by Lionel White
“Is the child yours?”
She shook her head. “His.”
“You should go to the police,” I said.
“He is the police. He’s the deputy sheriff here.”
“Well, any son-of-a-bitch that would do that���”
I stopped in mid-sentence. I didn’t stop because of what I was thinking. What I was thinking was why the hell am I getting involved in something that is none of my business. This girl means absolutely nothing to me. I have no interest in her, I don’t even want her.
But even as that flashing thought passed through my mind, I wondered if I wasn’t lying just the slightest bit to myself. In any case, my plans were made, the things I had to do certainly didn’t leave room “for becoming involved with some girl who had her own set of problems, and who, without question, would sooner or later solve them in her own particular fashion.
What stopped me in mid-sentence was the door crashing open.
He stood just inside the door, and when I looked at the width of his shoulders, I figured that the only way he could have gotten through was sideways. He was a big man all around, and he must have weighed well over two hundred and sixty or seventy pounds. A good sixty or seventy of it, however, was in his belly.
He had short red hair, tiny, close-set eyes, a chin like a mud scow, and a nose which had been broken at least twice. He was wearing a stained sweatshirt, a pair of khaki pants, and tennis shoes. No socks. His hands hung at his sides, at the end of hairy arms, and he could have hired them out to a Hollywood studio for an ape picture. He smelled of sweat and stale booze.
For a second or two he just stood inside the room, and his eyes went from me to the bottle on the table to the girl. Then he moved, and for a big man it was fantastic. He was across the room like a cat. One hand reached out and slapped the girl off the chair. He turned toward me.
“What are you doing with my wife? Getting her drunk?”
Sharon lay on the floor, propped up on one elbow. The complete terror in her eyes as she looked at the man reminded me of an expression in the eyes of another girl, which I’d seen a long time ago and which I’ll never forget.
He took a sudden step toward me, and this time he staggered slightly. I realized that I would not have a chance to get out of the chair, and with his bulk and size I didn’t believe it would do me much good if I did.
I didn’t even think. When my foot went out, it was instinctive. I didn’t plan it; I only knew that I had to reach him before he reached me.
The foot, the straight kick, caught him in the groin, and he hesitated for a fraction of a second. As he doubled over, I didn’t wait. I came out of the chair like a bullet, my head bent low, and I caught him in that massive belly. The air went out of him like a punctured balloon.
There was a gun in my suitcase, but I knew I wouldn’t have time to get it. I wouldn’t have more than a split second to do anything before he would recover.
He wasn’t the kind of man you could stop for long with a kick in the balls and a gut punch.
I hated the thought of wasting good bourbon, but my right hand reached the neck of the Jack Daniels bottle, and I swung it full arc. It took him on the side of the head and shattered. If it hadn’t, it probably would have fractured his skull and killed him. As it was, it dropped him cold.
I turned to Sharon.
“If this ape is your husband,” I said, “I have just given you an instant divorce. I figure you’ve got about five minutes. Go in and pack your bag and meet me at my car. Make it fast.”
She got up without a word, not looking at him as she stepped over his fallen, prone body, and went out the door.
I didn’t look at him, either, as I got my things together.
I wasn’t thinking of him. I wasn’t even thinking of the girl, Sharon. All I was thinking of was that I was a complete horse’s ass to get myself in a situation like this at a time like this. I was also thinking that the sooner I got away from the Happy Hours Lodge and the further I got away, the better it would be for all concerned.
3
The scene at the Happy Hours Lodge acted like a shot of adrenalin. Pulling away and cutting onto Route 5, heading south, with the girl beside me and her bag nestled against mine in the back of the car, I forgot how exhausted I really was. The exhaustion, however, had been replaced with something that was infinitely more uncomfortable.
She had told me he was a deputy sheriff. That meant it was a county office, and I knew that this particular county extended all the way to the border. My first inclination had been to cut back north and go into San Diego and drop her off there. On second thought, however, I didn’t relish the idea of coming back down this road. I didn’t know quite how much pull he might have with the state police, and I was pretty sure that the blow on the head wouldn’t keep him quiet for very long.
I figured the border was less than ten miles away. It would take about eight minutes to reach it, another five to stop at one of the all-night insurance offices and pick up the insurance papers which would be necessary after
I crossed into Mexico proper. I hoped we would have time to make it before he had an opportunity to stop us.
I turned to Sharon, who was slumped in the seat beside me. She had not spoken a word since getting into the car.
“You have any money?”
“About six dollars.”
Great, I thought. I had not only slugged an officer of the law, but now I’m stuck with an eighteen-year-old girl, who is broke.
“You have a family somewhere? Any place you can go?”
She didn’t answer, so I took a quick look at her out of the corner of my eye, and she was shaking her head.
There was only one thing to do. I could hardly dump her at the side of the road, and there would be no particular risk in crossing the border with her. They don’t ask questions going into Mexico. They only ask them on your return.
I figured we could cross the border, go into Tijuana, and I’d find her a room at a hotel and give her a few dollars. In the morning, she could recross the border, take a bus up to San Diego, Los Angeles, or wherever the hell she wanted to go. Or she could stay in Mexico and pick up a job as a waitress in some dive, or she could sell her ass on the turf, as far as I was concerned.
Whatever she did, it probably would be no worse than what she had just left.
I stopped at the first all-night insurance office, and it only took a minute or two to buy the policy which would keep me out of jail if I were unlucky enough to have some minor car accident once I was on the other side. You can buy those policies for twenty-four hours, or up to any length of time that you plan to be in Mexico. I took a policy out for thirty days, and it cost me $45.
We had no trouble crossing into Mexico.
She began to talk in a low voice that was barely audible above the soft hum of the engine, as I swung the car to the right and headed for the downtown section of Tijuana.
“Do you think you killed him? I hope you did.” She sounded as though she meant it.
“It would take a lot more than a broken whiskey-bottle to kill that guy,” I told her. “By the way, you aren’t his wife, are you?”
“His wife is dead. He hired me about six months ago to take care of his kid. I guess that’s about the only decent thing about him. He really digs young Johnny.”
“What made him say you were his wife? Were you sleeping with him?”
She didn’t answer my question. She merely said, “He’s a son-of-a-bitch. He threatened to have me put in a reform school if I didn’t do what he wanted me to do, and he wasn’t bluffing.”
“At eighteen, they don’t put you in reform school.”
“I’m really seventeen. And I already have a record.”
She sounded very tough, but I couldn’t quite believe her, at least about the record.
“A. record? What kind of a record?”
“Well, I ran away from an orphanage, and I got busted a couple of times for smoking pot. I was up in Hollywood
for a while, and I was just sort of kicking around when I took that job with him at the motel.”
We were cruising down the main drag of Tijuana. I hadn’t been in the town for more than six years, but it really hadn’t changed a great deal. I remembered a small hotel out by the race track, and although she hardly looked even the seventeen years that she said she was, I knew that it was the kind of place where they wouldn’t care if I checked in with a pair of twelve-year-old Siamese twins.
“We’re going to a hotel to check in,” I said. “And we’re going to get some sleep. In the morning���”
“I don’t want to think of the morning. I just wish you hadn’t broken that bottle when you hit him.”
“The bell boy can send up a bottle,” I said.
It took a little longer than I thought it would to find the El Camino Hotel. It had changed considerably since I had last seen it. Even in those days, it had hardly been a first class hotel, even by Mexican standards. I guessed, since the track burned down and the Americans were no longer flocking across the border to drop their money, business had fallen off.
There was a parking space next to the hotel, and as I took the two bags from the car, a half-dozen, bedraggled street-urchins converged on me.
I knew the routine. I gave the biggest one a dollar, American, and told him if he was still sitting in the car when I came back the next morning, and the hubcaps were still on the car, he’d get two more dollars.
He spoke sharply in Spanish to his friends, and they drifted off. He climbed proudly behind the wheel and settled in for the night. He assured me in broken English that I would have nothing to worry about. He winked at me, and very carefully undressed Sharon with his liquid-brown eyes as we started into the lobby.
The desk clerk could have been his older brother. But he wasn’t old enough to start shaving. He couldn’t help leering when he asked if I wanted a room with a double bed or twins.
I asked about getting some whiskey, and he explained that they no longer had room service. But he would be able to find me a bottle of tequila. There was no bellhop to take our bags up, so he carried them himself.
While he was down getting ice, the tequila, and a half-a-dozen bottles of Seven-Up, Sharon wanted to know if I thought he could get us some grass.
She said tequila made her sick.
I told her pot made me sick, even the smell of it in the room, and she could take the Seven-Up straight or nothing. I wasn’t in the mood to pamper her.
The room was fairly large, and although shabby and run-down, it was an improvement over the Happy Hours Lodge. The boy had taken me at my word, and there were twin beds. While we waited for the ice and tequila, Sharon walked over to one bed, sat on it, and bounced up and down a couple of times. She looked up at me, her eyes half closed.
“I guess you don’t like me very much,” she said.
“I like you fine, baby,” I said. “But I’m tired.”
She pouted. “I could make you sleep real well.”
She probably could.
“Anything you could do to make me sleep,” I said, “we can do in one bed. But I’m used to waking up alone.”
She had taken her bag and gone into the bathroom and closed the door by the time the desk clerk returned with the ice and drinks.
I paid for the stuff and told him I wanted a call for eight in the morning.
I was sitting up on one of the beds with a couple of pillows propped behind me when I heard the shower go off. I had stripped down to my shorts. I was dead tired, but for some reason was no longer sleepy.
I was taking a drink when the bathroom door opened and Sharon came into the room. For a second I thought it must be a different girl. Her face had been scrubbed clean of the make-up, and the eyeshadow was gone. She had combed and brushed her blond hair and parted it on one side. It hung down to her shoulders.
She wore nothing but a man’s pajama-top, which was unbuttoned halfway down the front and ended not more than six inches below her navel. Her thighs and legs and feet were bare.
She stood for a moment in the doorway, her head cocked on one side, sucking on her index finger, watching me.
You might have taken her for a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, if it wasn’t for the expression in her eyes, an expression which reminded me of every whore in the world.
I began to understand how that fat deputy sheriff who ran the Happy Hours Lodge as a sideline had become involved with her. I also began to doubt her own version of their relationship.
“I guess I will have tequila, as long as that’s all there is,” she said.
Watching her as she walked over to pour the drink, I saw she was making sure I saw everything there was to see. At least what she had was worth seeing. With the drink in her hand, she sat on the opposite bed, leaning forward, and the pajamas were open to expose one brown nipple on a pear-shaped breast.
I hadn’t wanted her, I hadn’t wanted any woman for a long time. But in spite of myself, I could feel my loins tighten. I could sense the beginning of an erection.
Looking over at her, I thought, she’s young, she’s pretty, she’s desirable, and, God knows, she certainly seems willing. Then the image of Ann Sherwood came to my mind.
Ann was beautiful and desirable, but I had let her go, made no real effort to hold her and have her. Then, for Christ’s sake, why was I getting an erection now, a week too late?
Sharon’s voice brought me back to reality.
“I want to stay with you,” she said.
“I have some business here, and then I’m heading south, and you’re going back to the States.”
“No. No, I want to stay with you. I’ll go south with you.”
I shook my head. “Sorry, baby, you just don’t fit into my plans. What I have to do, I have to do alone.”
“I’m not going back,” she said.
“All right. Stay here then. But I’m moving on.”
She took the glass from my hand and went back to the bottle on the dressing table.
Watching her, I suddenly knew that I didn’t want another drink. I didn’t want to go to sleep either. I didn’t want to be lying in that bed alone. Maybe I didn’t want her, maybe I only wanted to prove something to myself. In any case, I said, “Never mind the drink. Come here.”
She put the bottle back on the table, turned, looked at me curiously.
“I said, come here.”
She hesitated for a second and then slowly approached the bed. There was a funny little half-smile around her mouth, and I could see that she figured that somehow or other she had been making points.
I didn’t care what she figured.
“Let’s see how good you really are.”
Her pajama top came off, and then she was leaning down and her hands were working the shorts down from my hips.
Some twenty minutes later, I rolled off of her, spent, limp, breathing heavily. I knew one thing. There might be something wrong with me emotionally, but there was nothing wrong physically. The knowledge failed to make me feel any better. It made me wonder if the only women who could appeal to me sexually were tramps.
She was back in the other bed, and I was half asleep when she spoke. “Do you like me any better?”
I didn’t answer.
“Well, you did like to’ ball me, didn’t you?”
“Sure,” I said; “but so have a lot of other guys.”
“You’re a son-of-a-bitch.”
“Go to sleep.” I waited a moment and added, “You’re good. You’re very good.”
It must have been some six hours later when I woke up. It was the screaming that woke me. It was my own screaming.
There was nothing new about it. I’d been waking up that way on an average of two or three times a week for the last twelve months. The only thing different this time was that, instead of waking up alone, I could feel her standing at the side of the bed, shaking me and saying something. As I came out of it, I heard her voice. “Wake up-come on, wake up. You’re having some s
ort of nightmare.”
I looked at her, dazed for a moment, remembering the dream rather than the reality. Then I remembered where I was and who she was.
“Some water,” I said.
She took a glass and went to the bathroom, and I heard the faucet as she turned it on. I tried to shake the dream from my mind. I didn’t want to remember it, I didn’t want to think about it. And I certainly needed no psychiatrist or analyst to tell me what it meant, because it wasn’t a dream that had to be interpreted.
It was only a memory that came back in the form of a dream.
She brought the water in and handed it to me.
“You have nightmares like that often?”
“Too often,” I said.
She took the empty glass from my hand and returned it to the dresser. She turned and said, “You want me to come back to bed with you?”
“Yes.”
The sun streaking through the broken Venetian blinds and falling across my face awakened me, and I yawned and looked over at the wristwatch lying on the table next to the bed. It was nine o’clock.
I wasn’t surprised. I had asked the desk to call me at eight, and I suppose they probably would have gotten around to it sometime before noon. They don’t take time too seriously in Mexico.
I stretched, realized I was alone, and my eyes went over to the other bed. The covers were wrinkled, but it was empty. I pulled myself to a sitting position. I felt good. Relaxed, rested. There’s a rumor around that sex can be exhausting and that over-indulgence in it can be downright debilitating. Don’t you ever believe it.
I saw that the bathroom door was open, and I walked over and looked in. She was not in the bathroom, and her bag was still lying where she had left it at the foot of the bed. But she was gone.
A quick check of the money-belt which I had buried under the mattress while she’d been showering the previous night erased a momentary panic. My little girl was gone, and I guessed that she had awakened hungry and wandered out to find herself some breakfast. I wasn’t worried about her.
I called downstairs, and they told me that they still didn’t have any room service, but that there was a small taco joint a half a block down the street.