I knocked mine back in the same manner and got straight to business. She now looked like she was a drink or two away from being no fun at all. “How’d you like to join me for a double feature at the Miller?”
She put the tips of the fingers of her left hand on my right knee, and for the first time I noticed her wedding band. “That’s real sweet, Wayne, honey,” she said, and I steeled myself for rejection on the basis of my being half her age. Instead she confirmed my long-held suspicion that sexual transactions between adults were far less complicated than those between people my age: “I got a better idea, though.” She lowered her voice to a hoarse stage whisper. “Why don’t we go back to my house and you can manhandle me some.”
I picked up my change, leaving a healthy tip for Gleason, and helped her off her stool. As we walked toward the door he nodded to me approvingly, with a slightly wistful air.
~ * ~
We jaywalked, or ran, to the other side of the street, and she laughed when she got a good look at my 1916 Hudson Super Six Phaeton.
“Shall we take yours, then?” I asked, careful to hide my irritation. The car had cost me a month’s commissions the year before, and I’d spent hundreds of hours since improving it mechanically and cosmetically, but to some people a twenty-year-old car was junk, no matter its condition.
“I came in a taxicab,” she said. “So unless you want to spring for another one, this’ll do fine. I live in Riverside, on Woodrow, down by the park.”
It was even muggier than when I’d arrived at the Royal Crown, and despite that shower my fresh shirt was already sticking to my back. I noted with pleasure that the same thing was happening to her, the cotton dress clinging to her in dark, wet ovals just above and below the back of her brassiere. She brightened visibly when I lowered the top, and when I pulled out onto Douglas she closed her eyes and sighed at the air flowing over her, drying the sweat on her brow before we’d crossed the drainage canal. An airplane droned overhead, descending, and I looked up out of habit to identify it.
“That’s a brand-new Collins Airmaster, headed for Collins airfield,” I said reflexively.
She opened her eyes and looked sideways at me. “Goody gum-drops,” she said, “a brand-new Airmaster.”
I didn’t let my face give anything away, though what I wanted was to backhand that supercilious smirk right off her mouth. We didn’t say anything else until we got to Woodrow and she pointed out her house.
~ * ~
2. What You Got for a Gin Gimlet in Those Days
It was a big red brick two-story, just around the corner from my girl’s parents on Porter. I wondered if she knew them, and then I got worried about someone who knew me seeing me go into her house at five in the afternoon. It couldn’t be helped, though. I opened her garage door and put the readily identifiable Super Six inside. As I helped her out and pulled the garage door down it occurred to me that someone might show up expecting to find the space empty. “You don’t have a husband coming home, do you?”
“Hell, no,” she said. “I’m not that drunk. Floyd and the kids took off on a camping trip at five this morning. You ever hear of a place called the Garden of the Gods? It’s in Colorado.” She went around front, despite my craven suggestion that we go in the back door. She had trouble finding the key, and when she did she couldn’t quite slip it into the lock at the right angle.
“I’ve heard of it,” I said. “How come you didn’t go?”
She laughed that pretty laugh again, only this time it was a little out of control. “I’m supposed to be helping with the goddamned back-to-school church fair. I’m on . . . on . . . the organizing committee.” She was nearly hysterical now, bracing herself on the doorframe as the door opened. She practically collapsed entering the front room, and I followed quickly, slamming the door behind me. She fell onto the couch, and I lit a lamp. Spying a radio in the corner, I moved to turn it on for some music.
“Whattaya doing?” she asked, winded, from the couch.
“Thought it might be nice to have some music,” I said.
“What the hell for? I have no intention of dancing with you. S’not Christian.” She broke up again, doubled over, and I sat on the couch next to her. “Organizing committee. Oh, boy. What I stayed home for was to get drunk and screw for a couple weeks.” She finally stopped laughing. “So why don’t you get busy and fuck me, Wayne?”
~ * ~
The first time was on the couch, and it was a quick one, with my pants around my ankles and her dress up to her waist. Afterward she led me upstairs, and despite the fact that less than two minutes earlier I had been inside her, I stared at her ass as longingly as old Gleason had as she mounted the steps ahead of me. One of her stockings had rolled down past her knee, and the sight of the backs of her long legs as they climbed, their muscles relaxing and contracting with each step beneath a healthy layer of fat, was enough to get me ready for another roll in the hay without a breather.
The room was pretty bright and not stiflingly hot, since two windows were open and a pretty good cross draft blew through it. The wallpaper was dark green, and there were fresh flowers in a cheap mail-order vase on the dresser.
“You might go a little slower this time,” she said as she fell back onto the bedspread. “I’ll get a lot more out of it.” I didn’t take it as an insult. It had been extremely quick, though she had certainly made enough noise to give the impression — probably to the whole neighborhood — that she was having a good time.
I undressed her slowly, exposing what hadn’t already been exposed, and in the golden light slanting through the Venetian blinds I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen naked. I shocked her by putting my mouth onto her private parts, but she’d done the same to me downstairs when we were getting started, and pretty soon I had her going so fast and hot she didn’t care if it was against the laws of nature or not. After I was pretty sure she’d had her share of the fun I got inside again and rode her slowly but surely to the point where we were both yelling and moaning. Right before I shot my second and more satisfying load she squealed, “Rudy... take me, Rudy, take me ... that’s it, Rudy,” and then her cries became incomprehensible and animalistic before tapering off as I disengaged and rolled onto the sheets.
I lay there next to her for a little bit, feeling the breeze cool my sweaty torso, and when it seemed like it was time to talk I asked her who Rudy was.
She pointed at the dresser, atop which sat among many framed family pictures a signed portrait of Rudolph Valentino. “I always thought it was a damned shame he died before I got the chance to give myself to him. I coulda made him happy in a way that Russian bitch never could.” Her eyes were wet with tears now, though she didn’t sound as drunk as she had in the car.
I’d always heard Rudy was queer, but it wouldn’t do to say it to her. He was ten years dead anyway. She was swimming in melancholy, luxuriating in it, and I swung my feet off the bed so I could wash up and get away.
“Where the hell are you going?” she asked.
“Thought I’d go and let you have a little peace and quiet.”
“The hell with peace and quiet. You and me got more screwing to do.”
I must have had a funny look on my face, because she laughed.
“What the hell’s the point of picking up a real young sport if you’re not going to take full advantage of all that extra horsepower?”
What the hell, I was having a good time. “Okay.”
“Anyway, there’s plenty of things we haven’t done yet. I sure did like that mouth-on-the-pussy business of yours. It’s a safe bet Floyd’s never gonna put his mouth anywhere near the goddamn thing.” She got up on her knees and leaned forward. “Have you ever had sex with a lady’s rectum, Wayne?”
I nodded. A very religious girlfriend in my sophomore year was eager for it that way, since she believed that vaginal intercourse was for marriage only, and even then only for the purpose of conceiving future soldiers of the Cross. It had been a year and
a half since I’d messed around that way, though, and I missed it.
“Well, we can do some of that if you want, I don’t mind. Believe me, there’s all kinds of ways to do it we haven’t thought of yet.” She moved to the edge of the bed and dangled her legs off it, and with a thoughtful look cupped a hand under each breast as though trying to guess their weight. “Last time Floyd took the kids on a camping trip was more than a year ago, and I am just about as goddamn horny as it’s possible to be without taking to the streets.”
“Floyd doesn’t ever give you any?”
“What Floyd gives me happens once a week and takes about ninety seconds, and I could get more satisfaction from a sanded-down dowel rod. I often do, as a matter of fact.”
I looked back up at the dresser and saw what I assumed to be a picture of Floyd, a beefy-looking kind of guy with a gap in his front teeth and a receding hairline. Next to that was a picture of him with Mildred, and three little kids. Judging by her apparent age in the picture, and her bobbed hair and flapper dress, it was a few years old. “How old are your kids?”
She thought for a second. “Sylvester’s seventeen. Myrtle’s fifteen, gonna be sixteen in October, and Herbert’s ten. He was a surprise, if you catch my meaning.”
Fuck a duck, I thought, and my hands began to tingle as though I’d been hit in the funny bone; I had just put the meat to Sylvester Halliburton’s mother. I’d stolen my girl Sally from Sylvester the year before, and he still hated my guts for it. I wondered what he’d do if he found out I’d fucked his dear old mother, and the thought got a laugh out of me.
“What’s funny?” she asked, and I said it was nothing. Rather than pursue it, she wondered if I knew where to get a bottle, since neither of us had thought to get one to go at the Royal Crown. “Floyd won’t allow me to keep any in the house. It’s against the law,” she said, mimicking an idiotic hillbilly’s voice. I knew a source just a few blocks away, and I decided to walk rather than take the car. “Make it rum,” she shouted after me.
~ * ~
3. Rum, Sodomy, and the False Eyelash
The evening was cooling off when I crossed the 11th Street Bridge, and I started thinking maybe I could make this a habit with Mildred. She certainly seemed to be enjoying herself, and I could easily afford the price of a motor court cabin a couple of times a week. I’d be doing her a favor as much as myself, if you thought about it, giving her on a year-round basis the hooch and screwing Floyd was failing to provide.
I was en route to a blind pig on 12th and Bitting, on the upper floor of an old carriage house, across the street from a steep slope leading down to the riverbank. This time of year the bars didn’t fill up until the cool of the evening, and the proprietor of the blind pig was so lonely he insisted on giving me a drink on the house before he’d sell me the bottle, just to have someone to talk to. I didn’t mind sticking around, and I figured Mildred’s reaction on my returning later than expected would give me an indication of what to expect if I pursued her any further.
“Guess school must be about to start. You done yet?”
“One more year and I’m free, Norman.”
“What you planning to do after that?”
“I’m going to college. No choice in the matter, my old man’s been socking it away since I was born.”
“Uh-huh. That’s good, Wayne.” He emptied his drink. “You getting any lately?” he asked.
“I’m a door-to-door salesman, Norman,” I said as if that meant something.
He nodded and poured himself another bourbon. “Married women. Got to watch it, there. Good way to get into trouble.”
I agreed with him and asked him the same question.
He held up his right hand and wiggled his fingers. “Since Lisette ran off it’s mostly been Madame Palm and her five daughters.”
“Lisette?”
“My wife. She took off for warmer climes a couple, three years ago. Before you started coming in.”
I wondered what sort of woman she had been. Norman was fifty or so, with hair that always needed cutting. His face seemed perfectly round, an impression accentuated by a pair of round spectacles through which his wide-set eyes gazed sadly at his circumscribed world. In the two years I’d been coming to the blind pig I had never rung the bell without Norman being there to answer, and I knew this was his home as well as his business. If he went anywhere at all, even to get groceries or stamps, I wasn’t aware of it.
I got the bottle, and though he wanted me to stay for a second drink I left. It was starting to get dark, and I was ready to go back and give it to Mildred some more. Hell, I thought, maybe I’ll give Sylvester another brother, even more surprising than the last one.
The sun was all the way down before I got back, and I went in through the front door into the dark living room like the deed had my name on it and not Floyd Halliburton’s. “Darling, I’m home,” I bellowed, and I bounded up the steps three at a time and found her sitting up in bed, naked and crying. The tears had made an awful mess of her eye makeup; one fake lash dangled limp from the corner of her left eye and streaks of black ran right down to her tits, with one rivulet describing the border of her right aureola. The enticingly mature woman I had met at the Royal Crown had transformed somehow into a gorgon, and I wondered about making an excuse and leaving her to her boozing.
“What are you crying for?”
“What the hell you think? Give me that goddamn bottle,” she said, and I handed it to her. She cracked it and took a long, hard swallow, then clumsily tried to place the bottle on the nightstand. It fell over, and a good portion of it spilled out before I could right it. I didn’t want any more myself, but I’d paid for it and her carelessness rankled.
She seemed to feel a little better, and without wiping her face she smiled wickedly at me. “Thanks for getting the booze, sweetheart. You’re a real doll. Now, did you see what I got for you?”
I didn’t and told her so in a curt manner that didn’t seem to put her off at all.
“Went down to the kitchen and got you some of this,” she said, and notwithstanding her grotesque appearance I felt my dick begin to harden again at the sight of the cardboard can of vegetable shortening. She stuck her hand into the thick white mess, and then I saw her red-nailed middle finger disappear briefly into the puckered asterisk of her anus, damned near up to the third knuckle. Extracting it, she gave me a look of such depraved cunning that I had an impulse to bolt for the street, but I managed to ignore it as I vaulted onto the bed, wrestling with my trousers.
My third orgasm of the evening took a while in coming, and halfway through it she reached over clumsily for the bottle, nearly knocking it over again, and I pulled out for a minute to allow her to knock back a decent slug of it. Then I replaced it on the nightstand and started back up. Afterward I washed my dick in the bathtub, despite her whining and pleading that I stay in bed with her. She was afraid I was going to leave, and she was right; in any case, the combined smell of fecal matter, vegetable shortening, and rum needed to be dealt with immediately or I was going to get sick. When I returned she had the bottle in hand again, and rum dribbled from her lips to her chin. For the first time I considered that getting hooked up with an alcoholic woman might be less amusing than I’d always imagined; the girls I knew at school got silly and playful with a little booze in them, but in her cups Mildred put me in mind of an embittered, middle-aged male wino, full of vitriol and self-pity.
She held out the bottle for me and I waved it away. I had my trousers back on again, and she frowned without looking too broken up about it. “Whyncha come back tomorra,” she said. “We can think of some more things to do, I bet.”
“I’ll do that, Mildred,” I said over my shoulder as I skipped down the stairs. “I’ll bring a bottle.”
That brought forth a ghastly cackle, and the question of whether I’d be back or not was very much undecided as I picked Mildred’s discarded unmentionables up off her couch and jammed them into my pants pocket for a souvenir. I
stepped out the front door and crossed the yard and driveway to the garage, where I stashed the silk shorts in the glove box of the Super Six. Pulling out onto Woodrow, I thought about stopping over at my girl’s house, but I imagined I could still smell Mildred’s shit on my dick despite my earlier, vigorous ministration of soap and water. Anyway, and this was the curious part, I felt sated for once. A fourth orgasm would have been superfluous, and I realized that if that weren’t so I would have stayed with Mildred, who seemed set to go all night long.
~ * ~
I was headed east on Douglas with no particular destination in mind, and as I neared Hillside, I thought I’d stop at the Royal Crown and let old Gleason know how it had gone. I parked at the curb a few doors down and stepped inside to find seven or eight drinkers at the bar and a dozen or more scattered around the tables, mostly men with a few girlfriends or wives thrown in. I greeted Gleason, who nodded and said, “How’d it go, champ?”
“Aces,” I said. “Six ways from Sunday.”