IT WAS STRANGE. CORA WAS, HE GUESSED, TEN YEARS OLDER THAN HE was, and her stomach had marks on it that made him guess she must have had a child herself at some time in the past. If so, where was the kid, and where was the kid’s father? He did not ask. The only photograph he saw, in a fancy silver frame on the night table beside her bed, was of a dog, a Yorkshire terrier, he thought it was, wearing a bow around its neck and sitting up on its hind legs and grinning with its tongue out. “That’s Rags,” she said, reaching out a bare arm and picking up the frame. “God, did I love that mutt.” They were sitting on her bed, she at the top end, naked, with a pillow on her lap, and he at the foot, leaning back against the wall, wearing only his shorts and drinking a beer. The bruises on his ankle and knee and all around his rib cage were coming up blue already; he could imagine what his face looked like. The only light was from a shaded lamp on the night table, and in it everything in the room seemed to droop downward, as if the whole place was wilting in the rank heat of the steam radiator humming and hiccuping under the window. He had hardly spoken in the hour he had been here, and then only in a whisper, uneasily aware of his wife’s sleeping presence somewhere close overhead. He could see his nervousness amused Cora Bennett. She watched him now with a faint, skeptical smile through the smoke of her cigarette. Her breasts were flat along their fronts, adroop like everything else in the place; they gleamed, amber-colored in the lamplight; she had pressed his throbbing face between them, and a drop of her sweat had run into his mouth and stung his burst lip. He had never been with a woman as old as she was. There was something excitingly shameful about it; it had been like sleeping with his best friend’s mother, if he’d had a best friend. At the end, when the fierce storm they had whipped up between them was over, she had cradled him against her, nursing his bruised and burning body, as he had sometimes seen Claire hold the child. He could not remember his own mother ever holding him like that, so tenderly.
Then he found himself telling her about his plan, his big plan. He had never spoken of it to anyone else, not even Claire. He sat with his bare back against the bedroom wall, nursing the beer bottle between his knees-the beer was warm by now but he hardly noticed-and laid it all out for her, how he would get hold of a top-class auto, a Caddy or a Lincoln, and set up a limo service. He would borrow the money from old man Crawford, who liked to think of himself as John D. Rockefeller, the help of the workingman; he was sure he would have the loan repaid inside a year, with maybe enough left over to start thinking of a second limo and another driver. In five years there would be a fleet of cars-he wrote the title on the air with a sweep of a flattened palm: Stafford Limo Service, A Dream of a Drive-and he would be sitting behind the wheel of a crimson Spyder 550, driving west. Cora Bennett listened to all this with a thin smile that in any other circumstances would have made him mad. Maybe she thought it was just a truck driver’s dream, but there were things she did not know, things he had not told her-for instance, that Mother Superior’s promise to talk to Josh Crawford about getting him off the trucks and into some other, better-paid work. She had mentioned a taxicab, but he would never drive a lousy cab. All the same, maybe the nun could fix a meeting for him with Josh Crawford. He was sure he could persuade the old man, one way or another, to advance him the cash. They did not know, Sister What’s-her-name or Josh Crawford or any of them, just how much he knew about this thing they had going with the babies. He saw himself at the Crawford place down there in North Scituate, sitting at his ease over a cup of fine tea in a big room with palms and a glass wall, and Josh Crawford before him in his wheelchair with a blanket over his knees, ashen-faced, his hands shaking, as Andy calmly told him how much he had found out about the baby smuggling, and that a check for, say, ten grand would be a great help to him in keeping his mouth shut…
Cora Bennett had moved down in the bed and now her foot came out from under the sheet and started trying to wriggle its way into his shorts. He got up and put on his shirt and pants. He was sitting on the end of the bed pulling on his boots when she scrambled to her knees and waded forward and draped herself over his back, the way Claire liked to do, and he could feel her naked breasts and belly pressing against him. “It’s late,” he said, trying not to sound irritated, which he was. She breathed a hot, low laugh into his ear, her hands reaching down to his crotch. He had to admit, she certainly was something. That thin mouth of hers could do some special things, things no one, certainly not Claire, had ever done for him before. She asked when she would see him again, but he said nothing, only turned and kissed her quickly and stood up, buckling his belt. “So long then, Tex,” she said, with that smile again, kneeling there on the bed naked in the lamplight, with those flat breasts, the nipples dark and shiny like his bruises. Tex, she was calling him. He did not think he liked that. It felt as if she was laughing at him.
He went out by the front door and around by the side of the house-something skittered in the boughs of the walnut tree-and hauled himself up the wooden stairs and through the French door. The place was silent, and still there were no lights burning, he was relieved to see. He was bone tired, and his knee and his cut mouth hurt like hell. He limped into the bedroom, making hardly a sound, but of course Claire woke up. She raised herself on an elbow and peered at the luminous hands of the clock beside her. “It’s late,” she said, “where were you?” and he said “Nowhere,” and she said his voice sounded funny, and when he did not answer she switched on the lamp. When she saw his mouth and the swelling on his cheekbone she jumped up from the bed like she had been scalded, and then there was the usual palaver. What happened? Who did it? Was there a fight? He stood motionless in the middle of the floor, arms hanging and eyes cast down, waiting for her to finish. Did women really feel all this stuff, he wondered, or were the fluttering and squeaking and hand-wringing just their way of getting through the first minute of a crisis while they figured out what to do? She soon calmed down and went off to the bathroom and came back with wads of cotton wool and Lysol or something and warm water in an enameled bowl. She made him sit down on the side of the bed and began dabbing at him with the disinfectant, which stung. He thought of Cora Bennett, lying below in the dull yellow light of the lamp beside her bed, and his anger flared again. He felt weakened, as if he had let her take something away from him, something inside him that no one should ever even be allowed to see. Yet what angered him most was not the memory of what they had done together in her bed and how it might have affected him, but the fact that he had told her his plan for Stafford Limos.
“What happened?” Claire said again, calm now that she had something to be busy at. “Tell me,” she said, almost commanding, “tell me what you were fighting about.”
She was standing over him, pressing a pad of wet cotton against his face; he could feel the blanket warmth of her body. Her hands were capable and strong, surprisingly strong for such a skinny girl. He was being, he realized, mothered, for the second time that night, but how differently this time, with none of Cora’s hot tenderness. Claire put her hand to the back of his head to make him sit steady and pressed the swelling there and he flinched. Suddenly it came to him, out of nowhere, that it was not one of M’Coy’s buddies who had whacked him with a chair leg, but the barman, Pete the goddamned barman, with his baseball bat! He recalled him in the passageway, a tough little harp with a boxer’s nose, leaning over him and asking him if he was okay. Of course, it had to have been him-he would naturally have sided with M’Coy and the others. Andy clenched his fists on his knees. Somehow this betrayal was the thing that made him most angry now, angrier even than he had been when he broke the beer glass and stuck it at M’Coy’s throat. He could just see Pete, the little bastard, sidling out from behind the bar and taking up a batter’s stance, hefting the bat in his hands, waiting for just the right moment to give it to him across the back of the head. Well, he would get his, would Pete; some night at closing time after he had locked up and was stepping out by that steel door into the alley on his way home to his harp wife and his harp kids Andy would be there, waiting for him, with a tire iron-