Regiment of Women (31 page)

She hooked the garterbelt at the small of her back. Her waist was so small he could almost have encompassed it with his two hands; just below began that extraordinary slope to the terminal globes of her bottom.

She sat on the floor and began to pull on a dark stocking. The light that came through the two little back windows was not so good as that from the windshield, and she revolved on her seat to face forward, to fasten the unfamiliar front clip of the garterbelt. Oblivious to all else, biting her pink mouth, rumpled blonde head lowered, one thigh stretched out, the other knee in the air—

There was a double thickness of fabric in the plump vee of the crotch, but double spiderweb, and in her contortions the narrow strap became a ribbon and then a string and finally a thread which disappeared within a silken furrow of flesh.

Cornell scraped his teeth across his lower lip, forced his eyes from the mirror, and cocooned himself tightly in the blanket, shuddering with revulsion and something worse. Eventually she finished and climbed into the driver's seat with a show of garters and hosiery.

She wore a Kelly-green nylon blouse with a panel of ruffles. It was much too large for her. A chocolate-brown maxiskirt, split to the knee. Textured stockings in navy blue, and enormous black patent-leather sling shoes with three-inch heels.

Mary! What an outfit. Above it, her unkempt blonde head and those small features, so incongruous on one dressed as a male. Despite the attire, she didn't seem masculine at all. Cornell in his various female outfits had looked much more like a woman than she resembled a man.

She started the engine and probed, with her preposterous shoe, for what he remembered as the clutch. The spike-heeled shoe, which was outlandishly too big, fell off her foot, which was scarcely larger than Cornell's hand. He realized only now that he had seen her vulva when she was putting on the stockings. It seemed to be a continuation of the division between the buttocks. How neat and efficient, how unlike a man's pendulous growth. So up inside it, theoretically, was a complete Birth Facility. Hard to believe, looking at the small abdomen. As a schoolboy he had heard horror stories of perverted, criminal women who produced babies from their own bodies by some process that sounded like defecation, but in those days he had always been appalled by anything creepy, weird. He had first learned of menstruation when he lived with Pauline Witkovsky, the painter, who was wont to clog the commode with stained Kotexes, and it was he who had to work the plumber's suction cup.

He remembered another odd thing: that somehow he had felt guilty because she bled. That made no sense at all. He had never seen a woman's bare groin; when they had you, they naturally stayed dressed, strapping the dildo over their trousers.

The girl fetched her shoe from the floor.

“Look around,” she said, “and see if you can find some paper to stuff in the toe.”

“That's big enough to fit me,” said Cornell.

“It was the smallest I could find.”

“You stole this stuff from a sperm conscript,” he said.

“See if you can find some paper, will you?”

“You were supposed to be a man who was drafted like me. What about the civilian clothes you came in?”

“They weren't in good taste. I threw them away.”

Cornell's eyebrows rose.

“Don't you think this is a nice outfit?” she asked.

“Swell.” He studied her for a while, and then he finally picked up the shirt and trousers that lay between them.

“I don't know who you really are,” he said, “or even what you're pretending to be any more. But I'll tell you something, I don't think you are crazy. And I also don't think that
you
think you're a man.”

“Georgie Cornell,” said she, in the most matter-of-fact voice, “don't look a gift horse in the mouth.”

“What did you call me?”

“It's the name you used in jail.”

“Jail?”

“The Men's House of Detention, my dear cellmate.” She said these things in a self-satisfied rhythm punctuated by insolent stresses. He had an impulse to slap her face.

“You think you're smart, don't you?” Here she had known his identity all along, but his immediate feeling was one of competitiveness rather than fear.

That was stupid. After what he had gone through in the past few months, he should be capable of something better. He forced himself to grin.

“Well, I guess you're right. You
are
smart.” He felt better for having said that, because it was the truth. “I thought the nose job made me look different.”

“It does.” His praise had taken the edge off her. She looked aside in a certain delicacy. “Actually, I probably wouldn't have recognized you.”

“Was it my voice, when we had that run-in over which group used the john?”

She peered earnestly at him. “Georgie, the Movement was using you as a dupe.”

“I figured that out for myself after a while…. I guess you know the whole thing, the masturbation scheme? It couldn't possibly have worked…. Stanley tipped you off about me, didn't he?”

“Stanley? I didn't know his name.”

“Now it seems I have betrayed
him”
Cornell said stoically. “Oddly enough, that doesn't please me—even if he does deserve it.”

“The name is probably false,” she said, sitting there behind the wheel in her oversized male clothing. “Is he the leader?”

“I can't tell you anything else,” said Cornell. “Even if they did set me up as they did. I don't intentionally sell out anybody. That would make me their sort, you see—people who manipulate others, and for what? They want to liberate men, but
I'm
a man, and they would have got me castrated. I may be dumb, but I'm smart enough to understand that.”

She said hastily: “You're not dumb, Georgie! You're the only prisoner to have escaped from the Men's House of Detention in ten years.”

Strange praise from her.

He shrugged. “That took no great intelligence and not even a large amount of courage. Despite the brutality of the jailers, the place was barely guarded. The woman on the front door was asleep—like the sentry back there at the camp gate.” He looked out the window at the rear of the billboard. “Speaking of which, we're only a hundred yards or so from the camp. Is this the place to sit and talk? Won't they be searching for us? Any pursuers who looked closely could see our wheels from the road. There's a space under the billboard.”

She was smiling. “There you are: you're pretty shrewd.”

“Yeah,” he said in chagrin, “so clever I forgot for a moment that you are one of
them
. What's your game?” Suddenly he turned hostile and shook his fist. “Get this thing going if you don't want your face smashed in.”

She threw back that small, fragile face and laughed, a movement which caused her trunk to arch and the front of the loose blouse to show the projection of her breasts, which she had freed, when donning the male clothing, from the constraining band. They were small, but conical and definite.

Nevertheless he shook his fist again and said: “I'm warning you.” He had a great fear of being conned.

“Georgie,” said she, “will you please get me some paper to stuff in my shoe?”

He looked at the threatening hand: he had forgotten he was still holding her sling pump.

She said: “You had your chance to beat me up that time we fought in jail, and you didn't use it. Even though I deserved a beating for what I did to you. You exerted just enough force to subdue me. I was impressed by that. You know, I used to wrestle in college. I had never before been overpowered without being hurt.”

He found a big, almost clean handkerchief in the back pocket of the lieutenant's trousers, easily tore it in two, and stuffed a half into the toe of each shoe.

“Try this. If you're going to keep dressing like that, remember a hanky is better than newspaper, because it doesn't rustle. Just plain Kleenex is good, too, but you need quite a bit because it compacts.”

She put on the shoes and stamped her feet. “Feels O.K.”

“It occurs to me to ask where'd you get the men's clothes you wore when disguised as an inmate in jail and a sperm conscript? You're awfully small, and yet they seemed to fit.”

“The FBI had a wardrobe department.”

Cornell pursed his lips, but like most men he couldn't whistle. “You're FBI?”

“Sexual sedition is a federal crime.”

“You're an FBI woman and you were assigned to
me?
Good heavens, I was just an insignificant little secretary. I really did get into all this by accident.”

With her shoe firmly seated, she depressed the clutch and put the gearshift into reverse.

“Don't worry,” she said. “That's all over for me. I really am defecting.”

When she had backed out to the road, she had the old trouble with the shift lever. Once again he had to assist her to get it into first.

O
LIVE
S
CHREINER
, 1911

T
HEY
WERE
APPARENTLY
on some sort of back road, the main purpose of which was to furnish access to the camp. No other vehicles appeared while they were on this stretch. They were not pursued. This failure was not one of which Cornell could complain, but it amazed him, and he mentioned it to the girl.

“That's the Army for you,” she said. “They're probably making a half-assed search for us in camp. They probably think we're drunk and joyriding around. It wouldn't occur to them that we were going over the hill.”

She had her foot all the way down again, and they were speeding past the billboards, which were now separated from the road by a drainage ditch full of litter.

“They're a bunch of idiots in the Army,” she said. “Believe me, I know. I've worked with Army Intelligence on espionage cases. Once their agents arrested some of
us
as spies.”

The wind was whipping his face, and Cornell instinctively began to roll up the window so his hair would not be disordered. Then he remembered he really had no coiffure to be ruined.

Up ahead a big motorway appeared and soon they reached its feeder road. The girl turned onto it so swiftly that he felt the wheels on his side leave the ground. But he had anticipated this and clamped his fingers under the seat, and then braced himself for the inevitable braking. After a scream of tires, a skid, and a correction, they eventually stopped with the nose of the ambulance within a foot of the motorway on which the vehicles were motionless and bumper-to-bumper. A young woman in the sedan they would have struck shook her fist and raved in-audibly behind closed windows.

The girl with Cornell made a vulgar motion with her vertical middle finger.

“I don't know why women get so ferocious when they're behind the wheel,” Cornell said. “I used to have a very calm and gentle girl friend who would become insanely mad at other drivers. Once she climbed out of the car in the middle of some intersection and got into a fistfight. Imagine that. Because somebody cut her off or something.”

“Have you had many girl friends?” She looked straight ahead.

“Not many regular ones,” Cornell said. The question made him a bit shy. He looked into the lap of his blanket. “Like the one I'm talking about. I had maybe three dates. After that she stopped calling.” He cleared his throat. “The story of my life.” The girl was staring through the windshield. “How about you? Have you had many boys?”

She continued to study the hood. “I've dated a few.” She blinked. “But I've never
had
one.” She turned and looked him in the eye. “So you can put your clothes on now.”

Cornell could feel his blush go all the way down under the blanket.

“How dare you make such an innuendo!”

“Well, why are you still naked?”

“I'm not.” He grasped his blanket. What hurt was that just as he thought they had established a genuine rapport she pulled this dirty trick. Indignantly he flipped his face in the other direction, but no sooner had he done so than he suddenly understood that she was paying him back spitefully for his undiplomatic remark about drivers.

It wasn't easy, but he managed to turn back and say, reasonably, while still blushing, or perhaps blushing again and more furiously from this effort: “Believe me, I wasn't trying to lure you or anything. I simply forgot, because this blanket is so comfortable.”

Now it was she who seemed embarrassed, whether by his display of self-control or by a sudden realization on her part that she had been needlessly mean. She did not apologize in so many words. Instead she quickly directed an abstract wrath at the traffic.

“Look at that,” she said, pounding the steering wheel. “We'll be here for hours!”

Still he made no move to put on the lieutenant's uniform, which was lying across his lap. Matters of attire seemed so trivial in view of their odd partnership, an association so complex as to have restrained him thus far from asking the obvious questions. But having deflected her thrust, he found the energy to begin.

“Have you been following me ever since I broke out of jail?”

She grimaced. “Does it matter?”

“I guess not.” He reached over and touched the nearer of the two hands which still gripped the wheel tenaciously though the vehicle was at rest.

She pulled away. “Don't do that!”

He frowned. “What's wrong with you? I'm just trying to be nice. But you make it terribly difficult.”

“Just keep your paws to yourself, that's all. I don't like to be touched.”