The Accomplice: The Stairway Press Edition Read online

  “She is a cheap beaner, she is a cheap beaner...” chanted Ginny.

  Beef could not stop laughing.

  “Good night, Bomba,” said Ginny curtly. “Good night, Mrs. Lister.” Then she turned back to Gordon and continued her catalog of Maria’s vices, the most damaging of which Ginny imagined was her unremitting passion for black lovers, one of whom she credited with knocking her up.

  Beef helped Mrs. Lister walk to the door, unable to stifle his laughter. Ginny called after him, “Stay at the Folding Hotel. I’ll be in touch.”

  The last thing he heard before closing the door was Gordon’s cry of pain. Evidently he had cut his finger on one of the blades of the disposal.

  FIVE

  He knew he should get back on the road again, to Oklahoma maybe, and out of old Mother’s problems; but he had been fed so well and had spent the day inside a home, sitting down with folks to eat and play and argue. An element of pride returned to him, a whisper of an earlier security, thought lost forever when his father disappeared and he was set out against the world, as though to find him. He had the curious sense of belonging once again to a family, peculiar as it was, and he was falling into its embrace. His face was still warm where she had kissed him in a spontaneous burst of affection he could never remember receiving from his own mother.

  He walked along Nevada Avenue, quiet except for a score of people leaving the last show at a movie theater. Beef paused to look at the posters and to wonder where the disbanded members of the audience would go now and what they would do when they got there.

  He passed into the seedy end of Nevada, where there was still song, however sad, beckoning from curtained doorways between closed pawnshops and greasy lunch counters, pool halls, and vacant stores.

  He chose a place for no particular reason, moved aside the curtain, and went inside. It was called the Ponderosa Pines, but because of the lack of any exterior or interior theme it could have been called the Sheltering Palms with equal justification. A few cowboys sat at one end of the bar, arguing the virtues and shortcomings of the various General Motors models; a lone old rummy held down the other end of the bar with both his numb elbows; Beef took a seat in the middle. He ordered a Coors from the barmaid and asked her, “What’s a fella do around here?”

  “Everyone he can,” she said without interest.

  One of the cowboys called her “May,” and Beef pointed out that it was the month of his birth, maybe they had something in common.

  “M-A-E,” she spelled; they had nothing in common but the melancholy mode of their lives.

  They rolled dice for the music, she won, Beef slid a quarter across the bar. She took it and came around the bar to the jukebox. Beef liked large asses well enough, but he relished the dainty kind he could, if permitted, grasp with one hand, like Mae’s. Her hair was blond, peroxide, an inch or two longer than the black Dynel wig she presently wore over it. Her skin was not healthy, from too much smoke and darkness. She did not look happy. But what a nice behind in off-white jeans.

  On her way from the jukebox to behind the bar, she was caught at the arm by the old rummy in a fumbling expression of affection. She whipped her arm away so hard he spun off his stool and fell to the floor. She never even looked to see if he had broken anything. The rummy eventually got to his knees and crawled back on his perch. “Goddamn, Mae.” Some barmaid.

  “She swallows it whole,” a fellow barfly would later tell Beef. What? (Understanding something sexual in that.) “Life, she swallows it whole.”

  “I need a place to stay,” Beef told her.

  His full stomach made him feel confident and he was equal to taking long shots.

  “The Folding Hotel,” she recommended. “Right around the corner.”

  “That’s the same place Ginny said.”

  “Well, Ginny was right,” said Mae.

  “Don’t like the sound of it.”

  “There are hotels for flying and hotels for folding.”

  She is a deep person, thought Beef.

  “I got wings a mile long,” he boasted, undaunted, as deep as she.

  She looked at him with something like pity; Beef thought it was her own doughy sadness.

  “Bet you a beer I can make you laugh,” he said.

  Her look warned him not to deal with her humorlessness, but she said, “Go ahead.”

  Beef Buddusky had mastered a wide variety of tricks involving food: he could drive a straw without bending it through a raw potato, he could remove the peel of an apple in one continuous curl, he could make three wieners give you the directions to Biloxi. He could do a whole show around the wonderful egg, infinite in its natural secrets. Every trick had this in common: at some point in it the examples would wind up in Beef’s stomach.

  “You got a raw egg?” he asked Mae.

  She took one out of the refrigerator and gave it to him.

  “Pencil?”

  She handed him a pencil.

  Under cover, he poked a tiny hole in the egg and sucked out its contents. He blew into the hole and sealed it with a bit of wet coaster. He dropped the egg to the bar and sure enough it bounced back into his hand unbroken.

  “That’ll be a dime for the egg and a quarter for the beer you owe me,” said Mae.

  It’s been a good day anyway, he thought. He paid her, and said, “See you around.”

  “Sure.”

  “The name’s Beef.”

  She looked him over. Who the hell cared what his name was?

  A small sign hung over the sidewalk on Nevada Avenue; the actual entrance, a single door, was around the corner on Colorado, as though trying to keep itself a secret. It was actually called the Flouding Hotel. The other name must be a local joke, thought Beef. He lay on his bed and put his hands behind his head. In the john at the end of the hall someone was being terribly sick, too much so for concerns over his own privacy and others’ sensitivities. Beef pushed the retching sound out of his fantasy of Mae above him, astraddle, and he arching his back so high he swept her knees off the bed. She held onto the hair of his chest and challenged him in passionate screams to drive her through the ceiling if he could. In his fantasy he could.

  He would stay in Colorado Springs, at least until something pushed him out of the place, as something had always pushed him out of one place or another.

  SIX

  Beef Buddusky’s vocational demands were very simple. He wanted a job at which he could work two days and honkytonk five.

  Ginny Wynn had called, as promised, and sent him on two job interviews with assurance that in mentioning her name the interview would be over and the job his. Neither boss had ever heard of her, but Beef did not want to insult her with this information when she called to send him on a third interview, this time to a pool maintenance firm. She was unknown to this boss too, who looked at Beef with mild amusement and said, “What can you do, kid?”

  Thirty years old and they were still calling him kid. In answer, Beef went to a nearby pool heater, lifted the huge thing easily, and carried it to the other side of the room.

  The boss smiled and said, “Well, can you paint a house?”

  Beef looked at him for a moment. “Shingle it too,” he said. The old fart.

  “Can you wash a truck?”

  “Wax it too.”

  “Can you suck a tit?”

  “Pussy too,” said Beef, capping the litany and making the old fart laugh as loud as he longed to make Mae laugh.

  “You’re hired! Come by my house tonight, my old lady’ll be ready for you!” cried the boss, wiping his eyes.

  That is how Beef became a swimming pool maintenance man, a line of work he had never done before, but one to which he would adjust quickly.

  He celebrated with dinner alone in an Italian restaurant. At a table close by, three couples clicked their glasses together in a toast. As they drank, Beef picked up his own glass, accidentally clicking it against’ the saltshaker. The couples all looked at him as though in his solitude he were mocking thei
r happiness. The hell with ‘em, thought Beef, but he felt himself shrink to nothing. After dinner, he went to Ginny’s place and watched television with her and Mrs. Lister.

  In the days that followed, he saw Ginny and Mrs. Lister often, and when his schedule allowed it had lunch with them at the Purple Cow or Howard’s or the Colorado Lunch. Ginny always picked up the tab. By no means did he drum himself out of the fraternity of boozers on lower Nevada Avenue, and he continued trying to make Mae laugh, sometimes raising a crooked half grin, which, if it told anything, Beef was unable to decipher. Most of his evenings, however, were spent sitting in either Ginny’s or Mrs. Lister’s apartment, doing the job on their iceboxes, or walking in the evenings to find and hide Gordon’s car. She wanted the car hidden so that Gordon would associate inconvenience with wanting to see Maria.

  Beef had told her the first time in the police department parking lot, “Missus, I want to confess to you that I have got in trouble once for driving other people’s cars.”

  “This is half my car. But I don’t know how to drive, dammit. Never had the patience to learn.”

  Two policemen going into the station waved at them and one called cheerily, “Hello, Mrs. Wynn!”

  Beef turned his face away from them. Ginny returned their wave and shouted, “Hi, honeybunch!”

  The first few times he hid the car, he called Gordon to tell him where it was, but Gordon was so cold, unappreciative, and downright unfriendly that Beef stopped telling him. He wanted to be friends with Gordon. He began to think of him as a bright younger brother whose future (and therein the hopes of the family) was in peril, a typical, family problem affecting all members.

  He liked his job. It was good to work in the air, and he liked the smell of chlorine and the way the sun worked out its routine on the blue water of the pools he serviced. One morning he was skimming a pool, picking up the dead insects floating on it, when the owner’s daughter came out in her bikini and stood next to him. She was perhaps seventeen, no older. “When will it be ready?” she asked, looking at the water. Beef could actually smell her, a heady aroma of fresh, clean skin. “Won’t be long,” he said, trying not to stare at her. Slightly pigeon-toed, she ran back to the house, probably to call her friends. Beef inhaled deeply, capturing the last trace of her odor. I’d like, someday, he thought, to make love to a seventeen-year-old named Maria. I’d like to lie with her and have her tell me she adores me, to be in her and hear her moan, “Fuck me, Beef, fuck me.” He shook the insects out of his wire Mesh and dipped it back into the pool.

  He bought a pair of used trunks for fifty cents at the Goodwill Thrift Shop and after servicing each pool he cannonballed into it, just to stir around the chlorine, he said. The owners usually kept a supply of Coors beer, the champagne of Mexican gardeners and Anglo day workers, and were loose with it on a hot day. The Mexicans laughed at Beef’s large marble-white body, tan only on the face and the arms, like any other short-sleeved laborer.

  Soon Beef tanned evenly and began to look a bit like the athlete he once was.

  Woi Yesus, he told himself, this life here is agreeing with you. You’re comin’ near settlin’ down.

  SEVEN

  Meat loaf was Ginny’s most complicated dish. It had lodged within it four whole hard-boiled eggs, like impacted wisdom teeth. She served it with instant mashed potatoes, canned gravy, and a pre-tossed salad the supermarket sold in cellophane bags. Yet once she had tried to buy a restaurant with her imaginary $50,000. The dinner was so dreadful that even she wouldn’t touch it, which did not stop Beef from having seconds.

  “Sometimes it turns out pretty good,” said Ginny, astounded by Beef’s appetite.

  “Long as it fills the stomach and makes well, long as it fills the stomach. That’s what my mother used to say.”

  “We’ll have to invite her to dinner sometime.”

  “No chance of that,” said Beef, wiping his plate with a crust of bread.

  “Well, we might as well invite somebody. Lately there’s been an empty plate around here.”

  “He probably had to work late again,” said Mrs. Lister, softening up a piece of garlic bread in her coffee.

  “That’s what they always say.”

  “You want to save what’s left for him and keep it in the oven?” asked Beef.

  “No, eat, go ahead, he wouldn’t want it anyway.”

  Beef transferred the heel of meat loaf to his plate, spread a thick layer of mustard on it, and continued eating.

  “Where the hell is he?” asked Ginny.

  He was with Maria in a hotel room in Manitou Springs, trying to open an iced bottle of champagne that had been there for their arrival. Didn’t that prove there was no doubt about his going through with it? Even so, now that it was done he was almost too nervous to pour. They clinked their glasses together and Maria offered a toast: “To the three of us.”

  Gordon did not drink. “That your idea of a joke?” he said.

  “Darling, to you, me, and the baby.”

  “God, Maria, I’m sorry. I thought you meant my mother.”

  They had had a few bad moments on the way to the courthouse, when Maria learned that he had not told his mother they were to be married. She did not want to feel she was sneaking off to her own wedding. They were not sneaking, Gordon told her, they were adults. “Wouldn’t it be nice to think so?” said Maria. She wanted to delay the wedding for a day, but was afraid to offer that postponement to Gordon, for fear she might lose him forever. She looked at the small bouquet he gave her to hold during the ceremony and said, “Are you sure you want to go through with this?”

  “I want to get married. I love you.”

  It was only the second time he had ever told her.

  There was another bad moment, quite a bad moment, when they arrived at the judge’s chambers. Judge Montgomery knew Gordon as a frequent witness in his court and seemed to like him. After meeting Maria and commenting upon what a lucky fella Gordon was and what a handsome couple they were, the judge said to Gordon, “I spoke to the clerk. He will not include your names when he gives his list to the local press.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Maria, but she did too well.

  Judge Montgomery looked from her to Gordon. “Well, it was my understanding that you wanted the wedding kept confidential.”

  Gordon turned to her. “I have to do it my own way, honey. I don’t want her winding up in the hospital again.”

  It was, she knew, her last moment to seize. There were too many things wrong with a day that should be perfect. But Gordon took her arm and she moved with him uneasily into the event she had once longed for.

  Now, in the bridal suite, the evening attained some small festive air, but even that soon began to unravel. They finished the bottle of champagne and ordered another from room service.

  “I hope it will be a boy,” she said. “Don’t you?”

  “Do you know what I felt when you told me you were in trouble?” he asked.

  “Not trapped?”

  “No, not trapped. Proud. I felt pride.”

  She loved him for his pride.

  “It’s a wonderful thing to be able to do, when you examine it,” he said. It would make him like the other men on the force. They would not exclude him now.

  “If it’s a boy, I hope he becomes a doctor,” she said.

  “We’ll let him become what he wants. If he wants to be a cowboy, we’ll let him.”

  “But wouldn’t it be grand to have a doctor in the family? I’d like him to go to school in the East.”

  “Maria, he’s not even born yet and you’re mapping out his life for him.”

  “No, I’m not, I’m just dreaming for him.”

  “That’s how it begins,” he said.

  “I just want him to amount to something,” she said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  The bellboy arrived with the new bottle of champagne. lie opened it for them and filled their glasses. Gordon raised his glass and said, “By God,
I hope it’s a girl”

  Soon they were pleasantly intoxicated. They liked each other that way. Gordon, never very demonstrative, became affectionate under the influence; and she, generally conventional, became more daring. He undressed her to her stockings and then undressed himself. He stopped her from removing the stockings. She was disturbed by male fantasies but agreed to oblige this innocent one. He caressed each nipple in turn with his tongue and then with a mouthful of champagne bathed them. They were exquisitely proportioned but small breasts, and as he pressed his face between them he wished they were large, large enough to hide him. Her skin was olive, flawless and incredibly smooth. He lapped her shoulders, breasts, and belly. “I want you in me,” she whispered, but he crouched over her on his knees, one hand cupped around her breast, his mouth over the nipple. He guided her hand and told her to stroke him. She grew more and more uncomfortable. He directed her to a point just under the glans, the “acorn” he called it, and asked her to concentrate on that small spot. She wanted to please him; she had never heard him moan with such sweet pain, but as his intensity grew hers diminished and she felt too much like an instrument. Couldn’t the touch of her fingertips be matched by a million other women? He told her to use only her little finger and not to stray from that spot below the acorn, and she did as she was told, and the aching that asked for him in her passed.

  Mrs. Lister was nodding off to sleep in the recliner, singing drowsy bits of songs, waiting with Beef and Ginny for Gordon to come home.

  Beef sat in the dimly lit living room gazing at the gift he had given Ginny, which sat on her television set. It was a lamp that heated wax, sending globs of it floating through a liquid solution. He loved it and could watch it without boredom. It had been behind the bar of the Ponderosa Pines, but Beef had made a deal for it. He wanted Ginny to have it, for all her kindnesses.

  She sat beside him on the sofa, snuggled to his side. He put his arm around her shoulders and together they watched the hot wax rise and fall.