3. Rum, Sodomy, and the False Eyelash
The evening was cooling off when I crossed the 11th Street Bridge, and I started thinking maybe I could make this a habit with Mildred. She certainly seemed to be enjoying herself, and I could easily afford the price of a motor court cabin a couple of times a week. I’d be doing her a favor as much as myself, if you thought about it, giving her on a year-round basis the hooch and screwing Floyd was failing to provide.
I was en route to a blind pig on 12th and Bitting, on the upper floor of an old carriage house, across the street from a steep slope leading down to the riverbank. This time of year the bars didn’t fill up until the cool of the evening, and the proprietor of the blind pig was so lonely he insisted on giving me a drink on the house before he’d sell me the bottle, just to have someone to talk to. I didn’t mind sticking around, and I figured Mildred’s reaction on my returning later than expected would give me an indication of what to expect if I pursued her any further.
“Guess school must be about to start. You done yet?”
“One more year and I’m free, Norman.”
“What you planning to do after that?”
“I’m going to college. No choice in the matter, my old man’s been socking it away since I was born.”
“Uh-huh. That’s good, Wayne.” He emptied his drink. “You getting any lately?” he asked.
“I’m a door-to-door salesman, Norman,” I said as if that meant something.
He nodded and poured himself another bourbon. “Married women. Got to watch it, there. Good way to get into trouble.”
I agreed with him and asked him the same question.
He held up his right hand and wiggled his fingers. “Since Lisette ran off it’s mostly been Madame Palm and her five daughters.”
“Lisette?”
“My wife. She took off for warmer climes a couple, three years ago. Before you started coming in.”
I wondered what sort of woman she had been. Norman was fifty or so, with hair that always needed cutting. His face seemed perfectly round, an impression accentuated by a pair of round spectacles through which his wide-set eyes gazed sadly at his circumscribed world. In the two years I’d been coming to the blind pig I had never rung the bell without Norman being there to answer, and I knew this was his home as well as his business. If he went anywhere at all, even to get groceries or stamps, I wasn’t aware of it.
I got the bottle, and though he wanted me to stay for a second drink I left. It was starting to get dark, and I was ready to go back and give it to Mildred some more. Hell, I thought, maybe I’ll give Sylvester another brother, even more surprising than the last one.
The sun was all the way down before I got back, and I went in through the front door into the dark living room like the deed had my name on it and not Floyd Halliburton’s. “Darling, I’m home,” I bellowed, and I bounded up the steps three at a time and found her sitting up in bed, naked and crying. The tears had made an awful mess of her eye makeup; one fake lash dangled limp from the corner of her left eye and streaks of black ran right down to her tits, with one rivulet describing the border of her right aureola. The enticingly mature woman I had met at the Royal Crown had transformed somehow into a gorgon, and I wondered about making an excuse and leaving her to her boozing.
“What are you crying for?”
“What the hell you think? Give me that goddamn bottle,” she said, and I handed it to her. She cracked it and took a long, hard swallow, then clumsily tried to place the bottle on the nightstand. It fell over, and a good portion of it spilled out before I could right it. I didn’t want any more myself, but I’d paid for it and her carelessness rankled.
She seemed to feel a little better, and without wiping her face she smiled wickedly at me. “Thanks for getting the booze, sweetheart. You’re a real doll. Now, did you see what I got for you?”
I didn’t and told her so in a curt manner that didn’t seem to put her off at all.
“Went down to the kitchen and got you some of this,” she said, and notwithstanding her grotesque appearance I felt my dick begin to harden again at the sight of the cardboard can of vegetable shortening. She stuck her hand into the thick white mess, and then I saw her red-nailed middle finger disappear briefly into the puckered asterisk of her anus, damned near up to the third knuckle. Extracting it, she gave me a look of such depraved cunning that I had an impulse to bolt for the street, but I managed to ignore it as I vaulted onto the bed, wrestling with my trousers.
My third orgasm of the evening took a while in coming, and halfway through it she reached over clumsily for the bottle, nearly knocking it over again, and I pulled out for a minute to allow her to knock back a decent slug of it. Then I replaced it on the nightstand and started back up. Afterward I washed my dick in the bathtub, despite her whining and pleading that I stay in bed with her. She was afraid I was going to leave, and she was right; in any case, the combined smell of fecal matter, vegetable shortening, and rum needed to be dealt with immediately or I was going to get sick. When I returned she had the bottle in hand again, and rum dribbled from her lips to her chin. For the first time I considered that getting hooked up with an alcoholic woman might be less amusing than I’d always imagined; the girls I knew at school got silly and playful with a little booze in them, but in her cups Mildred put me in mind of an embittered, middle-aged male wino, full of vitriol and self-pity.
She held out the bottle for me and I waved it away. I had my trousers back on again, and she frowned without looking too broken up about it. “Whyncha come back tomorra,” she said. “We can think of some more things to do, I bet.”
“I’ll do that, Mildred,” I said over my shoulder as I skipped down the stairs. “I’ll bring a bottle.”
That brought forth a ghastly cackle, and the question of whether I’d be back or not was very much undecided as I picked Mildred’s discarded unmentionables up off her couch and jammed them into my pants pocket for a souvenir. I stepped out the front door and crossed the yard and driveway to the garage, where I stashed the silk shorts in the glove box of the Super Six. Pulling out onto Woodrow, I thought about stopping over at my girl’s house, but I imagined I could still smell Mildred’s shit on my dick despite my earlier, vigorous ministration of soap and water. Anyway, and this was the curious part, I felt sated for once. A fourth orgasm would have been superfluous, and I realized that if that weren’t so I would have stayed with Mildred, who seemed set to go all night long.
I was headed east on Douglas with no particular destination in mind, and as I neared Hillside, I thought I’d stop at the Royal Crown and let old Gleason know how it had gone. I parked at the curb a few doors down and stepped inside to find seven or eight drinkers at the bar and a dozen or more scattered around the tables, mostly men with a few girlfriends or wives thrown in. I greeted Gleason, who nodded and said, “How’d it go, champ?”
“Aces,” I said. “Six ways from Sunday.”
“You managed to walk out of here with the only unaccompanied female that’s been in all week. Congratulations.”
“She got what she came in for, all right.”
“Uh-huh. You want something to drink?”