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  “Enjoy,” she said and disappeared back into the kitchen.

  Katherine sipped her drink. “You go, dad,” she said. “I’m not interested.”

  “The thing is, Dr. Greenberg says she’s gotten a lot worse. That she’s almost completely nonverbal now. Says all she does is watch TV in the dayroom. She’s not eating right either. That’s why he’s asked me to come on out. He thinks maybe it might help. Pull her back some. Might help her to see you too.”

  “It’s not gonna help, dad.”

  “We can’t know if we don’t try.”

  The last thing in the world she wanted to do was fly to California to visit her ghost of a mother in the funny farm, and they both knew that seeing Deke was just a carrot. Though if her mother had really gone wholly nonverbal, it must at least have cut down on the rages. But she’d mostly stopped thinking of her mother as her mother years ago. She’d gone from mom to that screaming crazy bitch to pretty much zero.

  Where once her mother was a fire inside her now she was barely embers.

  There were times she was furious with her father for relocating them to this nowhere town, times she absolutely longed for San Francisco because San Francisco was a happening town and this was not, this was just hills and lakes and long winding roads. There was no Fillmore here, there was no Telegraph like there was in Berkeley, no music scene and hardly any dope scene but going back for a weekend wasn’t going to cut it with her, wasn’t going to make up for anything. Especially if it involved her mother.

  She shook her head. “Sorry, dad. No way.”

  “Is it the place or is it her, Kath?”

  “I guess it’s both.”

  “It’s a nice place.”

  “It’s all dressed up like a nice place. It’s still a place where everybody inside is crazy.”

  Her father sighed again and sipped his lemonade. There was no denying the truth of what she said and he knew it. He wasn’t the sort of man who would argue with her just to get his way.

  “You’ll be all right alone here?”

  “Sure. Etta’ll be around.”

  Etta would be around during the days. The nights she’d have to herself and that was fine. It presented possibilities. They had only been in town since the end of the school year, a little over a month and she didn’t know much of anybody. But there was Ray now for one. And the best way to get acquainted with somebody, she thought, was to dive right in.

  “Well, I guess what I’ll do is book a flight for Friday after work, come back some time Sunday night. Sound all right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You sure you won’t come along with me, Kath?”

  “I’m sure.”

  They finished their lemonade and her father went back to his shop and she climbed the stairs to her bedroom. The shop, she thought, was part of the way he dealt with things.

  Dirty or not, the shop was good for him.

  She found the number Ray’d given her in her wallet and lay down on the bed and dialed.

  “Bates Motel.”

  “Huh?”

  “Did I say Bates? I meant Starlight. Is this who I think it is?”

  “You always answer your phone that way?”

  “I gave you my private number. On the other line I do it straight.”

  “Oh.”

  “This is great! You called me!”

  “You’re surprised?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Which yes and which no?”

  “Hmmm. Well, now you got me in a kind of a position here.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, anything I say is going to make me look sort of egotistical.”

  “Which is to say you’re not egotistical.”

  “Let’s just say I was hoping you’d call because you wouldn’t give me your number. And then I would have had to find it out myself.”

  “You wouldn’t have found it. It’s unlisted.”

  “I’d have found it. Vee haff ways. Or else maybe I’d have had to stake out your house for a couple of days, accost you on the street, you know, that kind of thing.”

  “I don’t know if I’d have liked that.”

  “Doesn’t that sort of depend on how I did the accosting? Like with a dozen long-stem roses maybe, a bottle of champagne, couple of tickets to Paris?”

  “It might make a difference.”

  He was making her smile and that was good because now she felt more secure about what she was going to suggest to him. It was treachery. But only small treachery. Her father’d never know.

  “You busy Friday night, Ray?”

  “Hold on, let me check my calender. Let’s see, Monday night, nope. Tuesday night, busy. Wednesday night, unh-unh, busy again. Thursday night, nope. Friday night—I’ll be damned. It’s free.”

  “Clown.”

  “Joker. There’s a difference.”

  “Pick me up at eight.”

  “Are you gonna tell me what you have in mind?”

  “I don’t think so. And do me a favor?”

  “What.”

  “Make it a solo appearance. No little groupies, please.”

  “You mean Tim and Jennifer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who are Tim and Jennifer?”

  “Good. See you then.”

  “Not before? Friday’s a long way away.”

  “Your schedule wouldn’t permit it.”

  She hung up feeling pleased with herself. She did like the guy, quirky as he might be. Quirky as he definitely was. And it was good to be skipping lightly over the rules again.

  Since moving she’d been such a good girl.

  She didn’t really think it suited her.

  Chapter Five

  Ray

  Perfect timing, he thought. He no sooner got off the phone with her than Jennifer came padding out of the bathroom. A couple seconds earlier, he’d have had to have used a little finesse talking with Katherine on the other end. Not necessary. Jennifer was wrapped in a white motel bath towel. As usual she didn’t look as good to him after a fuck as she had before one. But it was like that with most of them anyway.

  He went to the refrigerator, opened it and popped a beer.

  “Who was that?”

  “Huh?”

  “Heard you talking.”

  “My goddamn mother. Just some scheduling thing we’re having at the front desk. What else is new.”

  She pulled off the towel and began to dry her hair. Her hair was long and she would always bend over and towel dry it in front of her. He wished she’d do it in private but she never did. There was a crease in her belly when she bent over like that that hadn’t been there a year ago and that he didn’t like to see.

  He pushed some Batman comics off the Naugahyde chair and sat down in front of the TV set and turned it on. He reached over and skimmed the channels. There was some kind of news summary on NBC. Lindsay was bickering with Rockefeller over municipal funding. Pope Paul VI was celebrating a mass in Uganda. Nixon was winding up his tour of Asia. Who could possibly give a flying shit?

  About the only remotely interesting story was that some court had denied an inquest into the carwreck out at Martha’s Vineyard, the one where that girl got her ass drowned after partying too hearty all night with that ugly fuck Teddy Kennedy. He wondered if Kennedy had been fucking her. It sounded that way. The thought of Teddy Kennedy fucking anything was revolting. Guy looked like a chipmunk. He turned the dial. There was a Bowery Boys movie and Way Out West with Laurel & Hardy but he’d already seen them. There was a Mets game being broadcast from Montreal. Baseball bored him to tears. He decided on the Bowery Boys. You couldn’t hate Huntz Hall.

  The phone rang again and this time it really was his mother.

  “I want you over in nineteen. Now.”

  “Why? What’s the problem?”

  “Carla says the toilet’s backed up. Says it’s all the hell over the place.”

  Carla was one of the part-time maids. Eighteen, with a cute little ass on
her. He’d already fucked her twice and one of these days he just might fuck her again. He decided to throw her butt out of the unit before he got down to work. Toilets were gross and he’d have to be digging around in there. He didn’t want her watching.

  Spoil the image.

  “Great,” he said.

  “Hurry up and get over there before it ruins the rug.” His mother’s voice was harsh with too many Kents over too many years.

  “All right. I got to get dressed, though.”

  “I don’t care if you run over in your goddamn birthday suit, Raymond. Just do it. Quick.”

  He wished his father were around. If his father were around it would fall to him to plumb out some guy’s latest healthy turd. But as usual on Sundays his father was down at the Sparta Lanes bowling with the boys. His father was in a league. He bowled every Sunday. His mother allowed him that much, anyway.

  Bowling, for god’s sake. How lame.

  He cradled the phone and pulled on his jeans and a denim workshirt and slipped his feet into a second pair of socks and then pulled them into his boots. The extra pair of socks were necessary to cushion and protect his feet from the crushed beer cans and newspapers stuffed into the bottoms which, combined with the two-inch-high heels, gave him the four more inches in height than his actual five-three.

  He never took the boots off until he was in bed with a chick and never got out of bed until they were on again. So none of them ever caught on. Jennifer was the only exception to that but Jennifer could give a damn and knew well enough to keep that particular piece of information all to herself. She was not even about to tell Tim about it and she and Tim were pretty tight.

  She was lying on the bed in her white bra and panties, eating Fritos out of a bag and watching Huntz Hall.

  “Your mom again?”

  “Big fucking emergency in nineteen. Toilet duty. You want to go on over for me?”

  “Oh yeah, sure. Swell.”

  “Like my mother’s a goddamn cripple. Like she couldn’t go over there herself.”

  “Hell, Ray. You think of it, why should she? She owns the place. You’re the assistant manager. She pays you, gives you this apartment. I wouldn’t go plumb out a toilet bowl if I was her either.”

  She was right of course though he didn’t have to like it. His mother paid him pretty well in fact, enough so that with his paycheck along with the dope money his pad looked like something out of Playboy only smaller, complete with state-of-the-art Magnavox turntable and speakers, twenty-one-inch TV, a small mahogany wet bar, black satin sheets and a brand-new waterbed.

  Originally the room had been a storage space behind the management office, but they’d added sixteen units in ’63 and a bigger storage space behind them in order to maintain the whole thing. When Ray agreed to come on as assistant manager his father, who was pretty good with his hands if not for much else in Ray’s opinion, had converted the old space into a two-room apartment with cherry-paneled walls and a kitchenette and added the requisite plumbing.

  Ray having his own apartment was part of the deal. It got him out of his parents’ house up on the hill above the complex. The house that had made him laugh like hell when he saw Psycho. He now had a pad you could bring any babe to and feel good about yourself.

  When it was clean and tidy. Right now it wasn’t too clean and tidy but that was because hell, it was only Jennifer.

  “Okay. Be back in a flash. Don’t eat all the goddamn Fritos on me.”

  “I won’t.”

  He meant it. Jennifer was turning soft on him. Slack in the belly, a little puffy in the thighs. She was still a damn good fuck though and she knew that thing he liked which most of his other girls didn’t know, not unless they found it out for themselves because he didn’t really like to tell them. That thing about slipping a finger or two up his asshole right before he was going to come. It drove him fucking crazy.

  But you couldn’t just up and tell them.

  He got the plunger out from under the sink because who the hell wanted to bother with the storage space just for that and walked out into a blast of warm humid air and crossed the macadam lot around the side of the pool to number nineteen. He glanced over his shoulder and through the plateglass window saw his mother at the front desk registering a middle-aged couple. Their van was parked out front.

  Sundays were the only days his mother would consent to sit desk duty. The rest of the time he split with his father and Willie, their old part-timer, supposedly about fifty-fifty but it didn’t work out that way because his father had no life. Shit, you could buy Harold Pye with a clap on the back and a smile and a fifth of J&B and he’d gladly handle the overtime.

  Inside the unit he found Carla in the bathroom trying to stem the tide, dipping a pan into the filthy water and emptying it into the sink. There were rolled-up towels on the floor by the entranceway. She’d managed to protect the green wall-to-wall carpeting anyway.

  “I’ll take it from here,” he said. “I’ll have her call you when I’m through.”

  “Thanks, Ray.”

  She was grateful. This kind of job? She damn well should be.

  Twenty minutes later he had the water running clear again and a soggy brown Kotex in the sink, Fucking women. Some of these women were fucking animals. You posted a sign in every unit telling them not to flush the goddamn things, provided disposable bags but they went and did it anyway. He cleaned and rinsed the plunger in the tub, dried it with a towel and headed out to the manager’s office to get Carla for the final cleanup.

  His mother was sitting in the swivel chair behind the desk with a pretty young blonde standing in front of her who turned and smiled at him briefly as he walked in. His mother did not smile. She rarely did. On the television behind her they were showing clips from the moon landing. No sound. His mother thought sound intrusive in public places and in bad taste. At home she’d blast the sucker.

  “Ray, meet Sally Richmond. Sally, this is my son Ray. He manages the place along with my husband Harold. Sally’s coming on in housekeeping tomorrow.”

  Housekeeping. His mother called them housekeepers. They were maids for chrissake. In some other town they’d all have been black. Sparta had no blacks. Not so far at least. So far the niggers were at bay.

  “Hello, Sally. Good to meet you.” He extended his hand and she took it. Her grip was surprisingly firm, her hand not nearly as soft as he expected. He exerted just the right amount of pressure and then let it fall away.

  “Hello, Mr. Pye.”

  “If you’re going to be on staff here it’s Ray, okay?”

  “Okay. Ray.”

  “Nine o’clock, then,” his mother said.

  “Sure. Nine will be fine.”

  “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. We’ll give you three days to start with and then see about extending you.”

  “Fine. Tomorrow, then. Nice to meet you, Mrs. Pye. Nice to meet you, Ray. Thanks.”

  “See you tomorrow.” He smiled at her and she returned it brightly. It was no more a shy smile than his was. The girl was pretty and knew it and didn’t mind somebody appreciating the fact.

  She walked past him out into the parking lot and he told his mother about the Kotex in the toilet and that the room was ready for Carla and his mother said she’d page her. And that was the extent of their conversation. When he stepped out of the office again Sally Richmond was just pulling out into traffic in a blue Volkswagon Beetle.

  The girl was interesting. Very interesting, he thought. Slim but not fine-boned. Tall too. And pretty. Not as pretty as Katherine Wallace was but that was going some. Long blond hair and big green eyes.

  And not shy.

  She’d be coming in tomorrow. Tomorrow was Monday and that gave him four days and four nights before his date with Katherine on Friday. He could get rid of Jennifer easily enough whenever he wanted to. He had Jennifer pretty well trained by now. She came and went pretty much on his say-so.

  A lot could happen in four days. You never knew.


  He crossed the hot macadam to his apartment. He hoped Jennifer would be dressed by now and ready to split. It would be nice to take a long, hot shower, find Tim and maybe Lee and some of the other guys and hang out for a while and smoke a little dope and tell them about Katherine and this new girl Sally and he couldn’t do that with Jennifer tagging along.

  Fact was, Jennifer was getting to be something of a drag on his action lately. Katherine obviously didn’t like her or Tim. He wondered what he should do about that, if anything. He didn’t know. Keep them separate anyway for now.

  Divide and conquer.

  It always worked for him.

  Chapter Six

  Sally

  “You know one thing I love about you? Your hair.”

  “Hair? I don’t have hardly any.”

  “Sure you do. It’s fine as baby’s hair.”

  “And there’s just about as much of it.”

  Ed lay on the pillow under her arm. She stroked his head. When he turned toward her she could feel his beard against her breast. The beard was thick and soft, not at all prickly as she’d first expected and she liked the feel of that too.

  She stroked his powerful shoulders, his strong arms, the soft smooth lightly freckled skin.

  “What time you have to be at work in the morning?”

  “Nine.”

  “I wish you’d told me what you were planning to do and where you were planning to do it. I couldn’t forbid you god knows but I sure as hell would have tried to talk you out of it. Harold and Jane, they’re all right I guess, though I don’t really know the mother too well. But that goddamn Ray. I dunno, Sally. Were you listening to what I just said? We had the guy prime on a murder charge. Charlie and I still think he’s guilty as sin. Or at the very least knows who is. You sure I can’t get you to rethink this thing?”