“That tomato of yours has got kind of a smart mouth, hasn’t she?” Jack said sourly, lighting a cigarette.
“She just says what she thinks,” I told him.
“If she was with me, I’d slap a few manners into her.” He was still stinging from the put-down.
“You’d get your balls kicked off, too,” I told him. “She meant what she said about that.”
“A tough one, huh?” he said. “Where’d you latch onto her anyway?”
“She’s the one I met at that Italian movie, remember?”
“Oh, that one. You sure got a weird taste in women, is all I can say.”
“She’s a human being,” I said, “not just a stray piece of tail. As long as you treat her like a human being, fine. It’s when you come on like she was a cocker spaniel that you run into trouble.” I knew there wasn’t much point in talking to him about it. He wasn’t likely to change.
“I’d still slap some manners into her if it was me,” he said.
“I don’t hit women much,” I said, looking out toward the sunset.
He grunted and went down to spell Sloane on the mower.
Sloane came back up the steps, puffing and sweating like a pig. “Man,” he gasped, “am I ever out of shape. I’m gonna have to start jogging or something before we go up into the high country.”
“You said a mouthful there, buddy,” I said. “We probably all should. Otherwise one of us is going to blow a coronary.”
“Hey” — he giggled —”I like that little girl of yours. She’s cute as a button, isn’t she?”
“She’s a boot in the butt,” I agreed.
“Boy, did she ever get the drop on old Jack. I thought he was gonna fall right on his ear when she threatened to bust his balls for him.”
“I think he’s still a little sore about it.”
“He isn’t used to havin’ women react that way to his line.”
“She just doesn’t buy the glad-hand routine,” I said, “and Jack doesn’t know any other approach.”
“How’d you manage to latch onto her?”
“You’d never believe it,” I said.
“Try me.”
I told him about it.
“No kidding?” he said, laughing. Then a thought flickered across his face. “Say, she isn’t a user, is she? I mean, a lot of those kids are. She hasn’t got any stuff with her, has she? I can square the beef if the cops come in here because we’re makin’ too much noise or something, but if they come in and find her stoned out of her mind on something, that could get a little sticky.”
“No,” I told him. “No sweat — oh, she blows a little grass now and then, but I’ve told her that I don’t particularly care for the stuff, and I don’t get much kick out of talking to people when they’re stoned. It’s like talking into a wet mop. She stays away from it when she’s with me. We’ve got a deal; I tell all her friends I’m an ex-con, and she stays off the grass when I’m around. What she does on her own time is her business.”
“Sounds like you two have quite an arrangement going.”
“For the most part, we don’t try to tell each other what to do, that’s all. We get along pretty good that way.”
“There, you lazy bastards!” Jack yelled, killing the lawn-mower. “It’s all done.”
“You do nice work,” Sloane said. “Let’s go get cleaned up. I brought towels and soap and stuff. I get firsties on the shower.”
The girls had finished the inside cleanup and had already bathed and changed clothes. Sloane, Jack, and I all showered and changed while they cooked up the steaks and whipped up a salad out of some of my produce. We all had mixed drinks with dinner and a couple more afterward. Along about sundown things started to loosen up a bit.
“Hey,” Helen said, her hard, plastered-on face brightening, “let’s play strip poker.”
“I didn’t bring any cards,” Sloane said.
“Oh, darn,” she pouted. “How about you, Jack? Dan? Haven’t one of you guys maybe got a deck of cards in your car?”
We both shook our heads.
“Maybe the people who lived here —” She jumped to her feet and ran into the kitchen to start rummaging through the various drawers.
“Je-sus Christ!” Clydine said, “if she wants to take her clothes off so goddamn bad, why doesn’t she just go ahead and take her clothes off?”
Sandy smiled slightly. It was the first time I’d ever seen her do it.
“Come on, you guys,” Helen called, “help me look.”
“We cleaned out all those drawers this afternoon,” Sandy said, her voice seeming very far away.
“Damn it all, anyway,” Helen complained, coming back into the living room. She plunked herself back down on the couch beside Sloane, sulking.
The orgy wasn’t getting off the ground too well.
“Jeeze,” Helen said, “you’d think somebody’d have a deck of cards. Myron always has a deck of cards with him. All the sergeants do. They play cards all the time.”
“At least when they’re playing cards, they’re not dropping napalm on little kids,” Clydine said acidly.
Helen’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t know about some people, but I think we ought to back up our servicemen all the way.”
“So do I,” Clydine said. I blinked at her. What the hell? “I think we ought to back them up as far as Hawaii, at least,” she finished.
It took Helen a minute or two to figure that one out.
“I’m proud to be the wife of a serviceman,” she said finally, not realizing how that remark sounded under the circumstances.
“Let it lay,” I muttered to Clydine.
“But —”
“Don’t stomp a cripple. It’s not sporting.”
“Hey,” Jack said, moving in quickly to avert a brawl, “I meant to ask you, Cal, are we gonna take pistols with us, too? On the hunt, I mean?”
“Sure,” Sloane said. “Why not? If we don’t get any deer, we can always sit around and plink beer cans.” He giggled.
“You got anything definite out of that other guy yet, Dan?” Jack was pretty obviously dragging things in by the heels to keep Helen and Clydine away from each other’s throats. A beef between the women could queer the whole party.
“Carter says the whole deal could hang on him goin’. You better nudge him a little.”
“He’s gotta make up his own mind,” I said. “I can’t do it for him.”
We kicked that around for a while. We had another drink. I imagine we were all starting to feel them a little, even though we’d been pretty carefully spacing them out. Even Sandy started to get loosened up a bit.
Then we started telling jokes, and they began to get raunchier and raunchier — which isn’t unusual, considering what this party was supposed to be. In all of her jokes, Helen kept referring to the male organ as a wiener, which, for some reason, just irritated hell out of me.
I went on out to the kitchen to get a beer, figuring to back off on the whiskey a little to keep from getting completely pie-eyed. I heard the padding of bare feet behind me. Clydine had her shoes off again.
She caught me at the refrigerator. “This is an orgy?” she said. “I don’t think these people know how. They’re like a bunch of kids sitting around trying to get up nerve enough to play spin the bottle.”
“You want some action?” I leered at her.
“Well, after that popcorn and purity routine last night, I’m pretty well primed. When does something happen?”
“Hey, in there,” Helen called, “no sneaking off into dark corners. If you’re gonna do something, you gotta do it out here where we can all watch.” She giggled coarsely.
“That does it!” Clydine said. She grabbed my arm. “Let’s go screw — right in the middle of the goddamn rug!”
“Cool it,” I said, “I’ll get things moving.”
“Well, somebody’s going to have to. This is worse than a goddamn Girl Scout camp.”
I rummaged around until I found a large glass. Then I got a couple more bottles of beer and went back to the living room.
“I’ll bet he was copping a feel.” Helen snickered. “How was it, honey?”
I ignored that, but Clydine glowered at her.
“I just remembered a game,” I announced. “The Germans play it in the beer halls.”
“What kinda game?” Helen demanded a little blearily.
“It’s a kind of drinking game,” I said, pouring beer into the large glass.
“A drinking game,” she objected. “That’s no goddamn fun, How about a sex game?”
“Just hang tough,” I said. “The point of this game is that the person who takes the next to the last drink out of his glass — not the last one, but the next to the last one — has to pay a penalty of some kind.”