The Devil's Dream (26 page)

“Excuse me just a minute,” he says once they're inside, and he goes in the bathroom and pees and takes two pills so he'll be sharp, and then wraps the rest of the pills and the gun in a towel and stashes it all under the sink. It hurts to pee. He breaks the seal on a new pint bottle of vodka and drinks some and goes out and gives Sheila some, and then turns off a couple of the lights she's turned on. She's sitting on the room's one chair with her legs crossed at the ankle, like she's in church or something. She still looks pretty good, even if she is older than he thought at first, why, those boys of hers could be twelve, fourteen years old, and he notices she's not saying. Her cheeks have got that dumpy little sag on either side of the mouth that you don't see before thirty, thirty-five. But that's okay. In fact it's better. Johnny doesn't want a real young girl, or a beautiful girl, or a rich girl. He wants a
grateful
girl, and he might of just lucked out tonight. She's chugging vodka from the little bottle like a pro too. Johnny hangs up his expensive cowboy suit carefully before he falls to his knees naked in front of Sheila on the orange shag Moon Winx carpet. “I can't tell you how I felt when I saw you there in the bar.” He rubs his face against the tight denim crotch of her jeans. “I swear, honey, I just worship you.”

At the moment, this is true.

But even if it were
not
true, Johnny would say it anyway, and not feel bad about saying it either, because he firmly believes it doesn't matter what you say when your blood runs south and you're trying to get a woman to fuck you. Hell, you can tell her any damn thing that works. This is okay. A man turns into an animal at such times, his brain turns into a pig brain, he's nothing but a walking dick. He's not responsible for anything he says or does. And no pussy is bad pussy either. Because when you get their clothes off it's worth it, it's always worth it; in a lifetime of fucking women he's only seen three he'd just as soon not look at, and this is definitely not one of those, great big fat titties with saucer nipples, fine white dimply thighs, squeals like a cheerleader when she comes. Or
acts
like she comes, anyway—you can't ever tell if they're acting. The last thing she says, right before she rolls over on her side and starts snoring this sweet little whiffly snore like a puppy, is, “Please wake me up in fifteen minutes, you know I've got to get right on home.” Johnny lays there beside her for a while and then he walks around the bed so he can watch her sleep. Everybody's so nice when they're asleep. And women in sleep fascinate him, their sweet slack-jawed faces, the random passions and griefs that pass across their loose features, how they'll twitch or startle sometimes and wake up all flustered. Sleep is active. It's not like death. It's not a thing like death, death is the only thing like death, and the way you can tell you're not dead is if you're fucking somebody, or if you just fucked them, or if you're fixing to. He watches Sheila sleeping for a while. Light from the open bathroom door falls in a path across her. She looks real young in that light. After looking at her for a long time, Johnny gets up and goes in the bathroom. It hurts like
hell
to pee. Shit. If your dick goes, you might as well kill yourself. Johnny looks in the mirror and is startled by who he sees there, that hollow-cheeked dude, you can count his ribs. Shit. He's got a free bed now for the rest of the night, but of course he can't sleep, he did all those pills tonight, he'll be good till noon. Shit. Might as well get on the road, get on over to Monroe. Maybe he can catch some Zs over there before the show. Johnny dresses carefully, quietly, takes his stuff out from under the sink, pulls one of the three fifty-dollar bills out of Sheila's billfold and puts the billfold back in her pocketbook, puts the bill in his breast pocket, a little transfer of funds you might say. Johnny might need some cash, you can't be too careful driving at night, especially driving alone at night. The roads of America are full of crazies.

Johnny sits down on the edge of the bed to pull his boots on; this gets harder all the time. Right now he's got a shooting pain that fans out from his dick all over his body. These women have broke down his health. Hard living and juke-joint food. He's not thirty but looks forty, maybe forty-five. Finally on his way out the door, Johnny pauses and then goes back to get Sheila's purse again. He takes it to the bathroom and dumps it out on the countertop by the sink. It's just awful what all a woman will carry around in her purse. Johnny paws through the mess until he finds her lipstick, Fire Engine Red. Then he writes across the mirror with it in big block letters, THANKS A MILLION, LOVE JOHNNY, and leaves.

It's three a.m., the dead of night, lonely enough to spook you, but at least it's quit raining. It's not hot or even warm now, but Johnny's sweating by the time he pulls out of the Moon Winx parking lot, and he starts sweating more when he looks in his rearview mirror and sees a long black Oldsmobile coming along real slow behind him. Now what kind of a person would be out driving around in the middle of the night? Somebody up to no good, that's who. Some maniac.

Johnny unwraps the Moon Winx towel from around his gun and lays the gun on the seat beside him. When he turns onto the highway, heading east, the black Oldsmobile turns too.
Shit
. Then for about an hour, it follows right along behind, just pacing him, keeping the same speed. If Johnny speeds up, the Oldsmobile speeds up. If he slows down, the Olds slows down too. Johnny drinks some vodka to get ahold of himself. He never could stand suspense, he always hated cop shows. Then, after about an hour of this, he looks in his rearview mirror and he can't see the Olds. The Olds is gone. This ought to be some relief, but oddly enough it's not, somehow. It's worse. Johnny is sure the Olds is still back there even though he can't see it. He thinks it's turned invisible or something, following him. His shirt is soaked through with sweat and he's feeling kind of light-headed by the time he gets to Arcadia, sometime in the last puny hours of the night. He decides to stop for breakfast if he can find any place that's open. Probably not, though. Arcadia is some kind of a college town, look at all these fucking columns, white and ghostly. Johnny hates college towns and college girls, smart-ass, got-it-all and know-it-all rich girls, he had him a run-in with one of those lately.
Greer
.

Only he didn't
know
she was one of them right at first, she looked just like anybody else at the Hilltop in Nashville, where he was opening a show for Gene Vincent, last-minute replacement but what the hell, pretty high cotton for a country boy. Well, there she was, shiny straight brown hair rippling all down below her shoulders like a waterfall, and he couldn't take his eyes off of her. Eventually he got it around to where they struck up a conversation. She had this friend with her, which should have tipped him off, but she was so pretty, somehow it didn't. A good old girl does
not
take her friend along when she gets in a car with somebody, he'll remember this.

But somehow it all seemed pretty natural at the time, they'd been drinking a lot of beer, the three of them, till their mouths got all drawed up and they were talking funny. Her name was Greer, she said, and he said he'd never met a woman with a name like that. “No, you wouldn't have,” said the friend, who was one of them straight-up-and-down washboard kind of girls with no waist and no tits. “Hush, Buffy,” Greer said. The friend's name was Buffy or maybe Muffy, one of those names.

They were driving in Greer's car out to her parents' house to go swimming, the parents were out of town, and damn if it didn't turn out to be one of them fucking
mansions
out on Belle Meade Boulevard with a stone gate and a gatehouse and a lawn big enough to keep a Negro busy all the time just mowing it. If it was
him
now, Blackjack Johnny Raines, he wouldn't put all that energy into grass. He'd grow him something worthwhile, or he'd up and
pave
the sucker. Or maybe he'd put in a par-three golf course.

Anyway, the sight of this house, Greer's house, had sobered him up right fast, but no sooner did Greer park (nice car, baby-blue convertible) than she and Buffy were headed for the pool, dropping clothes as they went. It was the prettiest thing you can imagine, Greer buck naked in the moonlight thataway, poised like one of them art-museum statues before she dove headfirst off the board. It had not occurred to Johnny that they'd be swimming naked, but hell, he was all for it. The only problem was, once he got in there with them, it wasn't really sexy, it made him kind of
sad
, in fact, for some damn reason. It
ought
to've been sexy, the pool had lights in it and everything, so he could see the girls all the way down, every bit of them, even the dark triangles of hair which always embarrassed him somehow. It seemed like a shameful secret, for girls to have so much hair. This pool was painted aqua, so the girls' bodies looked kind of aqua too, aqua and insubstantial, dreamy mermaid bodies, nothing a man can grab ahold of and fuck.

Although by that time Johnny was beginning to get the idea that they weren't going to fuck anyway, him and Greer, he's not sure exactly when he figured this out. She wanted to talk too damn much, for one thing. She wanted to kid around. And that friend of hers, that Muffy or Buffy, stayed
right there
. So being naked in the water like this was no turn-on at all, in fact it was the opposite of a turn-on, in fact it put Johnny in mind of the swimming hole that Robert Floyd dynamited in Grassy Branch, it made him remember how long it took him to teach Rosie to swim and how little she looked in the water. She was just a kid then. At first, she was scared to put her face in. Later, she was scared to lean back. She never did learn to swim very good, not like these rich girls who seemed to be part fish; they could tread water for hours and ask him innumerable personal questions.

And for once, that night, Johnny just told the truth, fuck it, it was pretty clear he wasn't going to get any off of Greer anyway, so what the hell. He told them about leaving home—although he left out the part about
why
—he told them about the freight trains and the oil fields, he told them about the army, where he met a huge black man named Rufus Main who played nigger blues on the guitar, with a lot of string pushing and choking, and how Rufus Main taught him all his licks and runs, real patient, niggers always act like they've got all the time in the world, which is one thing Johnny likes about them, he hates hyper little white dudes like the kind that run everything in this fucking country. He'll take a big slow nigger anytime. He told them about the stolen cars, the petty theft, the bogus checks.

“This is amazing,” the girl named Buffy or Muffy said, treading water.

“Have you ever been married?” Greer asked him then, and Johnny said, “Yes,” which was true, in fact he might be married right now only he wasn't sure if he was or not, it was some Tijuana thing, it might or might not be legal, there's no way of knowing, and yes, he has a child. A boy he thinks, he's never seen him, though. L.A. They live in L.A.

Now at this point Greer got real serious; she went into some kind of a major dog-paddle and came over real close to Johnny, her hair floating out on the water like a giant lily pad. “How can you do that?” she asked, she was
too
fucking serious. “How can you treat them like that?”

By “them” Johnny guessed she meant the boy and old bucktooth, big-ass Ruth. Ruth was a terrible mistake caused by too many margaritas, although it's true that Johnny has always liked a woman with an overbite.

Greer dog-paddled around him in a circle, it was a fucking water ballet. “How can you justify doing this?” she asked in a tight little bitch voice.

Truth was, Ruth had been Johnny's landlady, free rent at a time when he needed it, but she was a mean drunk, she came at him with a kitchen knife, with a hoe, with a teakettle full of boiling hot water. A fucking
dangerous
woman, hell could freeze over before he'd get tangled up with Ruth again. But Johnny had a feeling he'd said too much already, he didn't want to get into it with these rich girls. He didn't even mention Sandra, the first one, which was not enough of a marriage to
count
anyhow, some crazy kid thing.

“Well?”
Greer demanded, floating right in front of him.

Johnny didn't know what to say.

“Men are shits,” he said finally.

“This is amazing,” Muffy or Buffy said, after a little silence. Then she started swimming fast splashy laps like she was trying out for the Olympics, and while that was going on, Johnny grabbed Greer and pulled her over to him in the shallow end and kissed her hard, which she
allowed
, it seemed, but she did not kiss him back or put her arms around him. It was weird. It pissed him off.

“What the fuck is the matter with you?” he asked her, his breath coming hard. “You brought me over here, didn't you? You took off all your goddamn clothes, didn't you? What did you
expect
, sugar? I'm a
man
, in case you haven't noticed.”

Greer was kneeling on the bottom of the shallow end of the pool, head and shoulders above the water, hair floating out, keeping her pretty body entirely to herself. She stared at Johnny with her big dark eyes. “I guess I wasn't thinking,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

Johnny could tell she meant it, he could tell she was really sincere. The thing about rich girls was, when they were nice, they were
so goddamn nice
, but you couldn't touch them, you couldn't just fuck them if you felt like it and they didn't, and this kind of a girl could break your heart.

“Come here,” Greer said, and then she leaned forward in the water and Johnny leaned forward and she kissed him softly on the lips, a little kiss like a prayer. No tongue.