged and half carried him to her car.
She gunned the engine and the car jerked into gear.
"You drive like a maniac," he said.
She passed him a clean handkerchief and he mopped at his face. "God, you're unattractive," she said. "I don't think you'll be able to make a living off your looks any more."
"Shut up."
She laughed. "It's just as well. Now you'll have to be faithful to me."
"What the hell were you doing here anyway?" He'd had enough of coddling, and was trying to dig through his pockets for a cigarette.
"I drove past the house and saw them sitting on the curb waiting for you." She smiled. "Well, I didn't ask them if it was you they were after or anything, I mean. Let's just say that it was a lucky guess."
"Ha, ha."
"Don't smoke now. Your lip is knocked into smithereens."
"Look, I didn't ask you to pick me up."
"You're a hell of a pickup." Her tone was light but still forced. Jeanni didn't really feel like laughing. He didn't look like himself and she was frightened.
"You're a hell of a chick."
Boy-O sucked in his breath and the cigarette hurt his lips but the sting there couldn't compare to the throbbing in his head and so he stopped listening to it. He laughed ruefully.
"What's funny?"
"It's a gas. I mean, it's a real gas. The first girl whose reputation I worry about throws it to the winds and lets all the neighbors know that she didn't run out of gas after all."
She didn't laugh. She slowed the care to a stop m front of a modest white frame house that had a shingle hanging outside it that said, "Dr. Troy Willis."
"I'll just be a minute."
"Where are you going?"
"To get him to help me with you."
"Oh, for God's sake, I can walk. Just get the car door for me, will you, baby?"
"All right."
She came around to his side of the car and opened the door. He looked up at her through his squinting, swollen eyes and smiled. "You know what I said to myself walking to Sarah's?"
"No," she answered, helping him to his feet and supporting as much of his weight as she could. "Here, lean on me. I'm strong."
"Sure you are," he said sarcastically.
The rest of his thoughts were lost in the effort it took to get to the front door. He was sure the whole town was watching from behind its curtains. Well, let them. What did he care?
Jeanni rang the bell, and propped Boy-O up against the doorjamb. She pressed on the bell two or three times.
"Take it easy. Take it eay. I'm not going to die."
Dr. Willis was long in coming to the door; when he did get there, it was obvious he'd been gotten out of bed.
"Yes? Oh. Jeanni, give me a hand."
"I'm not dead. I can walk," Boy-O said.
"Lean on me, son." He almost carried Boy-O into the next room, where he stopped for breath. Then he said, "Jeanni, make i pot of coffee." He pointed a trembling finger. "The kitchen is that way."
When he got Boy-O into the office, he cupped his head in his hands and peered into his face. "They gave it to you good, I have to say that."
"Thanks."
"It looks like I'll have to take a stitch or two in that forehead."
"Don't worry about it, Doc. It's an old wound from another war. It didn't get stitched before."
"I am the doctor here, Boy-O. Lie down on the table." He turned away and began selecting instruments and medications. "You certainly are a mess," he said.
"Why the hell is everyone here so damned concerned with my looks? I'm not running in any beauty contest."
"You had your mother's looks," the doctor said and applied alcohol gently around the wounds.
"Leave my mother out of this."
Doctor Willis had eyes that were as blue as Boy-O's. "Shut up and let me work," he said.
Boy-O fell asleep before the good doctor finished his treatment. The doctor covered him with a blanket and left him sleeping there.
"Coffee's ready, doctor."
"Good."
"Shall we wake him up?"
"Good heavens no. The coffee was for me. Let him sleep there for a while. I'll move him upstairs later."
When Boy-O came to, he was upstairs in the spare bedroom. Late afternoon sun was streaming through the window, and Jeanni was sitting reading in a chair next to the bed.
"Close the blinds, will you?"
"Is the light too much?"
"Uh-huh." He felt miserable, and the sight of Jeanni only made him feel worse. He'd come back to Swanik's Landing to give the town what for and he'd collected the goods instead. She closed the blinds and crossed the room to him.
"How do you feel?"
"Terrible. How do you feel?"
"Fine. You're in love with me, you know."
Boy-O turned to look at her, sitting beside him at the edge of the bed. The light filtering into the room through the blind magic on her features, softening the proud line of her nose, and warming her green eyes. Her hair flowed lavishly on her shoulders.
He reached out and stroked one of her breasts.
"You do feel better," she said.
"Not as good as I will feel. Hey, baby, lie down beside me."
"You're not Tarzan you know, and with your face looking that way, you're not Gregory Peck either."
"Hummm," he said letting his hand drop back onto the covers and falling asleep again.
When he awoke again, it was night in Swanik's Landing. Jeanni was curled up on her chair sleeping. He stretched his body, muscle by muscle and slowly sat up. Each part of his body ached in a hundred different ways.
He pulled himself to his feet as quietly as possible and walked painfully to the mirror.
Jeanni had been right. He looked terrible. One eye was horribly colored besides being swollen shut. Doctor Willis had bandaged the area around his old scar and padded the bandage, Boy-O thought, to make it look worse than it really was.
His lower lip stood way out and throbbed its ugliness at the world.
He began to wonder if he would ever look the same as he had before. "You're a mess," he said to himself in the mirror.
Jeanni had begun to rouse herself when Boy-O walked over to her and crouched by her chair. Jeanni was too good to be true.
He ran his hand through her shining hair. "Hey, baby, are you up?"
"Boy-O, you're out of bed!" Her eyes and her smile betrayed the gentleness she tried to keep out of her voice. As awful as he looked, as little as she could see of his eyes, the glint in them was still there. She couldn't forget what had happened at the motel. She didn't want to forget what he had taught her and what she'd given him. Between people like us, she thought to herself, what goes on in the bedroom is more important than anything else you can mention. His face, she wondered, will it look like the waiters' faces at Hades-will he end up looking like a movie gangster?
"Jeanni, do you know how you're looking at me?" She shook her head. "Like I was someone on the moon or something. You're a thousand miles away from me, baby. Were you on the moon?"
"Yep." She leaned toward him and kissed his cheek gently. "Get back in bed," she said. "Only if you go with me."
"All right, all right." Boy-O limped back to his bed, and lay down, careful to leave half of the mattress for her. "I'm really beginning to fall apart, you know? No fight ever got to me like this!"
"That wasn't a fight, my love, that was attempted murder." She lay down beside him, and turned on her side to gaze into his eyes. "You see, that's the price you have to expect to pay in your field. It's one of the risks like heart attacks are for stock brokers." She smiled at him and rubbed the back of his neck gently.
"And the business I'm in, what's that?"
"The business. Giving the ladies the business, giving the business to the people. You're in the getting even field, the revenge market, the hate works." She smiled as she said that and rubbed her lips along his neck.
He moved his body closer to her, and let his hand caress her waist. "Tell me more," he whispered at her ear and bit the edge gently.
She smiled against his cheek. "Your whole lie of a life has been getting back at people. You've dished the works at them, particularly the women, because you figure somehow in that warped brain of yours that all of the people have that coming. And you've gotten even a hundred times, because you are so damnable handsome." She smiled and touched his swollen lips. "Were so handsome," she corrected herself.
He moved his hand slightly on her back and stroked her. "You've got a nice rear," he said.
"But you were the one who got hurt the most." She moved still closer to him, and her breasts massaged the bruised muscles of his chest. He buried his face against her cool, shining brown hair.
"Does your mother know where you are?" he asked.
"Umm. I called her this morning." She kissed his throat and ears and ran her lips playfully along the outline of his Adam's apple. "Did anybody ever beat you up this bad before?"
"Oh sure. A hundred times. Once in Phoenix, no, I think it was Dallas, I had to spend a week in the hospital." His hands felt their way around and moved up the front of her until he held and squeezed her breast. "You're not that stacked, for a high-priced pro."
"When you get into my class, the size of your boobs doesn't matter as much as what you can do with them." She began to move a little against his touch.
"And what do you do with them?"
Her breath was faster now. He moved his head and let his swollen lips play over her. "Everything," she said. Then, "What the hell are you doing?"
"If you're such a high-priced babe, how come you don't know?"
His hand slipped under her skirt, and pressed hard against her.
"Don't start anything you can't finish," she teased, urging him on all the more and letting her hands touch him all over. She pressed her body against his tentatively and drew in a sharp little breath of surprise. "My god, you're ready. What kind of man are you?"
His hands moved around her and he listened to her groan with pleasure and surprise. "You may not know," he whispered against her ear, "but my real name is not Clark Kent."
It was hard for her to laugh. She couldn't find the breath. She sang against him, her body close, and her lips danced laughingly across his face.
Her hands circled him and got him so ready, he almost couldn't wait. "Easy," he muttered. He pushed her willing body over and rolled against her.
Her arms opened for him and he lay for a moment gathering strength. Then he took her and every tired muscle of his body screamed at the tension. He groaned with the pain.
"Boy-O, are you all right?"
"I can't manage, baby. Help me."
She kissed him and whispered against his lips. "All right."
He smiled in spite of himself, in spite of the disappointment. Jeanni was good, she was real good. He bit at her chin and rolled onto his back.
She lay quietly for a moment and then she drew herself up.
He smiled and lay with his arms under his head, watching her work, watching her sweet breasts bob and shimmer as she did. He forced himself to keep his eyes open against the mounting pleasure, smiling at her. That was a contest of endurance.
Then their breathing grew too hectic and they were off and flying. She fell, trembling against him. "Oh, I love you. I really do."
"Jeanni, Jeanni."
"Umm."
"Nothing. Just Jeanni, Jeanni."
"Boy-O, what's going to happen to us?"
"I'm thinking about that. Jeanni love, I'm thinking about that all the time."
She buried her face against his chest and kissed his arm, sinking her teeth into his bruised muscle. "What have you thought of?"
"Ouch!" He wrapped his hand in her hair. "Take that easy, will you?"
"What have you thought of?"
He pulled her close to him. "How do you feel about foreversville, hon? Do you want to marry me?"
"Yes."
"But I don't know how to play it square, you know that don't you?" His voice was dubious. "I mean, I'm not trained for anything, and I can't think of anything to do."
"Neither am I. We're not exactly used to worrying about our living are we?"
"See, that's the drag. What'll I do, baby, to bring in the bread?"
"What do you want to do?"
"I don't know. Drive a truck I guess or build things."
She didn't say any more, but Boy-O could see all her expensive clothing dancing in her mind and that little yellow dream of a car. "It's not enough, is it?"
"I don't know. It'll damned well be different." She drew away from him and sat up on the bed, straightening his clothes. She lit a cigarette for him and one for herself. "We could buy a farm, I guess."
"With whose money?" He didn't much believe it any more. It was a stupid dream.
"Oh, Boy-O stop it. You know I have money." She looked at him. "But we have to give it a try, don't we? What else can we do but take that chance?"
"I don't know. It's a hard life." i
"You've got to let me try," she said. "I've got to try and see if it's enough. I love you, you big lug."
"Okay. We'll try."
She kissed his mouth and kissed him again. But the kiss tasted bitter. It was just a matter of time.
"I've got to go now. I'll be back in the morning."
She got up and left him alone. Boy-O Carter didn't know whether to dream and plan, or confront his suspicions. The room was dark, and his brain was still pounding from the battle. But he couldn't stand to sleep and he couldn't stand to think.
So he lay there, cursing in the darkness.
CHAPTER NINE
Jeanni didn't go home. When she got into her car, she thought it was to drive home, and when she turned the car off on the road out of town, she told herself that she was taking a drive. To cool off, to catch the evening air, to think. She told herself all of these things and more. But after an hour on the road, she forced herself to admit the truth. She was running, running as fast as she could. To Chicago.
"I'll tell Mike I'm clearing out. There's a lot to do. I can give up the apartment and sell my furniture and get my money out of the bank and still be back before Boy-O is up and around."
That was comforting. She could drive to Chicago in peace with that thought in her mind. She let herself daydream as she steered the car onto the highway and followed the white lines.
Id her fantasy she again was Boy-O's wife and they had a sweet little farm, all checkerboard crops and flowers, and they had kids too. And she loved them and she loved the life. She wove a lovely little fairy tale and wrapped it around the truth.
The truth was that she was going back to Chicago.
Halfway there, she stopped off and called home. She didn't want to worry her parents. They pretended to believe that she'd be back the next day, or the one after, or at the very latest, the one after that. But they didn't believe her. Jeanni could tell they thought she was leaving because of the scandal of her staying out all night with Boy-O Carter and then picking him up off the sidewalk in broad daylight. Well, let them think what they wanted to think.
It didn't matter to her.
She was on the road to Chicago, and back to the Jeanni she knew. The Jeanni who was good at her job and success and never confused.
Love confused her. What happened to her when he touched her confused her. Boy-O Carter, a two-bit hitchhiking gigolo, was like a thousand other young men who came around asking Manelli for work in the big time. Manelli hated them and he'd taught Jeanni to hate them for their grasping, two-bit ways. "They're not natural. They're not meant to stay in the big time." He had told her a thousand times. "Cause they've got hash-house tastes and all of them are too busy fighting their own bogymen to think about the customers."
Women are the only ones who can make out in the business she was in, Mike had taught her. Because men get their bodies mixed up with their self-respect and their hearts. Women can separate the two a lot better in the long run. Studs only lasted at Club Hades for six months. Jeanni had watched them fade away, disappear, get married. Only the women stayed. Because they didn't have to give all of themselves to satisfy their clients, and that was the female code of honor, in her racket.
What had it been about Boy-O then that had thrown her off the deep end? What did he have that the hundreds of others like him that she'd met didn't have? A cocky smile? A tiny scar over one eye that made his eyes seem even bluer than they were? Black hair and a thin body? None of these things were so unusual. She'd met men more handsome-a thousand time more handsome.
What had happened to her then? There had to be a reason. It couldn't have anything to do with Boy-O's personality-too much in that was false, too much guarded and what showed was too often unpleasant.
Funny, she thought, here I am, head over heels crazy about someone and the more I think about it, the more I think it had nothing to do with him. It must be because I was in Swanik's Landing, and because I felt so guilty about what I have become. I must have been looking for an out all the time and love and marriage is it.
Did that matter in her love?
She objectively conjured him up. He stood in front of her car on the highway. Boy-O, with his shoulders hunched and his thumbs jammed in his hip pockets. Boy-O. with his crooked wise-guy smile and his ice-blue eyes. Boy-O.
It made no difference. She loved him. She admitted it.
"I'm in love, Mike," she said, as she walked into his office.
"You look like hell. Been driving all night?" He poured a stiff double of his most expensive Scotch into a crystal tumbler and, adding ice, passed it to Jeanni.
"It isn't morning yet. It's only about four. Work has hardly begun.
He laughed and kissed her on the forehead. "Drink up. You look like you need it. What was it? One oi the local objects?"
Jeanni laughed. "No, hon. Worse than that. His name is Boy-O Carter."
Manelli burst into laughter. He walked over to Jeanni and caught her in his arms and held her there while he roared. Then he drew away and, wiping his eyes, said, "Say no more. That name takes the end of the story and prints it first. Boy-O. Jeanni, you're the greatest. There are three types of girls in this business First, there are the cheap ones-they go for doctors and lawyers or types with credentials. They make the worst hustlers because they're husband hunting. If they're lucky, you don't have them for long and if they're unlucky they turn into bitter chicks that go for a damned ten dollar quickie. But, like they're depressing, and the higher types won't throw out the cash for them. Then, second there are the perverts. They don't mind the work, because they've got other interests. So sure, there are guys, who come running when you raise the girlie flag md even so, you can turn them into chic chicks. But, in the long run, no. They just haven't got the heart. They don't hit the top rung of the ladder, even if they stay in the business for the rest of their lives."
"Which one am I?"
"Hold on. I'm getting to you. You're three. You're the best kind of hustler going. You're the kind that will bring in the big money for a long time."
"And my fatal flaw?"
"Boy-O's, baby. You dig the bad guys. I tell the truth. The first day you walked into my office, I figured you for type number two. And I was even sort of sorry for you, because I knew then that with your looks you could be top and tops around here."
"If you thought that, why did you wait so long before giving me my first female customer?"
"Well, you know," Mike bit off the end of a Havana cigar that he'd smuggled into the country and concentrated on lighting it. He walked around the desk and finally settled into his chair. His feet went on the desk.
Jeanni smiled. Whenever Mike said something he thought was not the wisest thing to tell someone, he always looked casual.
"You were such a kid," he went on. "I was afraid I would drive you off the deep end. You know, it's not unusual for those Lesbian chicks to do themselves in when they find out what the merry-go-round is all about."
"So you gave me a car to soften the blow."
"Yeah. And I expected you to start giving yourself to Claudia What's-her-name for nothing." He threw his hands into the air and smiled. "That's how wrong I can be. That Claudia chick is so wild about you, she wouldn't settle for nobody else while you were gone. It looks like this is the time to jack up your fee. You know, when they're that eager for you, they'll pay what ever you want to ask."
Jeanni smiled. "Sorry, Mike dear. But I'm getting out."
"That's right. I almost forgot. You're in love."
"In love. One hundred per cent in love." Jeanni slugged down the rest of her drink. "You think I'm crazy and I'm not sure I don't agree with you. It may be a cancerous romance but I'm wild about him. Forgive me, Mr. Manelli but you dig, I have to see this through to the end."
"You have."
Jeanni looked at him after he answered her that way. And the silence ate into her.
"I'm waiting for you to explain that," she said quietly. The tears were forming in her frightened eyes.
"Don't look so scared. I'm not going to have you slashed. Where's the boy friend, kid? Downstairs having a drink?"
Jeanni shook her head slowly. She was beginning to suspect what he was going to say.
"Where is he?"
She took a long time answering. "He's at home. He's, well, I guess you might say he's laid up at the moment. I thought I'd come and break off with Hades and get back before he got out of bed."
"Is that what you thought, or is that what you told yourself you thought?"
The tears that had been waiting spilled over on her cheeks and down her face. Mike walked over to her and handed her his linen handkerchief.
"Yeah, you're type number three all right. Where were you going to live, lovey? On a farm?"
She nodded and snuffled into the handkerchief.
"So you ran away from him, without even knowing it. And you came home, you see that don't you? This is your home now."
She nodded. Jeanni forced herself to stop crying. It was true. It was all true.
"When do you want me to start work again?"
"Like you said, the evening's young."
"I'll have to go home and change first."
"No. There's a job scheduled for five A.M. You can take that and work here."
Jeanni shrugged. It was all the same to her. "Anybody I know?"
"I don't think so. You ever meet a guy named Hanson, here?"
"If I did, I don't remember."
"If you did, you'd remember. There's an extra hundred for this one." Mike refilled her drink and Jeanni emptied it in one gulp. "Room two thirty-two. Borrow a negligee from one of the girls." Jeanni nodded and, picking up her bag, started for the door. "Cheer up baby, everything will be all right, you'll see."
She saluted him and walked out.
Jeanni stood for a moment at the top of his staircase and looked down at the dining room of the Hades. It was almost empty now. The members who had come for the evening were either in the amphitheater or the gambling room or one of the private salons upstairs. The bar was filled with the drunks who weren't interested in women and with the girls who were on their coffee breaks. She drew a deep breath and started downstairs.
Hermie Huston was at the bar. "Hi, Jeanni. Hey, kid, do me a favor?"
"What do you want, Hermie?"
"See when my wife's going to be free and ask her to come out and say hello, will you?"
"Sure." She patted him on the shoulder and began to walk away but he haunted her side.
"Jeanni!"
"Yeah."
"Don't go yet. I didn't ask you the real favor." She turned to face him. Boredom and intolerance were written all over her face. "Listen. Ask Mike to let me back in the gambling room, will you? He'll listen to you."
"Nope. Your wife hasn't even worked off half of what you owe the house, Hermie. Mike won't listen to me, especially about you. He knows I can't stand you, Hermie."
"Well, ask him if he has any openings. I'll go out on the streets and find him some new girls. I got good taste. I found you, didn't I?"
"Ask him yourself."
"You know he can't stand me."
"Who can, Hermie?" She walked away, waved to two of the waiters and passed through the curtained doorway that led to the more lucrative parts of Hades.
She took the elevator all the way to the floor marked "Penthouse." When the cage stopped, she extracted a key from her purse and unlocked the mechanism that had stopped it there. It started up again, went just one floor higher and then stopped again. Jeanni extracted her key and the doors opened. .
She was in a large room that was furnished like an expensive living room. Several doors led from it into cubicles where beds were made up, and several other doors led into fully equipped dressing rooms. This floor was given over to the girls exclusively. Even Mike Manelli never came up here. The floor was off limits for anyone but the working girls, who used it between dates for recuperating.
Jeanni had always kept herself somewhat aloof from her comrades. She didn't go in for coffee klatches that specialized in trading trade secrets; and then, too, she didn't want to be bothered by the house dykes. So she had a friendly but cool relationship with most of the six girls scattered around the room.
"Anybody off duty for the night?"
Heads were turned her way. She had been the target for a lot of professional envy. Jeanni was the most expensive girl in the house. She worked only one time a night and at the most twice, and her customers always lined up for a repeat performance. Not only that, but Manelli was always giving her presents, a mink coat one month, a Picasso the next.
"Why princess, need a chauffeur?"
"Nope. A negligee."
Now several girls were interested. Jeanni was usually set for the night by this time and rarely on the premises.
They waited for an explanation. Jeanni wasn't about to offer any. If she had to, she'd go to the room naked.
"Done something wrong, sweetheart? Thrown on the K.P. line?" It was Leslie who said that. She was tall and big bosomed, with a good face and flashing black hair. But she was a dyke, and that, Jeanni reminded herself, put her in the second class.
Jeanni smiled. She felt rather maternal toward Leslie. The girl was older than she, but she was only three months old at the game and still rather shaken about things. "In a way. Just came back from a vacation and Mike wants me to get back into shape." Jeanni twisted the knife a little in their jealous minds. She was the only one allowed to call Manelli by his first name.
"What room assignment?"
"Two thirty-two."
"Well, what do you know." Leslie smiled intimately. "We're doing a tandem. I've got that assignment, too. Hanson?"
Jeanni nodded. Mike wouldn't be trying to push her down a notch would he? He'd always played square with her before. Except for that time with Claudia Butch. Still, if she'd been the type to go Lesbo, she would have turned by now.
"That's different. You can use one of my spares, as long as that's all in the family. We're about the same size."
"Thanks." Jeanni allowed herself to be led to the locker room. Leslie had four extras on hand. Jeanni chose a lace floor-length number.
"I thought you'd choose that one," Leslie said. She slipped an arm around Jeanni.
Jeanni didn't move a muscle. "Have you ever been with Hanson before?" she asked.
Leslie smiled and nodded, "He's one of my regulars."
"What's his gig?"
"Didn't Mr. Manelli tell you?" Jeanni said nothing. Leslie tightened her arm around her waist. "Well then, why don't you wait and see?"
"That's all the same to me really. A customer's a customer. They're all the same and they all get the same treatment."
"Well, then, let's go and treat him."
They got into the elevator and operated it by key, which meant that it passed every floor until it reached the one they were going to. Manelli's system was infallible If there ever were a raid, the cops wouldn't find much.
Room 232 was like only one or two others in the place. It was designed for threesomes, which is to say, it had an exceptionally large bed, and a chair. The lighting instead of being lamps around the room, consisted of one spotlight in the ceiling above the bed.
"Ever worked a threesome before?" Leslie asked as they approached the room.
"Sure." Jeanni was lying and she knew the other girl knew that. She was a lousy liar. She waited for Leslie to expose her, but the girl kept quiet. Jeanni supposed Leslie thought she was going to have the last laugh.
"Manelli gives them to me all the time. I wonder how he decides who gets what?"
Hanson didn't look like the type who would want his medicine any other way than straight. He was an enormous broad-shouldered ape of a man, with a face that went with his bulk. He liked Jeanni. He smiled wolfishly when he saw her. "Hey, you're my type, sweetheart," were the only words he said to her.
"You see, you really are slumming tonight," Leslie whispered to her ear.
Jeanni smiled. She sidled over to Hanson and ran her arms around his neck. "Why haven't we met before, handsome?" He turned his lips' away from her kiss, and pulled her arms off him. Then he began to peel off his clothes, his beady eyes dancing over Jeanni's body like he was about to attack her.
"Did you tell her anything about me?"
Leslie smiled and strutted over to Handsome Hanson. She began to help him undress. "Of course not. You like them to be ignorant, don't you?"
"Yeah, but I never trust you sisters."
He sat down on the chair, lifting one foot off the ground. "Take off my shoes and socks, lover." He motioned to Jeanni. She did as she was told.
"I feel good tonight. I'm going to give you hell tonight. I know this is one of my good nights." It seemed to Jeanni he was going to go on repeating that theme for his entire time.
"Okay," , he said, flexing his muscles, and shifting his huge body on the chair. Jeanni glanced curiously at his body. She gasped in astonishment.
Hanson was the biggest man she had ever seen.
She looked at Leslie. A taunting smile played on Leslie's lips. Jeanni stood stunned as Leslie walked over to her and untied the collar of the negligee. Then she peeled that off Jeanni's body, and kindly led the naked girl to the bed.
Now Jeanni understood why Mike had sent her to this room, this assignment. He was punishing her and warning her all at the same time.
"Sit on the edge of the bed, honey, and face Mr. Hanson." Leslie spoke in a low voice and Jeanni obeyed.
She sat there while Leslie stripped, trying to make her body numb, afraid of what she was going to experience. Leslie sat behind Jeanni. She pressed her body against Jeanni's back. "Mmm, I'm going to enjoy work tonight. You're my type, baby." Leslie's cool hands ran up and down Jeanni's arms.
And Jeanni couldn't lock the feeling out.
"Lean your head back on my shoulder, lovely, and make noises. Mr. Hanson likes his girls noisy."
Jeanni threw her head back and now lips brushed her face.
And hands were running over her body. Jeanni made sounds and told herself that she was thinking of the customer. Her breathing accelerated and she told herself that she was putting on a show for the customer. She cried out and the sound was not pain, and she told herself, the customer, the customer.
Leslie cooed at her ear, cooed about the feeling of her breasts and pinched the ends and squeezed the flesh and let that pour through her fingers and Jeanni stopped thinking of the customer. Her mouth opened to gulp air and her lips moved against the air, caressing the air. She turned her head and her lips moved over Leslie's throat.
"That's my baby. Baby likes her Leslie."
Leslie moved back on the bed and Jeanni's body, leaning against hers, inclined on a lower angle. Her lips moved, against whatever part of Leslie's body brushed them, and her flesh crawled with the fire of Leslie's touch.
"Give that to her, give that to her," said the customer, and Jeanni felt her body struck by his glance and warmed by his breath.
Leslie's hands grappled with the flesh on Jeanni's lean hips. Jeanni felt her body begin working rhythmically of its own accord.
Move, move, in anticipation of a touch, of a kiss.
Leslie moved still further back on the bed until Jeanni was lying prone and then the girl moved to her and her lips were all over her and her hands and her mouth.
Jeanni muttered and growled low in her throat. Leslie laughed and moved away. Jeanni opened her eyes and saw Hanson. "No!" She screamed and tried to crawl up the bed away from his hairy, sweating body. He laughed. And fell at her.
"Ow!" She screamed with the pain, and then screamed against him. Her hands dug at the material on the bed and she flayed her legs, kicking to crawl up the bed away from the pain, away from the customer.
That wasn't over quickly.
Hanson got up when he'd finished and dressed quickly. He patted Leslie on her head on his way out of the room, and said, "I like her. Speak to the boss and get her again."
Jeanni lay motionless on the bed. Her hair was plastered to her forehead with perspiration and she ached horribly. Hanson wasn't' a client, he was a torture machine. She closed her eyes and let her breathing return to normal.
Leslie walked over and sat next to her on the bed.
"Want a cigarette?"
Jeanni nodded without opening her eyes.
"How do you feel, princess?"
"Like I just had an entire regiment." Jeanni sat up. She walked over to the telephone and picked up the receiver. "Manelli," she said.
There was a long wait before Manelli picked up the phone. She sat patiently waiting, smoking. An odd smiled smeared itself across her face.
"Mike? Mike, listen, I'm hurt, badly. Get a doctor will you? Where do you think I'm hurt? Well, Leslie is pretty worried. She's fainted. Okay, I'll wait. Mike, you sound worried ... oh, Mike ... I made Hanson happy."
She hung up her phone and in a flash was into her negligee. "C'mon honey," she said to Leslie. "Let's quick go upstairs before Mike gets here."
"You're in for it. Manelli will break you."
"Just a joke between friends, dear."
They raced to the elevator and by using the key, were able to make it back upstairs before Manelli hit the floor.
Jeanni took her time getting dressed. She showered and washed her hair. She took hours making up her face. The sun was up and half of Chicago at work before she was ready to go.
Most of the girls had waited for her. The air was thick with tension. Manelli had been phoning for her regularly. In fact, the phone rang again as she walked into the big room.
"How does it feel to be Marie Antoinette on her way to the party?" Leslie smiled at her. "It's too bad. I thought we were just beginning to be friends."
Jeanni shrugged and reached for the telephone. "Hi, Mike. Buying me breakfast?" She lit a cigarette and laughed into the phone. "Well, love, if you own something that's valuable, you don't treat that like junk ... Okay, meet you downstairs."
She put the phone down and her cigarette out and walked to the elevator without looking to either side. As she entered the cage, she turned around and smiled sweetly at the group of friends she'd left behind. "Sorry girls," she said. And smiled.
Jeanni didn't get home until eleven o'clock. It was eleven-thirty before she climbed between the sweetly scented satin sheets of her large and lonely bed. If she didn't fall soundly asleep immediately, that wasn't because she hadn't had enough exercise.
It might have been that she was thinking of Boy-O Carter and how far away from her Chicago life any feelings for him were. It was almost as if she had never met him at all.
CHAPTER TEN
Boy-O awoke the next morning feeling like a million dollars. His lithe bocly had recovered from the beating it had taken and his plans for the future had filled in whatever energy was physically missing. He had a girl. A girl named Jeanni. She was his chick.
It was the first time Boy-O had ever had a girl that he'd wanted. Women had pursued him, and supported him, but they had never, never meant a thing to him.
They had been meal-tickets, and there were hundreds of them. So if one money-babe got finicky he had been able to walk out, and five minutes later meet the next.
None of them had mattered. Not even the girl who had first taught him how.
And now Jeanni. Jeanni, now sweet Jeanni had come along. And it was all different. It was all a wedding world of easy loving. He'd forgive Sam Revere. He'd forgive Troy Willis. And he'd live to be an old man with kids and love and Jeanni. The funniest thing about it was that Boy-O didn't feel like a sap. He didn't feel like he had lost his freedom or been suckered into a fink's paradise. Things were fun, things were fine.
He walked to the window. Even the sun was celebrating. He walked to the mirror. He still looked terrible. He would probably never be a handsome guy again. It was probably planned that way. It was a world where only the studs were handsome, only the guys who needed looks for a living.
"I see you are feeling better." Dr. Willis leaned his thin frame against the bureau. "Feel like some breakfast?"
"No. Has my girl called yet this morning?"
"Give her a chance to wake up. Come, have some breakfast with me."
"Wake up? It must be noon already." Boy-O was suddenly embarrassed. He wanted to split, to leave this house and this man who was and had never been his father.
Doctor Willis picked the old ash from his pipe and loaded it with fresh tobacco. "Please, Stephen. I want to ask you something. And tell you a hundred things."
"The name is Boy-O."
But still, he allowed the doctor to lead him down the stairs and into the kitchen. He didn't know what to do. All he could think of was getting out of the house.
He wasn't angry any more, and without anger this man had no hold on him. Still, he helped the doctor to fix breakfast.
"I gather from talk about town that you came home to do a couple of us in."
"That's right. At least, it used to be right."
"Used to be?"
"Yeah. Things are changing. I'm beginning not to care whether you people die with your sins intact or not." Boy-O ate voraciously. He had a lot to do. As soon as he could get this guy off his tail, he'd collect Jeanni in her sweet little car, and they'd go out into the country. And breathe free.
"I loved your mother," said Doctor Willis.
Boy-O's head jerked up from his food. He looked at the doctor for a long time and his swollen lips curled into his familiar sneer.
"Don't lie to me, Doc," he said. "I'm a big guy now. I've seen lots of supposedly nice guys get cold feet. And don't lie to me about my old lady."
"I'm not trying to lie to you, Stephen. I'm telling you the truth, son. I always wanted to, but then circumstances took you away' from here before you were old enough to understand."
"There's no excuse, man, no excuse that you can give me, that would make up for everything you didn't give me."
"I wanted to give things to you."
"Come off it. I don't believe you, or any of that crud."
Boy-O watched Doctor Willis tremble with emotion. The old cat has some quilty conscience, he thought to himself. I don't know what he's going to do about it, but crying on my shoulder is not the answer.
"Boy-O...."
"Got to go, man. Got to go and get my girl." Boy-O started to get up.
"I offered to marry your mother." Wistfully, the old man laid his hand on Boy-O's shoulder.
Boy-O screamed with fury. "Don't lie to me. Don't lie."
"I'm not lying. I offered to marry your mother. She wanted to get rid of you, but I wouldn't hear of that. We'll get married, I said, and damn this town and damn my father. The whole thing is stuff and nonsense. I love you and you love me and that's enough."
He stopped and Boy-O stood tensely waiting for the rest of the story. There was something in his manner that made Willis believable, a certain pathetic earnestness, a certain unquestionable honesty. Boy-O searched his face for one twitching muscle that would let him believe this old man was lying out of fear or loneliness. He couldn't find it.
"Sit down, son."
"Don't call me son. I'm not your son. What made you a father? Where were you when the kids at school learned what names to call me? Where were you when I was helpless in front of them? Don't call me son, or I'll kill you."
"I loved you. I loved her. I wanted to be your father, have you carry on my name. I always have, from the day you were born, no, even before that." Willis trembled with emotion. He motioned Boy-O to a chair and the boy did as he asked. He lit his pipe and Boy-O lit a cigarette.
"Your mother was a strange girl. She hated most of the people in this town just like you do, but with less reason. She hated being poor and couldn't stand the envy she felt for the best families in town. I was a feather in her cap. Can you understand that?"
"If that was so, she'd have jumped at the chance to have you."
Willis drew on his pipe. "Maybe and maybe not. Because by' catching and shaming and then rejecting the richest and most respected family in town, she made herself better than them. Can't you see that?"
"I don't believe you."
"She wouldn't marry me, and I was pretty broken up at the time. I thought she was going to kill you somehow. I was afraid for her. I begged her not to hurt you. I told her that she could go away and that I would send her money to support you. I promised her regular support if only she would let you live."
"I don't believe you." Boy-O tried to block out the words, but he heard. And Willis knew he had heard.
"She did go away for a while. I thought she had done as she had said she would. I used to mail her checks to General Delivery, Chicago. Then one day she came back to town. You were a year old at the time.
She was alone, and unmarried and she had you." Doctor Willis's emotion was so great, he couldn't keep his pipe lighted.
"What'd you do?"
"Well, what do you think I did? I went round to her shanty and asked if she'd marry me now. She wouldn't. Then I asked her why she'd come back and she said she often got lonely in Chicago and missed watching what all the good people of Swanik's Landing were doing to one another."
"I couldn't believe it. I asked her if she'd had any trouble up there. Maybe she'd met a man or something, and gotten into trouble. 'This is your boy. Try and convince anyone he isn't.' That's all she would say to me. I told her that she wasn't being fair to you and that she wasn't fair to me either. But she only answered me with sneers and shouts and curses."
"No. That's not right."
"Yes, it is, Boy-O. It's true. And nobody but you and me and your dead mother know it. Well, anyway, I said that if she wouldn't marry me, she wouldn't get another cent. But cash was all she would take from me. She had an odd kind of pride. It wouldn't let her ask for anything from anybody."
Boy-O got up and paced the room. It couldn't be true. He'd gotten so used to hating Willis and loving his mother, if it were true all his years of hating had been for nothing.
And everything was for nothing.
"If that's true, why'd you avoid me all those years?"
"Avoid you? I followed you around. I watched you go wrong and I wanted to help you, wanted to talk to you, damn it, wanted to give you birthday presents and all of that."
"So?"
"I was ashamed. I was embarrassed. I was afraid." Willis paused and looked Boy-O in the eye. "I told myself that one day when you were a man and could listen to me, I'd tell you all this. Then you went away and I never got the chance."
"Okay, so you told me."
"Let me be your friend, son." Willis stretched out his hand.
Boy-O stared at it for a long time. Then he said slowly, "I don't know. I can't think about it now. I don't know what to do. If you only knew the nights I asked myself what way I would get back at you. Now you want to be friends, friends. Do you have any idea the ways I was going to shame you? I have a thousand plans, a thousand tiny hurts to deal you. I owe them to you. At least, I thought I owed them to you."
Willis let his hand wait.
"All right, all right. I'll shake your damned hand. Now leave me alone." Boy-O grasped the other man's hand for a moment and then they parted. And he ran from the house.
Ran to get Jeanni, to be against her body, to remember what he knew. He wanted to be safe, he wanted that more than anything else in the world.
On the streets, peoples' stares reminded him of his eyes, still black and blue. The people looked smugly al him, the good people of Swanik's Landing. He had been repaid by one of their native sons, and that was good enough. No one thought he would have the nerve to go near Sarah again.
It wasn't a question of nerve but of interest. Boy-O wanted to run to his Jeanni, but their staring sneers forced him to slow his walk and swagger in their faces.
They hadn't touched him where it hurt.
But Willis had.
"I'm sorry Stephen, but Jeanni's not here."
"That so? Where is she?"
"She's in Chicago, I imagine."
"What?" Boy-O felt the blood drain from his face.
"That's right. She didn't come home from Dr. Willis's last night. She just went straight to Chicago."
Boy-O turned and walked away a little bit. Then he broke into a run, racing fast as hell for the highway.
"She said she was coming right back, Stephen," Mrs. Jensen called after him. She watched him run and she felt sorry for the poor frantic young man. She'd felt sorry for him as long as she had known him. "I'm sorry, Stephen," she shouted.
If he heard, he made no sign.
Boy-O raced for the highway, but his body rebelled. His breath stopped coming and he was forced to slow his pace and gulp for air. He found himself on the main drag, on the sidewalk outside Revere's drug store. Without thinking twice, he walked in.
The store was empty of customers. Ben Johnson was the only one in the store. Sarah was not in sight.
"Get out of here. I don't want you coming near Sarah." Ben threatened.
Boy-O ignored him. He walked over to the cigarette counter and called to her. "Come here. I need you."
She appeared. When Boy-O called, she always appeared. Promptly.
"I need your help, Sarah."
"You're leaving, aren't you?"
"Yeah. Will you help me?"
She nodded, not relying on her voice to hold up. She loved him. Everything he'd done to her had only made her love him more.
"Let me borrow your car. I'll bring it back. And give me money for gas. I've got to get to Chicago. Fast. You dig?"
Sarah felt the corners of her mouth tremble. She vowed that she wasn't going to let him see her cry. He'd walk away without that.
She dug beneath the counter for her pocketbook and, finding it, extracted the car keys and a twenty dollar bill. She shoved them at him, and then turned and ran madly for the safety of the prescription booth. Life would only be Ben Johnson from now on. Unless she got up the nerve to leave this place. Sarah regarded herself in the mirror that hung on the wall there. It occurred to her, for the first time in her life, that she just might have the nerve. She just might have nerve enough to clear out.
"Thanks, Sarah, thanks," Boy-O carted as he turned and began to leave.
Ben Johnson stood in his path.
"You got a lot of nerve coming around her again," he said, flushed with his previous success. He'd obviously forgotten that Boy-O had knocked him flat.
"Oh, dry up." Boy-O walked right past him and broke into a run for the Revere house and Sarah's car.
He drove like the wind to the main highway into Chicago, and racing beyond the speed limits on the road to Chicago, he lied to himself. All the way to Chicago.
"She loves me. She's waiting for me. She loves me."
He smoked cigarette after cigarette, got two tickets and made it to Chicago in five hours. And not once along the way did he stop to think that he didn't know where Jeanni lived in Chicago, not where she worked in Chicago, nor where to find her in the whole city of Chicago.
He hated the city. He hated himself. He hated her.
Of course she wasn't in the phone book. Of course she had an unlisted number. Boy-O broke his twenty dollar bill and turned into the nearest phone booth. He placed a person to person call to Mrs. Jenson.
"I'm in Chicago, Mrs. Jensen," he shouted into the phone.
"Already? You were just over this morning. Young people travel these days. In my day, we were frightened of moving so fast." Mrs. Jensen's voice was rambling.
"Mrs. Jensen." Boy-O's voice was under control now. It was low and commanding. "I'm in love with your (laughter. Now, if you'll just give nie her address so I can find her and everything, you can start planning the wedding ceremony. Because as soon as I find her I am going to bring her home and marry her. Do you understand?"
"Of course I do. Congratulations Stephen. Funny, she didn't say anything about it to me."
"Her address, Mrs. Jensen."
"Three thirty-four North Drive. Penthouse apartment."
"Thanks, Mother!" Boy-O slammed down the phone and climbed back into Sarah's car. It was fifteen minutes to North Drive. In half an hour he'd have her in his arms. And he wouldn't have to be so afraid any more.
It was a chic apartment all right. Jeanni had hit the biggest time in the mid-west. Her maid said she was sleeping.
Boy-O said, "Wake her."
The maid obeyed, only because Boy-O raised his voice to enforce his directions. While he waited for her, he paced the room.
"What are you doing here?"
She was beautiful. She was very beautiful. Her body glistened in a satin robe and her brown hair matched its reflections. Everything about her said lovely and expensive. Expensive. Expensive.
"Don't tell me you're surprised." Boy-O listened with amazement to the sarcasm in his voice.
"I am. Get me some coffee," she said to the maid. "Yes'm."
"Yes'm," Boy-O mimicked. Then he advanced on the poor trembling maid. "Get out of here and don't come back until you hear from me. Get."
She vanished.
"Listen." The tone of Jeanni's voice was tolerant and patient and thoroughly insulting.
"Don't talk to me like that. And stop pretending. It makes me sick. You love me, and you know it. Now make me a drink."
Jeanni smiled with amusement. She sighed, and walked to the bar.
"What do you want?"
"How the hell should I know?"
She laughed and mixed him a brandy and soda. But she didn't take it to him. She left it on the bar and went and sat on a posh velvet chair.
Boy-O gulped the drink down, and silent, for a moment, listened to it fizzle in his empty stomach. He struggled to get control of himself.
"So you didn't want to give all this up." He took his time looking around the room. He took his time while he searched for some argument that would win her back. He wasn't good at asking. "Can't say I blame you."
Jeanni kept a set smile on her face. "I haven't got much time," she said.
"That's right I forgot You work nights." He wandered restlessly' around the room. He dug in his pockets for a cigarette and, letting it dangle from his lips, searched again for a match-When he finally got his cigarette to the point where he could smoke it, he couldn't find a place to throw the match. Boy-O had never been so uncomfortable.
Jeanni watched him struggling. He was out of his class. The dungarees looked ridiculous in the midst of her furnishings.
"Look," she said, making another try at beginning their farewell scene.
Boy-O walked over to her. He stood in front of her, and forced the old smile on his face. "Stand up," he commanded.
"Oh, now, really."
"Do as I say. Or I'll...."
Jeanni stood up before he could finish the sentence. She was determined to put up with him, and to let him know that that was just what she was doing.
Her perfume was a heavy fragrance. The scent almost made Boy-O dizzy.
"Oh, Jeanni," he murmured. "Jeanni."
She could have won if only he'd helped her to stay angry. But the helpless way he'd said that, and the look on his face, reminded her. He smiled ruefully at her and stroked her silken hair.
"Okay, I'm going," he said, all at once accepting her decision.
"No, don't go. Don't go yet."
She reached out for him and turned him back to her. She -edged closer to him and rested her hands on his chest.
"Kiss me first," she asked.
Boy-O pulled her to him. His lips owned her. His body owned her. She answered his kisses, and murmured in his arms. The satin felt good against his arms.
They drew apart and Jeanni smiled. She took him by the hand and led him into the bedroom, to her extra-large bed. He stripped his clothes from his body and she watched, feeling hunger. She understood, now, how her clients felt. She'd never understood before what that meant to want someone you knew was good.
He saw her eyes on his body and he laughed. That was good to be in command again. Good to know that she loved him again. He walked over to her and the strut was back in his walk, the swagger was back, and the confidence.
He slipped the satin of her robe from her shoulders and buried his mouth against the satin of her flesh.
Again she broke away from him. Again to lead him to the bed. She got up onto the bed and stretched her arms up to him. Boy-O smiled and went to her.
He watched her mouth open as he touched her breasts. He watched her breathing faster and faster as he kissed her mouth and her breasts. And then he couldn't watch her any longer. He closed his eyes and forgot everything but the pleasure of her touch and her kisses and her body.
"I do love you," she whispered to him. "I do, I do."
Her body shifted and he fell beside her, and felt her arms wrap around him. That was warm and sweet lying with her. He kissed her neck.
She sighed and her head fell back onto the pillow, gluttonously waiting. He watched her again.
"You're beautiful, Jeanni. My Jeanni."
"Take me quickly," she urged. Her voice rang with hoarse longing. She didn't feel complete without him. She wanted him. Her eyes saw only colors, and tensely and eagerly she longed for him. This is how this is to be done, she thought. This is how that feels to be in love with someone's body. She felt him close to her, very ready, very strong. His chest rippled with muscles and his lips bit at her flesh, making her warm and cold and incomplete without him. She twisted and laughed at his caresses.
"Take me," she cried again. "Please."
Still he didn't do what she wanted, but let his touch drive her up to still greater peaks of wanting him.
"Boy-O, I love you. I'll give you anything. Everything. But don't make me wait, my darling. Take me now."
He tensed in her arms. For a moment that was almost as if he had disappeared.
She opened her eyes and saw him staring at her. In shock. In disbelief. In understanding.
"You-you are just like the others. You sound just like the others. But you are supposed to love me." His voice was tight. He was choking on his understanding.
"I still love you," she said, giving her lips to his mouth and murmuring still against the kiss. "I still love you. Don't stop. Don't leave me like this."
"I won't leave you," he said. "Not like this." He removed her arms from around his neck and held them back on the sheet. He would give her what she wanted. He would give that to her good. This was his Jeanni. This was his love. And she wanted him. This way. Only this.
He bit at her shoulder and she laughed with pleasure and struggled to embrace him, but he held her tightly. His lips tightened on the flesh of her breast and he bit at her until she screamed with pleasure.
He moved closer to her, teasing her with the promise of his force and his youth, until she seemed ready to scream with wanting him.
Then he took her, and worked hard while she murmured and screamed her money promises and trembled with her delight. But still he held back and managed to wait and give her more and more and then again she trembled and again she sighed.
He released her arms and they circled him, and her nails dug at his back, ripping the skin and kneading the hard muscles.
She lay in his arms, her mouth working against his chest.
"I loved you," he said. "You can't imagine how much I loved you."
He broke out of her embrace and walked around the room. She watched his proud body, all amazement and new desire. He was lithe and young. He was lean and beautiful.
And suddenly everything was simple.
"Stay with me, Boy-O," she said. "We can stay here. I make so much money it is unbelievable. There are a lot of people in this world, in this city who will pay a thousand dollars for me, for one night. We can live here together. We have everything."
"You were my last chance." He walked and walked. "I know that now. You were my first chance and my last chance. You were the big money. You were the sweepstakes. We might have been happy somewhere. Might have had what I guess I never had. A home and a life and all that sort of stuff. We could have made the square life hip. We could have made it."
"We still can." She watched him start to dress, and panic started in her. She began to understand that he was leaving. "Is it taking money that bothers you? Then I'll talk to Mike. He'll give you a job and in no time you'll be making more money working than you ever dreamed of having."
He didn't say anything to her, dressing silently.
She got up and moved to him. She stopped his hands from buttoning up his shirt.
"Don't go. Don't leave me. Tell, what is it? What have I done?"
"I loved you." He couldn't smile. He couldn't make the words come out lightly. "Do you think I can stand to know that other men have you every time they pay their money at the door? Do you think I could stand to know that you are up for grabs? My girl, up for grabs?"
He walked toward the door.
"Don't be stupid," she said. "What will you do now? I'll tell you. You'll sell yourself on the highway, and in every cheap saloon in the world. Why? What's the difference?"
"I loved you. If you can't understand that, you can't understand anything."
Jeanni watched him walk out the door, and close it softly behind him. Maybe she hadn't loved him. Maybe there were others who could do the same things for her. But, oh, Boy-O Carter was the best. She felt the tears start rolling down her face, but she knew that wasn't her heart crying. She knew what part of her was producing the tears. She knew what part of her was sorry.
Maybe no one will ever love me again like that, she thought to herself. Maybe that was my last chance at all the things I left behind.
She reached for the telephone. While she was waiting for her party to answer, she dug in her night table for a cigarette.
"Hello Mike. It's me. Listen darling, I'm very low, blue as the bottom of a dye bottle. Do you mind if I don't work tonight? I'll call Claudia Butch myself and arrange a date for tomorrow afternoon to make up. She won't care. She's crazy about me." She listened, smiling, to his answer. Then she said, "Thanks, sweetheart. And Mike. Do me a favor. I don't want to be alone tonight. Pick out someone for me and send him over will you?" She lit a cigarette and drew deeply on it. "I don't know. Tall and lean, I guess. And not too pretty. Find me a man, will you? Fine. Yeah, don't worry. I'll be waiting."
He stood by the side of the road nonchalantly. The cars bolted past him at great speeds along the highway. Sometimes he watched them approach. In the' distance, the moon bouncing off their chrome bumpers made them look like great silver stars.
It might have been his superior attitude about hitchhiking that had kept him standing in the gutter for two hours.
Or maybe it was because all the cars that had passed were driven by men.
