I took another drag on the cigarette and watched Veda staring at her sister as though she were something from outer space. Then I had to tell her. You don’t miss opportunities like that. I said, “Veda baby, don’t get rough on her. There was you and the governess from the Forbes estate, you and the cute black-haired girl from school you brought home one holiday, you and that interior decorator the old man hired to do over the Mondo Beach place ... so don’t look at Pam. Hell, you only liked broads until you were seventeen. How you doing now?”
Both of them sat there like lumps, hands fidgeting nervously in their laps, trying to play the elegant matrons listening to some horrible diatribe, but each of them knowing it was true.
“In case you’re worried, Lucella isn’t any better. She’s just more honest. She was a straight-out fucker who always got caught and wound up marrying a nithead she had the good sense to divorce. Too bad. She’s still young enough to enjoy a good piece now and then. At least she can booze it up enough to lose all those sexual urges in a good sleep.”
My cigarette had burned down to the filter tip and I scraped it out on the jade ashtray. The old man used to do the same with his cigars. The ashtray was worth a cool ten grand, but the old man liked to live big. I looked at his picture over on the wall, the one with the scowl and the two pheasants in his hand, the unloaded and open shotgun crooked over his other arm. The pheasants looked stiff like they had been stuffed. They must have been, otherwise they would have stunk before the portrait was finished.
Old Cameron Barrin’s frown wasn’t as fierce as I had thought it was. As a matter of fact, now that I looked at it closely, it was a worried expression. I winked at the picture and mentally told him not to worry, the seed was still there and even if it was a bastard seed it still had some Cameron genes in it straight from the source of his own balls and not his stupid brother’s.
“Little old ladies,” I said, “you are impoverished.” Pam reacted first, coming out of her chair in a defensive gesture that almost looked real. Her voice was deliberately controlled as though she was taking care of an obstreperous bridge club member. “You are not about to come in here and ...”
“I am in here and like I said, stop the shit, both of you.” I dropped my feet off the desktop and pulled my chair up to the edge so I could prop my arms on it. I didn’t realize it until I saw their faces change, but that was exactly what the old man used to do when he was about to pull the cork.
“Your stock is gone,” I told them. “Now look at me.”
Their attention was undivided. I didn’t have to tell them because they felt it coming, but I wanted to make it all very sure in their minds so once and for all it would end. They didn’t even suspect what the tag scene was going to be.
“I have it all. That and more. I’m about to control the Barrin Industries.”
Veda’s lips were white. Pam kept pulling at her sleeve.
“Alfie boy and Dennie don’t know about it yet, do they?”
Veda’s mouth was a thin, colorless line. Pam just sat there.
“You’ve been playing the game on empty pocketbooks, ladies. It’s a good thing the old man left everything free and clear. Barrin stock is down in the peanut class and the boys are still trying to ride a stallion. All you have is some property, antiquated factories and contracts that can be yanked and you’re all sitting on a lousy watersoaked log floating downstream with the vultures circling overhead.”
“Dogeron ...” Pam said.
I ignored her. “And do you know who the vultures are? You got me and McMillan and the Securities Exchange Commission who are going to move in pretty damn soon and if I don’t get it, or McMillan doesn’t get it, the SEC will chew you to pieces.”
“Dogeron ...”
“What?”
“How ... can you do this?”
“No trouble at all, Pam. Like I said, you looked at my bleeding asshole once too often. I’d like my turn at bat.”
“The family name ...”
“My name’s Kelly, or did you forget?”
“That was so long ago.”
“Look at the calendar and look at the clock. The time is now, kid. The game is over. You all lost it in the locker room.”
“Dog.” Veda was sitting back, studying me with callous eyes. “You didn’t have to come here to insult us.” I grinned again, and she knew what I was grinning at and waiting for, so nodded and added, “Or remind us of the truth.”
“That’s right.”
“Why are you here?”
“I was wondering when you’d ask.”
Both of them wanted to look at each other, hang on to lines of communication and get mutual support like they used to, but neither of them dared to.
I said, “Unless all of want to find what it’s like to be out on the street, you’ll do exactly what I want you to do.”
“What ... will that be?” Pam managed to say.
“As far as Alfred and Dennie are concerned, you still have your stock. Condition one is, you’ll vote it the way I tell you to no matter what they say. You don’t have any choice, so it’s an easy condition. Be nice and I may drop some of those Barrin paper goodies back in your hands. Try any tricks and the shit hits the fan. I haven’t got a damn thing to lose, but your feminine dainties can get put up for auction. Clear?”
Neither of them was stupid. They didn’t have to look at each other for the answer. They knew I had it all in my hands and weren’t eager for any further clarification. The hard work of generations had slipped through the greasy fingers of avarice and they were beginning to find out that you don’t crap in a rose garden because human feces aren’t as adaptable to soil culture as animal dung and the stink is pretty damn distinctive. And even worse when you kicked the topsoil off and let them show.
Ladies. They sat there as if I were the liar, trying to compose themselves with all the Victorian demeanor of royalty looking down their noses at the hun upstart and I knew Veda would be the one to have to shed her wig.
She fell right into the trap. “And condition two?” she asked with that same ridiculous haughtiness.
The crunch. The tag line. She never should have asked it and suddenly she knew it. I lit another cigarette and put my feet back on the desk.
“Stand up,” I said. “Both of you.”
This time they got in that mutual glance, but they both stood up.
“Take off your clothes,” I told them.
Horror has to be seen to be enjoyed and I enjoyed it. Only seconds ticked by, but their faces went from indignation to anger, then a plea for pity, finally disintegrating into abject subservience when I gave them a narrow-eyed look to remind them of the delivery boys and the governess and the other things they didn’t realize I knew and they took off their clothes.
Everything they had was piled in a heap on the floor like I told them to do, then I made them turn around, then face me again. I dropped the stub of my cigarette in the old-fashioned inkwell and pushed the chair back.
I called out, “Harvey, bring my stuff in here.”
When the butler came in with my coat and hat he barely paused at the threshold, his eyes taking in the entire scene. I put my coat over my arm, put on my hat and looked at the two women. “Sloppy,” I said. “Pam, you ought to shave. You’re the hairiest broad I ever saw in my life” Harvey opened the door for me and this time he couldn’t quite hide his smile. “Will there be anything else, sir?”
I gave his shoulder a squeeze. “I don’t think so.”
“Very good, sir.”
Two steps down I heard his chuckle. Softly he said, “Very good, sir.”
The pale-blue pickup was behind me for the fourth time. I stopped at the post office and bought a folder of airmail stamps and looked at the driver of the truck who was mailing a package at the parcel post window. He was about sixty, dressed in faded blue denim pants and a torn sweater. The clerk was giving his receipt when I went back outside. I waited in my car until he came down the steps, drove off and turne
d right at the first intersection. He turned left and in the rearview mirror I saw him pull into a parking slot outside a small appliance store.
I was getting edgy again and even the thought of my naked cousins couldn’t take the bite out of things. I kept thinking, DOG. FERRIS. 655, wondering what the hell it meant.
He was young and had blond hair and didn’t have time to grab his helmet. He was a young, grinning kraut and he damn near took me out after he shot down Bertram and all I had was that one look at him and the name Helgurt under his canopy and the five insignias, three American and two British under that just back of the yellow spinner on his ME 109. He lifted his wing the same time I did and we slid together like lovers waiting to kiss in a monumental close-up of flame, but air pressures and engineering combined to keep those lips apart and we hauled back on the controls into tight, stall-vibrating turns that dragged the blood from our eyeballs and there he was coming into my reticule before I came into his and my fingers squeezed the trigger on the stick and six fifties went off converging into a cone of fire at four hundred feet that took his yellow spinner off with the prop and chewed a beautiful flying machine into a pile of junk within three seconds leaving the young, grinning blond-headed kraut without any helmet and without any head or body parts anybody could remember. He had five kills and I had a hell of a lot more, but I remembered them and his name, Helgurt, and his yellow spinner, so why couldn’t I remember DOG. FERRIS. 655?
Somebody had left the brochure on the desk, a four colored come-on with block-lettered Farnsworth Aviation, Inc. headlining the aerial photo of the sky over the mountains with the latest Farnsworth executive jet streaking by under a high band of striped cirrus clouds.
“Nice plane,” I said.
“Who may I say called, sir?” the receptionist asked me.
“Just a friend of the family,” I told her. “I’ll come back.”
She poised her pen over the lined pad and gave me an annoyed grimace. “Ill be very glad to ...”
“I know you will, kitten, but I won’t,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ll see you again.”
Behind me, the stout man in the pin-striped suit coughed behind his hand and I moved out of the way. He said his name was Meehan and he was expected at the conference. The receptionist pushed a button on her intercom, made the inquiry, then admitted him through the gate with a practiced smile. I went back to my car and drove away from the parking lot. On the other side of the building a double line of men were strung out for a good hundred yards. Two other men were taking down their information on clipboards, then admitting them into the main building.
The time was sixteen minutes after two in the afternoon and Barrin Industries looked for all the world like a thriving enterprise. I drove around the factory complex, took a side road through the old section up to a saloon, went in and had a beer and, halfway through, picked up my change and made a phone call from the booth at the back of the bar.
Sheila McMillan laughed when I told her who I was and dared me to come out for lunch. I told her to climb a tree and to meet me at Tod’s if she wanted to really know how her husband got that scar on his skull and when she said she would I hung up, finished my beer and drove down to Bergan and High, parked and went in where the moths were still gnawing at the stuffed dead heads of all those beautiful animals.
All the old men were gone now. The sun was on the other side of the room throwing a rosy glow through the dirt-streaked windows and the heavy tones of the Dante Symphony from Tod’s radio had quieted the three at the bar. I wouldn’t let Tod change stations and the mood had diminished the baseball talk, turning it into nostalgia and latrinograms of what might happen to the big smog mill on the riverbank and Tod didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.
Hell, he knew Sheila even if nobody else did. He had known Cameron Barrin and he had known my old man. He remembered my mother and he knew Cross. Now he was knowing me and trying to put all the pieecs together and all he could do was look at the two of us back in the comer sitting together and all he could imagine was the wires touching and the bomb going off with him in the middle and everybody else fat and happy minding their own business.
She didn’t have to turn up in those crazy hot pants under the leather skirt. She could have worn stockings instead of letting all the skin show. The fringed buckskin jacket didn’t have to be tied with a rawhide thong that let her breasts peek out almost to the nipples showing all that tanned flesh from the top of her navel to the jutting rise of her bosom. But it was.
“Why is Tod looking at me like that?” she asked me.
“You’re a walking orgasm, doll,” I said.
“To him or you?”
“Skin isn’t new to me, sugar.” I told Tod and he looked back at his customers. “You’re sure kicking him around.”
“Legs or tits?”
“All one big package, and he can only take a little bit at a time.”
“Which one first?”
“You mess with Tod and you’ll get your face splashed up.”
“So I’ll mess with you.”
“I can do worse.”
“Talk.”
“Look at me,” I said.
“I am.”
“Don’t you know yet?”
“You must be kidding.”
“Sorry, baby. It’s real. Watch it.”
Her smile came on so slowly it was like the sun rising. I watched her lift her drink and sip at it deliberately, with eyes so deeply blue it was incredible washing over me like a gentle, laughing waterfall.
“Tiger?”
“Of a sort. Just be careful. Even tigers can purr.”
“You’re a mean one.”
“Don’t go to too much trouble finding out,” I said.
“Somebody’s been telling you lies, Dog.”
“Don’t you think they’d waste their time trying that?”
“Would they?”
I nodded.
“How did Cross really get that crease on his head?”
“He probably told you the truth. I hit him with a rock. I was too young to do anything else. My baser instincts took over at the moment.”
“Oh, how he hates you.”
“Nuts. He hates the Barrins.”
“Only you’re not a Barrin.”
“But I’m the one with the rock, remember?”
Sheila held her glass up and looked at the sunlight coming through the ice and the liquid. A spectrum of color danced across her face for a moment, then she put the glass down. “You know what he’s going to do to you?”
“He’s going to try,” I said.
“All the way.”
“That won’t be enough,” I told her. I finished my drink and waved for Tod to bring me another. “Are you as pretty all the way naked as you are now?”
I watched her eyes change shape, then go back to their original oblongs and heard her laugh. “Prettier.”
“Hair color the same?”
“Identical.”
“Leggy?”
“All beautiful thighs right up to my whoosis, then down again.”
“Nipples sensitive?”
“See them pointing at you?” she smiled.
“Come fast?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Often?”
“Certainly.”
“Only when you’re doing it to yourself?”
She twisted the glass in her hand and held it up again. The sun had gone down and there weren’t any multicolored spectrums showing on her face now. “You really are a tiger, aren’t you?”
“Want to find out?”
“No.”
“Better to just talk about it?”
“By far,” she said.
“We have a lot of talking to do, haven’t we?”
Sheila finished her drink and set the glass down gently. Her eyes came up and smiled at me. “I think so,” she said.
“You know women pretty well, don’t you?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Can we go someplace and talk?”
I put a bill on the bar and helped her into her jacket. Tod was looking at me as if I were in a cage and shook his head, then threw a wave as if he were giving up all hope and took the curse off with the kind of grin only one man can give to another. I grinned back and Sheila walked out ahead of me. When we reached the car she got in, sat there looking straight ahead a second, then said, “Somebody’s got to lose.”
“Always,” I told her
XVI
She opened the buttons on my shirt down to my belt buckle and let the edges of her nails trace little lines of fire down my chest. “Like?” she asked me.
“Nice,” I said. Overhead, the moon was a thin crescent in the black of night, fuzzing out occasionally behind the cloud barrier. The dim glow of Linton outlined the turrets and the Moorish-looking left wing of the old beach house and when I looked back over my head I could see the corner of the widow’s walk I had fallen from when I was six years old.
“You’re not paying attention,” Sheila told me.
“I’m enjoying myself,” I said.
“Men are supposed to be aggressive.”
“When the need arises.”
“I felt you. You have arisen.”
“Sheila, I think you have penis envy.”
“Weren’t we going to talk?”
I reached over and ran my hand down her leg. I could feel the muscles tighten under my fingers, then relax as if somebody had pulled down the handle on a rheostat. Her fingers on my chest stopped a minute, then started the tracing action again and ran under my belt, but it was still mechanical and forced, an actress on stage doing her part the way the script called for.
“What’s Cross doing?” I asked.
The tips of her nails dug in just a little bit before they softened. She didn’t even know what had happened. “Working. He’s a very dedicated person when it comes to business.”
I took my hand away and put it back under my head. Her fingers started teasing again and she rolled onto her stomach to look down at my face. “He should be home dedicating himself to you,” I said.
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