Dan Wakefield - Going All the Way - A Novel

“Some guy from Terre Haute knocked her up. She had a pie in the oven, and the guy married her.”

“Shit,” Gunner said, “couldn’t he have got three witnesses to testify?”

It was said that if a girl got pregnant and you could get three other guys to testify they had fucked her, too, there was some law that said you didn’t have to marry her because she was a loose woman or something. It was one of those things that everyone seemed to know about, but nobody was too clear on. If you asked a lot of questions about it, that showed you were green, so everyone just accepted it, as far as Sonny could tell.

“Buddy, you talk about three —he could of got three hundred ,” Big Quinn said. “But the guy was from Terre Haute . He didn’t know .”

“Oh, my achin’ ass,” Gunner said.

“ His achin’ ass,” Big Quinn said, and both of them laughed. Gunner said he had to get back to his chow, and both guys biffed one another on the arm and said they’d see each other around.

“Well, no more Donna Mae Orlick,” Gunner said as he and Sonny went back to the wagon.

“Son of a bitch,” Sonny said.

Somehow he figured it was his bad luck, that it was just to torment him that Donna Mae had got knocked up and married some Terre Haute guy. The waitress came with the food, and Sonny made himself swallow the Coke and hamburger even though he didn’t feel like it. Gunner chowed down like a starving Armenian. When he finished he let out a satisfied belch, clapped his hands together, and said, “O.K., team, let’s go get ’em.”

Sonny gunned the motor, peeled the old wagon out of the lot and into the street with confident purpose, and then slowed down. “Where to?” he asked.

“Well, what say we check out the East Side. Maybe we can find us some Tech babies.”

“Right,” Sonny said, feeling a shiver of fear and excitement.

They were on their way to what was for them, North Side guys, foreign and often hostile territory. Looking for “Tech babies,” girls who went or had gone to Manual-Technical High School. Manual-Technical! The name itself conjured up in Sonny’s mind images of vast machinery; lathes and pistons, turbines and diesels, great groaning gears and belching smokestacks, sooty air and greasy rags, Bessemer steel, spontaneous combustion. That was the sort of thing Sonny figured you learned about when you went to Manual-Technical. The massive school was housed in an old armory, a spread of gray, dungeony buildings on a grassless, sooty campus by the clanging streetcar tracks, in sight of the factories where its graduates would file into line after graduation to grind out their living. The school’s colors were black and red—most brutal of hues, most basic and bestial, red of the workingman’s blood and black of his heavy industrial machines. Their athletic teams were called “The Black Riveters” and were known for their hulking, grinding efficiency. Their line could mash enemy quarterbacks to scrap; their fullbacks were trucks wearing uniforms. Manual-Technical stood on the opposite side of town from Shortley, and though there were other schools scattered between and beyond, these were the two giants, the natural archrivals, the poles of human opposition—the Manual-Technical Black Riveters versus the Shortley Blue Barons. The Shortley colors were robin’s egg blue and cream (“whipped cream,” the envious rivals called it and sneered at the Barons as “cream puffs”) and yet their rivalry over the years was evenly matched, it ebbed and flowed back and forth like the very forces in the world itself that the two schools seemed to represent.

As they neared downtown, before turning east, Gunner spotted a colored woman on a streetcorner, crooking her finger at them.

“Dark meat for sale,” he observed.

Sonny glanced up at the street number, to file in his memory. Just in case.

They headed out East 10th Street, and Gunner asked Sonny to stop at a dim little park where some kids were clustered on benches, talking and giggling.

“I’ll check it out,” he said.

Sonny didn’t want to watch as Gunner sauntered right up to the kids and struck up a conversation. There were some louder giggles, and Gunner came back and said to move on.

“Jail-bait,” he explained.

They stopped again when Gunner spotted a couple of girls in toreadors hanging around outside a little rundown drugstore. Sonny pulled up at the opposite corner and Gunner went back to talk to them. Sonny lit a cigarette, trying not to let his hand shake. He snuck a look in the rear-view mirror and saw Gunner gesturing, turning his powers of persuasion on them. Sonny wondered what the hell he’d do if Gunner actually got them into the car. He was almost more afraid that Gunner would succeed than he was that Gunner would fail. When Gunner came back alone, Sonny felt a secret relief.

“Just little teasers,” Gunner explained when he came back empty-handed. “Listen, let’s hit the Tropics Club. It’s farther out on Tenth.”

The Tropics Club had a jazz combo, and the place was heavy with smoke and people. Burly guys with T-shirts and tattoos on their biceps, sharpies with flashy sport shirts and ducktail haircuts, babes in tight skirts and flouncy hairdos. The combo wasn’t bad, and Sonny and Gunner ordered boilermakers and started tapping the table in time with the music. A couple of babes came in by themselves and sat down about three tables away, but they were real dogs.

After three boilermakers Gunner glanced at the two broads again and said, grinning, “Funny thing, later it gets, the better they look.”

“The dogs, you mean?” Sonny asked.

Gunner raised a palm, as if protesting. “Think positive,” he said. “Look for the good in people.”

“Like what?”

“Well, take the blonde, for instance. Her face’d stop a clock, but see if you can’t find some ‘good points’ about her.”

“Yeh,” Sonny said. “She’s built like a brick shithouse.”

“If I ever saw one,” Gunner said. He bolted his shot, chased it with a long gulp of beer, and looked a little glassily at Sonny. “But I never did see one, come to think of it. Did you?”

“What?”

“Ever see a brick shithouse? I mean a real one.”

“I guess not,” Sonny admitted. “Just the wooden kind.”

“Yeh, me too. And yet all our life we go around saying a woman is built like a brick shithouse if she has big knockers. What have big knockers got to do with a brick shithouse? Nothing sticks out on a shithouse, does it?”

“Not that I ever saw.”

“Man,” Gunner said, shaking his head. “It’s weird. We say all kind of stuff we don’t even know what it means. Or how come we say it.”

“There’s probably a lot of stuff like that. We say.”

“Fuckin-A there is.”

The combo had finished a set, and there was loud giggling from the two broads.

“They’re hot to go,” Gunner said.

“I guess,” Sonny said without much enthusiasm. He figured if Gunner actually got the girls, he would be stuck with the one who was not built like a brick shithouse. This one who was not had red hair that looked dyed, piled on top of her head, and enough lipstick to paint a wild Indian.

“Let’s go get ’em,” Gunner said.

Sonny felt faint. “Listen,” he said, “I gotta take a leak first.”

Gunner looked him straight in the eyes and Sonny coughed and looked away, hoping he didn’t seem nervous. “Look,” Gunner said understandingly, “maybe I oughta go make the first move myself. Then, if it looks like action, I’ll call you over.”

“Good plan,” said Sonny.

Gunner finished off his beer and started ambling over to the two broads. Sonny hurried to the head. It was one of those moldy kind of crappers with only one toilet and no pissing trough. The toilet didn’t flush too well and there was a pretty bad mess in it. Sonny took aim and then looked away from it, up at the wall. There was a picture of a cock, and underneath it said “Eat Me.” Under that someone had scrawled in pencil, “I did—Kilroy was here.” Under that somebody else had written “Kilroy Sucks.” In another place was a phone number and the message “Call Susie—she likes to blow.” Sonny read this stuff while he pissed, then shook the last drops off and tucked his prick back in. It seemed especially small, as if already retreating from the war-painted redhead. On the wall beside the door was a rubber machine, and it said in big letters “For Sanitary Purposes Only,” like you weren’t supposed to use them for fucking. The brands were obscure ones you didn’t ordinarily hear of, like Varsity Tip, King O’ Hearts, and Kamikaze. Sonny pulled out his wallet and checked to see if he still had the single Trojan in the secret pocket of it. It was there, getting pretty rumpled and beat-up-looking. Anyway, Trojans were best. Everyone knew that. Sonny wasn’t sure how everyone knew it, but it was something you just knew, like you knew that whores didn’t kiss on the mouth, and Nice Girls didn’t do it when they were riding the rag, and drinking too much gin in hot weather could make you blind.