Hot Shot (15 page)

"Would you like me to fix you a drink?"

He gazed at her for a moment as if he were making up his mind about something, and then he nodded stiffly. "Yes, why don't you do that?"

She turned to leave, only to have him speak again.

"And Paige. That dress is quite ugly. Would you mind changing it?"

Her first reaction to his criticism was the familiar defen-sive surge of anger, but almost immediately the anger faded. He wasn't sending her away. He wanted her to stay. Now that Susannah was gone, she wasn't an outcast anymore.

It took her only seconds to make her decision. Slipping out into the hallway, she went to Susannah's room and removed the thrift-shop dress. Five minutes later she descended the stairs wearing one of her sister's soft Italian knits.

The world flew past Susannah's eyes like a carousel spinning out of control. The wind tore at her hair, snarling it around her head, whipping it against Sam's cheeks. Her dress had ridden up, and the tops of her legs chafed against the rough denim of his jeans, but she didn't notice. She had moved to a point beyond simple sensation. As she clung to his waist, she prayed the wild ride would never end. The motorcycle was a magic chariot that held time at bay. As long as the machine kept moving, there was no yesterday, no today, no tomorrow.

Sam seemed to understand her need to fly. He did not take them due south, but zigzagged across the peninsula, showing her a familiar world from a different perspective. The San Andreas Reservoir flashed by, and later the bay. They roared through quiet neighborhoods and ran with the wind along the highway. Eighteen-wheelers sped by them, tossing grit and belching blast-furnace gusts of air that stole her breath. Car horns blared at the lace-clad runaway bride perched so incongruously on the back of a Harley-Davidson. She wanted to ride forever. She wanted to race through time into a different dimension—a world where she had no name. A world where actions bore no consequences.

South of Moffet Field, Sam pulled off the highway. Before long, they were passing industrial parks and strip malls. Then he began to slow. She pressed her cheek against the back of his shoulder and closed her eyes. Don't stop, she prayed. Don't ever stop.

But he did. He kicked off the engine, and the bike became still between her thighs.

Turning, he pulled her close against him. "Time to get a move on, biker lady," he whispered. "Your man is hungry."

She made a breathless, frightened sound. Was he her man? Oh, God, what had she done?

What was going to happen to her?

He let her go as he got off the bike, and then he held out his hand. She grasped it as if his touch could save her.

"It's a new world," he said. "We're walking into a new world."

More accurately, they were walking into a Burger King.

Susannah's eyes flew open as she became aware of where they were. The asphalt of the parking lot was warm beneath her stockinged feet. She was barefoot. Oh, God, she was barefoot in front of a Burger King! A hole had formed in her silk stockings over one knee, and a small circle of skin pushed through like a bubble on bread dough. Sam pulled her forward, and she saw faces gaping at them from the window.

Her frightened reflection stared back at her—rumpled lace wedding dress, auburn hair hanging in rowdy tangles, thin nose red from the wind. Panicked, she grabbed at his arm.

"Sam, I can't—"

"You already have."

With a tug on her hand, he thrust her through the door into the burger-scented heart of middle America.

A gaggle of teenage boys interrupted a burping contest to stare at them from an orange booth. She heard laughter at the spectacle she was making of herself. The soles of her stockings clung to a sticky spot on the tiled floor. A group of six-year-olds celebrating a birthday party looked up from beneath crooked cardboard crowns. One of them pointed.

Throughout the restaurant, patrons abandoned their french fries and Whoppers to stare at Susannah Faulconer. She stood there and tried not to let the enormity of what was happening sink in.

Good girls didn't get themselves kidnapped. A society bride didn't flee her wedding on the back of a Harley-Davidson. What was wrong with her? What was she going to do?

She had humiliated Cal. He'd never forgive her. And her father…

But what she had done was too monstrous, and she couldn't think about her father. Not now. Not yet.

Sam had stopped at the counter. He turned to her and studied her for a moment. "You're not going to cry, are you?"

She shook her head, not able to speak because her throat had closed tight. He didn't know her well enough to know that she never cried, although at that moment she very much wanted to.

"You look great," he whispered, his eyes sweeping over her. "Loose and sexy."

A thrill shot through her, the sensation so intense that she forgot for a moment where she was. No one had ever called her such a thing. She drank in the sight of his face and wondered if she would ever get her fill of looking at him.

He gave her a crooked grin and glanced up at the menu board. "What're you going to have?"

Abruptly, she remembered where she was. She tried to take courage from his complete disinterest in the opinions of the people watching them. He had called her loose and sexy, and with those words she wanted to become a new person, the person he was describing.

But words weren't enough to make her into someone else. She was still Susannah Faulconer, and she hated the spectacle she was making.

He ordered and picked up their food. Numbly, she followed him to a table by the window. Her appetite had deserted her, and after a few bites she abandoned any pretense of eating. Sam reached for her hamburger.

As she watched his strong white teeth rip through the bun, she tried to tell herself that no matter how frightened she was, anything was better than dying a slow death of old age at twenty-five.

Susannah had somehow imagined Sam living in a small bachelor apartment, and she wasn't prepared for the fact that he still lived with his mother. The house was one of the small mass-produced ranches that had sprung up in the Valley during the late fifties to house the workers who had flooded to Lockheed following the launching of Sputnik. The front was faced with green aluminum siding, the sides and back with dingy white stucco.

Tarpaper topped with fine gravel covered the roof. It sparkled faintly in the fading sunlight.

"The light's not on," Sam said, gesturing toward the garage that sat off to the side along with a ragged palm. "Yank must not be here."

"Does he live here, too?" she asked, growing more nervous by the minute. Why couldn't Sam have lived by himself? What was she going to say to his mother?

"Yank has an apartment on the other side of town. Mom's in Las Vegas with a girlfriend for the next couple of weeks. We have the place to ourselves."

That, at least, was a relief. She walked behind him to the front of the house. Next to the door stretched a long opaque window with vertically ridged glass. The caulking around it had loosened and cracked. Sam unlocked the door and went inside. She followed, stepping across the threshold and directly into the living room. She caught her breath.

The decor was a monument to bad taste. Ugly gold shag carpeting covered the floor. An aquarium filled with iridescent gravel sat next to a Spanish sofa with dark wood trim, brass nail heads, and red velvet upholstery. Sam flipped a wall switch, turning on a lamp made up of a wire bird cage filled with plastic philodendrons. Nearby, occupying what was obviously a place of honor, hung a full-length oil painting of Elvis Presley wearing one of his white-satin Las Vegas outfits and clutching a microphone with ring-encrusted fingers.

Susannah looked over at Sam and waited for him to say something. He returned her stare, his expression belligerent as he waited for her to make a comment. The look of challenge in his eyes and the stubborn set to his jaw touched her. She wanted to go to him and lay her head against his shoulder and tell him she understood. A man with so much passion for elegant design must find it unbearable to live in such a place.

She asked to use the bathroom. Decals of fat fish were stuck to tangerine tiles. She took off her torn stockings and stuffed them into a plastic wastebasket. A smaller painting of Elvis done on black velvet regarded her from the wall behind the toilet, LOVE ME

TENDER was written in glitter ill script across the bottom, except some of the letters had worn off so that it read love me ten. Not one, she thought as she washed her hands, avoiding her reflection in the mirror. Don't love me two or three. Love me
ten
.

She found Sam in the kitchen. He offered her a can of Coke and a pair of gold sandals with a plastic daisy at the apex of each thong. "They're my mother's," he said. "She won't mind."

She slipped into the sandals but politely refused the Coke. He studied her for a moment, then picked up a handful of hair next to her cheek and closed it in his fist. She felt dizzy with his closeness, as if she were racing toward the edge of a cliff.

"You have beautiful hair," he whispered. He brushed his thumb over her lips. Her breath quickened. The amber flecks in his eyes glowed like the fireflies she had once trapped in a jar as a child. When Susannah wasn't looking, Paige had opened the lid and dumped the insects on the ground, then squashed them with the soles of her sneakers so that their crushed bodies left a yellow phosphorescent streak in the grass. Afterward, Paige had cried so hard that Susannah had thought she would never stop.

The expression in Sam's eyes told Susannah that he wanted to make love to her, and the tissues in her body began to feel loose and fluid, as if she'd had too much wine. There had been so much emotion that day, so many feelings rushing through her. She wanted to live out all her fantasies, but she was frightened. This was the final step in her emancipation, and she wasn't ready.

She pulled abruptly away from him and walked back into the living room. Elvis, soul-eyed and sullen, looked down at her from the wall. Did she love Sam ten? she wondered frantically. She didn't even know what love was anymore. Was this love or was it simply lust? She loved her father, and look what she'd done. She'd been pretending to love Cal, and that had resulted in disaster. And Sam? Had she gone crazy succumbing to the sexual fantasies this amber-eyed renegade aroused in her? Had she thrown away everything familiar for sex?

"Come on out to the garage with me," he said from behind her.

She whirled around and saw him standing in the archway between the kitchen and living room.

"I want you to see what we're doing," he said. "You're going to be part of it now."

He led her toward the back door, talking all the time. "I told you it was starting for us, Suzie, and I meant it. Last week I got an order for forty circuit boards from this guy named Pinky at Z.B. Electronics. Forty! And this is just the beginning."

As Joel Faulconer's daughter, it was difficult for her to work up much excitement for such small numbers, but she tried to respond enthusiastically. "That's wonderful."

She felt the plastic petals on the daisies of her sandals scratch at her toes as she crossed the backyard. Sam pointed toward the garage with his can of Coke. She studied his hand as it curled around the can. It was a working man's hand. His fingernails were clean but uneven, and an untidy white scar marred his thumb.

"Garages are good luck in the Valley. Bill Hewlett and David Packard started Hewlett-Packard in a garage in Palo Alto, and we're going to start our company in this one. Right now, half the guys in Homebrew have projects going in garages. Do you remember Steve Wozniak from the Homebrew meeting? I pointed him out to you."

"He and his friend are the ones building that single-board computer with some sort of fruit name."

Sam nodded and stopped in front of the side entrance to the garage. "They're working out of Steve Jobs's parents' garage in Los Altos. I heard that Mrs. Jobs is driving Woz crazy by running in and out all the time to use her washer and dryer." Sam grinned and opened the door. "Yank has it even worse."

Susannah didn't understand what he meant until she stepped inside the Gamble garage. It was roughly divided into two sections. The back section held shelves of electronic equipment, a long lighted workbench, and a faded floral sofa. The front of the garage was partitioned off with blond paneling. Susannah walked through a narrow doorway set in the paneling and saw a shampoo bowl, a beauty-shop chair, and several hair dryers.

Where the garage door should have been stood a wall of gold-flecked mirrored tiles.

At that moment a phone sitting on a small desk next to an appointment book began to ring. An answering machine clicked on and a woman's voice announced, "This is Angela at Pretty Please Salon. I'm closed for the next two weeks while I try my luck in Vegas.

Leave a message and I'll get back to you."

There was a pause and then a beep. "Hi, Angela. It's Harry Davis at Longacres Funeral.

Old Mrs. Cooney passed away during the night. I wanted you to do her before the first viewing on Monday, but since you're not going to be around, I'll get Barb. I'll call you with the next one."

The answering machine gave its final beep. Susannah turned to Sam and said weakly,

"Your mother does the hair on corpses?"

"She does them when they're alive, too, for chrissake," he retorted belligerently. "She works with one of the nursing homes. When the old ladies finally croak, the funeral home calls her. It drives Yank crazy."

"The funeral home?"

"The old ladies. The nursing home buses them over here to get their hair done.

Sometimes when he's working, they peek through the door and start asking him questions." He took a swig of his Coke and gestured with his thumb toward the other side of the partition. "Come on. Let me show you what we're doing."

She left the Pretty Please Salon to follow him into the other section of the garage. The guts of a Sylvania television along with the computer circuit board, a keyboard, and a cassette tape recorder sat on a workbench. He flipped on the overhead work light and began to fuss with the equipment. In front of her, the picture tube started to glow. He put a tape in the cassette recorder, and before long a message appeared in block letters on the screen.