"Theodore Breedlow," said the short boy, returning the gesture. He indicated the tallest boy: "Cole Magnus, and," turning to the third young man, "George Young. They call me Teddy Bear." He smiled sheepishly at his own soph.o.m.orism.
They threw his st.u.r.dyboard case into the trunk of the big black Lincoln, and hollowed out a place for Robert among the clothes and packages tossed helter-skelter across the back seat.
And then they were off down the road.
They were from an entirely different social stratum than Robert had known. While he had come from genteel and mildly Puritanical Middlewestern conformity, the three young men in the front seat had been sp.a.w.ned by the harsh, black-and-white hustling of Detroit. Where he chose his words for maximum effect and clarity, they b.u.mbled and shotgunned through the language with rimfire "ain"ts" and copper-jacketed "G.o.ddams" and frequent double-barreled scattergunned "muthuh-f.u.c.kers." It was not entirely new to Robert, but in such close quarters, and for such a protracted length of time down the road, it became almost a heady experience. They were refugees from an a.s.sembly line in Dearborn, ferrying the big black Lincoln to a buyer in San Francisco, and they were GoToh.e.l.ls this week and next. Then, pilot another car hack to Detroit, and the lathes and conveyor belts of their waking hours. But this week and next!
"Man, I pushed more"a them G.o.ddam Fords down"a line than I got hairs on my head. Sheet, man, it"s good to be outta that racket and in the fresh air." And Teddy Bear turned up the air-conditioning in the hermetically sealed Lincoln another notch.
"If my parents could see me now!" George Young chirruped. "They"d c.r.a.p!" He bounced in his seat. His laughter began slowly, like a dynamo winding up, and in a moment had become so much a part of the charged air, that all four of them were laughing together. "Th-they ... they ... think l"m, they think I"m ... buh ... back in Dearborn sweating on that f.u.c.kin" line an" an" an" here I am out in the m-muh-muh-iddle of Nevaaaaduh ... !" and he rocked back and forth like an old Yiddish man dovening over his Talmud, the tears streaming down his freckled face. Cole Magnus was forced to pull over on the shoulder, as they all capered tightly in the Lincoln. It was a madhouse for a moment.
When they were going again, Cole said suddenly, "Hey, you remember what Roger Sims told us ... ?"
Teddy Bear and George Young looked at him questioningly. "You remember: about Winnemucca, Nevada!"
The lights shone out abruptly from their eyes, and Teddy Bear went, "Whoo-eeeee, sheeeet, man! Yeahhh! Now I remember, yeah! Winnemucca, Nevada!"
And George Young clapped his hands together like a delighted child. "Hoo hoo hoo, boy, I"m gonna get me a piece"a"tail ... hoo hoo hoo!"
Cole, without turning around from the wheel, pulled his right shoulder forward allowing his head to move sidewise, as he spoke to Robert. "We got this buddy back in Detroit"--he p.r.o.nounced it Dee-troyt--"and he"s almost as big a swordsman as George-O over there, and he took this trip out to Frisco--"
"The natives hate the name Frisco, I understand," Robert stuck in without meaning to be rude. "They prefer it to be called San Francisco ..."
"Yeah, well," Cole went on without hearing him, "Roger came back and said he stopped off in some little burg called Winnemucca, Nevada, just this side of Reno, and he says they got the next best thing to legalized prost.i.tution there." He p.r.o.nounced it proz-ti-toosh-un. "Wanna stop off there for a little diddly-doo?"
"Aw, that was probably one of Roger"s G.o.ddam wet dreams," Teddy Bear denigrated the idea. "You know he lies, man. If he says he got laid the night before, it prob"ly means he said h.e.l.lo to some chick on the street and followed her till she called the laws."
"Yeah, well ..."
George Young stuck in, "No, I think he was shooting straight. He had a ball, I could tell from the way he was talking. h.e.l.l, it can"t hurt, can it? Just to stop and see. It"s on the way, ain"t it?"
They pulled out the map and ran fingers down US #1 till they located it. "Right on the way," Teddy Bear said cheerfully. "I guess it can"t hurt to try. It"ll probably be one of them wet dreams, but what the h.e.l.l ..."
"What about you?" Cole asked Robert.
Robert had never been with a wh.o.r.e. In fact, at the age of twenty--perhaps two years older than these three wandering minstrels--he had had only one girl. Sally Gleeson, who had been as virgin as himself, until they had discovered each other the year before. Now Sally had gone off to Radcliffe and was making time with Robert"s ex-friend Dave, who had met Sally on a visit to Robert"s home, from New Jersey where the family had moved. He was not at all sure he wasn"t terrified by the idea. But he could not expose the twitching raw end of that fiber of fear without denying everything he had decided was true of himself: Robert Hirschhorn came from a small town outside a larger town in central Ohio. He hated the town. Hated it because it did not know what to do with him. He was the one who read Proust and Edward Gorey and MIDDLEMARCH and Ronald Searle and Hobbes and Ian Fleming, and who ignored Morris West and Leon Uris and Daphne Du Maurier and Harry Golden and Irving Wallace and Time magazine. He was something other than what everyone else was in town; he knew it, and they knew it, and there was something more for him than the softly moldering inside of the coc.o.o.n called Starkey, Ohio.
He had decided he wanted to be a writer. It came to him not entirely unbidden, for he had contributed a seven-part serial to a kiddies" column in the now-defunct Cleveland News when he was still in grade school. He had won a National Scholastic writing award for a short story about a robot that had taken over the world (which he had cribbed in concept from Capek"s famous R.U.R.). And he had decided that college would be of no use to him if what he needed to know was the world. So Robert Hirschhorn, at the age of twenty, had taken to the road with his black st.u.r.dyboard suitcase, and a determination to taste of life in all its sherbet flavors. Which offered, this week, the tantalizing, fraudulent favorite, Cheap Wh.o.r.e. It was a combination of peach, rocky road and lemon. And to turn it away, back to the cooler chest, in return for a triple-dip of the pallidly familiar vanilla on which he had been subsisting for so long, would be to deny all that he had decided about himself.
"I"m game if you are." He grinned widely. Perhaps a trifle too widely.
"h.e.l.l, how should I know?" said Teddy Bear. "I suppose you ask a cabbie. Ain"t that the way they do it?"
George shook his head. "Listen, stupid, you got to be more uh more undercover, more--"
"Surrept.i.tious?" offered Robert.
"--whatever." George refused to accept the word. "But you can"t just go around town asking any dumb hick where the hoo-er-houses are. That"s stupid."
"Oh, h.e.l.l, this isn"t Detroit," Cole said. He suddenly braked to a stop by a general store, and leaned out to an old man sitting in a straight-back chair propped against the wall. "Hey, Mister!" The old man looked up disinterestedly. He closed one eye to focus better with the other. "Where"s the wh.o.r.ehouses, huh?" Cole asked blatantly.
"Straight down this street till you come to Main, take a left and keep going till you see the veteran"s trailer camp. There"s a big wood fence behind it. Th"other side is Littletown. That"s it, can"t miss it." He went back to picking his nose.
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 cl.u.s.ter of silver trailers, all hunkered together like poor animals in a warren. It was a scene of somehow surpa.s.sing squalor, though everything seemed neat and clean. Perhaps it was the lack of gra.s.s--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.
"h.e.l.luva place to live, right next"a the cat houses," Teddy Bear remarked. Robert stared out the window as they pa.s.sed. Yes, it seemed a h.e.l.luva 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 prost.i.tution, having left college, b.u.mming 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 took him 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 gla.s.ses 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, c.o.c.ky, 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 b.u.mper 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 wh.o.r.ehouses. 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 over the sills, so their b.r.e.a.s.t.s rested on the sills, and they wore ballerina outfits of silk and bright colors, and their meaty arms were resting on the sills, also.
"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 fur 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, miG.o.d am I ugly, thought Robert. I used to have braces, and I still need my gla.s.ses for seeing things far away. Oh G.o.d! 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 ma.s.s 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 ap.r.o.n, 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d," 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 b.u.t.tocks joined to the legs of a woman. It was sensually thrilling to him, 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 in the light she had always been re-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 seash.o.r.e, 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s, 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 skirt. 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 what he had done 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.