It didn’t just happen, either, that he’d be occupied in the backyard when Frances and Dora, the new maid (over twenty-one and built like a brick… as the guys at Hedblad’s service station would say and Joe wouldn’t, even there), came out to sunbathe by the stone wall — on which a friendly young neighbor, as he might appear to be, though seldom speaking or spoken to, would soon be leaning, with an erection, considering the possibilities in the bodies below and sometimes in the conversation.
When Dora said, as she frequently did, “Rex, he don’t care if I go out with other parties, just so’s I don’t go steady, and I don’t care, just so’s he don’t,” Frances seemed to understand. But Joe wondered about this, since Rex and Dora (she seemed to meet these other parties while working at her other job, relief cashier at the Orpheum and the Palace) were engaged and planning to get married right after Rex had done his hitch. Joe also wondered about the property that Rex and Dora were hoping to buy with his winnings (craps) and her savings, which Joe thought could not amount to much. Dora called the property (“propitty”), which was in “easy reach” of Fort Bone, where Rex was stationed, a roadhouse — something Joe knew little about, only what he’d learned from his reading that summer (Randy had met Diane at a roadhouse, the Red Rooster) and from movies in which babes in high silk hats and black silk tights sold cigarettes to merrymakers at small tables with bed lamps on them. Joe thought that some of the places he heard swing music emanating from on his radio late at night, places like “Frank Dailey’s Meadowbrook” and “the beautiful Glen Island Casino,” might be roadhouses, real ones, but that what Rex and Dora had in mind was only a highway tavern with a name like Dew (or Do) Drop Inn stenciled on a beer sign. Even that was putting it too high, Joe thought when he heard that Rex would tend bar and keep order there while Dora kept order among the hostesses and doubled as one of them on busy nights, at least until the roadhouse got on its feet. “It won’t take long. Rex says we’ll be chargin’ a dollar for a ten-cent bottle of beer, and maybe more after hours. All his old buddies’ll come.”
“Dora!”
“Whut?”
“What you said!”
“Whut?”
“Come!”
At such times they’d laugh, and even when they were lying with their heads down and their bottoms up (how Joe most liked to see them), he’d gaze off in the distance as if not listening to the conversation — he didn’t know whether Frances thought he couldn’t understand it, didn’t care if he could, or was trying to embarrass him. Sometimes she’d suddenly look up at him and say: “You still here?” Once she’d said, but hadn’t looked up at him, fortunately, because it had made him blush:
“Dora, what about this Peeping Tom here?”
“Whut? Who?”
“Joe. He drinks, you know. What if he came in drunk some night?”
“Whut? Where?”
“The roadhouse.”
“Whut if he did? So whut?”
“Dora!”
“Whut? Not old enough to do business with?”
“Dora, he plans to enter the priesthood.”
“Do tell.”
“Maybe,” Joe said, “I’ll just enter the family business.”
“Anytime, kid,” Dora said.
And Frances laughed.
Until that summer, Joe had visited Hedblad’s only as a customer, in the Reo or the Pierce-Arrow, usually in the daytime, but late in June, still wearing his letterman’s sweater, he began what was now his routine in the evening (unless he drove out to the ball park in the Reo), dropping in at the station to talk sports with the night attendants. Dale, the younger one, had gone to Immaculata for a while, but wasn’t the kind of guy Joe had known, not an athlete and not much of anything else, just one of the guys you see around school and then don’t. Rock, over twenty-one, was from Chicago and thought he was so great — claimed that he’d once seen Ralph (not Al) Capone, whom he called Bottles, and that he’d lived near Wrigley Field, Home of the Cubs.
If Rock and Dale were busy, Joe was now trusted to answer the phone, to hand out road maps, to hose down the pavement, and the talk was now less of sports, more of cars and babes. Joe didn’t pretend to know much about cars, couldn’t say what the Reo or the Pierce would do if opened up, and wouldn’t have pretended to know much about babes if it hadn’t been thought (by Dale, not Rock) that he did because he was so blasé. (“You’re Blasé” was one of Joe’s favorite songs.) Dale, if not Rock, was impressed by the neighborhood Joe lived in, the clothes he wore, and probably by the way he’d casually pick up a dirty cartoon book and toss it aside unread, the way he’d casually point out that a car was waiting for service when the talk was about babes, and the way, recently, he’d casually bought (as if they were cigarettes) a pack of “cundrums” at the station. “Ever lose one on the job, Joe?” “Can’t say I have, Dale. You?” Blasé.
So if Joe asked for advice on how to do business with Dora, he had plenty to lose at the station, at least with Dale, who, though, was a very serious guy for a guy with nothing on his mind but cars and babes and wouldn’t laugh at him, as Rock would. But what if Joe asked for advice and Rock found out from Dale? Rock was a crude character. At first he’d called Joe Dash Man—“Hey, Dash Man!”—but now it was Gash Man. Joe, though embarrassed by this, was also flattered by it, as he wasn’t when Rock asked him how often he beat his meat, pulled his pud, or when Rock held his hand out limply, palm up, as though the fingers were broken, and whispered, “Smell my new babe,” which Rock had done nightly until Joe replied, “Sorry, Rock, I’ve got a cold.” Blasé.
Some of the things Joe heard at the station were hard for him to believe. It was a sure sign of recent sexual activity if a babe’s eyes were all black underneath, Dale said, and as often as not, after a babe whose tank he’d filled, oil he’d checked, windshield he’d cleaned, and eyes he’d inspected, drove away, he’d shake his head and say, “Goes another one,” drawing from Joe, at most, a nod. Blasé. According to Rock, when Mr Hedblad was there during the day, hot babes phoned the station, even in the summertime, to say they couldn’t get their car started—that was the code—and off Mr Hedblad (whom Rock called Horse Cock) would go in the wrecker. “You seen him in it, Joe.” “Oh, sure.” Blasé. It was hard for Joe to believe this of Mr Hedblad, an old bald-headed married guy who wore a black leather bow tie. But from other things Joe heard at the station and did not doubt, many more people than he’d imagined — not just young guys like himself, and certainly more babes — were having trouble with the Sixth Commandment.