insisted that she should take it.
“I'd just as soon stay right here,” Jane said. “I like to be where you are. I'm not lonesome the way I was the first night, and I don't have to go anyplace.”
But Ruth said that it would seem very strange if Jane stayed there on her day off, and of course she was right. I knew that the local gendarmerie might be narrow-minded about anything they found out, especially since we were from the city and I had brought a typewriter with me. I remembered that even old man Dreiser had been dragged into court for doing nothing worse than traveling with his secretary, and I couldn't even plead impotence, as he had.
I told Jane to use the car if she wanted to, but she said that wouldn't look good either. That's how things are done in the country.
“I'll call up a boy I know,” Jane said. “I've never had a good time with him, but if I tried to be nice to him I might have a good time.”
That sounded like a fine idea, so after breakfast she called the fellow, and he told her that he would be around in an hour and get her. He had to borrow a car first. Jane got dressed, and when she came out of her room the first thing that Ruth did was slip her hand under her dress. Jane smiled and stood very still, but Ruth scolded her.
“That's not the way to dress for a boy.”
She lifted the girl's dress and took her pants off. She patted Jane's fuzz and kissed it.
“Now don't be backward about showing it to him,” she said. “Tease him with it if you want to, but don't tease him too long.”
“You'd make a wonderful mother,” I said. “You're so understanding about these things. Jesus, the girl's almost as old as you are. She doesn't need help.”
The mailman's car stopped outside, and I went out to the box. Beside the papers and some advertising addressed to the “Boxholder” there was a letter from Charlie. He said that he had expressed a package that I would like, and that was all that was in the letter, so I got out the car and drove with Ruth to the store for some groceries and then to the railroad station. We talked about Jane.
“She's strange,” Ruth said. “She's all fucked up in her head, the way I used to be, but worse. When she gets over that she'll be a hot young bitch.”
“She was pretty good last night.”
“But she acted funny. I would have liked it better if she had raised hell. She was too quiet about it. She didn't even raise a blush.”
“It must be her metabolism,” I said. “Do you expect everybody to act the way you used to? Which reminds me, now that you've turned homo, how do you like it?”
“Don't call me a homo. If you have to call me something you can call me a cunt sucker, but I'm not anything like a homo.”
“Well, how do you like it?”
“I like it fine. I'm going to prey on innocent young girls. I'll haunt bath houses and beaches and lure them off to the bushes.”
“I wish I could be as sure as you are that you're just kidding,” I said.
“All right, I'll stop kidding. From now on you can expect anything, because I'm going to go to bed with women too. Now that I've been down on a cunt I can see that I've been missing something, and the first thing I want to do when we get back to the city is to have you take me to that black girl you were with the other day. She'd let me French her, wouldn't she? I could be nice to her.”
“I suppose so,” I said. “See here. Why do you want her, especially? Because she's brownskin?”
“I don't know. Because she was the last one you laid and the first one I thought of, I suppose. My friends are going to be surprised when they find me wanting to suck them.”
“You won't have any friends. Does Toby have any? People aren't usually friends after they've been to bed.”
“Bull. We're friends, aren't we?”
“I guess so.”
“I hope so. I think maybe you're the only friend I've got, Bill.”
“Turn it off,” I said.
Jane was gone when we got back to the house. I opened the package that Charlie had sent, and all it had was the proofs of some essays he was having published. There was a note that said I could correct them when I got bored with the country. I felt like throwing the damned things into the fire, but in the afternoon Ruth was working and I had nothing else to do so I got started on them and that was what I did all day. At about eleven that night Jane was not back, and Ruth and I went to bed early. We took a short one and went to sleep. I heard a car stop outside sometime later.
Jane had already eaten breakfast when we got downstairs. She was wearing her house coat, and the zipper was very low. She said that it was stuck there, and she came to me to have it fixed. I worked on it a while and couldn't do anything with it, but I enjoyed fooling around with her.
“Did you have a good time yesterday?” Ruth asked her. “Sit down and tell us about it.”
Jane sat down and poured a cup of coffee for herself.
“I had a good time and I had a bad time,” she said. “Did you have a good time?”
I don't imagine that a person runs into someone like Jane more than once in a lifetime. I know that I haven't met anyone else like her, and I haven't kept my eyes closed, either.
“Did he jazz you?” Jane asked Ruth.
“Yes,” said Ruth. “He jazzed me.”
I broke open the film over my fried egg. There was something vaguely unpleasant about the way it spilled over the plate, but I could not think of what it was that it reminded me of. It tasted all right.
“I was screwed too,” said Jane. “At night, just before he brought me home.”
Ruth nodded at her, and we both waited.
“He took me to the movies, and when we were there he began putting his hand on my legs. I let him get his hand up until he touched between them, and it was nice. Only it was tickly when he touched me where the hair is.”
“What else?” Ruth said. “Did you put your hand on him too? Did you feel of his cock then?”
“Let her tell it,” I said.
“No,” Jane said, “I didn't touch him, except to keep his hand away just at first. At first I wanted to keep him away, but he kept touching me and squeezing my leg, and then I let him put his hand all the way up, but I didn't touch him back. It was in the car, after the movie, that I put my hand on him. I was letting him feel of me as much as he wanted to, and I began to feel the way I did from the drinks the night before, and I even felt dizzy. And I began to think of his prick and the hair so close to me-so close that I could touch it if I wanted to-and before I knew it I had my hand over the place where it would be.”
“Before you knew it,” Ruth repeated. “And then he stopped the car.”
“Yes. He turned down a road that goes to one of the lumber camps and then he stopped the car and he lifted my dress up. Then he made me slip off the edge of the seat and spread my legs so that he could see my cunt better.”
“And you didn't want to, of course.”
“Oh, but I did want to! And I remembered about the pictures you gave me, and I had them in my purse, so I got them out and let him look at them, and while he was looking at them I unbuttoned all the buttons on his pants. I was hoping that he'd put my hand inside, but he didn't, so I put it in myself, and it was all hair and hot.”
“Did he steal the pictures?” Ruth asked.
“No. He handed them back to me when I took his prick out of his pants, and then he held me and tried to jazz me, but he couldn't do it on the seat, so we got out of the car and went behind a pile of logs and he did it there. He made me take his clothes off. And he made me say that I had gone out without wearing any pants just so that he could feel me up better and he made me say that I had been wanting to have him jazz me for a long time and that I'd just made up my mind to do it. And that part wasn't so, but I said it because he wanted me to.”
“You're getting along fine,” Ruth said. “Keep saying the right things that way and you'll have a nice fat scrap
