Terry sat in a rickety chair with loosely crossed legs, her hair standing out in wild disorder, looking rumpled and untidy and too tired to care. For the first time he realized she was as worn and ragged as he was; he had begun to think she was indestructible.
“Go on in and take a shower. Make you feel better.”
“As soon as I get the strength,” she mumbled. She glanced at him; her eyes seemed slightly glazed. “What in the hell are we doing here?”
“Sometimes I forget, myself.”
“We’re bananas,” she said vaguely. “Stark, raving bananas.” She got up and took a moment to steady her balance, and went weaving into the bathroom.
He lay back on the bed and listened to the beat of the shower. Ought to keep an eye on Billie Jean, he thought distantly; and then, To hell with her, let her look out for herself. Everything was so muddled it didn’t really matter any more. The pipedream was just that; ashes, now. Maybe Floyd was around here someplace and maybe he wasn’t—what difference did it make? It would be just as easy to rob Fort Knox. In a dark fugue, a dirge, Mitch closed his eyes. He felt instantly as if he were falling down on layers of misty cushions; he heard himself whimper softly in his half-sleep and then a kind of peace settled on him.
A soft touch on his cheek brought him sharply awake. His eyes flashed open.
Terry, leaning over him, kissed him.
He got up on his elbows. She pushed him back with a slim pink arm coated with a fine gauze of soft pale hairs. She was sitting on the edge of the bed; she drew the towel tighter around her; the tip of her tongue quested her mouth corner. She looked pink and scrubbed. Inside, Mitch felt a visceral quiver, the slow coil and press of wanting her—stupid, he said to himself; but out of his urgency of danger, his sense of hopeless failing, came a blood need that sent spasms into him, beyond reason or sensibility.
Her eyes locked on his; her mouth became soft and lost its smile, her eyes became drowsily heavy. With a finger he brushed back a stray damp lock of her hair. He didn’t want to think beyond this bed, this moment, her. He felt tranquil and sure. He pulled her down, drew her tenderly close; her head moved over his and she made a kitteny little sound in her throat and pressed against him and sucked his lower lip. Her mouth made deeper and deeper demands; he twisted, rolling her, grinding against her. She touched him—hot sensation raced through him. He pulled the towel away and laid his face in the softness of her flesh: her body, which looked like hot marble, was after all the softest of down. She pulled his head tight against her and he felt her stir, her breath coming as quick as his own; they made love with a driving hard urgency, hers matching his own.
When he lay back all the certainty drained out of him as if a plug had been pulled. A knotted muscle rippled at his jaw; he didn’t look at her until she made as if to get up. Then he put out a detaining hand. He pulled her against him and spoke into the turned hollow of her neck:
“I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that—you don’t deserve any part of me. I never wanted to—turn you into something cheap, something to be ashamed of.”
She drew away, saying nothing. After a moment he reached for her hand. It was ice-cold. She said abruptly, “Is that how you feel? Cheap?”
“No—I didn’t mean—”
“You’re a puritan, Mitch. Underneath that hip exterior- is a pious prude. Don’t you think I wanted this as much as you did?”
He studied her gravely—the earnest wide beauty of her eyes, the soft curves of her body. Feeling almost burst his throat: he felt an overwhelming warmth course through him, an unreasoning reaching-out of his heart. “I must have been around Billie Jean too long—she’s the one that makes it seem cheap. I’m sorry I said that—I didn’t mean it. I don’t know what I really meant. Well, look, I never said I wasn’t stupid.”
She lay back and smiled at the ceiling. “Don’t you feel fine?”
They waited in shared nesty silence, not needing to talk, until the grinding tensions began to return, setting his nerves on edge again, dispelling the moment’s grateful lassitude. Fear was a malaise never far from the surface, reminding him biliously that this wasn’t an idyll but only a momentary respite.
He said, “I think you’d better get in touch with your old man. You don’t have to tell him where you are but you ought to let him know you’re all right.”
“Not yet.” She sounded hard; she sat bolt upright and tossed her head, resentful, angry with him for having broken the spell.
He said, “Why?”
“It’s a long story.” She was curt.
“Look, I didn’t mean to step on a sore corn. I’m sorry. But he must be climbing the walls by now.”
“Good—let him.”
“You really hate his guts, don’t you?”
“Yes. No—oh hell, Mitch, I don’t know.” She pulled the towel up over her like a bedsheet and lay back. “Do you really want to hear about me, the sad story of my life?”
“Do you want to tell it?”
“Why not?” she said; and she did.
“My mother is still in the home,” she concluded. “He drove her into that. He drove my brother to suicide. He’s never had time for any of us, Mitch, and that’s why. That’s why I want him to endure the silence, wondering. My silence will hurt him the way his hurt us all. I want him to have plenty of time to think about that.”
He said, “Maybe it’s none of my business, but it seems to me it won’t get your mother out of the sanitarium and it won’t bring your brother back to life and it won’t make you any happier. And I imagine your old man’s too old to be changed by anything you do at this late date—you may hurt him but you won’t change him.”
“What am I supposed to do, then—forgive him?”
“I don’t suppose you ever could. But maybe you’re hurting yourself more than you’re hurting him. That kind of hate sort of festers inside you—it can eat you away like some kind of acid, you know? It’s not going to do you any good.”
“You sound like a schoolteacher,” she said sarcastically. “‘This will hurt me worse than it hurts you.’”
“Couldn’t you just make some kind of truce with him and go your own separate way?”
“I mean to. But first I—look, I don’t want to talk about it any more, all right?”
“If you say so. Only—well, a little while ago you and I made love and I kind of got the feeling it meant something to both of us. Didn’t it?”
Her answer was a long time coming. “Yes. It did, Mitch.”
“Then if you’re going to fill yourself full of hate, how much room’s left in you for—?” He left it unfinished, unsaid; he rolled his head to the side and looked straight at her.
Watching him, her eyes slowly filled with tears. She groped for his hand but he pulled away and got off the bed. His face hardened and he said, “I told you I was stupid. This is all ridiculous. I’m the guy that kidnaped you, remember? Shit, we’d make a great couple—a rich beautiful Ivy League debutante and a crummy flat-busted guitar player with a twenty-to-life rap hanging over my head. Sure—sure.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that, Mitch. I wouldn’t press any charges against you, you know that.”
“You wouldn’t have to. Your old man will be glad to take care of that little item.”
She didn’t have any ready answer for that. He turned away, feeling blue and bleak, and went into the bathroom. His drawers and socks were still wet but he put them on. The shirt was damp but he put that on too, and came out of the bathroom ramming his shirttails into his trousers. “Listen, it’s a funny thing but every week or so I do get hungry. Suppose we go get something to eat. I hope you like Mexican food.”
“I love it,” she said. She appeared to have joined in an unspoken agreement not to reopen the previous discussion. When she got to her feet she held the towel against her, picked up her clothes and went into the bathroom, and by shutting the door against him seemed to be shutting him out of her intimate life just as surely as she had opened i
t to him a short while before. And so when she reappeared in her dress he made his face a blank mask and said, “Okay, we’re just two people who happened to meet one night in the desert. We’ll leave it like that.”
She surprised him: she said, “I won’t leave it like that even if you will. Mitch, I thought I came on this crazy thing because I wanted revenge on my father, and it’s true, I did—I still do. But that wasn’t all. A little while ago I came out of the shower and saw you lying there and I knew I’d really come with you because I just wanted to be with you. If I’d let you leave me along the road somewhere I’d never have seen you again, and I didn’t want to lose you. Maybe it’s just a delirious reaction to this whole weird thing we’ve been through—maybe it’s something I’ll get over when I wake up one morning and the nightmare’s over. But I want to have a chance to find out. If that’s the way it turns out I won’t be scared to say so—let’s keep it clean and honest between us, can we?”
“We can try,” he said, and began to turn toward the door. Suddenly he went rigid. “My God. What time is it?” He looked at his watch and his face fell. “Jesus, you know how long we’ve been here? It’s almost eight o’clock. That damned farmacia’s bound to be closed by now—they pull in the sidewalks at sunset in these towns, don’t they?”
“We’ll find him in the morning, then,” she said, practical and unruffled. She had remarkable resilience—perhaps all women did, but he wasn’t experienced enough to tell. She said, “Anyhow we’re in no condition to face up to Floyd tonight. We need a good solid meal and a long night’s sleep, and time to think out what we’re going to do. My brain’s too fuzzy for that right now and I imagine yours is too.”
“I guess,” he said, and put his head down, thinking. “Matter of fact, I have got one or two ideas, but I don’t want you to get caught in the middle. You’ve been through enough.”
“If you’re leading up to a suggestion that I ought to go home, forget it, Mitch.”
“Look, Floyd’s on the run from big trouble. Now what do you think he’d do to anybody who got in his way?”
“I know. But even a train stops, Mitch—something’s bound to fracture that superman complex of his. We can do it.”
“I’m glad you’re so sure of that.”
“We can do it,” she said again, firmly, and followed him to the door; but then she said in a different voice, “Why’s he like that, anyway?”
“Floyd? He was born a son of a bitch. He doesn’t need reasons.” He held the door for her and then walked over to the adjacent room and knocked. There was no reply; the lights were on and through the window he could see the room was empty, the bed undisturbed, the bathroom door wide open and the bathroom light switched off.
“She’s not here,” he said, suddenly cold. His glance whipped around the swimming pool but it was deserted.
Terry said, “She probably only went somewhere to eat.”
“And not tell us first? What if she went to Floyd?” He was shaking; he grinned loosely. “Look at me. Nerves of steel. Tower of strength. Maybe we both ought to get the hell out of here.”
Terry said, “The car’s still here. She hasn’t gone far. Let’s not jump to conclusions, Mitch—Billie Jean isn’t a threat to us. She’s in just as much trouble as you and Floyd are. She won’t go running to the police.”
“I wasn’t worried about that. But what if she decided to join up with Floyd? If she tells him we’re looking for him, he’ll be waiting for us. He’d just as soon kill us as step on an ant—and down here there wouldn’t even be any questions asked. They kill you around here for your shoes and wristwatch. It happens all the time. A couple of gringo tourists found dead in some alley—who’d bother?”
Terry said, “Let’s go have dinner and sleep on it. We’ll think better in the morning.”
“I don’t know,” he said, but he went with her.
C H A P T E R Sixteen
It wasn’t all that long after dark but Caborca at night was like Barstow at three o’clock in the morning. That was the morose judgment of Charley Bass as he moved machine-like through the streets, his heavy shoes thudding, empty-eyed in a wilted shirt. Charley Bass was a jaded Yankee slicker with a tired masculine appearance, thin hair combed carefully over the pink scalp, square chin tucked close to his chest on the short wide neck and powerful shoulders of a thick frame that had played collegiate football fifteen years ago and hadn’t yet begun to fatten up too badly.
A bum staggered near with his palm outstretched. Charley Bass gave him a synthetic capped-teeth smile and pressed a coin into his palm and the bum breathed profuse thanks over him in a wash of beer-breath. All along the street there were girls leaning against the walls in dark doorways and Charley Bass gave them each his practiced appraisal before he moved on. Most of them, when you got up close, were fat and filthy; one was a boozy raddled old whore who poked her anxious face forward above her ropy neck and spat on the ground when Charley Bass went by shaking his head no. He felt hard-up horny but not so hard-up he wanted to risk a dose of crabs or native siflis.
He turned a corner and saw the sputtering fizzy neon of beer signs around the plaza a block away; he went that way, past a weathered fence. Tomcats yelled passionately somewhere in the darkness nearby and one cat streaked slyly across the dark top of the fence, stopped midway and stood arched on its claws. Charley Bass picked up a stone and hurled it at the cat. There was a yowl and the cat disappeared. He went on, tasting the sour flavor of bile, remembering in an unhappy rush of images the golden-thighed Hollywood girls with no last names, the series of middle-aged nymphomaniacs, last month’s sticky affair with that banal woman in Barstow. Somehow he never seemed to attract the kind of woman he wanted to attract.
A cacophony of trumpet-guitar music assaulted him on the square, coming out of the open-walled fronts of three cantinas which stood open to the plaza like penny arcades. He stopped outside the first one, a dank place that smelled of urine and beer, and swept it with a quick scrutiny, and went on along the sidewalk. He was about to pass by the second cantina, which seemed even dingier than the first, but he saw a girl eating a taco at a back table and he stopped, went back, and twisted in through the crowded doorway.
It was a cheap saloon with pungent atmosphere—two pinball machines, a dark scratched bar like a Western movie saloon set, no bar stools; half a dozen small tables standing on uneven legs on sawdust and grease. There was a straightforward row of bottles—cheap wine, Mexican beer, rum and tequila—under a wall crowded with beer posters, dusty snapshots, and half a dozen broken rusty old guns of the sort obtainable at a hock shop for ten or fifteen pesos. The terrible band stood around at the far end of the bar, four musicians, one tooting a raucous trumpet and the others playing guitars of various sizes and resonances. There was a great deal of smoke and noise. Charley Bass tried to remember whether it was Thursday or Friday night. There were plenty of people in the place. Almost all of them looked like locals; Caborca wasn’t a tourist town.
Except the girl. She was from the States, that was obvious. Charley Bass crowded up to the bar and after an exercise in bad Spanish and sign language managed to buy a glass of black beer which he sipped as he turned his back to the bar and studied the girl over the rim of his glass.
Her dress was soiled, her fingernails dirty, her hair tangled in ropy disorder, but she was big and sloppy and exciting, her mouth full and sensuous, her eyes pushing out a sleepy, provocative sexual aura as tangible as the smell of the bar room. Her hefty hips and big freewheeling breasts made straining curves against her tight soiled dress.
She had a lot of fingerprints on her. But she was a girl who wanted sensation and did as she pleased: a woman in heat.
Charley Bass bought another beer and carried it over to her table. “May I join you? I’m unarmed.”
She looked up; her cranky, pouty expression changed. Charley Bass adjusted his smile, ready for her rebuff. The girl picked up her margarita and drank fast; some of it ran down her chin. He realiz
ed, what he hadn’t seen before, that she had had quite a few. Her eyes were slightly vague and she almost upset the glass when she set it down. She stared moodily at him and stuck out a pudgy index finger to swirl the ice cube in the squat glass; she still hadn’t said a word. The air around her was thick with the heavy scent of cheap perfume.
Finally she spoke but her voice was pitched low and he couldn’t make out what she said against the heavy background of talk and laughter. He bent down, staring at the heavy lard-white mass of bunched cleavage visible in the scoop-neck of her dress. “Beg pardon?”
“I said siddown.”
“Thanks.” He settled into a fragile-looking chair across from her. When he put his elbow on the table it rocked toward him. It was a tiny table, hardly large enough for two drinks and four elbows. Noise and crowd swirled close-packed around them. He said, “I’m Charley Bass.”
“Good for you.”
He put on his hearty red-cheeked smile. “Hell of a town to get stuck in, isn’t it?”
“You can say that again.”
He wondered how old she was. Twenty-five, maybe; getting a little too soft and suety. A few years more and she’d start getting passed down the line until some smart guy came along and took her on a little vacation to Hong Kong or South America, and then they’d cop her passport and unload her into a crib where she’d get beat all the way down until she didn’t even want to go home. He knew: he’d plied that trade himself.
She was watching him sleepily. He said, “Here I had a great weekend all set up, meet some friends down at Rocky Point and go out on their boat for marlin in the Gulf. But what happens? My damn Buick blows a wheel-bearing five miles up the road and I spend the whole damn day getting a tow back to this lousy town. Stuck here till morning now. How do you like that?”
“Yeah,” she said. “We had a breakdown too, back up the road. Seven stinking hours in this heat before the good-for-nothin’ grease monkey got the water pump fixed.”
What of Terry Conniston? Page 17