Waylaid (14 page)

“That's real good,” Broken Nose said, smirking and glancing at Gaunt Cop. “That's real good,” he said again.

“If this guy shows up, give us a call. We'll be back,” Gaunt Cop said, ignoring Broken Nose's comments.

“I'm not fucking around,” said Broken Nose. “You pick up that phone and call when you see him.” The office door closed with a sharp click behind them. I watched their car pull out to see if they would flash their red and blue lights, but they didn't.

Half an hour later, I was renting out another room to a john.

It wasn't until the end of April that Lee Anderson touched my hard-on with her hands. She would let me push it against her pussy or her hip, but then I got behind her in the teacher's lounge. I pushed it between her ass cheeks, which were well-defined in those tight Gloria Vanderbilt jeans.

“Oh!” she yelped, turning and kissing me. She put her arms around my waist, but I grabbed her left hand and put it on my cock. “Gee, that's pretty hard,” she said.

“Rub it,” I said. She giggled and withdrew. “I wish you could blow me here.”

“What!”

“I've never had a blow job,” I said.

“I've never given one,” she said.

“Always a first time.”

“Maybe we should go to college together, then we could live in the same apartment. My sister does that with her boyfriend.” Then her voice faltered. “You know, I'm moving in the summer.”

“To where?” I asked, shocked.

“California.” In a soft voice she added, “My dad lost his job. We're going to move in with my uncle.”

“God…California…”

“We could meet again in college. We'll go to the same place. We could cook together, too. Wouldn't that be fun? I love cooking.”

“What about…you know?”

“I know…” she said.

“Well, how about before you leave?” I asked.

“I don't want to…I need to watch my reputation.” She sighed. “I think you're the cutest thing and of course I love you. You know, I just need some more time.” I placed a hand on each of her breasts.

“I think you're the perfect girl,” I told her. She blushed.

“Really?”

“Yes,” I said, squeezing her tits. “Really.” Two more months and she'd be in California. I only had two more months.

Memorial Day weekend was a few weeks away, which meant it was time to tidy up the doorstep and shake out the rugs for the return of the Bennys.

I was killing time between errands at the hardware store and buying groceries, and as I walked down to the end of the boardwalk and back, I inhaled deeply. It smelled like salt and booze.

Tractors on the beach dragged what looked like huge rakes across the sands, clearing away planks of driftwood, garbage, and dead horseshoe crabs that had washed up during the stormy spring months. Crews hammered new planks onto the boardwalk. Watching them work made me think of Mitchell Cone's father.

The boardwalk stands had reopened, and newly hired barkers would practice the patter that would lure Benny men into their stalls to buy softballs and break plates. Two-foot high stuffed Smurfs formed a first line of defense around the stands. Smaller Smurfs and fake animals covered the back walls. They tricked you into thinking you could win the big Smurfs with one fifty-cent try, but you had to win five times — break 15 plates — to get one. With only one win, you'd never get more than a keychain. All the stands had their sucker angle. The water gun relays, the go-fish pond, the rubber frog leap, and the no-frills quarter toss. You could never get the best prize with only one shot, no matter how good you were.

“Haw! Haw! Haw!” screeched the seagulls.

When I got to the supermarket, I saw that they'd already stacked Styrofoam coolers to the ceiling. They loomed like monoliths from a primitive culture. Bags of ice pushed the popsicles and ice cream down into a lone shelf in the freezer. It was going to be another big summer, a real scorcher. Even the gas stations were stocking suntan lotion. Another season to make money.

The big three-day Memorial Day weekend was getting closer. “Everybody's Working for the Weekend,” by Loverboy was getting heavy airplay. We reopened the entire hotel. Rooms that had been shut all winter and spring had to be aired out.

I walked from room to room with an ice bucket filled with keys and a clipboard. I checked the keys to each room, marking down if there were one or two beds in it and making sure the television worked. If a room smelled funny, I would close the toilet lid, stand on it, and crack open the bathroom window.

Then it was here. You could feel the buzz of leased Pontiacs driving south from the city. All the rooms were gone by 8 p.m. on Friday, even at our inflated prices. Friday and Saturday night were $50 each, but if you took Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night, you only had to pay $40 per night.

Two women signing in for a room asked me if there were a lot of singles in town.

I said I didn't know. They were both nearly blind drunk and had stumbled into the office out of their car, leaving the doors open and the headlights on. One had a flabby face that she tried to diminish with mounds of teased brown hair. The other was a cute blonde with black eyebrows. That meant her pussy hair was black, too.

“Are you single?” asked the flabby one while the blonde giggled. “I was thinking maybe we could we do something about the price? Maybe we could find some way to lower it.”

“I'm sorry, I can't go any lower,” I said.

“I mean I could go lower. You know? I mean all the way down,” said the flabby one. “Both of us would,” she said, her pointed finger spinning in the air. She looked anxious.

This was Love Letters material. It wasn't the first time I'd been offered sex, but it was the first time it had happened with girls I'd take the offer up with. Two drunk women giving me head at the same time, passing it back and forth between them.

But something was wrong. The blonde was shaking her head.

“I don't wanna…Chinaman! They got small dicks. Jesus, small dicks!” she whined. A look of alarm washed over the flabby woman's face.

“She's drunk, already, she won't even care! She doesn't care!” she said. But it killed the moment for me. The blonde was the one I really wanted.

“That's $127.20 for the three days, with the tax,” I said. Their American Express card didn't go through, but the flabby girl handed me a Visa card that was approved. I scrawled the acceptance number on the form. I got the signature from the flabby girl while the blonde frowned.

“You can't sign for my card,” she said.

“I just did,” said the flabby girl. The signature was close enough, and I gave her the receipt and the carbons.

My mother had tried to call Nancy to ask if she could come back to clean rooms, but the number didn't work anymore. My mother ended up hiring two high-school girls. On Monday, she started training the girls how to clean rooms. By then, most of the rooms had checked out already, though some Bennys were still hanging out in the parking lot, sitting on their car bumpers and trying to finish the rest of their beer before hitting the road.

My mother left the two girls on the odd-numbered wing and went back to the front desk. The maid's cart was fully packed with the vacuum cleaner and massive amounts of toilet paper, soap, and towels. Its swivel wheels were stuck in four different directions. The girls struggled to push the cart down to the next room, but the wheels were jammed. They rocked the cart back and forth like a stubborn, overloaded mule.

I was busy with hauling out cases of Howdy! and Briardale Cola, so I didn't take any further notice of their lack of progress. If the girls weren't so unfuckable, I might have paid them more attention. Both were wearing t-shirts and shorts, and didn't have bodies that deserved to show any more. If I'd run across their pictures in a magazine, I would have flipped to the next pictorial.

A short while later, I heard a few splashes in the pool. It was about 4 p.m., a few hours after check-out time, but I didn't care if people went for a swim before actually leaving. I locked up the newly stocked soda machines and headed back for the office, passing by the pool. I saw four wet mounds of hair at the edge of the shallow end. Little ripples radiated out from the lightly bobbing heads. The Bennys were humping the maids in the water. The cart was still outside of Room 41, which meant the girls had cleaned one room in the past hour. My mother was going to flip.

As I approached the office door, she was already charging out to the swimming pool with the cordless phone in hand. She had seen the girls jump into the pool from her perch on the office bar stool. The cordless phone wouldn't work from that far away, but its physical presence and the threat to call the police on the two Bennys who were rubbing up against 15-year-olds would be enough to break up this pool party. I couldn't hear what was going on down there, but watching the four bodies scramble out of the pool was enough to make me wish I had the balls to just grab a girl and fuck her.

Later on that afternoon, I went around the hotel with a new pair of giant Craftsman shears. The evergreen bushes that had been planted across the arms of the hotel had grown out unevenly. The builder had intended for the bushes to line the inside driveway, like velvet in a jewel case, but most of the bushes had died, leaving withered stumps that drunk customers stumbled over.

I cut into the overgrown bushes, trying to make them look like rectangles or round globs, depending on how dense the branches were. I was tired after the fourth one, and my arms ached like I'd pitched extra innings. But I did find a water-damaged and sun-dried issue of Gallery nestled in a pile of dead needles. The pages were warped, and some were stuck together, but I managed to get one pictorial opened — two women alternating on a pool table, with cue sticks. The pictures were discolored, and their skin had been stained brown. The next page I was able to rip open had the right colors.

After staring at some pussy, I tore into the rest of the bushes with lust-driven abandon. I thought about fucking Lee Anderson on that pool table. Chop. Chop. Chop. When I was done, I swept the cuttings into plastic garbage bags and dumped them in the woods. My upper arms and shoulder blades hurt all night.

On my way out to the bus the next day, I grabbed the key to Room 54. I had a Trojan ribbed condom in my jacket pocket. I was thinking about bringing the cock ring, but I'd never tried it, and I didn't want to risk anything going wrong. I'd been jerking off so much anyway that I thought I'd be able to last long enough on my own.

In the teacher's lounge, I stuck my hand into Lee Anderson's left back pocket. My thumb was on her panty line.

“Come back on my bus with me,” I whispered into her ear.

“What for?” she asked.

“It's a surprise.”

“What kind of surprise?” I forced myself into her belt buckle and she frowned, but didn't back away.

“Is that all you want?” she asked. I shook my head.

“I want some of this, too,” I said, sweeping my free hand across the side of her breast.

“I…I don't know,” Lee began, trying to maneuver away, but my hand on her ass kept her from breaking free.

“I mean, you love me, don't you? You said you loved me, Lee.”

“I do.”

“Then come back with me, if you really love me.”

“I don't want to do it, you know? Not yet.”

“If you love me, you will,” I said. “If you really love me, you will.”

I held her hand on the bus. When we got on, I was afraid that Mrs. Krackowski was going to demand a bus pass or permission slip for Lee. But the old woman just winked and said, “So, you're taking a little friend home! She's cute, she your girlfriend?” We didn't say anything.

Lee's hand was sweaty and slippery. I could smell the salt in her palm. I sat by the window and kept watch for the familiar landmarks. The car wash. The pancake house. The gas station. I wanted to make sure this bus wasn't going off-course. Nothing was going to stop me from fucking this girl.

I suddenly realized that I hadn't looked into Lee's face since we sat down. I turned to her and brought my knee up on the seat between us without letting go of her hand. Her eyes were half-closed, but when I ducked my head to see under her eyelids, I saw her pupils rattling back and forth like beautiful blue marbles in a glass tumbler.

“I love you, Lee,” I said.

“I'm scared,” she said.

“Don't be,” I said. “It's natural.”

When we got off, I snuck her off to the side to hide from my mother's view if she was waiting in the office. We prowled up to the even-numbered wing of the hotel. Cars passing on the highway must have wondered what those two sneaking kids were up to. I looked down and was surprised to see that I was still holding Lee's hand. I put my arm around her waist, and we made a dash for Room 54.