She did not understand.
“You need more than clothes,” he went on. “You need money, too. A hundred bucks worth. Remember?”
She nodded.
“Well,” he said, “I got the dough for you. A hundred bucks. See?”
He took a roll of five-dollar bills from his pocket and spread them before her in a fan. Then he folded them once and returned them to his pocket.
“A hundred bucks,” he said. “All for you, April. All you have to do is earn it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you?”
She shook her head. But actually she was afraid that she did understand, that she understood all too well. Her earlier thoughts — that she could always become a prostitute if everything else failed — came back to torment her. Apparently she was going to become a prostitute already.
“I didn’t have a hundred bucks lying around, April. Hell, none of the guys have that kind of dough. But I found twenty guys with five bucks each. Five times twenty is a hundred, April. All you have to do is give each guy his five bucks worth and you’ll have a hundred for yourself.” He winked at her. “Judging from what I got a few minutes ago, it shouldn’t be hard for you. Hell, let’s face it. You’re the hottest stuff around. You’ll love every minute of it.”
She wanted to tell him that she had only been pretending, that she would not love it at all. And she did not need the money, not really. It would be definitely easier to go home and get the money than to earn it by lying in a pile of hay while one boy after the other took his pleasure with her.
But what was the use? She was in a spot now. There were twenty boys outside, and they had not come out in the rain just to be turned down. If she tried to call the whole show off, she had a fairly good idea what would happen.
They would force her.
That would not be hard for them. They would hit her, and they would hold her down, and instead of a simple line-up it would be mass rape. Then they would not even give her the rotten hundred dollars — they would leave her half-dead in the barn and go away.
“Suppose I don’t want to,” she said, feeling him out.
“You’ve got to.”
“And if I won’t?”
“You will.”
The certainty with which he said those two words convinced her that she was right. She had no chance. She looked at him, looked at the cocky expression on his face, and she knew that he was not going to let this opportunity slip through his fingers. She was stuck.
“You’re quite an organizer,” she told Danny. Quite a pimp, she silently amended.
He took her words for a compliment. “It was nothing,” he said modestly. “All I had to do was pass the idea around. Everybody went for it like a shot.”
“They did?”
“Sure,” he said. “Everybody’s pretty darn hot to get to you, April. They’re panting all over the place. Every guy I asked was off like a shot to pick up five bucks and come after you. Some of them went and borrowed the dough.”
It was almost funny.
“All except Bill Piersall,” he went on. “You know, the jerk took a poke at me when I mentioned the deal to him.”
“He did?”
“Yeah. Jesus, I wanted to powder him. Here I was, letting him in on a good deal, and he started yelling that I should leave you alone, that you were a decent girl and I was a son of a bitch. He’s a real farmer, let me tell you. Sticking up for you like a clown. He can’t realize that you just love to get it night and day.”
She wanted to laugh, then changed her mind and wanted to cry. All along Bill had been sticking up for her, trying to treat her as a decent girl, while she was playing harlot for Craig Jeffers. And Bill was the one she’d vented all her anger on, the one she had brushed off repeatedly.
“He’s some kind of a nut,” Danny said.
A nut? Maybe, she thought. He must be nuts if he likes me. But he did like her, liked her and respected her in spite of what she had done. And it was not as if he were an innocent kid with a distorted picture of a girl named April North. She could still remember the time he had made love to her in the woods, and she knew how good it had been, better than she had ever permitted herself to realize.
Bill was not after sex. He had had that, and he wanted more. He wanted her — as a person, as a girl, as a woman.
But it was too late now.
Too late. Because what might have been could never be now, and whatever chance she had had for happiness with Bill was shot to hell and gone. Now she would turn her tricks for Danny and his boys and take her hundred dollars and run. If she did not, she would just be stuck all over again. Danny would probably take back the clothes and leave her high and dry — or more accurately, low and damp. She would miss out on the ride to Xenia and the money and the dry clothes, and she would probably spend the rest of her life in the abandoned barn waiting for the rain to stop.
“Want to get started, April?”
She looked at him. For a second she glared, and he flinched from the venomous hatred her eyes revealed. But instantly she masked this expression and flashed what was supposed to be a coy smile.
“I’m ready,” she said.
He laughed, turned and went outside. She waited, inwardly sick, until the first boy came in. She recognized him but could not remember his name. He was tall and gangling, with nervous eyes that could not quite meet hers and at the same time could not stay away from her ripe body. He stared at her legs and breasts and his tongue was hanging out.
A virgin, she thought. A simple slob who didn’t know what a woman was like.
“Well,” she said. “I won’t bite.”
He stammered something unintelligible.
“Get those silly clothes off,” she said.
I’m old and jaded, she thought. What’s the difference? It all makes no difference.
But the gangling boy never got to her. There was noise in the background, a car pulling up sharply, a door opening and banging shut. And then the boys out front were yelling, and then a man was bursting through the open door of the barn.
Craig.
“You stupid urchin,” he yelled at the boy. “Get away from her, you fool!”
The boy backed away, confused. Craig charged into the room and swung a fist at the boy. The boy caught the punch with the tip of his chin and went down as though pole-axed. He fell to the floor and did not move.
Craig turned to April, his eyes bright. “Well, how lovely,” he said, lips curling in a smile. “This is the reformation of April North, isn’t it? I looked all over for you, dear. I wondered what had happened to you. And then I passed a caravan of cars loaded with boys singing dirty songs. And sure enough, dear, they led me straight to you.”
She tried to cover her nakedness with her hands and he laughed at her.
“April North’s life of purity,” he said. “Taking on the senior class. What are they paying you, April?”
“One hundred dollars.”
“Great Caesar’s ghost,” he said. “That’s magnificent. Get your clothes on, April. If you’ve got to play harlot, you might as well do it properly. You can live a life of luxury for the same work.”
“With you?”
“With me. It’s only sensible, April. If you’re going to use sex to stay alive, you might as well get some benefit out of it. You’ll live luxuriously at my house. You’ll have parties and friends and excitement instead of serving as a doormat for the students of Antrim High School. Doesn’t it make a little more sense that way, dear?”
It did. She had sworn to stay away from Craig, but now she was only selling herself cheaply. If she had to be a tramp, she might as well make it pay. And it would pay better as Craig’s mistress than as mistress for twenty kids, all of them damp behind their ears.