Kitten with a whip (11 page)

"What do you mean?"

"That show you were putting on back there. Did you want to make sure he'd remember you, or were you just keeping in practice?"

Jody giggled and scooched down in the seat, playing the bad little girl. "Jealous," she said.

'Look, I can turn around right now if you say the word, ril be glad to give you to him. For keeps."

"That kid!" She let out a scornful laugh. "I was just wigghng around to see how stupid he was. That's the joke. He's back there now thinking how that girl really went for him. He'll work it all up into a big sexy daydream, never knowing it's a big fat lie. See, that's the joke. Hell, David, he had pimples on the back of his neck."

He said softly. ''You're pretty maUcious, aren't you?"

"What you got against fun?" She grinned up at him, fanned his face with the roadmap. "Even so, I still like you best. All my Hfe I'll think about you once in a while. I mean, you flounder around a lot but still you make me blow land of warm for you."

S8 KITTEN WITH A WHIP

'Torget it."

"Okay. Where you take me now, David?* "Home.'' The word tasted bitter in his mouth, something to be spit out. "Isn't that where everybody goes when there's no other place left?"

Chapter Ten

As THEY SPED SOUTH, David was so preoccupied with grappling with his personal dilemma that he didn't notice the girl lapse gradually into a strained and morose silence. Too, their moods tended to coincide in the situation that had been thrust upon them. They had driven north full of anticipation, they had been thwarted, and now they were retreating through the same sunburned scenery they had viewed only minutes before. It was monotonous, it reeked of failure, it danced jeeringly in the heat.

He thought, What if I simply stopped the car and shoved her out on the side of the road and drove away? Only trouble with that, it wouldn't work. The police or the sheriff would pick her up and she'd drag me into it out of spite. No, when I get rid of her, she's got to he in a fairly good state of mind about me so she won't feel any immediate inclination to shoot off her mouth about me. And most important of all, when I dump her, it's got to be some place where she's in no danger of being caught right away.

And where might that be? The law people were old hands at setting up those roadblocks where there's no country lane or herd trail way of bypassing them. The coast highway was corked tight, so there was no doubt that the inland route was too—and the same went for the two highways east, and they'd be watching the border gates into Mexico . . .

His train of thought was broken by a movement from Jody. Her narrow hand shot out and tuiTied on the radio. Before it even had time to warm up, she struck like a snake again, turning it off. Then David began to note how jittery she was, slumped beside him on the seat, her fingernails clenched into the nalms of her hands, her pointed little face sullen with discontent.

"What's the trouble now?'' When she didn't answer, he shrugged.

They passed a dense stand of sagebrush and juniper that overhung a white clay blufiF. Tody squirmed around to look back at it until it was out or sight. A moment later she said in a low expressionless voice, almost as if she were communing with an invisible third party, "They took me down into a canyon. I went for a ride with them, a couple of marines, and they took me down into a canyon. It was right after my twelfth birthday. They kept me there all afternoon."

David winced inside, caught oflF-guard. He wanted nothing more than to believe her, to feel sorry that she hadn't gotten the breaks. But he'd learned his lesson. He said, "What kind of sympathy play is this?"

"Oh God," she moaned. "Shut up." She leaned forward and buried her face in her hands, mufHing her voice. "There was once, a couple years back, that I thought for once in my Hfe everytning was going to sort out beautiful and nice. Out on Point Loma, you know? Where there's this big parking place all around that funny httle old-fashioned lighthouse, and you can hear the ocean way down below and you look out and there's all the lights of the city spread out for miles. And there's other people in their cars too, looking out at it, and it makes you want to whisper. I never felt so wonderful before or since." She stopped talking.

A mile later, David couldn't hold in his curiosity any longer. "Well, what happened?"

Her hands dropped away from her face and she glared at him. "What always happens? It turned out to be a miserable lie, that's what! A cheap and dirty lie."

I could tell you, he thought, that it doesn't always happen. You're talking about the same Point Loma where, not too many years before your time, Virginia and I used to go to neck. After a movie, after a dance . . . and we held long serious discussions that we thought were settling our future and the world's future too. We can look back and laugh now, even at our pompous young views of morality. We never did anything but neck until two nights before our wedding when the same excitement took over the both of us and, not saying a word.

we found a more secluded spot and made love on the back seat of the old car I drove then. We were clumsy, faltering and tender—and all these affectionate years later it's still our private little joke about what a loose woman I married. Ifs easy to smile over things that are so far from the truth. I guess we were both pretty staid people— my only experience was a couple of fiy-by-night things in the army. But we never thought of ourselves as dull or naive. Maybe if Vd gotten around more as a young man Yd never have blundered into today s trouble.

But that's a lousy price to pay.

He glanced over at Jody's set withdrawn face and wondered at the complex structure of circumstances and genes that made her different from Virginia. Certainly Virginia at that age had been just as healthy a girl, yet the idea of a promiscuous or untruthful Virginia was unthinkable. Later, as a wife, she had confessed to having been burningly curious about sex, but not until on the very brink of their marriage had she been able to overcome her secret fear that he would desert her, run away to sea or something equally fantastic. Perhaps she had sensed the flaw in his character—a hidden capacity for the cavalier gesture, a secret longing to break the rules—that he had never come upon the peiSect opportunity to display until eight years later. Eight years later—yesterday.

'What are you going this way for?" demanded Jody crossly.

Automatically, he had turned east on the freeway that was the shortest route home, bypassing the city. "I don't get you."

"You aren't going through downtown."

"Of course not. This way's faster."

Jody hammered her fist on her knee. "But I want to go through downtown! I want you to nm an errand."

^Well, maybe if you'd explain what you're talking about . . ."

"You got eyes, haven't you?" Her voice had turned raspy, like a distant shriek. "I need a fix!"

He knew instantly what she meant. Subconsciously, he decided, he must have expected and dreaded this moment ever since her vitahty had begun to run down.

No usQ reminding her that only an hour or so ago she had emphatically denied having any narcotic habits. Truth to Jody was a pet creature or the moment. He feigned ignorance. "We'll get something to eat at home. You'll feel better then."

"God damn it, who wants to eat!" she yelled at him. "If I don't get a hft, I'll fall apart. You got to get it for me, understand?"

He spoke reasonably to her although his foot was pressing compulsively harder on the accelerator. "Now look here, Jody. I've done everything I could to help you but there are some things I can't do and won't do. And one of them is to get narcotics for you."

"Look here yourself. You're not trying to help me. I'm making you help me. You're going to take the next tumoflF into town and go down Market Street and turn where I say. There's this rinky httle drugstore. Put a dime in the jukebox when you go in. Play either the first or the last record. The druggist's name is Nicky and it'll only cost you about five dollars if you tell him who it's for. Otherwise, I'm going to grab the wheel and we'll both wind up in the ditch."

He caught a glimpse of her intent fierce face and, to his surprise, he laughed aloud. "Grow up. Play the jukebox—what kind of cloak and dagger stuff is that?"

"I'm warning you—"

"Sure, you are—and I'm paying no attention. Go ahead and grab the wheel, get us all cut up. Wreck me or wreck my life, if that's what you want. I've gone along with you so far because of that very reason. Because, I guess, I'm afraid of you. But I'm afraid of this other thing more. I'm not going to get mixed up with dope."

She was silent for a moment and he was braced for her to lunge at him and try to smash up the car. But when she spoke, it was in a childish wheedUng tone. "You make it sound like murder or something. David, honey, it's not that bad. All I need is a couple of bennies and I'll be going great again."

"Bennies?" The term was new to him.

"Benzedrine tablets. They give me a jolt. Lots of people take them. They're hke medicine. I only take

them two or three times a week. And any time I want I can cut down to once a week like I used to. It's not as if I'm on the hook or anything."

"Oh no, nothing Hke that." He concealed his surprise at the prosaic sound of her narcotic habit. He had anticipated Jody's need as more unwholesome, heroin or cocaine, at least marijuana. But benzedrine sounded no more sinister than caffeine tablets or the mild nerve tonics that you were able to buy over the counter. Then he brought his reasoning up short as it began to veer into the apologetic. That was the same path that Jody must have taken once. It's really nothing, everybody does it, it never hurt anybody, and all the other demonic commonplaces. No, his mind was made up and he wasn't going to be caught anywhere near her vicious little drugstore. He had finally drawn the Line somewhere.

She could read it in his face. She began to whimper.

He said, "Look in the glove compartment. Might be a couple of caffeine tablets in there."

She quieted down and rummaged Hstlessly in the continually cluttered compartment, road maps, lube job receipts, green stamps, old shopping lists . . . She said in a dull voice, "You ought to feel sorry for me. You don't know how it feels to be coming apart inside, everything pressing down on you like a big weight, until you've got to do something or die."

"You're at a fine age to be talking about dying."

"I've reached eighteen today. Maybe that's far enough." She held out her ami. To his horror, he saw the gleaming silver point she held pressed deep into the blue-veined flesh of her wrist. It was a beer can opener, the one he kept in the station wagon for emergency duty on picnics.

He jerked the car over onto the shoulder of the road and braked to a stop. "What do you think you're doing?" he yelled at her and grabbed the can opener. She didn't resist. She simply sat there looking at him reproachfully while a sinuV drop of blood appeared to decorate her slender wrist like a tiny ruby. "You little idiot!"

"I told you to feel sorry for me. You just don't know."

He pulled out his handkerchief and held it against the puncture. "Now stop this dying talk, Jody. How you. ever going to become a model ii you scar yourself up?"

"I don't know. Who's to care, anyway?"

"Ah, don't be so silly." But he cared, he reahzed. She had forced that much out of him. He couldn't help a pang of sorrow for a girl who so wanted pity that she would hurt herself. Provided, of coiurse, that the gesture was genuine; the guardian part of his mind remembered that she had scarcely scratched herself. The bleeding had stopped already, leaving a single red dot on his handkerchief. Yet Jody was in an extremely depressed state and, considering her other psychotic tendencies, suicide wasn't out of the question. So he cared doubly. It was bad enough to be involved with her life; how much worse it would be to get involved with her death.

He began puUing odds and ends out of the glove compartment in the belief that the caflFeine tablets would be better than nothing. Suddenly, Jody gasped. "Oh, God! God and a big wowl" An object had rolled forth and she seized it up with both hands and inspected it greedily. She spoke to it. "Oh, dream buddy, why didn't I think you might be in therel"

"Well, what is it?" David asked.

She let him see for an instant. It was a two-inch plastic tube with a rounded top, a nasal inhalator of some trade name or other that he or Virginia must have left in the car during the virus season last winter. Even seeing it, he barely could recollect it. He watched, fascinated, as Jody put it on the floor and cracked it open with her heel. Hands trembling, she pulled forth from inside it two narrow accordion-folded strips of stiff gray paper. She popped them into her mouth and began to chew happily.

David shook his head, dumbfounded.

Jody leaned back with an exhilarated smile. "See how easy? Now what were you scared of?"

"Nothing." With a sigh, he started the car and steered back into the stream of traflBc. Jody, playing good little girl now, tidied up the glove compartment. Presently, he mused, "When I was your age I wasn't even smoking cigarettes."

"Buster, you just didn't belong," said Jody airily, and that was tliat. As they neared his neighborhood, she obediently climbed iuto the rear of the station wagon, ducking down out of sight until they had driven into the garage and David had lowered the big door. The house was unchanged from the morning, the breakfast dishes stacked in the dishwasher, the funny papers spread on the living room carpet, the familiar clutter of security. At least, that was its normal significance; today it only reminded him that nothing had changed with them either. Them—in his unconscious thinking, he reahzed, he was beginning to link the girl to himself with the inexorable certainty of a nightmare. Always he had enjoyed the sensation of returning home to the particular corner of the earth that was his. But today, to enter it not as a refuge but as a cage . . .

He followed her into his bedroom—his and Virginia's— to see if he could get anything settled. "Let's face facts, Jody. What do you intend to do?"