The Accomplice: The Stairway Press Edition Page 7

  “Big old snuggle bear, aren’t you?” she said.

  “It’s nice like this, ain’t?”

  “I know it hasn’t been that long, but seems like you’ve always been here, Bomba.”

  “Don’t it?”

  She was as peaceful as he had ever seen her. Usually she was riding her nerves, unable to relax.

  “Have you given any thought to the fifty-thousand-dollar proposition I told you about?”

  “No, I sure haven’t”

  She sighed. “Maybe in the long run that’s best.”

  “I kinda figured that out for myself.”

  “It’s hard not to hate yourself sometimes.”

  “It’s often I can’t stand my own company,” said Beef.

  “Wish I was twenty years younger.”

  “I used to wish I was an old man,” he said, “and have it all over with. I have lots of strange wishes, dependin’ on the mood I’m in.”

  “You know what did when I was fourteen?” she asked.

  “I sure don’t.”

  “You want to tike a guess?”

  Beef tried to think of the really notable things a girl of fourteen could do. “You got married,” he said.

  “Right! You ever hear of such a thing?”

  “Oh, yes, Ginny Mom.”

  “Wanted to get out of the crummy house. A man twenty years older than me. But I’m not ashamed of it. All my brothers and sisters left home early too, trying to better ourselves, and today I’m the only one has a pot to peel potatoes in.”

  “You done all right for yourself, lady.”

  “He left me, that man, got tired of me and went, and for a time I was on my ownie. I sure didn’t like that, I’m A person can’t tolerate being alone, and then along came Gordon’s father. You won’t believe it, knowing Gordie, but his father was a slack-jaw weakling. I think I married him ‘cause I felt sorry for him. He’d follow anything that’d call his name.”

  “I always felt sorry for that type of individual,” said Beef. “It ain’t an easy life.”

  “By the time I had Gordie, I couldn’t stand the man. But, God, I was dependent on him. There I was, a young mother with no skills to speak of. Made me hate him more, and of course he took off too. I saw the necessity of another husband and quick, so I was already hating my third husband before I ever met him. Poor guy, he didn’t stand a chance. I guess from the time Gordie was born it was pretty much him and me. My brothers and sisters gave birth to waitresses and baby-sitters, soldiers and taxicab drivers…”

  Her voice choked up. Beef wondered what his own mother had to say about him: that he was thirty and still lost, bouncing from one town to another, all across the country, telling lies to himself and joining in the lies of others like him, no prospects for the future, no benefits from the past.

  “Ain’t nothing in the world the equal of a mother’s love for her child,” said Beef.

  “I’ll forsake everything for Gordie, and he knows it. I love you, boy, but I’d sell you down the river in the blink of an eye for my son.”

  “I’d expect you to.”

  “But what can you do against pretty young women?”

  “Not much. The world belongs to pretty young women.”

  “Not all of it, Bomba, not my piece of it.”

  Mrs. Lister had fallen fast asleep. The kitchen clock could be heard ticking. Beef felt a wonderful sense of relaxation and oneness with himself.

  “It’s almost midnight,” she said. Then, bitterly, “Where can he be?”

  A few minutes after midnight, Ginny took her customary Seconals and asked Beef to see Mrs. Lister to her own apartment. From there he hurried to the Ponderosa Pines for his fill before last call.

  At the Ponderosa Pines that night of the clandestine wedding Beef sat at one end of the bar and followed Mae’s lethargic moves with a longing almost tangible. He watched her put the glasses over the wash brush and jerk them slowly up and down, creating a suction. Beef got an erection. She knew he was watching, she knew what he was feeling, she knew men, if nothing else. She began to tantalize him purposely, taking a kosher dill out of the gallon jug and sucking the end of it sensually before biting through. It’s a curse to be a man and ugly as a bus depot, thought Beef.

  A cowboy at the other end of the bar sang along with the jukebox. “I ain’t gonna take a thing I didn’t bring. I’m leavin’ with my saddle, you can stay here with your ring...”

  “I sure get tired of all this gunsmoke and horseshit,” said Mae directly to Beef.

  “I can’t get you out of my head. I dream about you,” said Beef. He had been honest with himself all evening.

  She almost smiled, biting down hard on the kosher dill.

  “If I knew how to lie and cheat my way into your pants, why, I’d do it, Mae. I got it real bad.”

  She looked at the clock and announced, “Last call for alcohol.” Beef ordered two. He finished the first by the time the last barfly left and Mae locked the door behind him.

  “You want me to drink up and go?” asked Beef.

  “Take your time.” She turned out every light, leaving on only the beer signs. In the darkened room, the blue streams became deeper; the hunter almost alive, the geese higher, the bright rising and falling spots more brilliant and hypnotic.

  She stood at the end of the bar, at his right elbow, and helped herself to a swig of his beer. He took a swig after her, flattening his tongue where her lips had been. She leaned on the bar and laid her hand on his leg. She took another swig of beer, she patiently fussed with his zipper, he sucked in his belly to help. His penis sprang out like a paper snake out of a tin can. ‘He stood up and moved her through the square of moonlight from the skylight to the darkness of the corridor that led to the rear entrance. She hiked up her skirt, he pulled off her pants and let his trousers drop to his ankles. He lifted her a foot from the floor and pinned her to the wall. Her legs came around him and squeezed like a good memory. He put his beery mouth over hers.

  To make this good thing last longer he studied the unfinished wall behind her, the smallest fibers of it. He tried to think of the technical word for this cheap construction material, the same his father and he had once put up in their cellar, trying to make it into more than a cellar. “A rumpus room” they had in mind, an unclear plan for middle-class leisure.

  Mae stuck her tongue into his ear and cried urgently, “Give honey, you big goddamn grasshopper, you! Give honey!”

  What was the name of that material? They beat the wall with her behind. Boom! Boom! Boom! The whole of the Ponderosa Pines seemed to shake.

  “Give honey!” she pleaded.

  Beef rose to his toes, an instant away from that sweet release, still focusing on the wall in front of him. What was that stuff? He remembered as they crashed through it.

  “Beaver board!” he screamed as he came, and he fell like an oak.

  Crashing through the wall, Mae clinging to him in a scissors grip, he was amazed at how long it took them to reach the floor. He had time to picture his father’s hammer on the floor of their unfinished “rumpus room,” covered with a layer of dust.

  Finally they landed and lay panting on the ladies’ room floor, pieces of the wall around them, a broken mirror under them. Beef slid the pieces of mirror away. They caught and reflected some moonlight. Beef looked around at where he and Mae were lying and said, “Well, when you gotta go, you gotta go.”

  At last Mae laughed, all the way from Oklahoma somewhere, showing her snaggletooth and saying, “You’re a real hard come, ain’t you?”

  EIGHT

  Later, on his bed at the Folding Hotel, Beef crossed his hands over his hairy stomach and said aloud, “I sure love that little broad.”

  She became part of the comfort and confidence and warmth and passion that had befallen him since arriving at the Springs, all made possible because he wisely would not go on down the road to a place called Pueblo. For the first time in a few years he felt proud of himself and pleased with himse
lf. He was close to putting a lot of bad times behind him. He wanted to tell Ginny and Mrs. Lister. He wondered if telling her about Mae could possibly make her angry.

  How could it, he reasoned on his way to her place. He was not her son, after all. He was free to involve himself with anyone he pleased. Still, he could easily withhold the subject of Mae and Ginny would probably never be the wiser, unless she should happen to see them together somewhere, and then he might have some explaining to do. Ginny was a friend, though, and Beef felt very much in debt and considered her privileged to his confidences, since she had shared so many of her own with him. Who knows, she and Mae might hit it off and Mae could join their little family. Beef would like that.

  He found her and Mrs. Lister sitting, each with a shoe box full of snapshots of Gordie on her lap, each with a pair of scissors with which they laboriously cut the pictures into tiny pieces. He reached into the box on Mrs. Lister’s lap and helped himself to a handful of the pictures. Some of them included a youthful Ginny Wynn. He was struck by how beautiful she had been. She had had a long, smooth, elegant neck.

  “Once a picture’s gone,” he said, “it’s gone forever.”

  “It will satisfy me,” she answered distantly.

  Beef concluded that Gordon must have done something terrible to deserve this symbolic torture. Married, he thought, he must have married the girl. Would he at last have a look at Maria, now that Gordon had married her? He wanted to see her, to see what it was she had that kindled such a rage in Ginny.

  Beef looked at a picture of Gordon as a toddler holding Ginny’s hand. His other arm was raised, holding someone else’s hand. The rest of the picture, all but that self-existing hand holding Gordon’s, had already been neatly trimmed away before ever being put to rest in the shoe box. His father, Beef believed. The picture filled him with sadness. Both of them had been cut away from their fathers, falling to mothers who failed them.

  He tossed the pictures back into Mrs. Lister’s shoe box. “Any milk in the reefer?” he asked.

  Ginny did not acknowledge. He went to the refrigerator and took out a quart of milk. Mrs. Lister called, “There’s pepperoni.” Ginny always tried to keep a supply especially for him. He cut six inches off the pepperoni and chewed away at it as he walked back into the living room. He drank the milk from the bottle.

  He sat on the floor in front of Ginny and said, “Ginny Mom, you ain’t gonna believe what’s happened to me. I think I...”

  “Bomba, Bomba,” said Ginny, “my boy’s gone off and got married on me. He’ll quit his classes now, watch.”

  “Well, it was bound to happen,” said Beef begrudgingly. He wanted to get his own news out first, before he lost heart.

  “Can I stand by and allow it?”

  “I don’t see you can do much else.”

  “I had a feeling, a mother’s feeling, that told me.”

  “Woman’s intuition,” said Beef.

  “It’s not a picnic to be a mother nowadays, not with the type of girls they have running free, coming in from other countries. God bless me. Bomba, I have this peculiar feeling he did it just to show off. They start by trying to bite off your tit for you.”

  “And after all those phone calls,” said Mrs. Lister. “You’d think she’d be too scared.”

  “It’s the Latin blood,” said Ginny. She turned to Beef. “I called her office, and one of the clerks there told me. That’s the announcement for the mother of the groom.” She started to cry. “A Mexican!”

  Beef laid the stick of pepperoni across the mouth of the milk bottle and took her shaking body into his arms.

  “There, there,” he cooed. “It’ll all come out in the wash.”

  “Ginny got her new phone number and address out of the clerk,” giggled Mrs. Lister. “Told her she was a friend of hers from Mexico and wanted to buy silverware for her wedding present. Told her she already knew Maria’s pattern.” That bit of invention appealed to Mrs. Lister’s sense of humor.

  “What’re you gonna need with her phone number, address?” asked Beef.

  “I’ll think of something,” she said, working out of his embrace.

  He saw her place the scissors directly between Gordon’s legs and slice quickly but deliberately. She put one side on top of the other and cut off the two halves of his head.

  Gordon did not come home for dinner and this, she told them, was expected. She had visions of him dining with the slut in some expensive restaurant. She could see the people around them, watching and saying, “Look at the new girl with Officer Wynn. Where is his mother?”

  His mother was literally not in the picture. But pictures can be altered so easily, with a scissors.

  They walked to the Purple Cow Drive-In Restaurant for dinner. They ate there often, a lumbering oaf and two little old ladies, incongruous to the setting, a mottled neon haven for small-town hustlers and nymphos, dragsters and bikers, teen-age rocks and their chicks, snooker shooters and pan players. The place was known as a good bet for a job in order to strike for parole. Winos drying out became fry cooks there. Women just passing through town went there and became waitresses or carhops until something else got shaking. The shortest tenure of record belonged to a strawberry blonde named June, who after forty-five minutes on the job was seen getting into a de-chromed and lowered ‘49 Merc with Texas plates, never to be seen again.

  Ginny held four envelopes of sugar in her hand and tore off the tops as though they were one and poured the sugar into her coffee as though it were one envelope instead of four. She stirred the coffee, sipped it, and made a face. “They probably never clean the pot,” she said. She looked into her cloudy coffee for, a moment, then raised her head erect, laid both palms flat on the table, and said, “Bomba, how would you like to earn three thousand dollars?”

  “I got no objection.”

  “Are you willing to listen?”

  “Like a bartender on a slow afternoon. I do that good.”

  “That girl wouldn’t let my son alone.”

  “Ginny Mom, I never knew a man yet couldn’t let a woman know he don’t want her around anymore. There’s bound to be a little yelling and maybe a beer bottle up alongside somebody’s head, but, hell...”

  “I want you to get rid of her.”

  “Really?” said Mrs. Lister.

  “Like I say, let old Gordie stand back a few steps and tell her to pack up her gear and icdo domu spac. But if he had a mind to do that, he wouldn’t of married her.”

  “I want you to kill her.”

  “You shouldn’t even kid around about stuff like that,” said Beef, looking nervously around him to see if anyone had heard. “If I thought you was serious, I’d slide right out of this booth and you’d never see me again. You been good to me, missus, a mother prit’ near, but I ain’t gonna total no girl I don’t even know and wind up strapped in some goddamn gas chamber.”

  “I got pills and acid and all to do it. You can use Gordie’s car.”

  “We’re in a public place, Ginny, watch what the hell you’re sayin’!”

  “Three thousand when the deed is done.”

  “I didn’t hear a word of it. As far as I’m concerned I come here to chop wood but you’re cookin’ on gas.”

  He slid out of the booth and left the Purple Cow.

  Ginny paid the bill and the two ladies hurried down the street after him. When they finally caught up with him, Mrs. Lister grabbed his arm for support. She was panting like a finished parade.

  “No it was and no it is,” said Beef to Ginny.

  “Slow down, for God’s sake,” she said.

  “I’m a fun-lovin’ sort, Ginny Mom. I believe we’re put here to enjoy ourselves.”

  “Somehow, Bomba, you don’t strike me as the life of the party.”

  “I’ve had some unhappiness, but, goddamn, I never hurt nobody.”

  “All right, all right, forget I mentioned it. God forbid you should burst a blood vessel or something.”

  “If you can’t hav
e fun outa life, what’s it for?”

  “You’re too late with that question.”

  “I respect your problem, but you gotta respect my way of thinkin’.”

  “All right, forget it. It never happened.”

  “You were only kiddin’, huh?” asked Beef. “Tryin’ to get a rise outa old Bomba, huh?”

  “Only kidding, yes,” she said. Her mind was already on something else.

  “That’ll be the day,” said Mrs. Lister, in a voice the others could not hear.

  Back in Ginny’s apartment, he tried to calm her, unsuccessfully. Nothing could put her at her peace. Like a hyperactive child, she could not sit still. Her hands were constantly slapping, picking, shaking. He was unable to tell her about Mae.

  He turned on the eleven o’clock news, but no one could watch it.

  “Look,” said Ginny.

  Neither Beef nor Mrs. Lister knew where to look.

  “Look, there’s another way out of this,” she said.

  “Another way out of what?” asked Beef.

  “We might be able to settle this without killing that bitch.”

  “Now you’re talkin’,” said Beef. “You can move most people out of the way without killin’ ‘em.”

  “What do you want to do?” asked Mrs. Lister conspiratorially. “I’ll help.”

  “I know I can count on you, dearie. But will you help us, Bomba?”

  “Depends.”

  “I’ve been going about this the wrong way.”

  “I can’t help agreein’ to that,” said Beef.

  “Our only problem,” said Ginny, “is bringing Gordie back to his senses. This girl has him bewitched. He doesn’t love her. All I have to do is show him that.”

  “How’re you going to do that, Ginny?” asked Mrs. Lister.

  “I’m going to take him back to Denver. We could return to those early struggling years.”

  “But you always told me those years were hard and awful,” said Mrs. Lister.

  “It will give him a chance to come back to his senses,” said Ginny, ignoring her.