by Lee Smith
“Where are you going?” She’s thick-voiced, maybe a little drunker than he thought, a little drunker than he likes them.
“I got to get my guitar and stuff,” Johnny says, and when he goes back into Loretta’s for it, the kid that’s trying to look like Elvis gives him the high sign. “Man,” he says. “That didn’t take you long.”
“Hell, it’s nothing but pussy,” Johnny says. “It don’t mean a thing,” and he leaves the boys thinking that one over.
Loretta herself comes by to say, ”Glad you made it this time, hoss. You were real good too. Mighty fine.” Now if Johnny failed to make it some other time, he can’t remember the occasion. He doesn’t know what Loretta’s talking about, but she’s pissing him off pretty bad.
“Honey, you must have me confused with somebody who gives a shit,” he says, which makes Loretta’s jaw drop down about a foot and her fat cheeks sag. Johnny goes out the door while she’s just standing there with her hands on her hips, so scratch Loretta’s, it’s a dump anyway.
Meanwhile, Sheila’s gotten kind of nervous in the car. “Listen,” she says when Johnny returns, “maybe I’d better follow you or something. I forgot about my car. My car’s right over there.”
But Johnny’s lost them this way before. “Aw, honey,” he says, nuzzling into her big blond hair, “we won’t be out long. I just want to get to know you a little bit.” He puts a hand under her chin and turns her face toward his, to kiss her.
Just at the wrong moment, she jerks her head. “This car’s a mess,” she says nervously. “I don’t see how a star like you can let a car get like this.” The car is a 1950 Ford flathead V-8 which contains most of what Blackjack Raines owns in this fucking world, since he was evicted from his apartment just two days before the start of his tour. So he pretty much lives in the car these days, plus Vic’s got him on this financial program to cover those bad checks and pay for the van he totaled last month, which wasn’t his van actually, Vic is handling all this so maybe Johnny won’t have to fuck around anymore with his parole officer.
“Honey,” he says now, “I’ve gotta come right out and say something to you. When I saw you sitting in that bar back there, I can’t tell you what come over me, the way I felt, I mean. You look just like my sister, I swear you do. You look just like she would of looked if she’d ever of growed up, I mean. And I felt like, well, I . . .” Johnny hesitates, running his hand almost absentmindedly over her tits, while Sheila listens real hard to what all he’s saying. He’d better be careful now; he’d better get it right.
“Well, you know I’ve had some trouble with the law,” Johnny says then.
She nods. Anybody who knows a thing about Blackjack Johnny Raines knows this. In fact, Sheila thinks she’s probably taking her life in her hands to be sitting out here in a parking lot with him right now; she must be out of her mind.
“But it’s all because I was a little orphan,” he says. “After I found my mamma dead in the snow, I just didn’t see no sense in being good,” he says. “So I became a wayward youth, you might say. I went all over this country, honey, hopping freights, working here and there, picking apples, you name it. Sure, I got in trouble, but now some of what you’ve heard is publicity, to tell the truth. I served my time. And I’m good inside, honey, I really am, only I ain’t had nobody to bring it out in me. When I saw you sitting in that bar, why, it just came all over me like an ocean wave.”
Now that he’s got his hand under her sweater, Sheila’s having trouble following. “Uh, what did?” she asks. She didn’t get the part about the ocean wave.
“She’s the one, I said to myself. She can see your true nature, I said to myself, she could bring out the good in anybody, and she looks just like an angel with all that pretty yellow hair.” Johnny is rubbing his face in her hair, which is kind of gluey, actually; she’s got it all sprayed with something. He holds a breast in each hand.
Although Sheila has not exactly thought of herself as an angel before, she likes the idea fine. “I can tell you’re a good man,” she says to Johnny.
“Let’s go, then,” Johnny says. He’s about to bust his pants.
“Go where?” Sheila tries to pull back enough to look at him.
“Why, your place,” Johnny says.
Now she really gets nervous. “Shoot, we can’t go to my place,” she says, “I told you, my sister’s there, staying with the boys, why, we couldn’t ever go over there! Where are you staying?” she asks, peering at him. Sheila can’t see Blackjack Johnny too good in the dim light of this parking lot, plus they’ve steamed up the windows now, messing around in the car. Sheila got married at seventeen; it’s been years since she’s messed around in a car. There’s something sexy about it, for sure. Married people never do a thing in a car.
Johnny realizes he’ll have to give up the idea of getting her to put on one of her dental hygiene uniforms for him. “I was real late driving into town,” he says, “so I just came straight over here. I was going to check into a motel after the show. Let’s you and me go find us one with a Magic Fingers bed,” he says.
“Well, it is real late,” Sheila says thoughtfully, “but I think there’s a motel out on the highway that stays open all night. Everything right around here is closed. I don’t know about the Magic Fingers, though.”
Johnny starts the car and backs up, spinning gravel.
“Wait a minute! We never did decide where we’re going!” Sheila’s real loud; it’s obviously true that she doesn’t do this in the regular run of her life.
“I got to get me a room somewhere, honey,” Johnny says as patient as he can. “So why don’t you come on and stay with me, just for tonight? I’m real lonely, and you’re the best thing I’ve ever seen,” he adds, but Sheila has got her hand on the door handle anyhow.
“I told you, my sister’s over there, I can’t stay out all night long!” Sheila’s voice is shrill, and Johnny realizes that he may have misjudged her a little bit, she’s not as easy as she looks. Plus her eyes are too close together. But her tits were as big as grapefruits in his hands.
“Just pay me a little visit, that’s all,” Johnny says. “I’ll drive you right back over here. One hour, I promise. Scout’s honor,” he says, shifting gears, edging out into the street.
Sheila hesitates. Rain patters lightly on the hood of the car; all the neon lights blur together in the rain-streaked window. The thing is, her married sister likes Blackjack Johnny Raines even better than Sheila does; she knows her sister would understand her having a little date with a star. After all, you can only stay heartbroken for so long, and speaking of heartbroken, Sheila can’t even remember what her husband, Ralph, looks like. Of course that’s her ex-husband, might as well call a spade a spade. Johnny’s profile is real handsome, but she wishes he wouldn’t smoke so much in the car, of course she won’t say a word about it. It’s clear that this man has suffered so much. He’s got kind of a big nose, hasn’t he, and that wide mouth, but he looks more sad than mean, she thinks, in fact he doesn’t look mean at all, just handsome in a mean way. “Turn left,” she says, then, “Turn right.” She lets him keep his hand on her thigh; it’s the least she can do when clearly he’s led such a tragic life.
He doesn’t take hardly any luggage when he goes to check in at the Moon Winx Motor Lodge, but apparently this is all right with the clerk, who is mostly asleep anyhow. Sheila looks all around the lobby carefully because of course anybody could be here, anybody from her church, or any of Dr. Gold’s patients, or anybody, but nobody’s around at all except for a Negro vacuuming the lobby. The Moon Winx is a fairly new stucco motel with a mostly tropical motif. Suddenly Sheila feels sexy.
“Honey?” Johnny is asking. “Have you got any cash in your purse? I just got a big check from Loretta, but of course they can’t take it here, and my wallet’s someplace out in the car.”
That messy car! He’ll never find it, it’ll take hours, and they don’t have much time. Sheila giggles. “Here, you can pay me back later,”
she says. “I just got paid yesterday,” and she gives him what he needs out of her billfold. Sometime between when she got in his car and the time they got here, she realizes, she’s decided to go ahead and do it. It would be stupid to come to a motel and not do it. Everybody would think you had, anyway, so you might as well. Actually, she’d give anything if Ralph could see her right now, it’d serve him right.
Johnny keeps his arm around her all the way down the brightly lit sidewalk, until they get to room 34. “Here we are,” he says, turning the key in the lock.
“Excuse me just a minute,” he says once they’re inside, and he goes in the bathroom and pees and takes two pills so he’ll be sharp, and then wraps the rest of the pills and the gun in a towel and stashes it all under the sink. It hurts to pee. He breaks the seal on a new pint bottle of vodka and drinks some and goes out and gives Sheila some, and then turns off a couple of the lights she’s turned on. She’s sitting on the room’s one chair with her legs crossed at the ankle, like she’s in church or something. She still looks pretty good, even if she is older than he thought at first, why, those boys of hers could be twelve, fourteen years old, and he notices she’s not saying. Her cheeks have got that dumpy little sag on either side of the mouth that you don’t see before thirty, thirty-five. But that’s okay. In fact it’s better. Johnny doesn’t want a real young girl, or a beautiful girl, or a rich girl. He wants a grateful girl, and he might of just lucked out tonight. She’s chugging vodka from the little bottle like a pro too. Johnny hangs up his expensive cowboy suit carefully before he falls to his knees naked in front of Sheila on the orange shag Moon Winx carpet. “I can’t tell you how I felt when I saw you there in the bar.” He rubs his face against the tight denim crotch of her jeans. “I swear, honey, I just worship you.”
At the moment, this is true.
But even if it were not true, Johnny would say it anyway, and not feel bad about saying it either, because he firmly believes it doesn’t matter what you say when your blood runs south and you’re trying to get a woman to fuck you. Hell, you can tell her any damn thing that works. This is okay. A man turns into an animal at such times, his brain turns into a pig brain, he’s nothing but a walking dick. He’s not responsible for anything he says or does. And no pussy is bad pussy either. Because when you get their clothes off it’s worth it, it’s always worth it; in a lifetime of fucking women he’s only seen three he’d just as soon not look at, and this is definitely not one of those, great big fat titties with saucer nipples, fine white dimply thighs, squeals like a cheerleader when she comes. Or acts like she comes, anyway—you can’t ever tell if they’re acting. The last thing she says, right before she rolls over on her side and starts snoring this sweet little whiffly snore like a puppy, is, “Please wake me up in fifteen minutes, you know I’ve got to get right on home.” Johnny lays there beside her for a while and then he walks around the bed so he can watch her sleep. Everybody’s so nice when they’re asleep. And women in sleep fascinate him, their sweet slack-jawed faces, the random passions and griefs that pass across their loose features, how they’ll twitch or startle sometimes and wake up all flustered. Sleep is active. It’s not like death. It’s not a thing like death, death is the only thing like death, and the way you can tell you’re not dead is if you’re fucking somebody, or if you just fucked them, or if you’re fixing to. He watches Sheila sleeping for a while. Light from the open bathroom door falls in a path across her. She looks real young in that light. After looking at her for a long time, Johnny gets up and goes in the bathroom. It hurts like hell to pee. Shit. If your dick goes, you might as well kill yourself. Johnny looks in the mirror and is startled by who he sees there, that hollow-cheeked dude, you can count his ribs. Shit. He’s got a free bed now for the rest of the night, but of course he can’t sleep, he did all those pills tonight, he’ll be good till noon. Shit. Might as well get on the road, get on over to Monroe. Maybe he can catch some Zs over there before the show. Johnny dresses carefully, quietly, takes his stuff out from under the sink, pulls one of the three fifty-dollar bills out of Sheila’s billfold and puts the billfold back in her pocketbook, puts the bill in his breast pocket, a little transfer of funds you might say. Johnny might need some cash, you can’t be too careful driving at night, especially driving alone at night. The roads of America are full of crazies.
Johnny sits down on the edge of the bed to pull his boots on; this gets harder all the time. Right now he’s got a shooting pain that fans out from his dick all over his body. These women have broke down his health. Hard living and juke-joint food. He’s not thirty but looks forty, maybe forty-five. Finally on his way out the door, Johnny pauses and then goes back to get Sheila’s purse again. He takes it to the bathroom and dumps it out on the countertop by the sink. It’s just awful what all a woman will carry around in her purse. Johnny paws through the mess until he finds her lipstick, Fire Engine Red. Then he writes across the mirror with it in big block letters, THANKS A MILLION, LOVE JOHNNY, and leaves.
It’s three a.m., the dead of night, lonely enough to spook you, but at least it’s quit raining. It’s not hot or even warm now, but Johnny’s sweating by the time he pulls out of the Moon Winx parking lot, and he starts sweating more when he looks in his rearview mirror and sees a long black Oldsmobile coming along real slow behind him. Now what kind of a person would be out driving around in the middle of the night? Somebody up to no good, that’s who. Some maniac.
Johnny unwraps the Moon Winx towel from around his gun and lays the gun on the seat beside him. When he turns onto the highway, heading east, the black Oldsmobile turns too. Shit. Then for about an hour, it follows right along behind, just pacing him, keeping the same speed. If Johnny speeds up, the Oldsmobile speeds up. If he slows down, the Olds slows down too. Johnny drinks some vodka to get ahold of himself. He never could stand suspense, he always hated cop shows. Then, after about an hour of this, he looks in his rearview mirror and he can’t see the Olds. The Olds is gone. This ought to be some relief, but oddly enough it’s not, somehow. It’s worse. Johnny is sure the Olds is still back there even though he can’t see it. He thinks it’s turned invisible or something, following him. His shirt is soaked through with sweat and he’s feeling kind of light-headed by the time he gets to Arcadia, sometime in the last puny hours of the night. He decides to stop for breakfast if he can find any place that’s open. Probably not, though. Arcadia is some kind of a college town, look at all these fucking columns, white and ghostly. Johnny hates college towns and college girls, smart-ass, got-it-all and know-it-all rich girls, he had him a run-in with one of those lately. Greer.
Only he didn’t know she was one of them right at first, she looked just like anybody else at the Hilltop in Nashville, where he was opening a show for Gene Vincent, last-minute replacement but what the hell, pretty high cotton for a country boy. Well, there she was, shiny straight brown hair rippling all down below her shoulders like a waterfall, and he couldn’t take his eyes off of her. Eventually he got it around to where they struck up a conversation. She had this friend with her, which should have tipped him off, but she was so pretty, somehow it didn’t. A good old girl does not take her friend along when she gets in a car with somebody, he’ll remember this.
But somehow it all seemed pretty natural at the time, they’d been drinking a lot of beer, the three of them, till their mouths got all drawed up and they were talking funny. Her name was Greer, she said, and he said he’d never met a woman with a name like that. “No, you wouldn’t have,” said the friend, who was one of them straight-up-and-down washboard kind of girls with no waist and no tits. “Hush, Buffy,” Greer said. The friend’s name was Buffy or maybe Muffy, one of those names.
They were driving in Greer’s car out to her parents’ house to go swimming, the parents were out of town, and damn if it didn’t turn out to be one of them fucking mansions out on Belle Meade Boulevard with a stone gate and a gatehouse and a lawn big enough to keep a Negro busy all the time just mowing it. If it was him
now, Blackjack Johnny Raines, he wouldn’t put all that energy into grass. He’d grow him something worthwhile, or he’d up and pave the sucker. Or maybe he’d put in a par-three golf course.
Anyway, the sight of this house, Greer’s house, had sobered him up right fast, but no sooner did Greer park (nice car, baby-blue convertible) than she and Buffy were headed for the pool, dropping clothes as they went. It was the prettiest thing you can imagine, Greer buck naked in the moonlight thataway, poised like one of them art-museum statues before she dove headfirst off the board. It had not occurred to Johnny that they’d be swimming naked, but hell, he was all for it. The only problem was, once he got in there with them, it wasn’t really sexy, it made him kind of sad, in fact, for some damn reason. It ought to’ve been sexy, the pool had lights in it and everything, so he could see the girls all the way down, every bit of them, even the dark triangles of hair which always embarrassed him somehow. It seemed like a shameful secret, for girls to have so much hair. This pool was painted aqua, so the girls’ bodies looked kind of aqua too, aqua and insubstantial, dreamy mermaid bodies, nothing a man can grab ahold of and fuck.
Although by that time Johnny was beginning to get the idea that they weren’t going to fuck anyway, him and Greer, he’s not sure exactly when he figured this out. She wanted to talk too damn much, for one thing. She wanted to kid around. And that friend of hers, that Muffy or Buffy, stayed right there. So being naked in the water like this was no turn-on at all, in fact it was the opposite of a turn-on, in fact it put Johnny in mind of the swimming hole that Robert Floyd dynamited in Grassy Branch, it made him remember how long it took him to teach Rosie to swim and how little she looked in the water. She was just a kid then. At first, she was scared to put her face in. Later, she was scared to lean back. She never did learn to swim very good, not like these rich girls who seemed to be part fish; they could tread water for hours and ask him innumerable personal questions.