The other reason was more selfish.
See, I was just having too much fun the way things were going. It was a fantastic ego trip for me, the whole thing, and even knowing something is an ego trip isn’t enough to take the enjoyment out of it. For once in my life I was the teacher and she was the pupil, and I was getting a tremendous charge out of it. Instead of feeling like some utterly hopeless dope of a kid, I was the wise old man and she was the little innocent one. And every time I took her upstairs and let the stuffed animals watch me teach her something new and con her into doing it, well, it made me feel as if I was really somebody sensational.
(Which was another reason, I guess, that I had no desire to get in bed with Claureen or Rita. There was no way on earth I could feel like the wise old man with either of those two, and I guess I knew it would just bring me down in a bad way.)
By only seeing Lucille at lunch hour, I made that part of it be our entire relationship. And because we had so little time together we could just keep on going forward a little at a time instead of rushing straight into all-the-way sex. I didn’t realize at the time that this was something I wanted. Instead I told myself it wasn’t fair to rush her, that I wanted to let everything come at its own pace so it would be natural and good for her. But that was bullshit, really. Utter bullshit.
“You’re like a drug to me, Chip,” she said one day. “I just need more and more of you.”
“Must be a good kind of drug. You look prettier every day.”
“The girls ask me about you.”
“What do they ask?”
“What you’re like. Everybody knows about that place you work at. Some of them sort of want to go out with you. They want to come home with me and meet you. But they’re scared of you at the same time.”
“Scared of me?”
She nodded. “They think you must know things other boys don’t. The things I could tell them! And sometimes I just could die for wanting to tell someone. I feel I could burst from holding it all inside me.”
“I don’t think it would be a very good idea to tell anybody.”
“I know. I just say we hardly talk at all. That you don’t even know I’m alive.”
“Oh, I can tell you’re alive, all right.”
“Ohhhh—”
And a little later she said, “I’m scared of you, too, Chip.”
“Oh, come on. You must know by now you can trust me.”
“I know. But it used to be I could trust myself, and now I can t. I never knew I was like this.”
“Aren’t you glad you found out?”
“I don’t know.”
“Huh?”
“I just, oh, I don’t know.” Her face clouded, then suddenly brightened and she giggled. I asked her what was so funny.
“I was thinking about Jimmie.”
“What about him?”
“If he could see us now.”
If he could have seen us right then he would have come on the spot and saved himself ten dollars.
“He asked about you.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Same as I told the girls. Not even that much. But I was thinking what would happen if I told him about you and me and all.”
“He would probably kill one of us,” I said. And if he had to choose, I thought, he would pick her. I had never mentioned to her that I had seen Jimmie now and then at the Lighthouse, so I couldn’t tell her that he tended to back down pretty easily from fights. I didn’t hold this against him, though. In fact I preferred him that way.
Her hand dropped onto me. “The other night,” she said, “he wanted me to touch him.”
“Did you?”
“’Course not. I asked him what kind of a girl he thought I was.”
“What did he say?”
“He apologized,” she said, and giggled again. “He’s just a baby, I guess. I never used to think so. Not until I met you.”
Ego food.
At the beginning I thought I was going to get tired of her, maybe because she was so square. I suppose this would have happened if we had seen each other more, had dates and long conversations, or if I had met her friends or anything like that. But she left the boring part of her personality outside the bedroom, and once she stopped fighting the whole idea of sex she turned out to have quite a natural aptitude for it.
For a long time she spent half her time being passionate and the other half feeling guilty about it. At first she was very uptight every time we did something new, as if we were taking still another step along the road to Hell. This was fun in a way—first I taught her something new, and then I assured her it wasn’t awful.
It wasn’t long, though, before she wanted to do new things and came to bed looking forward to it. I guess what happened was that her mind finally realized I wasn’t going to make her have regular intercourse, so she set that up in her mind as the one absolute sin and decided it was perfectly all right to do absolutely anything else.
So I taught her things I had done before, of which there were not too many, and things I had heard about or read about, of which there were a ton, and some things that I more or less invented. I’m not saying that I thought of things no one had thought of before because I’m not sure there are any of those things left, but they were new to me.
“My God,” she would say. “When did you have time to learn all these things, Chip?”
She didn’t know we were learning some of them together.
And she liked everything we did. Everything. I did oral things to her and taught her to do them to me, and she lived up to what Willie Em had told me about Southern girls.
And we tried anal things, which I hadn’t done before. She didn’t like the idea at the beginning, and she thought it would be painful and disgusting, and when we were done she said it was painful and disgusting and cried a little and I told her we wouldn’t do it again.
And the next day she wanted to do it again and never said another word about it being painful or disgusting.
One day I brought a vibrator from the Lighthouse. I didn’t tell Geraldine I was borrowing it. I didn’t tell Lucille where it was from, either, but of course she would have had to know.
And finally one day we got our clothes off and got into bed and she asked me what I wanted to do, and I said we would just see what happened. And after a lot of things had happened she was lying on her back with her eyes closed and I was on top of her and our flesh touched.
She opened her eyes and asked me what I was doing.
I said, “I’m going to fuck you.”
“All right,” she said, and closed her eyes again.
Afterward she said, “I guess I should have let you do it right off. I knew it would happen the first day you kissed me. I knew it and I never forgot it and I was right, and we might just as well been doing it all along.”
“Are you sorry?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.”
“Did I hurt you?”
“Not enough to talk about. You hurt me worse other times and I never minded it. Will I get a baby now, Chip?”
“No.”
“How come you’re sure?”
I showed her the condom.
“It looks so silly,” she said. “Did you buy it in a store or what?”
“I took it from—”
“From that place. I guess if Jimmie doesn’t marry me I can always work there, can’t I?”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“Knowing all you taught me. Unless you don’t think I’m pretty enough.”
“You’re beautiful.”
“I wonder do I look different now.”
“No.”
“I guess I’ll call the school in a few minutes and say I can’t come back today because my father needs me. I used to do that before you were working here.”
“You don’t have to worry, Lucille. No one can tell anything from looking at you.”
“That’s not why.” She stretched and wriggled her toes. “I guess I
don’t want to get up and go putting on clothes again. I guess I liked what we did. I guess I want to do it again.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Do you have any more of those little things?”
“Uh, no.”
“Can you use them more than once?”
“It’s not a very good idea.”
“Oh, well,” she said. “There’s other things we can do, I guess. An old boy named Chip taught me a whole roomful of them.”
“You’re an angel.”
“I’m a devil is what I am. But I just don’t care.”
That was on a Friday afternoon in early March. I didn’t see her at all over the weekend. I was hoping Jimmie Butler would come to the Lighthouse Saturday night and start a fight so that I could brain him with the club. Don’t ask me why. Anyway, he didn’t show up.
I almost went to church the next morning. Just a nutty impulse.
Monday morning I helped myself to a box of a dozen rubbers on my way out of the Lighthouse. We used one of them that lunch hour, and afterward she told me she almost broke up with Jimmie Saturday night.
“But I didn’t. I wanted to, but I thought I’ll wait until the proms are over and all, because he’d have to find somebody to take and everything, and it’s easier to go along the way it is. And if I stopped going steady with him other boys might want to take me out, and at least I’m used to Jimmie. And I know I can handle him.”
“Why did you want to break up?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I just don’t like being with him is all. And I hate it when he touches me. I just don’t feel a thing. Sometimes I’ll pretend I like it but I don’t and it never does anything to me. He just keeps going with me now because it’s a habit. He doesn’t like it that I won’t let him do any more than he used to do, but if he went out with anybody else he’d have to start all over at the beginning, so I guess he thinks I’m better than nothing.”
“I think you’re better than anything.”
“I wouldn’t marry him, anyway. Even if he wanted. I don’t love him.”
“Did you love him before?”
“No, but I didn’t know it. I didn’t know anything. Not knowing what I was missing, I guess.”
I felt kind of weird. I had more than I had started out wanting in the first place, and I didn’t know whether or not I wanted it now, or what I was going to do about it.
She said, “I love you, Chip.”
I just wouldn’t tell her that I loved her. She never asked for the words, not once, not even by throwing out hopeful pauses which you were supposed to fill with the words. And I just wouldn’t say them.
I don’t know why I made such a big deal out of it. I mean, I love you doesn’t mean all that much. Nine times out of ten it’s a polite way of saying I want to ball you, and you know it and the girl you say it to knows it and just saying the words doesn’t send anyone out shopping for engagement rings.
The really dumb thing about it is that I could have said the words and meant them, because I did love her, whether or not I knew it at the time. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with her, but that’s not what the words mean anyway. I dug her and I cared about her and I enjoyed being with her and I wanted good things to happen to her and I, well, I loved her.
But instead of saying the words I even managed to keep them out of my own mind. I would ask myself things like, Well, Chip kid, how will you get yourself out of this one? After all, old man, you’ve got to be gentle with the kid. You don’t want to break her little heart.
(I’ll tell you something, I really hate writing all this down, because until just this minute I never realized what a complete asshole I was. I felt so goddamned adult with Lucille, and when I look back at it all now I can’t believe I ever could have acted like such a shitty little snotnose. And I suppose a year from now I’ll be apologizing to myself for being such an immature moron now.)
Of course I loved her, for Pete’s sake. I loved her a lot more than she loved me, if you come right down to it, because I at least knew who she was and all, and what she knew about me was more lies than truth. She fell in love with me, or thought she did, because I taught her what her body was for.
Maybe I loved her for about the same reason. Oh, the hell with it.
But figure this out. The day she told me she loved me, I sent a postcard to Hallie in Wisconsin.
NINE
SHERIFF TYLES SAID, “WELL, I HEAR TELL you got a salary increase, boy. I hear you’re coming up in the world.”
“Oh, I’m getting rich.”
“Reckon Geraldine thinks a lot of you.”
“It was because I finally won a game of chess,” I said. “So she decided I ought to have an extra five dollars a week.”
“You wouldn’t be getting it if she didn’t like the way you were doing the job.”
“There’s not much job to do. Playing chess with her is about three-quarters of the job.” I took a sip of Coke. “Anyway, I don’t guess it’s enough to retire on.”
He clucked. “Well, it’s all in how you look at it, isn’t it? An extra five dollars a week, look at it that way and I’ll admit that it ain’t so much. But since you were only getting five dollars to start with, what you got amounts to a hundred percent increase, and I never heard of anybody kicking at a one hundred percent increase that they didn’t even have to go and ask for. Even a goddamn nigger labor union ought to be happy about a hundred percent increase.”
“I never thought of it that way.”
He winked. “You keep doubling up that way, you’ll be rich in no time.”
“Guess you’re right.”
“On the subject,” he said, “how you making out as far as money is concerned? You able to get by all right?”
“Oh, sure,” I said. I had been buying clothes from time to time, and other things, and I was only making twenty a week from the two jobs—well, twenty-five now—but there was really nothing to spend money on. I even got my books free from the local public library, not because I was too cheap to buy a paperback but because the only ones in town were at the Atlantic station, and all they had were four shelves of swinging swapper garbage and one rack of Brian Garfield westerns. Every once in a while I would go back to see if they got something new, but they never did. I guess they were waiting until they sold the ones they had.
The library had a lot of good books. The only trouble was that they had all come out before the Second World War. This was okay as far as the fiction was concerned, I could get into old stuff well enough, but when I wanted to figure out how to fix the Lathrop television set I ran into a stone wall. There was nothing in the card catalog under Television.
“I’ve even been putting some money aside,” I told him.
“Thought you might be. Probably got more than enough for the fare to Miami, I’d say.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, probably.”
“Be summer in a few months,” he went on. “Florida weather’s no attraction that time of year. Not that it’s a bargain here. Myself, I don’t mind the heat one way or the other. I’ll sweat on a hot day, but I never minded sweating. Must do a man good. Otherwise you wouldn’t do it, the way I see it.”
I said something bright, like “Uh-huh.”
“Heat bother you much?”
“Not usually.”
“Didn’t think so. A Yankee, your typical Yankee, the heat’ll get him and he won’t mind the cold. With folks down here it’s the other way around. The way some of us were complaining about the first week in February, and it wasn’t all that cold. Of course our heat isn’t the kind you’ll get in a big city, where the buildings hold it in. Makes somewhat of a difference.”
I nodded.
“Minnie was saying you really made a good impression on the Reverend. She’ll see him Sundays after the service and as like as not he’ll have a good word for you.”
“I hardly ever talk to him.”
“Well, I wouldn’t let on in front of Minnie, but I wouldn’t be all that su
rprised if that’s what the drunken old sonofabitch likes about you. Last thing he wanted was for those old hens to saddle him with a nursemaid. Imagine the kind of person they’d be apt to pick. Some Salvation Army jackass with a ramrod up his ass who’d either be watering the old sonofabitch’s whiskey or praying all over the place. Just for the sake of somebody leaving him alone, I don’t suppose the Reverend would even mind if you was screwing his daughter six times a week and twice on Sundays.”
I came within inches of cardiac arrest. But the Sheriff went sailing right on, and I’m sure to this day he just tried to pick the least likely example he could possibly think of. He gave me a bad moment, though.
“And Geraldine’s happy with you, too. Happier than she lets on. She don’t let on much, that one, but I got to know her pretty good over the years. Had a place here for the longest time. Set it up herself. There was this woman she was working for who was doing wrong by everyone—girls, customers, law enforcement people. Geraldine, she opened up on her own and got the right backing and the right girls working for her and sent the other old bitch clear out of the state. She knows what she’s doing, that one.”
“I can believe it.”
“In her day, wasn’t a better-looking woman in the county. You can believe that one, too.”
“I do.”
“Wasn’t that bad myself, in those days. Before Minnie’s cooking.” And he patted his paunch and let his eyes drift off to examine old memories. Before Minnie, too, I thought, and wondered if Geraldine and the Sheriff still got it together once in a while for Auld Lang Syne. On holidays and birthdays, say. I sort of hoped they did.
“She thinks a lot of you,” he was saying. “She thinks you’re a good man to have around the place. Me, I think you make a damn fine Deputy Sheriff.” He clucked again. “Well, I’m running off at the mouth again, and you better get on back if you want your supper. Just thought I’d give you a few things to think about.”
A couple of days later Geraldine said, “Mate in four, starting with Knight to King Five. See it?”
I studied it for a long time, then nodded and started picking up the pieces.
“Interesting thing happened in the next county over,” she said. “Used to be two regular gambling places there. About a year ago Ewell Rodgers had a second coronary, and you generally only get three of them, and he closed up and went and sat on his rocking chair. The other place was run by a man named Morgan from East Tennessee. He was getting all of Ewell’s crowd, and success must have gone to his head. He rubbed some people the wrong way that he shouldn’t have. He got raided and arrested, and while he was sitting in jail waiting for someone to put up bail money, his place somehow or other caught on fire, and the fire department just happened to take a wrong turn getting there. Not a stick left. Morgan took the insurance money and bought the fastest car he could find and drove all the way back to East Tennessee with the gas pedal on the floor.”