An older guy in his late twenties was crouched on a three-legged stool in front of the stand, pounding with an almost sexual fervor on the bottom of a five-gallon ice cream container. He wore Levi’s, hack boots, a crushed cycle cap, sunglasses, and a two-day growth of beard. The sleeves of his black leather jacket barely contained his massive biceps. Big guy.
He brought a bottle of dago red out from under his jacket. A silver skull ring glinted on the ring finger of his left hand.
“Hey, man, anybody got any more of this Sneaky Pete?”
The crowd parted for a pimply teenager wearing khakis and a white sweatshirt with a ketchup stain down the front of it.
“I got money, Johnny!” he said proudly.
“Hey hey hey! Double Bubble, run and get me my bongos.”
An overweight blond girl trotted off, her enormous breasts jouncing with each stride. Johnny winked at the crowd as he beat suggestively on his ice cream container. Reluctantly Dunc drifted away. After all, Penny was betrothed, not his to save.
“Isn’t it exciting, honey? These kids with no money, no jobs, no security, but with all that music inside. They’re—”
“Exciting? They’re tramps, beach bums!” Gerald realized that he hated California and everything it stood for. He heard himself blurt out, “That drummer with the greasy hair and the sunglasses, that’s what you find exciting. First the bartender and now this animal—”
Her fingers were icy but she managed to unclip his fraternity pin from the bosom of her dress. She dropped it into the pocket of his jacket. “I believe this is yours,” she said.
Gerald slapped her very hard across the face. In the same instant he regretted it, but she was already gone, leaving her coat behind on the sand. He returned to the Anchor Room, ordered a martini. She’d show up. He had the car keys.
Penny, wandering around alone! And then Dunc lost her in the crowd. Johnny’s bongos had arrived, along with a guitar and a set of maracas. They had moved to boxes set in the sand, had lit a forbidden driftwood fire. Dancing flames made red masks of their youthful laces. The bongo beat was formless, primitive.
“Dance!” someone shouted. Other voices made it a chant. “Jimmy dance! Jimmy dance! Jimmy Jimmy dance dance dance!”
The lithe boy m the swim trunks leaped into the middle of the circle to gyrate frenziedly. He arched back until his hair brushed the sand, came erect with deliberate pulsing movements.
A Negro girl wearing tight black, pedal pushers and no bra under a half-open black sweater leaped into the firelight facing him. She and Jimmy whirled, churned together, apart, against one another, on their knees. The sweater came completely open; eyes, cheekbones, ebony breasts shone in the firelight.
Jimmy fell, all through, was dragged away by his ankles like a vanquished gladiator. Johnny, head down and heavy shoulders hunched forward, punished his bongos savagely, thighs straining around the drums as around a woman’s body.
The Negro girl spun away, finished, but Penny, barefoot, threw away a wine bottle, drunk, languid, danced in her place without frenzy, undulating, almost dreamy, unutterably sensual. One silver earring was gone. Her hair had come loose, fireglow-lit with fluid highlights. The tight red skirt had slid up, her long legs flashed, richly ivory. She was magnificent.
Johnny was still attacking his bongos, but now his head was up, his eyes behind their sunglasses were fixed on Penny as she moved. Where in hell was her fiancé? This guy was huge, six-two, with arms like an ape. Together, maybe, just maybe, the two of them could handle him, but not Dunc alone. Could he?
Gerald was irritated. Perhaps he hadn’t been entirely blameless tonight, but after forty-five minutes and no Penny he stormed back out into the night. There was a bonfire on the beach, from the boardwalk he could see some cheap slut with her skirt up...
Oh God no! It was Penny!
He tried to elbow through the crowd to the ring of fire, but was shoved this way and that, casually. Flames danced redly as from the entrance to the Pit. Drums throbbed in his skull.
The music stopped, the crowd parted. Penny shambled by him, unseeing, eyes glazed, skirt still halfway rucked-up. Gerald floundered after her through the soft sand. But someone was before him, slipping a thick possessive arm around her waist.
That horrible greasy-haired drummer!
“Hey, chiquita.” Minus the sunglasses, Johnny’s eyes were blue and expectant. His bongos were slung over one broad shoulder. He sang in a good baritone, “Chiquita banana, and I’m here to say, my banana’s gonna get you in a certain way—”
“Stop that!” cried Gerald. “She’s engaged to me!”
Johnny laughed. One big hand began massaging her breasts. She tried to bite it. The other big hand planted itself in Gerald’s face, pushed. Gerald windmilled backward into the sand.
“You can have her back tomorrow, but tonight—”
But another man had materialized from the darkness, six inches shorter than Johnny but equally broad. Johnny let go of Penny and spoke in a soft, pleased voice.
“Hey, great, next to fuckin’ I like fightin’ best!”
“Dunc?” asked Penny in belated recognition.
Gerald got shakily back on his feet. How many men did...
Johnny came in a rush, heavy arms swinging like clubs. Dunc ducked and weaved desperately, but one of the haymakers caught him on the forehead to open a shallow cut with the silver ring. Despairing, panicked, Dunc aped one of Ned’s special three-punch combos: a slashing left jab to the nose, a hook to the heart, a right cross to the back edge of the chin.
As if by magic, Johnny went down, nose blossoming blood.
And just for an instant, Penny’s soft lips were pressed fiercely on Dunc’s as in another dream, then she was gone. Johnny, a surprised look on his face, was sitting on the sand, legs wide, waggling his jaw gingerly with one hand.
“Fuck you hit me with, man? A Mack truck?”
“A Nitro Ned Davenport combination,” said Dunc happily.
Chapter Twenty-one
But Penny, after all, had gone home with the wrong guy. Dunc still didn’t know how to reach her. After washing the blood off his face in the Anchor Room’s john, he had a beer at the bar.
“Get in a brawl down on the beach?” asked Billy.
“Yeah. You look like you’ve gone a few rounds yourself.”
“Thirty-six fights, but to tell the truth I never was much of a boxer.” Billy waggled his chin with one hand. “Glass jaw.”
Glass jaw. That must have been why Johnny had gone down so easily. Couldn’t take a punch. Talk of fighting inevitably led to thoughts of Nitro Ned. As Dunc drove north along the Coast Highway I, in no mood to go home to bed, he thought: for a minute there tonight Ned had been guiding his fists.
At the trailer park everyone’s lights were out. Pound on Birdie’s door? Gus might not even be there, and the fog made it too cold to sleep on the beach. He would sleep in his car by the Church of the Order of Melchizedek. Maybe Penny would show up in the morning to attend Rephaim’s service.
He parked behind the manzanita bushes at the foot of the road, at 6:00 A.M. sat up yawning and shivering. Had the cold awakened him? Or the smell of beans and chili? He got out, shut the car door carefully and quietly, and whizzed in the weeds, shivering in his light windbreaker. Why so stealthy? Why hadn’t he parked behind the motel last night?
The grass soaked his shoes and pant legs as he swished through it. The massive old surplus army six-by-six loomed up through the drifting ground mist like a misplaced rhino, so abruptly only an outthrust palm against the wet hood kept him from walking into it.