Sin Hellcat

by Lawrence Block

  By then, it was midnight. We walked, we hoped, toward the Ylicaw stadium, found it at last and, to our dismay, discovered that the cars were gone. We learned the next day that the others hadn’t even noticed our non-appearance. There were ten of them, all somewhat high, and with that number in that condition it was easy to lose track of two people.

  For a few minutes, we didn’t know what to do. My eight dollars wasn’t enough to get us back to campus, not even by bus, assuming we could find a route—changing buses, changing buses, changing buses—that would take us from the nondescript out-of-the-way dinky little hick town of Ylicaw to the equally non-descript out-of-the-way dinky little hick town where the campus was situated. At any rate, we couldn’t afford a bus anyway. And it was too far to walk, of course. And far too late at night to hitchhike, on the secondary and tertiary roads that would be our inevitable route.

  Jodi suggested calling someone on campus, preferably one of those who had so unceremoniously just dumped us here, at the edge of beyond. But of course we couldn’t expect them to get back to the dorms before three at the earliest. In the morning, I could call someone to come and get us, but for the moment we were stuck.

  The long and short of it was that we were going to have to spend the night in Ylicaw.

  We talked around the subject for a few minutes and finally brought it out into the open. We were going to have to spend the night in Ylicaw.

  Now, what with piercing flashlights and threatening fat men and being abandoned by our friends and whatnot, we had pretty well lost the fervor that had driven us all day long. We were neither passionate anymore, nor were we coy. And so when we spoke of staying the night here, we discussed the subject with clinical coldness.

  We couldn’t very well sleep in the park; neither of us was in a particular hurry to meet the flashlight-bearing patrolman or his red-faced superior again. And, dressed only in bathing suits, carrying no luggage, and with no ring on Jodi’s third-finger-left-hand, staying at a hotel seemed a remote possibility. Nor were we particularly happy about the idea of spending the next nine or ten hours wandering around the streets. We were somewhat tired, from our day’s exertions.

  We strolled, talking it over, irritated and worried. We strolled for perhaps fifteen minutes and then we saw the hotel.

  It was the western edge of town. Every town in the country has a section like this, on one edge which is neither fringe nor outskirt but seems to be a small hunk of downtown broken off and rolled into a corner. A few seedy-looking stores, some equally seedy offices, and, down at the corner there, a rambling structure two stories high, fronted by a neon sign reading “BAR-HOTEL.”

  “I’m going to take a chance,” I said, the minute I saw that sign. “Places like that usually aren’t too particular.”

  “I’ll wait here,” she said, tiredly.

  And so she waited there. I continued down to the corner and stepped into the bar. A hotel like this, of course, had no lobby.

  I made quite a stir in the bar. There were six or seven locals, hulks in hunting jackets, draped over beers at the bar, while another hulk, this one in a filthy white shirt and apron, played bartender in front of them. And here I walked in, a nineteen-year-old kid in a bathing suit.

  They watched me, with stoic interest, and I got a bad case of stage fright. I sidled to the bar, the bartender ambled over, and I said—whispered, rather, for I was completely intimidated by the surround-ings—“Have you a room?”

  “Sure I got rooms,” he said. He looked me up and down, slowly, looked beyond me through the fly-specked window at the empty street, and said, “Single or double?”

  My hesitation should have been a dead giveaway. Finally, I said, “Single.”

  He didn’t seem to notice the hesitation at all. He simply nodded and told me the charge was three dollars, and that he wanted it in advance, since I had no luggage. I paid him, gratefully, and he came out from behind the bar and led the way to my room.

  We went through a door in the side wall, coming into a long narrow hall, with a street door at one end and a flight of stairs at the other. The bartender pointed at the stairs. “Up there,” he said. “First door on your right.” He handed me the key.

  I thanked him, in a frightened whisper, and he nodded and started back to his bartending duties, pausing to look at me and point at the street door. “Bring her through there,” he said. “And try to keep it quiet.” Then he went back into the bar, closing the door after him.

  After only a few seconds of paralysis, I raced to the street door, opened it, and waved frantically at Jodi. She came down the street at a half-trot, and when she reached me I whispered, “We’ve got a room. It’s okay, the bartender’s on our side.”

  “I’ve got to get off my feet,” was all she said.

  We hurried upstairs and into our room.

  This time, there was no caressing, there was no physical play. We entered the room—a small barren linoleum-floored monstrosity with bed and dresser and chair—and the both of us immediately stripped off our bathing suits and crawled into bed. I switched off the light, a glaring overhead affair, and Jodi and I lay together in the dark, almost touching, but a million miles apart.

  We lay there, side by side, unmoving, for perhaps fifteen minutes, and then Jodi exhaled in a long sibilant sigh and whispered, “My God, it feels good to lie down.”

  “This sure turned into a mess,” I answered. I was beginning to feel very sorry for myself.

  “Poor Harvey,” she murmured. She rolled over her side—demonstrating, in the process, that we were aboard a bed with a particularly virulent squeak—and patted my arm consolingly. “Fate was against us,” she whispered.

  “I’m sorry about that thing in the park,” I said.

  “Hush. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Damn it, Jodi.”

  “Poor Harvey,” she whispered again, and leaned over to kiss me on the cheek. When she did so, her breast brushed my arm, hard and electric.

  Passion, in a manner of speaking, came back in a rush.

  Squeak! went the bed, as I flipped over onto my side and gathered Jodi into my arms. Squeak! it went again, as she pressed herself close against me, and then all was silence as we kissed, kissing with lips and tongues and hands and pushing bodies.

  The feel of her beneath my hand, her breasts crushed against my chest, her hair around my face, drove me in seconds to the same fever pitch that had originally taken me all afternoon to work up. I kissed her, caressed her body, and she responded like the passionate nymph she was.

  Squeak! went the bed as I pushed her over onto her back again, and squeak! it went once more, as I followed, moving at her and squeak! and squeak! and squeak! and squeaksqueak-squeaksqueak.…

  Long and painful as the frustration of the afternoon and evening and night had been, I was suddenly grateful for it. If I had been able to take Jodi at once, this afternoon, right off the bat, it would have been fast and furious and finished before barely begun. Even had our commingling in the park been consummated, it wouldn’t have been the love that lasts. But the day’s events had temporarily aged my body somewhat. No longer the randy rooster, picapicapicapuc, I was now a mighty javelin in my very first marathon mating.

  The sweat started from us, our bodies were slick and hot in the dark on the wrinkling sheets. Jodi, but eighteen then, was even less experienced than I, and at first she simply lay passive, receiving me, but the force of the rhythm awoke her body, and all at once she surged beneath me, and the bed screamed, and she moved as lustily as I. Her moaning gasping breath was hot in my ear, her arms clutched my back, her body drove and drove. Like a rolling liner on the rolling sea we rolled together.

  I felt her passion climbing, up and up, and knew myself to still be strong, and knew I would last, and when she went rigid beneath me, nails sunk in the flesh of my back, legs straining upward, head arched back, I only drove harder and harder and harder still, and it wasn’t till the second time for her that I finally surged to immobility,
and held my breath, and squeezed my eyes shut, and bit the soft flesh of her shoulder.

  We lingered together, calming slowly, our breathing gradually becoming more normal, and at last I moved over to my own side of the bed again, and Jodi kissed me, and we fell asleep in one another’s arms.

  We awoke late the next morning, both ravenous. We left the bar-hotel, had breakfast together at a diner, and I called one of our compatriots from last night, who promised to drive out for us at once. While waiting, Jodi and I, incredibly conspicuous on the quiet streets of Ylicaw in our bathing suits, strolled and window-shopped and held hands and, whenever no one could see us, touched one another in fond reminiscence.

  Our driver, apologizing profusely for last night’s oversight—for which we were, of course, no longer angry—arrived at about two in the afternoon, and drove us back. We had already worked out our story, and told everyone that we had been picked up by the police for wandering around in bathing suits in the park at midnight, and had spent the night in separate cells in the local hoosegow. Jodi told all her girlfriends that, and I told the same story to all the guys in the dormitory. But I, in my telling, made damn sure no one was going to believe me. Jodi was too lovely a conquest, too desirable a bedmate, for me, at callow and loud-mouthed nineteen, to be able to keep it all a secret.…

  Talking together now, Jodi more desirable and more exciting than ever in that green knit dress with the revealed expanse of thigh, we laughed over that first time, and Jodi said, “In a way, I’m glad the cop caught us. That bed was a lot softer than the ground in the park.” She gave me a melting smile. “And you were a lot firmer.”

  TWO

  If Helen had been waiting for me, preferably nervous and dynamically concerned, I could at least have permitted myself the luxury of delicious guilt feelings. But such luck was not to be mine. The train let me off and the chrome-plated ranch wagon was waiting for me, emptily metallic. I turned a key in it and drove along tree-lined streets to our little hate-nest among the crab grass. I buried the car in the carport—garages are sadly out of style; all that space to waste on cars that don’t fit in them anyway—and I walked around to look at the outside of our deluxe split-level colonial.

  There is something reassuringly schizoid about a split-level to begin with. Ours looks as though it couldn’t possibly continue to exist if the various floors were level all across the board. The imbalance of its design is essential if it’s going to survive all the concentrated imbalance of the people who live in it. But when you take this split-level and make it colonial as well—colonial, for the love of the lord—well, the result is nice to visit, but wouldn’t you just hate to live there?

  The other car, Detroit’s most recent attempt to barrelhouse into the compact field, was missing. It stood to reason that Helen was missing as well. She never goes anywhere without the car—in fact I was once thinking of buying her a bicycle to get into the house from the carport—and by extension the car never goes anywhere without her. I rang the bell anyway, sort of for the hell of it. If a doorbell rings and there’s nobody in the house, did it really ring? It really rang. I heard it. Then I opened the door with my key and went inside.

  Experience told me to go first to the kitchen. It’s an electric kitchen, of course. Electric range, electric icebox, electric garbage disposal, electric washing machine, electric dishwasher, electric frying pan, electric sink, electric pop-up toaster. The sad thing is that if you put your head in the oven you can’t turn on the gas. You can only turn on the electricity. Shocking, but harmless.

  The kitchen had a pegboard. It came with the kitchen, of course, and it is a huge flattened-out cork shaped like a kidney where husbands and wives leave notes for each other. A last-ditch attempt at eliminating conversation forever from the domestic scene. I looked at the pegboard and there, of course, was a note from Helen.

  Harv—it began, quaintly enough. Couldn’t wait dinner for you. The girls are playing at Betty’s tonight. You know the number if something comes up. Now what in the world could come up? I pushed onward. There’s a teevee dinner in the fridge. Just pop it on the stove and eat hearty. The note was unsigned but I had a fairly sound idea who had written it.

  I opened the fridge and stared thoughtfully at the teevee dinner. It was a Dexter Frozen Dinner. A Square Deal on a Square Meal, I thought. And just how square could you get? It was unsettling. I was selling my own wife.

  I took out the teevee dinner, the Dexter Frozen Dinner thoughtfully provided by Harvey Christopher’s Frozen Wife. I put it on the electric range and turned the dial. The burner unit glowed like neon. I looked at Dexter’s creation—pieces of unhappy chicken swimming with leaden wings through a sea of à la king. I watched the green peas in one section of the aluminum foil container grow slowly warm. The frozen French fries thawed and heated.

  When the chicken bubbled the dish was prepared. Scientific eating. Scientific cooking. I took the container—dishes are a waste of time, of course, even with an electric dishwasher to care for them, and besides you can only get them in boxes of soap, and soap makes too many suds and is harmful to your new automatic, and—I took the container into the family-style living room carpeted protectively from wall to wall to hide the bad job they’d done on the floor, and I sat down in a chair no more comfortable than it looked. I placed the container on the arm of the chair, then flicked the remote switch that clued in the television set to the fact that someone, by God, was eating a teevee dinner, and while the set woke up and came to life I plunged a fork into the chicken mess and brought it to my mouth. I chewed it—it wasn’t really necessary, because the Dexterino people sort of chew the food for you, scientifically, of course, as an unbeatable aid to digestion. A western was happening on the screen. I studied it for a moment, pausing before attempting another forkful of Dexter’s Death Warmed Over.

  And I thought about Jodi, and bed with Jodi, and Jodi’s happy apartment on Lexington in the very heart of Madcap Manhattan. Jodi’s apartment was not schizoid. It didn’t even have a sunken living room. It was all on one level, as, for that matter, was Jodi.

  And something happened. I reached for the remote switch and killed the television set in the middle of a howdy. I stood up, slowly but quite firmly, and I carried the Dexter’s Frozen Tundra to the bathroom.

  The toilet wasn’t electric but it tried. I poured the teevee dinner into it. There was no chain to pull, no handle to yank. There was instead a pedal on the floor. I trod lightly upon the pedal and the toilet gurgled pleasantly at me while Dexter’s Frozen Folderol disappeared to wherever bad food goes when it dies.

  I had a shaker of martinis mixed before I remembered that I didn’t really like martinis. I poured them down the toilet and pedaled the pedal. It was damned enjoyable. Then I looked for the Scotch, and we were out of it. I started for the carport, stopped suddenly, and returned to the kitchen. I scrawled a note for Helen Hel—it began. Went out for Scotch. Couldn’t wait until you got home. I didn’t sign it, because I figured she would know who it was from.

  Then I got into the ranch wagon and pointed it at Manhattan. I didn’t really have to do much more than that. The car knew the way. I pointed it, and I let it drive, which it did very well with its automatic transmission and its power steering and its power brakes and its power windows and power doors. And while we rode along, the car and I, I thought about Jodi some more, and about me. My mind must have been as properly primed as the car. The memories flowed easily.…

  It was a strange affair, if you could call it an affair. I don’t think you could. Affair means several things, and none of the things is what we had. Affair means contemporary adultery, or it means modern people having a go at it, or it means a Radcliffe girl having a mad fling before she marries a stockbroker’s son. And Jodi and I were none of these things, so what we had wasn’t really an affair, evidently.

  But whatever it was, it was fine with me. We were at college, and we were young, and there is no better time nor place for falling happily and heedles
sly into the hay. We were at college, and we were young, and we were not in love, and we realized this.

  After the wonderful night in the wonderful hotel, after the wonderful leading up to it and the wonderful doing it and the wonderful lying there and thinking about it, there was a period of about a week during which I avoided Jodi. No, that’s not it, not quite. I didn’t avoid her like the plague, or walk away when I saw her coming, or steer clear of her favorite haunts. I simply made no attempt to seek her out. Our paths did not cross by accident and I did not cause them to cross by design.

  I suppose I was shy, or embarrassed, or merely young. It was the way my mind worked at that period of my life. I had made love to Jodi, and it had been more fun than a beer-drinking contest, but it was over. Make love to her again? Hell, man, I already did! Why do it again, for God’s sake?

  Fear of foreign alliances, perhaps, or fear of rejection, or just stupidity. But I went on with classes and beer and rides and assorted nonsense, and I dated a few girls and caressed their breasts. Their breasts were nice, if not quite so nice as Jodi’s. And at that stage of my life, the skirt of one girl was much the same as the skirt of another. If something was missing with those other girls I was barely conscious of it. Something was missing, of course. I didn’t get to sleep with them. But I would, in due time, and I was busy making plans.

  Then I ran into Jodi. Quite literally, as a matter of fact. I was strolling down the campus oblivious to mostly everything, and so was she. I didn’t see her coming and I don’t know whether she saw me or not, but we bumped chests, always a nice way to say hello. She started to topple over and I grabbed her and hoisted her upright again and we looked deeply into one another’s eyes. I remember feeling very ashamed of myself and not knowing why.