Love and Glory

Chapter Six

Guze was a tough kid, a fullback on the football team, with biceps that made his shirt sleeves tight, and the intensity of a wolverine when he got in a fight. We were the only two college kids in the Arena Café, and that made me nervous. If you were drinking with Guze, the odds on winning any fights you got into went up. The bad part was that the odds on getting into a fight went up too. I was uneasy. This was a town bar, full of lumberjacks and mill workers. I was uneasy, too, because we were waiting for two girls.

“They fuck like bunnies,” Guze said, “both of them.”

I felt the excitement bore into my solar plexus. It mingled with anxiety. The prospect of being with a girl who fucked like a bunny was a little scary, especially since I’d never actually done it at all, exactly. I felt awkward and sweaty. I dragged on my cigarette.

“Where we going to take them,” I said.

“We’ll take them in the car. You get in the back with the sister, me and the Shark up front.”

“The Shark?”

“Yeah, it’s her nickname. I don’t know why. Maybe sharks are supposed to fuck a lot.” Guze shrugged. “Anyway, I haven’t seen her sister, but the Shark says she’s good-looking and hot.”

“Like me,” I said. I drank some beer. “You got any safes?”

“Sure.” Guze fumbled in his jacket pocket and came out with a handful of Ramses. He skidded one in its small cardboard box across the tabletop. I picked it up quickly and put it into my shirt pocket.

“You always have a supply handy, Guze?”

“Bet your ass,” he grinned. “Big G man from the west, Boonie.” He looked across the room. “Here they are.”

I wished I hadn’t come. I looked at the two girls as they slid into the booth with us. One beside Guze, the other one beside me. The one with Guze looked a little like a shark: dark and smooth and not exactly sharp-featured but sort of a streamlined face. Her hair was black and cut short and brushed back like Doris Day wore hers, with a pompadour in the front.

“Boonie, this is Shark.”

I said hi.

“Hi, Boonie, this is my sister, Barb.”

“Hi, Barb, how ya doing?”

“Nice to meet you.”

Barb was smaller than Shark and younger. It was hard to tell. Maybe she was pretty young. But she had tits; you could see them. She had slid her coat back off her shoulders and her sweater was tight. Her hair was lighter than her sister’s and she wore it shoulder length. Her face was like Shark’s but less complete, more tentative. She had on very red lipstick. Her nails were short, as if she bit them.

I said, “Want a cigarette?”

Barb said, “Sure.”

I shook one out of my pack of Camels and she took it. I lit a match, cupping it inside one hand, and lit her cigarette. She held it out near the tips of her fingers and I don’t think she inhaled. I was in a panic. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“So where you from?” Barb said, moving her cigarette in front of her face, waving the smoke away.

“New Bedford, Mass.,” I said.

“That’s a long ways.”

“It’s not a long way,” I said. “This is a long way.”

“Huh?”

“You go to school?” I said.

“Sure,” she said. She puffed on her cigarette.

A big waitress shuffled over. Her arms, in her short-sleeved dress, were fat and solid looking. She wore old fleece-lined bedroom slippers.

“Four beers,” Guze said, making a circular gesture with his right hand. The waitress shook her head.

“They won’t bother us about under-age college kids,” she said, “but not the girls.” She looked at Barb. “How old are you, honey? For crissake, you’re about fifteen.”

“I’m twenty-one,” Barb said, and puffed on her cigarette.

The thick-bodied men at the next table were looking at us. I felt kiddish and ineffectual. Barb’s face was a little flushed. The waitress grunted.

“You can’t stay in here,” the waitress said. “You’re too young.”

Guze took a five-dollar bill out of his pocket and folded it in half, the long way, and showed it to the waitress.

“You’re sure you don’t want to change your mind?” he said.

The waitress gestured with her thumb toward the door. “Beat it,” she said.

I didn’t want to be the first to get up, although all of me trembled to leave. “Why don’t we pick up some booze and take a ride,” I said. Inside my voice sounded small and piping, like a child’s. Guze nodded.

“Yeah, this place sucks anyway,” he said. He dropped the five on the table and walked toward the door without looking back. We followed him, the two girls, and me last. I slowed, frightened, by the table full of men, so it wouldn’t look as if I were running. None of the men looked up, and I swaggered slightly, keeping myself between the girls and the men, as we left the bar. Outside I felt relief and self-satisfaction. I had been brave walking past the men; they’d had plenty of chance to give me lip and they hadn’t. Now if this little babe would let me fuck her...

It was mid-November in central Maine, but the weather was warm. It had been cold the previous week, but the way it did sometimes, it had warmed, and you could walk around in a Windbreaker. It seemed like early fall as we drove up toward the college in a car Guze had borrowed. We had a pint bottle of Ballantine’s scotch that we passed around. It tasted to me at the time like one of those medications taken to induce vomiting. Always in the movies it looked good when the men rode in and bellied up to the bar and poured a big drink. I took a pull at the bottle and passed it to Barb. I gave no sign that it tasted dreadful. Barb drank and gave no sign either. Guze swung the car onto the road behind the dorms and pulled up on the far side of Johnson Pond.

“Shark and I are going to take a walk down by the lake,” Guze said. “Keep the bottle.”

Then we were alone in the back seat. I drank again from the bottle and forced myself not to shiver. I held it toward Barb.

“Want another shot?” I said.

“Sure,” she said. She drank.

Across the pond the lights of the fraternity houses were bright. With the windows down we could hear the sounds of radios and record players and occasional shouts. I took some more scotch. My stomach burned with it.

“You like college?” Barb said.

I said, “Yes,” and lunged against her as if I were plunging through a window. She put her mouth against mine and opened it and stuck her tongue out. I felt the hot red surge that I would feel again, a surge that wasted all inhibition, that brooked no hesitance. Barb with her tongue motionless in my mouth went supine on the back seat, face up, with me clumsily on top of her. Jesus Christ, she’s going to let me. And she did. She lay perfectly still while I fumbled under her blouse and felt her small breasts inside her pointy, wired bra. She lay perfectly still while I put my hand inside her underpants, and perfectly still while I pulled them down over her thighs awkwardly with one hand. Still with one hand I got my fly unzipped, and she lay watching me with a slight quirk of a smile that rested without movement on her mouth. When I got my pants down she reached out and took hold of me the way a child might hold its father’s finger. I remember us that way, frozen in time, her face in that fixed small smile, holding on to me, motionless as I looked down at her in the back seat of a 1946 Ford sedan.

I said, “Can you help me put it in?”

She stared up at me and made no sign that she’d heard, but she let go of me and put her legs apart and I managed on my own.

When it was over she put her underpants back on. In the bright moonlight they were white cotton, puckered at the waistband from laundering. We sat silently and drank some more scotch until Guze and Shark came back and we drove the girls back downtown.