What of Terry Conniston? (3 page)

They reached the freeway interchange and turned southeast on the superhighway. Floyd checked his watch and said, “Pull over to the shoulder when you get a chance.”

“What for?”

“Yours not to reason why, Mitch.”

He rolled the Pontiac off the roadway and crunched to a stop. “Well?”

“Just wait until I tell you to go. I want to see something. Leave the lights on.”

Mitch curbed his tongue and settled back, fished out a cigarette and punched the dashboard lighter. The lights of cars passed them at speed. There was nothing much to look at—tall gooseneck highway lights, a few truck stops clustered around the interchange half a mile ahead, scrubby desert crowding the road shoulders, the Rincon Mountains vague in the falling night. The day's heat was dissipating fast.

Floyd sat twisted around, squinting through the back window. Mitch made a face and pressed the red lighter to his cigarette. Floyd was looking at his watch again and Mitch started to say something but Floyd cut him off: “Shut up. It's just about time.”

“Time for what, for Christ's sake?”

There was no response. Mitch drew smoke deep into his lungs and frowned. He had had enough; it was definitely time to quit. He didn't like Floyd and what was the point of hanging onto a job that offered no work and no pay? He would pack his things as soon as they got back to the motel. It wouldn't be wise to mention it to the others, particularly to Floyd; no, he would just pack and go.

Floyd stiffened. Mitch followed the direction of his glance and saw a red sports car come up fast from behind, passing under the street light; it swept past and droned away in the beams of Mitch's headlights. He had a glimpse of a vivid, pretty girl at the wheel.

Floyd said, “We can go now.”

“Who was that?”

“Her name, my learned friend, is Terry Conniston. She takes an evening summer course four nights a week at the University and drives home about this time every night, home being the Conniston ranch down near Sonoita.”

“Girl friend of yours?”

“We've never met,” Floyd said.

“Then what is it?”

“Contain your impatience, there's a good boy. Let's get home.”

Intent on his own plans to break away, Mitch didn't press it. He flipped the cigarette out the vent window and angled the car back onto the freeway. Within a few minutes they turned off and rolled into the gravel parking yard of a truckers' café. There were a few dead letters in the neon Modern Motel sign. When they had lost the last nightclub gig they had sought the cheapest rooms available, and here they were.

Floyd picked up the sack of liquor-store money and the packet of dope—twin handfuls of evidential explosive—and they went around the side of the café to the outside staircase that hung uneasily to the flimsy side of the building. Through the kitchen's back door Mitch could see a fat Mexican woman in an apron slapping corn tortillas from arm to arm. The place was flyblown and filthy. The stairs creaked when Mitch put his weight on them.

The upstairs door let them into a long narrow hall, seamy and waterstained, lit by one yellow forty-watt bulb. Mitch stopped at the door to his room and said vaguely, “I'll see you,” and watched Floyd go on toward his brother's room; Floyd said over his shoulder:

“We'll get something to eat in a little while.”

“Sure.” Mitch went inside and shut the door behind him. He looked around the tiny room without expression. It smelled of cheap disinfectant and the washbasin and cracked toilet-bowl had yellow stains from the dripping erosion of years. The room had one plain kitchen chair with chipped offwhite paint and a sagging bed redolent of hasty sex, loveless furtive perversions, tired-eyed whores. Once when he was seventeen he had spent part of a night with a high school girl in a room like this. It had been awkward and frantic and unhappy.

He heaved his suitcase onto the bed and threw his meager belongings into it. After that he sat down in the chair and smoked; he would wait and leave after the others were all asleep.

He could see himself in the corner-cracked mirror over the basin. It surprised him how boyish he still looked—the youthful broad face still not far beyond a careless ease of smiling. It was hard to understand how he had possibly come to this dreary place in his life. He had always had the best of his world: he was athletic, smart, attractive to girls, the son of decent middle-class parents from an ordinary suburban town. He was no hippie, no rebel. But in his pleasant youth he had never been tested. His splendid health and brain and surroundings had let him assume that things would always come easily.

His sophomore college year had ambushed him—a few too many beer parties and rehearsals and band gigs at fraternity houses, and he had walked into the physics final exam knowing with sudden hollow fear that he was not going to pass. And the tough old Lit professor had failed him for spelling mistakes. Flunked two courses out of five—that had put him out.

His father and mother had tried to be kind and understanding but through the brave pretense Mitch could see their crushed bitter disappointment. His father had got him a job in the real estate office. Mitch had tried but he couldn't face them every day seeing what they were thinking: twenty-one and a failure. He had run away, baffled and hurt. He would become a success, build up a band of his own, make records and money. He joined a band in New Mexico, swingers, and then had come the months in jail, and now this.

He supposed he ought to start thinking about where he would go. To another town, maybe, check in with the musicians' union local and see if anyone was hiring. He had enough for a bus ticket to Salt Lake or Las Vegas. Then too he could always wire his father for money and go home to Cleveland. But that would be admitting he had failed again. He didn't want that. He didn't want to say a word to them until he could show them he had made a success of himself.

He crushed the cigarette out underfoot, got up and took the cased electric guitar from the corner and put it on the bed beside the suitcase. That was everything he owned. The sight of it sagging on the dilapidated bed turned his sense of dismal depression to fear, a sudden lonely sense of panic. A dry taste like brass on his tongue, an urgency in his groin. He remembered how, when he had been twelve, his father had taken him duck-hunting on the remote north shore of the lake. In the cold wet dawn his father had left him in a blind and moved away to a farther blind beyond earshot or sight. For hours Mitch had been convinced his father had got lost, forgotten where he was, forgotten about him entirely. He had felt the terror of being lost and alone.

He jumped when his door latched open. Floyd Rymer, in the door, gave him a dry look and said, “Know what you need?”

“A lock on my door?”

Floyd started to speak but then his eye fell on the cases on the bed. “Well, now,”—sarcastic—”what's this?”

Mitch said reluctantly, “I'm clearing out.”

“Just like that?”

He needed to talk fast. “Look, we're not doing each other any good, are we? I'm just a fifth wheel the way things are—you can get bookings a lot quicker if you cut back to three men and anyway I'm getting sick of this hot country. I think I'll head north and see what I can pick up around Vegas or Tahoe.”

“You won't have any luck. It's a slow summer everywhere—they're all buying jukeboxes and Muzak because it's cheaper than live musicians.”

“I'll take my chances, I guess.”

“Then take them with me, Mitch.”

“Why?”

“Believe me, you'll do far better with me.”

“It doesn't look that way from here. Anyway I'd think you'd be anxious to get rid of me.”

Floyd said, softly so he would know it was important, “I need somebody around here with a level head on his shoulders.”

Floyd pushed the door shut, hooked the chair over to him and sat down cowboy fashion, legs astraddle the back of the chair and arms folded across the top. “Besides, you know too much. Suppose you get picked up for vagrancy and decide to earn brownie points by turning me in? I can't very well afford to let you do that, now, can I.”

“I'd have to implicate myself to turn you in. With my record that's hardly likely.”

Floyd had a dry quizzical smile. “Do you want to know why I pulled off that liquor-store thing?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes, to me. I did it because I wanted to make sure it would work. I wanted to be sure I could get away with something like that. And I wanted to see which way you'd jump.”

“So?”

“It was a rehearsal,” Floyd said. “A practice scrimmage to warm us up for a bigger ball game. Is that a spark of interest I see in your eye? That's good because I'll need your help to pull it off.”

“I don't think I even want to hear about it.”

“Of course you do. If you don't find out what I'm talking about your curiosity won't ever let you alone.” Floyd got up abruptly, shoved the chair away and reached for the door. “Come on, Mitch,” he said, in a voice gone suddenly flat and hard.

As he started toward the door, it occurred vaguely to Mitch that never once in his life had he wanted anything, or wanted
not
to do anything, badly enough to fight for it.

He didn't fight Floyd. He went with him down the hall to Georgie's room.

C H A P T E R
Three

They were all gathered in Georgie's room. Mitch thought it looked like a cell meeting in a lunatic asylum.

Georgie Rymer sat curled on the far corner of the bed, a tense gaunt shape in the shadows. He wore a candy-striped shirt and a necktie made of a raccoon tail. He had long hair, girl-long, down to his shoulders. Georgie's upper jaw poked forward, giving his mouth the look of a gopher with two big front teeth showing. The trivial moustache on his upper lip failed to give him the toughened appearance it was intended to provide. Georgie was blowing his nose when Mitch came in with Floyd. He didn't look up. He had an unbreakable facial apathy that indicated he was high on a recent dose, half freaked out.

Theodore Luke stood close against the girl, frowning, earnestly scratching his buttock with stubborn determination. He wore only a T-shirt and drawers; he was a hulking brute with thick hair on his arms and legs. The back of his head was flat and he had let his hair grow very long not because it was the fashion of the moment but because it helped conceal his face. Theodore's face was distorted and crippled—asymmetrical and cauliflowered where plastic surgeons had grafted on an ugly imitation in place of an ear he had lost in an automobile wreck at the age of seven. His right eyelid was partially paralyzed; it tended to droop—he couldn't keep it altogether open or altogether closed, not even when he was asleep. It revealed an opaque, gray-clouded eye, blind and not coordinated with its mate. The face had made it inevitable that Theodore learn to be a deadly vicious fighter and he had learned early in childhood how to hate murderously. But from some amazing reservoir of talent Theodore had dredged the rare ability to play the drums softly and with intricate delicacy.

Right by Theodore stood Billie Jean Brown, leaning against the wall with one hand clutched in her hair. She was sensuous and spider-waisted. The sweep of her eyebrows was emphasized in dark pencil but her face was nondescript, pouting and dull. She was a creature of sensation. Her feet were flat and her breasts were just beginning to sag; she wore nothing under her thin print dress. Mitch doubted she owned any underclothes.

Theodore crowded close against her and put his hand inside the front of Billie Jean's dress. Her eyes closed and she made small gutteral sounds.

Mitch made a face and looked away. Floyd was beside him, just inside the door, standing the way he often stood on the bandstand when he sang: relaxed like a crooner, one hand in the pocket, a lidded lazy smile, casual glance roving the audience. There was no denying Floyd possessed a magnetic charisma. He had the grace and self-confidence of a decathlon champion. Just now, amused by what he saw, he seemed in no hurry to call the group to order. Billie Jean and Theodore were oblivious to anything but themselves; the girl's dumpling face was closed up happily. One hand tangled in her hair, the other propped impudently on her hip, she surged her plump young breast up full into Theodore's palm. Sweat rolled freely along Theodore's grotesque face, filled with a rubbery leer of sensual pleasure. Moving languorously, Billie Jean slipped her hand into the fly of his shorts.

Floyd slammed the door. “All right, don't go ape.”

Theodore looked up drowsily. “Ain't she a pistol?”

Floyd said, “We've got business to discuss.”

“You want to see us do it? Right here standing up against the wall?”

“I wouldn't buy a ticket,” Floyd said. “Now cut it out, both of you. I don't want to have to repeat myself again.”

Billie Jean pushed her lips out and withdrew her hand. Aroused, Theodore reached for her but Billie Jean twisted away; she said, “Not now.”

“To hell with him,” Theodore growled.

Floyd moved two steps into the room. Billie Jean looked quickly, anxiously at him. She said, “Not now, Theodore. Don't you remember how Floyd beat up on that trucker in Amarillo? He was twice your size and he must've been laid up for a month.”

Theodore dropped his arms to his sides, sucking air like a grounded fish. Floyd said mildly, “Go sit down and breathe through your nose.”

Theodore moved grudgingly, sat down on the edge of the bed and put a finger in his nose. Georgie on the bed was slowly uncoiling from his curled-up reverie. Sprawling as if boneless, he blinked pale-eyed in sulky silence.

“All right,” Floyd said. “Gentlemen, I solicit your attention. Theodore, stop picking your nose. Wipe that vacant bewildered look off your face and pay attention.”

“Me pay attention? What about the hophead? What about Georgie?”