Hot Spot (4 page)

The next day was Saturday. Harshaw was across the street at his desk in the loan office all morning and at noon when they closed it, he came over and said he was going fishing for three days down at Aransas Pass.

“I’ll be back on Monday night,” he told Gulick. “If you run into any snag making out papers for sale, you can always get hold of Miss Harper.”

We didn’t sell anything. The town was jammed with the usual Saturday-afternoon crowd, but nobody was looking for a car. I prowled morosely around the lot and wondered what Gloria Harper did when she wasn’t working. Just before we closed, the telephone rang. I answered it.

“Mr. Madox?”

I recognized the voice. So she didn’t go with him, I thought. “Yes. Madox speaking.”

“This is Mrs. Harshaw. I know you’ll think I’m an awful pest, but I wonder if I could ask another favour?”

“Sure. What is it?”

“Mr. Harshaw has gone fishing, and he promised me a car off the lot while he was gone with ours, but he forgot to bring it home. I wonder if you’d drive it out for me when you close up?”

“Sure. How do I get there?”

“Go down Main Street to the bank and turn right. It’s about three or four blocks beyond the edge of town. There are a couple of cross streets, I think, and then a filling station on the left. The next block is big oak trees on both sides of the street, and only two houses. Ours is the two-storey one on the right-hand side.”

“Check,” I said. “Which car is it?”

“He said there was a Buick. A coupé.”

“Yes. It’s still here. I’ll bring it out.”

“There’s no hurry. Any time after you close up. And thanks a lot.”

It was around six when we locked up the cars and the shack. I told Gulick where I was taking the coupé, and left my own car on the lot. The place wasn’t hard to find, after I’d threaded my way through the double-parked congestion of Saturday-afternoon Main Street. Beyond the filling station she had spoken of, the road swung a little to the right as it entered the oaks. The house itself was back in the trees and had a big lawn in front and a gravel driveway running back beside a hedge of oleanders. It was a smaller copy of the old-style southern plantation house, with a columned porch running across the front and down one side next to the drive. I stopped by the side porch and got out. It was secluded back in here, partly cut off as it was from the street, with long shadows slanting across the lawn.

“Hello,” she said.

I glanced around, but didn’t see her until she opened the screen door and came out on to the porch. She had on a little-girl sort of summer dress with puffed-out short sleeves tied with bows, and was rattling ice cubes in a highball glass. She was bare-legged and wearing wedgies with grass straps, and her toenails were painted a flaming red. I don’t know anything about women’s clothes, but still I was conscious that she jarred somehow. The teenage dress didn’t do anything for that over-ripe figure except to wander on to the track and get run over, and she looked like a burlesque queen in bobby socks.

“Oh, hello,” I said. “I left the keys in it.”

“Thanks. It was sweet of you to drive it out for me.”

“Not at all.”

“How about a drink before you go?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

I followed her inside. The venetian blinds were half closed in the living room and a big electric fan oscillated like a slowly shaking head on the mantel above the fireplace. She stopped and faced me, and again I could feel that faint strain in the air.

“Bourbon and water?”

“That’s fine.”

“Push some of those magazines out of the way and sit down. I’m sorry the place’s in such a mess.” She turned to go, and then stopped and added, as if it was an afterthought, “I gave the girl the week-end off, to visit her folks.”

She went out. It was hot in the room, even with the fan going, and I was conscious of a deep quiet, unbroken except by the whirring of the fan blades and now and then a tinkle of ice against glass out in the kitchen. I lighted a cigarette and put the match in a tray. It was heaped up and overflowing with butts smeared with lipstick. Movie and confession magazines were scattered over the sofa and lying on the floor, and I could see the rings left by highball glasses on the coffee table. Standing there looking around at the evidence of boredom was like watching a burning fuse.

She came back in a minute with the drink, and I saw she’d refilled her own. She sat down in the big chair across from me with her legs stretched out and the toes of the wedgies touching each other, and looked at me with her chin propped on her hand.

“Well, how are you standing the excitement?”

I shrugged. “Maybe it picks up on Saturday night.”

“Yes, it really does. They show two westerns at the movie instead of one.”

“Sounds pretty rugged.”

“Well, you can always join the Ladies’ Club and collect junk. There’s a hot pastime.”

“I might have trouble getting past the credentials committee.”

“I bet you wouldn’t if you approached ’em one at a time. Meow.”

“What a way to talk about the Ladies!”

“They’re a bunch of dears.”

I put my glass on the coffee table and walked over to the front window to look out through the venetian blind. The house across the street was a little further up and you couldn’t see it from here.

“Which one of ’em lives over there?” I asked.

“Mrs. Gross. She’s the one with fourteen eyes and party-line ears.”

She put her glass down and walked over and stood close to me. “Well, what do you think of the view?”

I turned, and we were staring at each other again. “It’s better all the time.”

“Oh, I meant to ask you. Did you have any trouble finding the place?”

“No,” I said. “I could find it in the dark.”

“Are you sure?” she asked.

I put a hand behind her neck and then brought it up in back of the ash-blonde curls, holding it there and pulling her face against mine, hard, as I kissed her. Her mouth was soft and moist, and she came to me like a dachshund jumping into your lap. In a minute she turned her face aside and pushed back.

“You’d better get out.”

“Like hell.”

“I thought you told me you’d lived in a small town.”

“What of it?”

“Don’t you think that old witch over there watched you drive in here? And she’s watching right now, waiting for you to leave.”

I tried to take hold of her again, but she moved back, pushing at my arms. “Harry, get out!”

I could see she meant it, and somehow I had sense enough to realize she was right. There was no use asking for trouble.

“All right,” I said. “But don’t think you can tease me. I’ll be back.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Well?”

Her face was sullen. “Well?” she said.

I picked up my car at the lot and drove over to the rooming house. After standing under the shower a long time, I changed into slacks and T-shirt and drove down to Main. It was dusk now, with heat lying motionless and sticky in the streets, and bugs danced through the beams of weaving headlights. It was hard finding a parking place, but I finally beat two other cars to one in front of the bank and sat there for a while trying to push the sultry weights of Dolores Harshaw off my mind. She was dangerous in a town like this. The hell with her; I wouldn’t go back. But wouldn’t I? What about later on? Keeping the thought of her out of that bleak hotbox of a room was going to be like trying to dam a river with a tennis racket.

I shook my head irritably, and stared at the bank. A light was burning over the vault in the rear, and I could see the layout of the whole room through the glass doors in front of me. The over-all depth would be about fifty feet, and the side door which came in off the cross street was well back, not over twenty feet this side of the vault and the door which probably led into a washroom or closet of some kind. I turned my head and tried to picture about where the old Taylor building would be from here. Down one block, I thought, and two to the right, which would put it diagonally in front of the bank. That was about right.
About right for what?
I cursed and threw away the cigarette I was smoking and got out to stand on the sidewalk.

I was too restless and irritable to think of eating, so I started walking aimlessly up the sidewalk through the crowd. Up in the next block I went past the drugstore and as I glanced in through the window I saw Gloria Harper in front of the magazine racks. Without stopping to wonder why, I opened the screen door and went in.

She was still absorbed in the magazines and didn’t see me.

“Hello,” I said.

She glanced up abruptly. “Oh, hello, Mr. Madox.” She didn’t smile, but there was nothing unfriendly in the way she looked at me.

“How about a soda?”

She considered it thoughtfully. “Why, yes. Thank you.”

She paid the clerk for the magazine and we went back to one of the booths across from the fountain.

“First,” I said, “I’m sorry about the other day. I must have had the book open at the wrong place.”

The violet eyes glanced up at me, and then became confused and looked away. “It’s all right,” she said.

“Then you’re not mad at me?”

She shook her head. “Not any more.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “Now we can start even again. Next time I’ll read the instructions on the bottle. What do you do around here on Saturday nights?”

“Not much. There’s just the movie. And sometimes a dance, but not this week.”

“How about going swimming, then?”

“I’d like to, but I couldn’t tonight. I’m baby-sitting.”

“You must be a big operator, with two jobs. What’re you trying to do, get rich?”

“No, it’s just in the family. I’m staying with my sister’s little girl so she and her husband can go to the movies.”

“Oh. Well, I’ll drive you out there.”

“It’s only five or six blocks.”

“I’ll drive you anyway.”

She smiled. “Well, all right. Thank you.”

I watched her while she finished the soda, thinking of that odd gravity about everything she did, and the way she always said “Thank you,” instead of just “Thanks.” A sweet kid from a nice family, you’d say; probably teaches a Sunday-school class and goes steady with some guy in his last year at law school. The only hitch was—where did Sutton fit in? How about the way he’d looked at her, with that secret and very dirty joke of his? It was impossible, and still there it was.

She told me how to get there and we drove out Main, going north past the used-car lot. I asked her a little about herself, and she told me she’d lived around here most of her life except for a couple of years away at school. Her mother and father had moved to California and she was living with her sister and brother-in-law. I slipped over a couple of oblique questions, looking for a steady boy friend, but she let them slide off without saying one way or the other. She didn’t wear any engagement ring, though. I looked.

It was a small white house on a gravelled side street, complete with a white picket fence and a young tree in the yard. “Won’t you come in?” she asked.

Why not? “Sure,” I said. “Thanks.”

There were no street lights, but the moon was waxing, and higher now, and I could see the dark shadow of vines growing along the fence and over the porch. The air was heavy and sweet with something I hadn’t smelled for a long time, and after the second breath I knew it was honeysuckle. To make it perfect, I thought, the gate should drag a little and need to be listed to open it. It did.

All the lights were off and they were sitting on the porch steps. When they saw there was somebody with her, they reached inside the front door and turned on the porch light. The sister was a slightly older version of Gloria, a little heavier, maybe, and having grey eyes instead of the startling violet. They were friendly, but a little embarrassed, like people who didn’t get around very much. Gloria introduced me. His name was Robinson, and he was a slightly built man around my age with thinning yellow hair and rimless glasses.

“Mr. Madox is the new salesman at the lot,” Gloria said.

“And apprentice baby-sitter,” I added, clowning a little to break the ice. We shook hands.

“Well, you don’t look as if they could overpower you,” he said, and grinned.

As they went out the gate Mrs. Robinson called back, “Make Mr. Madox some lemonade, Gloria.”

“Thanks,” I said. “We just had a soda.”

I didn’t notice the child until they had gone. She was maybe two or four years old or something like that, curled up in a long nightgown in the porch swing, a golden-haired girl with big saucer eyes. The whole place, I thought, is as blonde as an old-country smörgäsbord.

“This is Gloria Two,” she said. “And this gentleman is Mr. Madox, honey-lamb.”

I never know what to say to kids. That itchy-kitchy-coo stuff makes me as sick as it probably makes them, so I just said, “How do you do?” Surprisingly, she stared back at me as gravely as her aunt and said, “How do you do?”

Then I thought of the funny name. “Gloria Two?” I asked.

Gloria Harper smiled. “They named her after me. And then when I came to live here it was a little confusing. Mostly we just call her ‘Honey.’”

“Isn’t that confusing too?” I asked.

She stopped smiling. “Why?”

“Doesn’t anybody call you that?”

“No.”

“They should. It’s the colour of your hair.”

She shook her head. “It’s just sunburned.”

She took Gloria Two inside to put her to bed. When she came back I was admiring the watercolours on the walls in the living room. I recognized one of them as being the wooden bridge over the river, the one we’d crossed going out to the oil well.

“They’re good,” I said. “Did you do them?”

She nodded. “I don’t have much talent, but it’s fun.”

“I like them.”

“Thank you,” she said.

We went out and sat down on the porch with our feet on the steps. A cocker spaniel came around the corner, looked me over, and jumped into the porch swing. I handed Gloria a cigarette and we smoked, not saying much. The honeysuckle vines looked like patent leather in the moonlight and the night was heavy with their perfume.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” she asked quietly. “Sometimes when it’s quiet like this you can hear the whip-poor-wills.”