A Girl Called Honey

Two

A man AWOL is a man running scared. Richie Parsons was a man AWOL, and he was scared out of his mind. A boy AWOL, really, for Richie Parsons had crept into his eighteenth year only a scant four months ago.

Richie Parsons was running scared. He was used to being scared, he’d been scared of one thing or another as long as he could remember, but he wasn’t used to running. He’d never run before in his life, he’d always crept or sidled or tiptoed. His grammar school teachers had talked about him as “the shy, quiet little boy, the one who always edges along the wall, as though afraid to be seen.” His high school teachers had mentioned him as “the loner, the boy who doesn’t belong to the group, but only creeps around the fringes, watching and silent.” His Tactical Instructor in Air Force boot training had complained about him as “the little sneak with two left feet.” His contemporaries, in grammar school and high school and the Air Force, at all times and all ages, had spoken of him as “the gutless wonder.”

Richie Parsons, eighteen years old, five foot seven-and-one-half inches tall, weighing one hundred thirty-five pounds, with watery eyes of a washed-out blue and Kansas drought blond hair, was everything everyone had ever said about him. He was silent, solitary, sneaky and gutless. And, at the present moment, he was also running and scared.

He’d hated the Air Force. He’d hated it from the minute he’d walked into the recruiting center for his physical and his qualification tests. He’d been one of a group of about fifty young men, thrown into close proximity with them all, and he’d hated that. When he’d tried to move back against the wall, away from the milling jumble, a uniformed sergeant had hollered at him to get back with the group.

They had all been herded into a long, cold, linoleum-floored room, and they had all had to strip, down to their shoes. Then they were fifty chunks of ill-assorted, poorly developed, goose-bump-covered flesh, forming a long line and shambling on by the bored and annoyed doctors, whose examination might have been funny if it hadn’t been so pathetic.

Richie had hoped he would fail the physical. He knew he was weak, he knew he was underweight, and his eyes, without his plastic-rimmed glasses, were almost useless. But every doctor had passed him, even though he had fainted when they took the blood sample from his arm. He had fainted, calling attention to himself, and when he came back to consciousness, lying on the Army cot near the busily stabbing doctor, the rough Army blanket itchy against his nakedness, the whole line was looking at him. Frightened, embarrassed, so nervous he could hardly stand. He had crept back into the line, hoping they would all forget him, look at somebody else for a change, hoping somebody else would faint and draw the crowd’s attention away from him.

He had passed the physical. But he still believed there was a chance he would fail the mental tests, the qualification exams. Until he took them, that is, he believed he might stand a chance of failing them. After all, he had never done very well in school. He had spent seven years getting through the first six grades of grammar school, and four years getting through the three grades of junior high school. He had only gone to senior high school one year, had flunked half the courses, and quit school at seventeen to join the Air Force.

But Mama hadn’t wanted him to join the Air Force. Mama hadn’t wanted Richie to do anything not suited to a boy of ten. So Richie had to wait until his eighteenth birthday, when he could enlist without Mama’s consent.

And already, even before actually enlisting, he hated it, and he hoped he would fail the qualification tests, because he would never have the courage to just turn around and walk out. He would be doing something different, calling attention to himself, and he just couldn’t do it.

Nor could he fail the qualification tests. High score was one hundred. Passing score was ten. If Richie Parsons had been imported just that day from the jungles of the upper Amazon, speaking only Ubu-Ubu and unable to read or write, he still could have passed the Armed Forces Qualification Test. In fact, there were three Puerto Ricans among the fifty enlistees, three Puerto Ricans who spoke only Spanish, and they passed the test.

The test went like this: On the left is a picture of a screwdriver. On the right are four pictures, a wrench, a hammer, a screwdriver, and a pair of pliers. You have to match the picture on the left with the similar picture on the right. If you make a mistake, one of the recruiters will come to you and “explain the instructions” to you again, to make sure you do it right.

Richie tried to fail. He tried his darnedest to fail, and he got a score of forty-eight. He passed with drooping colors.

In his four-month Air Force career, the only thing Richie really came close to flunking was basic training. Left and right were totally mysterious concepts to him. It took him a month to understand that spitting on a shoe doesn’t make it dirty; when done right, spitting on a shoe makes the shoe shinier than ever. During familiarization with the carbine (in which there is no failing score), he plugged virtually every target on the field except his own. He was always at the wrong end of the formation when his group had KP, and he always wound up either in the garbage room or the grease trap. There were seventy-two trainees in his basic training flight, and his Tactical Instructor assured him he was by far the worst of the lot. When they all went to the indoor swimming pool to learn the proper way to jump off a torpedoed ship, in case they ever were onboard a ship and it happened to be torpedoed, Richie Parsons was the only one of the seventy-two basic trainees who had to be dragged, half-drowned, out of the pool.

There is always petty thievery in a barracks containing seventy-two young men. There was petty thievery in Richie Parsons’ barracks, too. The petty thief is usually never discovered. Richie Parsons was never discovered either.

Richie Parsons had never once been discovered, in a lifetime of petty thievery. It had begun with Mama’s purse, from which an occasional nickel or dime filched wasn’t noticed. It had moved on to the grammar school cloakroom, where candy bars and coins, even if their absence were noted, could certainly never be traced. The junior high school locker-room had been next, and the magazine rack at the neighborhood candy store. And in the Air Force it was his barracks-mates’ wall- and foot-lockers.

He was never discovered. He was never even suspected. His perfect record of perfect crime was not the result of any brilliant planning on his part at all. He didn’t plan a thing. His perfect record was caused by equal parts of his own personality and dumb luck. His own personality, because he was such an obvious sneak. No one in the world skulked quite as obviously as Richie Parsons. No one in the world was as obviously incompetent in absolutely everything. A guy who is completely obvious in his sneaking, and completely incompetent in his actions, could never possibly get away with petty thievery. The idea never even occurred to anybody. During the eleven weeks of basic training, almost everybody in the flight was suspected at one time or another, but no one ever suspected clumsy, obvious Richie Parsons.

During the last couple of weeks of basic training, Richie and his fellow-trainees were classified. That is, they were tested, inspected, and assigned their particular Air Force careers, usually on the round-peg-square-hole method. Richie was given an IQ test, and amazed everybody, including himself, by coming up with a score of 134. Apparently, hidden down beneath the layers of confusion and cowardice and inferiority feelings, way down deep inside Richie Parsons, where it was never used, was a mind.

On the basis of this IQ score, and because it was one of the few careers open that week, Richie Parsons was assigned to Personnel Technical School, at Scott Air Force Base, near St. Louis, Missouri. He was given a seven-day leave at home after basic training, where Mama slobbered over him at every opportunity, and he edged along walls more furtively than ever, and then he took the bus and reported to the school squadron at Scott Air Force Base.

The Personnel Technical School was ten weeks long, but Richie Parsons only lasted the first three weeks. Then, all at once, he was AWOL and running scared.

It was the petty thievery again. There were only fifty-six young men in the barracks with Richie at Scott, and the barracks had been given interior partitions, forming cubicles, in each of which slept four men. There were no doors on the cubicles, no way to seal them off from the outside world.

As usual, in an open or semi-open barracks, there was petty thievery. As usual, no one suspected bumbling Richie Parsons, who was having such a terrible time in school, and who still didn’t know his left from his right. No one paid much attention to the fact that most of the thievery was done on weekends, when everybody else was in East St. Louis, and Richie Parsons was practically alone in the squadron area.

Richie Parsons went to St. Louis twice, and East St. Louis once. St. Louis and East St. Louis have virtually the same relationship as Cincinnati and Newport. St. Louis is a clean town, where all the bars close at midnight, and the local churches have free Sunday breakfasts for the soldier boys from the air base and the Army camps that ring that city. East St. Louis is a hell-hole, where the bars never close, the cathouses have everything but neon signs, and the soldier boys work up their appetites for Sunday morning breakfast across the river.

The first time Richie Parsons went to St. Louis, he attended a major league baseball game, which was free to men in uniform. He’d never seen a major league baseball game, and it disappointed him. The second time, he went to the concert at Kiel Auditorium, which was also free to men in uniform. He’d never been to a concert either, and that bored him stiff.

The one time he went to East St. Louis, he was brought along by a few other guys and he was scared out of his wits. While the other guys trooped into the whorehouse, Richie stayed out on the sidewalk, furtive and scared and lonely, the gutless wonder to the end, incapable of either going inside to lose his virginity or going back to the base to save it. A dark-haired, evil-grinning girl in a ground-floor window of the whorehouse kept talking to him, saying, “Wanna make it with me, airman? We go round the world for fifteen, boy. Come on, live a little. Wanna see what I got for you? Hot stuff, airman. I do anything you want, boy, all you has to do is ask.”

Richie made believe he didn’t hear the woman, cooing at him from the window. He walked jerkily back and forth in front of the building, head down, staring hopelessly at the sidewalk and wishing he’d stayed at the base or gone to the USO in St. Louis. But all you could do at the USO was dance with high school girls, and he knew he’d be too afraid to ask a strange girl to dance with him. Besides, he was a terrible dancer; he danced the way he walked, furtively, sneaking and shuffling, round-shouldered.

Nobody noticed that the stealing didn’t happen when Richie Parsons was in town. But everybody noticed the stealing, and people began to get mad about it. The Captain, the commander of the squadron, heard about it, and he called a special formation of that barracks, because there was more filching than usual going on there. “I want you men to find the sneak-thief in your midst,” he told them, passing the buck. “You know the other men in your barracks with you. I want you to find him, and I want you to drag him to my office by the heels. And I won’t raise a fuss if you kick his ass before you bring him to me.”

Everybody liked that. The Captain was all right. Everybody watched everybody else, and nobody trusted anybody.

But still nobody noticed Richie Parsons.

Until that last Saturday night. A six-foot fullback named Tom Greery decided to find out who the hell the dirty crook was. He didn’t go to town that Saturday night, though he would have loved to spend another ten on that red-haired Bobbi in the cathouse on Fourth Street. He stayed in the barracks, lying on the floor under his bed, looking down the row of cubicles at the shoes and bed-legs. The partitions didn’t reach all the way to the floor, and he had a clear view all the way to the end of the barracks.

He spent four hours under the bed, impatiently waiting for something to happen. He kept thinking about red-headed Bobbi, with the pneumatic drill hips, and he kept getting madder and more impatient by the minute.

And finally he saw movement. Way down at the other end of the row of cubicles, a pair of feet came into view. They moved around in that cubicle for a minute, and Greery wondered whether he should make his move yet not. But this might not be the sneak-thief. It might be guy who bunked in that cubicle, and Greery didn’t want his presence to be known too early. Not until the lousy bastard son-of-a-bitch of a thief showed up.

The feet, moving very softly, left that first cubicle, and reappeared in the second. Greery watched, growing more and more sure of his quarry. When the feet moved on to the third cubicle, Greery was positive he had his man. Awkwardly, trying to be absolutely silent, he crawled out from under his bed and tiptoed down the center corridor, past the empty and defenseless cubicles, to the one where his man was waiting. He got to the doorway, looked in, and saw Richie Parsons with both hands in Hank Bassler’s foot-locker.

“All right, you son-of-a-bitch,” said Greery, and Richie leaped around, terror and confusion distorting his face. “Now,” said Greery, “I’m going to kick the hell out of you.”

“Please,” said Richie, but that was all he said. Because Greery was as good as his word. He kicked the hell out of Richie Parsons, and then he dragged him, with a painful grip on Richie’s elbow, out of the barracks and down the row to the Squadron Headquarters building.

But the Captain, too, was in East St. Louis, working up an appetite for Sunday morning. There was no one in HQ but the Charge of Quarters, an unhappy airman given the duty of sitting around the orderly room all Saturday night, in case the phone rang.

Greery shook Richie Parsons by the elbow, and an-nounced to the Charge of Quarters, “I got the bastard. The lousy sneak-thief.”

“This one?” asked the CQ in surprise.

“Caught him red-handed,” said Greery. He spoke in capitals. “Caught Him In The Act!”

“You want me to call the AP’s?” asked the CQ.

“No,” said Greery, considering. “The Captain will want to see this little son-of-a-bitch.” He shook Richie again, and glowered at him. “You hear me, you bastard?” he said. “You are going to go on back to the barracks, and you are going to hit the rack, and you are going to stay there until Monday morning. You hear me?” Richie nodded, quivering.

“Eight o’clock Monday morning,” said Greery, “we are going to go in and see the Captain. You better show up, too. If you don’t, you’re AWOL. You’ve got your ass in a sling as it is, so don’t add AWOL to everything else.”

Richie shook his head, mute and terrified.

Greery dragged the sneak-thief back to the barracks, booted him through the doorway, and went off to town to see the redhead, Bobbi.

Ninety-nine out of a hundred people in Richie Parsons’ position would have stayed and taken their punishment. Richie had only been in the Air Force four months, and he had been well-indoctrinated, as all recruits are, in the horrors of going AWOL. It was, all things considered, a much more serious crime than thievery.

Besides, ninety-nine out of a hundred in Richie Parsons’ position would have realized they could beat the rap without half trying. Monday morning, you go to see the Captain. You’re all bruised up, because Greery kicked the hell out of you. You look scared and remorseful and hang-dog. You throw yourself on the Captain’s mercy. You tell him this is the first time you’ve ever done anything like this, and you don’t know what made you think you could get away with it. You mention — not as an excuse, because you know and admit there isn’t any excuse for your terrible behavior, but just in passing — you mention the fifty-dollar allotment (out of your eighty-four-dollar a month pay) that you are sending home to your widowed mother. The Captain looks at your Service Record and sees that you do have a fifty-dollar allotment made out to Mama, and that your father is dead. He sees how contrite and terrified you are, and he sees that you’ve had the crap kicked out of you. So he gives you a stern chewing-out, and lets you go, with the warning that next time you’ll be court-martialed. You go back to the barracks, where every-body joins in to kick the crap out of you again, and it’s all over and forgotten. And you don’t do any more stealing until you’ve been reassigned somewhere where nobody knows you.

Ninety-nine out of a hundred people could have figured that out, and acted accordingly. Richie Parsons never did go along with the group, not in anything.

Richie Parsons went AWOL.

He packed a small suitcase, stuffing some uniforms and underwear into it, put on civilian slacks and shirt and jacket, and took the base bus to the front gate. East St. Louis was down the road to the left, to the west. Richie headed to the right, to the east.

The only sensible thing he did was bring along a complete uniform. They’d told him in basic training what the difference was between AWOL and Desertion. When you were AWOL, you figured to come back some day. When you Deserted, you planned to never come back. And the evidence that counted was your uniforms. If you threw your uniforms away, or sold them, or pawned them, then you weren’t planning to come back. You were a Deserter. If you held on to your uniforms, you were planning to come back. You were only AWOL. The difference being that Deserter gets a Dishonorable Discharge, and somebody who’s AWOL gets thirty days in the stockade.

Richie Parsons wasn’t planning on coming back to Air Force, not ever. But he remembered the ground rules of the game, so he brought along a complete uniform, just in case he was caught.

He headed east across Illinois, hitchhiking, terrified of cops and Air Police and just about every adult he male saw. He got a few rides, across Illinois and southern Indiana and into Kentucky, and up through the tobacco fields of Kentucky toward the Ohio border and Cincinnati. And one ride he got left him in Newport, Kentucky, at nine o’clock on Monday evening. The old farmer who’d given him the ride pointed out the direction to the bridge for Cincinnati, wished him luck, and putted away down a side street. Richie started walking, lugging his suitcase.

He was running, and he was scared. He didn’t know where to go, he didn’t know what to do. He knew only that he couldn’t go home, to Albany, New York. He knew the Air Police would first look for him there, and they would watch his house. He couldn’t go home.

And he didn’t know anyone at all anywhere else in the world. Billions and billions of people in the world, and he knew only a handful of them. A few relatives and schoolmates in Albany. A few guys who hated him at Scott Air Force Base. He didn’t know anybody at all anywhere else in the whole wide world.

He had about sixty dollars left. He’d gone through the barracks like a vacuum cleaner before he left, grabbing bills, change, rings, watches, electric razors, everything he found that could possibly be turned into cash. He’d had to carry the stuff on him all weekend, but today, Monday, he had pawned his way across Kentucky, leaving one or two pieces of stolen property in every pawnshop he saw. All he had left now were a watch and a high-school ring, and the pawnshops were closed at that hour. They would go tomorrow.

He was hungry. He hadn’t eaten since ten o’clock this morning. He decided to find a diner or something here in Newport, before walking to Cincinnati and hitchhiking farther on to wherever it was he was going.

He was on Third Street, with Schwerner Boulevard just ahead. Down at the corner was a diner, with a modest red neon sign saying, “Third Street Grill.”

He walked faster, feeling the hunger pangs inside him. He got to the diner and pushed on the door, but nothing happened. He looked through, and saw that the diner was all lit up. A skinny, stringy woman in a soiled white apron was behind the counter, and a plump, well-girdled, in-credibly blonde woman was sitting on one of the stools, drinking coffee and eating Danish pastry.

The place was open. That was obvious. But the door was locked, or stuck, or something. Richie looked at the door, trying to figure out how to open it, and saw the bell-button on the right. He’d never been in Newport before. He’d never been much of anywhere before. As far as he knew, you had to ring the bell to get into all diners in Newport. Maybe that was the way they worked it.

He pushed the button.

The plump woman eased herself off the stool and padded to the door, looking heavy and ominous and much too mother-image. Even before she opened the door, Richie Parsons was terrified, his mind a daze.

The woman opened the door, and grinned at him. “The counter’s closed just now,” she said, speaking rapidly in an obviously-routine pattern. “Would you like to go back and see a girl?”

Richie was a blank. The woman had asked him a question, something that had sailed on over his head. He was afraid she suspected him, that she would turn any second and call the police: “We’ve got a Deserter here for you!”

He nodded, jerkily, hoping it was the right answer, hoping his face wasn’t giving him away, hoping he’d get out of this all right, and be able to hurry on out of Newport.

It was the right answer. The woman’s smile broadened, and she stepped back from the doorway, motioning to Richie to come in. He did, and followed her through a door to the right of the counter. She motioned for him to go on back, patted him chummily on the arm, and went away to the front again.

Richie, not knowing what else to do, barely knowing his own name at this point, kept on down the hall, and found himself in a dim-lit parlor, where a girl with reddish-brown hair and a smiling mouth was looking at him from where she sat in an over-stuffed chair near a doorway and a flight of stairs leading up.

The girl got to her feet and walked toward him, smiling, her eyes fastened on his, her body undulating gently as she moved. “Hi,” she murmured. “My name’s Honey.”

And Richie Parsons, numbly gripping the handle of the suitcase, finally realized he was in a whorehouse.

For Honour Mercy Bane, the last two weeks had been busy (though happily, not fruitful) ones. There’d been so much to learn, much more than she’d expected. It was, in many ways, more difficult to be a bad woman than to be a good woman. No good woman ever had to douche herself twenty times a day. No good woman had to keep smiling when her insides felt as though they’d been scraped with sandpaper; and here comes another one. No good woman had to try to be glamorous and desirable while doing the most unglamorous things in the world. Such as accepting money, and even sometimes (how silly could men get?) having to make change. Such as checking a man for external evidence of disease. Such as squatting over an enamel basin.

No good woman had to learn as much about the act of love, and its variations, as a bad woman did. And no good woman was exposed to quite so many variations all in one day.

Not that Honour Mercy Bane was unhappy in her chosen profession. Far from it. There were any number of things she enjoyed about it. First and foremost, of course, she enjoyed men. By the end of an eight-hour stint on her back, her enjoyment was usually on the wane, but she always snapped right back with it the next day, just as fresh and eager as ever.

And she liked the other girls, her coworkers. The other three girls on the night-shift with her were the ones she knew best, of course: Dee and Terri and Joan. Dee was a little difficult to understand, sometimes, with that big vocabulary of hers, but she was really friendly, and gave Honour Mercy a lot of good advice. Dee was a real pro, a girl who’d been working here for almost five years and knew just about everything there was to know about the business. Madge didn’t know it, but Dee was saving up to start a house of her own. She talked with Madge a lot, finding out what it took to become a madam, who had to be paid off, the ins and outs of the trade. And Dee had promised that Honour Mercy could come with her when she set up her own place.

Joan was kind of strange, in a way. She never talked much, never seemed to care to go to the movies in the afternoon with the other girls or do anything, never seemed to care about anything but her eight hours a day at the Third Street Grill. She was friendly, but reserved, saving her smiles for her customers.

Terri was Honour Mercy’s best friend of the bunch. Terri and she enjoyed the same things, loved to go to the matinees at the movie down the block from the hotel, loved to go window-shopping. They could talk together for hours without getting bored. Terri had come from the same kind of town and family as Honour Mercy, and for pretty much the same reason, and that made a bond of understanding between them.

As for Madge, Honour Mercy didn’t see much difference between Madge and her parents back in Coldwater. They both had strict sets of rules and regulations, ironbound values, and absolutely insisted on complete obedience. Madge’s set of rules and values was, of course, quite different from Honour Mercy’s parents’, and a lot easier to conform to, but the similarity was still there.

This was now her second Monday night, and her last night shift for two weeks. Starting tomorrow, she’d be on the noon-to-eight shift, which meant a little less money, but that was all right, because her period of forced inaction would come during that time. It would be better than being inactive while on the night shift, which was what kept happening to Terri.

In the last two weeks, she had come to learn that every man is different, and every man is the same. Every man is different in the preliminaries, and every man is the same in thinking that he is different in the act itself. At least twice a night, someone would come in with a brand-new variation he’d just thought up, and these variations were never brand new at all. Of course, Honour Mercy wouldn’t tell the poor guy he wasn’t as original as he thought he was. After all, it was extra money for extra service, and special tricks rated as extra service.

She had been worried that the other girls would get all the business, because they knew more, but it turned out that she got all the business she could handle. There was something naturally fresh and unspoiled and virginal about her, and a lot of men were attracted to that, liked to have the impression that they were the very first, though of course they had to know better, since she was working here and all. But still, they liked the impression, and she was making darn good money at it.

Of all the men who had come to see her in the last two weeks, this pop-eyed boy with the suitcase was by far the most different and most same one of them all. The fear and indecision and doubt that were, she knew, hidden deep in every man that paid his way here, was right out in the open on this boy’s face. Sameness and difference. It was strange that a thing could be the same and different all at once.

She spoke to him, and he simply looked more pop-eyed than ever. Dee had told her, when a man got stage-fright in the parlor, bring him immediately upstairs. Seeing the bed will snap him out of it, one way or the other. Otherwise, you could waste half an hour with a man who might change his mind at the last minute and run off without paying a cent or doing a thing.

So Honour Mercy took the pop-eyed boy by the elbow, and gently led him upstairs. He followed obediently enough, but he didn’t look any less terrified, no matter how much she smiled at him, or how gently she talked to him.

She led him to her room, empty except for the sheet-covered bed and the stand and the chair and the enamel basin and the sink. And, upon seeing the bed, he froze solid.

“Come on, now, honey,” she said soothingly. “It isn’t as bad as all that. Why, some men even think it’s fun. Specially when I do it with them. You come on, now.”

He stayed frozen.

This was the first time a man had done this, but Honour Mercy was ready for it. Dee had warned her it might happen, and told her the antidote was nudity. She should take off her clothes, in front of him, as provocatively as possible.

She did. She crooned to him, telling him how much fun it would be, and she slipped out of her dress, wriggling her hips to make the dress slide down away from her body. Beneath the dress she wore only bra and panties. A slip was a waste of time, and a girdle would be a horror to remove.

She kicked off her shoes and walked over in front of the boy. “Unsnap me, will you?” she asked him, and turned her back.

She was afraid he’d stay frozen. If he didn’t unsnap her, she didn’t know exactly what she could do next. She waited, her back to him, holding her breath, and all at once she felt his fingers fumbling at the bra strap.

“That’s a good boy, honey,” she said. She turned to face him again, still smiling, and said, “Slip the old bra off me, will you, honey?”

His face was still frozen, but his arms seemed capable of movement. He reached up, gingerly, just barely touching her skin, and slid the bra straps down her arms, releasing the fullness of her breasts.

She cupped her hands under her breasts. “Do you like me?” she asked him. “Am I all right?”

He spoke for the first time, with something more like a frog-croak than a voice. “You’re beautiful,” he croaked, and his face turned red.

“Thank you,” she murmured, and leaned forward to kiss his cheek, rubbing her body against him as she did. He stiffened again, and she swirled away, afraid of rushing him. She slid out of her panties, and walked, hip-rolling, toward him, her arms out to him. “Come on now,” she crooned. “Come on now, honey, come on now.”

His head was shaking back and forth. “I didn’t know—” he started. “I thought — I didn’t know—”

“Come on now, honey,” she whispered, her outstretched arms almost reaching him.

“I can’t!” he cried suddenly, and collapsed at her feet, sitting on the floor and covering his face with his hands.

She stared at him, amazed, and suddenly realized he was crying. A man, and he was crying. It was the strangest thing that ever happened.

She knelt on the floor beside him and put a protective arm around his shoulders. “That’s all right, honey,” she whispered. “That’s all right.”

“I can’t,” he said again, his voice muffled by his hands. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. I’ve never done it, I’ve never, never done it. I don’t know how, I can’t—”

It seemed as though he’d go on that way forever. Honour Mercy interrupted him, saying, “If you never did, honey, how do you know you can’t? There’s a first time for everybody, you know. There was a first time for me.”

Something — her voice, her words, her arm around his shoulder, she wasn’t sure what had done it — something managed to calm him, and he looked at her with the most pathetic and wistful expression she had ever seen. Like a lost puppy, he was.

“I can show you how,” she whispered. “It’ll be all right, you’ll see.”

“I don’t think I can,” he said hopelessly.

“We’ll try,” she told him. “Here, I’ll help you with your clothes.”

Normally, she discouraged a man from undressing completely. It meant more time spent afterward, waiting for him to dress. But this, she knew, was a special case. This was the pop-eyed boy’s first time, and she felt that it was her job to make it as good for him as she possibly could. She didn’t stop to think that she was feeling this way solely because the boy was the first person she’d met in the last two weeks who was even less experienced than she.

She helped him undress, even to his socks, and they both looked at his body. “You see,” he said mournfully. “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can,” she said. “Come on to bed, and we’ll take care of that.”

Obediently, he crawled onto the bed with her, and they lay side by side. She touched him, holding him with one soft hand, and smiled at him. “I’ll make you ready,” she promised him. “Don’t you worry.”

“I want to,” he said. “I really do, you’re beautiful and I wish I could. But I just don’t think I can.”

“Yes, you can. Now, when you go downstairs, if Madge — that’s the heavy woman out front — if she asks you what you had, you tell her it was just a straight trick. That’s ten dollars. You’ve got ten dollars, haven’t you?”

He nodded vigorously.

“All right. You tell her it was just a straight trick.” She smiled again, and squeezed him. “But it’s going to be a lot more than that,” she told him. Dee had told her how to get a man ready, all the different ways, and she did them all. At first, he lay awkwardly on his back, his brow furrowed with doubt and alarm, but gradually he relaxed to the soothing strokes of her voice and hands and lips. And all at once he was ready, and finished. It had happened like that, so fast, and he looked mournful all over again. But she whispered to him, fondled him, assured him would be all right, and soon he was ready again, and this time it lasted. She didn’t have to fake passion this time. Then he was finished again, completely finished this time, and they went through the mechanical aftermaths without losing any of the glow. He paid her the ten dollars, and she took him back downstairs, where she squeezed his hand and said, “You come back again, now, d’you hear?”

“I will,” he said. “I sure will.”