“Your goddamn union’s getting all the dollars underneath.”
The chair-man gave a grunt of laughter. “All the dollars underneath. That’s a good one. All the dollars underneath.”
“Under the table, too,” insisted Dunc.
“Shut up, wise guy,” rumbled the couch-man, half rising.
Gus grabbed Dunc’s arm. “C’mon, let’s get outta here”
Osvaldo pulled his truck up outside in a cloud of red-brown dust, and Dunc got mad all over again; he could do nothing, the other Mexicans were on their way back to the border, but dammit, they’d been screwed out of their wages.
Gus drove Grey Ghost back down the dirt subdivision street.
“It’s better than digging graves,” he said, thinking Dunc’s anger was still about the hefty union initiation fee.
“At least digging graves nobody got fucked.”
“Here we get a hell of a lot more money”
“The Mexicans didn’t.”
“But I did — enough for the weekend with Birdie.”
Chapter Twenty
Since the radio predicted an unseasonably cool evening with fog at the beaches, Penny put on her favorite dress, a warm red wool knit that displayed her full bosom and narrow waist to perfection. She fastened her lustrous wavy hair back behind her ears with silver combs, and examined herself critically in the mirror. Light glinted from her matching silver earrings.
“Penny.” Gerald, outside the bathroom. “Are you ready?”
“In just a minute, hon.”
The week had not gone well. He had to report to his father in Cedar Rapids on California business conditions, so it had been aircraft factories instead of studio tours, tracts instead of romantic dinners. “Penelope!”
“Coming.”
They’d get married next June after he got his master’s in biz ad and she got her bachelor’s in history. Her mom liked him, and her sister, with two little kids, adored him. And she’d done an admirable job of keeping Pierce Duncan out of her thoughts.
She added subdued red lipstick, blotted it by pressing her full lips together with a tissue between them. On the tissue the O of her mouth looked huge. No time for anything else.
The cozy two-story house was one of many in Highland Park snatched up by returning vets. Uncle Carl was in his easy chair in the living room, watching the Saturday baseball game. Aunt Goodie appeared with iced tea and chocolate-chip cookies. Gerald was by the archway to the front door, impeccably groomed, sandy-haired, compact, his blue eyes impatient.
On impulse Penny twirled around in the middle of the room, her arms out and raised as if she were dancing.
“Hey! Hubba-hubba!” exclaimed Uncle Carl.
Penny was suddenly blushing. Goodie set the tray down on the coffee table to slap her husband’s arm.
“Carl, you stop that now, you’re embarrassing her.”
“Hey, am I blind? Am I dumb? She’s a great-looking girl.”
“Penny, you know what I think of that dress.” Gerald’s mouth was prim. “It’s too tight, too revealing.”
“Not in Tinsel Town,” said Carl with a quick grin.
Goodie poured, Carl grabbed cookies. Penny crossed her legs, Gerald reached over and pulled down her hem.
“Let’s go watch the sun set over the Pacific,” she said.
“The Seaside Hotel has a nice little restaurant called the Anchor Room that looks over the ocean and does good seafood. You kids take the car, and don’t worry about getting home late.” Aunt Goodie tipped Penny a bawdy wink that Gerald could not see. “And if that fog gets too thick, get rooms at the hotel.”
Her aunt had married Carl mainly for sex, and claimed to only occasionally regret it. Sure, save yourself for your wedding night, she told Penny, but there was something wrong with a man who didn’t at least try to sleep with his fiancée.
“Just south of the Santa Monica sport-fishing pier,” said Carl. “At a place they call Muscle Beach.”
Muscle Beach! A jolt of electricity ran through Penny’s body; she hadn’t driven Dunc out of her subconscious, after all.
“You have to wear a coat over that dress,” said Gerald.
Muscle Beach was a narrow strip of sand between the Santa Monica pier and a big old shabby hotel a quarter mile to the south. Dunc drifted down the boardwalk in the gray, chilly afternoon, past fried shrimp, ice cream, hamburger, beer, and Pronto Pup stalls decorated with photos of the bodybuilders and lifters who had trained there over the years.
He had started lifting in high school, with a hundred-pound barbell set that had a booklet of exercises modeled by the movie actor Fred MacMurray, had kept on at Notre Dame. But these guys!
In fact, even the gawkers were interesting: faddists, beach bums, physical culturists, high school girls with condoms in their purses getting their jollies from all the exposed male flesh, queers doing the same: a fringe world by the Pacific.
One girl with her back to him stood out from the rest, a diamond among zircons, wearing a red knit dress like the girl in his dream. When she turned to say something to the sandy-haired man at her side, he realized she indeed was Penny Linden.
Forty minutes before, Gerald had said icily, “You just stay here and order me a martini,” and went out to get Penny’s coat. She had forgotten it in the car and had gone into the Anchor Room brazenly exposed in her red dress.
He never acted this way back in Iowa. A nice start to their romantic night at the beach! “A martini for my fiancé, and...” She felt rebellion within. “A... third rail.”
The bartender had scar-tissued eyes and a flattened nose and wore a starched red knee-length apron.
“When I was fightin’ I always trained on good beefsteak an’ tomatoes. Lotsa protein, that’s what it takes.” He set the drinks in front of her, put a foot on the beer cooler, leaned forward confidentially. “Thirty-five fights, light-heavy like Billy Conn. I even got the same first name, but between you an’ me, I like tendin’ bar a hell of a lot better.”
“I bet you were a very good fighter, Billy,” Penny said.
“Billy? I leave you alone for five minutes and you know the bartender’s first name?”
Thinking he was joking, she said, “Oh, hi, honey. Billy was just telling me what it takes to be a prizefighter.”
“Years and years of no schooling.”
“Gerald!” she exclaimed, astonished. “What a terrible—”
“And you’ve had too much to drink.”
He grabbed the glass from Penny’s hand to slam it down on the bar. Penny grabbed it back up and drained it and waved it.
“I’ll have another one of these, Billy.”
She’d had a third, in fact, before Gerald finally got her out of there to “walk it off.” The third rails had bombed her.
“I’m sorry, honey,” she said in a little voice she hoped wasn’t slurred. “Let’s not let it ruin our last night together.” On a wooden platform twenty yards from the walk, three gargantuan lifters were taking turns doing three-hundred-pound repetition squats. “Let’s go watch those huge men lift those huge weights.”
Dunc didn’t like the boyfriend’s looks, his clothes, his build, anything about him. Especially his prim little mouth. When they moved back to the boardwalk from the lifting platform, Dunc tagged along behind. Muscle Beach was a rough place.
A teenage boy leaned against the edge of one of the stalls and blew into an empty beer bottle to make hollow whistling tones. Another, slightly older, wearing only swim trunks, was behind the counter tapping two Coke bottles together and moving his lean tanned body to the beat. A third squatted on an empty pop case playing the spoons back-to-back.