We pulled off the turnpike just east of Cleveland. I passed them doing seventy and in the rearview I could see the eyes of her dear old father, like a pair of mushrooms grown in somebody’s basement.
The Red Coach Motel was a U-shaped complex, twelve little ticky-tacky boxes, with a VACANCY sign burning vermilion in the night. I plowed in across the gravel and got my room as quickly as possible. I watched from the window as they emerged from the office and hesitated till they spotted the room number. Five down from me on the long arm of the U. They went in. I took a shower.
There I lay on the tacky bed, the phony farm-furniture furnishings all around me. The hurricane lamp, the borax bureau in imitation Quaker, the hooked rugs, the antique hat rack from Sears. I lay with the towel wrapped around my middle, and the light on. My arm thrown over my eyes. I didn’t count time.
Finally, the footsteps, and the door opened.
She didn’t wait for bugles or sightings, for banners unfurled or stately pavannes danced. She came across the room throwing the door closed behind her, and off came the trench coat. She was naked underneath, and she fell down on the bed, right on top of me, one leg dumped over mine, the moist heat of her coming straight through the towel.
And then she moved.
And then she mewled.
And then she attacked.
Once, down in Biminy, I went to a cockfight. It was one of those threepenny operations where the foam and the blood spattered high; and the higher and foamier, the more the swine around the taffrail leered. The winner got the loser down and stripped him, and they watched. Flesh came off bit by bit, all matted with blood-soaked feathers; and the eyes, like little bits of soft jelly, running down off the killer-beak.
She attacked.
Hard inner thighs, locked around my waist. Arms that pressured me tight to her hard little belly. The breasts hanging over me and then suddenly rolling, and the breasts squared flat against my chest. The mouth an open wetness, all good wine and musky. Teeth clenched, breath sucked in heavily, and pinwheels of color that went cascading over me like sparklers from a kid’s dynamite stick on a holiday outing. And that word; yeah,that word, the one with the eff opening, over and over again, and begging. Then a pow!
Another pow!
A string of oil wells gushering, wetness all over everything. “It’s a shame we have to wait for tomorrow night,” I said, drying myself. “Ten doesn’t seem like nearly enough.” She looked at me in the bathroom mirror. “He gets nappy about two in the afternoon. Where on the map does that put us?”
I laid her in Galesburg, Illinois.
I laid her in Omaha, Nebraska.
I laid her twice in Colorado. Sterling and a little town without much of a name near the Grand Canyon.
That old man, that father of hers, half-conscious from driving and sleeping, dogging it behind the wheel while she was getting her backside and her brains banged out in every two-bed twitchery along the Great Divide.
She popped it to me, the big cross-country hustle, in Salt Lake City. The Mormon fathers would have crapped.
I said no, forget it, that wasn’t my bag. So she showed me a new trick. It was very close in there, very strained. I couldn’t remember my answer after a couple of hours.
So here I am now, on this rainy night with the rain coming down like rain never came down before, sending cars off bridges and pedestrians over like nine-pins. Here I am on this high-fatality night in the parking lot of a California motel, loosening the lug nuts on the left front wheel of that blue baby Mustang, so she can ask that old man — who never was, and never had been her father — to drive into the next town across that fatal damned slippery careening sure-death turnpike and get her a certain medicine from a druggist that will stop the sudden cramps she planned to have, way back in Salt Lake City.
Here I am loosening the lugs so her old-man husband — who had heard the same song, so much earlier than I did — can go off and get himself killed and the investigation started that will sure as hell show someone loosened the lugs and I’ll be grabbed, and all that coffee won’t get to the gourmet shops.
Here I am, doing it, all for that hard little ass back there on the motel bed. And what I want to know is, why? Why, dammit, when I know I’m going to get skewered for it, without a prayer in the world? If I knew the answer, I could put down this lug-wrench and get in my truck and cut out of here. But I don’t know why.
And never have.
And never will.
Is it ladies-first in California gas chambers?
Hey … what’s her name?