The Best American Mystery Stories 2003

From Measures of Poison

1. Upholstery

After cashing the last of the summer’s commission checks I had stopped at home for a shower and a change of clothes, then headed straight for the Royal Crown Club on East Douglas. I sat for a while shooting the bull with old Gleason, the prehistoric bartender, and trying in vain to ignore the oppressive, wet heat of the tail end of a Kansas summer. I was morbidly watching a drop of sweat work its way down Gleason’s piebald temple to his flabby cheek when a woman walked in through the front door and took a seat, her perfunctory show of disinterest given lie to by the fact that she’d planted her nicely upholstered rump a mere two stools to the right of me. The bar was empty except for me and Gleason, and if she didn’t want company she would have taken a table.

Gleason, who was my father’s oldest friend, had been a widower for twenty years, and he stared enraptured and without shame at her knockers; she helpfully pretended not to notice. With his slobbery, loose jowls, his peculiar dusty odor, and earlobes hanging damn near down to his chin, he was old enough to have tended bar before the state outlawed booze, and Kansas had done it thirty years ahead of the rest of the country. It was still contraband in the Sunflower State, despite the passage of the Twentieth Amendment, but it could be had with a minimum of effort if you knew where to look.

The woman shifted her ass on the stool and pulled at the neckline of her thin summer dress, giving her tits a quick bounce for old Gleason. She looked to be about thirty-five, with black hair coiled in a permanent wave, and a little extra baggage at her waist and hips and under her kohl-smeared eyes. None of that bothered me at all, in fact all summer I’d been wondering what it would be like screwing a woman her age. I mean one who liked it, not one of those you hear about who just lies back and goes limp and thinks about something else, waiting for it to be over so she can go back to her bonbons and movie magazines and radio serials. That was too much like the high school girls I’d been nailing since I turned fourteen, girls who traded sex for status, for the sake of being known as the quarterback’s or the student council president’s girl. Nuts to that.

But I couldn’t act on my impulses, despite the many opportunities sales work afforded me. First of all, I was a professional salesman with a code of ethics. Secondly, if such a breach of that code were found out it could have meant the loss of my position, even if it was only a summer job. Thirdly, times were tough, and most of the offers I’d had over the last three summers had involved a quid pro quo, a blow job for a new coffeepot or a plain screw for a cast-iron frying pan. One careworn and brazen mother of five proposed paying me fifty cents on the dollar plus three (3) incidents of sexual intercourse per week all summer for a full set of stainless steel kitchenware, a sort of carnal installment plan that would have wrecked me financially. If I hadn’t had a girlfriend from school to take the physical pressure off a couple of nights a week, I might have been tempted.

I wasn’t on the job now, though, and the lady to my right wasn’t a customer. On top of her fresh permanent and florid perfume I could smell the sauce she’d already downed before coming in, and I calculated I could find out what I wanted to know for the price of two to four more drinks, judging from the thickness of her slur as she’d ordered the first. My wallet had a small fortune in it, thirty-six dollars before I’d started buying drinks, and when she swallowed the last of her drink I pulled out a two-dollar bill and signaled to Gleason.

“Another gimlet for the lady,” I said, and she swiveled the stool around to face me, recrossing her legs as she did so. They were long, and her flimsy red and white dress was short enough to reveal a certain slackness of thigh that I found unexpectedly appealing.

“How genteel,” she said, softening the “g.”

“My pleasure,” I said, raising my own glass. “Wayne Ogden.”

“Mildred Halliburton. Pleased to meet you, Dwayne.” She moved over to the stool next to mine, and when her thigh met my knee she didn’t move it away.

“That’s Wayne.”

She giggled as Gleason served her, his watery blue pupils blatantly following her nipples like twin searchlights. “I’m awfully sorry, Wayne. And what, as they say, is your line?”

“I’m a salesman for the Lanham Company.” At least I had been until two days before; I didn’t think it would help to mention that the next week I would be starting my senior year of high school.

“Oh. Selling pots and pans, door to door?”

“Kitchenware of all kinds.”

“How inneressting,” she slobbered. “I myself am a user of kitchenware.” I braced myself for the inevitable offer of a trade, but she surprised me. “I got all I need, though, so you can forget about that.” She laughed again, and I started to think my one drink might be my ticket into her short-and-silkies.

“I’m not on duty anyway,” I said.

She knocked the drink back in a gulp, then placed her palm flat on her breast. “Oh.” Her eyes were wide open for a second, and then she laughed again, a melodious, low sound. “These drinks are starting to hit me, I think.”

I knocked mine back in the same manner and got straight to business. She now looked like she was a drink or two away from being no fun at all. “How’d you like to join me for a double feature at the Miller?”

She put the tips of the fingers of her left hand on my right knee, and for the first time I noticed her wedding band. “That’s real sweet, Wayne, honey,” she said, and I steeled myself for rejection on the basis of my being half her age. Instead she confirmed my long-held suspicion that sexual transactions between adults were far less complicated than those between people my age: “I got a better idea, though.” She lowered her voice to a hoarse stage whisper. “Why don’t we go back to my house and you can manhandle me some.”

I picked up my change, leaving a healthy tip for Gleason, and helped her off her stool. As we walked toward the door he nodded to me approvingly, with a slightly wistful air.

We jaywalked, or ran, to the other side of the street, and she laughed when she got a good look at my 1916 Hudson Super Six Phaeton.

“Shall we take yours, then?” I asked, careful to hide my irritation. The car had cost me a month’s commissions the year before, and I’d spent hundreds of hours since improving it mechanically and cosmetically, but to some people a twenty-year-old car was junk, no matter its condition.

“I came in a taxicab,” she said. “So unless you want to spring for another one, this’ll do fine. I live in Riverside, on Woodrow, down by the park.”

It was even muggier than when I’d arrived at the Royal Crown, and despite that shower my fresh shirt was already sticking to my back. I noted with pleasure that the same thing was happening to her, the cotton dress clinging to her in dark, wet ovals just above and below the back of her brassiere. She brightened visibly when I lowered the top, and when I pulled out onto Douglas she closed her eyes and sighed at the air flowing over her, drying the sweat on her brow before we’d crossed the drainage canal. An airplane droned overhead, descending, and I looked up out of habit to identify it.

“That’s a brand-new Collins Airmaster, headed for Collins airfield,” I said reflexively.

She opened her eyes and looked sideways at me. “Goody gum-drops,” she said, “a brand-new Airmaster.”

I didn’t let my face give anything away, though what I wanted was to backhand that supercilious smirk right off her mouth. We didn’t say anything else until we got to Woodrow and she pointed out her house.

2. What You Got for a Gin Gimlet in Those Days

It was a big red brick two-story, just around the corner from my girl’s parents on Porter. I wondered if she knew them, and then I got worried about someone who knew me seeing me go into her house at five in the afternoon. It couldn’t be helped, though. I opened her garage door and put the readily identifiable Super Six inside. As I helped her out and pulled the garage door down it occurred to me that someone might show up expecting to find the space empty. “You don’t have a husband coming home, do you?”

“Hell, no,” she said. “I’m not that drunk. Floyd and the kids took off on a camping trip at five this morning. You ever hear of a place called the Garden of the Gods? It’s in Colorado.” She went around front, despite my craven suggestion that we go in the back door. She had trouble finding the key, and when she did she couldn’t quite slip it into the lock at the right angle.

“I’ve heard of it,” I said. “How come you didn’t go?”

She laughed that pretty laugh again, only this time it was a little out of control. “I’m supposed to be helping with the goddamned back-to-school church fair. I’m on... on... the organizing committee.” She was nearly hysterical now, bracing herself on the doorframe as the door opened. She practically collapsed entering the front room, and I followed quickly, slamming the door behind me. She fell onto the couch, and I lit a lamp. Spying a radio in the corner, I moved to turn it on for some music.

“Whattaya doing?” she asked, winded, from the couch.

“Thought it might be nice to have some music,” I said.

“What the hell for? I have no intention of dancing with you. S’not Christian.” She broke up again, doubled over, and I sat on the couch next to her. “Organizing committee. Oh, boy. What I stayed home for was to get drunk and screw for a couple weeks.” She finally stopped laughing. “So why don’t you get busy and fuck me, Wayne?”

The first time was on the couch, and it was a quick one, with my pants around my ankles and her dress up to her waist. Afterward she led me upstairs, and despite the fact that less than two minutes earlier I had been inside her, I stared at her ass as longingly as old Gleason had as she mounted the steps ahead of me. One of her stockings had rolled down past her knee, and the sight of the backs of her long legs as they climbed, their muscles relaxing and contracting with each step beneath a healthy layer of fat, was enough to get me ready for another roll in the hay without a breather.

The room was pretty bright and not stiflingly hot, since two windows were open and a pretty good cross draft blew through it. The wallpaper was dark green, and there were fresh flowers in a cheap mail-order vase on the dresser.

“You might go a little slower this time,” she said as she fell back onto the bedspread. “I’ll get a lot more out of it.” I didn’t take it as an insult. It had been extremely quick, though she had certainly made enough noise to give the impression — probably to the whole neighborhood — that she was having a good time.

I undressed her slowly, exposing what hadn’t already been exposed, and in the golden light slanting through the Venetian blinds I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen naked. I shocked her by putting my mouth onto her private parts, but she’d done the same to me downstairs when we were getting started, and pretty soon I had her going so fast and hot she didn’t care if it was against the laws of nature or not. After I was pretty sure she’d had her share of the fun I got inside again and rode her slowly but surely to the point where we were both yelling and moaning. Right before I shot my second and more satisfying load she squealed, “Rudy... take me, Rudy, take me... that’s it, Rudy,” and then her cries became incomprehensible and animalistic before tapering off as I disengaged and rolled onto the sheets.

I lay there next to her for a little bit, feeling the breeze cool my sweaty torso, and when it seemed like it was time to talk I asked her who Rudy was.

She pointed at the dresser, atop which sat among many framed family pictures a signed portrait of Rudolph Valentino. “I always thought it was a damned shame he died before I got the chance to give myself to him. I coulda made him happy in a way that Russian bitch never could.” Her eyes were wet with tears now, though she didn’t sound as drunk as she had in the car.

I’d always heard Rudy was queer, but it wouldn’t do to say it to her. He was ten years dead anyway. She was swimming in melancholy, luxuriating in it, and I swung my feet off the bed so I could wash up and get away.

“Where the hell are you going?” she asked.

“Thought I’d go and let you have a little peace and quiet.”

“The hell with peace and quiet. You and me got more screwing to do.”

I must have had a funny look on my face, because she laughed.

“What the hell’s the point of picking up a real young sport if you’re not going to take full advantage of all that extra horsepower?”

What the hell, I was having a good time. “Okay.”

“Anyway, there’s plenty of things we haven’t done yet. I sure did like that mouth-on-the-pussy business of yours. It’s a safe bet Floyd’s never gonna put his mouth anywhere near the goddamn thing.” She got up on her knees and leaned forward. “Have you ever had sex with a lady’s rectum, Wayne?”

I nodded. A very religious girlfriend in my sophomore year was eager for it that way, since she believed that vaginal intercourse was for marriage only, and even then only for the purpose of conceiving future soldiers of the Cross. It had been a year and a half since I’d messed around that way, though, and I missed it.

“Well, we can do some of that if you want, I don’t mind. Believe me, there’s all kinds of ways to do it we haven’t thought of yet.” She moved to the edge of the bed and dangled her legs off it, and with a thoughtful look cupped a hand under each breast as though trying to guess their weight. “Last time Floyd took the kids on a camping trip was more than a year ago, and I am just about as goddamn horny as it’s possible to be without taking to the streets.”

“Floyd doesn’t ever give you any?”

“What Floyd gives me happens once a week and takes about ninety seconds, and I could get more satisfaction from a sanded-down dowel rod. I often do, as a matter of fact.”

I looked back up at the dresser and saw what I assumed to be a picture of Floyd, a beefy-looking kind of guy with a gap in his front teeth and a receding hairline. Next to that was a picture of him with Mildred, and three little kids. Judging by her apparent age in the picture, and her bobbed hair and flapper dress, it was a few years old. “How old are your kids?”

She thought for a second. “Sylvester’s seventeen. Myrtle’s fifteen, gonna be sixteen in October, and Herbert’s ten. He was a surprise, if you catch my meaning.”

Fuck a duck, I thought, and my hands began to tingle as though I’d been hit in the funny bone; I had just put the meat to Sylvester Halliburton’s mother. I’d stolen my girl Sally from Sylvester the year before, and he still hated my guts for it. I wondered what he’d do if he found out I’d fucked his dear old mother, and the thought got a laugh out of me.

“What’s funny?” she asked, and I said it was nothing. Rather than pursue it, she wondered if I knew where to get a bottle, since neither of us had thought to get one to go at the Royal Crown. “Floyd won’t allow me to keep any in the house. It’s against the law,” she said, mimicking an idiotic hillbilly’s voice. I knew a source just a few blocks away, and I decided to walk rather than take the car. “Make it rum,” she shouted after me.

3. Rum, Sodomy, and the False Eyelash

The evening was cooling off when I crossed the 11th Street Bridge, and I started thinking maybe I could make this a habit with Mildred. She certainly seemed to be enjoying herself, and I could easily afford the price of a motor court cabin a couple of times a week. I’d be doing her a favor as much as myself, if you thought about it, giving her on a year-round basis the hooch and screwing Floyd was failing to provide.

I was en route to a blind pig on 12th and Bitting, on the upper floor of an old carriage house, across the street from a steep slope leading down to the riverbank. This time of year the bars didn’t fill up until the cool of the evening, and the proprietor of the blind pig was so lonely he insisted on giving me a drink on the house before he’d sell me the bottle, just to have someone to talk to. I didn’t mind sticking around, and I figured Mildred’s reaction on my returning later than expected would give me an indication of what to expect if I pursued her any further.

“Guess school must be about to start. You done yet?”

“One more year and I’m free, Norman.”

“What you planning to do after that?”

“I’m going to college. No choice in the matter, my old man’s been socking it away since I was born.”

“Uh-huh. That’s good, Wayne.” He emptied his drink. “You getting any lately?” he asked.

“I’m a door-to-door salesman, Norman,” I said as if that meant something.

He nodded and poured himself another bourbon. “Married women. Got to watch it, there. Good way to get into trouble.”

I agreed with him and asked him the same question.

He held up his right hand and wiggled his fingers. “Since Lisette ran off it’s mostly been Madame Palm and her five daughters.”

“Lisette?”

“My wife. She took off for warmer climes a couple, three years ago. Before you started coming in.”

I wondered what sort of woman she had been. Norman was fifty or so, with hair that always needed cutting. His face seemed perfectly round, an impression accentuated by a pair of round spectacles through which his wide-set eyes gazed sadly at his circumscribed world. In the two years I’d been coming to the blind pig I had never rung the bell without Norman being there to answer, and I knew this was his home as well as his business. If he went anywhere at all, even to get groceries or stamps, I wasn’t aware of it.

I got the bottle, and though he wanted me to stay for a second drink I left. It was starting to get dark, and I was ready to go back and give it to Mildred some more. Hell, I thought, maybe I’ll give Sylvester another brother, even more surprising than the last one.

The sun was all the way down before I got back, and I went in through the front door into the dark living room like the deed had my name on it and not Floyd Halliburton’s. “Darling, I’m home,” I bellowed, and I bounded up the steps three at a time and found her sitting up in bed, naked and crying. The tears had made an awful mess of her eye makeup; one fake lash dangled limp from the corner of her left eye and streaks of black ran right down to her tits, with one rivulet describing the border of her right aureola. The enticingly mature woman I had met at the Royal Crown had transformed somehow into a gorgon, and I wondered about making an excuse and leaving her to her boozing.

“What are you crying for?”

“What the hell you think? Give me that goddamn bottle,” she said, and I handed it to her. She cracked it and took a long, hard swallow, then clumsily tried to place the bottle on the nightstand. It fell over, and a good portion of it spilled out before I could right it. I didn’t want any more myself, but I’d paid for it and her carelessness rankled.

She seemed to feel a little better, and without wiping her face she smiled wickedly at me. “Thanks for getting the booze, sweetheart. You’re a real doll. Now, did you see what I got for you?”

I didn’t and told her so in a curt manner that didn’t seem to put her off at all.

“Went down to the kitchen and got you some of this,” she said, and notwithstanding her grotesque appearance I felt my dick begin to harden again at the sight of the cardboard can of vegetable shortening. She stuck her hand into the thick white mess, and then I saw her red-nailed middle finger disappear briefly into the puckered asterisk of her anus, damned near up to the third knuckle. Extracting it, she gave me a look of such depraved cunning that I had an impulse to bolt for the street, but I managed to ignore it as I vaulted onto the bed, wrestling with my trousers.

My third orgasm of the evening took a while in coming, and halfway through it she reached over clumsily for the bottle, nearly knocking it over again, and I pulled out for a minute to allow her to knock back a decent slug of it. Then I replaced it on the nightstand and started back up. Afterward I washed my dick in the bathtub, despite her whining and pleading that I stay in bed with her. She was afraid I was going to leave, and she was right; in any case, the combined smell of fecal matter, vegetable shortening, and rum needed to be dealt with immediately or I was going to get sick. When I returned she had the bottle in hand again, and rum dribbled from her lips to her chin. For the first time I considered that getting hooked up with an alcoholic woman might be less amusing than I’d always imagined; the girls I knew at school got silly and playful with a little booze in them, but in her cups Mildred put me in mind of an embittered, middle-aged male wino, full of vitriol and self-pity.

She held out the bottle for me and I waved it away. I had my trousers back on again, and she frowned without looking too broken up about it. “Whyncha come back tomorra,” she said. “We can think of some more things to do, I bet.”

“I’ll do that, Mildred,” I said over my shoulder as I skipped down the stairs. “I’ll bring a bottle.”

That brought forth a ghastly cackle, and the question of whether I’d be back or not was very much undecided as I picked Mildred’s discarded unmentionables up off her couch and jammed them into my pants pocket for a souvenir. I stepped out the front door and crossed the yard and driveway to the garage, where I stashed the silk shorts in the glove box of the Super Six. Pulling out onto Woodrow, I thought about stopping over at my girl’s house, but I imagined I could still smell Mildred’s shit on my dick despite my earlier, vigorous ministration of soap and water. Anyway, and this was the curious part, I felt sated for once. A fourth orgasm would have been superfluous, and I realized that if that weren’t so I would have stayed with Mildred, who seemed set to go all night long.

I was headed east on Douglas with no particular destination in mind, and as I neared Hillside, I thought I’d stop at the Royal Crown and let old Gleason know how it had gone. I parked at the curb a few doors down and stepped inside to find seven or eight drinkers at the bar and a dozen or more scattered around the tables, mostly men with a few girlfriends or wives thrown in. I greeted Gleason, who nodded and said, “How’d it go, champ?”

“Aces,” I said. “Six ways from Sunday.”

“You managed to walk out of here with the only unaccompanied female that’s been in all week. Congratulations.”

“She got what she came in for, all right.”

“Uh-huh. You want something to drink?”

I didn’t really want any, but I didn’t want to look like a lightweight. “Same as before.”

He set the drink down in front of me, and a man next to me turned and gave me the eye. He looked like he was in his forties, with thin brown hair on top and an oft-broken nose.

“You want to paint my portrait, Gertrude?” I asked, and his expression got harder.

“Goddamn it, Gleason,” the man said. “I told you a million times not to serve kids in here.”

“Who’s a kid?” I said, self-consciously deepening my voice, fortifying my feeling of adulthood with the thought that I had just had carnal knowledge of a woman in her middle thirties.

“You’re a kid,” the man said, apparently unable to read my thoughts. He sniffed and wrinkled his nose. “And you smell like shit, too. Go home and wipe your ass and come back when you’re twenty-one.”

“This is a speakeasy,” I protested, feeling my voice rise. “There’s no minimum age.”

“There sure as hell is. I pay off the law, and one of their conditions for looking the other way is, they don’t want to see any goddamn kids in here. You understand me? Now scram.”

He took my drink off the table and handed it back to Gleason, and I suddenly felt like I was ten years old.

“Shit, Gleason, I got Stanley Gerard coming down from K.C. tomorrow. I don’t want him to see anything like that, got me?”

“Yes, sir, Mister Shelton.” Gleason nodded with great dignity as I slid off my stool and headed for the door, my cheeks burning with shame and rage. I went to my car and sat for a while, dreaming of revenge, and then I headed for home.

4. The Duesie

The next day I stayed around the house reading. Around four-thirty in the afternoon I headed over to my girl’s house, just a block away from Mildred’s. Sally was home and her parents weren’t, and they weren’t expected back until evening. We screwed furtively in her room upstairs, and as I was zipping back up I said I’d be going.

“Now? But I thought we might go to a picture show,” Sally whined.

“I’m feeling a little peaked. I think I’d better go on home,” I said with a pout to show what a physical wreck I was. She scowled and turned away from me, and didn’t acknowledge me as I left. Outside in the car I laughed out loud. What I was feeling was horny and dirty, still, and what I wanted now was my dirty, drunken, middle-aged gal Mildred.

I stopped by the blind pig for a bottle, and Norman was once again alone, so I let him buy me a drink.

“Shit, these hot days like this it ain’t worth staying open. I’m barely making my nut here.”

“How big’s the nut?” I asked. “If you’re paying more than twenty bucks a month rent you’re being robbed.”

“I pay seventeen-fifty, and that ain’t the problem. I have my stock to account for, and I have to pay people to stay in business. In case you ain’t heard, this stuffs against the law around here.” He knocked his back and poured another.

“Who do you pay? The cops?”

“Them first, and then there’s other guys. Guys from out of town. Costs me damn close to a hundred and fifty bucks a month just to open the goddamn door.”

Downstairs someone opened the big carriage house doors and started up a car. Then the door shut and the driver tapped the horn, and I looked out the window in time to see a Graham Custom Eight, obviously the pride and joy of the ape behind the wheel, who wheeled out onto the street and burned rubber up 12th, honking his horn again at the corner.

“That’s one of the guys I gotta pay to stay in business. He rents the garage space downstairs.”

“What’s his racket?” I asked.

“His racket is, people pay him so they can stay in business,” Norman said, a little irritated. Again he wanted to give me another drink, but I demurred and started to leave. I stopped at the door and asked him if he knew the owner of the Royal Crown.

“Larry Shelton? I know who he is. He don’t know me from a snake’s dick.”

“All right,” I said. “See you.”

I parked in Mildred’s garage again. When I knocked on the front door there was no answer, so I tried the knob. It opened and I went inside.

“Mildred?” She didn’t answer, and I wondered if she wasn’t passed out upstairs. “I got you a bottle.” The downstairs was neat and clean, and so was the upstairs. The bed was neatly made, and turning it down I saw that the sheets had been changed. Mildred wasn’t as sloppy a drunk as I’d thought.

I could have gone back to Sally’s and made her happy by taking her to a movie like she wanted, but instead I headed for the Royal Crown and hoped I wouldn’t have to clash with Larry Shelton.

Parked in front of the Royal Crown was the only Duesenberg SJ I had ever seen outside of the pages of a magazine. I parked a few doors down and hopped out. I stood before the SJ for a minute, wondering where it had come from and to whom it belonged. Its top was down, and shortly a yokel slouching down the sidewalk slopped to join me, whistling in admiration.

“You know what that is?” he asked.

Paying the dope, I scratched my head. “Some sort of convertible?” I said.

“‘At there is a Duesie SJ.”

“Like the Jesuits?”

“Nuh-uh, it’s a Duesenberg. Some of ’em’s got a ram’s horn manifold’ll boost you right up to four hundred horsepower.”

“This one?”

“You’d never know unless you drove it, or looked under the hood.”

“Golly Moses,” I said. “Imagine just leaving it on the street like that. Somebody might just open the hood and take a look inside at the manifold.” I was tired of pulling the hillbilly’s leg and I left him standing there gaping, tormented by the temptation I had just placed in front of him. I didn’t blame him, though. It was a beautiful piece of machinery, black and white with red trim, and it made that Graham I’d spotted earlier look like a galvanized trash barrel on wheels.

The sun was low and the temperature dropping, but the Royal Crown wasn’t hopping quite yet. Gleason spotted me at the door and shook his head, jerking it at Shelton, who sat there talking to a swell who looked like he might belong to the Duesenberg. At any rate, the man was wearing a suit that wouldn’t have seemed shabby behind the wheel of a car like that. Shelton’s back was to me, and two stools down from him sat Mildred, still able to balance on the stool despite the approaching dusk. She had on the same thin sleeveless dress as the day before, probably the only flattering summerweight one she had. I took the stool next to hers despite Gleason’s frantic, silent attempts to wave me away, his head shaking so hard his jowls shook like rubber balloons filled with water.

“Gin,” I said, “and another gimlet for the lady.” He just stood there looking at me, lips tight, and then he turned disgustedly and made a single drink, which he placed in front of me. Then he leaned down.

“Leave the chippie alone,” Gleason whispered. “She’s with those fellows tonight.”

“The hell with that,” I said in a normal tone of voice. “I said another gimlet for the lady.”

Gleason shook his head disgustedly, and Mildred, sensing that some free booze was on offer, turned my way. She looked nice, I thought, better than she had last night before things got started, and she smiled in recognition. “Hello, there, Wayne.” Her eyes promised the foulest of biblically proscribed delights.

“Mildred.”

Gleason put the gimlet down in front of her.

“You sure are sweet.”

“Thanks. I stopped by your house with a bottle, only you weren’t there.”

“Nope, I was here.”

“You want to go drink it, once you finish that?”

She glanced over at Shelton, still deep in conversation. “What the hell,” she said, and she knocked the gimlet back in a gulp and slid off the stool. “Lead on, MacDuff.”

I laid down some money on the bar, and Gleason shook his head at me with a very grim look on his face.

We were halfway to the door when Shelton noticed us.

“Hey,” he shouted. “Mildred.”

“I’m tired of waiting, Larry, and this nice young gentleman offered me a ride home. Wasn’t that kind of him?”

Larry Shelton looked at me without much pleasure. “You look like a boy doesn’t understand what ‘stay the hell away’ means.”

“You said to stay away until I was twenty-one. Today’s my birthday.”

He softened a little. “Well, why didn’t you say so?” Grinning, he showed off a gap between his front teeth that made Floyd’s look like an orthodontist’s masterwork, and he stuck out his hand for me to shake. “Come on over here and I’ll buy you a drink for your birthday.”

I thought for a second, stupidly, that I’d pulled one over on him, and approached him with my hand extended. The man with the snappy suit watched the transaction with bored disinterest, impatient to resume his conversation with Shelton and annoyed at the distraction.

When I was three feet away from Shelton, he grabbed his own drink from the bar and threw it in my face. I stood for a moment, humiliated, with bourbon running down my face and dripping off my chin as he and his friend cracked up laughing.

“You were about to offer the lady a ride home on your bike, junior?” the man in the suit said.

“Come on, Mildred,” I said, turning to face her, but she wasn’t there. She was leaning against the bar in hysterics, laughing so hard that no sound was coming out, doubled over with her hands resting on her shapely knees. Tears rolled down her cheeks, streaming kohl in their wake as they had yesterday, and my first urge was to throw my fist at her jaw. Instead I put the slug onto Shelton, and I got him so fast he went down with the first blow to the midriff. Mildred was still laughing, and so was the man in the suit. I gave Shelton a kick to the ribs and another to the belly that knocked the breath clear out of him, and I grabbed my own unfinished drink from the bar. I poured it into his hair and rubbed it in with my hand like scalp tonic.

Everybody was laughing but me and Shelton, and I wanted to, God knows. Gleason stood behind the bar making a valiant effort to keep a straight face, but his eyes shone with joy.

“All right, boy,” the man in the suit said. “You’ve had some fun, now it’s time to run along.” He was still smiling, but he said it like he meant it.

My honor was restored, and I was happy to go now. “Come on, Mildred,” I said.

“Huh-uh. Mildred’s not going.”

I almost made a smart remark, but Mildred was back on her bar-stool now, wiping the smeared makeup off her cheeks with a wet bar rag, facing the bar and studiously pretending I wasn’t there.

“You with them or with me, Mildred?”

She turned around. “You’re a dear sweet boy, Wayne, but tonight’s kind of a grown-up night for me, if you don’t mind. I’ll see you some other time.”

“You hear that, Wayne? Now scram.”

It was crazy, but at that moment I wanted Mildred more than I had ever wanted any woman before, more than I had ever desired anything in my whole life. I wanted to fuck her, run away with her, marry her, raise a family. I didn’t care that she was a lush and a slattern, that she was nearly twenty years older than me, or that she had dropped me for the first prosperous swinging dick that came through the barroom door. I wanted her right then and there, and I took her by the arm.

“Mildred, let’s go.” I had hoped to keep the pleading tone out of my voice, but I heard it just like everyone else did, high-pitched and boyish.

“Mildred, let’s go,” the man in the suit mocked in a voice like Mickey Mouse’s that deepened to a growl. “Let go of her arm or I’ll break yours.”

“Screw you, Charlie,” I said.

“The name’s Stan Gerard, and I own this place.” He stood up and moved toward me, and with no more telegraphing than I’d given Shelton he backhanded me across the face, and then he pulled something metallic out of his pocket and hit me with it, hard, and I closed my eyes for a second. Crazy colors floated before me, and another blow caught me on the ear as I went down. I never quite lost consciousness, but somehow I couldn’t open my eyes as they carried me through the bar to the rear and tossed me into the back alley.

“Don’t hurt him too bad,” I heard my beloved call languidly from her perch at the bar.

I hit the pavement, hard, and Stan Gerard spoke to me in a polite way before he went back inside.

“Can you hear me, Wayne?”

I indicated that I could.

“Like Shelton said, come back when you’re twenty-one. I’ll even buy you a drink. But not before then, got me?”

I nodded once again, and the door closed. I opened my eyes and looked around. It was getting dark, and I limped around to the side alley and made my way to the street, where my Hudson sat parked a stone’s throw from Stan Gerard’s Duesenberg.

Idiot, I told myself as I sat there pulling the starter again and again with no result. You’ve been running all over town, covering twice as much ground as you normally would have, and you didn’t stop for gas. With my cheekbone throbbing, I got out and started the humiliating six-block walk to my house and my bicycle.

5. In Which I Accept My Status, for Now

I couldn’t find my old man’s gas can, so I took a milk bottle in a wire basket from the back porch. As I climbed onto my bike with it I had an idea. I went back to the porch and took a second bottle, and then I rode over to the Skelly station on Hillside.

“Ain’t putting gas in there, not in a glass bottle.” The Skelly man shook his head firmly, letting it stop at the far end of each shake.

“I’ll put it in myself.”

“Nuh-uh. You take this metal can or nothing. Cost you a nickel extra for deposit, but you can get it back.”

Though the evening had cooled considerably, the asphalt beneath our feet still felt warmer than it should have, and the whole station smelled like gas, seeping up through the asphalt and past my nostrils to lodge in the spongy repository of my sinus, where it would slowly leak into my brain for the rest of the night if I didn’t get away. I could feel the fumes building up there, thick and nauseating behind my eyes, and I broke.

“Okay, put it in the can,” I said.

The Skelly man got up off of his chair and took the can over to the pump. He filled the can and I paid him and rode along the sidewalks back to the Royal Crown. I put the bicycle and the basket with the milk bottles into the rear seat of the Hudson and put some of the gasoline in the tank, and a little slug into the carburator. There was about a quart of it left, and I left it in the can on the seat next to me.

I headed one block east on Douglas and turned left over to First, where I parked in front of a two-story duplex. I got the bike and one of the milk bottles out of the back seat and filled the milk bottle with the can of gas. From the glove compartment I extracted Mildred’s purloined drawers, drenching them in the gasoline and stuffing them into the mouth of the bottle. I hopped back onto the bike and rode back to Douglas and, from the safety of a large coniferous shrub outside the Hillcrest apartment building, cased the front of the Royal Crown. The sidewalk was empty, and I pulled out my lighter and went for broke, coasting down the sidewalk with one hand on the handlebars and the other around the bottle. When I got to the Duesenberg, I stopped and propped the bike up on one leg as I flicked the lighter and lit Mildred’s gasoline-soaked intimates. They burned bright for a second and in a single action I threw the bottle at the dashboard and kicked the pedals into motion, hearing with no small satisfaction the breaking of the bottle and the whooshing sound of the fire erupting from the interior of the Duesie. I didn’t look back, but I could feel the heat at my back, and the sidewalk before me glowed yellow in a way it hadn’t a second before.

I tore ass across Douglas against the light. Once safely across, I stopped in the shadowy entryway to a store that sold artificial limbs and settled in to enjoy the show.

The flames were big and bright, eclipsing the streetlights and engulfing the interior of the convertible. From the seat of the bike I watched a disbelieving Stan Gerard race out of the Royal Crown, followed by several others, including Larry Shelton; Mildred straggled out last, a little unsteady on her feet, and had to hold on to the doorframe in order to stay upright. I could hear them shouting, and people started crowding the sidewalk, pouring out of the surrounding buildings and passing cars that had stopped at the sight, all of them keeping a respectful distance from the fire. Finally Gerard, looking scared as hell, ran up to the car to get something out of it. Shelton caught up to him, though, and tackled him and pulled him back, an action that would probably have earned him an asskicking had the Duesie’s gas tank not chosen that moment to blow.

The crowd oohed and aahed at the sight of the fireball, of the car’s low-slung skeletal frame showing delicately through the flames, and I felt a certain pride of authorship. It was a shame to have to waste such a terrific piece of machinery, but I believed at that moment I had used it to create something even more beautiful, though fleeting. I’ve read about some odd birds who get a sexual thrill out of watching fires burn, but this wasn’t like that; my pleasure was purely aesthetic. This was a spectacle of light and shadow, metal and heat, underwear and gasoline.

It got old quick. When I heard the klaxons of the fire engines hauling it down Hillside I pedaled away on the bicycle, past the businesses across from the Royal Crown and toward College Hill. It felt good to be on the bike after such a long time, and before I returned to the Hudson I rode far out of my way, looking in at the houses and wondering who lived there. It wasn’t a neighborhood I’d worked, but I bet there were a dozen women just like Mildred around there, and a hundred boys just like me.