Lawrence Block: Chip Harrison Scores Again

We huddled together under her coat and kissed briefly. Then I said, “Why the suitcase?”

“Can’t you guess?”

The only thing that had occurred to me was that she wanted to put her diaphragm on, but I couldn’t believe that. This was a bus, after all, and it wasn’t particularly comfortable or roomy even if all you wanted to do was sit in it. I know people screw in the most unlikely places, but only midgets and contortionists could possibly do it on a bus.

I had already decided that the best I could hope for was to shoot in my pants, if you’ll forgive me for being crude about it. (I can’t really think of any other way to say it.) And I wasn’t all that sure I wanted to do that. I don’t suppose I really cared about getting off myself. I just wanted to go on thrilling Willie Em.

“No,” I said, “I can’t guess.”

“Did that old suitcase feel heavier this time?”

“No.”

“It was, though.”

“It was?”

She grinned impishly. “Something in it that wasn’t in it before.”

What? A roll of toilet paper? A Coke? What?

“What?”

“You have to find out for yourself. But I’ll bet you appreciate the change.”

“I think you lost me.”

“Why, I surely hope not! Now why don’t you shut your mouth and start loving me up instead of asking all those questions?”

I had no argument there. I kissed her and put a hand on her breast. It felt softer than ever. I petted it and light dawned.

“Oh.”

“Uh-huh. And that’s just the half of it.”

I could guess the other half, but I sent my hand on an expedition to make sure. I slipped it under her skirt and there were no panties there. The panties, like the bra, were currently in her suitcase.

I hope she wrung them out first.

It certainly did make things easier. We snuggled under her coat and unbuttoned her cardigan and pulled her skirt all the way up, and all of sudden there was a lot more to do. She had wonderfully soft skin and nice firm little breasts. The perfume she was wearing mixed nicely with the musk of her.

I was going to put down a whole description of just what we did over the next couple of hours, but I’ve been thinking about it and I decided the hell with it. Partly because I think that would just be too much sex. And despite what Mr. Fultz said, I think there is such a thing as too much sex.

Because when all you have is a description of what happened, who did what and where and how and all of that, then all you’ve got is the kind of book Willie Em was reading, The Swinging Swappers or The Swapping Swingers. And that sort of thing may be exciting in small doses, but it’s also pretty disgusting, actually.

What’s important, really, is what it was like and where everybody’s head was at while it was going on, or otherwise it’s just bodies with no people attached to them. And anyway we kept on like this for a couple of hours, and I couldn’t honestly remember the whole thing piece by piece. It would be easy enough to fake it and get the tone right the same way I fake some of the dialogue because I can’t actually remember every stupid conversation I ever had word for word. Let’s just say that I kept doing things to her and she kept enjoying them and let’s let it go at that. I figure that if all you wanted in the way of a book was something to get off with you would have stopped reading before now and gone on to the swinging switching swapping swill.

Three times in the course of all this I took her hand and put it on me. Twice she gave a little squeeze and murmured “Later.” The third time she repeated this and added, “When it gets dark, Chip.”

You know, I wonder how often she did this. I mean, she had the whole thing choreographed, for Pete’s sake. Sometimes when I think about her I picture her spending her entire life riding north and south on Greyhound buses. Maybe her aunt doesn’t even have pleurisy. Maybe she doesn’t even have an aunt. Maybe Greyhound gives her a commuter’s rate. Maybe they let her ride free because it’s such great public relations for them. Maybe—

When it got dark, I didn’t even have to reach for her hand. It came over of its own accord and quickly found what it was looking for. She gave a few affectionate squeezes, worked a zipper, reached in, and brought her hand quickly back out again.

She put her lips to my ear and whispered, “Why don’t you go to the lavatory and take off your shorts?”

I guess I should have done this at the rest stop. God knows it would have been a lot easier. The lavatory wasn’t really spacious enough to change clothes in. It was barely big enough to take a leak in, actually.

I came back with my shorts in my pocket and got under the coat again. Then she decided we should change places, with me sitting in the window seat and her on the outside, and somehow we managed to do this without getting out from under the coat. Don’t ask me how.

“Poor old Chip,” she murmured. “Getting me off about a hundred times” — at the very least, I thought — “and you never getting off once your own self. But we’ll fix that.”

And I sat there with her head in my lap and my hand bunched up in all that yellow hair and she fixed everything in the world. She fixed things that weren’t even broken.

Wow.

Afterward, while I waited for the top of my skull to come back down where it belonged, she nestled her sweet and talented little head on my shoulder. After a while she said, “Happy?”

“Mmmmm.”

“You like being loved up that way?”

“Mmmmm.”

“They tell me girls up North don’t like to do that. Damned if I know why. First time I did that I wasn’t but fourteen years old and at a drive-in movie and too dumb to know about keeping my teeth out of the way, and the good old boy I was with was too dumb to tell me.” She giggled. “You like that kind of loving, you’re gonna enjoy yourself down South. Southern girls are decent, see. And they know the one thing that’s not decent is getting pregnant before you’re married, and another thing they know is no girl ever got a big belly from it.”

From her tone of voice she could have been talking about crop rotation and soil erosion. It was really weird.

I said, “The purity of Southern womanhood.”

“You better believe it. Next Southern girl you meet and get friendly with, you tell her to try it with a mouthful of warm water. Of course you couldn’t do that on a bus.”

“The Waterloo,” I said.

“You know about that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“They know about that up North?”

“Not exactly.”

“You ever have it done?”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean, ‘Not exactly’?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Well—?”

“I read about it.”

“In a book?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Like the kind of book I was reading before? One of those randy books?”

“More or less.”

“Lordy,” she said. “I’ll usually get a book like that to read if, oh, if I happen to have to take a long trip on a bus.” I could believe it. “I’ve read my share of them, I guess. Never read anything about the Waterloo in any old book.”

“Maybe it was written by a Southern girl,” I suggested.

“No maybe about it. It must have been.”

“Maybe a girl from Tennessee.”

“Georgia,” she said.

The bus station in Bordentown was just an Atlantic gas station that sold bus tickets. They had a Coke machine, but I passed it up. I was down to about two and a half dollars and I didn’t know where I was going to get a room, or how much it would cost. I figured the Y was the best bet, and I asked an old guy at the station how to get to it.