She stopped climbing, turned with one foot on the next stair, and looked down at me. I bet Rusty liked that view.
“So if we’re not here…” I said, and shrugged.
“Just be back in time for supper.”
“What’re we having?” I asked.
“Hamburgers on the grill.” Smiling, she added, “There’ll be enough for your friends if they’d like to join us.”
“That might be neat,” I said.
Rusty, looking embarrassed, shrugged and said, “Thank you. I’ll have to check with my folks, though.”
“We can go over to your place and ask,” I threw in.
“Good idea,” Rusty said.
“I’ll just go ahead and count on the three of you for burgers,” Mom said. “If somebody doesn’t show up, more for the rest of us.”
“Great,” I said.
“Thank you, Mrs. Thompson,” Rusty said.
Around adults, he was always excessively polite. Not unlike Eddie Haskell on Leave it to Beaver, even though he looked more like a teenaged, overweight version of the Beave.
“Come on,” I told him, and led the way into our kitchen. I walked straight to the refrigerator. “Lemonade or Pepsi?” I asked.
“You kidding me? Pepsi.”
I opened the door, pulled out a can and handed it to him.
“Aren’t you having one?” he asked.
“I had a Coke over at Lee’s house.”
He snapped off the ring tab and dropped it into his Pepsi the way he always did. I figured someday he would swallow one of those ring-tabs and choke on it, but I didn’t say anything. I’d already warned him about it often enough so that I suspected he kept on dropping the rings into his cans just to annoy me.
Acting as if I hadn’t even seen him do it, I stepped over to the wall phone.
“What’re you doing?”
“Gonna call Slim, see why she isn’t here yet.”
“Good idea.”
I dialed her house.
As I listened to the ringing, Rusty took a drink of his Pepsi, then went over to the kitchen table and sat on a chair. He looked at me. He raised his eyebrows.
I shook my head.
So far, the phone had jangled seven or eight times. I let it continue to ring in case she was at the other end of her house, or something. I knew the ringing wouldn’t disturb anyone, because nobody lived there except Slim and her mother. And the mother was probably away at work.
After about fifteen rings, I hung up.
“Not home,” I said.
“She’s probably already on her way over….”
Just then came a thump of plumbing, followed by the shhhhh sound of water rushing through the pipes of the house. Mom had started to run her bath water.
Rusty lifted his gaze toward the ceiling—as if hoping to see her.
“Hey,” I said.
He grinned at me. “Maybe Slim’s taking a bath. Has the water running. Can’t hear the phone.”
“Maybe.”
After gulping down some more Pepsi, he suggested, “How about we give her five minutes, then try again?”
“If she’s running bath water, she’ll be in the tub five minutes from now.”
“But she’ll hear the phone,” he explained.
“Not if she’s taking a shower.”
“Girls don’t take showers.”
“Sure they do.”
Leering, Rusty said, “Nah. They just love to lounge in a tub full of sudsy hot water. They do it for hours. By candle light. Sliding a bar of perfumed soap over their bodies.”
“Right,” I said.
“Hey! Just thought of something! How would you like to be Slim’s bar of soap?”
“Get outa here,” I said.
“No, really. Think about it.”
“Shut up.”
“Or would you rather be Lee’s soap? Sliding all over her. Just think of all the places….”
“Knock it off, okay?”
“You’re blushing!”
I turned away from him, picked up the phone and dialed Slim’s number again. This time, I only let it ring twelve times before hanging up.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“Where to?”
“Slim’s house.”
“Want to catch her in the tub?”
“I want to make sure she’s all right.”
“She’s fine.”
“She should’ve been here by now. She’s not taking any bath, not with all those cuts on her back. Maybe a quick shower, but she would’ve been done with that a long time ago and it only takes five minutes to walk here. So where is she?”
“What about our sandwiches?”
“I’m not hungry,” I said. “And you ate a Ding-Dong in the woods.”
“That was hours ago.”
“We’ll get something later. Come on.”
“Shit,” Rusty muttered. He polished off his Pepsi, then scooted back his chair and stood up.
On our way to the front door, I said, “Slim did make it home, didn’t she? You stuck with her the whole way?”
“Almost. We split up at the comer.”
“At the corner?”
“The comer of her block.”
“Great,” I muttered, throwing open the screen door.
Rusty followed me onto the porch and down the stairs.
“So you don’t really know she made it home?”
“Her house was right there.”
“You should’ve walked her to the door.”
“Oh, sure.”
“And even if she made it into her house,” I said, “nobody was there to take care of her. Maybe she got inside and passed out, or something.”
“What was I supposed to do, go in with her? Then you’d be riding my ass for being alone in the house with her.”
I guess he was right about that.
“You could’ve at least made sure she was all right,” I muttered. “That’s all.”
Speaking slowly, in a clipped voice that sounded as if he might be running short of patience, Rusty said, “She told me she’d be fine. She said she didn’t want any help. She told me to go over to your place and she’d be along as soon as she got done bandaging herself up.”
“How was she supposed to put bandages on?” I asked. “The cuts are on her back.”
“Don’t ask me. I’m just telling you what she said.”
I said, “Damn it.” My throat felt tight and achy.
“Don’t worry, Dwight.” He sounded a little concerned, himself. “I’m sure she’s fine.”
Chapter Fourteen
Even though Slim didn’t have a father and her mother worked as a waitress at Steerman’s Steak House, she lived in a better neighborhood than mine and in a better house.
That’s because they inherited the house and some money from Slim’s grandparents.
Slim’s mother, Louise, had grown up in the house and continued to live there even after she got married. This was because she and her husband, a low-life shit named Jimmy Drake, couldn’t afford to move out. At the time of the wedding, she was already pregnant with Frances (Slim), and Jimmy had a lousy job working as a clerk in a shoe store. After Slim was born, Jimmy wouldn’t allow Louise to have a job.
Actually, this wasn’t unusual. Back in those days, most men preferred for their wives to stay home and take care of the family instead of run off to work every day. A lot of women seemed to like it that way, too.
In this case, though, Louise wanted to work. She hated living in her parents’ house. Not because she had problems with them, but because of Jimmy’s behavior. He drank too much. He had a violent nature and a horny nature and he enjoyed having people watch.
Slim never told me all the stuff that went on, but she said enough to give me the general picture.