“Um.”
She ran her fingertips across his upper lip. “Hey! You gone and shaved it off! Now what in the world you look like, I wonder.”
She scrambled away from him. She fumbled with the headboard control panel for a few seconds and then a bright overhead spot blinded him. He shut his eyes tightly, opened them a little bit and squinted at the girl.
She was kneeling, staring down at him, a deeply browned leggy girl. Her brown eyes were huge and round. Her mouth was shaped into a round shocked circle. She had big round brown breasts with a startling white stripe across them. She had a flat tummy, smooth muscles of a swimmer, and under a tight tangled cap of white curls, a lovely, delicate, angelic face, bronzed and innocent.
“Who you, you tow-head son of a bitch!” she yelled. “What kinda smart-ass trick you pulling anyways? I’m gonna rip the face right offen you!” Her fingers curled dangerously.
“Now hold it!”
“For what? What do you think I am anyhow? Where’s Bernie?”
“I don’t know.”
“You were supposed to be him, gawddamn it!”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Anybody pull what you pulled, mister, somebody ought to take a rusty knife to em and plain—”
He sat up and glared at her. “What the hell is the matter with you?” he roared. “I was sound asleep! I didn’t know who you were, and I don’t know who you are. I was so sound asleep I didn’t know even what you were.”
A corner of her mouth twitched. “You could have got the general idea I was a girl.”
“That occurred to me!”
“Don’t you roar at me, you sneaky bassar! You woke up, all right, soon enough, and you could have figured it out, being in Bernie’s bed, maybe some mistake was happening. But did you say a damn word?”
He stared at her. “When? And what was I supposed to say? My God, girl, it’s like a man falling off a building; you’d expect him to tie his shoes and wind his watch on the way down.”
Her mouth twitched again. “Real something, wasn’t it?” Without warning her eyes filled and she put her hands over her face and began to sob like a child. She toppled sideways and lay curled up, shivering and weeping.
“Now what?” he said with exasperation.
“S-S-Sneaky b-b-bassar!”
“Why are you crying?”
“What you d-done to me. In my whole l-life I never had no affair with s-somebody I din even know. Makin’ me feel like a slut girl. Makin’ me feel all cheap and r-r-r-rotten. Oh, oh, oh.”
“You hush, whatever your name is.”
“Doan even know my name!” she wailed. “Bonny Lee Beaumont, gawddamn you!”
“My name is—” He hesitated. “Uh — Kirk Winner.” He pulled her right hand away from her face and grasped it and shook it. “Now we’re introduced. For God’s sake, stop blubbering.”
“But I din know you then!”
“But if you’d known you didn’t know me, then it wouldn’t have happened would it?”
She stopped abruptly and looked up at him, sidelong and wary. “Huh? How does that go?”
“As far as you were concerned, I was Bernie. Right? So there’s no reason to blame yourself, is there?”
She was silent for a moment. Then she sat up, snuffled once, nodded at him. “I guess I got to think on it the way you say. But I broken a secret vow to myself, made when I was fourteen, how never in my whole life would I sack out with no man I din feel love for. Even it’s an accident, it still counts, sort of. I even feel funny you lookin’ at me, and it never bothers me with no man I love. But I get dressed, that’s funnier yet. I doan know what the hell to do, mister. What’s your name again?”
“Kirk Winner.”
“Friend of Bernie’s?”
“A friend of a friend.”
“You down on the television thing?”
“No.”
“Married?”
“No.”
She tilted her head. “You’re not such a bad looking fella anyways.”
“Thanks so much.”
She wrinkled her clear young forehead into a thoughtful scowl. “What bothers me, it was so real fine, Kirk. I mean I had the idea there had to be love, so when it’s fine with a stranger, it makes me out some kind of animal like.”
“You were expressing the love you feel for Bernie. That’s what made it right, Bonny Lee.”
She grinned. “You talk things out good for me. You’ll be having me coming around with all kinds of problems, hey?”
“Any time.”
“I keep wondering now how Bernie would look without the mustache. Gawddamn it, I thought I was going to get to see.”
“How old are you, Bonny Lee?”
“Twenny, practically.”
“Dear God. You live with your folks?”
“My folks! You some kind of a nut or something? My folks, they’re farmin’ on shares, South Carolina, and I was fourteen, went into a beauty contest you were supposed to be sixteen, and I sure God looked sixteen or better. I didn’t do good on the talent part, but the prize I got was one of the judges taken me to New Orleans and I never been back since. Married one time and it was a mess and I shucked him fast, man played clarinet and drank shine. Then I got to singing around, and now I’m working a place, Rio’s, up North Miami, singing and sort of stripping some, but not down to raw, and a bongo thing I do too. But what’s coming on for me good now is a career, and that one marriage was plenty I can tell you, and Bernie he’s been good to me, starting last year. So I have a ball, it saying on my work card I’m twenny-two, and my own little car and all, and friends enough, but Jesus I didn’t count on walking into nothing like this here. I tell you true, it has plain upset the hell out of me, Kirk.”
She swiveled and moved off the bed in a leggy stride, moved out of the bright area of the light. She was in a shadow area then, where the only visible things were the bright hair and the two pale areas of bikini.
“Folks!” she said and snorted. “I swang that hoe enough under that hot sun, and I stayed, I’d be wore down with nakedy kids by now, cause there you don’t have your first young by fifteen, you got to be looking like a toad frog, and I sure didn’t. And don’t.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Took that little judge’s wife seven weeks to hunt him down, and then she bust every dish in the apartment. On him, and me going out the back way with the little bit of money he had left by then. That taking the money is the only thing I ever did shamed me until this night, Kirk.”
Moving slowly, she picked her clothes off the floor, shook them, hung them over an arm of a chair. She came back toward the bed, picked up a white purse and sat on the edge of the bed, toward the foot of the bed, just out of the cone of light, facing him.
“Glaring on you,” she said. She got up and switched on a low lamp in a far corner, turned off the overhead prism and sat on the bed again. She took a small brush out of her purse and brushed the fitted cap of white curls. She was partially silhouetted against the light. She lit two cigarettes and stretched toward him and handed him one.
“Well, hell,” she said wistfully. “You can’t win ’em all.”
He had begun to realize how remarkably good he felt. He wanted to ride a chrome bike down Main Street, no hands, waving all the flags of the Americas. He wanted to get a reasonably good start and run right up the side of a few tall buildings. He could do a tireless handstand and twirl batons with his toes. This was indeed a splendid girl. He was very fond of her.
“What’s so gawddamn funny?” she demanded.
“Sorry. I didn’t realize I was laughing.”