They headed back to Ohio the next afternoon. He drove and she sat on the pillows they had stolen from the motel room. He found that he had a hard time looking her in the eye, and they barely said two words to each other all the way across the desert and into Colorado. As they started up into the Rockies, the bleeding finally stopped and she told him that she would rather drive than sit there thinking about being raped by that midget’s doped-up slave while all those men cracked jokes about her. When she got behind the wheel, she lit a cigarette and turned the radio on. They were down to their last four dollars. A couple of hours later, they picked up a man smelling of gin thumbing his way back to his mother’s house in Omaha. He told them that he had lost everything, including his car, in a whorehouse — just a house trailer, really, with three broads working shifts, an aunt and her two nieces — out in the sand north of Reno. “Pussy,” the man said. “It’s always been a problem for me.”
“So it’s like some kind of sickness gets hold of you?” Carl said.
“Buddy, you sound like that head doctor I had to talk to one time.” They rode along in silence for a few minutes, then the man leaned forward and laid his arms casually on the top of the front seat. He offered them a drink from a flask, but neither of them were in the mood for a party. Carl opened up the dash to take the camera out. He was thinking that he might as well take some nature shots. Good chance he would never see these mountains again. “This your wife?” the man asked, after he scooted back again in his seat.
“Yeah,” Carl said.
“I’ll tell you what, friend. I don’t know what your situation is, but I’ll give you twenty bucks for a quickie with her. To tell you the truth, I don’t think I can last to Omaha.”
“That’s it,” Sandy said. She hit the brakes and flipped the turn signal on. “I’ve had my fill of motherfuckers like you.”
Carl glanced down at the pistol in the glove box half hid under a map. “Wait a minute,” he said to Sandy in a low voice. He turned and looked at the man, nice clothes, black hair, olive complexion, high cheekbones. A hint of cologne mixed with the smell of the gin. “I thought you lost all your money.”
“Well, I did, all I had anyway, but I called Mom when I got to Vegas. She wouldn’t buy me another set of wheels this time, but she did send me a few dollars to get home on. She’s good about stuff like that.”
“How about fifty?” Carl said. “You got that much?”
“Carl!” Sandy screeched. She was on the verge of telling him that he could get his fucking ass out, too, when she saw him slip the gun out of the dash. She turned her eyes back to the road and brought the car back up to cruising speed.
“Boy, I don’t know,” the man said, scratching his chin. “Sure, I got it, but fifty bucks oughta buy some fireworks, you know what I mean? You care to throw in some extras?”
“Sure, anything you want,” Carl said, his mouth turning dry as his heart started beating faster. “We’ll just have to find somewhere private to pull over.” He sucked in his gut and slid the gun down in his pants.
A week later, when he finally got up the nerve to develop the photographs he’d taken that day, Carl knew with the first glimpse, with a certainty that he had never felt before, that the beginning of his life’s work was staring back at him in that shallow pan of fixer. Though it hurt him to see Sandy once again with her arms wrapped around the whore hound’s neck in the throes of her first real orgasm, he knew he would never be able to stop. And the humiliation he had felt in California? He vowed that would never happen again. The next summer they went out on their first hunt.
The waitress waited until Carl lit the cigar, then asked, “So what do you do out there?”
“I’m a photographer. Movie stars mostly.”
“Really? You ever took any pictures of Tab Hunter?”
“No, can’t say that I have,” Carl said, “but I bet he’d be a nice one to work with.”
27
WITHIN A FEW DAYS, Carl was a regular at the White Cow. It felt good to be out among people again after spending so much of the winter holed up in the apartment. When the waitress asked him when he was heading back to California, he told her that he had decided to stay put for a while, take a break from all the Hollywood crap. One evening he was sitting at the counter when a couple of men who looked to be in their sixties pulled up in a long black El Dorado. They parked just a few feet from the front door and strutted inside. One was dressed in a Western outfit trimmed in sparkling sequins. His potbelly pushed against a belt buckle designed to look like a Winchester rifle, and he walked bowlegged, as if, Carl thought, he had either just gotten off a mighty wide horse or was hiding a cucumber up his ass. The other wore a dark blue suit, decorated across the front with various badges and patriotic ribbons, and a square VFW cap at a jaunty angle. Both of their faces were flushed red with strong drink and arrogance. Carl recognized the cowboy from the newspaper, a Republican loudmouth on the city council, always complaining at the monthly meetings about the degenerate, wide-open sex scene in the Meade city park. Though Carl had driven through there a hundred times at night, the hottest thing he’d ever encountered was a couple of gawky teenagers attempting a kiss in front of the little World War II memorial.
The two men sat down in a booth and ordered coffee. After the waitress served them, they began talking about a man with long hair they had seen walking down the sidewalk on their way over from the American Legion. “Never thought I’d see anything like that around here,” the suit said.
“You just wait,” the cowboy said. “If something ain’t done, they’ll be thick as fleas on a monkey’s ass within a year or two.” He took a sip of his coffee. “I got a niece lives in New York City, and that boy of hers looks just like a girl, hair clear down over his ears. I keep telling her, you send him to me, I’ll straighten his ass out, but she won’t do it. Says I’d be too rough on him.”
They lowered their voices a bit, but Carl could still hear them talking about the way they used to hang niggers, how someone needed to start lynching again, even if it was goddamn hard work, but with the longhairs this time. “Stretch a few of their dirty necks,” the cowboy said. “That will wake ’em up, by God. At least keep ’em out of these parts.”
Carl could smell their aftershave clear across the diner. He stared at the sugar bowl in front of him on the counter and tried to imagine their lives, the irrevocable steps they had taken to get to where they were on this cold, dark night in Meade, Ohio. It was electric, the sensation that went through him just then, the awareness he had of his own short time on this earth and what he had done with it, and these two old fucks and their connection to it all. It was the same sort of feeling he got with the models. They had chosen one ride or one direction over another, and they had ended up in his and Sandy’s car. Could he explain it? No, he couldn’t explain it, but he sure as hell could feel it. The mystery, that’s all Carl could ever say. Tomorrow, he knew, it wouldn’t mean anything. The feeling would be gone until the next time. Then he heard water running in the sink back in the kitchen, and the clear image of a soggy grave he’d once dug on a starry night rose to the surface of his memory — he’d dug in a wet spot, and a half-moon, high in the sky and as white as new snow, had bobbed and settled on top of the water seeping into the bottom of the hole and he had never seen anything so beautiful — and he tried to hold on to the image because he hadn’t thought about it for a while, but the old men’s voices broke in again and disturbed his peace.