Sloane’s house, on the other hand, was damned nice. It was an older frame place with one of those deep porches all across the front, and it nestled up to its eaves in big, old shrubbery. There was about a half acre of lawn in front and probably more in back. A long driveway went up to the house and along one side of it to the garage behind the house. On the other side of the driveway was a garden plot that had pretty much gone to weeds.
I ran my car on up the driveway and pulled up just behind Sloane’s Cadillac.
“Nice place,” Clydine said, looking out at the white-picket-fence-enclosed backyard.
“Well, well, well,” Jack said, bustling out of the house with a bottle of beer in his hand. “What have we here?”
Clydine and I got out of the car.
“My”—Jack grinned, coming through the gate—“she’s a little one, isn’t she?” He was giving her the full benefit of the dazzling Jack Alders’ smile, guaranteed to melt glaciers and peel paint at a hundred yards.
“Jack,” I said, “this is Clydine.”
“Clydine? How the hell’d you ever get a name like that, sweetie?”
“I won it in a raffle,” she said with a perfectly straight face.
“She won it in a raffle!” Jack chortled with a forced glee. “That’s pretty sharp, pretty sharp. Come on in the house, kids. Fuel up.” He waved the beer bottle at us and led the way toward the house.
“Far out,” Clydine murmured to me.
“Hey, gang,” Jack announced as we went in the back door, “you all know my brother Dan, and this is his current steady, Clydine. Isn’t that a handle for you?” He pointed to each of the others standing around in the kitchen and repeated their names. “Tell you what, sweetie,” he said to Clydine, “I’m never gonna be able to manage that name of yours, so I’m just gonna call you Clyde.” He winked broadly at the rest of us.
She smiled sweetly at him, and then said very pleasantly but very distinctly, “If you do, I’ll kick you right square in the balls.”
Sloane shrieked with laughter, almost collapsing on the floor. Jack looked stunned but covered it well, laughing a little hollowly with the rest of us. His jaws tightened up some though.
We had a couple of beers, got the girls organized, and then Jack, Sloane, and I went outside to tackle the yardwork.
I fell heir to a scythe and the chore of leveling the jungle that had been a garden. Once I got into it, I discovered that in spite of the weeds, there was a pretty fair amount of salvageable produce there. By the time I got through, I’d laid a couple bushels of assorted vegetables over on the grass strip between the garden and the driveway—radishes, carrots, lettuce, onions, cucumbers, and so forth. I hauled great armloads of weeds and junk back to a brush pile behind the garage. The place looked a lot better when I was done.
I washed off my produce at an outside faucet and put it on the back porch. Then I grabbed another beer and went to see how Jack and Cal were doing. I found them sitting on the front porch, staring down at the half-mowed lawn.
“Takin’ a beer break, hey, Dan?” Sloane said.
“No. I finished up.”
“No shit?”
They had to come out and inspect the job. Then they looked at my haul on the back porch, and then we went back to the front porch to sit and stare at the lawnmower some more.
Sloane sighed. “Well,” he said, “I guess it’s my turn in the barrel.” He walked heavily down the front stairs and cranked up the mower.
“That tomato of yours has got kind of a smart mouth, hasn’t she?” Jack said sourly, lighting a cigarette.
“She just says what she thinks,” I told him.
“If she was with me, I’d slap a few manners into her.” He was still stinging from the put-down.
“You’d get your balls kicked off, too,” I told him. “She meant what she said about that.”
“A tough one, huh?” he said. “Where’d you latch onto her anyway?”
“She’s the one I met at that Italian movie, remember?”
“Oh, that one. You sure got a weird taste in women, is all I can say.”
“She’s a human being,” I said, “not just a stray piece of tail. As long as you treat her like a human being, fine. It’s when you come on like she was a cocker spaniel that you run into trouble.” I knew there wasn’t much point in talking to him about it. He wasn’t likely to change.
“I’d still slap some manners into her if it was me,” he said.
“I don’t hit women much,” I said, looking out toward the sunset.
He grunted and went down to spell Sloane on the mower.
Sloane came back up the steps, puffing and sweating like a pig. “Man,” he gasped, “am I ever out of shape. I’m gonna have to start jogging or something before we go up into the high country.”
“You said a mouthful there, buddy,” I said. “We probably all should. Otherwise one of us is going to blow a coronary.”
“Hey”—he giggled—“I like that little girl of yours. She’s cute as a button, isn’t she?”
“She’s a boot in the butt,” I agreed.
“Boy, did she ever get the drop on old Jack. I thought he was gonna fall right on his ear when she threatened to bust his balls for him.”
“I think he’s still a little sore about it.”
“He isn’t used to havin’ women react that way to his line.”
“She just doesn’t buy the glad-hand routine,” I said, “and Jack doesn’t know any other approach.”
“How’d you manage to latch onto her?”
“You’d never believe it,” I said.
“Try me.”
I told him about it.
“No kidding?” he said, laughing. Then a thought flickered across his face. “Say, she isn’t a user, is she? I mean, a lot of those kids are. She hasn’t got any stuff with her, has she? I can square the beef if the cops come in here because we’re makin’ too much noise or something, but if they come in and find her stoned out of her mind on something, that could get a little sticky.”
“No,” I told him. “No sweat—oh, she blows a little grass now and then, but I’ve told her that I don’t particularly care for the stuff, and I don’t get much kick out of talking to people when they’re stoned. It’s like talking into a wet mop. She stays away from it when she’s with me. We’ve got a deal; I tell all her friends I’m an ex-con, and she stays off the grass when I’m around. What she does on her own time is her business.”
“Sounds like you two have quite an arrangement going.”
“For the most part, we don’t try to tell each other what to do, that’s all. We get along pretty good that way.”
“There, you lazy bastards!” Jack yelled, killing the lawnmower. “It’s all done.”
“You do nice work,” Sloane said. “Let’s go get cleaned up. I brought towels and soap and stuff. I get firsties on the shower.”
The girls had finished the inside cleanup and had already bathed and changed clothes. Sioane, Jack, and I all showered and changed while they cooked up the steaks and whipped up a salad out of some of my produce. We all had mixed drinks with dinner and a couple more afterward. Along about sundown things started to loosen up a bit.
“Hey,” Helen said, her hard, plastered-on face brightening, “let’s play strip poker.”
“I didn’t bring any cards,” Sloane said.
“Oh, darn,” she pouted. “How about you, Jack? Dan? Haven’t one of you guys maybe got a deck of cards in your car?”
We both shook our heads.
“Maybe the people who lived here—” She jumped to her feet and ran into the kitchen to start rummaging through the various drawers.
“Je-sus Christ!” Clydine said, “if she wants to take her clothes off so goddamn bad, why doesn’t she just go ahead and take her clothes off?”
Sandy smiled slightly. It was the first time I’d ever seen her do it.
“Come on, you guys,” Helen called, “help me look.”
“We
cleaned out all those drawers this afternoon,” Sandy said, her voice seeming very far away.
“Damn it all, anyway,” Helen complained, coming back into the living room. She plunked herself back down on the couch beside Sloane, sulking.
The orgy wasn’t getting off the ground too well.
“Jeeze,” Helen said, “you’d think somebody’d have a deck of cards. Myron always has a deck of cards with him. All the sergeants do. They play cards all the time.”
“At least when they’re playing cards, they’re not dropping napalm on little kids,” Clydine said acidly.
Helen’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t know about some people, but I think we ought to back up our servicemen all the way.”
“So do I,” Clydine said. I blinked at her. What the hell? “I think we ought to back them up as far as Hawaii, at least,” she finished.
It took Helen a minute or two to figure that one out.
“I’m proud to be the wife of a serviceman,” she said finally, not realizing how that remark sounded under the circumstances.
“Let it lay,” I muttered to Clydine.
“But—”
“Don’t stomp a cripple. It’s not sporting.”
“Hey,” Jack said, moving in quickly to avert a brawl, “I meant to ask you, Cal, are we gonna take pistols with us, too? On the hunt, I mean?”
“Sure,” Sloane said. “Why not? If we don’t get any deer, we can always sit around and plink beer cans.” He giggled.
“You got anything definite out of that other guy yet, Dan?” Jack was pretty obviously dragging things in by the heels to keep Helen and Clydine away from each other’s throats. A beef between the women could queer the whole party.
“Carter says the whole deal could hang on him goin’. You better nudge him a little.”
“He’s gotta make up his own mind,” I said. “I can’t do it for him.”
We kicked that around for a while. We had another drink. I imagine we were all starting to feel them a little, even though we’d been pretty carefully spacing them out. Even Sandy started to get loosened up a bit.
Then we started telling jokes, and they began to get raunchier and raunchier—which isn’t unusual, considering what this party was supposed to be. In all of her jokes, Helen kept referring to the male organ as a wiener, which, for some reason, just irritated hell out of me.
I went on out to the kitchen to get a beer, figuring to back off on the whiskey a little to keep from getting completely pie-eyed. I heard the padding of bare feet behind me. Clydine had her shoes off again.
She caught me at the refrigerator. “This is an orgy?” she said. “I don’t think these people know how. They’re like a bunch of kids sitting around trying to get up nerve enough to play spin the bottle.”
“You want some action?” I leered at her.
“Well, after that popcorn and purity routine last night, I’m pretty well primed. When does something happen?”
“Hey, in there,” Helen called, “no sneaking off into dark corners. If you’re gonna do something, you gotta do it out here where we can all watch.” She giggled coarsely.
“That does it!” Clydine said. She grabbed my arm. “Let’s go screw—right in the middle of the goddamn rug!”
“Cool it,” I said, “I’ll get things moving.”
“Well, somebody’s going to have to. This is worse than a goddamn Girl Scout camp.”
I rummaged around until I found a large glass. Then I got a couple more bottles of beer and went back to the living room.
“I’ll bet he was copping a feel.” Helen snickered. “How was it, honey?”
I ignored that, but Clydine glowered at her.
“I just remembered a game,” I announced. “The Germans play it in the beer halls.”
“What kinda game?” Helen demanded a little blearily.
“It’s a kind of drinking game,” I said, pouring beer into the large glass.
“A drinking game,” she objected. “That’s no goddamn fun. How about a sex game?”
“Just hang tough,” I said. “The point of this game is that the person who takes the next to the last drink out of his glass—not the last one, but the next to the last one—has to pay a penalty of some kind.”
“What kind of penalty?” Sloane asked.
“Any penalty we decide. Everybody gets to kick him in the butt, or he has to go outside and bay at the moon, or he—or she—has to take off one piece of clothing or—”
“Hey,” Helen said, “I like that last one.” Some how I knew she would. “That sounds like a swell game.”
“That’s a pretty big glass,” Jack objected.
“That’s the point,” I explained. “Nobody can just chug-a-lug it down. You can take a big drink or a little one, but remember if the next player finishes it off, you gotta peel off one item of clothing—a sock, your pants, a bra, or whatever.”
We haggled a bit about the rules, but finally everybody agreed to them. We all discarded our shoes to get that out of the way. I caught a glimpse of Sandy’s face. It seemed completely indifferent. We pulled our seats into a kind of circle and began passing the glass around.
Sloane, of course, polished off the first glass, and Helen, with a great deal of giggling and ostentatious display of leg, peeled off a stocking. I think that mentally she was still at the “You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine” stage of development. Then Jack caught Sandy, and she mutely followed Helen’s example.
It went several rounds, with Sloane, Jack, and me pretty well able to control it—simply because we could take bigger drinks. I hadn’t dropped it on Clydine yet.
“Come on, crumb,” she hissed at me. “I’m beginning to feel like a virgin.” Helen was down to her panties and bra, and Sandy was in her slip. I’d lost one sock and both Jack and Sloane were down to their slacks and shorts. I was trying not to look at Jack’s tattoos.
“How much have you got on under that?” I asked Clydine. She had on a dark jersey and a pair of slacks. No sox.
“Just panties,” she said. “I want to beat that dim-witted exhibitionist down to skin.” Her competitive spirit was up. It was a silly game, but we were all drunk enough to start taking it a little seriously.
So the next time around, I emptied the glass, Clydine stood up and slowly pulled off the jersey. Her little soldiers snapped to attention. I heard a sharp intake of breath from Jack. Clydine took a deep breath, and Sloane choked a little.
“Come on, come on,” Helen snapped, “let’s get on with the game. That’s not the only set of boobs in the room.” What a pig!
Sandy lost her slip, and then Helen’s bra went. She thrust her breasts out as far as she could, but they were pretty sorry-looking in comparison to my two little friends. It’s a funny thing about nudity. Helen looked vulgar, but Clydine didn’t. My little Bolshevik was completely natural about the whole thing. After the first shock wore off, her nude breasts were almost an extension of her face—pretty but not vulgar. Helen’s face stopped at her neck with the sharp line where her makeup left off. Below that she was obscene.
I lost my other sock, Jack lost his pants, and Sandy’s bra went. There was a sort of simplicity, almost a purity in the way she numbly exposed herself.
“Break-time,” Sloane giggled. “My kidneys are awash.” He hustled on back to the can with Jack right behind him. Clydine wandered around a little, looking at the furniture, and Helen sat sulking. She was obviously outclassed; Sandy had a great shape, and Clydine, of course, was out of sight.
“It’s not much of a game really,” I said apologetically to Sandy.
She lit a cigarette, seemingly oblivious of her own nakedness. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s only for a little while, so it doesn’t make any difference.” I was suddenly disgusted with myself for having come up with the whole silly idea. Why does a guy do things like that?
“I’m not being nosey,” I said, lying in my teeth, “but why do you hang around with Jack anyway? You know there??
?s no future in it for you.”
“Oh, Jack’s all right,” she said. “If it wasn’t him, it would just be somebody else. It’s only for a little while anyway.”
She kept on saying that. Nobody was that cool. Maybe it was just a way of keeping things from getting to her.
“I like your little friend,” she said, suddenly flashing a quick smile toward Clydine. The smile made her face suddenly come alive, and there was something just under the surface that made me look away.
Sloane and Jack came back, and the rest of us trekked back one at a time to use the facilities.
The game continued in a fairly predictable way, with all the girls winding up totally nude, and Sloane, Jack, and me in just our shorts. Despite some fairly obvious suggestions from Helen about where the final penalty should be paid, each couple retired to a separate bedroom for the last stages of the party.
As I said before, Clydine and I had both gotten pretty well worked-up the preceding night, and we went at each other pretty hot and heavy the first time. The booze, however, took its well-known and pretty obvious toll. I wasn’t really making much headway the second time around, just sort of trying to entertain a friend, so to speak.
“It’s not working, Danny,” she said softly. “We’re both too tipsy. Let’s talk.”
I started to roll over.
“No,” she said, locking her legs around me, “just stay there. It’s kind of nice, and this way I’m sure I’ve got your attention.”
“Oh, gosh, yes,” I said, mimicking Carter. “This may add an entirely new dimension to the art of conversation.”
“Just relax,” she told me. She pulled me down.
“We’re not for keeps, Danny,” she said after a moment. “You know that, don’t you? I’m saying this because I keep having this awful impulse to tell you that I love you.”
I started to say something, but she squeezed me sharply with her legs.
“Let me finish,” she said, “while I’ve still got the courage. I know you think it’s silly, all this—well—political stuff I’m involved in, but it’s awfully important to me. I believe in it. I wish you did, too. Sometimes I just wish you’d believe in something—anything, but you don’t.”