Hard Case Crime: Getting Off

by Block, Lawrence

  She wasn’t sure he’d be waiting, but there he was, her knight in black leather armor, standing beside his bike. He reached for the bundle of clothes.

  “Everything I was wearing,” she said. “And that was his shirt, I got it from his suitcase.”

  “I’ll get rid of it for you.”

  He stowed the bundle in a saddlebag. She said, “I’m glad you stayed.”

  “I said I would.”

  “Yeah, well. I don’t know what I’d have done if you didn’t.”

  “You’d have thought of something. Where are you headed?”

  Her thoughts hadn’t gone that far. “Just...some other city. Which way are you going?”

  “South and west. Cincinnati for starters, but you probably want to get clear out of Ohio.”

  “Probably, but if you could get me that far...”

  “I could cut west now,” he said, “but that’d be Indiana, and I got reason not to go there.”

  “Oh.”

  “So I’ll run you through Cinci and into Kentucky. Let you off in Lexington or Lou’ville. That be all right?”

  “Sure.”

  He patted the seat behind him.

  She said, “I really appreciate this. You’re going to a lot of trouble for me.”

  “Not that much trouble.”

  “Well, the thing is, if there’s anything I can do—”

  “You could kick in ten or twenty bucks for gas. But if you’re short on dough, don’t worry about it.”

  “No, that’s easy. And if there’s anything else—”

  “You pay for gas and breakfast’s on me. But not until we’re on the other side of the Ohio River. There’s a good place in Covington. Can you hold out until then?”

  “Sure. But what I meant—”

  He turned to look at her, his eyes invisible behind the glasses.

  “Just if there was, you know, anything else you wanted. It’d be okay.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “I just—”

  “Thing is,” he said, “I’m not really into girls these days.”

  “Oh.”

  “Girls, women. Or guys either. I’m just, you know, keeping it real simple these days.”

  “Me too,” she said. “Real simple.”

  She paid for their breakfast in Covington—eggs and grits and link sausage, and coffee that had stayed too long on the hot plate. She gave him twenty dollars for gas, and he took it only after she’d assured him that she was okay for cash. When he dropped her at a Louisville hotel, she still hadn’t told him her name, or learned his.

  She dismounted, then remembered the dirty clothes in the saddlebag. He waved a hand dismissively, said he’d toss them once he’d crossed another state line. She wanted to say something, but all she could think of was “Thank you.”

  “We’re cool,” he said, and reached out a gloved hand to touch her lightly on the shoulder. Her eyes stayed on him until he and his bike were around the corner and out of sight.

  She took a room and paid cash in advance for four days, which was as much time as she figured she needed to spend in Louisville. Two hours later she was back at the hotel with new clothes and a suitcase. She took a long shower and put on some of the clothes she’d just bought, and decided to throw out the ones she’d arrived in.

  By now, she thought, he’d probably crossed another state line.

  Would she ever see him again? Jesus, would she even recognize him if she did? She didn’t know what he looked like. Except for his nose she hadn’t seen any portion of him that wasn’t covered by goggles or leather or beard.

  She could smell his leather jacket. She could feel the touch of his gloved hand on her shoulder.

  She couldn’t keep from having fantasies about him. They were full of the physical presence of him, and yet they weren’t specifically sexual. She envisioned the two of them on the bike, crisscrossing the nation together, stopping for gas, stopping for food, then moving on. They barely spoke, even as they’d barely spoken during their time together. You couldn’t talk over the roar of the engine, and the rest of the time there was no need for talk—as there’d been no need for it earlier.

  He’d looked so scary. But the look that she’d feared at first glance had turned out to be a comfort. There was an individual beneath the leather, behind the mirrored lenses. There was a person with a history and an outlook and a world of likes and dislikes. But she didn’t get to see any of that, didn’t need to know any of it. There was safety, somehow, in all that impersonality.

  I’m just keeping it real simple these days.

  An older brother, she thought. A male cousin. Or, oh, a guardian angel, if you believed in that sort of thing.

  She stayed in the Louisville hotel for the four nights she’d paid for. Took long walks, went to the movies, watched TV in her room. Ate three meals a day at the Denny’s on the next block. Took two showers a day, sometimes three.

  By the time she left—a cab to the airport, a plane to Memphis— she had let go of the memories. They were still there, but they’d lost their edge. The man who would have killed her, the man who got her out of there, were both now just a part of the past.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Rita said, “Memphis! Did you see Elvis yet?”

  “I was in a restaurant,” she said. “Just a diner, really. And there was an Elvis at one end of the counter and another one in a booth. Those were the only two I’ve seen and I saw them both at once.”

  “Elvis impersonators.”

  “Well, duh, yeah. I mean, if it was just one, I suppose it might have been the King himself, but with two of them—”

  “What I meant was have you been to Graceland.”

  “Oh. No, not yet.”

  “That would have been my first stop. Kimmie, every time you call you’ve got a new phone.”

  “Well, they’re disposable,” she said. “So I tend to dispose of them.”

  “Kimmie, you kill me.” Oh, don’t say that. “You know, I thought I saw you the other afternoon. In Seattle, in Pike Place Market?”

  “It wasn’t me, Rita.”

  “Oh, don’t I know that? I took a good look, and she didn’t really look like you at all.”

  “She was a lot prettier.”

  “Silly! But you know what I went and did?”

  “Picked her up and took her home.”

  “Kimmie!”

  “And ate her pussy.”

  “Kimmie, you’re terrible!”

  “Am I?”

  “You know you are. But what’s really bad—”

  “You thought about it.”

  “Yes! I went home and jilled about it.”

  “And is that what you’re doing now?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Oh?”

  “But I’m sort of in the mood.”

  “Oh, are you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well...”

  And a little later:

  “So I was out walking one night, and this guy gave me a ride on his motorcycle. I never saw his face. He was all in leather, and he had a beard, and he was wearing these mirrored goggles. And I rode a couple of hundred miles on the back of his motorcycle.”

  “You’re making this up, right? It’s okay if you are, because I like it just fine, but I was wondering—”

  “No, this is real, Rita. Anyway, nothing happened.”

  “Nothing happened? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “There was no sex.”

  “Why not? I mean, even if you were having your period—”

  “Neither of us wanted it.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know. We just didn’t. So I’m sitting behind him on the big Harley, and we’re zooming through the night, and there’s nothing in the world but the vibration of the bike and the smell of his beat-up leather jacket, and—”

  “And you came in your pants.”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t? I almost did, just from hearing
about it. How come you didn’t?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose I could have.”

  “What stopped you?”

  “I just...let it go. Have you ever been, like, out on a cold day, and you’re not dressed for it, and the wind’s like a knife?”

  “And that’s like being on a bike and smelling leather?”

  “No, let me finish. When that happens, out in the cold, there’s a thing I’ll do sometimes. I let the cold just blow right through me, and I visualize it passing through without affecting me. Have you ever tried that?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it sort of works. It’s a mental thing, I guess, but it sort of works.”

  “And that’s what you did? You let this biker guy blow through you?”

  “The feeling I had,” she said. “I just sort of let it pass on through. It stopped being sexual, and then it just went away.”

  “Wow.”

  “I know, it’s hard to explain.”

  “That woman I saw? In the Pike Place Market?”

  “Still thinking about her?”

  “I mean, I never could have approached her. It’s one thing to think of it and something else to act on it.”

  “I know.”

  “I keep thinking I want to try it with a woman. I’m like, Well, if Kim were here, yadda yadda yadda. But you’re not here, and what am I gonna do, walk into a gay bar?”

  “You could.”

  “I know I could. There’s one I keep driving past. I don’t even slow down, but I keep finding excuses to drive past it. Kimmie, tell me the truth, okay? Have you ever been with a woman?”

  “No.”

  “And here we are, a couple of phone sex buddies, and we don’t even know what we’re talking about. Except we sort of do, don’t we?”

  The place she found was just off Beale Street. The windows were blacked out, and an unobtrusive sign told the establishment’s name: The Daiquiri Dock. There was nothing to suggest that it might be a lesbian bar, but she evidently sensed something, and lingered in a doorway across the street. And, sure enough, the door opened and a pair of visibly gay women left arm in arm. She stayed where she was, and another woman turned up and walked into the bar, and two more followed shortly thereafter.

  She could have a glass of white wine. Get a sense of things, then go back to her room alone.

  And that’s what happened, except that it was two glasses of red wine, not one glass of white. She bought one, and a woman who said her name was Sandy insisted on buying her the second. Sandy wasn’t very attractive, there was a stolid quality to her that she found unappealing, and anyway Sandy lost interest and went off to study the jukebox selections. A couple of other women glanced her way, but she kept her face unexpressive and let her body language suggest that she just wanted a quiet drink.

  Back in her hotel room, she began loading her clothes into her suitcase. She wasn’t quite ready for this, but she was getting there. She’d get a good night’s sleep, leave town in the morning. And in the next city, or the one after that, there’d be a lesbian bar and she’d be ready.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  St. Louis, on a quiet street near Carr Square, within sight of the famous Arch. Another city, another lesbian bar, and when she’d scouted it out the previous evening she hadn’t even allowed herself to cross the threshold. Instead she’d spent the better part of an hour in the diner diagonally across the street, nursing a cup of coffee, watching through the fly-specked window as women passed in and out of Eve’s Rib.

  Now and then, a man. Not a mannish woman, there were plenty of those, but occasionally a man entering or leaving, sometimes accompanied by a woman, sometimes alone. One of these—alone, shoulders slumped, hands in pockets—reminded her for a split second of Sid.

  Sid from Philadelphia, who of course was not from Philadelphia, and was probably not named Sid. Sid the Cipher, Sid the Unfindable, the one remaining name on her list of Things to Undo. Sid who, just by existing, kept her from—what?

  Living her life.

  But this wasn’t Sid. It was just a man who looked disappointed, as if he’d expected to find the secret of the universe in a dykery, and—

  Oh, for Christ’s sake. That’s why they called the place in Memphis The Daiquiri Dock, even in the utter absence of a Caribbean motif. Daiquiri=Dykery. It had taken her a week and a few hundred miles to get the joke.

  She shook her head, finished her coffee. Then she’d returned to her hotel room.

  Tonight she was back, and dressed and groomed for the place, more femme than butch, but certainly no housewife, no sorority girl, no cheerleader. Just a woman looking to meet a woman.

  Missy, she thought. Tonight her name would be Missy.

  And tonight she didn’t hesitate. She went inside, made her way to the bar.

  While his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, the man led the woman to a booth with a good view of the bar. He sat down opposite her and breathed deeply, watching the women around him. And they were all women; he hadn’t seen another man since he crossed the threshold.

  He said, “God, I love this place.”

  “You love what we find here.”

  “And the place itself. This bar, and others like it. I like the atmosphere, Jesus, I like the way it smells.”

  “You like dyke bars because you like girls,” the woman said. “That’s the smell you like. You like the way they smell, and their softness, and how they yield, how they give in. How they submit.”

  “Well,” he said.

  The bar was called Eve’s Rib, and you had to be looking for it to find it, tucked away on a side street on the edge of the warehouse district. It catered to lesbians, but men were not unwelcome, so long as they didn’t make unwelcome advances to the women customers. There was a sad-looking older gentleman he’d seen there once or twice, always by himself, always wearing a suit and tie, always with a glass in his hand. But the fellow wasn’t here this evening, and he himself seemed to be the only man.

  His name was Brady. That was his last name, but it was all anyone ever called him. He’d never cared for his first name, which was Winston, and had thought of changing it from Winston Brady to Brady Winston. Or perhaps to Brady Brady. With B for a middle initial. B for Brady, naturally.

  He was tall, and he’d maintained the same weight effortlessly in the twenty years since college. He didn’t care that much about food, sometimes missed a meal. He didn’t run or go to a gym or do martial arts, but he somehow got enough exercise to maintain good muscle tone. The only thing he could be said to work at was his suntan, a deep bronze tone courtesy of the beach in the summer and a tanning salon in the winter. He was handsome, with strong facial features and high cheekbones, and he knew it, and knew the tan added to it.

  His hair was dark, with just a touch of gray at the temples. He hoped it would stay like that, but knew it wouldn’t. A touch of gray was all right, it was even an asset, but he didn’t feel ready for a full head of gray hair. Maybe he’d dye it, if it came to that. But in any event he’d preserve the gray at the temples, because he liked the effect.

  On the jukebox, an Anne Murray record ended and a K. D. Lang record followed in turn. A waitress came to their booth, took their drink order. She was neither tall nor short, a little thick in the waist but not objectionably so. She came back with two glasses of Chardonnay, and Brady watched her walk off.

  “I wouldn’t mind,” he told the woman.

  “Hands off the help.”

  “Oh, I know. It was an observation, not a suggestion.”

  “Anyway, she’s Girls Only. It sticks out all over her.”

  “Not the only thing that sticks out.”

  “She wouldn’t like it,” the woman said, “and you’d try to make her like it, but it wouldn’t work.”

  “So? It could still be interesting. But it’s idle speculation, because, as you so kindly pointed out, it’s a case of hands off the help.”

  “Exactly.”

  “All the same,” he said, �
�I wouldn’t mind.”

  She was sitting alone at the bar. She had ordered an Orange Blossom, straight up, without being all that certain what it was, but she’d heard the name and liked the sound of it. And wasn’t it something a sweet young thing named Missy would order? This one showed up in a stemmed glass, like a Martini, and it was orange, which figured, and garnished with an orange slice. She took a small sip and identified two of the ingredients, gin and orange juice, but there was an undertone of something else, some cordial, that she couldn’t place. Triple Sec? Cointreau?

  She kept her eyes facing forward but surveyed as much of the room as she could out of the corners of her eyes. She felt someone looking at her, actually felt the gaze, and she turned her head just enough to catch an oblique glimpse of them. A man and a woman, and she was a beauty while he was movie-star handsome. And they were looking at her, and wasn’t that interesting?

  But someone else was looking at her, and not from a distance. And walking toward her, no, not simply walking, striding toward her, with an aura of butch self-confidence overlaid upon a core of nervous anxiety.

  “What’s that you’re drinking?”

  “An Orange Blossom.”

  “Good?”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Well, drink up and I’ll buy you another.”

  A deep voice, probably deeper than the one God had given her. She’d read about a film star—a gay man, actually, although he kept it a secret until AIDS got him. He’d started out with a high-pitched voice, and did something about it; every day he went to a local subway stop, and when the express train roared by he screamed at the top of his lungs. After a few months his voice dropped a full octave, and he went to Hollywood and started playing romantic leads.

  Did this one know the subway trick? Or was she just forcing her voice into its lower register?

  Then again, what did she care? It was nice to be admired, but she wasn’t interested. If she was going to try being with a woman, what did she want with one who was trying to be a man?

  The woman set down her glass of Chardonnay. “Hell,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “That one would be ideal,” she said, “but that swaggering bulldyke got there first.”