We blundered and crashed our way into the shrubbery and came, all at once, to a cleared spot, completely encircled. Jodi whispered “Whew!” and immediately sat down. I flopped down beside her, reached for her, kissed her, and we toppled backward, lying prone on the barren ground.
Active hands, active hands. We were still in our bathing suits, and I had the straps of her suit unhooked and the top half folded down, and I was doing all sorts of interesting things to her bare and beautiful breasts, when the cop suddenly put in his appearance.
He shone a flashlight on us, the blasted Peeping Tom, the beam centered on Jodi’s tanned and pink-tipped breasts and she screamed. I didn’t blame her, I felt like screaming myself.
I was blinded by the light at first, but then I could make out the shadowy form leaning over the bushes on the side opposite the direction of our entry. As I peered trying to make out who or what this was, a voice said, rather gruffly and much too loudly, “What’s going on here?” So I knew that it had to be an officer of the law. Anyone else would have known what was going on there. And had the decency not to interrupt.
The long and the short of it is that Jodi and I — her top half once again barely covered by the bathing suit — were bundled into what Ylicaw apparently considered a prowl car (a dilapidated Chevy, three or four years old) and driven away to what Ylicaw apparently considered a police headquarters (a dilapidated brick structure, perhaps a hundred years old), where a short fat bald man with a red face and a red head threatened us with all sorts of unlikely punishments, grumbled at us, and wrote endlessly on sheet after sheet of paper.
Jodi, wearing only her bathing suit, carried, of course, neither money nor identification. I, however, as supply sergeant of our scouting party, had tucked my wallet into the waist of my bathing suit, and so I had identification and eight dollars. The bald man — a desk sergeant or some such thing, I suppose — took my wallet with claws that snatched, and wrote my name and home address down at least half a dozen times. I gave him a phony name for Jodi — what the name was I have no idea, at this late date — and he lectured and threatened and grumbled at us for a while again, finally releasing us with a warning to leave town at once.
By then, it was midnight. We walked, we hoped, toward the Ylicaw stadium, found it at last and, to our dismay, discovered that the cars were gone. We learned the next day that the others hadn’t even noticed our non-appearance. There were ten of them, all somewhat high, and with that number in that condition it was easy to lose track of two people.
For a few minutes, we didn’t know what to do. My eight dollars wasn’t enough to get us back to campus, not even by bus, assuming we could find a route — changing buses, changing buses, changing buses — that would take us from the nondescript out-of-the-way dinky little hick town of Ylicaw to the equally non-descript out-of-the-way dinky little hick town where the campus was situated. At any rate, we couldn’t afford a bus anyway. And it was too far to walk, of course. And far too late at night to hitchhike, on the secondary and tertiary roads that would be our inevitable route.
Jodi suggested calling someone on campus, preferably one of those who had so unceremoniously just dumped us here, at the edge of beyond. But of course we couldn’t expect them to get back to the dorms before three at the earliest. In the morning, I could call someone to come and get us, but for the moment we were stuck.
The long and short of it was that we were going to have to spend the night in Ylicaw.
We talked around the subject for a few minutes and finally brought it out into the open. We were going to have to spend the night in Ylicaw.
Now, what with piercing flashlights and threatening fat men and being abandoned by our friends and whatnot, we had pretty well lost the fervor that had driven us all day long. We were neither passionate anymore, nor were we coy. And so when we spoke of staying the night here, we discussed the subject with clinical coldness.
We couldn’t very well sleep in the park; neither of us was in a particular hurry to meet the flashlight-bearing patrolman or his red-faced superior again. And, dressed only in bathing suits, carrying no luggage, and with no ring on Jodi’s third-finger-left-hand, staying at a hotel seemed a remote possibility. Nor were we particularly happy about the idea of spending the next nine or ten hours wandering around the streets. We were somewhat tired, from our day’s exertions.
We strolled, talking it over, irritated and worried. We strolled for perhaps fifteen minutes and then we saw the hotel.
It was the western edge of town. Every town in the country has a section like this, on one edge which is neither fringe nor outskirt but seems to be a small hunk of downtown broken off and rolled into a corner. A few seedy-looking stores, some equally seedy offices, and, down at the corner there, a rambling structure two stories high, fronted by a neon sign reading “BAR-HOTEL.”
“I’m going to take a chance,” I said, the minute I saw that sign. “Places like that usually aren’t too particular.”
“I’ll wait here,” she said, tiredly.
And so she waited there. I continued down to the corner and stepped into the bar. A hotel like this, of course, had no lobby.
I made quite a stir in the bar. There were six or seven locals, hulks in hunting jackets, draped over beers at the bar, while another hulk, this one in a filthy white shirt and apron, played bartender in front of them. And here I walked in, a nineteen-year-old kid in a bathing suit.
They watched me, with stoic interest, and I got a bad case of stage fright. I sidled to the bar, the bartender ambled over, and I said — whispered, rather, for I was completely intimidated by the surroundings — “Have you a room?”
“Sure I got rooms,” he said. He looked me up and down, slowly, looked beyond me through the fly-specked window at the empty street, and said, “Single or double?”
My hesitation should have been a dead giveaway. Finally, I said, “Single.”
He didn’t seem to notice the hesitation at all. He simply nodded and told me the charge was three dollars, and that he wanted it in advance, since I had no luggage. I paid him, gratefully, and he came out from behind the bar and led the way to my room.
We went through a door in the side wall, coming into a long narrow hall, with a street door at one end and a flight of stairs at the other. The bartender pointed at the stairs. “Up there,” he said. “First door on your right.” He handed me the key.
I thanked him, in a frightened whisper, and he nodded and started back to his bartending duties, pausing to look at me and point at the street door. “Bring her through there,” he said. “And try to keep it quiet.” Then he went back into the bar, closing the door after him.
After only a few seconds of paralysis, I raced to the street door, opened it, and waved frantically at Jodi. She came down the street at a half-trot, and when she reached me I whispered, “We’ve got a room. It’s okay, the bartender’s on our side.”
“I’ve got to get off my feet,” was all she said.
We hurried upstairs and into our room.
This time, there was no caressing, there was no physical play. We entered the room — a small barren linoleum-floored monstrosity with bed and dresser and chair — and the both of us immediately stripped off our bathing suits and crawled into bed. I switched off the light, a glaring overhead affair, and Jodi and I lay together in the dark, almost touching, but a million miles apart.