So Willing

by Lawrence Block

  Poor Saralee. He’d played a dirty trick on her, all things considered. A hell of a dirty trick. She didn’t have a dime, and she didn’t have a car—not with the Packard parked at the airport. And, he realized all at once, she didn’t have a goddamned thing to wear. All her clothing was stashed in the trunk of the Packard. He’d put it there to keep her from running out, and now it looked as though she was going to do very little running out indeed. He tried to feel sorry for her, but it seemed as though every time he tried to feel really sympathetic towards her, he burst into uncontrollable laughter.

  Poor Saralee, he would think. Then Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. And so on, with all the other passengers staring at this idiot who kept breaking up and laughing all over the place. Let ’em stare, he thought. Hell with them.

  He settled back finally, and relaxed in his chair, and, because he was very tired, fell asleep. He woke up as the plane was bouncing through some air pockets. His ears were popping and his head ached dully. Then the pilot set the plane on the ground and everything was all right again.

  He took a bus to the East Side Terminal, and a cab to the Port Authority bus terminal, and another bus that made fifteen stops, the last of which was Lake Ludicrous. And then, finally, he was at the lake, and then at the cabin, and there was his father.

  “You’re late,” his father said, “and the car’s gone, and what the hell happened to you?”

  Vince took a deep breath. “The car,” he began. “Some idiot came down the wrong way on a one-way street and hit the car. Knocked it for a loop.”

  His father stared.

  “I was lucky I wasn’t killed,” Vince added, which was true in a way. “But don’t worry about the car. The guy paid for it.”

  “Paid for it?”

  “He wasn’t insured,” Vince said. “I could have sued him down the river, and he was all shook up, so he offered to pay for it. I’ve got the money. I figured suing him would just take a lot of time and get him into all kinds of trouble. He was a pretty nice guy, too. Stupid, and a hell of a driver, but a nice guy.”

  “How much?”

  “Huh?”

  “For the car,” his father said. “How much did you get for it?”

  “Oh,” Vince said. “Well, six hundred dollars.”

  His father stared. “You’re kidding,” he said. “You have to be kidding. You can’t mean it.”

  “It wasn’t enough?”

  Softly, his father said: “Perhaps, on a good day, I could have sold the car for a hundred and fifty dollars. On a bad day, maybe half of that. And you—” he said reverently, “—got six hundred beautiful round dollars for it.”

  Vince took the money from his pocket. “The guy was scared,” he elaborated, “and he just wanted to get rid of me, I guess. Here’s the money.”

  His father counted the money, his eyes shining happily. “Vince,” he said. “Good old Vince. My son. Chip off the old block. Only kid in creation who could make a pile of dough by cracking up a car. You’re a good boy, Vince. Any car I ever have, you be sure and borrow it. Borrow all of ’em. Great boy, Vince.”

  “Gee,” Vince said. This was going much better than he had expected.

  “Vince, I can’t keep all of this. You were the one who swung the deal. You ought to get sort of a commission. You know—a piece of the profit.”

  His father was pushing money at him, telling him go out and have himself a big time. Vince walked away shaken, and looked at the money in his hand. He counted it, after awhile, and discovered that there was a hundred and fifty bucks there. Which was quite a bit of money. Even with inflation, and all that, and the shrinking dollar, and the high cost of living, even with all those things to take into consideration, one hundred and fifty bucks was a lot of money.

  So here we are, he thought. Back at old Lake Lollapalooza, with a fistful of dough and no place to go. Now just where in hell do we go from here?

  The first place he went was to take a shower, because he stank a little, and to change his clothes, because they stank a lot. Then he went down to the lake and slept in the sunshine, which was fun, sort of. Then, because he was hungry, he went and had something to eat. After lunch he went back to the lake, on the prowl again for female flesh. There were plenty of likely-looking prospects, but somehow he couldn’t get interested. He would look at the girls and imagine what they would look like without any clothes on. Then he would imagine how they would be in the hay, and he would decide that it probably wouldn’t be much fun at all.

  He was frightened. Maybe he was losing his interest in sex. Maybe he had burned himself out, or something, and he couldn’t get excited by a woman again.

  That didn’t seem too likely. But there was something he found out that day, and it became more apparent during the next week. They spent part of the next week there at the lake, and then his father picked up a second-hand car at a good price and they drove back to Modnoc. At Modnoc it became obvious. The domestic life just wasn’t exciting enough. Modnoc and the lake, both at once, were totally lacking in points of interest. He was bored stiff.

  Well, he told himself, it was no wonder. In the past month or so he’d done one hell of a boatload of fascinating things. He had had two virgins who weren’t virgins, and then he had put the blocks to a married woman, and then the married woman turned out to be a nymphomaniac. Then he and the married woman ran off to New York, with the married woman’s husband’s hard-earned cash, and registered in a hotel and played sex marathon.

  Then the gal left him, and he begged on street corners, and skipped a hotel bill, and hitchhiked to Carolina, and raped a girl on command, and found the married woman, and made her whore for him, and left her naked and penniless, and flew back to New York, and here he was.

  Which was a lot of activity. And which made Modnoc seem more than ever a tasteless, lifeless, useless place to spend his life.

  He thought what it would be like to spend his life in Modnoc. He would go back to school in the fall, graduate the following June, and then go to college. Four dull years at a dull college and he would be back, taking a “good job” with the Modnoc Plastics company, marrying some stupid virgin or near-virgin, raising a batch of grubby kids and playing the good old American game.

  For three days in Modnoc he lay around the house waiting for time to pass. He thought about how nice it would be to leave Modnoc, to go somewhere else on his own. Hell, it wasn’t hard to be on your own. He’d managed well enough there with Saralee. She had conned him, of course, but then he turned around and conned her right back and came out of it smelling like a rose. If he left Modnoc now he would not have a car to worry about, and he would not have to come back at any set time. He could work things whatever way he wanted to work things. He would have all the room he needed to move around in. It would be a pleasure. He would go wherever he wanted, and he would do whatever he wanted, and if anybody didn’t like it, to hell with them.

  It sounded good. But he spent his time thinking about it rather than doing anything about it. The days dragged by until he couldn’t stand it any longer. So Friday night he finally went out of the house, anxious to find something to do.

  He found Sheila Kirk, who was slightly better than nothing.

  Sheila Kirk had always been around, and Vince had been convinced that she had always been available. There were no stories about her one way or the other, but she had that “Available” look in her eyes. For some reason, he had never taken her up on it. It didn’t make any sense, really, because she was one hell of a good-looking girl.

  One hell of a good-looking girl. Soft brown hair and very pale skin and a pretty face and good legs and an almost unbelievable pair of mammaries. She was good-looking, and she was available, and somehow he had never answered the door when this particular opportunity had come knocking.

  Well, that would have to change.

  He spotted her on the street, and he walked over to her, and he said hello, and she said hello, and from there it went according to formula. She told him how lucky he w
as to get to the lake because Modnoc was dead as a doornail in the summer, and he told her it couldn’t be that dead if she was around, and they went for a coke, and from there on it was pattern, pure pattern. It was as easy as rolling off a girl.

  He had it all figured out in a few minutes. Two dates, and a long ride in the country, and a blanket on the grass, and Sheila Kirk would be his. He was going along with the pattern, riding it out, when something snapped. He just couldn’t stand it another minute. It was part of the Modnoc routine, the dulldom capital of the western world, and he wasn’t going to play it that way.

  He broke off in the middle of a sentence, turned to her, caught her pointed chin in one hand and looked hard into her eyes. “Look,” he said to her, “how about walking over to the park and having a go at it?”

  She stared. Her mouth opened, then closed again, and she went on staring some more. He felt like laughing at her.

  “C’mon,” he said. “We’ll take a nice walk in the park and then I’ll take your cruddy clothes off and it’ll be good. I’m pretty great at it by now. I’ve been making a study of all the finer points and I’m an old pro already. What do you say to that, Sheila, old kid?”

  She didn’t say anything. Not a thing. She just stared.

  “Come on, old girl.” He took her arm and started off toward the park. She didn’t seem too enthusiastic, but at the same time she walked along with him, not pulling away, not fighting a bit. It was going to be easy.

  “The direct approach,” he announced. “Nothing like the direct approach. You and me, Sheila, we don’t have to pretend for each other. We can be honest. We can both stand a little action. We don’t have to play games. We just go to the park, and lie down in the sweet-smelling grass, and we have ourselves a ball.”

  Which, when you come right down to it, is what they did.

  He led her to a nice private place in the park, one he had used before, and there he undressed her. He didn’t kiss her, mainly because he had no desire to kiss her. He took off her blouse, and he took off her bra, and he played around with two things that were closer to mountains than molehills. Then he took off the rest of her clothing, and played some more little games, and took off his own clothes, and got going.

  She had been had before, and she had been had properly, and she was good at it. The shock of his approach seemed to have worn off because whatever state she was in now, it was not shock. She was squirming all over the place, and her nails were raking his back, and it was, by all rules, great.

  Then they got dressed, and walked back to town, and he told her goodnight and left her to find her own way back to her house.

  It was, by all rules, great. But somehow it wasn’t so great at all. Somehow it was lousy, and it shouldn’t have been lousy, but it was and this annoyed him. She had done a good job, and he had done a good job, and the sum total of their efforts had been highly charged monotony.

  Which was a shame.

  He was tired, so he went to sleep. But it took him awhile to drop off into blissful unconsciousness. He tossed around for awhile, thinking that he had to get out of Modnoc before he went out of his skull. It just wasn’t fun anymore. All Modnoc ever had to offer was female flesh, and now even that was beginning to pale. It was time to go.

  “I don’t understand,” his father said. “Don’t you like it here? Don’t you like living with us?”

  “Frankly,” Vince said, “no.”

  “We try to make a good home for you. We try to give you everything you want. And you just want to up and leave us. Where are you going? What are you going to do?”

  Vince shrugged. “Who knows?”

  “Crazy,” his father said. “That’s what it is, crazy. You won’t finish high school and you won’t go to college and you won’t get a good job and—”

  “Dad.”

  “And you’ll be a bum. That’s a hell of a note. I don’t want a bum for a son. A thief, yes. A con man, maybe. But a bum?”

  “Dad,” he said. “Dad, I’m not going to be a bum.”

  “You’re not?”

  He shook his head. “I’m going to be a great success,” he said. “Horatio Alger style. Spirit that made this nation the great and powerful country it is today. Young man out for success. Flash Gordon conquers the Universe. You know.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure,” Vince said, getting slightly carried away with himself. “No opportunities in a town like this. A young guy like me has a great chance in the world. Opportunities galore. Money, fame, power. All these things are waiting for a man with courage and initiative and imagination.”

  “You sound like an ad for door-to-door shoe salesmen.”

  “I’m not kidding, I’m serious, I mean it,” Vince said, meaning it.

  “Really?”

  “Sure,” Vince said. “The world is waiting for me. Maybe I’ll do some traveling. Paris, Rome, Berlin. The Mysterious Orient. The South Seas. Latin America. All over the globe, challenging chances await earnest young men.”

  “You’re not kidding,” his father said, glowing.

  “Nope.”

  “You’re serious,” his father said, beaming.

  “Right you are.”

  “You mean it,” his father said, bursting with pride. “My boy. My son, out for glory. A chip off the old block, that’s what you are. I should have known it the minute you sold the car for six hundred dollars. You’ve got a head on your shoulders, Vince. A real head.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “I’m proud of you, Vince. Really proud. Where are you going? Any ideas?”

  “I’m not sure, Dad.”

  “Of course,” his father said. “Of course. Got to feel your way around. Got to see which way the wind is blowing. Got to keep both feet on the ground, your nose to the grindstone, your shoulder to the wheel, all that. Hell of a position to get any work done in, but you’ll manage.”

  “Right.”

  “When do you figure on leaving?”

  “Well,” Vince said, “I was thinking of getting started tomorrow morning.”

  “That’s pretty soon, Vince.”

  “I know, but—”

  “But you’re one hundred percent right, boy. No time like the present. Can’t let the grass grow under your feet. You know what they say about rolling stones. Don’t gather any moss. But who wants moss? Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Better let me tell your mother,” Vince’s father said. “You know how mothers are. Probably be all upset that her boy is leaving her. That’s the way mothers are. They sort of carry on about things like that. A tendency they have.”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  “She’ll probably cry,” his father said.

  She did.

  Vince’s father didn’t get enthusiastic too often, but when he did, his enthusiasm was contagious. Before she quite knew what was happening, Vince’s mother agreed that Vince should go out into the cruel world. She wasn’t quite sure why she thought so, but she was the type of woman who had most of her decisions made for her. She was a fine woman, a good mother and all that, but Vince’s father was the real brains of the family.

  Which didn’t say too much for the family.

  It worked out, though. Before too long, Vince had a suitcase packed and a wallet full of money. He still had most of the hundred and a half from the car, plus a little extra left over from the Saralee episode, plus the extra hundred his father pressed on him as a going-away present. When morning came, he was on his way to the bus depot. And when the bus left, he was on it.

  The bus was bound for New York. That seemed like a good place to start. He had to avoid the hotel where he was known as James Blue, but in a city the size of New York that shouldn’t be too hard to do. He also had to avoid Rhonda, who lived in New York, but the chances of running into her seemed pretty small. And if he did see her, he could always cross the street. It wouldn’t be much trouble.

  The bus moved along, the wheels churning, and Vince hummed softly to himself
. The crap he had fed his father had been, strangely enough, partly true. He felt like a pioneer, a Forty-Niner heading for gold in California. Not many pioneers rode the bus, he knew, but times were changing. It was a brand-new world, a brave new world. His world.

  The sun was up and the roads were clear. The bus went along at a good clip and Vince could hear the wheels singing a little song to him. He couldn’t make out the words, but it was a cheerful, optimistic little song and he was happy.

  Modnoc faded off into the distance. New York was ahead of him.

  NINE

  Well, now, the best laid plans of mice and men, of mouse and man, of moose and Mau Mau, mink and marigold, as the trite and true old phrase doth say, often go astray.

  Well, there was New York, and here came Vince, roaring down from the upstate foothills like a one-man tidal wave, like a timebomb ready to go off in any girl who got in his way. Well, and then here was New York and here was Vince, in the middle of Manhattan with a suitcase in his hand and a gleam in his eye. Well, and then there was New York, and where was Vince?

  Vince was in Boston.

  The tale of how Vince ricocheted and rebounded, how he was bank-shotted off the biggest city in the world and basketed in Boston, is one of those long sad stories without even a happy ending to make it all worthwhile. Or much of any ending at all, except that he went to Boston.

  It started with the Port Authority Terminal where the bus emptied, Vince with it. He went out to the street, which was Eighth Avenue, with 41st Street to his left and 40th Street to his right. So he turned left, having had seventeen years of not going right and not wanting to change things at this late date, and a block and a half with the suitcase brought him to 42nd Street, which is the hub of half-a-dozen very strange worlds, most which Vince had no interest in.

  But he had to turn right now, because the bright lights were off to the right, and there was nothing off to the left but some more street and the river, and he was too young for the river. So he turned right, in spite of himself, and lugged the suitcase toward the milling people and the flashing lights.