Handsome Harry

by James Carlos Blake

  Margo was now divorced from her jailbird husband and was dating several fellows, but complained that she still hadn’t met a guy worth keeping. She had quit her waitressing job a few days earlier because the boss refused to keep his hands off her, but she’d be starting as a hostess at another restaurant in two weeks when the woman she was replacing left to get married. She jumped at our invitation to go with us to Florida and come back to Indy by train.

  I slept on the sofa that night and Mary shared Margo’s bed, and after an early breakfast we shoved off. It was cold and gray all the way into Nashville, where we checked into a downtown hotel, Margo in her own room next to ours. The next morning was slow-going over foggy mountain roads winding through dense pine forest, but once we got down from the hills it was all blue skies and sunshine, although still a little chilly, and we picked up some speed. At Margo’s request I bought a pint of bourbon at a roadside store somewhere in Georgia. She wanted it for later that evening—to take the chill off before bedtime, she said—but by the time we pulled into a motor court near a little place called Jessup, she and Mary had finished off more than half the bottle.

  Margo said she’d been lonely by herself the night before and asked if we could get one cabin with two beds. I said it was okay with me if it was okay with Mary. Mary ribbed her for being a big baby and said she sure knew how to cramp a big sister’s love life. Margo said she certainly didn’t want to do that and for us not to pay her any mind. You two go ahead and do whatever you feel like, she said, like I’m not even here. Mary told her don’t think we won’t.

  Well, let me tell you, both of them meant what they said. While Mary was soaking in the tub with a drink, Margo wasn’t the least bit bashful about changing into her nighty in front of me, stripping down to her panties with no more concession to modesty than turning her back. I was under the covers in my Skivvies with a book of short stories and I couldn’t help peeking while the peeking was good. She had a rump almost as fine as Mary’s, but she had slightly larger breasts, and I caught a side view of one as she raised her arms to slip on the nighty. As she turned around I cut my eyes down to my book, but her giggle as she got in bed made me suspect she knew I’d been watching. When Mary came out of the bathroom in her camisole I was reading a story about two gunmen waiting in a diner to kill a guy when he showed up, but Margo had ruined my concentration and I’d been on the same page for ten minutes. Mary must’ve given her some kind of look, because Margo said Oh now, he didn’t see anything, he’s had his nose in that book. I looked up all innocent and saw them both smirking at me. Mary turned the book in my hands so she could see the title. Men Without Women, she said—well, that’s certainly not your problem at the moment, is it?

  The minute the lights went out Mary started fooling around, which was a little surprising, given that we weren’t alone. But I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t extra exciting making love in the dark while her sister was in the next bed. Mary must’ve thought so too, and made no effort to mute her pleasure. We went through a lot of happy moaning and groaning and finished up breathing like we’d run a race. Margo said Boy oh boy, did that sound like fun—and we all giggled like school kids.

  Sometime in the middle of the night Margo got under the covers with us and hugged up against my back and whispered that she was cold and her blanket wasn’t warm enough and don’t mind her. Mary raised up on the other side of me and said not to try anything funny, and Margo said Not me, sis. I don’t know how I got back to sleep, snuggled between a pair of nearly naked women, but when I woke in the morning I was spooned up against Mary, and Margo was still cuddled to my back with her arm around me and a hand on my stomach, and I had an erection so urgent it ached.

  The girls came awake and Mary felt my horn nudging her and asked what I thought I was going to do with that big idea in the bright light of day and her sister right there.

  Margo slid her fingers down to me and said Oh my word. Mary rolled over, saying Hey you, that’s private property, and pulled her sister’s hand off me and out from under the blanket.

  I was on my back now, my stiffie poking the covers up like a little tent. My grin felt idiotic but I didn’t care.

  Margo asked if she could have a look at it, and Mary said certainly not.

  Margo said Pretty please, and Mary said No, it wasn’t a damn sideshow.

  Margo said Well, okay, then—and yanked down the blanket to expose my pecker sticking out of my shorts.

  Woweee she said, and grabbed it and gave a few quick squeezes, saying Honk-honk.

  Mary yelled Mar-GO!

  The thing twitched like it was having a seizure and…bang, the spunk shot out in filaments and the girls shrieked and scrambled off the bed. Margo ran for the bathroom as Mary flung a pillow at her, both of them howling with hilarity.

  I wasn’t having such a bad time myself.

  Those Northern girls…oh, man.

  Driving into Florida was like flipping several pages ahead on the calendar and entering late spring. A few miles north of Jacksonville we heard an excited radio report that John and Red and I had been killed by the cops in Chicago.

  Acting on a tip, the Dillinger Squad had stormed into a north-side apartment and shot the three of us before we could pull a gun. The reporter promised more details as soon as they were available.

  Mary said it was terrible news, she was going to miss me. Margo said I didn’t look half bad for a dead man. I said if God ever made anything stupider than cops and news reporters I hadn’t met it yet. I wondered who the three guys were.

  We had an early lunch in a Jacksonville café. The girls were wild for a side dish called grits, which looked like warm white paste mixed with sand and pretty much tasted like it to me. Mary said to try them with butter, so I did, and she said isn’t it better, and I said yeah, now it tasted like buttered sandy paste. The cornbread was another story, though, and I had several helpings of it with my barbecued pork ribs.

  At a tourist shop next door we bought sunglasses and straw hats, swimsuits and suntan lotion that smelled like coconut. And I got a short-sleeved shirt I couldn’t resist—bright green with yellow parrots all over it.

  None of us had seen the ocean before, and it was wonderful to drive along the open road for mile after mile with all that blue Atlantic on our left. The view was broken now and then by sand dunes and sea oats or by a town or a cluster of resort cabins. At a roadside stand we bought a sack of oranges and a bag of boiled peanuts—goobers, the woman called them. A horde of seagulls was swooping and screeching overhead, and we flung goobers for them to snatch on the fly.

  We rolled into Daytona Beach late that afternoon. We got a local map from a filling station and Mary figured out how to get to the house and directed me to it. When we pulled up in front of the place we could hardly believe the size of it. It looked like a small two-story hotel, which we came to find out was exactly what it had been once upon a time. The yard was large and deeply shaded with huge oaks hung with Spanish moss. The gang’s cars were in the driveway. As we were getting the bags out of the Vickie, the front door opened and they came rushing out to greet us, all open arms and happy laughter.

  I introduced Margo all around. A surpassing pleasure, my dear, Charley said, and kissed her hand. Margo batted her lashes like some coy thing in the movies and said Goodness, what a charming assembly.

  The house was even bigger than it looked. It had twelve rooms, including a huge parlor, a dining room, and a big kitchen. A gallery ran along both sides of the house and connected to a screened back porch that overlooked the beach and opened onto to a wide wooden sundeck furnished with lounge chairs, a picnic table, and a barbecue grill. The rushing surf was a hundred feet away. The first time the tide came in, Charley said, Opal thought it was going to carry them all off, but it crested about fifteen yards from the sundeck. John said he’d never really known what a great night’s sleep was till he’d snoozed under a window open to the salt breeze and the sound of breakers.

  They’d heard abou
t me and John and Red getting shot dead by the Shytown cops. John said he’d been thinking of sending Matt Leach an invitation to the funeral, but then the afternoon paper had said it wasn’t us, after all, just three small-time crooks.

  In the words of the great Mr. Twain, Charley said, the reports of your deaths were greatly exaggerated.

  We were in Florida for the next three weeks or so and had a terrific time. Except for the business with Billie, that is, and I’ll get to that.

  It was perfect weather, the days toasty but not hot, the nights cool but not quite cold. For the first two days, we spent the mornings walking on the beach and splashing in the surf, then lazing on the sundeck. I never got tired of watching the pelicans dive for fish. Despite the lotion we slathered on ourselves, all of us got sunburns except for Charley, who never stepped outside without his wide-brimmed straw hat and a long-sleeved shirt buttoned at the neck and cuffs. He’d wear bathing trunks but never went in the water, preferring to sit on the sundeck with a towel over his legs. After lunch we’d go Christmas shopping.

  There was a seafood diner called the Mermaid within walking distance of the house, and we ate lunch there almost every day. The first time we went there, Charley recommended we all try the raw oysters on the half-shell. He was the only one of us who’d ever eaten them before, and I asked what they tasted like. Well, he said, they’re fleshy and slick and juicy, and they have a salty, pungent flavor.

  Everybody grinned big and John said You know, if Red was here he’d want to know if you were talking about oysters or, ah…something I won’t mention in front of the ladies.

  Even the girls cracked up. Billie said she wasn’t sure she should try them. What if she liked them so much they turned her into a lesbian? John said that would be okay with him, since he was sort of a lesbian himself.

  On Christmas morning we all exchanged presents in the parlor. Mary was wowed by the diamond necklace I gave her, and I loved the gold ring she gave me. It looked a lot like a wedding band and naturally I got ribbed by the guys. John gave Billie some sexy lingerie, and she held it up for everyone to admire. Russell wolf-whistled and Charley and I applauded and she asked if we’d like to see her model it, but John didn’t care for the joke and told her to put it away. He got over his pique, though, as soon as he unwrapped Billie’s gift—a silver St. Christopher medal he’d admired in a Chicago jewelry store window one day.

  Old Saint Chris will keep you safe, baby, Billie said, and blew him a kiss across the room.

  I’d promised Mary we’d spend some time by ourselves while we were in Florida, and the day after Christmas we tossed our bags in the Vickie, told the others we’d be back in time to celebrate New Year’s with them, and drove down to Miami on a road called the Dixie Highway.

  We stayed in a fancy hotel overlooking the river where it empties into Biscayne Bay. The park across the street was deep green and shady with palms and had a band shell and fronted a charter boat marina, and there was a long pier with a three-story building containing an amusement arcade and a dance hall. We went to the horse races at Hialeah, where hundreds of flamingos roosted on a lushly landscaped lake in the center of the track, and each time the birds flew from one spot to another they became a huge cloud of shimmering pink under the deep blue sky. We went to the jai-alai fronton and marveled at the speed of the game and the grace of the players as they whipped the ball against the high court wall and raced and leaped and dove to catch the rebounds in their cestas and keep the ball in play. We bet solely on players in red jerseys and won two hundred bucks. We took walks in the bayside park and fed popcorn to the pigeons and strolled along the fishing docks and admired the catches the charter boats brought in, including a shark almost twice my size that could have swallowed Mary whole and was scary even dead. We went dancing every evening in the hotel ballroom, except one night when we went to the pier dance hall and then had fun at a shooting gallery in the arcade, the only time Mary fired a gun in her life. We made love under the open window of our room with a fat gold moon beaming on us.

  We hired a taxi to drive us around in the adjoining municipality of Coconut Grove and fell in love with the place, with its jungle greenery and salty air, its narrow streets and quaint houses and sailors’ taverns, its bohemian character. Mary said she wouldn’t object if I wanted us to move there when I finally called it quits in the banking trade.

  It was the first mention she’d made about me quitting the business, and I reminded her that she said she didn’t want a normal life. She said she doubted that life in Miami could be called normal. I said she was a pretty slick debater. She gave me a happy smooch and said yes she was.

  On the last day of the year we left Miami before the sun was above the palm trees and were back in Daytona by midafternoon. The girls boiled ears of corn and made a salad and seasoned a platter of steaks while John got a charcoal fire going in the grill. Russell and I filled a washtub with bottled beer and crushed ice and set it on the back porch.

  One of the girls had found a jump rope in the house, and they took turns with it. It wasn’t at all surprising that Billie and Mary were such nimble skippers, but even big Opal was an agile jumper. They all went at it as happy as schoolgirls. It was fun to watch them and listen to the jump rope ditties they’d learned as kids. Mary sang:

  Cinderella, dressed in yella,

  went upstairs to kiss her fella,

  Made a mistake and kissed a snake.

  How many doctors did it take?

  One…two…three…

  Opal said she bet there weren’t many girls who hadn’t made the mistake of kissing a snake sometime or other. Russell flicked his tongue at her and she took a playful swat at him. Billy’s ditty got a big laugh too:

  Oh my back, I’m so sore,

  ain’t gonna do it for a nickel no more.

  Fifteen cents, that’s the price.

  Give me a quarter and I’ll do it twice.

  Christ, John said, who taught you to jump rope when you were a kid? The girls at Mabel’s whorehouse?

  I thought you looked familiar, Billie said. You always went in there on Dollar Night, didn’t you.

  Mary and Opal laughed and blew raspberries at John.

  Somebody tuned a radio to a big-band station and we danced on the deck while the steaks sizzled and the sun went down on the other side of the house. It was another of the few times we relaxed our rules on drinking, and Russell had bought a couple of bottles of Scotch in case anybody wanted something with a little more kick than beer. We were all happily buzzed when we sat down to eat.

  Nobody could get over the fact that we were barefoot and in shorts while back in Chicago they were shoveling snow. Mary and I weren’t the only ones who’d given thought to moving there—Russ and Opal had talked about it too. Charley said he had a hunch that we might sing a different tune in the middle of a Florida summer, which he’d been told was as humid as dog breath and ten times as hot, not to mention the hordes of mosquitoes. John and Billie liked Florida too, but for some reason John had it in his head that Mexico was the place to retire for keeps. He’d never been there, but he knew that was the place for him. Billie said she guessed she’d have to learn Spanish. John said Sí, sí, señorita.

  Margo wanted to go dancing again at a beach club they’d been to the night before. Charley said sure, and Russ and Opal said they’d go along. Margo had confided to Mary that she had tried getting Fat Charley into the sack, but the man was in love with Tweet for real, and he wasn’t the kind to fool around behind her back. So Margo settled for the pleasure of his humorous company and the fun they had in dance clubs. They all got cleaned up and changed, then wished the four of us a happy new year, said not to wait up, and went off in Russell’s car.

  The moon had come up and the ocean gleamed silver. The tide was in and the waves were breaking big, the surf rushing up to within forty feet of us. The beach was pale and smooth and deserted in both directions except for a large bonfire at a far distance where a party was going on. We coul
d faintly hear the singing and laughter. We tuned in another musical program on the radio and did a little more dancing and had another drink or two. Then Billie said she wanted to go swimming. And right there in front of us she stripped to her black underwear. She skipped down the deck steps and stumbled slightly, then ran shouting into the surf and dove into a wave.

  John took a pull off his bottle of beer and stared out at her, then smiled and said Drunk redskin. None of us was more than vaguely sober at that point.

  Mary said Oh quit, Johnny, she’s having fun.

  And then she took off her shorts and shirt, even though she wasn’t wearing a bra, and ran off to join Billie. She whooped at the coldness of the water as she plunged in, and Billie took off her bra too and flung it away with a shout.

  John’s smile had gotten wider at the sight of Mary’s breasts. I have to say, Pete, that little girl of yours has got a side to her I never would’ve guessed.

  I’d been thinking the same thing ever since the escapade with Margo. Yeah she does, I said.

  The girls stood in water to their tits and held hands and yelled like kids on a carnival ride as a large swell lifted them and carried them on its crest before breaking and tumbling them in the surf. They came up spitting water and laughing and pushing their hair out of their eyes.

  Come on in, boys, Mary called out, the water’s fine.

  John said he bet it was colder than a witch’s cunt.

  I said I was game if he was.

  A moment later we were racing into the water in our undershorts and we yelled at the coldness of it, but after a few minutes of horsing around and splashing at each other and diving into the waves it wasn’t too bad. Then Mary got on my shoulders and Billie mounted on John’s and we had horse fights, the girls trying to wrestle each other off into the water as John and I tried to trip each other down. As often as not, we’d all go tumbling when a big wave hit us. We’d roll and bounce off each other in the surf and get dragged a few yards by the undertow before coming up spluttering and laughing and everybody claiming victory.