Scott Phillips
Sockdolager
From Measures of Poison
1. Upholstery
After cashing the last of the summer’s commission checks I had stopped at home for a shower and a change of clothes, then headed straight for the Royal Crown Club on East Douglas. I sat for a while shooting the bull with old Gleason, the prehistoric bartender, and trying in vain to ignore the oppressive, wet heat of the tail end of a Kansas summer. I was morbidly watching a drop of sweat work its way down Gleason’s piebald temple to his flabby cheek when a woman walked in through the front door and took a seat, her perfunctory show of disinterest given lie to by the fact that she’d planted her nicely upholstered rump a mere two stools to the right of me. The bar was empty except for me and Gleason, and if she didn’t want company she would have taken a table.
Gleason, who was my father’s oldest friend, had been a widower for twenty years, and he stared enraptured and without shame at her knockers; she helpfully pretended not to notice. With his slobbery, loose jowls, his peculiar dusty odor, and earlobes hanging damn near down to his chin, he was old enough to have tended bar before the state outlawed booze, and Kansas had done it thirty years ahead of the rest of the country. It was still contraband in the Sunflower State, despite the passage of the Twentieth Amendment, but it could be had with a minimum of effort if you knew where to look.
The woman shifted her ass on the stool and pulled at the neckline of her thin summer dress, giving her tits a quick bounce for old Gleason. She looked to be about thirty-five, with black hair coiled in a permanent wave, and a little extra baggage at her waist and hips and under her kohl-smeared eyes. None of that bothered me at all, in fact all summer I’d been wondering what it would be like screwing a woman her age. I mean one who liked it, not one of those you hear about who just lies back and goes limp and thinks about something else, waiting for it to be over so she can go back to her bonbons and movie magazines and radio serials. That was too much like the high school girls I’d been nailing since I turned fourteen, girls who traded sex for status, for the sake of being known as the quarterback’s or the student council president’s girl. Nuts to that.
But I couldn’t act on my impulses, despite the many opportunities sales work afforded me. First of all, I was a professional salesman with a code of ethics. Secondly, if such a breach of that code were found out it could have meant the loss of my position, even if it was only a summer job. Thirdly, times were tough, and most of the offers I’d had over the last three summers had involved a quid pro quo, a blow job for a new coffeepot or a plain screw for a cast-iron frying pan. One careworn and brazen mother of five proposed paying me fifty cents on the dollar plus three (3) incidents of sexual intercourse per week all summer for a full set of stainless steel kitchenware, a sort of carnal installment plan that would have wrecked me financially. If I hadn’t had a girlfriend from school to take the physical pressure off a couple of nights a week, I might have been tempted.
I wasn’t on the job now, though, and the lady to my right wasn’t a customer. On top of her fresh permanent and florid perfume I could smell the sauce she’d already downed before coming in, and I calculated I could find out what I wanted to know for the price of two to four more drinks, judging from the thickness of her slur as she’d ordered the first. My wallet had a small fortune in it, thirty-six dollars before I’d started buying drinks, and when she swallowed the last of her drink I pulled out a two-dollar bill and signaled to Gleason.
“Another gimlet for the lady,” I said, and she swiveled the stool around to face me, recrossing her legs as she did so. They were long, and her flimsy red and white dress was short enough to reveal a certain slackness of thigh that I found unexpectedly appealing.
“How genteel,” she said, softening the “g.”
“My pleasure,” I said, raising my own glass. “Wayne Ogden.”
“Mildred Halliburton. Pleased to meet you, Dwayne.” She moved over to the stool next to mine, and when her thigh met my knee she didn’t move it away.
“That’s Wayne.”
She giggled as Gleason served her, his watery blue pupils blatantly following her nipples like twin searchlights. “I’m awfully sorry, Wayne. And what, as they say, is your line?”
“I’m a salesman for the Lanham Company.” At least I had been until two days before; I didn’t think it would help to mention that the next week I would be starting my senior year of high school.
“Oh. Selling pots and pans, door to door?”
“Kitchenware of all kinds.”
“How inneressting,” she slobbered. “I myself am a user of kitchenware.” I braced myself for the inevitable offer of a trade, but she surprised me. “I got all I need, though, so you can forget about that.” She laughed again, and I started to think my one drink might be my ticket into her short-and-silkies.
“I’m not on duty anyway,” I said.
She knocked the drink back in a gulp, then placed her palm flat on her breast. “Oh.” Her eyes were wide open for a second, and then she laughed again, a melodious, low sound. “These drinks are starting to hit me, I think.”
I knocked mine back in the same manner and got straight to business. She now looked like she was a drink or two away from being no fun at all. “How’d you like to join me for a double feature at the Miller?”
She put the tips of the fingers of her left hand on my right knee, and for the first time I noticed her wedding band. “That’s real sweet, Wayne, honey,” she said, and I steeled myself for rejection on the basis of my being half her age. Instead she confirmed my long-held suspicion that sexual transactions between adults were far less complicated than those between people my age: “I got a better idea, though.” She lowered her voice to a hoarse stage whisper. “Why don’t we go back to my house and you can manhandle me some.”
I picked up my change, leaving a healthy tip for Gleason, and helped her off her stool. As we walked toward the door he nodded to me approvingly, with a slightly wistful air.
We jaywalked, or ran, to the other side of the street, and she laughed when she got a good look at my 1916 Hudson Super Six Phaeton.
“Shall we take yours, then?” I asked, careful to hide my irritation. The car had cost me a month’s commissions the year before, and I’d spent hundreds of hours since improving it mechanically and cosmetically, but to some people a twenty-year-old car was junk, no matter its condition.
“I came in a taxicab,” she said. “So unless you want to spring for another one, this’ll do fine. I live in Riverside, on Woodrow, down by the park.”
It was even muggier than when I’d arrived at the Royal Crown, and despite that shower my fresh shirt was already sticking to my back. I noted with pleasure that the same thing was happening to her, the cotton dress clinging to her in dark, wet ovals just above and below the back of her brassiere. She brightened visibly when I lowered the top, and when I pulled out onto Douglas she closed her eyes and sighed at the air flowing over her, drying the sweat on her brow before we’d crossed the drainage canal. An airplane droned overhead, descending, and I looked up out of habit to identify it.