It was so simple at first, Vince thought. You got in the car, stepped on the gas, and drove. When you found a quarry worth pursuing, then you stopped.
Sure you did.
The problems occurred after you were heading down the old road. There were plenty of problems. For one thing, you didn’t know where the hell you were going. For another thing, you had to get the damned car back to the damned cabin in a week, maybe ten days at the outside. That sort of ruled out a trip to any town that might be worth going to.
This limited things. He couldn’t go to Florida, which might have been nice, and he couldn’t go to California, which also might have been nice, and he couldn’t go to Alaska, which might have been even nicer. But he still could have gone to New York, or Philadelphia, or Boston. New York, in some small way, meant Rhonda, which was disturbing, but Boston or Philadelphia would have been one hell of a lot better than Brighton.
Brighton.
But there was one more problem, one overwhelming problem, and the problem was money. More precisely, the lack of money. He had fifty dollars and change with him when he took off, and while fifty dollars was a small fortune when you lived with your folks, fifty dollars was very little when it was the sole support of both yourself and a car.
A hungry car. A car that, with a good tailwind, managed ten miles to the gallon. A car that drank oil like a Bowery bum with a thing for petroleum. A car that could easily burn up fifty dollars getting to Boston or Philadelphia or New York.
The smart thing to do was to turn back and give it up as a bad job. But that meant Rhonda, and Adele, and more than anything else it meant admitting defeat.
So he did the dumb thing — which meant Brighton.
He pushed the car seventy miles down the road, passing two towns even worse than Brighton, towns consisting of a gas pump and a general store and three empty houses. And then he reached Brighton, which had more empty houses and two general stores and an occasional hitching post. It was about time either to fill the gas tank or park the car. So he parked the car. It was cheaper.
He had a plan. The plan was the essence of simplicity. He would get the cheapest room he could find, eat the cheapest meals he could stomach, and lay the prettiest girl in the town. Not a virgin, and not a dyke, and not an Uninhibited Relationship. A girl, an ordinary girl. There had to be at least one pretty girl in Brighton, for God’s sake.
So he got a room, a cubbyhole in a white frame Rooms-For-Rent run by a gray-headed keep-smiling tub of lard named Mrs. Rebecca Sharp. The room was fifteen dollars a week with meals, and by the looks of Mrs. Sharp, she could cook well. The room was clean, the meals turned out fine, and money was a little less of a problem.
And then, all settled, he went on the hunt for the prettiest girl in Brighton. And found her.
Her name was Saralee Jenkins and she was beautiful. Her face was the best part, sort of along the lines of a small-town Grace Kelly, with long blonde hair and blue eyes and an occasional freckle on her nose. The body was good, too. Not quite as good as Rhonda, maybe, but a hell of a lot better than Adele the Dyke. She was kind of short, with well-established breasts and a very slim waist, with legs that were damned fine up to the knee and probably better and better as they went along.
And she was not a virgin. If anybody was not a virgin, she was not a virgin. No virgin looked at you in quite that way. No virgin moved her tail in quite that manner when she walked down the street. There might be a virgin somewhere in the civilized world, but this was definitely not the one.
She worked behind the counter at the drugstore, making sodas and sundaes for the local yokels and frying an occasional greasy hamburger for an occasional greasy kid. Vince saw her for the first time when he stopped in for a coke, and he knew right away that this was the girl; that she was the only one in Brighton worth bothering with, that she was fair game, and that she was not a virgin. This last point he knew instinctively, and later he found it out for certain.
And this was part of the problem. In fact, it was the problem, plain and simple.
She was married.
There were a few rules in the quail-hunting game, and one of them was that you did not fool around with a married woman. You just didn’t. All you got out of it was trouble, and occasionally you got killed, and it just wasn’t worth it. Vince had had enough opportunities in the past, and once or twice he had been genuinely tempted, but each time his guns had remained in his holster and the prize had not been shot down. There were women in Modnoc, available women, and they had made their availability obvious. But he had pictured himself in the saddle when the horse’s owner walked into the room, and he had quietly forgotten the women involved.
But this was different.
For one thing, Saralee was too damned willing to play. That message hit him the minute he saw her, even before he saw the gold band on her finger. The way she looked at him, and the way she talked to him, and everything else about her — she was just there to be had.
Which was bad.
What was worse was that he wanted her, wanted her badly. The Adele episode had left him badly shaken. He needed a girl now, and without one he might go quietly mad. And the rest of the available talent in Brighton was either ugly or virginal. Saralee was neither.
He wanted her and she wanted him. And meanwhile her jerk of a husband, old Bradley Jenkins, stood in the back of the store filling prescriptions. That was all the dumb son-of-a-bitch seemed to know how to do. There was Saralee, itching for love, and the moron was filling prescriptions. It was ridiculous.
He talked with her for about half an hour the first day. She kept dropping hints and he pretended to be too dumb to see what she was getting at, which would have been very dumb indeed. Then, miraculously, the coke was gone, and he had a chance to leave.
So he did.
He spent the rest of the day trying to find someone else to spend the week with, but there wasn’t anyone. The girls who had looked merely beastly at first, now looked downright nauseating. He walked all over town, which took all of fifteen minutes, and the more he walked and the more girls he looked at, the worse they looked and the better Saralee looked.
He got back to Mrs. Sharp’s just in time for supper, which didn’t taste as good this day as it had the day before. He didn’t feel much like eating. He felt being alone, and after dinner he went to his room and stretched out on the bed.
There were so many reasons to stay away from Saralee Jenkins. Fine reasons. But the more he thought about them, the less important they became. There were other reasons, reasons why he should crawl between Saralee’s anxious arms as soon as possible; and these reasons grew bigger and loomed larger and more significant the more he pondered them.
She was hungry for it, that was for sure. Her broken-down excuse for a husband wasn’t doing his job. She needed a young man, and he needed her, and that was that.
She would be good. She would be damned good and hungry the way she was, hungry for him. It was good to have principles, and staying away from married women was a good principle to have, but there was a limit. She was worth stepping out of line for.
More important, it wasn’t as if he was crapping in his own backyard. Nobody knew him in Brighton. He could creep up on her like a thief in the night, get what he’d come for, and then head back to the little cabin on the lake. That would be the end of her and the end of Brighton, and to hell with both of them.
He still didn’t like it. Either way he didn’t like it. Staying in Brighton without sleeping with her would be impossible, and creeping back to the lake with his tail between his legs would be unbearable, and heading onward and downward to still another hick town in the middle of nowhere would be even worse.