Belle accepted Charlie’s hankie to wipe her tears and swab her nose, then went on with her tale. She said it was like knowing you’re having a dream but you can’t wake up. She was vaguely aware of time going by but she had no idea how much of it passed before she realized she didn’t have any clothes on and that somebody was “doing it” to her. A young curlyhaired blond guy. She was terrified and wanted to tell him to stop, to let her out of there, but it was like she’d forgotten how to talk. She felt so puny—it was all she could do to raise her hands to his chest, never mind push him away.
She heard music and voices and a low steady whirring. She saw Gladys sprawled in an easy chair by the wall, naked under an open robe and looking like she was drunk. The music was coming from a radio on a little table beside the chair—“I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby.” The whirring came from a movie camera. Young was operating it. Benton was at his side. By now her head was clearing and she felt some of her strength returning, but she still couldn’t push the guy off. He cursed her and pinned her arms over her head.
She heard Young say, “She needs another dose.” He sounded farther away than he looked. Benton said, “In a minute.” He was giving the blond kid directions, telling him to change positions on her, to touch her here, there, do this to her, do that. Finally the blond guy scooted up so that he was kneeling next to her face, pinning one of her arms with his knee and the other with one hand, trying to make her—
She broke off and started crying again. Charlie reached for her but the girl held her off. “No,” she said, “I’m going to tell it, I am. He tried to…he was trying to put his…you know, his thing…to put it in my mouth. So I…I bit him. I did!”
Her face dropped into her hands again and her shoulders shook.
Buck turned around to look at her. In the mirror, Charlie was openmouthed and staring at her too.
“You mean,” Russell said, “you bit the guy’s johnson?”
She kept her face in her hands and nodded. “Hard,” she said, the word muffled.
“Not for long, I bet it wasn’t,” Russell said—and we all busted out laughing. Belle looked up and gaped around at us like we were crazy.
“Oh honey,” Charlie said, and hugged her close.
“I’d say you evened the score pretty good,” Russell said. He put his knees together and made a face of pain.
“You’re damn lucky he didn’t kill you,” Buck said.
“It wasn’t for lack of trying,” she said—and for the first time seemed truly angry. “Next thing I knew I was seeing stars. That son of…that man started—”
“Sonofabitch,” I said. “Say it. It’s what he was.”
She looked at me in the mirror. “That son of a bitch started hitting me with his fists. Benton was hollering for him not to mess me up and trying to get him off me and when he finally did, I up and ran.”
“Right out into the hall,” Buck said, “wearing nothing but that shiner, as I recall.”
She blushed under the bruises and cut her eyes away. Charlie shook her head at Buck.
“Benton the mustache guy we laid out in the hall?” Buck said.
Belle nodded. “Thank you for…getting him away.”
“I only gave him the finishing touches,” Buck said. “Sonny here took the ambition out of him.”
She fixed her green eyes on me in the mirror. “Thank you,” she said.
The countryside expanded to an immensity of craggy rockland and thorny scrub under a cloudless sky beyond measure. We’d seen this West Texas country in photographs and in movieshows without having known its colors. Low blue mountains in the distance, long red mesas, conical purple buttes with peppercorn hides. Pale orange dust devils rising off the flats and swirling for miles before vanishing into the emptiness. Hawks sailing high, arcing over the scrub. Charlie had persuaded Russell to buy her a good pair of binoculars, and they turned out to be so much fun we all wanted a pair of our own. But no other place we stopped at sold them, and so Charlie let us take turns with hers.
All through the day, roadrunners would suddenly appear along the shoulder of the road, scooting with their long bills and tail feathers low to the ground, then veering away into the scrub. In midafternoon we spied a small herd of white-assed antelopes not a quarter-mile from the road and a pair of them butting heads. We pulled off the highway to watch them with the field glasses, and when I cut off the engine you could hear the faint smacking of their tall curved horns. We wished the bucks were distinctly different colors so we could lay bets, but it was impossible to tell them apart at that range.
We were still a couple of hours from Fort Stockton when the engine started to overheat. Luckily we came on a filling station within the next few miles, just beyond the Pecos River. I wheeled into the place with steam billowing from under the hood panels. We’d hoped the problem was nothing more than a ruptured hose but discovered it was a leak in the radiator. The station man said it would have to be soldered but he didn’t have the iron for the job. He did, however, keep a few eggs handy for such emergencies as this and he went inside and got one.
We’d uncapped the radiator to let it steam off and Buck refilled it with water. With the motor idling, the station man broke open the egg and dropped it in the radiator and put the cap back on. As the hot water circulated through the engine it cooked the egg and plugged up the leak. It was an old trick we were all familiar with, one which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. The station man said the makeshift repair should hold us till we got to the Sundowner Motor Camp and Diner about twenty miles down the highway. The place had a garage and a mechanic who lived on the premises.
We bought cold drinks and bags of potato chips. Charlie asked the station man the names of the more common plants around us. He pointed out broad-daggered yucca and skeletal ocotillo and long-stemmed lechugilla, scraggly creosote shrubs, the red tuna of the prickly pear. The tuna had spines so fine you couldn’t see them, and as Russell found out when he touched one, you can’t get those spines out even with tweezers. He’d feel their sting in his finger for days until his body finally absorbed them.
We drove on, everyone wearing dark glasses against the glare of the sun. The heat rose off the road in shimmering waves. Where the highway met the horizon behind us, a constant mirage gleamed like a pool of quicksilver.
The sun was a blinding incandescence at the ridge of the distant mountains when we spotted the Sundowner Motor Camp a mile or so ahead. A little ways beyond it stood a butte shaped exactly like a woman’s breast with an erect nipple.
“You believe that?” Buck said. The likeness was so true we thought it might’ve been sculpted by some half-crazed artist who had devoted years or maybe his whole life to the project.
I parked in front of the camp’s small garage and the mechanic came out and looked things over and said he could easy enough solder the radiator but it would have to wait till first thing in the morning. That was fine with us. Better to rest up tonight and get to Stockton feeling fresh tomorrow. We asked about the butte and he said it was a natural formation locally known as Squaw Tit Peak.
“Only one who can lay claim to that work of art is the Lord Almighty,” he said, “and He didn’t use no tools but wind and sand.”
We took our bags out of the car and went over to the office to check in. The place was run by a married couple, the wife taking care of the desk, the husband doing the cooking in the café. The camp had a dozen cabins and ten of them were available. We took three—one for me and Buck, one for Russell and Charlie, one for Belle. We put the bags in the cabins and then went for supper in the café.