CH01 - No Score

by Lawrence Block

  “A present,” he repeated, and got his hand back, and stuck it out into the hallway and brought it back in again, only now there was a girl’s wrist in it, with a girl attached. A redhead with a see-through sleeveless blouse and a flaring white miniskirt that ended less than an inch short of indecent exposure.

  “This is Cherry,” he said, and started to laugh. “Jesus Christ in Marlboro Country, but if this here is cherry then I’m an unkey’s moncle.”

  He tried to say it straight, and muffed it again, and fell apart laughing. Then he tried again from the beginning.

  “This here is Cherry,” he said. “Her name. She wants to get checked out for dendivorous insects. No, what she wants is to get laid and relayed and parlayed. Screwed, blewed, and tattooed. She wants to take on everybody who’s game, and I thought of my old buddies, and I thought, shit, what else do you do for kicks when it’s a hundred and ten in the shade?”

  Cherry was just standing there with a simple smile on her face. I guess that was the only kind she was capable of. She did look simple. There was no getting around it. She looked great, with a face that was reasonably pretty even if you didn’t fall heart-stoppingly in love with her, and with a body that would have made you willing to have her around even if the face had been horrible. But there was something in that face, some quality that was part stupidity and part vacancy, in the sense that if you opened up her head you would find a sign saying that part of her mind was on a sabbatical in Europe or something. So she stood there looking dumb and desirable, and that’s exactly what she was.

  The rest of us were saying encouraging things like Hey and Wow and Sounds good and No crap. And Solly put one of his hands on Cherry’s little behind and gave kind of a shove, and she took four or five little running steps into the room. Solly followed her inside and closed the door.

  “Now show the boys what you got there,” he said. “Get your clothes off, Cherry. Hurry it up. Any of you bastards got a deck of cards? High goes first and so on in order, and the same order for seconds and thirds, and after that we’ll worry about it.”

  “Seconds and thirds?”

  “Look at her. How often do you get a shot at something like that? You guys, I don’t know, you guys get so little ass that when you jerk off you close your eyes and pretend you’re jerking off. You think one shot at Cherry here is going to be all you want? Jesus, look at her!”

  I don’t know who he was talking to, because I’m pretty sure we were all looking at her. It seemed to me that she looked awfully young, but that happens with simple people. They don’t have the sense to worry about things.

  She took everything off, and she stood there with the same smile on her face, and I thought, well, take a good look at this one, Chip, because this is the one you’ll never forget, the first girl ever for you, and nothing can stop you now.

  “Ace is high. Suits are spades high, then hearts, then diamonds and then clubs. Same as in bridge, but you bastards don’t play bridge. Cut the cards, dammit.”

  Keegan wanted to cut first to determine the cutting order. Jimmy Joe told him to for Christ’s sake save the comedy for some other time. Flickinger, for once in his life, wasn’t reminded of a story. Lester looked as though they could tear down every Greyhound station and throw all the faggots on the fire and he wouldn’t mind for a minute. Solly cut the pack and got the seven of clubs and said something appropriate. Keegan cut the jack of diamonds. Jimmy Joe got the jack of clubs and insisted that put him ahead of Keegan. Keegan told him to piss off. Solly said diamonds were ahead of clubs. Jimmy Joe told Solly to piss off. Flickinger was sitting on a chair next to Cherry. He had one hand on her behind and was stroking up along the inside of her thigh with the other.

  I was going to get an ace. I knew it. I could feel it, the way sometimes you can feel things.

  Lester cut a nine, it doesn’t matter which suit. Flickinger was so busy with Cherry it was hard to get his attention, but finally he cut the cards and got the queen of hearts.

  Solly said, “Son of a bitch, that puts him first. He gets fifteen bucks every time one of us makes a sale, and now he gets first crack at her crack.”

  “Wait a minute,” someone said. “It’s the kid’s turn.”

  “Flick might as well start. Queen’s gonna be high.”

  “Aces are higher than queens,” I said. I gave the words a Dean Martin drawl because I felt just that cool and confident. I reached out for the pack of cards, cut, and got the fucking four of clubs. They all laughed their heads off, except for old Flick who was too busy getting his pants off.

  Lester put a glass of gin in my hand. “No sweat,” he said. “Somebody’s gotta be last. Just five guys ahead of you. The condition everybody’s in, you’ll be in the saddle in fifteen minutes. If it takes that long.”

  “Shit,” I said. I drank the gin in one swallow. I don’t ever do that, not even with a normal sized drink, and this was a whole glass of gin. I had already swallowed it before I realized what I had done, and even then I didn’t give a damn.

  “A girl like this, she’ll just be warming up when you get her.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Look at her face. Jesus, look at the old bull socking it to her, and she just lies there with that grin on her face. Like she’s enjoying herself but it isn’t really reaching her. You get a girl like that who wants to pull a train, you’d think of her as basically hot, right? But look at her. Cool as ice. That’s the thing. It takes her three or four men just to put her in the mood. God almighty, but will you look at Flickinger. I didn’t know he had it in him. Hung like a stud horse, too. If she can’t feel what he’s throwing her she must have a bun full of Novocain. He’s gonna ruin her for the rest of us if he don’t hurry up and get it over with.”

  “He’ll ruin her for the entire human race,” someone else said. “She won’t be fit for anything but donkeys and horses. Take it easy, Flick!”

  “And get it over with, Flick, you mother!”

  Flickinger got it over with, and almost got himself over with in the process. He finished roaring, and collapsed on the girl, and whether it was the sex or the liquor or what I don’t know, but he went out like a light. We had to roll him off of her, and Keegan kept saying that he was probably dead, but he wasn’t. We got him into a chair and let him sit there by himself while Keegan took over for him.

  Somebody handed me the bottle. I knew what I was doing this time, but all the same I took a drink. Just a short one, though. Not that I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do anything. I knew I would be able to do anything I wanted to do. But what worried me was that I might be like Flickinger and have a blackout. If I finally got laid after all this time and then couldn’t even remember it, for Pete’s sake, I might as well kill myself.

  I wondered if Flickinger would remember. Maybe he just forgot telling stories to people. I looked around to make sure he was okay. He was conscious now, but his breath was coming along pretty raggedly.

  While Keegan gave her a slow rhythmic banging, the rest of us somehow automatically started taking off our own clothes. We didn’t say anything but just did this. I suppose the idea was that we were getting ready so that no time would be lost, but it didn’t make any real sense for me, for example, to be in such a mad rush to get out of my clothes when there were still four men who were going to have her before my turn came.

  What it was, I suppose, was that we were all knocked out enough by the heat and the air conditioning and the sexual excitement of the scene that the usual inhibitions were gone and the raunchier the whole evening got, the better we were going to like it.

  When I thought about it later, for example, I couldn’t remember anyone actually saying that we would stand around watching while each of us took a turn with Cherry. This was never put into words, and yet once things got into gear, we all more or less took it for granted that that was how it would go. Normally I would have found that idea a little off-putting. I would have gone along with it, maybe, but I would have at least questione
d it a little. You would think it would just be more natural for a group of men to want to make it with the girl in private rather than as part of a group thing. Maybe we all wanted to watch each other with Cherry, and maybe we wanted to be watched, but it took the special mood of the evening for all of this to come into the open and to be taken so completely for granted by all six of us.

  Keegan suddenly increased the pace, and we were all sort of nodding along in rhythm with him as he hit his stride and finished. He was no sooner out than Jimmy Joe was in his place, all hunched up over Cherry so that he could nibble at her breasts as he humped away at her. I got a look at her face. Her eyes were half lidded and her jaw was slack, and she was drooling a little bit out of the corner of her mouth. That was about the extent of her participation in what was going on. She didn’t even move very much, just giving her behind a slight wiggle every once in a while, maybe to prove to us that she hadn’t gone and died somewhere along the way.

  Jimmy Joe didn’t last very long. After just a few seconds he started cursing his head off as he gave a last thrust and came. He was swearing all the way through, and he went on swearing after he withdrew, and he walked all the way across the room still cursing under his breath.

  “Hey,” Keegan said, pleasantly, “why don’t you put a sock in it, huh? Pipe down.”

  “Goddamn sonofabitching—”

  “Happens to everybody,” Keegan said.

  “What a time to turn into a rabbit.”

  “You got excited,” I said. The world’s foremost authority, Chip Harrison, passing out free advice. “You’ll feel easier the second time around.”

  “Or the third,” Keegan said.

  Jimmy Joe stopped swearing. Lester was taking his turn, not lying on top of her but standing with his feet on the floor. Maybe all those hours in bus station toilets had him thinking he had to be on his feet to enjoy sex. He had Cherry arranged so that her legs hung over the edge of the bed, and then he picked up her feet and doubled them up with her knees deeply bent, and then he bent over her and got down to brass tacks. It was an interesting position and the rest of us commented on its fine points, like sportsmen checking out a Thoroughbred racehorse.

  “He’s really getting in that way,” Solly noted. “You double ’em up that way, you can just about tickle their tonsils.”

  Someone else said he preferred to do his work lying down, and the discussion moved along, and Lester turned his head and told us to shut up, managing to do this without missing a beat.

  But I noticed something about Cherry. She was starting to get interested in what was happening. Lester had told me this would happen, but I didn’t really believe him. It was true, though. There were loads of sweat on her forehead and upper lip now, and between her breasts. She was breathing hard, and her hips were bucking and twitching, and after all the time she had spent just lying there, she was gradually getting into the mood in a big way.

  Which meant I was the lucky one, I thought, reaching for the bottle and knocking back another drink. I mean, they were just getting her ready for me. I was the one who was going to have the best time of it.

  I guess her excitement had an effect on all of us. The talk gradually died down and stopped completely. The five of us watched in silence, eyes riveted to the two of them on the bed.

  Lester finished. He dragged himself off the girl’s body and staggered over to the bathroom. Solly took his place and just stood there for a minute, looking down at the girl. I wanted to ask him what the hell he was waiting for, but I didn’t break the silence.

  He sighed, then put a hand down and touched her between her legs.

  She moaned. I guess it was the first sound I could remember hearing her make.

  He lifted his hand and looked at it. “Soaking wet,” he said to himself. “Dripping, the little mink is dripping. And hot.”

  Come on, I thought. Come on already.

  He entered her slowly, very slowly, and she moaned again, a rippling moan that was unlike any sound I’d ever heard. I was a little worried now that Solly was going to be the lucky one to make her come. It was a pretty silly thing to worry about now that I think back on it, but at the time it seemed very important that I be the one to do this. So I stood there with my hands in fists, wishing that Solly would learn Jimmy Joe’s impersonation of a rabbit.

  He worked slowly at first, in and out, very slowly, and my whole brain was filled up with the picture of the two of them rolling around on my bed, locked together in this slow thoughtful screw. If there’s anything that looks more ridiculous than people screwing, I don’t know what it is. I mean, if you stopped to think what you look like when you’re doing it, the facial expressions and the position and all, you might not feel as much like going through with it. They looked foolish, but they also looked as though what they were doing was a tremendous amount of fun.

  Then bit by bit the tempo picked up, with each of them working at the same pace. She spoke for the first time, begging him to do it harder and faster. She talked nonstop, and she didn’t use more than five different words all in all, and three of them were obscene, which is a pretty good average if you spread it over a person’s whole vocabulary. She begged him to do it, and he did it, and she wrapped her legs around him and dug her nails into him and really let herself go, kicking and screaming her head off.

  Solly gave a cross between a growl and a roar. He pitched forward on her the way Flick had done earlier. But Cherry didn’t stop kicking and screaming and wiggling her tail, as if she didn’t realize that the record was over. For a few seconds Solly just lay there being tossed around by her hips. Then he grunted and heaved himself up and away from her. She tried to hang on. He unhooked her arms from around his neck and dumped her on the bed.

  “She don’t know when to quit,” he said to no one in particular. I started for her, but he was standing in the way, just shaking his head and saying that she was a crazy little broad who didn’t know when to quit.

  She was writhing on the bed, making noises like cats fighting under a full moon. “Oh, I almost made it,” she said. “Oh, I’ll make it this time, somebody, help, please, somebody, I’ll make it this time.”

  Keegan started for her. I grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around.

  “My turn,” I said.

  “Oh,” he lied, “I forgot about you.”

  “Sure you did.”

  “Easy, now. If you want to stand arguing, someone’ll take your turn. That what you want?”

  “You know something, Keegan? I never realized it before, but you know what you are?”

  “Lad—”

  “You’re a son of a bitch, Keegan.”

  “Easy, now,” Keegan said.

  “Please,” Cherry said. “Please please please please—”

  “Open up in there,” a voice said.

  “Please please please—”

  “Open that door.”

  The room went silent again. I had shouldered Keegan aside and was on my way to the girl. Someone grabbed my arm. I shook the hand off.

  They kicked the door in. Four cops the size of the Green Bay Packers. One of them went around waving a badge and a gun at everybody, and the other three pulled me off Cherry.

  I bit one of them in the leg and hit one of them in the face and kicked one of them in the family jewels. If there had just been the three of them I think I would have taken them. I really mean it. But the fourth one managed to get behind me and hit me over the head with the butt of his gun.

  “Oh, you rats,” I heard Cherry howling. “I almost made it. Another minute and I would of made it, you rats. I’ll never let you dirty cop rats screw me again. Never, damn you. Oh, I almost made it—”

  The gun butt popped me again. The lights went out and so did I.

  You know, I can understand how people can become paranoid. It isn’t that hard to figure out. When things have been going wrong in one particular way over and over again, it’s natural to figure that there’s a conspiracy against you.

/>   Take me, for instance. (Take me! I’m yours!) No, seriously. Here I was, for Pete’s sake, with just one flung I really wanted to do, and I was being turned at every thwart. I was playing the goddamned Doris Day part in one of those movies where the big question is whether or not Doris can keep her legs together until the end of the film, and the big answer is always yes.

  You already know about Francine—remember? to hook your attention? the gun going off—and here I was the last man in line at an orgy and the cops came in just when my number came up.

  Why shouldn’t I be paranoid? Obviously those cops were just waiting in the hallway for it to be my turn. Obviously someone had switched decks of cards, so that I wound up cutting a deck where every card was the fucking four of clubs. Obviously there was a hole in the wall, or a two-way mirror, and good old Gregor was out there taking pictures and old Haskell was watching and beating off in the name of sociological research, and the Head was laughing, and the basketball coach was saying that a winner never quits and a quitter never wins, and Cherry was taking off her red wig and revealing herself as Aileen, being faithful to Gregor in her peculiar way, and Calvin was saying Rowrbazzle, which means Up your ass in Siamese, and my parents weren’t really dead, they were just trying to escape from their boring mess of a kid.

  I couldn’t have been unconscious for very long, because the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was a pair of baggy pants. I watched as the pants were pulled up past my face and onto Flickinger, to whom they belonged. I was lying on the floor next to the bed, and Flickinger was sitting on it, and pulling his pants on.

  I stayed where I was. There were conversations going on, but my head was buzzing and I was sort of listening through the conversations without hearing them, the way you do when you watch an Italian movie. All I knew was that there were four cops in the room, along with the five guys from the crew. I didn’t see or hear Cherry.