Trap Line - Carl Hiaasen [11]
“You’ve already been very sexy. Twice. Once on the top, once on the bottom.”
“Complaining?”
“I’m kind of hungry.”
“No,” Laurie said firmly, embarking on a longer, more tingling pause. “You want eat? I’ll give you eat.”
“What the hell,” Albury said.
Later, the smell of frying bacon roused him. He lit a cigarette and assayed the sounds from the tiny kitchen. Laurie was a tolerable cook. She came in after a few minutes with a cup of fresh coffee and tweaked his nose gently.
“I’m cooking up a half-dozen eggs. With garlic,” she announced. “The Sunday is young.”
She was the hungriest damn woman he had ever met. Ate like a horse and fucked like a dream. She had been with him almost a year and never once let him imagine that he was the only one. Some nights she didn’t come home. But then again neither did he, some nights.
Albury had met her in a bar and they’d screwed for the first time twenty minutes later in the backseat of the Pontiac. Like two horny kids.
She never talked much about herself, but as the year went by she let more and more show, the way a hermit crab slips out of the shell to see if it’s safe to dash for another. Laurie Ravenel, South Carolina girl, victim of one of those fancy New England colleges where they’d pruned her accent, straightened her hair, and filled her head with so much useless drivel that she had graduated a well-groomed zombie—poised, fashionable, and neurotic. A stockbroker had wooed her, married her, bored her, and caught her in bed with his best friend in quick succession.
She had stopped in Key West because that was where the road ended. A bright girl, but awful empty-headed sometimes. She was a sucker for causes. One week she collected petitions to build a refuge for sooty terns, as though Miss Ravenel, going on thirty and a Key West expert for all of six months, would know a sooty tern to say hello to if one nested smack between her big boobs. The gay crowd down at the Cowrie was where she picked up that kind of bullshit. It was like a virus. With each new cause—Save Fort Jefferson, Protect Our Beaches, Ban All Fishtraps—Albury seesawed between amusement and anger.
Laurie had been the first woman Albury had brought home since Peg had left. He had thought about it a long time before deciding it wouldn’t hurt Ricky. He was old enough to know which end was up. And they hit it right off, Laurie and Ricky. She might not have been the mother he needed, but she did fine as kind of an older sister. She cut his hair; washed his clothes; helped him with his homework, particularly when the math was beyond Albury; and one night, when he had come home with a savage crick in his pitching arm, Laurie had spent more than an hour working on it.
Most Sundays, Albury didn’t go out on the boat. Now he dozed on the black vinyl sofa. He dabbled with the newspaper, poked at a western. Laurie had appropriated the bedroom to write, so he made himself a scotch, quietly. It had been one week since his edgy conversation with Winnebago Tom. Albury had stopped by the Green Lantern a few nights before, and the arrogant asshole had waved at him and sent over a drink. A rum punch, whatever the hell that meant. Albury had left it on the bar.
The end of the month was on him. The bills were stacked up in the middle of the room, but they would keep.
Laurie emerged at one point in search of a verb. She was predictably disheveled in one of Albury’s boat shirts and a pair of her favorite lime panties. Poetry really took it out of her.
“You know the word ‘shirr,’ like shirr eggs?”
“So?”
“Do you think I can use it as a verb, to describe time? Like time ‘shirred’?”
“Sure.” He pronounced it to mock her.
“Don’t be stupid. I think it’ll work.”
Albury asked lightly, “Hey, lady, when are you going to sell one of them poems?” He rhymed poem with comb.
“Soon. Sooner than you think,” Laurie said. She slammed the door so hard that the windowpanes rattled.
Albury went back to his western. He would give Tom another week to run up the flags.