balls of her feet and her ass grew firmer and he bored deeper, trying not to finish too soon. He thought of other things to hold it back. He looked at the Ice Man through smears of mustard, for the heat of their activity had warmed the glass and made him visible.
Sweat filled Bill’s eyes as he continued to work. He grabbed Gidget’s hair and she squealed. He pulled her head back and kissed the side of her throat, feeling her pulse throb against his lips. He rubbed the mustard all over her.
“I can’t wait,” he said. “Jeez… I’m gonna finish.”
“Now?”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“It’s okay, baby. Give me all of it.”
He jerked her panties with his hands and they tore away. He tossed them on the floor and thrust into her hard, and just as he was about to let loose Gidget slipped from him, dropped and turned and took him in her mouth and he let go.
He pulled her up and lay her on her back across the glass and got between her legs, worked his tongue while he reached up and squeezed her nipples. Seconds later she let go with a soft scream. They found their way to the shower and bathed together, and made love standing up, then they dried off and lay down in bed.
“Won’t he wake up and miss you?”
“He won’t wake up till morning. I’ve used that stuff before. Thing I hate is he’ll wake up at all.”
“You shouldn’t talk like that.”
“Shouldn’t I?”
“No, you shouldn’t.”
“I don’t think I knew how bad I wanted to go away from here until you showed.”
“You didn’t like me, remember?”
“I didn’t like that face. When you cleared up I liked you fine. You look like James Dean.”
“Aren’t we supposed to like each other for who we are?”
“Bullshit. I want someone looks good and wants me as bad as I want him. Let me tell you something, Frost don’t look that good naked. And he has this kind of smell. I can’t describe it. It’s not a bad smell. He’s always pure and clean. It’s like… I don’t know. Do you smell us?”
“Yeah.”
“Hot and nasty and I like it. He’s like angel food cake out of the oven, all sweet and fresh baked. It gets to me. And that hand. I make him wear a glove when we fuck.”
Bill thought of the time Frost had stopped the fight between Conrad and Phil. He had been wearing the glove then. He remembered Gidget at the door of the motor home, somewhat peeved and slightly dressed.
“Why the glove?”
“I don’t like looking at it.”
“You still have to look at it, except it’s in a glove.”
“Yeah, but I don’t have to feel that hand. When he lays against me, I feel that hand. If he lifts up, the hand drops and touches me. .. You just don’t know. That hand… Sometimes I think it’s alive, not just flapping around against me. I keep thinking that hand wants to get hold of my throat.”
“Frost don’t seem that way to me.”
“He isn’t, but I think that hand is… and don’t smile at me like that. You’ve never had to touch it. It’s like something wet and muddy crawling over you. It feels like you think a snake ought to feel. I can’t take much more of it. He’s talking about us having a baby, and I’m thinking, yeah, great, we have a baby I can teach it to wash three hands. It might have four. It could work here in the carnival, wave at the crowd and knit a sweater. I don’t want to have no freak baby. It’s bad enough I got to have a freak inside me trying to get off.”
“But you went with him. It was your choice.”
“I’d have screwed a monkey while I was blowin’ the organ grinder to get out of that damn restaurant. I didn’t know what I was gettin’ into. I thought I could take it. I can’t take it. I want you, not him. We’re a beautiful couple, Bill.”
Bill’s body turned cool and goose bumps rose over him and the bumps were hard, like headstones. No one had ever wanted him before, least of all someone who looked like, felt like, and smelled like Gidget.
“I got to get rid of him, you know.”
“We could go away.”
“I thought about that.”
“We could just go off and you could get a divorce.”
“I could, yeah.”
“It seems like the only way.”
“I’ve gone off before, and I’m always just the same when I get to where I go. I might as well have stayed before I went. Everything I do is like fuckin’ deja vu. This time I got to do different.”
“We could go off and you could get a divorce and I could get a job.”
“Doing what? Brain surgery? You look good, baby, and I like what you do to me, how you make me feel, but you’re not exactly a hot job property.”
“It wouldn’t matter as long as we had each other.”
“It would matter to me. I don’t want to live in no shithole little town in a goddamn trailer with three snot- nosed brats pulling at my dress. I may not be worth a shit, and you may not be either, but I still want something better.”
“Then what can we do?”
“How much do you love me?”
Love hadn’t been mentioned before. Bill was taken aback. “I… I don’t know.”
Gidget turned away from him and stuck her face in a pillow and began to cry. “Jesus. Fuckin’ Jesus.”
“What?”
“Here I am pouring my heart out to you, and I’m just a piece to you. You don’t care about me. You don’t care I got to stay with this freak. It don’t mean a thing to you.”
“I didn’t say that.”
Gidget got up, still crying. She found her panties in the light from the lamp and tried to pull them on, but they were wrecked. She threw them on the floor, began to thrash about looking for the rest of her clothes.
Bill lay on the bed and looked at her and tried to think of something to say.
“I thought you loved me,” she said as she pulled her shorts on one leg.
“I didn’t say I didn’t love you.”
“It’s not something you have to think about, goddamnit.”
“Look, Gidget. I love you. I just… I’ve never been in love before. I didn’t know how to say it.”
She smiled and sniffed. “You just say it. That’s all. You just say it.”
“I love you.”
She pulled her shorts off the one leg she had managed to get them on, came back to bed and rolled up against him and ran her fingers down his cheeks and kissed him. They lay together for a while, not speaking. Bill broke the ice.
“So what do we do?”
“You want to be together, right?”
“I said so.”
“Then we do what we have to do.”
Bill let that one roll around inside his thoughts for a while. “God in heaven, Gidget. We couldn’t do that.”
“We could.”
“We shouldn’t. I mean, I’ve done some things, but I haven’t ever done anything like that. Well, not exactly.”
“What do you mean not exactly?”
He told her about his mother, the firecracker stand robbery and how his partner had shot the operator. He told her everything. It came out like water boiling over, every little detail.
“That stand operator should have kept his mouth shut and just given the money. That fella Chaplin didn’t do any more than he had to do. It just didn’t work out in the long run, but he was doing what needed to be done. The
