'Truth.'
'Sometimes a little white lie is better.'
She set her glass on the coffee table and kissed me on the neck.
'You going to go through all the men in the house tonight?' I said.
'Is that supposed to make me mad?'
'Yep.'
She kissed me on the neck again. 'You're the only man in the house.'
'Shit, Trudy.'
'You like me saying that, don't you?'
' 'If I believed it, I'd like it more.'
'Like you said, sometimes a little white lie is better.'
I smiled.
'Let's go for a ride, Hap.'
'Now?'
'Uh-huh.'
'You might get a little chilly, lady.'
'Just a minute.'
She got up and eased the door open and smiled back at me before she went into the hall. After she closed the door I thought about her going to the room she and Howard shared, tiptoeing about, looking for her panties and her clothes. I had looked through the house earlier, just to look, and their room was a small thing with a mattress on the floor and a messy pile of blankets and some Coke cans tossed about.
At the other end of the hall Paco and Chub shared a slightly larger room. Chub slept on a saggy box frame bed in the middle of the room and Paco had a cot in a corner. The room had very little in it. A chair with clothes tossed over it and a small box of Chub's books, all of them on subjects designed to be read at gunpoint.
Less than five minutes later she was back. She was dressed in a blue denim work shirt, jeans, scuffed black work shoes, and a thick red and black jacket. She looked like the best-looking lumberjill alive.
She held up a set of keys.
'The Volvo,' she said.
'Will Howard mind?'
'Of course.'
I pulled on my coat and we went outside and got in the Volvo, Trudy behind the wheel. We backed out and the ice in the drive cracked under the tires. We drove to the highway and started toward Tyler, which was about twelve miles away. The car heater worked slowly, and the car was as cold as a meat locker. The highway was smooth with hardly any ice. I guess road crews had been at work salting it, There were splashes of gravel for the really bad spots.
Trudy reached for me and I slid over and leaned my head against her shoulder and she kissed my cheek. She held one arm around me as she drove and I smelled her perfume and the slightly stale wool of her coat.
I felt good and a little foolish. There was enough of the old male culture about me that I felt positions should have been reversed. I hoped no one saw us.
We drove like that for a long time. Finally Trudy said, 'I wanted to go for this drive because I wanted to talk.'
'About what you people have planned?'
'You people?'
'You know, power to the people and all that.'
'Really have become a cynic, haven't you? God, but I miss the old Hap Collins.'
'Did you miss me the most while I was finishing up my prison term?'
'You never have got past that, have you?'
'Let's say it's the sort of thing that weighs on a fella's mind.'
'I did miss you, okay?'
'I like the way you showed it.'
'I never claimed to be perfect. I'm sorry it happened like that, but it did, and that's that. I can't undo it, so let's leave it. And the plans we have isn't what I wanted to talk about. I thought I might work up the courage to tell you something about myself you don't know. Something you ought to know. For old time's sake.'
'What kind of something?'
'Something pretty awful.'
Chapter 15
