Authors: Dan Wakefield
“I don't even know if she's around anymore,” Gunner said. “Jesus, I haven't been back in a year and a half. We could buzz the D-Vu, though, and ask around.”
“Why not?” Sonny said, trying to seem casual. He was shaking a little bit, excited by the prospect that something might really happen.
They settled up the tab and walked to the car. As they neared it, Gunner laughed and said aloud the words on the side of the wagon, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”
“It was easier to get this one than my old man's car,” Sonny apologized. “It's a real bitch having that shit on the side, though, especially for tonight.”
“Hell, no,” Gunner assured him. “That might help us to score. We can say we've come to save their soul.”
That fuckin guy can always see the bright side, Sonny thought admiringly.
They rolled down the windows in the front and Sonny drove with his right hand, the left arm slung out the window in a V-form, casual-like. As they drove north, toward the D-Vu, the sharp, green smell of wet grass grew stronger, an earthy intoxicant. The tires made a licking sort of sound on the soaked streets.
“Donna Mae Orlick,” Gunner said. “What a pair of knockers.”
“Tree-mendous,” Sonny said. He wasn't speaking from what might be called, in a factual sense, “first-hand knowledge,” but he wasn't really lying, either, since he often
saw
how tremendous her boobs were, pushing against her light silk waitress blouse. She didn't wear a bra and you could really see the nipples and the little bumps around them. What did you call those things? Niplets, maybe.
“You rubbed the tips of those babies,” Gunner was recalling of Donna Mae's knockers, “they stood up hard as pencils. Then she was ready to go.”
“Mmmm,” Sonny commented.
His prick had begun to crawl forward along his left thigh. He pulled his arm in from outside the window and gripped the steering wheel with both hands, hard.
“Shit, though, she's probably long gone from the D-Vu,” Gunner said.
“Well, ya never know.”
Dear God
, Sonny thought,
let Donna Mae Orlick still work at the Ron-D-Vu
. Then he added,
Forgive me, oh, Lord
.
Even though he hated God and religion, sometimes words and phrases like that, sounding like prayers, broke into his mind uninvited and without his consent, as irresistible as intruders who force their way into your house.
“Donna Mae, Donna Mae, do it with me in the hay,” Gunner sang, making up his own tune.
Ron-D-Vu
was spelled out in purple neon letters on the roof of the drive-in. It was made in a cement circle, painted white, with an oblong hole cut out where the waitresses picked up the orders. The car crunched up on the black cinder skirt that spread out and around the building, and Sonny drove slowly, looking for a spot. Cars nestled up around the place like puppies feeding off a giant tit, and there always were others patrolling the outer edges, looking for a good slot. It wasn't any good for a couple of guys to pull in next to a car with other guys, or guys with dates. What you wanted was to slide in next to a car with a couple of sexy babes who were hot to go.
“Take a lap,” Gunner said.
Sonny eased the car around the circle, peering for something good.
“There!” Gunner said, spotting a convertible with two blondes. Sonny had just gone past and he stopped and looked to see if he could back in, but as he stared in the rear-view mirror, a two-tone Ford gunned into the space with a squeal of tires and a shower of cinders.
“Shit,” Sonny said apologetically.
“Ah, fuck it. Pull in anywhere.”
Sonny eased the car into the next big space he saw. On one side was a car with a guy on a date, the girl leaning on his shoulder. On the other side was some old guy and his wife.
“We might as well chow down,” Gunner said, “if we're gonna be boozing the rest of the night.”
, “Right,” Sonny agreed, but he had no appetite. He knew he should eat because you get smashed faster on an empty stomach, but when he was thinking about sex he was never hungry. He ordered a plain hamburger and a Coke just to get something inside him so he wouldn't get woozy or sick right away when he started drinking. Gunner asked for two cheeseburgers with everything, an order of fries, an order of onion rings, and two chocolate shakes. The waitress was a scrawny, bored-looking girl with no tits at all, and food stains on her blouse.
“Say, Good-looking,” Gunner asked her when she finished writing the order down. “Does Donna Mae Orlick still work here?”
“Not that I heard of,” she said and flicked away, turning her nose up.
“Maybe she's just new,” Sonny said hopefully.
Gunner shrugged. “Let's case the joint,” he said and got out of the car.
Sonny got out of his side, blinking in the neon glare. He wasn't used to parading around the drive-ins on foot, like the Big Rods always did, strolling along like they owned the place, peering into cars and banging on the hoods of cars whose drivers they knew, or sometimes just if the driver was a cute girl. Sonny tried to feel casual. He shoved his hands in his pockets, kicked a little at the cinders, and followed along behind Gunner.
A bunch of guys were gathered around a Ford that was cut down and painted like a stock-car racer with a big, scrawly number “77” on the side. The hood was up, and the guys were looking in at the motor, which was no doubt very souped-up. Sonny recognized some as old Cathedral guys, who had gone to that Catholic high school. Mainly people from Shortley and Butler University went to the D-Vu, but some of the Cathedral guys went there looking for North Side snatch, guys who didn't want to go out with the girls from St. Mary's. Sonny had always been a little afraid of those Catholic guys, with their silver religious medals hanging on chains outside their T-shirts; swarthy, dark guys with big muscles who figured they had God on their side, too. And Sonny believed it. A couple of the guys in this bunch around the car were in Naval uniforms, but the others were in slacks and sport shirts, and there was one really big guy wearing Levis pressed like iron and a fancy orange-silk cowboy shirt. As Gunner and Sonny approached, the group began looking up from the hood and checking them out. One guy spit a big hocker into the cinders, and Sonny began to slow down, but Gunner sauntered right on and said real loud, “Who is that fancy mothering cowboy? Tom Mix or Roy Rogers?”
The guy in the cowboy shirt whipped around with his eyes looking like tips of knife blades, and Sonny stopped dead in his tracks.
“Big Quinn!” Gunner shouted.
The big guy relaxed, straightening up from what looked to Sonny like his karate position for instant murder, and tipped back his cowboy hat. “Gunner, you ole bastard,” he said with pleasure.
The two guys met and whacked the hell out of each other in greeting. Sonny remembered, when he heard the name, “Big Quinn” was one of those Cathedral guys who was supposed to be a great athlete but was always dissipating and never made his grades, so he never got to play varsity ball, but in the sandlot games and the alley-ball games he outplayed all the big stars from around the city, and in a funny way they had more respect for him than for the heroes everyone knew about. Only the other jocks knew about Big Quinn; he was something special. Instead of going to college, Big Quinn served a four-year hitch in the Navy, and now he was driving stocks in the dirt-track races and working part time in the Herman Cohen Men's Attire Shop on 38th Street. He always dressed real sharp.
Gunner and Big Quinn shot the shit for a while and Gunner got around to asking him whatever happened to Donna Mae Orlick.
Big Quinn hooted and slapped his knee. “Married,” he said. “Settled down. Can ya picture it?”
“How'd it happen?” Gunner asked, in the tone of a man inquiring about a great pianist who had lost his fingers.
“Some guy from Terre Haute knocked her up. She had a pie in the oven, and the guy married her.”
“Shit,” Gunner said, “couldn't he have got three witnesses to testify?”
It was said that if a girl got pregnant and you could get three other guys to testify they had fucked her, too, there was some law that said you didn't have to marry her because she was a loose woman or something. It was one of those things that everyone seemed to know about, but nobody was too clear on. If you asked a lot of questions about it, that showed you were green, so everyone just accepted it, as far as Sonny could tell.
“Buddy, you talk about
three
âhe could of got three
hundred
,” Big Quinn said. “But the guy was from
Terre Haute
. He didn't
know
.”
“Oh, my achin' ass,” Gunner said.
“
His
achin' ass,” Big Quinn said, and both of them laughed. Gunner said he had to get back to his chow, and both guys biffed one another on the arm and said they'd see each other around.
“Well, no more Donna Mae Orlick,” Gunner said as he and Sonny went back to the wagon.
“Son of a bitch,” Sonny said.
Somehow he figured it was
his
bad luck, that it was just to torment him that Donna Mae had got knocked up and married some Terre Haute guy. The waitress came with the food, and Sonny made himself swallow the Coke and hamburger even though he didn't feel like it. Gunner chowed down like a starving Armenian. When he finished he let out a satisfied belch, clapped his hands together, and said, “O.K., team, let's go get 'em.”
Sonny gunned the motor, peeled the old wagon out of the lot and into the street with confident purpose, and then slowed down. “Where to?” he asked.
“Well, what say we check out the East Side. Maybe we can find us some Tech babies.”
“Right,” Sonny said, feeling a shiver of fear and excitement.
They were on their way to what was for them, North Side guys, foreign and often hostile territory. Looking for “Tech babies,” girls who went or had gone to Manual-Technical High School. Manual-Technical! The name itself conjured up in Sonny's mind images of vast machinery; lathes and pistons, turbines and diesels, great groaning gears and belching smokestacks, sooty air and greasy rags, Bessemer steel, spontaneous combustion. That was the sort of thing Sonny figured you learned about when you went to Manual-Technical. The massive school was housed in an old armory, a spread of gray, dungeony buildings on a grassless, sooty campus by the clanging streetcar tracks, in sight of the factories where its graduates would file into line after graduation to grind out their living. The school's colors were black and redâmost brutal of hues, most basic and bestial, red of the workingman's blood and black of his heavy industrial machines. Their athletic teams were called “The Black Riveters” and were known for their hulking, grinding efficiency. Their line could mash enemy quarterbacks to scrap; their fullbacks were trucks wearing uniforms. Manual-Technical stood on the opposite side of town from Shortley, and though there were other schools scattered between and beyond, these were the two giants, the natural archrivals, the poles of human oppositionâthe Manual-Technical Black Riveters versus the Shortley Blue Barons. The Shortley colors were robin's egg blue and cream (“whipped cream,” the envious rivals called it and sneered at the Barons as “cream puffs”) and yet their rivalry over the years was evenly matched, it ebbed and flowed back and forth like the very forces in the world itself that the two schools seemed to represent.
As they neared downtown, before turning east, Gunner spotted a colored woman on a streetcorner, crooking her finger at them.
“Dark meat for sale,” he observed.
Sonny glanced up at the street number, to file in his memory. Just in case.
They headed out East 10th Street, and Gunner asked Sonny to stop at a dim little park where some kids were clustered on benches, talking and giggling.
“I'll check it out,” he said.
Sonny didn't want to watch as Gunner sauntered right up to the kids and struck up a conversation. There were some louder giggles, and Gunner came back and said to move on.
“Jail-bait,” he explained.
They stopped again when Gunner spotted a couple of girls in toreadors hanging around outside a little rundown drugstore. Sonny pulled up at the opposite corner and Gunner went back to talk to them. Sonny lit a cigarette, trying not to let his hand shake. He snuck a look in the rear-view mirror and saw Gunner gesturing, turning his powers of persuasion on them. Sonny wondered what the hell he'd do if Gunner actually got them into the car. He was almost more afraid that Gunner would succeed than he was that Gunner would fail. When Gunner came back alone, Sonny felt a secret relief.
“Just little teasers,” Gunner explained when he came back empty-handed. “Listen, let's hit the Tropics Club. It's farther out on Tenth.”
The Tropics Club had a jazz combo, and the place was heavy with smoke and people. Burly guys with T-shirts and tattoos on their biceps, sharpies with flashy sport shirts and ducktail haircuts, babes in tight skirts and flouncy hairdos. The combo wasn't bad, and Sonny and Gunner ordered boilermakers and started tapping the table in time with the music. A couple of babes came in by themselves and sat down about three tables away, but they were real dogs.
After three boilermakers Gunner glanced at the two broads again and said, grinning, “Funny thing, later it gets, the better they look.”
“The dogs, you mean?” Sonny asked.
Gunner raised a palm, as if protesting. “Think positive,” he said. “Look for the good in people.”
“Like what?”
“Well, take the blonde, for instance. Her face'd stop a clock, but see if you can't find some âgood points' about her.”
“Yeh,” Sonny said. “She's built like a brick shithouse.”
“If I ever saw one,” Gunner said. He bolted his shot, chased it with a long gulp of beer, and looked a little glassily at Sonny. “But I never did see one, come to think of it. Did you?”