HCC 115 - Borderline

  So what if she was smart, if she was beautiful, if she spoke her mind and knew what she wanted and went out and got it and was good in bed? Great in bed. So what?

  He stood up. His legs were in slightly better shape this time and his stomach was settling down. He opened the door of the stall shower and let the water run. When it was the right temperature he stood under it. For a moment be thought that the spray would knock him over, but it did not, and he let the water wash away some of the grime. He lathered his hard body with bar soap and rinsed more dirt away. He soaped himself a few more times, rinsed a few more times, turned off the shower and dried himself with a towel. He felt cleaner now, but some of the griminess seemed to have lodged itself beneath his skin. As though the filth were a part of him, he thought. As though he’d absorbed it and it was a permanent acquisition.

  His mouth had a vile taste to it. He brushed his teeth half a dozen times until the flavor of the toothpaste had driven away some of the unpleasantness. He left the bathroom and put on fresh clean clothes. Meg was still sleeping. He went to her side, gripped her shoulder and shook her roughly. For several seconds she made no response whatsoever. Then she opened her eyes, blinked, closed them. He shook her again, harder. This time her eyes stayed open.

  “I’m going away,” he told her. “When I leave, get up. You can take a shower if you want. Then get some clothes on and get out of here. Don’t come back.”

  She did not understand.

  “It’s over,” he said. “I don’t know just what it was in the first place but it’s over. You’ve still got your twelve hundred, or most of it. Take it and go. I don’t want to see you again.”

  “Why not?”

  “I live my own life,” he said. “You’re not part of it. I live alone and I like it. I want to keep it that way.”

  She said, “You said you loved me.”

  “I said that?”

  “Last night.”

  He decided he must have been awfully drunk. “I was wrong,” he said. “I don’t love anybody. I’m leaving now. Be gone when I get back, Meg. Go to the airport and catch a plane to Chicago.”

  “I don’t want to go to Chicago.”

  “Somewhere else, then. New York, Los Angeles, Cleveland. I don’t care where, but go.”

  “Can’t I even stay in your town?”

  Her eyes were bitter. “You shouldn’t,” he told her. “Paso brings out the worst in you; stay here and you’ll fall apart.”

  “I was all right before I met you.”

  “That’s the point. Get away from me and you’ll be all right again. Get away from me and from El Paso.”

  “You’re mad about last night?”

  “I’m just sick of it.”

  “You showed me around,” she said. “You took me every place. I don’t see why you’re angry at me.”

  “I’m not angry,” he said. “I just want to get you out of my sight.”

  “Damn it—”

  “So long,” he said. “I’ll be gone for three or four hours. You’d better not be here when I come back or I’ll throw you out on your butt. You can call a cab and take it to the airport.”

  “My bags are at the Warwick.”

  “Then stop at the Warwick and pick them up. So long, Meg.”

  She didn’t answer, which was just as well. He got his wallet, stuffed it into his hip pocket, and left the house. The Olds was in the garage and the key was still in the ignition. Sloppy, he thought. Somebody could have stolen the car. He got behind the wheel, started the car, backed out of the driveway.

  He drove to the diner where he’d eaten—when? Yesterday? It seemed more like a month ago. He parked at the curb and went inside. The whole idea of food sent his stomach flipping again, but he knew that passing up a meal would only make everything that much worse. Alcohol knocked you for a loop. It drained your system of vitamins, set you back a few pegs. You had to stuff yourself full of food to get on an even footing again.

  He ordered a large glass of tomato juice with a double dash of Worcestershire Sauce. It was supposed to be a hangover recipe. He drank it down, coughed, and ordered eggs sunny side with fried potatoes and toast and coffee. He didn’t have ham with his eggs. Meat, just then, would have been too hard to keep down.

  After five cups of black coffee, enough to give him a very minor case of caffeine nerves, he got back in the car and drove to the cigar store. There were no customers on the scene when he got there. He asked the clerk if anything was new.

  “Your daily double bet ran out,” the man said.

  He’d completely forgotten making the bet. He handed the man a five dollar bill and told him to play three and five again.

  “What else?”

  “The feller from Miami Beach,” the man said. “He was around again, still looking for someone to give him a game.”

  “The gin rummy man?”

  “The same. Says he’s leaving town tomorrow morning, him and his fishtail Cadillac. Wants to find some action before it’s time to go.”

  “He got business in Paso?”

  “I’d suppose so. Why else would he be here?”

  Marty nodded. “Where’s he staying?”

  “The Warwick. Only the best, I suspect.”

  Meg’s hotel. “He had some horse bets,” Marty said. “How’d he do on those?”

  “Poorly. One winner, the rest run out of the money. He lost most of what he bet.”

  Marty lit a cigarette. He had smoked three of them at the diner. This was the day’s fourth, and the first that almost tasted the way it was supposed to. He drew on it, inhaled, let the smoke trickle out slowly.

  “You got his name?”

  “Name’s Simon. Don’t know his first name, though.”

  Marty nodded again. He went to the phone booth, dropped a dime and dialed the Warwick. He asked the desk for Mr. Simon, from Florida. After a few seconds a throaty voice asked him who he was and what he wanted.

  “My name is Marty Granger,” he said. “A cigar store Indian says you play gin.”

  “Whattaya know,” Simon said. “You play.”

  “I play.”

  “He tell you the stakes?”

  “He told me and they’re fine.”

  Simon paused. “No insult,” he said finally. “If you’re a sharp, I’m not interested. I’m from Miami Beach, we play a lotta gin out there, we get a lot of card mechanics. If you’re one of them, let’s forget it. Because I’ll know if you try anything.”

  “I play straight.”

  “You better.”

  “That works both ways.”

  Simon said, “You don’t have to worry. Me, I’m too smart to drink and too old to chase whores. That leaves gambling, and gin’s the only game I know. I don’t have to cheat. I just want a game.”

  “Your room?”

  “Fine.”

  “Tonight, after dinner?”

  “Fine again.”

  Marty hung up. The cigar clerk said, “You playing the feller?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought you didn’t like the game.”

  “I don’t,” Marty said. “Listen, I’m going to sit in a Turkish bath for the afternoon, I want to sit and sweat for a while. He’s going to drop in here, lay ten or twenty bucks on you for setting things up, then pump you for what you know about me.”

  “What do I say?”

  “The truth. I’m a gambler and my game’s poker. I don’t play much gin but I figure this is an easy way to make a fast killing. I’m honest. I just think he’s a lousy gin player and I can beat him with my eyes closed.”

  “Is that last part the truth?”

  Marty thought about it. “No,” he said. “He’s probably good enough. But let him think I’m cocky about it. It never hurts.”

  * * *

  Lily was drinking a Cuba Libre, sipping it slowly, She was in the bar where she had met Cassie and the others the first time around. Benno was off somewhere. The rest of them were at the table with Lily, drinking rum Cok
es of their own.

  “How’d it go last night, baby?”

  She looked at Paul. He sat with one arm around Didi while his other hand gripped his rum Coke. “It moved,” she said. “It was all right.”

  “You dig the stage bit?”

  “I made it.”

  She looked at Cassie. The girl with red hair had a strange expression in her eyes. She’s in love with me, Lily thought. The stupid dyke is in love with me. If I say I just managed the bit on stage her feelings get hurt. I got to be nice to her.

  So she said, “It was kind of a gas. But I didn’t exactly dig having the whole world tuned in, you know? I didn’t know balling was a spectator sport, like.”

  Cassie beamed. Actually, Lily thought, the reverse was a little closer to the truth. It was better on stage than it was alone with Cassie. When they were on the black-sheeted bed it was just part of an elaborate con, just a balling act to break up the customers and put them on in spades. But when they were alone in the hotel room it was just her and Cassie. It wasn’t an act then and she wasn’t a performer. She was a dyke’s sweetheart, a butch’s femme. She couldn’t write it off as part of the job. Cassie was gay, and Lily was gay when she slept with Cassie. And, like, who needed it? Not her, not Lily Daniels. Not at all.

  “And the tricks?”

  “The tricks were a big drag.”

  “No kicks?”

  “No kicks at all,” she said. “Where’s the kick in balling somebody who’s paying for it? No kicks there, man.”

  That, at least, was the truth. She had had thirteen men, one after the other, in the little room where Ringo put her to work. Somehow she had managed to preserve her cool, had managed to isolate her mind and keep it from tuning itself in on what her body was doing. That was the vital part—retaining your cool, holding on to remoteness.

  Twice, the cool had faded. One time she was with a young kid, a boy only a year or two older than herself, a kid without experience or confidence. He had had trouble, had been impotent at first, and she saw his face contort with tears of frustration and embarrassment.

  “Cool it,” she had told him. “Lie down, relax.”

  Then her hands roamed his body and her lips had found him and fondled him. He responded, slowly but surely, and when he took her his passion was real and honest and strong. That time her cool had vanished. That time, somehow, the boy was genuine and important, and her mind synchronized itself with the motions of her loins.

  She actually cried after he left her.

  The other time was the reverse. That time she was reached not by passion but by revulsion, not by empathy but by contempt and disgust. The trick was a drunk with red eyes and a pot belly, a Midwestern banker on a holiday spree. He had her strip, had her parade the room naked, had her come to him on hands and knees. He told her to turn around, then, and he used her as he might have used a young boy, taking her from behind with his soft hands gripping her by the buttocks and his body punishing her, hurting her. She had been used in that manner before, by Frank in San Francisco one night when he wanted her and her period had prevented more relations. It had been unpleasant enough then, and it was worse now.

  So her cool vanished again. And she cried again when he left her, cried bitter tears that stained her cheeks.

  “It wasn’t that bad,” she told Paul now. “All I had to do was hang onto my cool.”

  She lifted her rum Coke and sipped it; the Coke part was flat and the drink sickening sweet. She put her glass down, wishing that somebody would spring for a bottle of tequila. For a moment she considered buying it herself, then decided against it. Damned if she would pay out her own bread for a batch of vultures. To hell with that.

  Because she had to save her money. The more money she earned and the more of it she held onto, the sooner she could get the hell away from Ciudad Juarez. It didn’t take a hell of a lot of thinking to lead her to the conclusion that she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life with Cassie on a stage and putting out for tourists in a back room. It was easy money, but she could live without it.

  Hell, she had the shape and the face. In New York, with the right connections, she could turn one trick a night and make twice the dough. They didn’t have wide-open pervert shows in New York, but they had out-of-town buyers getting the soft-soap routine from New York salesmen, and they paid call girls long bread for being handy in bed. There wouldn’t be any sex-on-the-stage crud, and there wouldn’t be any thirteen cats a night, and, more important, there wouldn’t be any Cassie.

  But she couldn’t make it without dough. She needed plane fare to New York, first of all, and she needed working capital when she hit town. Money for some really decent clothes, and for a good apartment in a good neighborhood. With that kind of a front she wouldn’t have any trouble getting started. A grand would do it neatly.

  How was she going to save up a grand in Juarez?

  At thirty-five or forty bucks a night, it wouldn’t be too easy. It would cost her ten a day to stay alive, so she could save, with luck, around a hundred fifty a week. But there would be extra expenses, and there would be four or five days a month when work was biologically out of the question. It would take ten weeks at a minimum, with twenty more like it. That was a hell of a long time to spend in Juarez.

  Well, she thought, maybe something would turn up. As things stood, she had a gig which wasn’t too horrible. She would save as much bread as she possibly could and wait for her break to come. When it came, she’d grab onto it fast and not let go.

  She hoisted her Cuba Libre and drained it.

  * * *

  Meg sat on her bed in the Hotel Warwick and studied the front page of the El Paso evening paper. SEX FIEND TORTURES, KILLS WOMAN, the headline shrieked. She read through the story and shuddered. A woman had been murdered, her breasts and belly and thighs slashed in a few hundred places, her fingers and toes sliced off, her body covered with burns. The paper was explicit, mentioning the toothmarks on the woman’s breasts and sex organs. It said, in a masterpiece of understatement, that the murder victim had been criminally attacked.

  Now wasn’t that something? A bizarre euphemism, she thought. Burn a girl’s breasts, slash her to ribbons, shear off her fingers and toes, and you have to give her a medical examination to tell that she’s been criminally attacked. Say rape, for Christ’s sake and to hell with euphemisms. The poor girl had been criminally attacked, all right, whether she was raped or not. How criminal could you get?

  She tossed the paper away and lit a cigarette. She felt rotten and the cigarette tasted about as good as she felt. Leave El Paso, Marty had told her. Well, to hell with him. She would stay where she goddamn pleased, and to hell with him.

  The bastard. He had a hangover, he was disgusted with himself, so she got stuck with the blame for it. What in hell had she done? She’d let go, she’d gotten hotter than hell and higher than heaven, and so she’d released all the tension that had been bound up within her. She didn’t blame herself and she didn’t blame Marty. As far as she was concerned, blame never entered the picture.

  She had a hangover herself, of course, but that didn’t mean she felt bad. Alcoholic remorse, or post-alcoholic remorse, struck her as a load of crap. She had made her hangover easier with a double of Beefeater on the rocks instead of sitting around and taking the pledge. And, instead of crying about how whorishly she had acted, she was pretty well pleased with herself. It had been a lot of fun. It was something she would do again, when the mood struck her. The simple fact that she had let herself go sexually was not going to make her run to the nearest doctor for a hysterical hysterectomy. Her mind didn’t work that way.

  Leave El Paso? To hell with you, Marty Granger. To hell with you, and go screw yourself, and so forth. She would leave El Paso when she was goddamn good and ready. If she felt like it, she’d spend the rest of her life in this rotten town.

  Marty Granger. Who was he, anyway? Just a tinhorn gambler, just a punk with a lot of style and not much more. For a while there she h
ad thought maybe she was falling in love with him. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t love. He was a stylish guy and he was good in bed, but you couldn’t take something like that and make a thing called love out of it. And what the hell was love, anyway? A big word that added up to nothing.

  She chucked the cigarette in the toilet and lit a fresh one. Love? You could get in trouble confusing a bad case of hot pants with love. What she’d had for Marty had been hot pants. It was what she had now. She was sure as hell not in love.

  Hot pants? Yeah, that was what she had, all right. But not, thank God, for Marty Granger.

  She stood up and began to pace the room.

  It was unnatural, she thought. But what was natural, anyway? She had hot emotions, and she had them for a honey blonde with big breasts. If someone had suggested two days ago that she might want to make love with a girl, she wouldn’t even have slapped him. She would have laughed aloud, because the idea would have been so ridiculous that she couldn’t so much as take offense.

  But now it seemed far less ridiculous. Last night she had watched a redhead and a blonde make love, and watching the two of them had been the most exciting experience of her life. Before that, a picture of two lesbians going at it was the most arousing picture in a folder of filth. And last night, after the show, she had watched Marty and a Mexican tramp having a go at it, and watching had made her hot. But she hadn’t been hot for Marty. She’d been itching to fill her own hands with the Mex girl’s breasts, had itched to get down on her knees and kiss the little slut.

  That blonde, she thought. That big-boobed blonde. Now wouldn’t that be something? God in heaven!

  What the hell, she thought. She was in El Paso, and a Mexican hot spot was just a few hundred yards away across an artificial border. Get out of El Paso? Not on your life, Marty Granger. She could cross that imaginary border, and she could find out just what it was like to have a lesbian fling. It wasn’t as though it would turn her into a dyke or anything, it would just be an experiment.