CH02 - Chip Harrison Scores Again Read online

  But I wasn’t going to bug her about any of this. I mean, it was pretty obvious this wasn’t the first time she ever got randy on a bus, and it wasn’t the first time she ever decided to do anything about it. This bus fetish was something she had indulged in before. And probably often. Which was why she sat down next to me to begin with. And why she wanted the window seat—partly so that we could bump bottoms while changing places, and partly because she would be better shielded from observation if she sat away from the aisle.

  I didn’t really want to get off the bus and back on again. Walking presented certain logistical problems that would be even more obvious to spectators if I had to leave my jacket on the bus. But I got off and I forced myself to drink a Coke and munch a pack of those peanut butter and cheese things. I waited until she emerged from the ladies’ room and got on board the bus before I followed her. She put her suitcase on the seat beside her so that no one could sit there, and I sprawled over the two opposite seats and looked as unkempt as possible so that no one would want to sit next to me. She waited until the bus was back on the highway before giving me a nod, and I came over and put her suitcase overhead and sat down next to her.

  We huddled together under her coat and kissed briefly. Then I said, “Why the suitcase?”

  “Can’t you guess?”

  The only thing that had occurred to me was that she wanted to put her diaphragm on, but I couldn’t believe that. This was a bus, after all, and it wasn’t particularly comfortable or roomy even if all you wanted to do was sit in it. I know people screw in the most unlikely places, but only midgets and contortionists could possibly do it on a bus.

  I had already decided that the best I could hope for was to shoot in my pants, if you’ll forgive me for being crude about it. (I can’t really think of any other way to say it.) And I wasn’t all that sure I wanted to do that. I don’t suppose I really cared about getting off myself. I just wanted to go on thrilling Willie Em.

  “No,” I said, “I can’t guess.”

  “Did that old suitcase feel heavier this time?”

  “No.”

  “It was, though.”

  “It was?”

  She grinned impishly. “Something in it that wasn’t in it before.”

  What? A roll of toilet paper? A Coke? What?

  “What?”

  “You have to find out for yourself. But I’ll bet you appreciate the change.”

  “I think you lost me.”

  “Why, I surely hope not! Now why don’t you shut your mouth and start loving me up instead of asking all those questions?”

  I had no argument there. I kissed her and put a hand on her breast. It felt softer than ever. I petted it and light dawned.

  “Oh.”

  “Uh-huh. And that’s just the half of it.”

  I could guess the other half, but I sent my hand on an expedition to make sure. I slipped it under her skirt and there were no panties there. The panties, like the bra, were currently in her suitcase.

  I hope she wrung them out first.

  It certainly did make things easier. We snuggled under her coat and unbuttoned her cardigan and pulled her skirt all the way up, and all of sudden there was a lot more to do. She had wonderfully soft skin and nice firm little breasts. The perfume she was wearing mixed nicely with the musk of her.

  I was going to put down a whole description of just what we did over the next couple of hours, but I’ve been thinking about it and I decided the hell with it. Partly because I think that would just be too much sex. And despite what Mr. Fultz said, I think there is such a thing as too much sex.

  Because when all you have is a description of what happened, who did what and where and how and all of that, then all you’ve got is the kind of book Willie Em was reading, The Swinging Swappers or The Swapping Swingers. And that sort of thing may be exciting in small doses, but it’s also pretty disgusting, actually.

  What’s important, really, is what it was like and where everybody’s head was at while it was going on, or otherwise it’s just bodies with no people attached to them. And anyway we kept on like this for a couple of hours, and I couldn’t honestly remember the whole thing piece by piece. It would be easy enough to fake it and get the tone right the same way I fake some of the dialogue because I can’t actually remember every stupid conversation I ever had word for word. Let’s just say that I kept doing things to her and she kept enjoying them and let’s let it go at that. I figure that if all you wanted in the way of a book was something to get off with you would have stopped reading before now and gone on to the swinging switching swapping swill.

  Three times in the course of all this I took her hand and put it on me. Twice she gave a little squeeze and murmured “Later.” The third time she repeated this and added, “When it gets dark, Chip.”

  You know, I wonder how often she did this. I mean, she had the whole thing choreographed, for Pete’s sake. Sometimes when I think about her I picture her spending her entire life riding north and south on Greyhound buses. Maybe her aunt doesn’t even have pleurisy. Maybe she doesn’t even have an aunt. Maybe Greyhound gives her a commuter’s rate. Maybe they let her ride free because it’s such great public relations for them. Maybe—

  When it got dark, I didn’t even have to reach for her hand. It came over of its own accord and quickly found what it was looking for. She gave a few affectionate squeezes, worked a zipper, reached in, and brought her hand quickly back out again.

  She put her lips to my ear and whispered, “Why don’t you go to the lavatory and take off your shorts?”

  I guess I should have done this at the rest stop. God knows it would have been a lot easier. The lavatory wasn’t really spacious enough to change clothes in. It was barely big enough to take a leak in, actually.

  I came back with my shorts in my pocket and got under the coat again. Then she decided we should change places, with me sitting in the window seat and her on the outside, and somehow we managed to do this without getting out from under the coat. Don’t ask me how.

  “Poor old Chip,” she murmured. “Getting me off about a hundred times”—at the very least, I thought—“and you never getting off once your own self. But we’ll fix that.”

  And I sat there with her head in my lap and my hand bunched up in all that yellow hair and she fixed everything in the world. She fixed things that weren’t even broken.

  Wow.

  Afterward, while I waited for the top of my skull to come back down where it belonged, she nestled her sweet and talented little head on my shoulder. After a while she said, “Happy?”

  “Mmmmm.”

  “You like being loved up that way?”

  “Mmmmm.”

  “They tell me girls up North don’t like to do that. Damned if I know why. First time I did that I wasn’t but fourteen years old and at a drive-in movie and too dumb to know about keeping my teeth out of the way, and the good old boy I was with was too dumb to tell me.” She giggled. “You like that kind of loving, you’re gonna enjoy yourself down South. Southern girls are decent, see. And they know the one thing that’s not decent is getting pregnant before you’re married, and another thing they know is no girl ever got a big belly from it.”

  From her tone of voice she could have been talking about crop rotation and soil erosion. It was really weird.

  I said, “The purity of Southern womanhood.”

  “You better believe it. Next Southern girl you meet and get friendly with, you tell her to try it with a mouthful of warm water. Of course you couldn’t do that on a bus.”

  “The Waterloo,” I said.

  “You know about that?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “They know about that up North?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “You ever have it done?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Not exactly’?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Well—?”

  “I read about it.”<
br />
  “In a book?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Like the kind of book I was reading before? One of those randy books?”

  “More or less.”

  “Lordy,” she said. “I’ll usually get a book like that to read if, oh, if I happen to have to take a long trip on a bus.” I could believe it. “I’ve read my share of them, I guess. Never read anything about the Waterloo in any old book.”

  “Maybe it was written by a Southern girl,” I suggested.

  “No maybe about it. It must have been.”

  “Maybe a girl from Tennessee.”

  “Georgia,” she said.

  FOUR

  THE BUS STATION in Bordentown was just an Atlantic gas station that sold bus tickets. They had a Coke machine, but I passed it up. I was down to about two and a half dollars and I didn’t know where I was going to get a room, or how much it would cost. I figured the Y was the best bet, and I asked an old guy at the station how to get to it.

  He scratched his head and said, “Why?”

  “Because I need a place to stay.”

  “But you asked—”

  “The Y,” I said. He was still puzzled. “The YMCA,” I said.

  “Oh, the YMCA. Let me just think. I believe they have one over to Savolia, but I couldn’t say for sure.”

  “How far is that?”

  “Oh, I guess I’d put it at twenty-eight miles. Say thirty at the outside.”

  There was a hotel in Bordentown, he told me. It was called the Bordentown Hotel, which seemed logical enough, and it was on Main Street, which wasn’t all that much of a surprise either. Salesmen would stay there, if they had to be in Bordentown overnight, and if they wanted to save money, because those motels over on the highway all ranged from eight to twelve dollars a room, whereas you could stay at the hotel for five dollars, or seven-fifty with a private bath. And then there were some single people who lived there year-round, widowers for the most part, and they paid by the month, which made it considerably cheaper.

  “Of course you wouldn’t be wanting to spend a month in Bordentown,” he said.

  I had the feeling he might be right. Anyway, I couldn’t afford to pay by the month. I couldn’t even afford to pay by the night. I asked if there were any less expensive places. He said there were some women who took in tourists for two or three dollars a night, but it was too late to go knocking on their doors.

  “How would it be if I slept in the back here?” I suggested. “It would just be for tonight.”

  “Company wouldn’t allow that.”

  I said I wouldn’t tell them if he didn’t, but he didn’t even bother answering that. He didn’t get exactly hostile, just sort of turned away. I had the feeling that he didn’t see much point in wasting any more time on me, and I could understand his point of view.

  I must have spent half an hour walking through the main part of town, and that was enough to cover it pretty thoroughly. There really wasn’t a lot there. It was about then that I started wondering if coming to Bordentown might not have been something of a mistake. Of course, it was the middle of the night. You couldn’t really expect a small town to be lit up like Times Square.

  Until now, though, I had been very much into the idea of going to Bordentown. The weirdness of it, finding the bus ticket and using it, had a special beauty of its own. In the normal course of things I might have spent the last few hours of the bus trip thinking about what I would do after I got off the bus, making plans and working things out in my mind. But you know how I spent the last few hours of the bus trip. I spent the last few hours of the bus trip with Willie Em, and the company of Willie Em tends to make one live very much in the Now.

  As a matter of fact, the memory of Willie Em tends to make one live very much in the Past, and while I walked around downtown Bordentown, such as it was, I found myself thinking as much about her as about my future. I couldn’t really get into anything like long-term planning at all. Just short-term goals, like getting a place to sleep and finding some kind of job, were the only things I could really handle.

  The place to sleep was the hard part. At that hour it seemed impossible. The only place I could go was the hotel, and I couldn’t afford it. If I had only had a suitcase it would have been all right, because I could tell them I was staying for a week, and if things went well I would have enough money at the end of the week to pay what I owed. On the other hand, if things went badly I could leave them the suitcase at the end of the week and go someplace else, and all that would mean was that I could never go back to Bordentown again, which didn’t sound that terrible anyway.

  No suitcase, though. Nothing but the clothes on my back, which had seen cleaner days. So any hotel would be sure to ask for cash in advance. The fact that I was poor but honest wouldn’t help. They’d rather have someone who’s rich but crooked.

  It’s funny how problems solve themselves, though, when you just let things happen. I had more or less resigned myself to finding some diner and sitting up drinking coffee until morning, at which time I could get some old lady to rent me a room that I could afford, when I got a place to sleep that didn’t cost me a dime.

  The Bordentown Jail.

  I was walking along when this car pulled up and a voice said, “Git over here, boy.” And when I got over there I knew who the guy was without him saying another word. I recognized him right away from all those Dodge commercials.

  He never did advise me of my rights, but I don’t guess he had to because he never exactly arrested me, either. He just told me to get in the car with him, and he drove over to a little concrete block building a few blocks from where he picked me up, and he asked me a lot of questions and took my fingerprints and put me in a cell. He took my belt and my shoelaces and my comb. I was getting sick of losing combs, and I hadn’t been eating much lately and my pants, without the belt, tended to fall down a lot. But I didn’t complain.

  I didn’t complain about any of this, actually. I was at a tremendous psychological disadvantage, especially when he made me empty my pockets and I had to take out that pair of undershorts and put them on the desk. Maybe some people can do that without feeling stupid. Not me.

  He said, “No identification, no visible means of support, no clothing. You say you’re from New York, boy? What you think you’re doing here?”

  I don’t remember what I said.

  “You an agitator? Come down to make trouble? Or a runaway? You wanted up North? Get your prints and description to Washington and see if there isn’t somebody looking for you.”

  There was something about the way the cell door closed that left me feeling it would never open again. I walked around the cell, which was a lot like walking around Bordentown except that it didn’t take quite so long. There was a kind of a toilet, which I’m just as glad I didn’t have to use, and a corn husk mattress that was more comfortable than it looked.

  During the summer some of my fellow apple-knockers had told me stories about Southern jails. About getting caught in a speed trap and being fined the amount they had on them, and then winding up on the chain gang on a vagrancy charge because they didn’t have any money. About trying to hitchhike through Georgia and getting sentenced to three months of chopping weeds with a road crew.

  I remembered all this now, and I really didn’t think I was going to get much sleep. But I must have been more exhausted than I realized.

  I woke up when the sun came through the bars. I just lay there for about an hour before the Sheriff turned up, trying to put together pieces of a story that would keep me off the chain gang.

  At first I decided to tell him the truth. I must have read a hundred murder stories where some poor idiot is suspected of a crime, and if he had just played things absolutely straight from the beginning it would have worked out with no trouble, but instead he tells one little lie or holds something back and gets in deeper trouble, until he has to go out and find the real killer himself. Of course, if he played things absolutely straight there wouldn’t hav
e been any book, so I can understand why writers do it that way, but the moral always seemed to be that the truth shall make you free.

  But it seemed to me that the truth in my case would make me very much unfree. In the first place, nobody was going to believe it. If I said I found a wallet that somebody had already stolen, anyone with half a brain would decide that I had stolen it. And if I said I came to Bordentown because I had a ticket that made it a toss-up between Bordentown and Boston, and Bordentown was warmer, and I didn’t want to spit in the face of destiny, and how one Mary Beth could lead to another, well, all that would do was keep me off the chain gang and land me in the insane asylum.

  The trouble with the truth was that it just didn’t sound true enough. And by the time he unlocked my cell door and came on in, I had thought up a few ways to improve it.

  “Well, now,” he said. “I guess you ain’t precisely Johnny Dillinger after all. Your fingerprints didn’t ring any bells and nobody up in Washington got too excited about your description.”

  I had been a little worried that I might still be wanted in Indiana for statutory rape, but I guess that got straightened out somewhere along the way. I knew my fingerprints had never gotten on file.

  (Until now.)

  “But that seems to make you what they call an unknown quantity, boy.” He clucked his tongue. “Chip Harrison. That some kind of a nickname?”

  “It’s my real name.”

  “Your folks handed you that, did they? Where are they now?”

  “They were killed in an auto crash a little over a year ago.”

  “Any other kinfolk?”

  “None.”

  “And no way on earth to prove you’re who you say you are. No identification at all.”

  “My wallet was stolen. In New York.”

  He looked at me.

  “They got my wallet and my suitcase. I was on my way to Florida. To Miami, I couldn’t stand it in New York with the weather and the kind of people you meet up there. I had my ticket bought and I was on my way to the bus station when they jumped me.”