So Willing

Seven

Vince was never quite sure how he did it. When he turned, slowly, in answer to that ominous question, and saw facing him a bald man wearing a pinstriped suit who could have been nothing in this world but a hotel manager, his blood sank to his shoes, his heart jumped up into his throat, and he went blank. And someone else, some total stranger, using his body and his voice, snapped with obvious irritation, “What is it?”

“About this bill, Mister Blue,” said the manager, holding up a squarish sheet of thin paper. “I hate to—”

“Bill?” snapped the person using Vince’s body and voice. “Bill? When my wife walks out on me, takes my car and goes God knows where, you come jabbering at me about a bill?”

The manager managed to back speedily away without moving a step. “Well,” he said, his face a symphony of sympathetic smiling, “well, I didn’t realize — of course, I had no intention—”

“You’ll get your money,” the genius in Vince’s body said contemptuously. “Let me worry about one thing at a time, will you?”

“Yes, of course,” said the manager. He was bowing from the waist now. “Of course.”

“I’ll straighten things out with you,” the genius in Vince said, “once I’ve found my goddam wife.”

“Certainly, sir,” said the manager. “Of course, sir.”

The genius who had control of Vince’s body glared with Vince’s eyes at the manager for a second longer, then spun Vince’s body on Vince’s heel and marched Vince the hell out of the lobby and out to the sidewalk. Then the genius went away to wherever he’d popped up from, and left Vince standing there, shaking like a leaf.

He’d gotten away with it. He’d gotten away with it! He’d gotten away with it!

Now, all he needed was a place to sit down for a while, until his knees could carry his weight again. Now, all he needed was a place to sit down and a strong black cup of coffee and a dime to pay for the coffee. And his father’s car back, so he could go home again. And Saralee standing in front of him, so he could beat her lovely face in.

It was so clear now, so goddam clear. She’d gotten up — it must have been seven o’clock or earlier, since the garage attendant said she took off with the car at eight — she’d gotten up, and she’d noticed Vince’s suitcase all packed and ready to go. And she had realized that Vince was on the verge of taking a fast powder. So she had decided that she would take that fast powder herself, before little Vince had the chance.

It was now just about noon. She had a four-hour start on him. She also had money, and he didn’t, not a dime. She also had a means of transportation, and he didn’t, not a pogo stick.

What Vince had been doing to her physically all week, she had just done to him figuratively. And she’d been a lot better at it than him. When she did it, she was thorough. There wasn’t any need for seconds.

Coffee. He needed coffee, and a place to sit down and try to think. That was the first thing. He couldn’t just stand here, on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, until that manager in there had a chance to think things over and decide maybe Mister James Blue ought to hang around the hotel awhile and wait for his erring wife where the manager could keep an eye on him.

As if in answer to his thoughts about coffee, a bum picked that minute to panhandle him. He was a short, scrawny, scrubby little bum, with a short, scrawny, scrubby little beard. He came staggering up, dressed like a picture on a CARE poster, with a pathetic expression on his rummy face and his filthy hand held out, palm up, and he whined, “You got a dime for a cup of coffee, Mister?”

Vince just looked at him. He opened his mouth, and closed it, and opened it again, and closed it again, and finally said, in a calm and reasonable voice, “If I had a dime for a cup of coffee, you stupid son-of-a-bitch, I would drink a cup of coffee.”

The bum blinked, and looked aggrieved. “Jeez,” he whined. “You don’t have to get that way about it.” And he went staggering off to panhandle somebody else.

Vince took off in the opposite direction. It was too dangerous to hang around in front of the hotel any longer.

He’d walked two blocks, trying to think about what to do about Saralee and the car but managing only to think about the fact that what he needed now was a cup of coffee and a place to sit down and think things out, when he suddenly had a brilliant idea.

He stepped into the next doorway he saw. He took off his tie and slipped it into his coat pocket. Then he turned his coat collar up, unbuttoned his white shirt halfway down and pulled one shirt tail out so it dangled down below the bottom of the suit coat. He rubbed his hands on the sidewalk until they were good and sooty, then rubbed them on his face until it was good and sooty. Then he stepped back out among the pedestrians and looked for a likely prospect.

One came along almost immediately. A youngish guy in his mid-twenties, walking arm in arm with his girl. Vince figured a guy with a girl would be afraid to look cheap in her eyes, and so would be an easy touch. He stepped in front of the couple, a pathetic expression on his face and his now-filthy hand extended palm upward, and whined, “You got a dime for a cup of coffee, Mister?”

The victim looked embarrassed. He stopped and fidgeted for a second, and mumbled something, while the girl with him looked curiously at Vince, and then he stuck his hand into his pocket and came out with a handful of change. “Here,” he mumbled, and dropped half a buck into Vince’s waiting palm. Then he hurried on by.

Not only a cup of coffee. A cup of coffee and a hamburger. With onions.

Sitting in the luncheonette, dawdling over his coffee and hamburger, Vince thought it out.

Saralee was gone. So was the car. They were together, Saralee and the car.

Vince needed the car. He was supposed to go back to the lake today, so his father could drive the car home and get back to work when his vacation ended.

Vince wanted to kick the crap out of Saralee while wearing hobnail boots and brass knuckles.

Vince had to have the car, and he wanted to get his hands on Saralee. And since the car and Saralee were together, once he had found one of them, he would have both of them.

That brought up the first question. Where would Saralee have gone? Where would an ambitious, unscrupulous, good-looking nymphomaniac with a stolen car and about three hundred stolen dollars go?

She wouldn’t go east because there was nothing east of New York but New England, and New England was kind of famous for prudery, and a girl like Saralee wouldn’t even think of going to an area that was famous, rightly or wrongly, for prudery. And she wouldn’t go north, because there was nothing to the north but lots of New York State, and then the Canadian border, and she’d never get over the Canadian border in a stolen car for which she didn’t have any registration.

Come to think of it, Saralee didn’t even have a license. He remembered her telling him that, after she had driven the car from the parking lot to the hotel, and how relieved he’d been that she hadn’t been involved in any of the thousand minor accidents that happened every day in midtown Manhattan.

Getting back to the geography, she wouldn’t head west because that way lay Brighton. The only direction left was south. Okay, she would go south. Now what?

He turned it around and looked at it from another point of view. Where would a girl like Saralee fit in? Where would a girl like Saralee naturally gravitate for?

Only two places: California and Miami.

There were lots of things against California. In the first place, it was three thousand miles away. And Saralee only had about three hundred bucks left out of the five hundred she’d lifted from Bradley Jenkins. You don’t take a car three thousand miles on three hundred bucks. Not if you plan to do any eating yourself.

In the second place, in order to get to California she would first have to drive toward Brighton.

In the third place, Miami was to the south, which is the direction she would naturally take anyway.

In the fourth place, Miami was only one thousand miles away, which a girl could do on three hundred dollars.

Okay, that answered question number one. Saralee, without a shred of doubt, was headed for Miami. Now for question number two.

Question two: How the hell was Vince going to get to Miami? Once he was there, how the hell was he going to find one sharp broad in a town full of sharp broads?

He sat there for a long while, and he just didn’t get any answers to question number two. The coffee got cold, and the hamburger got colder, and the hamburger bun got hard, and he still didn’t have any answers to question number two. The waitress began to glare at him and he still didn’t have any answers to question number two.

He finally left the place, noticing that it was now one o’clock, and Saralee now had a five-hour start on him.

Saralee didn’t have a driver’s license and she was driving a stolen car. Therefore, Saralee was going to be obeying every speed law she came across. Which meant it would take her two days at the very least to get to Miami, and probably three. The first day, she would maybe be able to drive four or five hundred miles. Then she’d clock out at a motel somewhere, and start off bright and early tomorrow morning.

If Vince had a car, he’d be able to at least catch up with her. He could drive all night, if need be, and finally he’d catch up with her, because she’d be obeying the speed limits, and she’d be stopping for sleep.

But Vince didn’t have a car.

And he didn’t have lots of time either. He was supposed to be back at the lake today. He might be able to get away with overshooting for a day, coming back tomorrow, but it just wasn’t possible to never go back there, or to go back without his father’s car.

He wandered around and occasionally, when he saw a likely customer, he panhandled a bit, because he at least needed eating money, and within half an hour he had three bucks. Which was a pretty good wage, averaging out to six dollars an hour.

He could always stay in New York, of course. Stay here forever, panhandling at six bucks an hour. Because he definitely could not go back to the lake without his father’s car. He definitely could not, and that was all there was to it.

He saw a gas station, one of the cramped little hole-in-the-wall gas stations common to Manhattan, and stopped in, on impulse, to get some road maps. There wasn’t any one road map for all of the Eastern Seaboard, but he got a bunch of state maps, and could go from one to the next, and follow Saralee’s route from New York to Miami. Then he went down to 72nd Street and Broadway, where they had benches on the mall, and sat down to look at the maps.

The thing was, there were so many roads. You had your choice of half a dozen roads going out of New York, and about half a dozen roads the rest of the way.

But Saralee would be in a hurry. She would take the shortest, straightest route. Vince searched his pockets for a pencil, found one, and marked out on the maps what he thought would probably be her route. He worked at it slowly and carefully, and by the time was finished, he was ninety-nine percent sure he knew every inch of road Saralee would be traveling.

It was two o’clock. Saralee was six hours ahead of him.

He looked at his maps, and he swore under his breath, and he felt horribly frustrated. And all at once, he got his idea.

It wasn’t a very good idea, but that didn’t matter. That didn’t matter, because it was the only idea. It was his only chance. He was sure of his reasoning all the way, sure that Saralee would be heading for Miami, almost dead sure he had figured out her complete route. If his reasoning was correct, his idea just might work. If his reasoning wasn’t correct, his idea didn’t matter and it didn’t matter what he did, because Saralee and the car and everything else were gone forever anyway.

So the idea was worth trying, even though it wasn’t very good.

He got to his feet and crossed the street to the subway station. He paid fifteen cents of his panhandled money and took the subway downtown. He made a couple of transfers, paid another quarter, and wound up on the H&M tubes, headed for Jersey. While in that last train, he put his tie back on, buttoned his shirt, turned his coat collar back down, and tucked his shirt-tail in. When the train reached the last stop in Jersey, everybody got off, and Vince was alone in the car for a minute. He pulled one of the advertising posters down from the row above the windows, hid it under his coat, and left the station.

The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western railroad station was right next to the last H&M tube stop. Vince went over there and stopped off in the men’s room. There he washed the panhandling dirt from his face and hands, and carefully wrote “UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI” on the back of the poster, in large, thick, letters. Then he went out to the waiting room, found a likely-looking untended suitcase, picked it up, and left the depot. He spent a dollar and a quarter on a cab to take him to the highway, and then he stood beside the road, the stolen suitcase next to his feet, the sign in his left hand, and his right hand out, thumb extended.

He waited five minutes before a new DeSoto screeched to a halt. He picked up the suitcase, ran to the car, and the driver, a thirtyish salesman type with horn-rimmed glasses, said, “I’m only going as far as Baltimore.”

“That’s fine,” Vince told him. “Every little bit counts.”

He tossed his suitcase into the backseat, slid into the front seat beside the driver, and said it again, his eyes staring down the road, southward. “Every little bit counts.”

A truck took him from Baltimore to Washington. He didn’t get to see much of the country, because he slept most of the way. He knew he was going to have to be wide-awake later on, so he forced himself to relax and sleep while he could.

Actually, it wasn’t that tough to get to sleep. He’d had a very active four days, coupled with some nervous running around today, and whizzing along a superhighway on a sunny summer afternoon was pretty relaxing anyway. He conked out within ten minutes in the salesman’s car, and didn’t wake up till they reached Baltimore. Then the salesman wished him luck, Vince thanked the guy for the ride, closed the door, stuck out his thumb, and a truck stopped. Just like that. He was running in luck, and he hoped it kept up that way.

By the time he got to Washington, he was pretty hopeful. The salesman had driven like a madman, and the truck driver hadn’t been any slouch either. Both of them had gone a hell of a lot faster than Saralee would dare to, and Vince figured by now he couldn’t be more than four hours behind her.

Then came Washington, and things slowed down to a crawl. For one thing, the truck driver let him off at the northern edge of the city, which meant he was going to have to work his way all the way through Washington, and he knew from experience that hitchhiking within a city is hell. For another thing, he was beginning to feel starved, and the money he could have spent on a fast cab-ride through town had to go for food. And the eating of the food took time, too, no matter how fast he tried to chew.

Then he was back on the street again, thumbing once more. And, as he’d expected, hitchhiking through the city was hell. He did it in four short rides, with long waits in between. And the fourth ride didn’t turn out to be so short after all.

It was a woman, driving a new Pontiac convertible, the incredibly expensive car for people with enough money to buy a Cadillac convertible and not enough sense to come in out of the rain.

This woman was about forty. He didn’t know whether she had any sense or not, but she very obviously had money. She was dressed in an obviously expensive blue suit and, even though it was warm as hell in Washington, a waist-length fur jacket over it. On her head was one of those goofy hats that was one-tenth hat and nine-tenths veil. She was a good-looking woman for forty, as far as the face was concerned. The fur made it impossible to tell much about the body, though her nylon-sheathed legs looked pretty good from the knee down.

She stopped the car next to him, smiled, and said, “Hop in.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, and hopped in. He’d barely had his thumb out, not expecting a woman to stop for a hitchhiker, and the fact that she had stopped surprised him so much it took him a second or two to react.

Once his suitcase and University of Miami sign were stowed in back, and he was seated in front beside the woman, the Pontiac slid away from the curb and purred southward through the evening traffic.

After a minute, the woman said, “I went to Miami, too. Quite a number of years ago.”

Vince tensed. He knew what was coming next, a lot of talk about the new buildings and the old professors and how the old town is getting on and all that garbage, none of which Vince would be able to handle, since he’d never been near either Miami or its university in his life. “Well, uh,” he said. “Uh, as a matter of fact I don’t go there myself. My brother does. I’m going down to visit him. This’ll be my first trip down there.” There, he thought, that ought to do it.

The woman turned to look at him for a second, smiled and said, “Crap.” Then she looked back at the street.

Vince blinked. He gaped at the woman, and waited for her to explain what that had been all about, but apparently she had no intention of doing so. She just kept driving along, a half-smile on her lips. He noticed that they were good lips, just slightly touched with lipstick, and that her hair was in a tight permanent that wasn’t blowing around even though the convertible’s top was down. Black hair it was, with just a touch of gray in some of the hairs at the side. It looked good on her, very sophisticated. She looked like a real heller who had grown older gracefully.

They drove two blocks in silence, and then the woman said, “Well? Aren’t you going to defend yourself?”

Vince decided the only thing to do was let this graying chick have the lead, until he could figure out where she thought she was going. “Defend myself?” he asked. “From what?”

“You don’t have any brother in the University of Miami,” she said. She glanced over at him, smiled again, and looked back at the traffic. “That sign of yours is just something to make it easier for you to get a ride.”

Vince shrugged. This time, he thought, the best thing to do was admit everything and say nothing. “It’s pretty tough to get a ride,” he said, “unless you do something like that.”

The woman nodded. “I know it is,” she said. “You’re absolutely right.” She glanced at him again, looked back at the road, and said, “What’s that bulge inside your coat? Is that a gun?”

“Gun?” Vince hadn’t even known he had a bulge inside his coat. He looked down, and realized all the road maps tuck into his inside coat pocket did make a healthy bulge. Now that he thought about it, with a bulge like that in his coat, it was a miracle he’d gotten any rides at all. And here this was the sixth person to pick him up. And this one was even a woman.

“Well?” she asked him. “Is it a gun?”

“No,” he said. He grinned uneasily, not sure what this crazy woman was leading up to. “Heck, no,” he said, playing it boyish. “Nothing like that. It’s just road maps. See?” He dragged them out of his pocket and showed them to her. “I really am going to Miami,” he said. “And I’ve got these road maps so I won’t get lost.”

The woman looked at the road maps, looked at him, stopped smiling, looked out at the street again, and said, “How disappointing.”

A nut, decided Vince. That’s what she was, a grade A, first-prize, number one nut.

He didn’t know just how nutty she was. They were in the southern part of the city now, near the Potomac, and Vince was surprised to see that they were coming to wooded sections among the built-up areas. And he had the crazy feeling they were going the wrong way.

The feeling got stronger, a lot stronger, when the woman suddenly made a turn onto an unpaved street and drove down past two rows of unfinished ranch-style houses to the end, and stopped.

Vince looked around, half-expecting a couple of guys to come running out of one of the half-built houses and grab him. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “What is this?”

“You’re an awful disappointment,” the woman said. She was sitting half-turned in the seat, facing him, and she was half-smiling again, her eyes shining at him in the moonlit darkness. “I certainly didn’t expect anything like this when I picked you up,” she said. “You turned out to be a complete flop, do you know that?”

“Well, for God’s sake,” Vince cried, “what the hell do you want from me?”

“Isn’t that obvious?” she asked him. “I want you to rape me.”

He could only stare at her. He couldn’t say a word or do a thing or move a muscle, all he could do was just sit there in the car in the moonlight and stare at her.

“If you look over that way,” she said, pointing beyond him, “you’ll see lights. There are lots of houses all around here full of people. If you don’t rape me, I’ll throw you out of the car, and then I’ll tear my clothes and go to one of those houses and say you did rape me. And I don’t suppose it would take the police very long to find you. You’d be on foot, and you don’t know Washington at all.”

A nut, thought Vince for the thousandth time. A complete and utter nut.

The woman watched him, growing impatient. “Well?” she demanded.

“Well—” said Vince. He was trying to think. This nut wanted to be raped, that’s all. That’s why she’d picked him up, because she heard women who picked up hitchhikers got raped, and she got it into her head she’d liked to get raped herself.

So, what the hell, how long could it take? And it might even be fun.

But then a sudden thought struck him. “How do I know,” he asked her, “that you won’t call the cops afterward, anyway?”

“I won’t,” she said. “I promise you I won’t.”

“Yeah, sure, but how do I know?”

“You know,” she reminded him, “that I will call the police if you don’t rape me.”

He thought that one over for a minute. It looked as though he didn’t have much choice. “Okay,” he said, and reached for her.

She slapped his hand away. “I didn’t say make me,” she said. “I said rape me. You’re going to have to work for it.” And she pushed the door open on her side and scampered out of the car.

She didn’t run very fast. In the first place, she was wearing one of those tight hobble skirts it was impossible to walk in, much less run. And in the second place, she wasn’t trying very hard.

Vince caught her after six steps. They were on ground that was going to be somebody’s front lawn some day, but was now just churned-up dry earth. Vince caught the woman by one shoulder, twisted her around, and she lost her balance and fell heavily onto the ground. He dropped to his knees beside her and grabbed.

“Don’t rip my clothes!” she cried, in a shrill half-whisper. “Don’t rip them!”

Vince looked at her, her straining face staring up at him, and he knew this woman wanted to be roughed up. And he was willing to go along with that. All he had to do was think about the fact that she was delaying him, and that she had threatened him with the law. And all he had to do was make believe she was Saralee Jenkins. That’s all he had to do, and then he could rough her up to her heart’s content. And then some.

So he belted her open-handed across the face, and snapped, “If you don’t want them ripped, pull them off. And do it fast.”

“Yes. Yes.” She struggled, lying on the ground next to him, pulling her skirt up and her panties off, and he saw that she had surprisingly good legs, that she was a woman who had cared for her body all of her life, and it had responded by staying firm and shapely long after most women were well into the sag-stage.

He slapped her again and said, “Get that fur thing off too.”

She did. She was panting and moaning and half-crying, staring up at him with a crazy combination of terror and desire on her face, and she struggled around until she got the fur piece and the jacket and blouse off, and then he reached down, inserted his fingers under her bra between the breasts, and yanked upward, ripping the bra in two. The bra fell away on both sides, and he slapped her hard, forehand and backhand.

She moaned and rolled over, trying to crawl away. He smacked her naked buttocks, grabbed her hip with pinching fingers and digging nails, and pulled her back around and down again. He had his own clothes open, and he was ready, and he fell on her.

She lashed at him, screaming through clenched teeth, trying to buck him off her, but he held on grimly. All the workouts he’d had with Saralee had made it possible for him to last a long time, and he was glad of it. He wanted the time, he wanted to give this woman all she wanted and then some, he wanted to make her sorry she’d ever threatened him, sorry she’d ever come out looking for this tonight. His hands slapped and pinched and pummeled her body, until finally she opened her mouth in a full-throated scream, and her fighting changed, became more real, and she shrieked, “Stop! Stop! Stop!”

But he couldn’t stop, and he wouldn’t stop. And now she wasn’t fighting him, either make-believe or real, now she was blending with him.

Slowly, his breath came back, slowly his awareness, of the place and the circumstances came back, and slowly he crawled off her and got shakily to his feet, readjusting his clothes. And the woman lay on her back, her skirt a wrinkled mess around her waist, her jacket and blouse and panties lying dirt-stained around her, and she smiled up at him, sighing, and whispered, “You weren’t such a disappointment, after all. Once you got started, you weren’t a disappointment at all.”

Now, he was sick of her. He felt used, cheapened, as he had never felt with a girl before. This woman had dragged him down into her own sickness and made him a part of it. He remembered how he had slapped her and clawed her, and how he had enjoyed doing it, and he felt sick and ashamed, and wanted nothing but to get away from here.

She got slowly to her feet, straightening her skirt as best she could, donning again her blouse and jacket and fur. Balling up her panties and ripped bra, she said, “Come on. I’ll drive you across the Potomac.”

He thought of saying no, but then he remembered how important time was, that he had to make up for a lot of lost time, and so he nodded and walked back to the car with her. There, she put the panties and bra on the floor in back and slid in behind the wheel, as Vince got in on the other side. All at once, he noticed that she was still wearing that nine-tenths veil hat, that she’d worn it all the way through the fake rape-scene. And for some reason, that struck him as the sickest part of it all, that she’d worn that stupid little Sunday-tea hat all during the phony rape scene.

She drove him out of Washington, then across the Potomac and through Alexandria to a good spot for him to hitchhike from. As he was getting out of the car, she leaned toward him, her hand held out, and said, “Thanks. You did a good job.”

He had the suitcase and sign in his left hand. He reached out the right hand, she dropped something into it, and her car spun around and headed back for Washington. Puzzled, Vince looked at what she had given him. A roll of bills. Ten tens. One hundred dollars.

He got another truck ride out of Alexandria, and this time he was really in luck. The guy was going all the way to Miami. Vince was about six hours behind by now and he was glad he wasn’t going to be losing any more time between rides.

This guy was driving an overload of tile pipe, so he didn’t exceed any speed limits. Vince was just as well pleased. He was coming into the territory where he was going to be very interested in the roadside scenery, particularly around the motels, so he was glad the truck wasn’t going to be whipping by too fast to see anything.

What he was looking for was his father’s Packard. He was glad, for one of the few times in his life, that it was a Packard. There were damn few of them on the road anymore, particularly dull gray ones. He wouldn’t be likely to miss it.

They headed on down across Virginia and into North Carolina, following the route Vince had marked out on the roadmaps back in New York, and every time they passed a motel, Vince took careful inventory of the cars parked in front.

He struck pay dirt just south of Charlotte, almost into South Carolina. A dull-gray Packard, right year, what looked like the right license plates in the dim motel light. She’d gotten pretty far in one day.

“Stop here,” Vince told the driver. “I get out here.”

“I thought you were going to Miami.”

“I just saw my roommate’s car back at that motel. He can take me the rest of the way.”

The truck driver was plainly puzzled, but he stopped the car. “Anything you say, buddy,” he said.

“Thanks a lot for the lift,” Vince told him. “I really appreciate it.”

Then the truck was gone, and Vince was walking back toward the motel. He threw the sign and suitcase away. He wouldn’t be needing those anymore.

He went up to the motel, noticing that the office was dark, which wasn’t surprising. It was almost four in the morning. He walked on down the row of motel units to the one with the Packard in front, and tried the door. It was locked, which didn’t faze him. He took one step back, took careful aim, raised one foot, and kicked the doorknob a good one.

As he’d supposed, the lock was pretty flimsy. The door flew open, and he walked on in. The light switch was beside the door. He flicked it on, closed the door behind him, and grinned at the wide-eyed girl sitting up in the bed.

“Hello, Saralee,” he said. “Surprised to see me?”