“Gentlewoman, start your engine,” Laverne said.
Thelma did, but before driving away she raised the top on the convertible so they didn’t look completely crazy.
She drove out to highway 270, then went north and got on I-70 headed west, toward Kansas City. When they took the bridge across the Missouri River, Thelma thought it was like crossing that Rubicon river she’d heard about, where there was no turning back. Not ever.
The two friends would start new lives under their new names in their new city, and they would date men who were more sophisticated than Seth or the losers Laverne dated. Laverne could get a job being hostess at a higher-class restaurant for much more generous pay. And if she didn’t like it there, she would quit. When either of them had had enough and, for whatever reason, wanted to move on to a more golden West, that is what they would do. What they were was completely free, even from each other.
The rain stopped and the sun came out, just for them. Or so it seemed. The Sebring rattled some but ran smoothly over the pavement, reminding Thelma of a magic carpet. Or the magic of movies, and she and Laverne were the stars. They would live in what they’d make a luxury apartment. They would dine out when they felt like it and shop at the Plaza and live like royalty. To the west lay the queendom of happiness.
All part of the plan.
Only a few miles outside Kansas City, they had a head-on collision with a pickup truck.
* * *
The two vehicles barely clipped each other, like a high-speed metallic kiss. The Sebring swayed and swerved but stayed on the highway. The pickup truck went bouncing and jouncing off the shoulder and into some high weeds.
“Fool was goin’ the wrong way!” Laverne said, as Thelma pulled over and parked. “Musta come down the off-ramp. Did you see him? Did you see that bastard comin’ right at us?” She sounded somewhat shaken, but not unduly so.
Thelma ignored her, got out, and walked to the front of the Sebring, which was idling on the highway’s slanted shoulder as if the driver had pulled over there to study a map or make a cell phone call. The left front fender was bashed in and there was a long scrape down the car’s side. It was still running, though. The engine was ticking over smoothly.
Laverne grinned at her through the windshield and Thelma grinned back.
When Thelma was behind the steering wheel again, she said, “Let’s drive back and look in on that fool in the pickup truck.”
“Screw him!” Laverne said.
“That’s just what I wanna tell him.”
They went in reverse back to where the truck sat almost out of sight in the brush. It was black, dented all over, and silent.
Thelma and Laverne walked to where the driver was seated behind the truck’s steering wheel.
The driver wasn’t a he; it was a hefty woman wearing a red and white do-rag on her head. Some of the red was blood.
“Damn fool didn’t have her seat belt buckled,” Laverne said. “Look there where her head banged on the windshield.”
The truck’s windshield was starred as if it had been struck from inside with a hammer. There was blood on the break in the glass.
“Other one was belted in, but he don’t look so good either,” Thelma said.
They moved around to the passenger side of the truck and both gasped at what they saw. The passenger was a mannequin wearing men’s clothing, including blue jeans, a plaid shirt, and a tan slouch hat pulled low over its face.
“Don’cha get it?” Thelma said. “She was traveling with a dummy so people’d think a man was along and wouldn’t mess with her.”
“And so she could use the car pool lanes,” Laverne said.
“That too.”
It was true that more and more women were traveling with artificial male passengers. Dummies or mannequins with obviously male clothing. Real enough at a glance. A safety measure in a dangerous world. Not much help in this situation.
“What now?” Laverne asked.
“I want that dummy,” Thelma said.
Laverne glanced back into the truck. “What for?”
“I want it. Simple as that.”
“It’s got blood on it. From the driver’s head, I guess.”
“Don’t care,” Thelma said. “You watch an’ tell me when there’s no cars comin’, and I’ll get Henry outta there and put him in the Sebring.”
“Henry?”
“I always thought if I got mixed up with a man named Henry, it’d bring me luck.”
“Henry it is, then.” Laverne moved to slightly higher ground where she could watch the highway. “Lotsa bugs around here,” she said, slapping at her bare arm.
“Yeah.”
“Listen, Esther—”
“Thelma.”
“Okay. That lady in the car is surely dead. Ain’t this some kinda crime?”
“Stealin’ a dummy? I guess so. Just a misdemeanor, I’d imagine.”
“I meant leavin’ a dead body in a vehicle like we are.”
“It was an accident.”
“Still an’ all, just up and leavin’ like we’re doin’ … Ain’t that a crime?”
“Don’t know an’ don’t care,” Thelma said.
She leaned into the truck and wrestled the mannequin from the passenger seat, careful not to get much blood on her. The driver’s eyes were open, as if she was staring at the speedometer.
“Clear,” Laverne said.
* * *
Kansas City worked out surprisingly well. Laverne right off got a job waiting tables in a jazz club on West 8th Street. It was in a neighborhood that used to be the old Garment District, and where the aroma of coffee from a nearby roasting plant on Broadway hung in the air. Laverne found she liked the pervasive coffee scent, even if it did soon emanate from most of her clothes. They served more liquor than food at the club, and the tips were good.
Thelma, though she was the one without the boobs, found work as a pole dancer in a place called T&A. The pervasive scents there were booze and stale perspiration. Laverne told Thelma she didn’t know she could dance. Thelma said that didn’t matter because nobody could dance anyway in the stiff leather outfit the management made her wear. Laverne decided not to ask any more questions.
The two of them pooled their money and rented an apartment in a neighborhood where the odds were okay that they wouldn’t get raped or robbed. They had to park the Sebring out at the curb, though, and sometimes kids or somebody wrote stuff on the windows with soap. It was no big deal, because it came right off with a razor blade and a damp rag.
So they were happy enough there, Thelma, Laverne, and Henry.
Sometimes Laverne wondered about Thelma and Henry. Laverne didn’t treat the mannequin like a real person, but she did buy him a change of clothes. Even a pretty good gray suit—wide in the shoulders so it looked something like a zoot suit—at a Goodwill store. Taught herself to tie a man’s tie.
It did give Laverne the green willies when Thelma would talk to Henry like he was real, propped up there in a corner of the sofa, where he usually sat. Laverne even walked in on them once when Thelma was telling Henry a long story about some guy at T&A who’d tried to stuff a five-dollar bill down her leather costume and got his watch band snagged in some chains. When Thelma gave the watch back to the guy he’d kissed it, despite where it had been. Thelma had told the story to Laverne more than once or twice.
Laverne drove Thelma to work one day and went into T&A just to see the place. It was rough and full of rough people. Only a few of the customers were women. Most of the men looked as if they’d just gotten out of prison. They were staring at the busty redhead dancing around a pole like she was a juicy steak they were about to cut into. Laverne wondered how frail little Thelma could stand it there.
Maybe a reasonably stable home life helped. Stable compared to life at T&A, anyway.
The three of them didn’t watch much television other than reality shows, but they usually had a radio playing jazz. They’d gotten fond of that kind of music, and Kansas City was one of the birthplaces of jazz. Laverne wondered how that was possible—
one
of the birthplaces. Thelma always got a big laugh out of it when Laverne pondered that question aloud, and would glance at Henry as if he was sitting there laughing along with her, instead of just sitting there being a mannequin. Laverne thought that in truth his expression was always kind of haughty. She suggested one time that Henry was a bit big for his pinstripe britches, and Thelma got so mad she threw an apple at her that almost struck her in the face.
Thelma saw a classified ad in the
Star
and bought some fella’s jazz CD collection and player, with big remote speakers. Soon she began leaving music on for Henry to listen to when he was alone.
Things got stranger from there. Laverne would find odd things lying about the apartment, like a black thong that, so far as Laverne knew, Thelma never wore. Least ways, she hadn’t seen it in the wash. And when Laverne looked in Thelma’s dresser to see if one of her shirts was in there by mistake, she discovered some kind of weird metal clamps poorly hidden under a stack of folded T-shirts. And one day Laverne noticed a used condom on the tile floor near the back of the toilet.
Laverne hoped Thelma wasn’t mixed up with one of those sicko types she’d seen at T&A. Those guys could bruise a woman just with their eyes.
Then she chastised herself. Maybe the guys at T&A were simply normal red-blooded American men. What was that saying about books and covers?
Laverne decided to make a joke out of the condom. “Saw somethin’ this mornin’ that made me wonder,” she told Thelma over a breakfast of coffee and cheese pastries at a nearby Starbuck’s. “You and Henry gettin’ it on?”
Thelma didn’t seem surprised by the question. “Not exactly.”
“What’s that mean?” Laverne had never really examined the mannequin for anatomical accuracy. Just thinking about it made something slither up her spine.
“I think you better drop that question,” Thelma said. “About me and Henry.” She stood up, holding both cups. “I’ll go get us some warm-ups.”
When Thelma returned to the table, they talked about how old Johnny Depp was and who was the best celebrity dancer.
* * *
Life fell into a routine that was at least bearable. Laverne got a raise. Thelma seemed happy enough pole dancing. The two women puttered around the apartment when they were home. The CD player was usually on, Miles Davis and his trumpet. Or Thelma filled the silence humming Miles Davis tunes. Henry pretty much just sat there.
Laverne forgot about the black thong and metal clamps and the condom, until happenstance brought them again to the fore of her mind. She came home early from work one day, and as soon as she walked in and shut the door behind her, she heard a strange noise from the bedroom.
Thelma wasn’t supposed to be there. She was scheduled to be working at T&A.
Listening to sudden silence, Laverne stood motionless except for her eyes. Her gaze met Henry’s, and his return gaze seemed knowing and amused.
“That you, Laverne?” Thelma called from the bedroom. Her voice sounded deeper, huskier than usual.
“Me!” Laverne called. The bedsprings squeaked. It didn’t take an idiot to figure out what was going on here. “Should I come back later?”
“Naw,” a man’s voice said. “No point in that, long as you’re here.”
He walked out of the bedroom, a large man with lots of dark hair all over his body. Red and blue tattoos covered his whole left side, including his arm. A black beard and mustache concealed most of his face, and lank greasy hair the same color was slicked back and dangled down to his shoulders. He was totally nude except for the condom that covered his huge erection. It was the kind with a reservoir tip.
“You must be Laverne,” he said with a wide grin. He was missing a few teeth up top and it made him look kind of devilish.
At first Laverne couldn’t take her eyes off his erection. When she did look away from it, she saw the knife in his hand. It was a long switchblade or gravity knife, thin and sharp.
“This is Henry’s brother,” Thelma said by way of introduction. She was standing in the bedroom doorway, as nude as the man. Laverne noticed a tattoo on Thelma that she hadn’t seen before, fancy blue letters spelling out
DEATH VALLEY
low on her stomach, an inch or so above her pubic hair.
“I didn’t know Henry had a brother,” Laverne said inanely.
“They was never close.”
It struck Laverne that Thelma had been working too long at T&A. Which is when she realized she’d seen Henry’s brother before, at the bar of T&A, which ran in a curve at the foot of the stage where the dancers performed. He’d been dressed all in black leather like a biker and was half drunk and doing a lot of bragging.
“I know you,” she heard herself say. The words had sharp angles and hurt her throat when she talked.
Henry’s brother had a crazy look on his face, but it wasn’t the craziest look in the room.
“You mean you know my kind,” he said. Again the wide, satanic grin. “I bet you think you know all about me. Got me pegged as the worst kinda asshole.”
“No, no—”
“Don’t apologize. You’re right on the money.”
He came at her slowly with the knife held low.
“You gonna hurt me?” she asked.
“Only for a while.”
Laverne looked to Thelma for help, but her friend was standing with her hands over her eyes, her painted lips forming an ugly, elongated triangle. Henry was no help either. He just sat and stared, looking faintly amused. Above it all, was Henry.
On fear-numbed legs, Laverne backed into a corner.
“You got no reason to hurt me,” she said in a pleading voice.
Henry’s brother shrugged and said, “Fun.”
* * *
“What’s that over there?” the big homicide detective named Small asked. “That a note?”
His partner Jarvis went over and used the cap of his ballpoint pen to poke at a folded piece of paper, only enough so that he could peek and read what was written on it. The CD player was still on a Miles Davis piece, soft and smooth. Neither detective would mess with that or the note until the crime scene unit was finished.
Jarvis read the note aloud, raising his voice slightly to be heard clearly above the trumpet: “
Sorry, Laverne. It’s all too much, as you well know. Me and Henry’s brother are going farther west together. You and Henry can be happy, I know. Or so I tell myself. Loves and kisses, Thelma
.”