“You’re insatiable.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means you never get enough.”
She licked her lips. “You hurry up and get some more,” she said, “or I’ll rape you.”
He shook his head, then walked out and got in the car. The next motel he came to was like striking gold. There were six of them there, six kids seventeen and eighteen years old, and all of them were about as interested in Saralee as it was possible for a person to be. They were ready to go, and they didn’t haggle over the price, and that meant a very fast hundred and twenty dollars, which was enough to retire on. He loaded them into the Packard and stepped on the gas.
On the way the boys kept talking about what they were going to do. They had some fairly unusual ideas. They weren’t going to stand around waiting in line, not them. They wanted sort of a party with all of them in there at once. Vince felt like telling them they were sick, but he had decided that pimping was one of those occupations where the customer was always right.
But he did have a good money idea.
“Look,” he said, “something like you got in mind, you got to have what is known as a package deal. That’s what we call it in the trade. A package deal.”
He sounded so professional that he scared himself. But right away they asked him what he meant by a package deal.
“Well,” he said, “the twenty dollar price, that’s for one man. You understand? But if you want sort of a party, then the price arrangement is different. What it is, you pay a lump sum by the hour. Then you can do whatever you want, all of you, as much as you want. It’s like you were renting the girl for the hour.”
He left it dangling there, waiting for them to bite, and they bit. They asked how much it was by the hour, and he told them it was a hundred dollars an hour, with a two-hour minimum. That way they wouldn’t have to worry about how many times, or what they were doing, or anything. They would pay him the two hundred dollars and do whatever they wanted.
They went for it. They got all excited, as a matter of fact, and before long he was standing in front of the door again, counting the money and waiting for the two hours to pass. He didn’t want to wait for two hours, not really. He didn’t want to stand outside the door while all that nonsense was going on inside the door, either, and it suddenly occurred to him that there was no reason in the world for him to stick around. He had the money, and he didn’t give a hydroelectric dam what happened to Saralee.
So why stay around?
He hopped into the car again, and drove to the Charlotte Airport. There was a flight to Idlewild leaving in half an hour, and because of a last-minute cancellation there was a seat open, and he took it. He got on the plane and studied the pretty breasts of the stewardess, which made him think once more of Saralee.
Poor Saralee. He’d played a dirty trick on her, all things considered. A hell of a dirty trick. She didn’t have a dime, and she didn’t have a car — not with the Packard parked at the airport. And, he realized all at once, she didn’t have a goddamned thing to wear. All her clothing was stashed in the trunk of the Packard. He’d put it there to keep her from running out, and now it looked as though she was going to do very little running out indeed. He tried to feel sorry for her, but it seemed as though every time he tried to feel really sympathetic towards her, he burst into uncontrollable laughter.
Poor Saralee, he would think. Then Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. And so on, with all the other passengers staring at this idiot who kept breaking up and laughing all over the place. Let ’em stare, he thought. Hell with them.
He settled back finally, and relaxed in his chair, and, because he was very tired, fell asleep. He woke up as the plane was bouncing through some air pockets. His ears were popping and his head ached dully. Then the pilot set the plane on the ground and everything was all right again.
He took a bus to the East Side Terminal, and a cab to the Port Authority bus terminal, and another bus that made fifteen stops, the last of which was Lake Ludicrous. And then, finally, he was at the lake, and then at the cabin, and there was his father.
“You’re late,” his father said, “and the car’s gone, and what the hell happened to you?”
Vince took a deep breath. “The car,” he began. “Some idiot came down the wrong way on a one-way street and hit the car. Knocked it for a loop.”
His father stared.
“I was lucky I wasn’t killed,” Vince added, which was true in a way. “But don’t worry about the car. The guy paid for it.”
“Paid for it?”
“He wasn’t insured,” Vince said. “I could have sued him down the river, and he was all shook up, so he offered to pay for it. I’ve got the money. I figured suing him would just take a lot of time and get him into all kinds of trouble. He was a pretty nice guy, too. Stupid, and a hell of a driver, but a nice guy.”
“How much?”
“Huh?”
“For the car,” his father said. “How much did you get for it?”
“Oh,” Vince said. “Well, six hundred dollars.”
His father stared. “You’re kidding,” he said. “You have to be kidding. You can’t mean it.”
“It wasn’t enough?”
Softly, his father said: “Perhaps, on a good day, I could have sold the car for a hundred and fifty dollars. On a bad day, maybe half of that. And you—” he said reverently, “—got six hundred beautiful round dollars for it.”
Vince took the money from his pocket. “The guy was scared,” he elaborated, “and he just wanted to get rid of me, I guess. Here’s the money.”
His father counted the money, his eyes shining happily. “Vince,” he said. “Good old Vince. My son. Chip off the old block. Only kid in creation who could make a pile of dough by cracking up a car. You’re a good boy, Vince. Any car I ever have, you be sure and borrow it. Borrow all of ’em. Great boy, Vince.”
“Gee,” Vince said. This was going much better than he had expected.
“Vince, I can’t keep all of this. You were the one who swung the deal. You ought to get sort of a commission. You know — a piece of the profit.”
His father was pushing money at him, telling him go out and have himself a big time. Vince walked away shaken, and looked at the money in his hand. He counted it, after awhile, and discovered that there was a hundred and fifty bucks there. Which was quite a bit of money. Even with inflation, and all that, and the shrinking dollar, and the high cost of living, even with all those things to take into consideration, one hundred and fifty bucks was a lot of money.
So here we are, he thought. Back at old Lake Lollapalooza, with a fistful of dough and no place to go. Now just where in hell do we go from here?
The first place he went was to take a shower, because he stank a little, and to change his clothes, because they stank a lot. Then he went down to the lake and slept in the sunshine, which was fun, sort of. Then, because he was hungry, he went and had something to eat. After lunch he went back to the lake, on the prowl again for female flesh. There were plenty of likely-looking prospects, but somehow he couldn’t get interested. He would look at the girls and imagine what they would look like without any clothes on. Then he would imagine how they would be in the hay, and he would decide that it probably wouldn’t be much fun at all.
He was frightened. Maybe he was losing his interest in sex. Maybe he had burned himself out, or something, and he couldn’t get excited by a woman again.
That didn’t seem too likely. But there was something he found out that day, and it became more apparent during the next week. They spent part of the next week there at the lake, and then his father picked up a second-hand car at a good price and they drove back to Modnoc. At Modnoc it became obvious. The domestic life just wasn’t exciting enough. Modnoc and the lake, both at once, were totally lacking in points of interest. He was bored stiff.