Whistle (44 page)

“I don’t know if I can,” Winch said. “But I’ll try to get in.”

“Do it if you can. We’ll be at my game at the Claridge. They carry a lot of weight in certain places. Know senators and people.” The voice seemed to know that he wasn’t going to come, anyway, but nevertheless felt required to go on and do its duty just the same. “Okay, I’ll talk to you tomorrow, otherwise.” The voice and the phone went dead.

Winch put the phone down and sat and looked at it. The nightmare, so familiar now in all its details, was as strong in his mind as the real conversation. He had no desire to be with Alexander tonight, and no intention of going to the Claridge. Desolation ran all through him and was like the taste of biting on some old copper coin, in his mouth. In this mood he wanted only to be with Carol.

His uniform was wrinkled from being slept in. He put the new winter blouse on over it anyway, without changing. Outside, it was still raining.

It was about thirty-five miles in to Luxor. In the rain, peering out through the slow fan of the wipers, it would take him fifty-five minutes, driving on the old-fashioned, white-concrete highway. Alongside the concrete ran the two-lane blacktop road the government was building. Together they would make a four-lane highway for the convoys into the city’s railroad station from O’Bruyerre. Winch settled into the driving, not wanting to think, wanting not to think. About Carol. Or about Alexander.

Alexander was right, of course, with his advice. There was nothing very tricky, or even very dishonest, about the way they were all making money. They did not do anything that your average businessman, after a government contract, didn’t do. Mostly it was just knowing the right people. Knowing the right people, and passing along or picking up the right piece of information at the right moment. Occasionally, very occasionally, it might mean slipping a small chunk of money along, too, at the same time.

But mostly it was just knowing the right thing to buy. And to buy at the right time you had to have money, cash. Somebody had to own the Coca-Cola and Budweiser delivery systems that carried all the Coke and beer to all the PXs in the area. Somebody had to own the beer and soft drinks distributorships that supplied them.

T.D. Hoggenbeck had explained it all quite clearly. Buy a bar, he had said. People will always drink. Come hell or high water, depression or boom. People will drink. But before you could buy a bar you had to have that kind of money. And Jack Alexander had the means of acquiring that kind of money. That was why T.D. had sent him to Jack. Jack had the contacts, he knew the people involved. Jack was also, Winch knew, dead right about his advice.

His advice, mainly, was to put by every nickel you could get your hands on. Then when the chance came to buy into some item, you would have the cash. Parts of enough such items, and you would begin to have the kind of money that could buy a bar, or two bars, or three, and pay off the politicians under the counter to get your package-store licenses, and pay for the high-priced licenses themselves. That was all there was to it. It was easy. And, all that was just exactly what Winch was not doing.

Alexander apparently knew there was some woman involved. But he did not know who Carol was. And he wasn’t interested in finding out. He wouldn’t even ask Winch about it. As far as Alexander was concerned, it had to be some woman. What else would make Winch spend all his cash like some drunken dockside sailor. Who she was did not matter.

“You’re going to regret it,” he would say mildly, with his scarred larynx. “Now is the time to buy in. These deals will all be gone, before long.”

Winch would always shrug, and promise that the next time he would have the money. Faithfully, Alexander would come and tell him when the next deal opened. Faithfully, Winch would say he didn’t have the cash again.

“A cunt aint worth it,” Alexander said phlegmatically.

Tacitly Winch agreed. A woman wasn’t. None of them was.

“If it wasn’t for old T.D., I’d write you off,” Alexander said mirthlessly. “And let you go to hell.”

Winch could not disagree with that, either. If it were not that he felt he owed T.D. some favors, Alexander would probably do it, too. But it was T.D. who had helped him put it all together.

It was not that Winch was buying Carol fur coats and jewelry. It was not even that he cared that much for Carol, or was madly in love with her. Winch knew, now, already, how all that was going to end.

Winch did not know where all the money went. He knew he spent it. Mainly it was spent in maintaining a certain life-style. A life-style which made his affair with Carol comfortable, and easy, for both of them. A life-style which made their affair, in a word not usual to Winch because he didn’t think that way, un-dirty. Un-grubby.

And underneath that truth was another truth, which was that Winch did not really give a damn. Down deep, half of him was glad whenever he could tell Alexander truthfully that he did not have the money for some deal. Half of him was pleased he did not have it. So why not dispense it all on and around Carol? What difference did it make? It was not that he expected some return from it.

Carol. She was quite an interesting girl, Carol was. In her own right. And so now, sitting over the wheel, behind the sweep of the wipers in the rain, he was thinking. Exactly what he had hoped not to do,

Was there ever a woman who did not always already have some man on the string, in her own right, that she was committed to? None. Or very damn few. They were just like men. The idea of being alone, really alone, terrified them. So they clung onto whatever man they had, until they found another that suited them better.

So, the only real alternative to taking a woman away from some other man (who might not want her any more than she wanted him, until he found her being taken away) was the rebound. And she was rare. A woman who had broken up with someone, and was really free. For a short while. Usually the life-span of a rebound did not exceed three months, at the outside. By then she would have found a new one. Rebounding was all in the timing. You had to know, quickly, when not to waste your time. Winch had been quite a rebounder in his day, back when women really meant something to him.

It was right after the first time he had gone down on Carol that she had first mentioned her boyfriend to him.

They were both lying nude on the bed in the Claridge hotel room. He had not yet taken the little apartment. Carol was lying all sprawled out flat, arms and legs spread wide, staring at the ceiling. “Most men don’t like to do that,” she said faintly.

Winch had to smile. “You mean, most American men. I suppose not. I like it. I like doing it, and I like giving pleasure.”

She had such a magnificent young body. Young breasts, flat hips, prominent crotch bone mound. So unworn by living.

“Why do you think they don’t like it?”

“Oh,” Winch said lazily. “I suppose it’s our American religious training. American Christianity. Sex is all scrambled up in with our religion. Evil, dirty, filthy. Guilt. It shouldn’t be. It’s all very primitive. Medieval. But it’s all tied in with our puritanism.”

“I never thought of it quite like that,” she said. He felt a certain pause of intensity in the air, before she spoke on. She was still staring at the ceiling. But stiffly now. “My boyfriend—up at school—doesn’t like it at all, and won’t do it,” Carol said.

Instinctively Winch sensed he was expected to react to this. A test balloon. From where he lay on his elbow, looking over, looking down at her, he saw her eyes roll toward him once, then flick back to her close scrutiny of the ceiling. Her one cockeye seemed to waver around for a focus up there, on it.

He smiled. “He won’t?” he said, easily. “He doesn’t?” He let a little pause develop. “Well, he’s very young yet.”

“Yes he is!” Carol said vehemently. Her eye focus never left the ceiling. “Did you ever go to a whorehouse?”

Winch had to laugh. “Me? Yes. Sure. A lot of times.”

“He goes to a whorehouse a great deal.”

Winch chewed on this a moment. He was, for no reason he could isolate, enjoying himself immensely. No jealousy, no anguish. No pain. “He probably tells you he goes a great deal more than he actually does,” he said.

“Why?”

“To show off.”

“It’s the only way I can climax,” she said. “What you did. Unless I play with myself.”

“In my experience, my vast experience,” Winch smiled, “very few women can come from simple fucking.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t think there’s anything wrong with me, then?”

Winch shook his head. Climax. That must be one of her college words. He had noted that she never would say the word
come.
It had struck him, suddenly, that perhaps she might be lying to him about the boyfriend’s whorehouses. Could she be lying to him about the boyfriend, too, then?

She wasn’t lying. “I like to do it that way, too,” she said. “Like it. Like to do it. But I’d never dare try it, with him. Never dare even suggest it.”

“We can arrange that easy enough,” Winch grinned.

“Do you mind if I talk to you about him? Tell you about him?”

“No,” he said. “Not at all.”

He had learned a great deal about him. Then, and since then. He had been Carol’s boyfriend, off and on, since high school. He was the second boy she had ever slept with. The first was a secret. Still a secret, even now. She had pretended to be a virgin with the boyfriend. She thought he had believed her. She had quit him once in high school for a while. For an older boy, a college boy. Then she had gone back to him. She had gone to Western Reserve up north largely on the suggestion of the college boy, who did not go to Reserve, but who was studying to be an actor. The boyfriend had followed her. He had intended to go to Mississippi down at Oxford. But he had found out he could study business administration at Reserve. And he said he could not stand to be away from her. At Reserve, she had left him twice, after stormy quarrels, but had always come back to him.

It had been hard for the boyfriend. The men of his family had always gone to Ole Miss. Once he decided to follow her, though, he had fought his family hard. But he was so insular. And so fixed. And stubborn. He was exactly like all the parts of Luxor she had wanted to get away from.

At school both times she had left him she had had affairs with older persons. Once with a senior boy, when she was a sophomore. Once with an English instructor, a married man, when she was a junior. Both, of course, had been impossible situations. Untenable. Both times the boyfriend had accepted her back, without any questions. He had been a perfect gentleman. Half of her, or some fraction less than half, had wished he had not been.

He always had wanted them to marry, as soon as they both graduated, when he came back home to go into business.

She had never agreed. She had refused to become engaged officially.

He was just so damned insular. When he was drunk, he was absolutely crude. That was when he talked about going to a whorehouse.

Lying naked on the bed beside Winch that first night she talked about him, Carol had suddenly blushed, all the way down into her breasts.

Once at a party, when he had gotten drunk and crude and jealous, and had passed out, in a fit of anger she had gone off with a lone dateless man, and had slept with him, outside, in the back seat of one of the cars. The boyfriend had never suspected.

“I’ve never told that to anyone.”

“It’s safe with me,” Winch smiled.

“I don’t want to be a Southern belle,” Carol said. She paused a moment thoughtfully. “But I’m afraid I’m a Southern belle, anyway.”

“You’re a beautiful Southern belle,” he said, emphasizing the descriptive adjective.

She raised her head off the sheet and looked appreciatively down along her nudeness, blushing again. “Not like in any of the War of the Rebellion lithographs, I’m not,” she said.

This had been in mid-November. And quite soon after, it came out that the boyfriend was coming home from school for Thanksgiving. She would not be able to see Winch for a few days. Perhaps a week. She hoped Winch would not mind. She hoped he would not hold it against her. She hoped he would not be jealous. And that it would not—change anything.

Winch had smiled. “No. It won’t. I’ve got plenty to keep me busy.”

“You won’t be lonely?”

“No, I won’t be lonely.”

Suddenly she laughed. “Damn you.”

He smiled. “Well, maybe I’ll be a little lonely.”

That was better, she had said. “You see, I can’t help being a Southern belle.”

When she came back from Thanksgiving, the first thing she said was that the boyfriend had said he “knew I had a lover.”

Winch laughed. “How do you think he knew?”

“He said he could tell by the way I acted. I was too happy. Of course, I denied it.”

And now the same thing had come up again lately, about Christmas. The boyfriend was coming home for Christmas vacation from school. She would not be able to see Winch for quite a while. Maybe three weeks. And of course by now Winch had the apartment.

“I’ll try to sneak away and slip off at least once,” Carol said.

“Don’t worry,” Winch had smiled. He was back to duty by now, out at O’Bruyerre, and busy in a very real way.

He did not really know what he thought about the boyfriend. He apparently was just a good, solid, generally good-natured, thoroughly fucked-up, upper-class Southern boy. Winch certainly did not envy him his marriage to Carol—if and when it came to pass. And Winch felt pretty sure it would come to pass. He felt a certain sympathy for the boy, more than anything.

“He wants me to be like his mother,” Carol said about him once. “And at the same time, he halfway wants me to be his whore.”

“But if you’re his whore, you can’t be like his mother,” Winch smiled.

“Exactly!”

But it was curious Winch was not jealous. He wasn’t. The time she spent with the boyfriend at Thanksgiving did not bother him. He did not conjure up painful pictures of her in bed with him, and brood about them. Instead, he felt he was very lucky. More than anything. A lucky weekender.

Perhaps it was just age. And his physical condition. But, what the hell, he was getting it up with her now more than he ever had with any woman, for quite some time. She was blowing him well, he was teaching her. And he was blowing her well. Apparently. And the fucking they had going was of a superior quality.