I saw him out of the corner of my eye. Didn’t recognize him. At first. But he was familiar. I made myself think. And I knew him.
The drummer.
The drummer in the rock band at Bunny’s the other night. And Peg Bunny Herself Baker’s latest shack-up, if barroom rumor had it right, and what I’d seen of her cow-eyeing him from the sidelines substantiated that rumor.
He was creeping from out the apartment down on the far left corner of the building, bottom floor, over there on the side where the pink Mustang was parked. He had closed the door gently and was moving slowly away, doing the walking-on-eggs bit, carrying tennis shoes in his left hand, holding them gently by his fingertips. He looked like a guy in a cartoon sneaking in late after a night’s drunk, only to be caught and clobbered by a shrew with a rolling pin. Except this guy was sneaking out, not in, and did not fit the henpecked hubby stereotype. His was another stereotype: long blond shaggy shoulder-length hair, stubbly beard, shirtless, faded blue jeans with “LOVE” stitched up the crotch.
I sat there in the car, still slouched, still unseen by this refugee from a panel cartoon. Oh, I thought idiotically, what I’d give for a rolling pin. I watched him near the pink Mustang; he was shooting furtive glances every half-second, moving carefully, the tips of his dirty toes barely touching cement. I didn’t know what this boy was up to, but up to something he was.
He opened the door to the Mustang on the driver’s side and crawled in. Crawled I say because he got down on the floor, on his back, poking fingers up under the dash. I sat and watched and for just a moment I wondered what the fuck the clown was doing and when the moment was up, I knew: he was hot-wiring the car.
He didn’t see me coming. He was on his back still, but his eyes were watching as his hands scurried up under the dash. He had a pocket knife out and open, stripping insulation from wires, and he knew what he was doing but his work was going kind of slow. I knew why. I could smell the liquor and I was standing and he was down there on his back. So he was a drunk sneaking out, if not in, and who but a drunk would steal a pink Mustang, anyway?
I grabbed him by an ankle and pulled him out. He bumped his head several times on several surfaces and by the time he was out onto the cement he was pretty shook up. I said, “Lose your keys?”
He tried to kick me in the face. I didn’t let him. I batted his foot away and he tried to slash me with the knife. I didn’t let him do that, either. I kicked the knife out of his hand and it skid across the cement and into some bushes and I stepped on his throat. Not hard, but with a throat you don’t have to step hard, really. His eyes were round and terrified, saucers full of fear. He tried to say something, but nothing came out; it’s difficult to speak when someone is standing on your throat. So I eased the pressure to hear what he had to say, lifted my foot completely off and he took the opportunity to say, “Mother-bitch-son-of-a-fucker,” which was an indication of how drunk he was.
I yanked him by the arm and he hung sort of in space and then I heard her.
“What the hell’s going on here?” she was saying. Her voice was high-pitched, shrill at the moment, but of course she was screaming, so that was natural.
“Is this your car?” I said, nodding to the Mustang.
“It most certainly is!”
“What about him? Is he yours too?”
“I know him. What are you doing to him?” She came a little closer and said, “Jesus, what a stink. Christ, is he drunk. He must’ve guzzled down every ounce of booze in my apartment.” She wasn’t looking as good as her Playboy picture, or as prick-teasing as her appearance the other night at the club, but Peg or Bunny or whatever she called herself was a beauty, a natural one, and with no makeup and with tousled hair and in an old worn-out blue terrycloth robe that covered her neck to knee, tied round the waist and giving only the slightest hint of the body under there, she was a woman you could screw, not a picture you could masturbate over.
I said, “What I’m doing is stopping him from stealing your car.”
“What?”
“He was hot-wiring it.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“He was hot-wiring it, rigging it so the motor would run without the use of the ignition key.”
“What the hell for?”
“So he could drive it away, I suppose.”
She came over and kicked the guy right along where the word “LOVE” was sewn. He kind of got away from me then, as he wrenched free from me so he could grab himself and roll into a ball.
“Fucking asshole,” she said. “Why didn’t he just steal the keys out of my purse?”
“You got me. Maybe he’s so drunk he’s stupid. Explain why anybody’d pick a pink Mustang to steal in the first place.”
She laughed. Not at all shrill. “Explain why anybody’d own one.”
“I was going to ask you about that.”
“Maybe I’ll tell you. What’s your name?”
“Quarry,” I said. I don’t know why I gave her that name. The moment I said it, I wished I hadn’t.
“Let him go, Quarry.”
“I’m not holding onto him.”
“You know what I mean.”
I said to the guy, “Okay. You can go.”
It took him half a minute to get to his feet. He looked at the girl for a second, then glanced at me, then took off running, in a limping, just-kicked-in-the-balls sort of way. He was up on the corner of Cyprus after a moment. He stopped there and yelled back, “Bitch! Cunt!” and limped quickly out of sight.
“He means you, I guess.”
She grinned. “Well, actually my name’s Peg. Peg Baker. Come on in and have a cup of coffee.”
“I don’t know.”
“What don’t you know?”
“I don’t know if it’s safe to hang out with somebody who drives a pink car and sleeps with something like that.”
“He slept on the couch. That’s where I made him sleep after he couldn’t get it up. You want coffee or don’t you?”
21
I studied her face and wondered how it could look so hard and so young at the same time and she said, “How about a grapefruit?”
I said, “What?”
“A grapefruit. How about a grapefruit.”
She was standing there in the kitchenette, her robe loose enough toward the top for me to get a look at the start of the swell of those Bunny breasts. I sipped my coffee and wondered whether her sexual allusion had been intentional and said, “Yes, I’d like a grapefruit.”
“Maybe it’s a little late for breakfast-type stuff, what the hell time is it, anyway?”
There was a clock above the window over the kitchen sink but it wasn’t running. I checked my watch. “Quarter till ten,” I said.
“I suppose you already had breakfast.”
“No, I just got up a little while ago myself.”
I sat at the table sipping the coffee and watched her as she went to the refrigerator and got out a big yellow softball of a grapefruit and sliced it in half on the counter with a long shiny knife. She sectioned the grapefruit halves and lightly sugared them, served them up in bowls and brought them over. She put one in front of me, leaning over so that I got a good look at what was happening under the robe. I took a bite of grapefruit.
“You keep eating,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
She walked from the kitchenette to a cubbyhole hall and went in a door and closed it after her. I turned to the grapefruit and continued eating, slowly, looking around the room as I did.
The room was horrifying. It made no sense that this supposed sexpot from the pages of Playboy lived here. This was an old woman’s apartment, loaded with memorabilia of decades past. Against the lefthand wall were two oak cabinets that nearly touched the pebbled plaster ceiling, the cabinets crammed full with china and cut glassware. Against the opposite wall was a sofa with doily-pinned arms, as were the arms of the several lounge chairs in the room, and over the sofa was a big mirror with a wooden frame painted gold and carved with cupids and flowers, the mirror reflecting the china cabinets back at themselves. The stucco walls were hung with plates picturing churches and dead presidents. Only the television seemed of this era, a new RCA Color job, but above it, in the corner it took up, was a knickknack rack whose shelves were filled with a salt and pepper shaker collection consisting mostly of little animals and miniature fruit, such as a white and a black lamb, and a pair of plump porcelain strawberries. The front two-thirds of the long room was living room and filled with this chamber of elderly horrors, and the back third was kitchenette. Two waist-high bookcases, with space between to walk through, divided the room. The books in the cases were not the sort you might expect from the girl behind Bunny’s; they ran to Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, a Collier’s Encyclopedia, occasional hardcovers, the raciest of which was Forever Amber, and scattered romance paperbacks. The kitchenette seemed largely spared of the senior-citizen school of interior decorating, outside of the clock above the sink which was a Felix the Cat clock with jeweled eyes and a tick-tocking tail, which was silenced now because the plug was pulled. Also, atop the refrigerator was a cute stuffed toy: a furry pink and black spider about the size of a healthy rat.