She told me. Few are the times in a man’s life when he can feel that it was all worthwhile -- the marriage, the divorce, everything. Rare are the times when he can feel that somebody up there is paying off his old grudges, redeeming his lost marital arguments, meting out punishment in retrn for the battering he’s received over the years from a woman. Infrequent indeed the times when he tastes the sweetness of completely unplanned revenge, savors the justice of vindictiveness which had been aimed at him backfiring, drinks in the flavor of a once wifely torturer now in trouble and pleading with him for help.
This was such a moment. What had happened was this:
Marcy and Hector, her outdoorsy lover-to-be, had left for their idyllic outing in Hector’s camp wagon, a custom-made vehicle with a four-wheel drive which was half jeep and half station wagon. They had set out at sunset and the idea had been for Hector to drive for four or five hours, then pull off the road to sleep until after dawn and resume their journey in daylight. But in practice their plans had been altered.
Marcy had fallen asleep shortly after it grew dark. Hector had kept driving much longer than he’d planned and it was well into the ayem when he finally pulled the camp wagon over to the side of the road. His stopping had awakened Marcy.
There was a brief conversation. Marcy wanted to drive while Hector climbed in the back and caught some sleep. Hector objected that Marcy had never driven this sort of vehicle before and might not be able to handle it. Marcy had pooh-poohed his caution, pointing out that she had driven other standard shift cars in the past and that there was little but straight highway ahead of them. Finally Hector agreed with the stipulation that if they came to an urban area, Marcy should wake him so that he might take over the driving. He was afraid she mightn’t be able to handle the camp wagon in city traffic.
Hector climbed into the back of the wagon and took off his clothes. Being a deep-breathing, nature-loving type, he climbed into his sleeping bag naked. By the time Marcy had driven the first five miles, he was sound asleep.
Shortly after dawn Marcy hit the outskirts of a small city. She knew she was supposed to wake Hector, but he was sleeping so soundly she decided not to disturb him. She had complete confidence in her ability to handle the camp wagon. After all, she’d been driving it for the past couple of hours. So she headed into the city without waking him.
Halfway through the small city she was confronted with a red light. Inexperience made her buck the vehicle as she braked it to stop. Unknown to her, the jarring motion awoke Hector.
Still groggy from sleep, he got out of the sleeping bag, stood up, and pushed aside the canvass over the rear of the camp wagon to get his bearings. At that moment the light changed. The camp wagon lurched as Marcy took her foot off the clutch too fast and sped away. What she didn’t know was the lurch had thrown Hector from the back of the truck and that he was now lying stark naked in the middle of the street behind her!
Here the story becomes fragmented. There’s the version of Miss Agatha Twinkle, as told to the police, for instance. According to Miss Twinkle, she had just rounded the corner of Main and Third Streets at the head of a group of small children she was escorting on a nature walk when this stark naked sex maniac rose from the gutter and ran screaming towards them.
There’s the version of Lem Clemson, a local druggist, who claims to have been assaulted by a large drunk without any clothes on. According to Lem Clemson, the drunk was babbling incoherently and tried to pull the jacket off his body by force. Only the appearance of a policeman in answer to Lem’s cry for help kept the naked drunk from succeeding in his objective.
According to the policeman, who gave chase, his first thought was that the naked runner must be an escaped convict who had ditched his prison garb and was trying to steal other clothes. The policeman admitted that the man was a magnificent physical specimen in top physical condition. The proof was that he managed to outrun the cop and lost him going around a corner.
Here the story is picked up by one Mademoiselle Fifi who ran a small ladies’ boutique. According to Mademoiselle Fifi she was just getting ready to open for the day when a naked man—-“c’est magnifique!” in her words — smashed in her front window, grabbed a brassiere-—the handiest item of apparel within his reach—tied it ineflectually around his midsection, cursed, looked around wildly, and continued running up the street with one of the bra cups flapping against his thighs.
The bra cup was waving in the wind when Hector was finally apprehended by two State Policemen on motorcycles. By that time there was an alert out for him. Not that a description was needed. According to one of the state troopers, it would have been hard to miss him since there weren’t really too many six-foot-six, two-hundred-thirty-pound naked men with brassieres caught between their legs running around town that early in the morning. They took him to the local pokey where irate citizens were already lining up to file their complaints against him. Here, it was awhile before Hector could pull himself together enough to tell the gendarmes his version of what he assumed had happened.
By this time Marcy was some twenty miles away, still unaware that she’d violated a town ordinance by dumping two-hundred-thirty pounds of nude male into the middle of Main Street before the stores opened for the day. The first hint she had that she’d lost Hector came almost another twenty miles further on when a State Trooper pulled her over to the side of the road. She left the wagon parked there and returned to the city where Hector was being held in the trooper’s car. In her distress at learning what had happened, she didn’t think to bring any clothes for Hector.
When Marcy reached the pokey, the situation worsened. The local uplift society had gotten wind of things and piled on some more charges against Hector. Finding out that he and Marcy weren’t married, and taking into account his unclothed condition, they’d arrived at the obvious conclusion. The license plates on the camp wagon clinched it. When the trooper reported that they were out-of-state plates, the local better-than-thous dusted off the Mann Act and came up with a Federal charge against Hector for transporting a woman across the state line for immoral purposes. The cry of “White Slavery!” was raised.
“And the worst of it is,” Marcy wailed to me over the phone, “that we didn’t even do anything!”
“Yet,” I reminded her. “Is Hector still in the callaboose?” I asked.
“Yes. Bail hasn’t been set yet. They can’t take him into court because he doesn’t have any clothes. He’s so darned large they can’t find anything to fit him. And while they’re looking this damned crusader is stirring up even more feeling against him. I wouldn’t be surprised if they decided to lynch him.”
“What crusader?” I asked.
“The Reverend Billy Boxx. You’ve heard of him.”
“Oh, yeah.” The long arm of coincidence seemed to me to be making lewd gestures.
“Well,” Marcy continued, “he just happens to be here conducting one of those antivice crusades of his. Just our luck! And he’s latched onto Hector and me as an excuse to get everybody stirred up. He’s got one of those evangelist’s tents set up in the city park and when I passed by there before he was telling the crowd I was a Scarlet Woman. Oh Vance, you’ve got to help me. I don’t know what to do. Hector could go to jail. And it’s this Reverend Boxx that’s got everybody so fired up. If only there was some way I could get him off our backs, I think the cops would be reasonable and Hector could just get off with a fine for being a public nuisance. But this Boxx is insisting that the Mann Act charge be pressed.”
“I may be able to help you,” I told her cautiously. I was remembering that I’d done Billy Boxx a favor by not casting Joy in the play and I figured I might talk him into returning it. On the other hand, I was in no hurry. I was getting quite a kick out of the predicament Marcy and her boyfriend were in and I saw no reason to get them off the hook too quickly. “But it’ll take some time,” I added.