The Wrong Quarry (17 page)

Her chin went up. “I loved Candy, but her aunt’s a raging skank. What does she have that I don’t have?”

“I didn’t know it was an issue.”

She tossed her cigarette with an unnerving confidence and crossed the small distance between us, and took one of my hands and placed it on a pert breast and grabbed my package in a firm but gentle if overflowing handful.

Her voice was a purr with claws behind it. “Who do you think taught Candy what’s what?”

“Her aunt?”

She sneered and squeezed my balls a little, and it almost hurt, but my dick was rising to the occasion. She pressed her mouth to mine and she tasted sweet and smoky. We played tonsil hockey for a while, and she was stroking me through my pants, a gifted girl who could do at least two things at once.

This was ill-advised, but fun. I hadn’t necked in a high school parking lot in a long time.

“Hey!”

My God, had the principal caught us?

A big guy in a yellow letter jacket with black sleeves came rushing at us, arms pumping like pistons. He’d been inside the school.

Enter Rod Pettibone.

Broad-shouldered, tiny-eyed Rod Pettibone, with short blond hair and a small nose and wide mouth over a shovel jaw. He looked like Moose in the
Archie
comics, but cartoonier.

“That’s my friggin’
car!” he yelled.

He was maybe ten yards from us.

And then he was ten feet away, saying, “And that’s my friggin’
girl
!”

He came at me like he was rushing the line. I backed up and Sally plastered herself against her own car, taking herself out of the play, providing Rod the hole he needed to charge through and take his man down.

Which he did, a good two-hundred-twenty-some pounds of him smashing me onto my back into the cement, knocking every ounce of wind out of me. He climbed off and picked me up like a bag of laundry and flung me against the tail of the Mustang, my lower back taking the brunt. Sally, eyes showing white all around, had her hands up like a pretty hold-up victim.

Before I could recover, he hit me in the right side of the head, and my brain spun, then he gave me hard shots in the ribs, on either side, followed by a deep right fist in the pit of the stomach.

I doubled over and puked, which made him back away, not wanting to get anything on the letter jacket apparently, and that’s when I kicked out and the heel of my shoe caught him in the right knee. Hard.

Fucking hard.

“My knee!” he screamed, going down on his other one. “Not my
knee
!”

“Good luck with your scholarship, jackass,” I said gratuitously.

And passed out, grinning.

* * *

Thunder woke me.

We were moving through the night. I was in a car. Someone was driving. Sally. In the Mustang. Mustang Sally. High beams revealing a gravel road, walls of ghostly corn stalks at our sides. Sky a gray canopy of rolling, roiling clouds, shot through with sudden, brief veins of electricity.

More thunder.

She smiled over me, pretty little face in the midst of all that frizzy tawny-blonde hair, given an odd glow in the dashboard light. “You’re awake.”

“Head’s swimming. What...what’s going on?”

“I’m taking you home with me. You’re my lost puppy, you know? You need some TLC.”

“Not necessary.”

“Rod knocked you out. But you got him back. The way he hobbled away, crying, you might have cost us the season.”

“Kicked him.”

“You did. He has kind of a bad knee anyway.”

I blinked. Headache, migraine level. Nauseated. Sky with those dark moving clouds and crackling veins of lightning and the gravel road and the towering black walls of corn stalks, felt like I was moving through a dream. I leaned back. Seat was comfortable. Bucket seat. Comfortable, but Jesus my fucking head.

Somebody, not the girl, said, “I think it’s a concussion. Mild concussion.”

Man’s voice.

Me.

“That’s what I thought. Try not to swallow your tongue, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’m gonna watch you for a couple hours. I’ll be Nurse Sally, you know? You’ll be fine. Tender loving care. That’s what TLC stands for.”

“Does it?”

“Just relax. You need to rest. Nothing strenuous.” She peeked over the steering wheel toward the sky. “Is it gonna snow or rain, I wonder? What do you think?”

“Not cold enough. Not snow. Rain.”

And I either passed out again or fell asleep.

* * *

“Come on, big boy,” she said.

She was helping me out of the car. I blinked myself awake, head still swimming but blurry vision gradually coming into focus. Girl had surprising strength, but then she was a dancer and a sort of athlete. She almost yanked me to my feet and slipped an arm around my waist, to guide me on my shaky legs up a sidewalk to a vague two-story structure where a short flight of wooden steps led to an open porch.

We made it up them somehow, as the sky roared and lightning flashed and illuminated the world, including this structure. A farmhouse, white clapboard, older, indifferently maintained. With an arm still around my waist, she opened the screen and worked a key in the front door.

Then we were inside. She did not turn on any lights, just walked me across a living room to a couch and deposited me there, putting two throw pillows behind my back. She unlaced my sneakers and removed them. Then she disappeared.

I lay in darkness and breathed deep. My head throbbed with pain but it no longer swam. I fell asleep again for a few moments or maybe minutes, but then was wakened by the sensation of cold pressing against the right side of my head.

“Ice,” she said. She was more a presence than anything I could actually see in the dark room. “In a washcloth. Can you hold it there?”

“Yes.”

“I’m gonna get you something.”

“Okay.”

She came back maybe a minute later with a glass of water and two small round yellow pills.

“Percodan,” she said, helping me sit up. “Good shit. Drink the water down.”

I did as I was told.

Thunder rumbled, lightning flashed, strobing through the edges around drawn curtains, making evident a very old-fashioned room around me.

Still holding the cloth-wrapped ice to my head, I asked, “Is your aunt here?”

“No,” she said.

“She doesn’t have a very comfortable couch.”

She giggled. “No, she doesn’t. It’s really old. Do you think you could make it up some stairs?”

“Think so.”

“We’ll get you into bed.”

“Okay.”

The vague outline of her drifted away, then a floor lamp snapped on and an under-furnished living room took shape. Very sparse, ’30s and ’40s crap, like an older person might have, or someone who shopped at Goodwill. Beyond was a dining room with a table but not much else, and an old kitchen past that.

She got me to my feet, dispensed with the ice. I breathed deep some more, and allowed her to walk me around to where the stairs to the upstairs were opposite the front door. They were narrow and I told her I could make it on my own. She let me try, and with the help of the banister, I managed.

A single dim light was on at the top. Again, it revealed very sparse furnishings, and old wallpaper, peeling a little. She walked me into a darkened room, but the meager light from the hall indicated a bed. Jesus, another fucking waterbed. Round. Black sheets. Did all the females in goddamn fucking Stockwell have waterbeds?

Outside the sky rumbled an inconclusive answer.

The rest of the bedroom seemed vague, but I could tell posters were on the walls, and judging by the waterbed, this was hardly the aunt’s room. And it was not a small space, more a master bedroom than what a teenage girl, living with an older relative, might have. That was just my sense of it, though—she didn’t turn on a light.

She asked, “You want help with your clothes?”

“I can sleep in them.”

“No, let’s get them off you. That heavy coat anyway.”

She did that, then went ahead and tugged off my shirt and tie, and undid my pants, and I stepped out of them. She guided me in my shorts to the nearby bed and I got under the sheets. The waterbed was warm, heated, and the gentle movement of it was soothing. Maybe waterbeds were okay. Maybe they were the shit.

I fell asleep.

* * *

The sky exploded in an artillery barrage that gave me just a brief Vietnam flashback as I sat up in bed, a little thrown by its waterlogged instability, and heard the rain finally break loose. There was a lot of it. Driving. Hammering. Machine-gunning.

Somebody was in bed next to me.

“You awake?” Sally asked.

“Yeah.”

“How do you feel?”

“Okay. Better. All right.”

“It’s really coming down. You were right, Jack.
Not
snow. If it was, we’d be up to our butts in it, you know?”

“Yeah. Uh, Sally. Thanks for helping me.”

“No problem.”

No thunder now. Just driving rain, pummeling the roof.

“That kid hit me with a shovel, I swear.”

“Rod’s really strong. I yelled at him for what he did to you. I told him we were through.”

“Are you?”

“Yeah. He’s not very smart. He’s a terrible fucking lay.”

“Why go with him?”

I sensed more than saw her shrug, and she said, “He was Candy’s guy. It’s a status thing, you know?”

“Where’s your aunt?”

“Not here.”

“But where is she? Elderly aunt of yours?”

Drumming rain filled the silence that followed.

Then she said: “How are you at keeping secrets?”

“Not bad. Pretty good.”

“...My aunt doesn’t live here.”

“Where
does
she live?”

“She lives in California and she’s only in her thirties, and she doesn’t give a fucking shit about me.”

“That’s not her furniture downstairs.”

“No, that’s...that’s just junk I picked up. For if somebody from the school comes around. Actually, it’s a pretense I don’t need to keep up anymore. I’m eighteen. You can be on your own at eighteen.”

“But when you moved here, you weren’t eighteen.”

“No. Sixteen. My parents died in a small plane crash outside San Francisco. They had some money that went to his brother and her sister, my aunt. But they had a decent insurance policy, and it went right to me. The courts gave my aunt responsibility for me, and we lived in Santa Barbara. But my aunt’s husband —husband number three, I think—he had the hots for me. She kind of kicked me out.”

“That was harsh.”

“Not really. I kind of...fucked him, you know? Not fucked him over, I mean...you know, actually fucked him one afternoon.”

“Ah.”

“I inherited a couple of other things from my folks, including this farmhouse. Actually, there’s a farm that goes with it, but I rent it out. Or my aunt does.”

“Is this an imaginary aunt?”

“No, the real one out in California. She was all for me getting my ass out of there, and fine with my plan to live by myself. Any help I needed to fool the school in Stockwell, she was up for. Better them than her.”

“You mean, the administrators at Stockwell High think you live out here with your aunt? An elderly aunt, based on the way you furnished the downstairs.”

“Right. That’s why this was my first parent-teacher night, you know? Pretty slick for a kid, huh? Pretty cool? Now I guess maybe I’m keeping up the false front more out of habit than anything else. And maybe I’d still get in trouble, even though I am, like, eighteen.”

Was the rain letting up, just a little?

“Sally, you’re a girl of great initiative.”

“Thanks.”

“Is this why you didn’t go out for the pageants, like all the other Stockwell girls?”

“Yeah. Really, I’d love to. They’re stupid, pageants, but I could pull that off. I could ace it.”

“I know you could. Who all knows your secret?”

“Well, Roger does. He’s my best friend. Or is now that Candy’s gone. She knew all about it. She knew everything. She used to come out here and we would have such a blast. Getting high. Getting wasted.”

“Big parties out here?”

“Oh no. Just Candy and me. If I had a big blow-out out here, you think my secret would be safe for long? Not fuckin’ hardly!”

“Sally...did you ever consider that Candy saw how you’d remade your life, and maybe she tried to do the same thing with hers? She and her father had really bottomed out, after all, and—”

She turned, moving closer to me. The scent of Charlie perfume tickled my nostrils.

Hope in her voice, she asked, “So you think Candy might be out there somewhere? Alive? Maybe tearing it up in some dinner theater or somewhere? Some little club? Wouldn’t it be a hoot if she were stripping or something! She had the body for it.
Has
the body for it. Gotta stay positive.”

“You really think she might be, Sally? Out there somewhere?”

The rain was just pattering now, but you could hear the thunder complaining again, only distant.

“No What I really think is, she would
never
run away. And if she did? She’d tell me. We were tight. Really, really tight.”

“Then what
did
happen to her?”

“Some perv did it. Maybe even Rod.”

“You said he was a pussycat.”

“Yeah, but...really, cats are pretty mean, when you get right down to it. He’s got a temper.”

“You’re telling me.”

“You
tell
me
—are you feeling better? How bad are you hurting?”

“I’m okay. My ribs hurt. I hope he didn’t crack them.”

“Let me get something.”

The waterbed sloshed as she climbed down and opened the door and, before she scurried into the hall where the light was still on, gave me a glimpse of her mostly naked shape, small, curvy, her dimpled, high-cheeked bottom barely hidden by pink lacy panties.

When she returned, she clicked on a little lamp on a boxy modern nightstand. She’d brought a tube of Metholatum ointment. She sat cross-legged on the unstable bed and rubbed the stuff into the areas around my sore ribs; the burning sensation helped, maybe because it was a distraction. Her bare, pert breasts definitely were. You will be proud of me: I did not stare.