by Pete Dexter
There was a hitchhiker on the highway just past the entrance to the high-speed line. She was young and round-faced, homely as an Idaho potato, and she had a guitar. Mickey pulled the truck into the right lane and then off the road. He looked in his rearview mirror, and when she didn’t move he backed up to where she was.
Her hair was tied into an old-fashioned ponytail, and she watched until he had stopped before she moved toward the truck. To be that skinny, she had to be using a needle. She opened the door but didn’t try to get in. “How far you going?” she said.
He said, “Philadelphia.”
She nodded, looking over the truck like she was thinking of buying it. She had two earrings on each side, and the holes she’d drilled to hold them were red and infected-looking. Her fingernails were bit to hell, and the skin that puffed up over the top looked infected too.
“What part of Philly?” she said.
“South Philly,” he said. “Where you goin’?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “New York.”
He said, “Well, I can take you as far as Philly. You might catch a ride up 295, but I ain’t got all day.” Mickey didn’t like people driving by thinking he was trying to pick up this skinny girl.
She looked at the cab and then she looked at him. She said, “I think I’ll wait for somebody goin’ farther than Philly.” And then, before he could say anything else—not that he had anything else to say—she slammed the door and walked back to the place she had been before and stuck out her thumb.
He wondered what it was about him she didn’t like. It wasn’t the truck, if she didn’t like trucks she wouldn’t of opened the door. He watched the mirror for a break in the traffic, embarrassed, wanting to get away from her. The traffic was steady, though, and he sat there two minutes. Once she turned around, and when she saw he was still there she picked her guitar up and walked twenty yards farther away.
There wouldn’t be nothing after Jeanie but what he paid for.
The front door was locked when he got home, and he went through his keys twice before he found the right one, thinking somewhere in the back of his head that she’d taken it away.
The house was empty, he closed the door and stepped in. He turned on the television and walked from the living room to the kitchen and got himself a Schmidt’s and a cheese sandwich. The place was all right while he moved, but as soon as he stood still it felt like he’d broke in.
On the television they were showing pictures of the flower shop. There was a pool of blood just outside the door, broken glass. They brought the bodies out in green bags. Then they showed old pictures of Angelo Bruno, open-mouthed against the car window after they’d shot the back of his head off. And then Chickie Narducci, lying in the street next to his Buick, hit seven times and not even covered with a blanket, just lying out there while the kids and neighbors and reporters stood on the sidewalk and looked. And then they showed a snapshot of Chicken Man Testa, and then the front of his house after they blew it up.
Television loved blood on the sidewalk. The people that decided what went on the air, they were the same ones who’d stand out in the cold for an hour and a half looking at Chickie Narducci’s body.
Mickey sat down. He put his sandwich in his lap and drank the beer. On the news, they said Aunt Sophie had been released and was not expected to be charged.
He took the phone off the table and put it in his lap, next to the sandwich, and called Smilin’ Jack. Jack said, “Moran’s Funeral Home,” in that voice he used for business.
“Jack, this is Mickey.”
“Oh?”
“Can we still do it Saturday? I’ll have the money by tomorrow.”
Jack Moran said, “How you going to get the money?”
“That’s my business,” he said. “I’m askin’ if you can still do it Saturday. The mahogany box, everything.”
“I got to have the money twenty-four hours in advance,” he said.
Mickey said, “All right, I’ll drop Leon off tonight.…”
“No,” he said, “I don’t want to see none of you again until after I see the money. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
“I never fooled you,” Mickey said.
“You come into my place and slapped me around,” he said. “You try to get over on me like I was some jerk-off. What the fuck did you expect?”
“Tomorrow afternoon,” Mickey said. “One o’clock, maybe two,” and he hung up. Then he ate his sandwich and waited for Jeanie to come home, so he could tell her it was going to be all right.
He had called at noon and said they needed to talk. “Have you found something out?” she said. He said yes, but the way he said it, she knew it wasn’t about Leon.
“I’ll pick you up,” he said. And she said yes.
Jeanie stood in front of the closet half an hour, pulling things out, putting them back. She took a skirt and two blouses with her into the bathroom and hung them from the towel rack, where she could look at them and make up her mind while she was in the tub. One of the blouses was a flat red, the other one was white. When she got out, the white one went back in the closet. She put on her makeup slowly, considering her eyes and the color of her skin as if she was seeing it all for the first time. She put perfume under her arms and in the creases beneath her breasts. She dressed and touched the line of her blouse from the side of her breast to her waist. It was the right blouse. He knocked on the door just as she got downstairs.
Richard Shellburn was moving better than he had last night. His hair was combed and his shirt was ironed. He didn’t look as sad with his hair combed. He started the car and said, “Do you know who T. D. Davis is?”
She’d thought it was something to do with Leon at first.
“T. D. Davis is the kind that never comes right at you,” he said. “When he wants you to know something bad, he goes around the edges and leaves you to find it in the middle.”
She waited then for him to tell her something bad about Leon, but then he was talking about rape clubs and lady columnists. They’d driven out past the airport before she figured out that he was talking about somebody at the newspaper.
Twenty minutes later they were out of the airport traffic and riding south on I-95. He was still talking to her like she worked at the Daily Times and knew the people he knew. And something else too. He was talking like there was already something between them, like he’d decided to just skip two months. She didn’t know that she liked that.
“Where are we going?” she said. He smiled at her then and reached across the seat to touch her hand. He had a soft hand, wet and heavy. She guessed it didn’t make much difference what his hand felt like, because she put her other hand on top of his and squeezed. She was trusting something, she didn’t know exactly what. Her sisters had moved out of the house now, Mickey might as well be on Easter Island.
“I wanted to show you the place,” he said.
Half an hour later, they went past a sign that said Maryland welcomed safe drivers. He hadn’t moved his hand an inch. They were on a two-lane road now, following a green tractor at fifteen miles an hour around curves and up and down hills. She had no idea what direction they were pointed.
“When I was little,” she said, “my father used to take us to the shore in August. I never knew how he found his way, and I used to think if it wasn’t for him, we’d never get back.” She looked out the window. Cows, weeds, daisies. Brick farmhouses. “It all looks the same, doesn’t it?” she said. “If you woke up out here alone, you’d never get back.”
Shellburn moved his hand then, back to the steering wheel. “You wouldn’t want to,” he said.
They came to a bridge. The tractor crossed it and went straight. Shellburn turned right, onto a little dirt road on the other side. They rode beside a river for a few hundred yards. There were sailboats on the water and people sitting in them wearing sweaters and white hats. Jeanie thought of herself in a sailboat, then the trees got between them and the river and she thoug
ht about waking up lost in the country.
Shellburn covered her hand again. “Almost there,” he said. She suddenly felt happy, and she wanted to tell him something true. It didn’t matter what.
She said, “When you told me about this, I didn’t know if it was real.” He looked at her, but he didn’t move his hand. “I thought it might of been something you made up. I mean, sometimes I still pretend I’m a dancer. I went to New York to study when I was younger, and sometimes I pretend I stayed there and got famous, and that’s where I am.”
Which was all a lie, except about wondering if the place was real. Jeanie Scarpato only pretended things that could happen, like her sisters dying. He put his arm around her shoulder then and pulled her closer. She fit herself into his side.
They went around more curves and then over one last hill, and then she saw the place he’d told her about. There were sailboats out on the water here too. It was all the way he’d said it, but she’d liked it better when it was a story.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
He sat there with his arm around her looking out the window. Then he got out of the car. “C’mon,” he said, “I’ll show you where we’ll put the house.”
At least two months, he’d skipped. But she took his hand and slid over his seat, and came legs first out of the Continental. He took a blanket out of the trunk, then a straw basket. The price tag was still on the basket. She took his arm and went with him toward the water. The ground was soft, and the grass was deeper than it looked, and tougher. It caught at her feet, and once she stumbled. He walked beside her, limping and smiling, and by the time they’d gone fifty yards he’d broken a sweat.
Then he stopped, moved a few yards to the left, and pointed out over the trees and water.
“Right here,” he said, breathing hard. “The living room goes right here.” He looked at her, and she tried to think of something to say.
“It’s a good view,” she said.
He spread the blanket over the ground and put the basket in the middle of it and himself next to the basket. She sat down on the other side. He was wearing a tie and pants that hung off his legs like old skin.
“Sometimes it’s like that for me too,” he said. “I think about this place, and I’m not sure if it’s real.” He opened the basket and pulled out a bottle of French wine. The kind with a cork. Then he looked back into the basket, moving bottles, until he found the corkscrew. She saw three or four more bottles and a bag of potato chips. Paper cups. The tag on the basket said $9.95, and over that, Crown Liquors.
He sat pretzel-legged on the blanket with the bottle in one of the holes where his legs crossed, and pressed into it with the corkscrew. His hands shook, and she looked out over the water again and pictured herself in a sailboat and a white hat.
When she looked back at him, he’d taken the top of the cork out and pushed the rest down into the wine, where it floated in pieces on top. He took the stack of paper cups out then and filled two of them with the wine, handed one of them to her. She sipped at it, straining the bits of cork with her teeth, and by the time she took the cup away from her lips he was refilling his glass. “How would you like to wake up in the morning here?” he said.
“I wouldn’t know where I was,” she said. He laughed and touched her hand, and then he drank everything in his cup and filled it again. Somewhere off to the side she saw something move in the trees. “There’s something over there,” she said.
He rolled over on his elbow and looked. “Probably a deer,” he said, and when he rolled back he put his hand on her ankle and then smoothed the skin on the back side of her calf. She saw the movement again, but when she turned to look, nothing was there.
“You don’t have bears, do you?”
“Bears?” he said. “Jesus, wouldn’t that be great?” He poured himself another cup of wine and freshened hers. This time she threw it down with him, mostly thinking about bears. “I’m fifty-three years old,” he said after a while.
She said, “You don’t look that old.”
He said, “I’m fifty-three years old, and a whole city loves me.” He laughed and she laughed with him. “Every day when I go to work there’s letters from people who love me,” he said. “People I never met. They want me to come to dinner or go out drinking or visit them in the Poconos.”
“Do you go?” she said.
He shook his head. “Golf,” he said. “They want me to play golf.” He lay back on the blanket, resting the cup on his chest. “Sometimes I think I ought to take one of them up on it,” he said. “Just bring a suitcase over and move in.” As he spoke he found her leg with his hand again, moved it from her ankle up her calf. She had the feeling that he’d moved in on her, now that he mentioned it.
“How long do you think it would take to get tired of having a celebrity around?” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said. His hand had come up over the top of her knee, bringing the skirt with it. The skirt fell into her lap, Richard Shellburn was looking at the sky. She took a long drink of her wine and then brushed the hair back off his forehead. She left her hand there and said, “It’s hard to believe it was only Monday Leon was alive.”
He looked then and saw her legs were bare. “Time is a bad bastard,” he said. “There’s nothing else that works against you like time. It goes slow when you’re where you don’t belong and fast when you’re comfortable. Are you comfortable here?”
“I think so,” she said.
“And then, no matter what you’re doing, there’s another kind of time, keeping track. But it isn’t to tell how far you’ve gone. It’s to make sure you can’t get any of it back.”
Something moved again, farther up in the trees. A glimpse of brown, and then Richard Shellburn moved again. His hand slid from her knee all the way up her leg and stopped with one finger resting against her underwear. “Let me tell you about your husband,” he said. She didn’t want to hear Richard Shellburn tell her about Mickey, not with his hand on her pants. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be with Richard Shellburn at all, but she was lost in this, and trusting something.
“Your husband,” he said, “can put an air conditioner in the wall by himself, or pick up an engine block.”
That was true, but she didn’t say anything because she didn’t want to get herself in any deeper. “And he sits in that bar across the street from your house, every night for two hours, talking with his pals, and when he comes home he doesn’t say jack-shit.” While he talked, she felt his finger slide under the elastic, and then he was touching her clitoris. Not moving, just touching it. She wasn’t sure Mickey knew it was there.
“He can take the air conditioner apart and put it back together,” he said, “because he knows all the parts. That’s what he understands, air conditioners and engine blocks.”
He slid the finger down her clitoris and found her lips, and circled them once just inside the rim. She knew she was wet. He took the hand out of her pants and sat up. Then he filled their cups, touched his to hers, and drank throwing his head back, throwing something away. And she threw hers away too. He pulled her down, on her back, and she let him. She saw a cloud pass over the sun, and then his face was over hers, so close then that it could have been Mickey or Tom Hubbard, or any of the ones in between, and then his hand was back between her legs, with more purpose now, and she was trusting. She was trusting him to take her back after he was finished.
She felt him push inside her and closed her eyes, and then couldn’t open them, because he was all over her eyelids, kissing her. He had a nice touch, though. He moved in and out slower than Mickey, like he had a reason for it besides happening to be there, and he wasn’t in a hurry to get somewhere else.
A few minutes later he pulled her hand down between them. She thought he wanted her to hold his balls, but when she reached for them he stopped her. He pulled himself off her chest, far enough for her to see his face, and put her hand on her clitoris. “What?” she said.
“You know wha
t,” he said. She could feel his cock and his eyes, and she began to move her finger. She closed her eyes again. It wasn’t something she wanted to see. It moved her, though, farther away from Mickey, from Leon. She was trusting.
She felt him begin to tighten just as she came. And when he yelled, she thought at first it was just the way writers made love.
Shellburn had gone from T. D.’s office to the fourteenth floor and called her from there. Then he went to a liquor store just across the bridge in Camden, New Jersey, and bought four bottles of sixteen-dollar wine—which was the best wine they had in Camden—along with some cups and potato chips and the basket. He saw the basket and knew it was going to be perfect.
He came back across the bridge and picked her up. The daylight didn’t spoil her looks. Some women got out in the sun and looked so healthy, in two minutes they had you thinking what you’d done to your liver. Jeanie wasn’t like that, and he drove out past the airport toward Maryland, explaining about his job. That’s how he told her who he was.
He took it a step at a time, and she understood. Sometimes she didn’t say anything for ten and fifteen minutes at a time, and he liked that. She was putting it together. And he liked it when she told him in the car that she wasn’t sure the place in Maryland was really a place in Maryland, and not something he’d made up. It was something he’d made up, until he’d seen it.
They came over the last hill and saw the cove, and she didn’t say anything at first, just put it together, and when she spoke, it was simple and perfect. “It’s beautiful,” she said. He thought he would like to write a column that ended just that way. “It’s beautiful,” she said. He couldn’t think what the story would be about.
And she went with him into the field, not pushing him, not having to be pushed. She had no motives. She showed him her legs—dancer’s legs—and he slid his finger up under her panties, and the hair was soft and pressed flat against her, no tangles as his finger went through it. And she never pushed him, or had to be pushed. It was like she’d expected him.