Lawrence Block: Chip Harrison Scores Again

Which still gave me two choices, actually. Boston or Bordentown. But I never seriously considered Boston. It would have been copping out. I mean, the ticket was about eighty-five percent New York-to-Bordentown and fifteen percent New York-to-Boston.

Besides, Boston would be as cold as New York, maybe even colder. And Bordentown was in South Carolina — I knew that much about it, dammit. It would be warm. And it would be a small town, it would have to be fairly small or I probably would have heard of it at one time or another. So if I was looking for a change from New York, I really didn’t have to look any farther.

For Pete’s sake, I’ve gone lots of places on less reason than that.

The bus ride started off horrible. Then it became very boring for a while, and then it got wonderful.

The horrible part was brief, from New York to Philadelphia. It was horrible because there were four men two rows back drinking wine and singing, and a third of the way to Philadelphia one of them threw up, and a few miles later so did the rest of them. It was horrible because the woman across the aisle from me was carrying a baby who cried all the way from New York to Philadelphia. The woman didn’t seem to mind. Me, I minded. It was horrible because the man in the seat next to me was fat enough to take up all of his seat and a good deal of mine as well. He didn’t use Dial, and I don’t guess he cared if anybody else did, either.

The four drunks got off in Trenton. The woman with the brat got off in Philadelphia. The smelly fat man was riding clear down to Miami, but when we got to Philadelphia I was able to change my seat. So that ended the horrible part.

The boring part was just boring. Nothing much to be said about it, really. I took crumby naps and woke up and went to the john and came back and sat down and looked out the window and waited for something to happen. Now and then the bus stopped somewhere and we all got off it and went to a terrible lunch counter, and I would have a Coke and a package of those little orange crackers with cheese and peanut butter between them.

(I knew a speed freak in New York who lived on nothing but Cokes and those sandwich crackers. Three packs of the crackers a day and six Cokes. He weighed about eighty-three pounds and the circles under his eyes looked as though they’d been painted on with shoe polish. “Speed doesn’t kill,” he told me. “That’s the lie they feed you. It’s the malnutrition that does you in. I figure I’ve got six months before my liver goes. Once your liver goes you’ve had it.”

(“Then why don’t you start eating right?”

(“Priorities, man. I need to speed to get my head together. Once my head is together I’ll kick the speed and stabilize myself with tranks and downs, and then I’ll get into eating right. High-protein, fertile eggs, the whole organic foods trip. And I want to get into bodybuilding. I’ve been getting all these catalogues of barbell equipment. But first I have to get my head together. I figure I can get my head together in six months. I figure my liver can make it that long.”

(Sure.)

The wonderful part, the part that was not at all horrible or boring, started sometime in the late afternoon and somewhere south of Washington. I don’t know the time because I wasn’t wearing a watch, and I don’t know the name of the town or even the state because I wasn’t paying all that much attention to where we were when she joined us. We stopped at some station and I didn’t feel like another Coke so I stayed in my seat with my eyes closed. Then just as the bus was starting up a voice said, “Pardon me?” and I looked up and there she was.

She was a little thing, with yellow hair to her shoulders and large round brown eyes and a pointed chin. She was wearing a plaid mini skirt that got halfway to her knee and a cardigan sweater the color of her hair. She had a coat over one arm and was carrying a little suitcase.

At first glance she looked about sixteen. When you looked a little closer at her eyes and the corners of her mouth you could add maybe ten years to that. Say twenty-five.

“Could y’all tell me if this seat is taken?”

It wasn’t. Neither were half the seats on the bus, which had emptied out a good deal in Washington. She could have had a whole double seat to herself, actually.

“And could I ask you to help me with this suitcase here?”

It was small and light. I put it in the overhead rack, and then she took a book and a package of cigarettes from her coat pocket and gave me the coat, and I put it alongside the suitcase. I sat down again and she sat down next to me. She didn’t have any makeup on except maybe a trace of lipstick, but she was wearing quite a bit of perfume. She smelled very nice, actually. It made me think of Mary Beth, the bus-ticket hooker. Mary Beth had been wearing perfume and hadn’t smelled very terrific at all. There’s perfume and there’s perfume.

“Well, now! I thought we might have rain, but it’s turned a nice day after all, hasn’t it?”

“Just so there’s no snow.”

“You from up No’th?”

“I’m not exactly from anywhere,” I said. “I was in New York for the past few months.”

“And what place do you call home?”

“Wherever I am.”

Her face lit up. “Now that’s exciting,” she said. What she said was excitin’, actually, but I hate it when writers spell everything phonetically to get across the fact that somebody has an accent. I’ll just say now that she had an accent thicker than spoonbread and you can bear that in mind when you run her dialogue through your head.

“When you don’t have one home in particular, why, it’s like you’re never away! Me, I’m an old homebody. My aunt has the pleurisy and I was up doing for her for onto ten days, but except when she has it bad I never get away from home.”

“Where’s home?”

“Georgia. Mud Kettle, Georgia. Ever been there?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s not that you missed much.” This I believed. The name wasn’t Mud Kettle, by the way, but I looked up the town she mentioned in an atlas just now and the population is less than twenty-five hundred, so I changed the name to Mud Kettle because otherwise somebody could probably figure out who she was, and it might shake up the old folks at home. “Not missing much at all. Well, here I am, little old Willie Em Weeks from Mud Kettle, G-A. Lordy!”

“What does the M stand for?” I mean, girls don’t usually announce middle initials.

“Emily,” she said.

“Emily starts with an E,” I said.

“Doesn’t stand for, it’s short for! You silly. Willamina Emily Weeks, and isn’t that a handle.”

Then she waited expectantly, and it occurred to me to tell her my name. She had never met anyone named Chip before, and I had never met any Willie Em, and we got what conversational mileage we could out of that. Which wasn’t much.

Then she said, “Chip? Would you mind awfully if I asked you a favor? Would you change seats with me?”

If she wanted to sit by a window, there were windows all over the place she could pick. I didn’t tell her this. I changed seats with her, and our bodies bumped a little in passing. Nothing fantastic, just enough to put ideas in my head.

Which was ridiculous, I thought, sitting down again. She would be fun to talk to, someone to break the monotony of the trip, but that was obviously as far as it was going to go. I was getting off in South Carolina and she was riding clear on to Georgia. And anyway she was married, there was a ring on her finger. And besides that we were on a bus, for Pete’s sake, in the middle of the afternoon, and all you can do on a bus is sweat and sleep, with sweating considerably more likely than sleeping.