“I’ve been in the movies,” she said acidly. She got to her feet, stood smoothing the dress over her hips, picked up her drink. She smiled, but the warmth was no longer there. “Well, have a nice trip... to El Centro.”
She turned, wobbling slightly, and headed back toward the bar.
“Wait—” Womack half rose to his own feet, settled back down with his beer, suddenly contented to let things ride.
He signaled for the waiter, making a mental calculation of how much he owed, and dug a couple of bills from his pocket. He was still waiting for his change when the man from the garage came in.
Bernie White acknowledged Womack with a nod, strode straight to the bar, and ordered a beer. Perspiration gleamed on his face. He downed the beer with one tilt of the glass, Adam’s apple working, then sat down opposite Womack in the booth. There was beer foam on his lip. He said, “How long did you drive with the rod bent?”
“How the hell do I know?”
“Well, don’t make no difference now.”
“It’s bad, eh?”
“Pretty bad.” He swiped at the foam with his hand. “She been pulling hard on the grades?”
“No. No worse than usual.”
“Well, I can fix ’er. But it’s going to take a couple of days to get ’er running good.”
“How much?”
White took out a scrap of grease-smeared paper with some writing on it. “Got it figured right here. Parts and labor should run you around a hundred and seventy-five bucks. Of course, that’s just an estimate, but I always figure kind of heavy.”
Womack sat there, thinking absurdly to himself, it might as well be a hundred and seventy-five thousand. Because, either way, I ain’t got a chance in hell of getting my hands on the dough.
“Okay.” Womack had no choice. “Fix her up.”
“Don’t worry.” White got to his feet. “I’ll have her running sweet as sugar.”
Womack picked up his change and made another mental calculation. With the cash remaining in his pocket, and if he also picked up the dime he’d left as a tip, he would be worth exactly twenty-three dollars.
He left the dime where it was. It wouldn’t do him any good. Neither would the twenty dollars remaining in his pocket. During the next couple of days, if he was to get his truck back to El Centro, he would have to figure a way to get his hands on some real dough. In the meantime, he could sleep in the rig.
Womack was about to follow White outside, when he noticed the girl again. She really had a sensational body. He thought about the way her breasts had looked inside the halter of her gown, startlingly white and pink-tipped, and a faint warning bell sounded down inside his stomach somewhere.
He didn’t heed the warning.
6
They had a few drinks together at the bar, beer and whatever it was she was drinking, while the bartender fed an occasional nickel into the jukebox. They were his only customers and he apparently wanted to keep them around.
At exactly seven o’clock he turned on the television screen high up over the bar. The fights were on. Womack found that he could barely hear the sound over the blare of the jukebox. He didn’t care. You don’t have to hear the fights. But it seemed strange to see the two men pawing at each other to the strains of the Missouri Waltz.
Womack gradually became engrossed. During one of the frequent commercials he turned his head slightly to look at the girl sitting next to him. Since joining her at the bar, they had said very little, just small talk. Her name was Lila. That much she had told him. Lila, a slender, dark-haired stranger with slanting green eyes and a sensuous mouth.
She stared up into his face. There was something strange about her, something different. Every word he had said, no matter how trivial, she had listened to attentively. It was as if it was important to her to have someone to talk to. And, yet, she had seemed contented to just sit while he watched the fights.
Womack took a swallow of beer and said, “You like the fights?”
Before she could answer, their attention was diverted by a soldier entering from the street. He was short and stocky, with damp sweat-spots under his arms and beneath his belt. He looked directly at Womack and the girl, as if he were using them to adjust his eyes to the reddish glow within the bar, then sat down on one of the stools. When he had paid for his beer he fished a dime from the change on the wet-stained bar and walked back to an inside phone booth in the rear.
Womack looked at the girl once more. Her face was very white, her eyes wide and frightened, and he wondered if she was going to be sick. He said, “Are you okay?”
“Yes.” She sipped her drink. “It’s the heat. It makes me a little woozy at times.”
“Would you like to go somewhere else?”
She started to speak and hesitated—
“Some place where we can get a little air. It’ll do you good.”
“I thought you wanted to watch the fights.”
“They’re a couple of pugs.”
“There’s a place out on the highway... the Blue Note. They only have a band on Saturdays... but there’s a dance floor and a jukebox. We could drive out there.”
“No wheels.” Womack grinned. “Isn’t there someplace close?”
Lila nodded. “No. But we can take my car.”
“Okay. Drink up.”
They finished their drinks, had a final round for the road, then got to their feet. Womack felt a pleasant constriction building in his throat. He was dimly aware that he was getting drunk. He decided that he didn’t give a damn.
He settled the bill and followed her outside and down the street to her car. It was a new Thunderbird convertible, white, with the top down. Somehow the car didn’t surprise him. It went with the expensive dress and the forty dollar shoes and the sophisticated-sounding sigh she exhaled as she pressed close beside him.
Womack heard the warning bell again. It sounded in his stomach, causing the muscles there to tighten. It was all wrong somehow. A girl with this much class...
He said, “Some rig.”
“It’s all mine.”
“Lucky girl.”
She laughed. “Would you like to drive it?”
Womack opened the door for her and helped her in, then walked around and slid under the wheel. When he pulled away from the curb he could feel the tremendous, silent power under the hood. It never failed to give him a thrill.
Lila edged closer to him. Her shoulder touched his. The wind pulled at her skirt and rippled the halter of her gown, exposing flashes of milky flesh, startlingly white against the dark tones of her arms and shoulders. Her hair brushed his face. It had a smell of wild flowers in it.
There was not much traffic on the road, only an occasional car, and the road was straight. Womack put his foot down hard on the accelerator. The car lept forward.
Lila laughed softly. There was excitement in her voice as she said, “Not too fast, Johnny.”
He let the needle hover at eighty. The hell with it. He felt good.
He glanced into the rear-view mirror once, noticed a set of headlights and wondered vaguely why the car behind them was following so close, then dismissed it from his mind.
He continued out Route 77 to a point where it intersected with a secondary county road. Near the intersection were a couple of acres of gravel-covered land with a shoddy motel and a combined gas station and cafe. A sputtering neon light alternately blinked The Blue Note... GAS... The Blue Note... GAS...
Womack swung the Thunder-bird onto the parking lot, gravel spraying the underside of the fenders, and stopped beneath the drooping branches of a tree that grew between the motel and the cafe. As he got out he noticed that the car he had seen in the rear-view mirror was stopping also.