Chip Harrison Scores Again

by Lawrence Block

  The fare from New York to Bordentown was thirty-three dollars and four cents, and I had to go through various pockets until I got that sum together. While I did this, he talked to himself. He wouldn’t tell me when the next bus left. I had to use one of the house phones and call Information. They told me there was a bus leaving in two and a half hours. It made express stops from New York to Raleigh, then made local stops all the way to Miami. It would put me in Bordentown in a little over forty hours.

  The only thing I knew about Bordentown was that it was in South Carolina, and that somebody named Mary Beth Hawkins probably lived there once. And that I evidently wanted to go there.

  I had four dollars and seventy-nine cents left. That was a lot less than thirty-three dollars and four cents, but it was a lot more than a quarter, so I was ahead of the game and playing on the house’s money.

  I was also starving. I found a lunch counter in the building and had two hamburgers and an order of french fries and three cups of coffee. It certainly wasn’t a macrobiotic meal. It wasn’t even very good, but that didn’t seem to matter. I ate everything but the napkin.

  Why Bordentown?

  That’s a good question. I don’t know if I can find an answer that’s as good as the question.

  See, what happened was that I sat, first on the bench and then on the toilet, and I thought about the money and tried to think of something to do with it. And none of the things that involved staying in New York seemed like very good ideas, and I came to the conclusion that I had bombed out in New York and it was time to go somewhere else. Nothing against the city. Any city or town is as good as or as bad as what you’re doing and the people you’re doing it with. And for one reason or another I had never quite managed to get it together in New York. There were some good times in among the bad times, and I was glad I had come, but it was time to split.

  (I have this tendency to go someplace else whenever I don’t like where I am. I never really had a home that I can remember. When I was with my parents we would stay at a different expensive hotel in a different city every couple of months, and when I was at school it was a different boarding school every year, and the pattern hasn’t changed since. Sometimes I think it’s weakness of character to pick up and run whenever things turn sour. But why stay where you don’t want to be? For Pete’s sake, there’s a whole world out there. I suppose there are things to be said for settling down and sinking roots, but someone else will have to say them.)

  The thing is, it’s not enough to have someplace to go away from. You also need someplace to go away to. And I didn’t have one. There were places I had already been, but I couldn’t see any point in going back to any of them. Chicago was vaguely possible, I had had reasonably good times there, but I thought about that wind coming off Lake Michigan and schussing through the Loop and imagined what that wind would be like in January, and that ruled out Chicago. Besides, it was too big, it would be too much like what I was leaving.

  There was a girl named Hallie with whom I had traded virginities on the very best night of my life. She was in college in Wisconsin. I had sent her a postcard before coming to New York, and since then I had written her three or four stupid letters but never mailed any of them, maybe because I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to say to her. I decided that it would be nice to see Hallie again, and then I decided it would be even nicer to see Hallie when I was a little clearer on how I felt about her and what I wanted to do about it. It would also be nicer if I could see her with clean clothes on me and money in my pocket and a little firmer sense of direction.

  And then it came to me.

  Bordentown.

  Maybe you’ve noticed that when you’ve gone without sleep and food for a long time, and without really talking to anybody, you start to get messages from God. That’s a little less crazy than it sounds. What happens is that a lot of minor things start taking on tremendous significance, and you start reading vital messages into them.

  Like the whole bit with the wallet. And what was in the wallet—a picture of Mary Beth Hawkins and a bus ticket. And the first person I met after that was also named Mary Beth, which may be less remarkable in the cold light of dispassionate analysis but which seemed extraordinary at the time. The way all these things seemed to add up was that it was meant for me to get that bus ticket. It was destiny. And for me to cash in the ticket and spend the money was spitting in destiny’s face. Obviously the thing to do with that ticket was to use it and go where it went.

  Which still gave me two choices, actually. Boston or Bordentown. But I never seriously considered Boston. It would have been copping out. I mean, the ticket was about eighty-five percent New York-to-Bordentown and fifteen percent New York-to-Boston.

  Besides, Boston would be as cold as New York, maybe even colder. And Bordentown was in South Carolina—I knew that much about it, dammit. It would be warm. And it would be a small town, it would have to be fairly small or I probably would have heard of it at one time or another. So if I was looking for a change from New York, I really didn’t have to look any farther.

  For Pete’s sake, I’ve gone lots of places on less reason than that.

  The bus ride started off horrible. Then it became very boring for a while, and then it got wonderful.

  The horrible part was brief, from New York to Philadelphia. It was horrible because there were four men two rows back drinking wine and singing, and a third of the way to Philadelphia one of them threw up, and a few miles later so did the rest of them. It was horrible because the woman across the aisle from me was carrying a baby who cried all the way from New York to Philadelphia. The woman didn’t seem to mind. Me, I minded. It was horrible because the man in the seat next to me was fat enough to take up all of his seat and a good deal of mine as well. He didn’t use Dial, and I don’t guess he cared if anybody else did, either.

  The four drunks got off in Trenton. The woman with the brat got off in Philadelphia. The smelly fat man was riding clear down to Miami, but when we got to Philadelphia I was able to change my seat. So that ended the horrible part.

  The boring part was just boring. Nothing much to be said about it, really. I took crumby naps and woke up and went to the john and came back and sat down and looked out the window and waited for something to happen. Now and then the bus stopped somewhere and we all got off it and went to a terrible lunch counter, and I would have a Coke and a package of those little orange crackers with cheese and peanut butter between them.

  (I knew a speed freak in New York who lived on nothing but Cokes and those sandwich crackers. Three packs of the crackers a day and six Cokes. He weighed about eighty-three pounds and the circles under his eyes looked as though they’d been painted on with shoe polish. “Speed doesn’t kill,” he told me. “That’s the lie they feed you. It’s the malnutrition that does you in. I figure I’ve got six months before my liver goes. Once your liver goes you’ve had it.”

  (“Then why don’t you start eating right?”

  (“Priorities, man. I need to speed to get my head together. Once my head is together I’ll kick the speed and stabilize myself with tranks and downs, and then I’ll get into eating right. High-protein, fertile eggs, the whole organic foods trip. And I want to get into bodybuilding. I’ve been getting all these catalogues of barbell equipment. But first I have to get my head together. I figure I can get my head together in six months. I figure my liver can make it that long.”

  (Sure.)

  The wonderful part, the part that was not at all horrible or boring, started sometime in the late afternoon and somewhere south of Washington. I don’t know the time because I wasn’t wearing a watch, and I don’t know the name of the town or even the state because I wasn’t paying all that much attention to where we were when she joined us. We stopped at some station and I didn’t feel like another Coke so I stayed in my seat with my eyes closed. Then just as the bus was starting up a voice said, “Pardon me?” and I looked up and there she was.

  She was a little thing, with yel
low hair to her shoulders and large round brown eyes and a pointed chin. She was wearing a plaid mini skirt that got halfway to her knee and a cardigan sweater the color of her hair. She had a coat over one arm and was carrying a little suitcase.

  At first glance she looked about sixteen. When you looked a little closer at her eyes and the corners of her mouth you could add maybe ten years to that. Say twenty-five.

  “Could y’all tell me if this seat is taken?”

  It wasn’t. Neither were half the seats on the bus, which had emptied out a good deal in Washington. She could have had a whole double seat to herself, actually.

  “And could I ask you to help me with this suitcase here?”

  It was small and light. I put it in the overhead rack, and then she took a book and a package of cigarettes from her coat pocket and gave me the coat, and I put it alongside the suitcase. I sat down again and she sat down next to me. She didn’t have any makeup on except maybe a trace of lipstick, but she was wearing quite a bit of perfume. She smelled very nice, actually. It made me think of Mary Beth, the bus-ticket hooker. Mary Beth had been wearing perfume and hadn’t smelled very terrific at all. There’s perfume and there’s perfume.

  “Well, now! I thought we might have rain, but it’s turned a nice day after all, hasn’t it?”

  “Just so there’s no snow.”

  “You from up No’th?”

  “I’m not exactly from anywhere,” I said. “I was in New York for the past few months.”

  “And what place do you call home?”

  “Wherever I am.”

  Her face lit up. “Now that’s exciting,” she said. What she said was excitin’, actually, but I hate it when writers spell everything phonetically to get across the fact that somebody has an accent. I’ll just say now that she had an accent thicker than spoonbread and you can bear that in mind when you run her dialogue through your head.

  “When you don’t have one home in particular, why, it’s like you’re never away! Me, I’m an old homebody. My aunt has the pleurisy and I was up doing for her for onto ten days, but except when she has it bad I never get away from home.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Georgia. Mud Kettle, Georgia. Ever been there?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s not that you missed much.” This I believed. The name wasn’t Mud Kettle, by the way, but I looked up the town she mentioned in an atlas just now and the population is less than twenty-five hundred, so I changed the name to Mud Kettle because otherwise somebody could probably figure out who she was, and it might shake up the old folks at home. “Not missing much at all. Well, here I am, little old Willie Em Weeks from Mud Kettle, G-A. Lordy!”

  “What does the M stand for?” I mean, girls don’t usually announce middle initials.

  “Emily,” she said.

  “Emily starts with an E,” I said.

  “Doesn’t stand for, it’s short for! You silly. Willamina Emily Weeks, and isn’t that a handle.”

  Then she waited expectantly, and it occurred to me to tell her my name. She had never met anyone named Chip before, and I had never met any Willie Em, and we got what conversational mileage we could out of that. Which wasn’t much.

  Then she said, “Chip? Would you mind awfully if I asked you a favor? Would you change seats with me?”

  If she wanted to sit by a window, there were windows all over the place she could pick. I didn’t tell her this. I changed seats with her, and our bodies bumped a little in passing. Nothing fantastic, just enough to put ideas in my head.

  Which was ridiculous, I thought, sitting down again. She would be fun to talk to, someone to break the monotony of the trip, but that was obviously as far as it was going to go. I was getting off in South Carolina and she was riding clear on to Georgia. And anyway she was married, there was a ring on her finger. And besides that we were on a bus, for Pete’s sake, in the middle of the afternoon, and all you can do on a bus is sweat and sleep, with sweating considerably more likely than sleeping.

  We talked a little more. She asked if I minded if she smoked, and I said I didn’t, and she lit a cigarette and opened her book and I settled back in my seat and closed my eyes. I was just as glad she was reading because she wasn’t that outstanding to talk to. It was nice watching her and listening to her voice, a very pleasant voice, but it was very hard to concentrate on what she was saying.

  So I thought I would doze off again into that sort of half sleep that’s possible on a bus, but I couldn’t manage it. It was her, the perfume, the presence. I was aware of her. Somehow I was more aware of her now when she wasn’t talking and I wasn’t looking at her than I had been before.

  After a while she said, “Chip? Are you asleep?”

  “No.”

  “Could you do me a favor?”

  She was very large on favors. I opened my eyes. “Sure,” I said.

  She handed me her book, her finger indicating a place on the page. “Starting right here,” she said. “Could you just read that scene?”

  “Out loud?”

  “No, silly.”

  I took the book and started to read, and the first thing I did was start blinking furiously. The book was called either The Swinging Swappers or The Swapping Swingers. It hardly matters which. And the scene she had given me involved six people in a sexual tangle, with everybody doing everything to everybody else, and all in the crudest and most explicit sort of writing. Absolute hard-core pornography. The scene went on for God knows how many pages. I stopped after two and a half of them, and it was just gathering momentum.

  And so was I.

  I don’t know whether I actually blush or not, but if I do, I was doing it then. I closed the book and turned very very slowly to look at her. The expression on her face surprised me. Very serious and matter-of-fact, with a little vertical furrow in the center of her forehead.

  “Did you read it?”

  “Uh, a couple of pages, yeah.”

  “You read fast. Could y’all tell me something?”

  “What?”

  “Was that there an erotic scene? Was it exciting?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was?”

  “Uh, yeah. Yes, I would say that you would have to call that an erotic scene. Yes.”

  Her face relaxed and she gave a little sigh. “Well, that’s good news,” she said. “See, I thought maybe it was just the bus that was getting to me. I always get so randy on buses. I swear I get like a mare in heat just from riding on a bus. I don’t rightly know what it is that does it. The rhythm of the wheels?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You think that could be it?”

  “I suppose.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “I can feel it right now,” she said. “The rhythm of the wheels on my backside.”

  From her tone of voice we could have been discussing the weather. Think it’ll rain? Oh, most likely not. Course we’re due for a little rain. Yes, and I always get so randy on buses. Christ almighty.

  She said, “Feel my heart, Chip,” and she took my hand and placed it on her left breast.

  “Can you feel it?”

  I couldn’t feel her heart beat, perhaps because my own had suddenly grown so loud. I could certainly feel her breast, though. I felt it through the thicknesses of sweater and bra, felt the nipple poking against my palm.

  I cupped her breast, stroked with my fingers. It was as warm and soft as a little bird. I kept the little bird in my hand and dreamed of giving her two in the bush.

  Our mouths found one another. She tasted of cigarettes. I don’t like to smoke but I like that taste on a girl’s mouth. We slid into an all-out kiss right off the bat. She was very goddamned good at kissing. We kissed for miles, and I held her breast as if I was afraid it would fly away if I let it go. I wasn’t about to take any chances.

  When we broke the kiss she sagged back in her seat with her eyes closed and her jaw slack. Her breathing was really ragged. I was a little shook up myself but she was way out a
head of me.

  Finally she said, “Get my coat, Chip.”

  “You can’t leave now. I mean, the least you have to do is wait until the bus stops.”

  “Leave? Who’s leaving?”

  “Not me. I thought you wanted your coat.”

  She sighed and tsssted at me. “Don’t you have no sense?” she whispered. “To put over us. To neck under. So nobody sees us.”

  “Oh.”

  “Because I’m not about to stop now. Chip, I told you how I get on buses, and then reading that scene with them . . . and then you messing around with me, I mean I’m not about to stop now.”

  “Fine by me.”

  “Now fetch my coat.”

  I fetched her coat and draped it over us. While I was getting it I checked out the other people in the area. If any of them were checking us out in return they were doing a good job of hiding it. The seats across the aisle were empty, and most of our other neighbors were asleep.

  As soon as I was seated beside her she grabbed my hand and tucked it up under her mini skirt. She was wearing panties. Very moist panties.

  I said, “Willie Em—”

  “Shhhh!” she whispered. “No more talking, Chip. Oh, Lord have mercy, I’m so hot I could burn! But don’t talk, don’t say anything. Just get me off. God, please get me off—”

  The thing is, she kept getting off and climbing right back on again. There was only so much we could do. I played with her and that was about the extent of it. She was unbelievably responsive. Each orgasm just seemed to make her that much more anxious for the next one.

  This went on for maybe half an hour, and I could see where it was destined to go on all the way to Bordentown unless I happened to run out of fingers somewhere along the way.

  And I was going to get off the bus in Bordentown with testicles the size of basketballs, and they were going to hurt like hell, and that was just too damned bad because I had already decided it was worth it.

  Maybe she wasn’t the only one who got horny on buses. Maybe it was the other people around, or maybe it was the build-up and letdown I’d gotten earlier from Mary Beth, or maybe it was just Willamina Emily Weeks herself, but whatever it was, it was worth six Waterloos and an Armageddon. I mean it was very goddamned exciting, believe me.