Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [111]
“Hell no. You must be a nympho or something.”
“Are you kidding? Do you know what a nympho is? It’s a skinny nervous woman who fucks to keep from going crazy. That’s not my problem at all. I’m not frigid; I’m just not tender and shy, like a textbook All-American feminine, that’s all.”
“What is your problem, then?”
“I just told you. I want everything sometimes. And I’m not going to get everything. Ever.”
There was something terribly wistful about her face, and Jack leaned over and kissed her gently, knowing of no other way of telling her he understood. He was about to whisper that he loved her when she broke away from him, tossing her head impatiently. “Don’t. I don’t like to kiss while I’m thinking.”
“Then stop thinking.”
She laughed and then hiccupped. “Oops. Too much drink.” She held out her glass and he filled it halfway and took a long gurgling drink from the bottle.
“Do you mind if I spend the rest of the night here?” he asked. “I’m too pooped to go home.” She didn’t answer right away, so he changed the subject. “Gee, I wish the fellows in Quentin could see me now.”
“I know what,” she said. “Let’s go down to Vegas and fuck around for a few days.”
“Tonight?”
“No, silly. In the morning. We’ll fly down. Fuck all day and play the slots all night. Sound good?”
To Jack it sounded very good, like an adolescent masturbation fantasy, but good anyway. “You’re really something,” he said. “You’re like a man, you know that?”
She giggled. “In what way?”
“The way you talk. That’s all. The way you think.”
“Anything wrong with that?”
“Hail, no,” he said. “Let’s go to sleep.”
“If you feel anything funny during the night, don’t worry, it’ll be me. Playing little games.”
Jack went to sleep thinking that he was a long way from San Quentin, a long way from anything he had ever known. It was easy to go to sleep thinking it would go on like this forever.
In the morning he was a little surprised that Sally still wanted to go to Las Vegas. She said, “We’ll take a cab over to your place and get your things and then haul ass for the airport. We’ll probably get there by the middle of the afternoon.”
Jack scratched his head. “How about letting me make breakfast for us? I cooked in the joint.”
“Okay. I have to make reservations.”
Jack went into the tiny kitchen. From the window over the sink he could see Alcatraz dazzling in the bay under a perfect sky. It was only seven in the morning, but there were already a few sailboats out, their white sails and bright spinnakers canting before the breeze. Jack could guess how the men on The Rock felt about the sailboats. They wished urgently that they could get their hands on one of them and sail off to Mexico or Venezuela. He wondered how the people on the boats felt about Alcatraz. If they didn’t suffer from guilt, they probably thought it was interesting—part of the attraction of the Bay area. Jack felt good just from knowing he wasn’t on The Rock; he did not feel sorry for the men out there; he didn’t feel sorry for anybody. He felt too good. His body could still remember the night, and for the time being he didn’t have a worry in the world. It was damned good to be out of prison. He thought about Claymore. Claymore must have known how good it was. Jack had never known before. He had been a punk, with a punk’s outlook, a punk’s self-pity and conceit, thinking the world was out to get him. That was stupid; he was mature now, time to enjoy life. And how lucky he was to have fallen into this!
“You know,” he called out to her, “if I hadn’t been railroaded into the joint, I wouldn’t be here right now.”
She came into the kitchen, dressed in a light-blue sweater that almost matched her eyes, those remarkable, penetrating, honest blue eyes, that seemed in the morning light to have a tinge of lavender in them, like the eyes of a Siamese cat. He drew her to him and kissed her, and the kiss seemed to make her girlish and innocent, the way she put her hands up on his chest and looked at him.
“Was it worth