Chip Harrison Scores Again

Three

The port authority bus terminal is a well-lighted and spacious modern building, and if you walk through it quickly in the daytime it just looks like a bank or an airport. But at night it’s depressing. All bus stations are. It’s the people. Half of them are only there because they don’t have enough money to fly or take a train, and the other half are there because it’s reasonably warm and the benches are reasonably comfortable and you can steal a nap there and other people will think maybe you’re waiting for a bus, and will leave you alone. Sooner or later, though, some uniformed old fart will ask you for a ticket, and when you don’t have one they tell you to go away.

I didn’t have any trouble cashing the ticket. I was in line behind a fat woman whose luggage was a matched set of shopping bags. She wanted to go someplace in Missouri, and she and the clerk had a hell of a job working out the details. This gave me time to figure out various reasons why I was cashing the ticket, but when my turn came I just pushed the ticket through the window and asked for cash. The clerk looked at it as if he suspected I was part of a gang of counterfeiters specializing in old bus tickets. But it passed.

You know, if it hadn’t, I really would have been irritated. I mean, the ticket would at least have gotten me Mary Beth.

Instead it got me thirty-seven dollars and eighty-three cents. I went to one of the benches and sat down and counted the money over and over again. Then I put different amounts in different pockets. I was somehow more conscious of pickpockets than ever before. It occurred to me that I could have kept the wallet, and if I had then I’d now have something to put the money in.

Thirty-seven dollars and eighty-three cents. I sat there with different portions of the money in different pockets for a long time, thinking of one thing and another. Then I went to the john. The free stall was in use so I had to use one of the pay toilets, but the attendant wasn’t there so I crawled under it. (Under the door. Not under the toilet.)

There should be a law against pay toilets.

I did some more thinking, in addition to doing what I had gone there to do, and I bought a comb for a quarter and combed my hair. The comb lost a couple teeth in the process. It was really shoddy compared to the one I’d thrown away.

Then I went back to the ticket window. “Bordentown, South Carolina,” I said. “One way.”

The clerk started hunting for the Bordentown tickets, then did an elaborate double take. “You were just here a minute ago,” he said.

“Well, maybe fifteen minutes.”

“You cashed in a ticket. A Bordentown ticket.”

“I know.”

“And now you want to buy it back?”

“That was a Boston-to-Bordentown ticket,” I said. “What I want is a New York-to-Bordentown ticket”

“Whyntcha just trade it in the first place and save me the aggravation?”

“I didn’t realize that I wanted to go to Bordentown.”

“What are you, a wise guy?”

“Can’t I just buy a ticket?”

“You people. I don’t know. Think everybody’s got all the time in the world.”

The fare from New York to Bordentown was thirty-three dollars and four cents, and I had to go through various pockets until I got that sum together. While I did this, he talked to himself. He wouldn’t tell me when the next bus left. I had to use one of the house phones and call Information. They told me there was a bus leaving in two and a half hours. It made express stops from New York to Raleigh, then made local stops all the way to Miami. It would put me in Bordentown in a little over forty hours.

The only thing I knew about Bordentown was that it was in South Carolina, and that somebody named Mary Beth Hawkins probably lived there once. And that I evidently wanted to go there.

I had four dollars and seventy-nine cents left. That was a lot less than thirty-three dollars and four cents, but it was a lot more than a quarter, so I was ahead of the game and playing on the house’s money.

I was also starving. I found a lunch counter in the building and had two hamburgers and an order of french fries and three cups of coffee. It certainly wasn’t a macrobiotic meal. It wasn’t even very good, but that didn’t seem to matter. I ate everything but the napkin.

Why Bordentown?

That’s a good question. I don’t know if I can find an answer that’s as good as the question.

See, what happened was that I sat, first on the bench and then on the toilet, and I thought about the money and tried to think of something to do with it. And none of the things that involved staying in New York seemed like very good ideas, and I came to the conclusion that I had bombed out in New York and it was time to go somewhere else. Nothing against the city. Any city or town is as good as or as bad as what you’re doing and the people you’re doing it with. And for one reason or another I had never quite managed to get it together in New York. There were some good times in among the bad times, and I was glad I had come, but it was time to split.

(I have this tendency to go someplace else whenever I don’t like where I am. I never really had a home that I can remember. When I was with my parents we would stay at a different expensive hotel in a different city every couple of months, and when I was at school it was a different boarding school every year, and the pattern hasn’t changed since. Sometimes I think it’s weakness of character to pick up and run whenever things turn sour. But why stay where you don’t want to be? For Pete’s sake, there’s a whole world out there. I suppose there are things to be said for settling down and sinking roots, but someone else will have to say them.)

The thing is, it’s not enough to have someplace to go away from. You also need someplace to go away to. And I didn’t have one. There were places I had already been, but I couldn’t see any point in going back to any of them. Chicago was vaguely possible, I had had reasonably good times there, but I thought about that wind coming off Lake Michigan and schussing through the Loop and imagined what that wind would be like in January, and that ruled out Chicago. Besides, it was too big, it would be too much like what I was leaving.

There was a girl named Hallie with whom I had traded virginities on the very best night of my life. She was in college in Wisconsin. I had sent her a postcard before coming to New York, and since then I had written her three or four stupid letters but never mailed any of them, maybe because I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to say to her. I decided that it would be nice to see Hallie again, and then I decided it would be even nicer to see Hallie when I was a little clearer on how I felt about her and what I wanted to do about it. It would also be nicer if I could see her with clean clothes on me and money in my pocket and a little firmer sense of direction.

And then it came to me.

Bordentown.

Maybe you’ve noticed that when you’ve gone without sleep and food for a long time, and without really talking to anybody, you start to get messages from God. That’s a little less crazy than it sounds. What happens is that a lot of minor things start taking on tremendous significance, and you start reading vital messages into them.

Like the whole bit with the wallet. And what was in the wallet — a picture of Mary Beth Hawkins and a bus ticket. And the first person I met after that was also named Mary Beth, which may be less remarkable in the cold light of dispassionate analysis but which seemed extraordinary at the time. The way all these things seemed to add up was that it was meant for me to get that bus ticket. It was destiny. And for me to cash in the ticket and spend the money was spitting in destiny’s face. Obviously the thing to do with that ticket was to use it and go where it went.

Which still gave me two choices, actually. Boston or Bordentown. But I never seriously considered Boston. It would have been copping out. I mean, the ticket was about eighty-five percent New York-to-Bordentown and fifteen percent New York-to-Boston.

Besides, Boston would be as cold as New York, maybe even colder. And Bordentown was in South Carolina — I knew that much about it, dammit. It would be warm. And it would be a small town, it would have to be fairly small or I probably would have heard of it at one time or another. So if I was looking for a change from New York, I really didn’t have to look any farther.

For Pete’s sake, I’ve gone lots of places on less reason than that.

The bus ride started off horrible. Then it became very boring for a while, and then it got wonderful.

The horrible part was brief, from New York to Philadelphia. It was horrible because there were four men two rows back drinking wine and singing, and a third of the way to Philadelphia one of them threw up, and a few miles later so did the rest of them. It was horrible because the woman across the aisle from me was carrying a baby who cried all the way from New York to Philadelphia. The woman didn’t seem to mind. Me, I minded. It was horrible because the man in the seat next to me was fat enough to take up all of his seat and a good deal of mine as well. He didn’t use Dial, and I don’t guess he cared if anybody else did, either.

The four drunks got off in Trenton. The woman with the brat got off in Philadelphia. The smelly fat man was riding clear down to Miami, but when we got to Philadelphia I was able to change my seat. So that ended the horrible part.

The boring part was just boring. Nothing much to be said about it, really. I took crumby naps and woke up and went to the john and came back and sat down and looked out the window and waited for something to happen. Now and then the bus stopped somewhere and we all got off it and went to a terrible lunch counter, and I would have a Coke and a package of those little orange crackers with cheese and peanut butter between them.

(I knew a speed freak in New York who lived on nothing but Cokes and those sandwich crackers. Three packs of the crackers a day and six Cokes. He weighed about eighty-three pounds and the circles under his eyes looked as though they’d been painted on with shoe polish. “Speed doesn’t kill,” he told me. “That’s the lie they feed you. It’s the malnutrition that does you in. I figure I’ve got six months before my liver goes. Once your liver goes you’ve had it.”

(“Then why don’t you start eating right?”

(“Priorities, man. I need to speed to get my head together. Once my head is together I’ll kick the speed and stabilize myself with tranks and downs, and then I’ll get into eating right. High-protein, fertile eggs, the whole organic foods trip. And I want to get into bodybuilding. I’ve been getting all these catalogues of barbell equipment. But first I have to get my head together. I figure I can get my head together in six months. I figure my liver can make it that long.”

(Sure.)

The wonderful part, the part that was not at all horrible or boring, started sometime in the late afternoon and somewhere south of Washington. I don’t know the time because I wasn’t wearing a watch, and I don’t know the name of the town or even the state because I wasn’t paying all that much attention to where we were when she joined us. We stopped at some station and I didn’t feel like another Coke so I stayed in my seat with my eyes closed. Then just as the bus was starting up a voice said, “Pardon me?” and I looked up and there she was.

She was a little thing, with yellow hair to her shoulders and large round brown eyes and a pointed chin. She was wearing a plaid mini skirt that got halfway to her knee and a cardigan sweater the color of her hair. She had a coat over one arm and was carrying a little suitcase.

At first glance she looked about sixteen. When you looked a little closer at her eyes and the corners of her mouth you could add maybe ten years to that. Say twenty-five.

“Could y’all tell me if this seat is taken?”

It wasn’t. Neither were half the seats on the bus, which had emptied out a good deal in Washington. She could have had a whole double seat to herself, actually.

“And could I ask you to help me with this suitcase here?”

It was small and light. I put it in the overhead rack, and then she took a book and a package of cigarettes from her coat pocket and gave me the coat, and I put it alongside the suitcase. I sat down again and she sat down next to me. She didn’t have any makeup on except maybe a trace of lipstick, but she was wearing quite a bit of perfume. She smelled very nice, actually. It made me think of Mary Beth, the bus-ticket hooker. Mary Beth had been wearing perfume and hadn’t smelled very terrific at all. There’s perfume and there’s perfume.

“Well, now! I thought we might have rain, but it’s turned a nice day after all, hasn’t it?”

“Just so there’s no snow.”

“You from up No’th?”

“I’m not exactly from anywhere,” I said. “I was in New York for the past few months.”

“And what place do you call home?”

“Wherever I am.”

Her face lit up. “Now that’s exciting,” she said. What she said was excitin’, actually, but I hate it when writers spell everything phonetically to get across the fact that somebody has an accent. I’ll just say now that she had an accent thicker than spoonbread and you can bear that in mind when you run her dialogue through your head.

“When you don’t have one home in particular, why, it’s like you’re never away! Me, I’m an old homebody. My aunt has the pleurisy and I was up doing for her for onto ten days, but except when she has it bad I never get away from home.”

“Where’s home?”

“Georgia. Mud Kettle, Georgia. Ever been there?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s not that you missed much.” This I believed. The name wasn’t Mud Kettle, by the way, but I looked up the town she mentioned in an atlas just now and the population is less than twenty-five hundred, so I changed the name to Mud Kettle because otherwise somebody could probably figure out who she was, and it might shake up the old folks at home. “Not missing much at all. Well, here I am, little old Willie Em Weeks from Mud Kettle, G-A. Lordy!”

“What does the M stand for?” I mean, girls don’t usually announce middle initials.

“Emily,” she said.

“Emily starts with an E,” I said.

“Doesn’t stand for, it’s short for! You silly. Willamina Emily Weeks, and isn’t that a handle.”

Then she waited expectantly, and it occurred to me to tell her my name. She had never met anyone named Chip before, and I had never met any Willie Em, and we got what conversational mileage we could out of that. Which wasn’t much.

Then she said, “Chip? Would you mind awfully if I asked you a favor? Would you change seats with me?”

If she wanted to sit by a window, there were windows all over the place she could pick. I didn’t tell her this. I changed seats with her, and our bodies bumped a little in passing. Nothing fantastic, just enough to put ideas in my head.

Which was ridiculous, I thought, sitting down again. She would be fun to talk to, someone to break the monotony of the trip, but that was obviously as far as it was going to go. I was getting off in South Carolina and she was riding clear on to Georgia. And anyway she was married, there was a ring on her finger. And besides that we were on a bus, for Pete’s sake, in the middle of the afternoon, and all you can do on a bus is sweat and sleep, with sweating considerably more likely than sleeping.

We talked a little more. She asked if I minded if she smoked, and I said I didn’t, and she lit a cigarette and opened her book and I settled back in my seat and closed my eyes. I was just as glad she was reading because she wasn’t that outstanding to talk to. It was nice watching her and listening to her voice, a very pleasant voice, but it was very hard to concentrate on what she was saying.

So I thought I would doze off again into that sort of half sleep that’s possible on a bus, but I couldn’t manage it. It was her, the perfume, the presence. I was aware of her. Somehow I was more aware of her now when she wasn’t talking and I wasn’t looking at her than I had been before.

After a while she said, “Chip? Are you asleep?”

“No.”

“Could you do me a favor?”

She was very large on favors. I opened my eyes. “Sure,” I said.

She handed me her book, her finger indicating a place on the page. “Starting right here,” she said. “Could you just read that scene?”

“Out loud?”

“No, silly.”

I took the book and started to read, and the first thing I did was start blinking furiously. The book was called either The Swinging Swappers or The Swapping Swingers. It hardly matters which. And the scene she had given me involved six people in a sexual tangle, with everybody doing everything to everybody else, and all in the crudest and most explicit sort of writing. Absolute hard-core pornography. The scene went on for God knows how many pages. I stopped after two and a half of them, and it was just gathering momentum.

And so was I.

I don’t know whether I actually blush or not, but if I do, I was doing it then. I closed the book and turned very very slowly to look at her. The expression on her face surprised me. Very serious and matter-of-fact, with a little vertical furrow in the center of her forehead.

“Did you read it?”

“Uh, a couple of pages, yeah.”

“You read fast. Could y’all tell me something?”

“What?”

“Was that there an erotic scene? Was it exciting?”

“Yes.”

“It was?”

“Uh, yeah. Yes, I would say that you would have to call that an erotic scene. Yes.”

Her face relaxed and she gave a little sigh. “Well, that’s good news,” she said. “See, I thought maybe it was just the bus that was getting to me. I always get so randy on buses. I swear I get like a mare in heat just from riding on a bus. I don’t rightly know what it is that does it. The rhythm of the wheels?”

“Maybe.”

“You think that could be it?”

“I suppose.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “I can feel it right now,” she said. “The rhythm of the wheels on my backside.”

From her tone of voice we could have been discussing the weather. Think it’ll rain? Oh, most likely not. Course we’re due for a little rain. Yes, and I always get so randy on buses. Christ almighty.

She said, “Feel my heart, Chip,” and she took my hand and placed it on her left breast.

“Can you feel it?”

I couldn’t feel her heart beat, perhaps because my own had suddenly grown so loud. I could certainly feel her breast, though. I felt it through the thicknesses of sweater and bra, felt the nipple poking against my palm.

I cupped her breast, stroked with my fingers. It was as warm and soft as a little bird. I kept the little bird in my hand and dreamed of giving her two in the bush.

Our mouths found one another. She tasted of cigarettes. I don’t like to smoke but I like that taste on a girl’s mouth. We slid into an all-out kiss right off the bat. She was very goddamned good at kissing. We kissed for miles, and I held her breast as if I was afraid it would fly away if I let it go. I wasn’t about to take any chances.

When we broke the kiss she sagged back in her seat with her eyes closed and her jaw slack. Her breathing was really ragged. I was a little shook up myself but she was way out ahead of me.

Finally she said, “Get my coat, Chip.”

“You can’t leave now. I mean, the least you have to do is wait until the bus stops.”

“Leave? Who’s leaving?”

“Not me. I thought you wanted your coat.”

She sighed and tsssted at me. “Don’t you have no sense?” she whispered. “To put over us. To neck under. So nobody sees us.”

“Oh.”

“Because I’m not about to stop now. Chip, I told you how I get on buses, and then reading that scene with them… and then you messing around with me, I mean I’m not about to stop now.”

“Fine by me.”

“Now fetch my coat.”

I fetched her coat and draped it over us. While I was getting it I checked out the other people in the area. If any of them were checking us out in return they were doing a good job of hiding it. The seats across the aisle were empty, and most of our other neighbors were asleep.

As soon as I was seated beside her she grabbed my hand and tucked it up under her mini skirt. She was wearing panties. Very moist panties.

I said, “Willie Em—”

“Shhhh!” she whispered. “No more talking, Chip. Oh, Lord have mercy, I’m so hot I could bum! But don’t talk, don’t say anything. Just get me off. God, please get me off—”

The thing is, she kept getting off and climbing right back on again. There was only so much we could do. I played with her and that was about the extent of it. She was unbelievably responsive. Each orgasm just seemed to make her that much more anxious for the next one.

This went on for maybe half an hour, and I could see where it was destined to go on all the way to Bordentown unless I happened to run out of fingers somewhere along the way.

And I was going to get off the bus in Bordentown with testicles the size of basketballs, and they were going to hurt like hell, and that was just too damned bad because I had already decided it was worth it.

Maybe she wasn’t the only one who got horny on buses. Maybe it was the other people around, or maybe it was the build-up and letdown I’d gotten earlier from Mary Beth, or maybe it was just Willamina Emily Weeks herself, but whatever it was, it was worth six Waterloos and an Armageddon. I mean it was very goddamned exciting, believe me.

God knows how many little orgasms she had. I couldn’t keep score. But she finally got the big one and collapsed like a tubercular lung.

In less than two minutes we pulled off the highway and stopped for a ten-minute rest break in Erewhon, North Carolina.

I swear she planned it that way.

She said, “Get my suitcase down, Chip. And put your jacket over those two seats across the aisle, and leave my coat here. And when we come back you sit over there and sort of take up both seats until the bus moves. So no one sits across from us, you hear?”

I heard and I did. I didn’t know why she wanted her suitcase, or why we had to get off the bus and back on again, or any of those things, really. I would have understood the bit about the coats even if she hadn’t explained it to me, although I’ll admit I wouldn’t have thought of it on my own, not just then.

But I wasn’t going to bug her about any of this. I mean, it was pretty obvious this wasn’t the first time she ever got randy on a bus, and it wasn’t the first time she ever decided to do anything about it. This bus fetish was something she had indulged in before. And probably often. Which was why she sat down next to me to begin with. And why she wanted the window seat — partly so that we could bump bottoms while changing places, and partly because she would be better shielded from observation if she sat away from the aisle.

I didn’t really want to get off the bus and back on again. Walking presented certain logistical problems that would be even more obvious to spectators if I had to leave my jacket on the bus. But I got off and I forced myself to drink a Coke and munch a pack of those peanut butter and cheese things. I waited until she emerged from the ladies’ room and got on board the bus before I followed her. She put her suitcase on the seat beside her so that no one could sit there, and I sprawled over the two opposite seats and looked as unkempt as possible so that no one would want to sit next to me. She waited until the bus was back on the highway before giving me a nod, and I came over and put her suitcase overhead and sat down next to her.

We huddled together under her coat and kissed briefly. Then I said, “Why the suitcase?”

“Can’t you guess?”

The only thing that had occurred to me was that she wanted to put her diaphragm on, but I couldn’t believe that. This was a bus, after all, and it wasn’t particularly comfortable or roomy even if all you wanted to do was sit in it. I know people screw in the most unlikely places, but only midgets and contortionists could possibly do it on a bus.

I had already decided that the best I could hope for was to shoot in my pants, if you’ll forgive me for being crude about it. (I can’t really think of any other way to say it.) And I wasn’t all that sure I wanted to do that. I don’t suppose I really cared about getting off myself. I just wanted to go on thrilling Willie Em.

“No,” I said, “I can’t guess.”

“Did that old suitcase feel heavier this time?”

“No.”

“It was, though.”

“It was?”

She grinned impishly. “Something in it that wasn’t in it before.”

What? A roll of toilet paper? A Coke? What?

“What?”

“You have to find out for yourself. But I’ll bet you appreciate the change.”

“I think you lost me.”

“Why, I surely hope not! Now why don’t you shut your mouth and start loving me up instead of asking all those questions?”

I had no argument there. I kissed her and put a hand on her breast. It felt softer than ever. I petted it and light dawned.

“Oh.”

“Uh-huh. And that’s just the half of it.”

I could guess the other half, but I sent my hand on an expedition to make sure. I slipped it under her skirt and there were no panties there. The panties, like the bra, were currently in her suitcase.

I hope she wrung them out first.

It certainly did make things easier. We snuggled under her coat and unbuttoned her cardigan and pulled her skirt all the way up, and all of sudden there was a lot more to do. She had wonderfully soft skin and nice firm little breasts. The perfume she was wearing mixed nicely with the musk of her.

I was going to put down a whole description of just what we did over the next couple of hours, but I’ve been thinking about it and I decided the hell with it. Partly because I think that would just be too much sex. And despite what Mr. Fultz said, I think there is such a thing as too much sex.

Because when all you have is a description of what happened, who did what and where and how and all of that, then all you’ve got is the kind of book Willie Em was reading, The Swinging Swappers or The Swapping Swingers. And that sort of thing may be exciting in small doses, but it’s also pretty disgusting, actually.

What’s important, really, is what it was like and where everybody’s head was at while it was going on, or otherwise it’s just bodies with no people attached to them. And anyway we kept on like this for a couple of hours, and I couldn’t honestly remember the whole thing piece by piece. It would be easy enough to fake it and get the tone right the same way I fake some of the dialogue because I can’t actually remember every stupid conversation I ever had word for word. Let’s just say that I kept doing things to her and she kept enjoying them and let’s let it go at that. I figure that if all you wanted in the way of a book was something to get off with you would have stopped reading before now and gone on to the swinging switching swapping swill.

Three times in the course of all this I took her hand and put it on me. Twice she gave a little squeeze and murmured “Later.” The third time she repeated this and added, “When it gets dark, Chip.”

You know, I wonder how often she did this. I mean, she had the whole thing choreographed, for Pete’s sake. Sometimes when I think about her I picture her spending her entire life riding north and south on Greyhound buses. Maybe her aunt doesn’t even have pleurisy. Maybe she doesn’t even have an aunt. Maybe Greyhound gives her a commuter’s rate. Maybe they let her ride free because it’s such great public relations for them. Maybe—

When it got dark, I didn’t even have to reach for her hand. It came over of its own accord and quickly found what it was looking for. She gave a few affectionate squeezes, worked a zipper, reached in, and brought her hand quickly back out again.

She put her lips to my ear and whispered, “Why don’t you go to the lavatory and take off your shorts?”

I guess I should have done this at the rest stop. God knows it would have been a lot easier. The lavatory wasn’t really spacious enough to change clothes in. It was barely big enough to take a leak in, actually.

I came back with my shorts in my pocket and got under the coat again. Then she decided we should change places, with me sitting in the window seat and her on the outside, and somehow we managed to do this without getting out from under the coat. Don’t ask me how.

“Poor old Chip,” she murmured. “Getting me off about a hundred times” — at the very least, I thought — “and you never getting off once your own self. But we’ll fix that.”

And I sat there with her head in my lap and my hand bunched up in all that yellow hair and she fixed everything in the world. She fixed things that weren’t even broken.

Wow.

Afterward, while I waited for the top of my skull to come back down where it belonged, she nestled her sweet and talented little head on my shoulder. After a while she said, “Happy?”

“Mmmmm.”

“You like being loved up that way?”

“Mmmmm.”

“They tell me girls up North don’t like to do that. Damned if I know why. First time I did that I wasn’t but fourteen years old and at a drive-in movie and too dumb to know about keeping my teeth out of the way, and the good old boy I was with was too dumb to tell me.” She giggled. “You like that kind of loving, you’re gonna enjoy yourself down South. Southern girls are decent, see. And they know the one thing that’s not decent is getting pregnant before you’re married, and another thing they know is no girl ever got a big belly from it.”

From her tone of voice she could have been talking about crop rotation and soil erosion. It was really weird.

I said, “The purity of Southern womanhood.”

“You better believe it. Next Southern girl you meet and get friendly with, you tell her to try it with a mouthful of warm water. Of course you couldn’t do that on a bus.”

“The Waterloo,” I said.

“You know about that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“They know about that up North?”

“Not exactly.”

“You ever have it done?”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean, ‘Not exactly’?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Well—?”

“I read about it.”

“In a book?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Like the kind of book I was reading before? One of those randy books?”

“More or less.”

“Lordy,” she said. “I’ll usually get a book like that to read if, oh, if I happen to have to take a long trip on a bus.” I could believe it. “I’ve read my share of them, I guess. Never read anything about the Waterloo in any old book.”

“Maybe it was written by a Southern girl,” I suggested.

“No maybe about it. It must have been.”

“Maybe a girl from Tennessee.”

“Georgia,” she said.