“Mah name’s Marvelle,” she said, out of breath. And when she flashed those legs and white breasts climbing into the truck I thought about chucking it all.
“This is Shelly here,” I said, “and I’m Eddie.”
Shelly still standing there dripping contentedly in the rain suddenly looked four feet tall. We got ourselves arranged in the cab. The truck had a floor shift and my arm hovered above the lovely warmth of Marvelle’s knees. I turned on the heater, the radio, and the wipers. It began to rain harder, the drops clanging like ball bearings on the metal roof. The seat was vinyl and the water from our wet clothes pooled under us as the windows began to fog. Above Marvelle’s brown bread scent was a hint of Violet Simplicity, a perfume one of my stepmothers had worn.
“So, what happened to all your friends?” I asked her.
“They got arrest-it.” She said it like a question, slinging her jaw to the left. “And Booey, he didn’t do nuthin.”
Shelly grinned like an eight-year-old at a peep show. “Seemed like Booey was gettin’ in his licks,” he said. It was funny how easily he had slipped into her accent.
I put it in gear and headed for the gate, passing some poor old tout in a clear green rain parka holding up a fan of tomorrow’s winning tip sheets.
“So, how’d you all do?” she asked. “Every time I looked over you was jumpin’ and whoopin’ up a storm.”
“We did all right,” I said.
“You got a system?”
“I’m telepathic.”
“No,” she said. “Can you read mah mind?”
“I might,” I said.
A bead of water dripped from the tip of her nose. “What am I thinkin’?”
“You wouldn’t want me to say it aloud.”
“Why, that is a fact.”
“He’s a mental patient,” said Shelly.
“Oh, well, then,” said Marvelle with a flop of the wrist.
“His father is Calvin Plum,” Shelly added.
“Should I know him?”
“It isn’t important,” I said.
“Can you do astrology?”
“Only when the moon is in the seventh house,” I said.
“And Jupiter aligns with Mars,” said a grinning Shelly, who had positioned himself for the best view down her blouse. Marvelle didn’t seem to mind.
“Y’all are from Mars,” she said good naturedly.
A wet woman smells like a wet cat, or maybe it was Shelly, but there was that Violet Simplicity mingled in with other robust and more titillating carnal and fresh-baked lipstick scents and I got to thinking about how things take form, and I wondered what flesh really was and how it got that way and what kept it together and how it stayed so sweet and firm and why it had to decay and then re-form somehow all ripe again like a peach on the bones of its next temporary owner.
Marvelle liked to talk, and though I wasn’t getting it all, Shelly was hanging on her every word.
“I don’t know how I’m gonna raise bail,” she was saying. “That’s the third time this month. Booey and Fred just don’t git along.” She turned her head to each of us, giving an imploring look with those gorgeous big eyes that brought to mind a starving child. “Sometimes I think about goin’ out on mah own.”
“How long you been in California?” I asked.
She fingered her chin. “About a year. Booey, he just got offa parole.”
“Parole for what?” I said.
She turned her head haughtily. “You have to read mah mind.”
“Aggravated assault.”
“Anybody could’ve guessed that.”
Shelly leered. I changed lanes and passed an old woman creeping along in her winged black Cadillac through the downpour at forty-five miles an hour, her sloshing tires half submerged. It was raining so hard I couldn’t see more than a hundred yards in front of me. The wipers slung the rain side to side as an Elton John song came on the radio, “Where to Now, St. Peter?” Marvelle sang some of the words, hitting the high notes just right on “blue canoe” and “half enchanted,” then found a comb and began to drag the water out of her hair.
It was twenty miles or so down the freeway to Downey. Marvelle lived on Cole Street in a rococo mansion with twenty-foot gilded pillars and a Louis XIV deck sitting atop a three-car garage. “Jesus,” Shelly whispered, thinking as I had that we’d be dropping Marvelle off at a trailer park. Shelly got out and held the truck door open for her. “Thank you kindly,” she said with a bow so low it would take Shelly half an hour to get that expression off his face.
We watched her stroll up the long driveway in the rain, the sodden, transparent skirt clinging to her hips. At the door, in the shelter of her portico, she gazed back at us, finger crooked on bottom lip. Shelly stared without breathing as if he were a toddler watching his mom boarding a rocket ship to another star. Finally, I waved, shoved the truck into first, and puttered away.
13.Sex and Murder Self-Help Book
IT WAS ALMOST NINE BY THE TIME WE GOT BACK TO SAN DIEGO. Driving half-drunk in the rain on the interstate with over a thousand dollars of winnings in my pocket and Marvelle’s scent like mental illness still hanging in the cab had pitched me into a swivet that would last me the week, I reckoned, unless a cop pulled me over or I got in a wreck. But I had to be positive and honest with myself and all that stuff that Doc Jangler had said. Seeing meat shop pictures of police lineups and half-naked chases across motel parking lots, I was glad I’d been able to resist Marvelle.
“We shoulda took her somewhere,” Shelly said for the third time.
“And done what with her?”
“I don’t know. Talked with her. Got some beer. Got a motel or something. Damn. How many opportunities do you get like that? She was beautiful.”
“Well, I like to think about consequences now and again.”
“Consequences!” he roared. “Since when?”
“Since Booey just got out on parole.”
“Hell.” Shelly groaned and shook his head heavily. “Booey’da never found us.”
“Well, she’s gone now,
