"Well, it doesn't matter, does it?" I said. I got up and put my tie in order. "Troublewise, they ain't getting no virgin."
"You can say that again," May said. "Run along now, sweetie, and see if you can keep your pants zipped for a whole week."
She had meant it when she said it was curiosity. There really hadn't been any great passion behind her wet kiss. It was habit with her. You don't melt an iceberg with a blowtorch because there just isn't that much juice in a blowtorch.
"See you, May." I started for the door.
"Yes."
That's all she said. Just yes.
3
The big luckboy with the lawyerlike aspect was hovering near the front of the Queen Anne Cottage, like a shark finning around a ship to pick up its garbage. He was looking for another likely group of marks.
I went over and buttonholed him. He was my big and looked handy, so I didn't mind pasting him if I had to.
"You and I need a talk back in the alley," I said.
He started to grin and to reach into his pocket at the same time.
"Hell man," he said, "I didn't know you belonged. Should have guessed though, the way you were in on the know."
He fished out my five and passed it over without hard feelings.
"You were asking for it though, you know," he said.
"That's right, I was," I admitted. "Was it the big guy that I bollixed with on the steps?"
"Hell no. That was just another mark. But Eddy was in the group and got him at the same time." The luckboy chuckled. "I couldn't myself. I had to put Eddy on you, once you'd challenged me."
"That Eddy must be good," I said as I handed the luckboy back his wallet.
He looked at the slab of leather like he had never seen it before. When he put it in his pocket I gave him back his watch.
"Kayriced," he whispered. "A pro of the first water. Look, Thaxton, you're in the wrong racket. You don't want to play house with walnut shells with a natural talent like that! Rob Cochrane practically gives us oldtimers a free hand. Within reason, that is."
"My name, racket and everything," I said. "You know it all already."
"Yeah," he said absently. "Word gets around. But look-"
"Uh-uh," I said. "It ain't in my line. But thanks for the offer."
I went into the Queen Anne and had a steak and showed my card to the cashier and she knocked the bill down to half. She was another one of those nice clean student employees who helped gloss over the fleecing with homey atmosphere, and she looked at me in a way that suggested she was starting to practice the look that had been handed down for thousands of years. But I ignored it, more or less, because I had promised Cochrane.
Anyhow, I had Billie on my mind.
I don't care how you cut it or how sexually degenerate you are, there's no man who can hold more than one thought in his mind at a given moment. That goes for thinking about girls. Sure you can love or want or need two or three all at once, but you can only actually activate the imagery of one at a time.
Try it. Picture yourself buried under a mound of naked girls. Strive as you will you can only imagine what one girl is doing at a time no matter how instantaneous your erotic thoughts fly.
That's how Billie struck me. All the rest of them in this great sensual world were suddenly secondary. It could be that in time, a hell of a lot of time, I would get around to a small percentage of them, but right now, Billie was the sum of the equation. Or something like that.
I wandered about for a couple of hours just to get the lay of the lot, but I got tired of it in a little while. Like most carny folk I don't like people as people but only as marks. Somebody you can trim for a dime or a buck or a bundle. If you break them down and feed them to me one by one, then maybe there will be a few I will like as individuals. But not when they flow past you like bawling cattle. Who needs a stampede?
Along about eleven thirty some hairy-lunged college boy climbed up to the lookout tower in the Viking Camp and blew through a horn that was ten feet long and suspended by rawhide thongs.
Hooo! the horn said in a fat dismal voice. Hooo!_
That meant the marks should start to clear out. Which suited me. I had to find a spot to grab some shuteye.
In my wandering I had seriously eyed Tarzan's tree house. It was summer and the breeze blowing off the sea was mild and this movie-copied replica of Tarzan's home was free. I had even showed my Open-sesame card and gone up in the bamboo-ribbed elevator to look the tree house over.
I had noted a zebra-skin bed with elephant tusks for posts, where Me Tarzan and You Jane had supposedly enjoyed their connubial bliss, and I had had to chuckle when I recalled that sex-frustrated oldmaid librarian in California who had raised such a stink about the Tarzan books simply because she hadn't bothered to read enough of them to learn that Tarzan and Jane had been legally married in the second book.
Anyhow, the connubial jungle bed looked good enough to me. You Jane or no You Jane. So I hung around there until the crowd petered out.
This Tarzan house overlooked the Swamp Ride and they had about nine nice clean kids who ran the boats through the circular swamp. One of them came by me with a polite smile and a face full of freckles.
"All closed up for the night, sir," he said.
I told him my name was Thax and showed him my wonderful Never Never card and that made him more polite than ever.
"I haven't seen you around here, sir. Are you new?"
Well, what are you going to do? If they have to call you sir how can you stop them? Beat 'em on the head with a stick? I smiled at him like foxy grandpa and admitted I was new.
"Well gosh," he said and he actually looked distressed. "I'd show you the Swamp Ride, except that-"
"Except that you have a tasty girl waiting." He probably had his little old grayhaired mother waiting but I wanted to make him feel good.
"Don't worry about it," I said. "It doesn't really matter."
I shooed him off, and when the coast was clear I went up the plank steps that curved around a phony tree like a scutellated snake, and I wobbled over the swaying bamboo footbridge to Tarzan's house.
It was really quite something when you thought about it- the fact that all the leaves on the two trees were fake and that each one had been placed on by hand. But I didn't think too much about it right then. I was deadbeat and that steak in my stomach still needed some repose time to digest in.
It was dark in Tarzan's house, but there were still some arc lights on down in Neverland and the bamboo and thatch walls let in light the way a sieve lets in water. I could see my way to bed.
There was another smaller bed against the other wall. That was Cheeta's bed. The bright little highschool girl in the skimpy leopard skin who was in charge of the tree house had told us so earlier. All the Ma's and Pa's had thought it was a great one. The Pa's had chuckled and the Ma's had said Oooh in that endearing way they have.
I didn't mind sleeping with a monkey, as long as he stayed on his side of the room. I was whipped. I even thought I dreamed that Cheeta swung in through his window and dropped into his bed in the late dark night.
It didn't matter. At least I didn't think it did.
I don't know how long that godawful noise had been going on before it woke me up, but when I finally consciously heard it all I could think of was a thunderstorm.
That's what a gator sounds like when he bellows. When he plants all four stumpy legs in the mud and really let go his voice has a sort of barrr-ooom to it like distant thunder.
It was morning. I looked at my wristwatch. Eight. Then I sat up. What else can you do when someone starts yelling for help?