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He glanced at Terry. “That place might not be too bad an idea at that. If we can afford it.”
Billie Jean said, “I got some money of my own. I’ll pay my own way. Just you drive me back to that pool.”
Drunk in his legs, Mitch opened the door and went in and looked around. His eyeballs seemed to scrape the sockets. The motel room was new, impersonal, sparsely filled with cheap blond furniture. It smelled stale. The drowsy desk clerk had explained with huge amusement how the motel, with its enormous carpeted lobby, had been built by gringo speculators who had assurances from the Mafia that Sonora was about to legalize gambling. The motel was to have been a gambling casino—only Sonora hadn’t passed the gambling law. That had been eight or nine years ago. The gringo speculators were still scheming and the Mafia were still making promises and the motel was still losing much money. The clerk had laughed uproariously. He had cast his wizened eye at Billie Jean (Terry had remained outside in the car) and at Mitch, and he had winked and handed over the keys to two rooms. They didn’t have enough money to take three rooms. Besides, it would have attracted attention.
He sat down on the bed and began to unlace his shoes. A shadow filled the door and he looked up to see Terry looking at him with an inquiring glance. He said, “You two take the other room.”
“If you think I’m going to stay in a room with that female Genghis Khan you’re mistaken.”
“Stay here, then. God knows I’m too fagged out to be dangerous.” He smiled weakly. “I feel like a two-dollar clock that somebody forgot to wind up. I don’t know about you but I’m going to wash off some of this dirt before I have to start paying real estate taxes on it.”
He shut himself in the bathroom, turned on the shower and let the water run until the rust cleared out of it, and scrubbed himself almost viciously. Blood on my hands, he thought sardonically, remembering the high-school production of Macbeth. “Is this a Floyd I see before me,” he muttered. He washed out his drip-dry shirt and underwear in the sink and hung them, wrung out and wrinkled, across the shower bar; and went back into the main room with a bath towel wrapped around his midriff. “I feel twenty pounds lighter.”
Terry sat in a rickety chair with loosely crossed legs, her hair standing out in wild disorder, looking rumpled and untidy and too tired to care. For the first time he realized she was as worn and ragged as he was; he had begun to think she was indestructible.
“Go on in and take a shower. Make you feel better.”
“As soon as I get the strength,” she mumbled. She glanced at him; her eyes seemed slightly glazed. “What in the hell are we doing here?”
“Sometimes I forget, myself.”
“We’re bananas,” she said vaguely. “Stark, raving bananas.” She got up and took a moment to steady her balance, and went weaving into the bathroom.
He lay back on the bed and listened to the beat of the shower. Ought to keep an eye on Billie Jean, he thought distantly; and then, To hell with her, let her look out for herself. Everything was so muddled it didn’t really matter any more. The pipedream was just that; ashes, now. Maybe Floyd was around here someplace and maybe he wasn’t—what difference did it make? It would be just as easy to rob Fort Knox. In a dark fugue, a dirge, Mitch closed his eyes. He felt instantly as if he were falling down on layers of misty cushions; he heard himself whimper softly in his half-sleep and then a kind of peace settled on him.
A soft touch on his cheek brought him sharply awake. His eyes flashed open.
Terry, leaning over him, kissed him.
He got up on his elbows. She pushed him back with a slim pink arm coated with a fine gauze of soft pale hairs. She was sitting on the edge of the bed; she drew the towel tighter around her; the tip of her tongue quested her mouth corner. She looked pink and scrubbed. Inside, Mitch felt a visceral quiver, the slow coil and press of wanting her—stupid, he said to himself; but out of his urgency of danger, his sense of hopeless failing, came a blood need that sent spasms into him, beyond reason or sensibility.
Her eyes locked on his; her mouth became soft and lost its smile, her eyes became drowsily heavy. With a finger he brushed back a stray damp lock of her hair. He didn’t want to think beyond this bed, this moment, her. He felt tranquil and sure. He pulled her down, drew her tenderly close; her head moved over his and she made a kitteny little sound in her throat and pressed against him and sucked his lower lip. Her mouth made deeper and deeper demands; he twisted, rolling her, grinding against her. She touched him—hot sensation raced through him. He pulled the towel away and laid his face in the softness of her flesh: her body, which looked like hot marble, was after all the softest of down. She pulled his head tight against her and he felt her stir, her breath coming as quick as his own; they made love with a driving hard urgency, hers matching his own.
When he lay back all the certainty drained out of him as if a plug had been pulled. A knotted muscle rippled at his jaw; he didn’t look at her until she made as if to get up. Then he put out a detaining hand. He pulled her against him and spoke into the turned hollow of her neck:
“I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that—you don’t deserve any part of me. I never wanted to—turn you into something cheap, something to be ashamed of.”
She drew away, saying nothing. After a moment he reached for her hand. It was ice-cold. She said abruptly, “Is that how you feel? Cheap?”
“No—I didn’t mean—”
“You’re a puritan, Mitch. Underneath that hip exterior- is a pious prude. Don’t you think I wanted this as much as you did?”
He studied her gravely—the earnest wide beauty of her eyes, the soft curves of her body. Feeling almost burst his throat: he felt an overwhelming warmth course through him, an unreasoning reaching-out of his heart. “I must have been around Billie Jean too long—she’s the one that makes it seem cheap. I’m sorry I said that—I didn’t mean it. I don’t know what I really meant. Well, look, I never said I wasn’t stupid.”
She lay back and smiled at the ceiling. “Don’t you feel fine?”
They waited in shared nesty silence, not needing to talk, until the grinding tensions began to return, setting his nerves on edge again, dispelling the moment’s grateful lassitude. Fear was a malaise never far from the surface, reminding him biliously that this wasn’t an idyll but only a momentary respite.
He said, “I think you’d better get in touch with your old man. You don’t have to tell him where you are but you ought to let him know you’re all right.”
“Not yet.” She sounded hard; she sat bolt upright and tossed her head, resentful, angry with him for having broken the spell.
He said, “Why?”
“It’s a long story.” She was curt.
“Look, I didn’t mean to step on a sore corn. I’m sorry. But he must be climbing the walls by now.”
“Good—let him.”
“You really hate his guts, don’t you?”
“Yes. No—oh hell, Mitch, I don’t know.” She pulled the towel up over her like a bedsheet and lay back. “Do you really want to hear about me, the sad story of my life?”
“Do you want to tell it?”
“Why not?” she said; and she did.
“My mother is still in the home,” she concluded. “He drove her into that. He drove my brother to suicide. He’s never had time for any of us, Mitch, and that’s why. That’s why I want him to endure the silence, wondering. My silence will hurt him the way his hurt us all. I want him to have plenty of time to think about that.”
He said, “Maybe it’s none of my business, but it seems to me it won’t get your mother out of the sanitarium and it won’t bring your brother back to life and it won’t make you any happier. And I imagine your old man’s too old to be changed by anything you do at this late date—you may hurt him but you won’t change him.”