April North

11

She was sitting at Danny’s side in the front seat of the green Olds. She was not sure why she had entered the car but it had seemed like the right thing at the time. She was cold and drenching wet and shivering, and this particular car was where her trouble had all started, and somehow it seemed only fitting for her to get into the Olds now.

He had the radio playing rock-and-roll, and someone was singing Get out the papers and the trash/Or you don’t get no spending cash. She tried not to listen to the blare of the radio, tried not to notice the huge raindrops splattering on the window.

“I shouldn’t be here,” she said.

“Why not, April?”

“Because you were rotten to me,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“You made love to me,” she said. “And then you told all your friends about it. That wasn’t very nice, Danny.”

He looked sheepish.

“I hated you for a while,” she went on. “But now I’m getting tired of hating people. I’m sick of it. There are too many rotten men in the world and if I keep on this way I’ll hate all of them. I guess there’s no future in it.”

They rode a mile or so in silence. She looked across at him, at the handsome profile, the basketball build. She remembered that first time — strange, she thought, that it should seem so long ago.

“What’s the trouble, April?”

“Everthing’s the trouble.”

“Tell me about it. Maybe I can help.”

She hesitated but only for a moment or two. “I have to go away,” she said ultimately. “I have to leave Antrim.”

“For good?”

“For better or for worse. If you mean forever, yes. I have to leave and I can’t come back.”

“Why?”

She looked at him. “I’m sorry,” she said slowly, “but I’d rather not tell you.”

“I can keep a secret.”

“So I’ve noticed,” she said bitterly. “Let’s just say I have to leave town and let it lie there.”

“Where will you go?”

“I don’t know. New York, I guess.”

“You’ll take a train?”

“I guess. I don’t have any money.”

She had money, of course. She had the five hundred forty-three dollars and seventy-four cents that she had drawn from her savings account when she tried to leave Antrim for the first time. But that money was at home, safely tucked away, and she could not get it without going home.

And she could not go home.

“I don’t have any money,” she repeated.

He looked at her. The radio had shifted gears to a jolly little number called Ave Maria Rock. The rain was still coming down hard and fast. She felt his eyes brush over her body, noting how the wet sweater clung to her full breasts. She wished he would stop looking at her that way. She didn’t like it, at all.

“Look, April. Maybe I can help.”

He could have helped once, she thought. He could have been more of a man and less of a boy. He could have kept her secret in the first place, could have gone on loving her instead of permitting his love to be killed by her final acceptance of it. Then what would have happened? She might have married him, she thought — and she was suddenly glad that he had talked about her, because she could imagine very few ways to spend her life that were worse than as the wife of Danny Duncan.

“Just leave everything to me,” he said. “You’re going to have clean clothes and a hundred bucks, and then I’ll drive you to Xenia and you can catch a night train to New York. You don’t have a thing to worry about, April I’ll take care of everything.”

He was turning the car around now. He drove a mile on 68, then turned off onto a winding dirt road. The car splashed water from puddles in the middle of the road.

“Got to find a place for you to stay,” he said. “While I go find those clothes for you.”

“Where will you get them?”

“My sister,” he said. “She’s about your size and she won’t miss a few clothes. I’ll get the clothes and the money and come back for you. Meanwhile I know a place where you can stay.”

“Where?”

“A barn. There’s an old barn along this road — we used to hack around out here when we were kids. Nobody’ll bother you. Hell, nobody ever goes there any more. You can relax and dry off while I get the clothes and the money.”

“The money,” she said.

“Yeah. A hundred dollars. That’ll be enough for you, won’t it?”

“Of course. But where will you get it?”

He chucked her under the chin. “Don’t you worry about a thing,” he said confidently. “I’ve got a pretty good idea where I’ll get it. Don’t worry, April.”

The barn was old and sagging, weatherbeaten and ready to crumble. But it was better on the inside than out. First of all, the interior was dry. Although the roof leaked in a dozen or more spots, there was one huge section where no rain dripped through, and that section was comfortable enough. The floor was covered with hay and dead leaves. The barn had a barnlike smell which she did not find unpleasant. This was certainly a hell of a lot better than wandering around in the rain.

“You’ll be okay here,” Danny said.

“Sure.”

He was looking at her now, his eyes warm. She saw how he was staring at her breasts and she knew what was on his mind. He was not exactly hard to figure out

“All this hay,” he said. “Sort of a shame to let a place like this go to waste.”

“Is that what you did when you used to come here?”

“We were just kids then,” he said. “But now things are a little different.”

She did not want to make love with him. She did not want to make love with anybody, Danny Duncan least of all. She wanted, in fact, only to be away from Antrim and on her way to New York. But he was getting her dry clothes, was giving her a hundred dollars, and was driving her to Xenia — perhaps he deserved something in return. And she had only one thing to give.

So she offered no resistance when he came to her, taking her in his arms and pressing his mouth against hers in a kiss. At first she merely stood still like a robot, but then she realized that she might as well make it good, that he had probably never had a very experienced girl and that she could give him something he would never forget.

She ground against him, her loins seeking his, her mouth hot and demanding. She felt nothing, nothing at all, but her lack of feeling he would never have to know about. She would make it good for him.

He let her go and stepped back.

She looked at him, at the strong athlete’s body. She felt no burst of passion, no rush of desire. In a sense, she was entirely cold-blooded about what she was going to do.

“Now, Danny.”

He came to her again, embraced her, and they tumbled to the floor. She felt leaves and hay under her body, pricking her flesh a little, getting her itchy. She drew him down upon her and burned his mouth with a kiss. He was hotter than a two-dollar pistol now, she thought, and she herself was cooler and more accomplished than a two-dollar whore. Her tongue was in his mouth, doing wonderful things and driving him wild, and he was squirming on top of her, writhing with excitement.

He moved, his hands grabbing for her breasts. He squeezed the mounds of flesh, stroked them, patted them. She felt nothing, but she knew enough to feign excitement. She wriggled on the hay carpet, thrusting up her hips and softly moaning.

“You’re the greatest, April. I never saw anybody like you. Never!”

She took one of his hands from her breast and moved it downward slowly, over her flat stomach. He touched her with greedy fingers, and she went on with her pantomime of passion, squirming and moaning as if his actions were exciting to her.

She thrashed beneath him, taking up the rhythm of love with the intensity of a dynamo, driving him outward and upward, making him moan and shriek with passion unlike anything he had ever experienced before. He bit her shoulder, cried her name to the skies.

Then he finished.

She held him for a moment, thinking that he was a child and that she was an old and sinful woman. She remembered the woman in Marseilles that Craig had talked about. Give me another twenty years, April North thought.

He got up slowly, his face flushed, his eyes wide. “That was — pretty great,” he said.

“I’m glad you liked it.”

He took a deep breath, held on to it for a moment, then let it out slowly. “I’d better get dressed,” he said. “Better get going. So I can get the clothes and the money for you.”

“Leave some cigarettes,” she said.

“Sure.”

“And some matches.”

“Yeah, I will.”

“And hurry back,” she said.

She did not bother to get dressed. The clothes were wet and to put them on again would have been ridiculous. Instead she sat on a pile of loose hay and smoked three cigarettes one after the other. She did not think about anything in particular at the beginning. She merely sat on the pile of hay — which tickled her rear end slightly — and smoked the cigarettes. She put them out carefully. It would not do if the whole barn went up in a sheet of flame. People would be annoyed.

The time with Danny, she reflected, had been sort of interesting. It had done nothing to her, despite the incredible effect it had had upon him. The interesting part was the way she could turn on all her passion and still not feel a thing. Maybe that was the secret of a prostitute, she thought. Give the man his money’s worth without losing any of your reserve. A valuable talent, no doubt. If everything went wrong in New York as it had gone so irremediably wrong in Antrim, she could always cash in on her ultimate negotiable asset and become a prostitute. She evidently had a bent for it

No, she thought. No, Danny Duncan had been the first and Danny Duncan would be the last. She was going to be good from here on out. She was going to get out of town, start fresh somewhere else, and this time everything would work itself out. She sat naked, smoking, letting her wet skin dry as the cool air hit it, and she waited for Danny to come back with clothes and money.

She heard a car and sprang to her feet. The car braked, and she ran to the door, keeping her naked body hidden and craning her neck to see who had arrived.

Not one car.

Five cars.

Each car stopped in turn. Doors flew open and boys piled out. About twenty of them, all with excited glints in their eyes and funny expressions on their faces. She recognized most of them; they were classmates at Antrim High, members of the senior class. She saw Jim Bregger, the fat pimply kid who had tried to date her when Danny had declared open season on April North. She saw other boys, and all of them were coming toward the barn.

Danny was leading them.

The rest waited outside. Danny came on in, and April stared at him. He tossed her a bundle of clothes — a wool plaid skirt, a yellow sweater, underwear and socks and shoes.

“Here you go,” he said. “But don’t put ’em on yet, April.”

She did not understand.

“You need more than clothes,” he went on. “You need money, too. A hundred bucks worth. Remember?”

She nodded.

“Well,” he said, “I got the dough for you. A hundred bucks. See?”

He took a roll of five-dollar bills from his pocket and spread them before her in a fan. Then he folded them once and returned them to his pocket.

“A hundred bucks,” he said. “All for you, April. All you have to do is earn it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you?”

She shook her head. But actually she was afraid that she did understand, that she understood all too well. Her earlier thoughts — that she could always become a prostitute if everything else failed — came back to torment her. Apparently she was going to become a prostitute already.

“I didn’t have a hundred bucks lying around, April. Hell, none of the guys have that kind of dough. But I found twenty guys with five bucks each. Five times twenty is a hundred, April. All you have to do is give each guy his five bucks worth and you’ll have a hundred for yourself.” He winked at her. “Judging from what I got a few minutes ago, it shouldn’t be hard for you. Hell, let’s face it. You’re the hottest stuff around. You’ll love every minute of it.”

She wanted to tell him that she had only been pretending, that she would not love it at all. And she did not need the money, not really. It would be definitely easier to go home and get the money than to earn it by lying in a pile of hay while one boy after the other took his pleasure with her.

But what was the use? She was in a spot now. There were twenty boys outside, and they had not come out in the rain just to be turned down. If she tried to call the whole show off, she had a fairly good idea what would happen.

They would force her.

That would not be hard for them. They would hit her, and they would hold her down, and instead of a simple line-up it would be mass rape. Then they would not even give her the rotten hundred dollars — they would leave her half-dead in the barn and go away.

“Suppose I don’t want to,” she said, feeling him out.

“You’ve got to.”

“And if I won’t?”

“You will.”

The certainty with which he said those two words convinced her that she was right. She had no chance. She looked at him, looked at the cocky expression on his face, and she knew that he was not going to let this opportunity slip through his fingers. She was stuck.

“You’re quite an organizer,” she told Danny. Quite a pimp, she silently amended.

He took her words for a compliment. “It was nothing,” he said modestly. “All I had to do was pass the idea around. Everybody went for it like a shot.”

“They did?”

“Sure,” he said. “Everybody’s pretty darn hot to get to you, April. They’re panting all over the place. Every guy I asked was off like a shot to pick up five bucks and come after you. Some of them went and borrowed the dough.”

It was almost funny.

“All except Bill Piersall,” he went on. “You know, the jerk took a poke at me when I mentioned the deal to him.”

“He did?”

“Yeah. Jesus, I wanted to powder him. Here I was, letting him in on a good deal, and he started yelling that I should leave you alone, that you were a decent girl and I was a son of a bitch. He’s a real farmer, let me tell you. Sticking up for you like a clown. He can’t realize that you just love to get it night and day.”

She wanted to laugh, then changed her mind and wanted to cry. All along Bill had been sticking up for her, trying to treat her as a decent girl, while she was playing harlot for Craig Jeffers. And Bill was the one she’d vented all her anger on, the one she had brushed off repeatedly.

“He’s some kind of a nut,” Danny said.

A nut? Maybe, she thought. He must be nuts if he likes me. But he did like her, liked her and respected her in spite of what she had done. And it was not as if he were an innocent kid with a distorted picture of a girl named April North. She could still remember the time he had made love to her in the woods, and she knew how good it had been, better than she had ever permitted herself to realize.

Bill was not after sex. He had had that, and he wanted more. He wanted her — as a person, as a girl, as a woman.

But it was too late now.

Too late. Because what might have been could never be now, and whatever chance she had had for happiness with Bill was shot to hell and gone. Now she would turn her tricks for Danny and his boys and take her hundred dollars and run. If she did not, she would just be stuck all over again. Danny would probably take back the clothes and leave her high and dry — or more accurately, low and damp. She would miss out on the ride to Xenia and the money and the dry clothes, and she would probably spend the rest of her life in the abandoned barn waiting for the rain to stop.

“Want to get started, April?”

She looked at him. For a second she glared, and he flinched from the venomous hatred her eyes revealed. But instantly she masked this expression and flashed what was supposed to be a coy smile.

“I’m ready,” she said.

He laughed, turned and went outside. She waited, inwardly sick, until the first boy came in. She recognized him but could not remember his name. He was tall and gangling, with nervous eyes that could not quite meet hers and at the same time could not stay away from her ripe body. He stared at her legs and breasts and his tongue was hanging out.

A virgin, she thought. A simple slob who didn’t know what a woman was like.

“Well,” she said. “I won’t bite.”

He stammered something unintelligible.

“Get those silly clothes off,” she said.

I’m old and jaded, she thought. What’s the difference? It all makes no difference.

But the gangling boy never got to her. There was noise in the background, a car pulling up sharply, a door opening and banging shut. And then the boys out front were yelling, and then a man was bursting through the open door of the barn.

Craig.

“You stupid urchin,” he yelled at the boy. “Get away from her, you fool!”

The boy backed away, confused. Craig charged into the room and swung a fist at the boy. The boy caught the punch with the tip of his chin and went down as though pole-axed. He fell to the floor and did not move.

Craig turned to April, his eyes bright. “Well, how lovely,” he said, lips curling in a smile. “This is the reformation of April North, isn’t it? I looked all over for you, dear. I wondered what had happened to you. And then I passed a caravan of cars loaded with boys singing dirty songs. And sure enough, dear, they led me straight to you.”

She tried to cover her nakedness with her hands and he laughed at her.

“April North’s life of purity,” he said. “Taking on the senior class. What are they paying you, April?”

“One hundred dollars.”

“Great Caesar’s ghost,” he said. “That’s magnificent. Get your clothes on, April. If you’ve got to play harlot, you might as well do it properly. You can live a life of luxury for the same work.”

“With you?”

“With me. It’s only sensible, April. If you’re going to use sex to stay alive, you might as well get some benefit out of it. You’ll live luxuriously at my house. You’ll have parties and friends and excitement instead of serving as a doormat for the students of Antrim High School. Doesn’t it make a little more sense that way, dear?”

It did. She had sworn to stay away from Craig, but now she was only selling herself cheaply. If she had to be a tramp, she might as well make it pay. And it would pay better as Craig’s mistress than as mistress for twenty kids, all of them damp behind their ears.

Danny was in the doorway, shouting something, yelling at Craig. She saw Craig step in close to him, then lash out with his right foot. Danny buckled, clapping his hands to his groin and groaning, his face contorted with pain. The edge of Craig’s hand came down in a deadly chop and caught Danny on the side of the throat. The boy fell all the way down, landing in a crumpled heap on the barn floor.

“Get dressed,” Craig snapped. “These churls won’t bother us. They have us outnumbered, but that won’t do them any good.”

She dressed quickly, putting on the clean dry clothes Danny had gotten from his sister. April tried not to look at Craig while she dressed. She felt terrible, but there was nothing else for her to do. She had had one chance — Bill Piersall — but she had muffed it. And you did not get a second chance.

“Come on,” Craig said.

They were in the Mercedes now. The other boys were milling around, trying to get up the courage to try to get their prize away from Craig. But they did not have enough time. Craig started the sleek sports car and spun around in a fast U-turn, heading back toward 68. He put the accelerator on the floor and the car was a streak in the night.

April noticed another noise, another car spinning around in a tight U-turn and coming after them. She looked over her shoulder, and her heart leaped up into her throat and she could not swallow it down again.

The car was a hot-rod.

The driver was Bill Piersall.