Waiting for the Galactic Bus (16 page)

At length, Eleanor desisted. “Love’s labors are definitely lost. Your sort are so predictably alike.”

That did it. She wasn’t his type but no woman talked to him like that. “What you mean all alike?”

Eleanor glanced down at his defeat. “A midsummer’s night dream turns to a winter’s tale or a comedy of errors.”

He didn’t know what the hell she was talking about but it sounded like she was making fun of him. A stud like him who could go all night with the right kind of woman. “Hey, listen, bitch. With a man sometimes the woman don’t turn him on, you know? Not my fault if you don’t do nothing for me.”

“The point is moot.” Eleanor slid from the bed and into her gown. “But then you’re not my sort either, you inadequate little man.”

“You shut your fuckin mouth, bitch!”

“Certainly.” Eleanor knew how to make a graceful exit with ruin in her wake. “This place isn’t your hell, darling. Nowhere you go will ever be. You carry it with you. For you, nice girls don’t, isn’t that so? You can never quite reconcile sexuality with virtue. Actually nice girls have more talent for sex. Less guilt, more imagination and a great deal more fun.”

“I said shut
up.”
Roy swung off the bed, ugly and dangerous. “You don’t talk to a man like that.”

“A man?” Eleanor’s laughter cut like shards of crystal. “And you’re what busy little Drumm dredged up for the people’s choice? White Paladin to the unwashed.
Bon chance,
darling. Hail and farewell from the gratefully obsolete.”

“Listen, you —” Roy took a vicious swing at her. She hardly moved, but whatever she did Bruce Lee would have paid to learn. Roy went tail over teakettle against the wall and landed head down, blinking at an upside-down Eleanor.

“Filet’s not for you, Mr. Stride. Adrian will fetch you something more in the line of grits.” The door closed behind Ms. Padgett-Clive.

Cold, shaking, Roy sat down on the bed, staring at the door. They knew. Everything. Got right down to the problem, even laughed at him. He cursed with feeble rage at Eleanor and Adrian and the whole goddamned lousy system that made things and people the way they were.

I didn’t make the rules about what’s nice and what ain’t. Just I’m a White Christian and that’s the way things are.

“Precisely, sir.” Adrian poised in the doorway, an etude in apology.

“Hey, man, do you people know what I’m thinking even?”

“Not exactly, but we have done business for ever so long. One hopes you will pardon my deplorable lapse of judgment. Eleanor of
course
was completely wrong for your specifications. Actually she specializes in the younger novelists. I insist on making amends. Our remaining selection is Florence Bird.”

Roy was in no mood to be gracious. “She better be the right stuff. Won’t be long’fore I got some pull around here. The business will go where I go, you got it? Who is she?”

Once more Adrian was the compleat sommelier. “Florence Bird: vintage’54. Robust, assertive as Pinot Noir. And absolutely Wasp.”

“For real?”

“On the house’s reputation: the last honest-to-Goebbels bottling Below Stairs.

“Well, run her in here before I go somewhere else. Can’t be only one whorehouse around here.”

“There is Club Banal for the pedestrian trade,” Adrian informed him with a definite chill. “Whatever
they
can make ordinary, A Son Goût can render sublime. Miss Bird, sir.”

Once more Adrian bowed and withdrew. Only a short wait, then the door flew open and Florence Bird gusted in. Roy’s heart leaped.

“’Allo, luv!”

Florence was large, frizzy-haired and utterly bare under the open nylon wrapper trimmed in rabbit fur that fluttered in her bold wake like the train of a raffish empress. Florence was nothing if not forthright.

“Had to spend a linnet up the apples for an’it and miss from all the pig’s ear and mother’s ruin down the rub-a-dub. Like me Bristols?”

Roy licked his lips in tumescent excitement. Florence was stout and coarse with a merry lasciviousness, though her very direct handshake was definitely not what he was used to from businesswomen. She sounded like some foreigner, very difficult to understand. “Hiya, honey. Where you from?”

“Lunnon,” Florence pealed like Bow Bells. “Carnt yer tell?”

More bullshit. He didn’t want to talk at all. She worked for him, all right, the kind that always did: loud, cheap, lay it on the line. Right on. There’d be no problems with Florence beyond translation. She was late, she explained, having been down at her pub having a few gins and beer chasers and had to stop at the bathroom for that and to rouge her nipples, knowing a man of his hearty tastes would appreciate the effect.

Right stuff, right on,
Roy thrilled
. Oh jeez, if she can only do the rest of it.

Subtle as a bayonet charge, Florence cupped Roy’s genitals and wiggled her hips. “Right bit o’ wick’n awls.” She winked, undulating her belly against his. “Like me Khyber?”

Whatever her Khyber was, Roy was all for it. “Yeah. Come on.”

“A course, for you, might have to down a few more pints to give yer what yer need, but we’ll give it a bash. Down on the floor, luv. Might be a bit left for yer.”

“Oh yeah. Yeah, that’s it, you got it.” Roy got ready, tingling with anticipation and need. “Give it to me, you lousy slut. The whip, too.”

Florence was cheerfully accommodating. Roy closed his eyes in bliss and pain under the benediction and the whip. Love had found Andy Hardy.

    17   

Faith, hope and Charity
Stovall

Charity didn’t dare stop for long. Of all the terrors hell might hold, she most feared that unknown voice pursuing her, though she could no longer hear it following on the wind. No real time in this place, no real distance she could measure with any certainty. The gray velvet gown was a Hollywood dream but not much for traveling, sodden and heavy with mist.

She stopped suddenly. Just ahead through the swirling fog hulked a large house surrounded by a high iron fence. No lights showed but smoke curled from one chimney. The gloomy presence of the house contrasted with a gleaming, fresh-waxed taxi near the front steps. The driver’s door bore the device:

BELOW STAIRS CAB

“ANYWHERE TO HELL AND BACK”

CALL 666-JAKE

Charity pushed at the wide gate. At the groan of rusty hinges, a huge hound raised his head from a nap on the crumbling stone steps with an inquisitive
woof.

“Got no time for games,” Charity told the dog. “Hope you don’t bite.”

“Not at all.” The hound yawned to his ears. “But beware the owner. He thinks.”

Charity was only moderately surprised. After a monster made out of television, an earthquake and a thrill-packed but exhausting interlude with Dane, a talking dog was not all that new, except he sounded kind of snooty. City people were always putting you down, trying to sell you something or draft your friends. “You got a funny accent. Where you from, doggie?”

“Boston, girlie,” said the hound with audible disdain. “I will not comment on your accent. Similes founder, metaphors fail.”

“I speak good American.”

“And I only English, alas. Yale,’52. Summa cum maxima, Skull and Bones.”

“Plattsville High School, class of’85.” Charity would not be outdone. “You don’t have to be so stuck-up about it. Everybody goes to school.”
Will you listen to me?
she caught herself.
I’m arguing with a watchdog.
“Anyway, is your owner home?”

“He’s not my owner.” The hound indulged in a thorough fore-and-aft scratch. “But he’s in. What do you want?”

“I guess a cab to town. Somewhere. Maybe get warm first.”

“The cab you can get; the warmth comes harder. His name is Jake. With a J.”

“I know, I know.” Charity grasped the heavy bronze knocker and banged it twice.

“Oh, go on in, it’s never locked,” the dog told her. “Jake had only a few things he valued and lost them ages ago. Some ideals and a friend.” He licked his chops and settled down again into his nap.

Charity had to ask. “How does a hound dog go to college?” One eye opened. “I’m only a dog on duty. Good hours, great for catching up on sleep, which was very difficult for a successful embezzler. Worries, occasional conscience. This is like keeping a lighthouse, not much traffic. So if you don’t mind, sayonara.” The eye closed.

Charity pushed the door in and found herself in a dark hall, musty with the long absence of light. The only illumination flickered feebly on a wall from a room far down the passage. Charity moved unsurely along the hall to pause in the entrance to a large living room lit only by a fireplace.

There was a man in front of the fire. He didn’t look up. “Prince?”

He slumped in his armchair, absorbed in a chess game on a small table on his near side. Charity saw at first only a brooding profile. Too young to read men with any accuracy, Charity still felt the profound sorrow of that presence. He barely acknowledged her, first moving a piece on the board.

“Yes?”

“The door was open,” Charity attempted, a little embarrassed. “The dog said just come in.”

“Of course.” Jake rose with a distant courtesy and came to meet her. His head canted at a weird angle as if the neck had been broken and badly set. A small leather bag hung around his throat and chinked dully with his movement: seemed an odd place for a cabdriver to carry change.

“Come in. Warm yourself if you can.”

“I saw your cab out front. Thought maybe you could drive me out of here.”

“There is no out.” Jake looked right through her, clearly disinterested. “Where would you like to go?”

“Somewhere,” she guessed with her small knowledge of Below Stairs. “Just I don’t have any money. I’ll have to owe you.”

“Don’t worry about that. Come by the fire.”

She spread her hands to the pale flame that she could barely feel. “What are you burning?”

“Old vanities, dry regrets,” Jake told her. “They don’t throw much heat.
Shalom,
Miss Stovall. Have a chair.”

“Do we know each other?”

“New arrivals: the news gets around. We don’t recruit as many as you’d think. It’s still a small town. You came with Roy Stride. He was my last fare.”

“Roy?” She twisted to him in her deep chair. “How is he? Where is he?”

“Doing quite well,” Jake reported. “Stiffed me for the tip.”

“Take me to Roy, please. Can you?”

Jake nodded. “Anywhere you want. I’d imagine there’s a great deal you want, Charity.” He ranged about the large room, turning up lamps here and there. “You haven’t changed for hundreds of years, and your sins, such as they are, have not grown in complexity. A moment of yes in a lifetime of thou shalt not. Certain punishment out of a steaming Protestant imagination.” He laughed as at an old, familiar joke. “Not that Catholics lack melodrama. In the thirteenth century, they imagined me hanging feet downward from Satan’s mouth. Next to Brutus.”

“Who?”

“A man with similar questions, similarly resolved.”

Nobody in this whole damn place can talk straight,
Charity thought restlessly. She couldn’t understand a word of Jake although he had his own fascination, quieter — thank goodness — than Dane, who had been exciting as could be, but he could wear you out. Now, Jake was... definitely good-looking, even a hunk by back-home standards; not so much the looks but the manner and voice. He reminded Charity of James Mason on the Late Show. Hell might be a strain, she concluded, but you couldn’t beat it for the new and different or the interesting men. Not that Jake put himself out to be polite. She wondered if folks were this hard to talk to in heaven.

“Sure is quiet here.”

“You object to that?”

“No, no, it’s a nice change.”

“One can think,” Jake mused over the chessboard. “If thought is desirable. For me it was a curse, an obsession, like chess. Always the intellectual yearning to be the man of action. To be, like Brutus, a fulcrum of history. That was denied me until one day when I — acted. I’ll never know whether I was right at the wrong time for my own sake or wrong at the right time for the sake of history.”

Well, how does a person answer something like that
? “Gee, I got good marks in history, but...”