Cole rolled the window back up and turned to his companions with a superior grin on his boyish young face. “Morons,” he gibed. He slipped the big black Lincoln into D and pulled out.
“I saw it, but I don’t believe it. I heard it, but it ain’t true,” George Young said, amazed.
They followed the old man’s instructions and came down the far side of Winnemucca till they saw a cluster of silver trailers, all hunkered together like poor animals in a warren. It was a scene of somehow surpassing squalor, though everything seemed neat and clean. Perhaps it was the lack of grass—just deep brown dirt streets—or the gray and leprous garbage cans tilted and rusting and staved in, right at the edge of the road.
“Helluva place to live, right next’a the cat houses,” Teddy Bear remarked. Robert stared out the window as they passed. Yes, it seemed a helluva place to live, and the silent sadness of the little trailer camp abruptly wore down on his spirit. What was he doing here? Going to a house of prostitution, having left college, bumming around the country in search of something intangible, something so remote even that he had no name for it, no way to call it, or think of it. His thoughts leaped bounded fled away.
And he thought of his father.
Was that the reason? Was it his father, who seemed so silent and distant, now that he was away? So importantly silent and distant, without love between them, without communication between them…
He knew his mother, perhaps knew her too well. That fine sensitive woman who had to go to Florida every winter for her cough, who tookhim everywhere, who said: “Wait till your father comes home, will you get it!” His mother, who knew she had something strange in the house. The soft, gentle beast that had given birth to the tiger. Where was she now, with his father? The man who went his hurried way, his gray fedora perched on his head with the brim turned up, his face quiet behind his glasses and the thin little sandy moustache, smoking his endless cigars, where were they now? He wanted very much to go to them, no, to him, to talk to him, and try to make some connection between them. Before it was too late. He had to talk to that man, to find out who he was, to find out not only who his father was, but who he—Robert, me—was also. He wanted simply to…simply to talk to him, to get the answers.
He wanted to leap from the car, and go to a phone.
“This’s gotta be it,” said George Young from another world. Robert’s thoughts slithered back to him, moaning.
He wrenched himself alert, and stared out the window at the scene in Littletown. They parked at the end of a street. Dirt. It was a long street of dirt. They got out of the Lincoln, and the three Detroiters bunched together as they moved away from the car. Robert stood silently watching them, taking in every facet of the street.
It was an exact replica of some “B” Western street. Dirt down the center, rutted from cars. Clapboard buildings on either side, with hitching rails for horses in front, and slat porches raised a foot off the street.
The buildings ran down either side, and at the far end of the street was a row of the same buildings, identical in their weather-beaten weariness.
The nearest building on his left had a painted sign on its roof-front. It said: THE COMBINATION BAR and under the big red letters it said: DRINKS MUSIC ROMANCE.
He felt ill, but he followed them.
They sauntered down the street, with George Young actually swaggering. He knew his way around. He was the swordsman of the group. And Cole Magnus seemed unsure, but there was breeding in him, some kind of breeding, and it carried him. Teddy Bear had bluff, little-guy bluff, feisty, cocky, and the three of them knew where they were going, knew what they were going to do with their bodies.
Robert closed with them. He was afraid, suddenly; more afraid than he had ever been before. More afraid than the night he had not wanted his parents to go to the party and had sneaked out of the house in his pajamas and ridden on the back bumper of the old green Plymouth, till honking cars had stopped his parents, and he had run away in the dark, and hit the stop sign with his face and neck and chest, and fallen down crying; more afraid than when he had quit college; more afraid than when they had said they were going to the whorehouses. He was bitterly, shiveringly, completely terrified, and he walked with them because they were the only things he had from the past. From before this time.
But they were another kind of boys.
They knew!
They knew it, the secret, and he knew none of it. They were younger, but they knew, and he did not.
The group walked down the street, and suddenly women began to appear in the windows of the buildings. They leaned out of the openings, their breasts resting on the sills, and they wore ballerina outfits of silk and bright colors, and their meaty arms, also, rested on the sills. Like gossipy middle-aged women in tenement apartments.
“Hey, sweetie, in here!”
“C’mon boys, we know what you want, hey, we’ll give it to you. Hey!”
“I can be had, baby, I can be had!”
“Over here, lover…c’mon over here, the best THE BEST!”
They walked down the length of the street. In the only lighted building (and suddenly Robert realized it was almost night, the dusk had fallen so swiftly) in the line facing them, at right angles to the main thoroughfare, there was a woman sitting in a large window. She was knitting. She was naked.
They turned around and started back up the street.
Perhaps, Robert prayed, perhaps we won’t go in at all. He wanted to be somewhere else. With all his soul and spirit he wanted to be somewhere else, far away from this place.
“Well, whaddaya think?” asked George.
“I dunno,” said Teddy Bear, “which one?”
“I think that Combination Bar back there’s the best one,” Cole said. “It looks bigger than the rest, we can probably all get taken care of in there.”
“How about you?” Teddy Bear looked at Robert.
He shrugged nervously. “Any one of them’s okay, I suppose.”
“You got any bread?”
“Huh? What?” Robert was mystified.
“Bread, man, you got any money?”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah, sure, a few bucks.” He pulled three silver dollars from his right-hand pants pocket. Teddy Bear nodded. “Okay, let’s make it.” They walked back down to The Combination Bar and up onto the front porch. Robert suddenly found himself shouldering past the other three, and he was the first to enter.
There was a seedy bar on the right-hand wall, and a dead jukebox against the far wall facing them as they came in, and several doors on the left and right, and off to the far left of the entrance, sitting in the window, was an old, fat woman in a rocking chair. She, like the naked woman at the end of the street, was knitting. Rocking back and forth in a bizarre rhythm, she was knitting. She did not look up as the boys entered, but the girls erupted from the back of the room, and came toward them gladly.
“Must’a been a quiet time,” Robert heard Teddy Bear say. Then the girls were on them.
Three of them were fat, bursting out of the silk and satin ballerina costumes that looked ridiculous on them. Their fleshy arms were wattled with excess flesh, and their hair was teased and back-combed into outlandish styles. Two of them had tattoos on their arms. One of them had a black beauty mark, in the shape of a heart, on her cheek. They instantly made for Cole, George and Teddy Bear, but Robert was drawn almost against his will to a smaller, dark-haired girl just coming out of a door on the right, near the bar.
She was exquisite. Really. I’m ugly, miGod am I ugly, thought Robert. I used to have braces, and I still need my glasses for seeing things far away. Oh God! That fast.
“Hi, sweetie,” the girl said, and Robert’s terror leaped out of his head through his eyes, like a living creature, and turning, fastened itself claw and fang in his neck.
She had a mass of ebony black hair, piled atop her head. Her features were small, delicate and finely drawn. Her eyes were as dark as her hair, but they gleamed with an inner light. She
wore a ballerina costume, like the others, yet somehow it fit her perfectly, was right for her, was proper. She took his arm and led him to the bar. Robert found himself suddenly filled with a great enthusiasm for what was happening. She was lovely. Really.
“How about dancing,” he said irrelevantly, turning to the jukebox, “what about it?” She stopped him.
“We can’t, sweet baby; it’s against the law. We haven’t got an entertainment license.”
She bounced up onto a stool, and pulled Robert up beside her. “Hey, Jerry,” she hailed a tall and red-necked man in a white apron, who had been slumped on a three-legged stool behind the bar, “I’d like a beer.” Jerry roused himself, bent down the corner of the page of the double-crostic book he had been working in, and started toward the cooler. The other three girls were at the bar, as well, and they chimed in with Robert’s girl. Jerry began pulling splits from the cooler, eight in all, and setting them up for opening. Robert felt put-upon. He didn’t want to be hustled; though he had no way of phrasing it to himself. He felt something for this girl, and he didn’t want to buy her a beer, like any common patron of The Combination Bar might do.
“No,” he said.
“Huh?”
“No. I don’t want to buy you a beer.”
“Uh.”
“Where do we go?”
“Uh, back there, back in uh in my room.”
“You don’t want to dance, huh?”
“No, we can’t, no license.”
“Entertainment.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Okay, let’s go see your room.”
“Yeah huh?”
“Yeah, your room.”
“Okay, sweet baby, just follow me.”
George looked across from where he was being smothered by his obese tattooed companion. “Lucky bastard,” he said, grimacing. Teddy Bear and Cole Magnus stared after Robert as he followed the girl from the bar room. “She was cute,” Cole said.
“You just pay attention to me, dahlin’!” said Cole’s girl, dragging his head around. Her gold tooth glinted in the light of the Schlitz Beer sign on the back bar.
Robert followed the girl down a short hall, and waited as she took a key from inside her bodice to unlock the door. He looked at her rounded hindquarters as she bent over the keyhole, and was amazed to find that he had never really noticed the way the buttocks joined to the legs of a woman. He was thrilled, and he wondered why he had never looked at Sally Gleeson in the light. They had always made love in the dark—she had wanted it that way—and by the time the lights were turned on again…she had always been dressed.
Now she was in the dark with his friend Dave, from New Jersey. It didn’t seem fair, somehow, that he had never seen her naked.
“After you, sweet baby.” The girl stood aside for Robert to enter the room.
“Oh no, after you,” Robert said sincerely.
She gave a small skyward look and preceded him into the tiny room. Robert followed and stopped just within the door. The girl closed the door tightly and turned to his back. “That’ll be four bucks. Now,” she said firmly.
Without turning around, Robert pulled the three silver dollars from his right-hand pants pocket, and gathered a dollar’s worth of change from his left-hand pocket. “On the bureau,” she said, from behind him.
Robert placed it on the white lace doily, and was held on a point of fascination by the photographs stuck into the frame of the bureau’s mirror. Tony Curtis. Steve McQueen. Steve Reeves. Vincent Edwards. Anthony Franciosa. Paul Newman. An unidentified man with a two-day stubble, a large ten-gallon hat worn at a rakish angle, and a pair of heavily tooled Western boots. A picture of a woman holding a baby holding a teddy bear. Robert thought of Teddy Bear, at the bar outside, pouring beer into the fat woman. A picture of two girls at a seashore, mugging ferociously.
He turned and looked at the rest of the room. There was a bed, with a metal frame, and a very clean, white bedspread. Three dolls, puffed in dirndl skirts, sat up frozen-faced on the pillow. The walls were gray, and covered with pictures in color, cut from movie magazines. There was a preponderance of Paul Newman and Vincent Edwards photos.
The bureau, a closet, a waist-high, overly long sink with rubber tubing connected to the spigot, internal machinery, female machinery, hoses, things without names, whose purposes he could only guess.
“Strip, sweet baby,” the girl said, and pulled a zipper on the front of her ballerina costume. She let it fall from her breasts, and shoved it past her waist, over her hips. It fell to the floor and she carefully stepped out of it, being certain not to catch her high heels in it. Robert watched her. She was naked under the ballerina outfit. No bra, no underpants, just her flesh, her pale flesh that filled his vision. He wanted to reach out and touch her, there, or there, on her naked body, but he caught himself; she wasn’t Sally Gleeson. She was someone else. He didn’t even know her name, and he was going to do with her, that thing he had done only with Sally. “What’s your name?” he asked her, softly.
“Terry,” she said, and stooped to pick up the satin garment. He watched her as she turned, seeing all of her as she moved, every inch of her, all the dark places only suggested by the folds and wrinkles and postures of women’s clothes. She went to the closet and hung the garment on a hanger. There were half a dozen more of other colors hanging there. She took a silver one out, closed the door, and laid the garment across the bureau, covering Robert’s four dollars. She turned to him, then.
“Well, c’mon, sweet baby, I haven’t got all night, you know.” She kicked off her spike-heeled pumps and took a quick step to the bed. She pulled down the spread, carefully removing the dolls and placing them on the bureau. Then without looking at Robert she dumped herself back on the bed, flat on her back, her legs up.
An open cradle. The pillars of love spread to receive him. His thoughts were briefly of Sally Gleeson. They did not match up. This was a girl out of a vision; not his perhaps, but a vision nonetheless.
“Hey, c’mon,” she said.
He started to strip, and she watched him as he slipped off his shoes, his socks, his pants. He was standing in his shirt when she said, “That’s funny, y’know.”
“What’s funny?”
“Your pants. You took off your pants first.”
“So? Doesn’t everybody?”
She shook her head. “Uh-uh. They take off their shirt first, and they all suck in their bellies so they look like some kind of strong man, and they lay the clothes out real neat, like they were going to be here awhile, and then they take off the shoes, and then they turn around and unzip the fly and take off the pants, and lay them out real neat, and then they come over and get close before they take off their underpants. Most of them wear either jockey shorts or some kind of loud boxer things. But you took off your pants first. That’s funny, y’know?”
It didn’t mean much to Robert.
“And they usually come to the bed with their socks on. You ever see how silly a guy looks with nothing but his watch and his socks on?”
Robert unbuttoned his shirt and stripped off his underpants, and dumped them on the floor with his pants and socks. He came to the bed and looked down into the warm dark of her, and felt he should say something: was this the feeling you always got? Was this the way for all men about to know women? He had no idea, but he felt he should do or say something that would set him apart from all the other men who had been inside this girl.
“What’s, uh, I mean how uh long am I supposed to be in here for uh four dollars?”
She looked up incredulously.
“Sweet baby,” she demanded, “just what the hell are you talking about…”
“Well, I—”
“Now, look, will you just kindly lock on here and stop all this laughin’ and scratchin’.”
She grabbed him by the thigh, and tumbled him onto the bed. His left hand came down hard on her breast, and she went oooof softly, but started moving around till he was firmly
positioned. He had the overwhelming urge to talk to her, to make some sort of conversation to keep her from what she was trying to do to him, what he was trying to do to her.
Then she found him, and his body betrayed him as she took him in her hand and guided him. It was like soft polyps, down a slim, slick tunnel, very smooth yet ruffled. It filled him with sensations he had never before known, and all he could think of was that Sally Gleeson, out there in the bushes with New Jersey Dave, his friend, was even a failure at this, as well as a failure at being real to him.
And then she was moving quickly, expertly, but he wanted it to go on and on for a long time. He propped himself up on his elbows and looked down at her lovely face. “Where are you from?” he asked, conversationally.
“Oh, shit! A nut.”
“No, really, where are you from? Come on, tell me.”
“Texas. West Texas. Okay?”
“How’d you get here?”
“How’d a nice girl like me wind up in a place like this? Oh, shit.”
“No, now come on, don’t make fun of me. I wouldn’t ask you a cliché like that. I know better.”
“Oh you do, huh?”
“Sure. I know a little.”
“Like that prostitutes are usually dykes, and like they’re all fallen girls from good families, and like they never kiss their johns even if they’ll screw them?”
“Well, yes, I’ve heard tha—”
She took his face in both hands and pulled him down to her and kissed him full on the mouth, prying open his lips with her soft, agile tongue, and running it inside hot and moist. She kissed him for a long time, for a very long time, moving her hips in an anticlockwise direction all the while. It was the most thorough kiss Robert Hirschhorn had ever had. In all his twenty years. It did the work of all the women who had come before, how very few there had been.
While she was still kissing him, there was a rude slam on the door, as though someone walking past had idly banged a fist against the panel.
“Oh, shit!” Terry said. “That’s the Missus. Come on now, sweet baby, make your seed and let’s get outta here before she howls holy hell at me.”