Texas by the Tail

waited together at the taxi entrance. He also found, after a moment, that she was studying him out of long-lashed green eyes. Embarrassed, he was about to shift his gaze when the eyes squinched shut in a double wink-an enticing nose-crinkling wink-and she growled at him. Yes, growled!

'Grrr,' she said. 'Rrrruff!'

'W-Wh-at?' he said.

'Grrr, woof!' she said. 'Bow-wow!'

Well, Mitch didn't have to be hit in the face with a pie to know when dessert was being passed. In a little more time than it took to get her telephone number, he was at her apartment, figurative fork in hand. He warmly declared himself ready to share the bed which she was obviously preparing to retire to. Teddy demurely demurred.

'I'm saving my candy for my daddy,' she explained. 'I figure that if a man buys the box he ought to get all the pieces.

Mitch suggested that they lie down and talk it over. Teddy primly shook her corn-colored head.

'Now, you wouldn't want to rob my future husband, would you? You wouldn't want to take something that was rightfully his?'

'Well, look,'-Mitch frowned. 'If that's the way you feel, why did you, uh-'

'I thought you might like to examine the merchandise,' Teddy said. 'I mean, how could you make a commitment unless you knew what you were getting?'

'Uh, w-what-huh!' Mitch gasped.

'But please handle with care,' Teddy murmured, as she shyly shed her negligee. 'None of these items can be replaced.'

Crazy? Sure, it was! 'Who said different? Mitch was pretty crazy himself by the time she shoved him out the door, politely wishing him a good day's sleep. A good day's sleep, for God's sake, after all that seeing and not a single sampling!

He had never felt so frustrated. So furious. So-yes- flattered. Here was obviously a very high-class girl, a woman rather, who not only had everything it took downstairs, but a brain to go with it. A woman like that could have any man she wanted; she probably had to fight them off with a club. Yet she had chosen him, Boy Nobody, and she was prepared to go to any lengths (well, practically any) to get him.

And how could you knock a thing like that?

He was back in her apartment the next morning, and the next, and the next. Weakening, he tried to get at the reason behind her behavior, the why of her desire for marriage with him. But the answer, no answer, was always the same. 'Because you're my sugar, my own sweet daddy.'

'But you don't even know me! You never saw me until a few days ago.'

'Oh, yes I do,' she smiled serenely. 'Oh, yes, I did.'

'But how could you? I mean, when?'

'I know my daddy,' she said. 'I'd know my sugar anywhere.'

At the end of the week, he married her. There were one hundred and ten delicious pounds of reasons for doing so, and no apparent reason not to.

On their wedding night they both got sozzled on champagne. So sozzled that he was a little hazy about his share in consummating the marriage. But awakening to the sound of Teddy's sobs, he charged himself with brutality. She shook her head, hugging him fiercely.

'I'm j-just so happy, darling. S-So glad you're not d-dead!'

'Hmm, what?' Mitch mumbled foggily. 'Who's dead?'

'I know you couldn't be, darling! Everyone said you were, even the general wrote me a letter. But I knew, I knew, I knew…'

''S'nice,' Mitch yawned, and was suddenly asleep again.

He was not sure, the next morning, that it hadn't been a dream. In fact, he hardly thought about it at all, Teddy being a woman to give a man much more interesting and delightful things to think about. When eventually he became alarmed and consulted a psychiatrist-a permanent resident at the hotel where he was working-and was advised that Teddy quite probably had cast him in the leading role in her own private sex fantasy, something with roots trailing back into puberty, he was incredulous and angry.

It just couldn't be, dammit! It couldn't! Yet doubtless it was; he never had a better explanation for her. And the dream which he had become a part of-which Teddy had hooked him into being a part of-ultimately turned into a nightmare.

Meanwhile, there was the meeting with his mother. A meeting which, in a negative way, had at least one plus quality. It almost made Teddy seem like a dull-normal person.

It was about five years after his father's death had separated them, before he saw his mother. She wrote occasionally and vaguely, and he replied. But his letters were often returned for want of a forwarding address. Once he got an urgent wire from Dallas, asking for a hundred dollars. One year she remembered his birthday three times, each with a ten-dollar bill. Finally, after a silence of almost a year, she wrote him that she was married and very happy.

The letter had been a long time in catching up with him. It was addressed from the same city in which he was then working. He read it, feeling a nostalgic tug at his heart. Having an afternoon off from his job, he went out to see her.

The house was in a scrofulous neighborhood of similar dwellings. Flanking it on one side was a weed-grown railroad siding. On the other was an abandoned commercial building, its crumbling faзade clustered with grinning, frowning, earnest-looking posters of innumerable political aspirants- cardboard vultures on the bones of a dead dream.

Stepping up on the porch and starting to knock, Mitch glanced through the opened screen door. It was a so-called shotgun house, its three-and-a-half rooms in a row. It was just about impossible not to see into the bedroom, the second room back, and to hear the epigamic surgings of the bedsprings.

Mitch lowered his hand without knocking. He went quietly down the walk, and sauntered up to the corner and back. Then, he moved toward the porch again, whistling noisily. He knocked. He knocked a second time, and the throaty flushing of a toilet answered him. In the fragmented silence that followed, a silence punctuated by a man's surly monosyllables and simpering whinny which could not be, but was, his mother's, Mitch called out to her.

'Mother? It's me, Mitch.'

In the interim before she finally came to the door, Mitch almost called it off and left. He did not see how he could face the whinnier, the owner of that cowering voice, and he was sure that he had better not face her husband. He could see the man moving about the bedroom, a swarthy, sleek-haired character with very broad shoulders and an invisible waist. And he detested every inch of what he saw.

Still, knowing that he should beat it, Mitch was somehow held where he was. So after almost ten minutes, he was at last greeting his mother through the rusted screen. Through it, since she did not unlatch it, although her hand hesitated fearfully in the neighborhood of the latch.

'Francis,'-she spoke weakly over her shoulder. 'It's my son, dear.'

'Big deal.'

'Uh, would it be all right-could I have him come in, dear?'

'He ain't my kid.'

'Oh, thank you, dear, thank you,' his wife breathed gratefully. And Mitch was allowed to enter.

She gave Mitch a hasty peck, obviously fearfully aware of the man in the other room. Mitch sat down on one of the three straight chairs, a little puzzled by the appearance of the divan until he recognized it as the front seat of an automobile. His mother asked him what he was doing now, and he said he was night bell-captain at the city's leading hotel. She said that was nice, oh, that was awfully nice; wasn't that nice, Francis? ('Big deal ') And Mitch thought, Holy God, what's happened to her?

He knew the answer to that one, of course, and in a way it seemed to have been good for her. The