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  BINGE ON A BLANKET

  Something leaped inside me. “You’re not sure?”

  “I’m not sure of anything.”

  I reached for a couple of fresh cans of beer.

  “I’d like to help you make up your mind.”

  She took a can of beer and wiped the sweat off it.

  “Maybe you should,” she confessed.

  “You’ve changed my life a lot,” I said.

  “Have I?” She seemed pleased.

  “More than you know.”

  She leaned toward me, her elbows on her knees, her eyes intent on my face.

  “How much, Chip?”

  I couldn’t let her go on like that, expecting an answer, and not do something about it. I threw the beer aside and grabbed her by the shoulders.

  “This much,” I said, pulling her to me.

  It was a good kiss. Her mouth was alive under mine and she let out a little sob. I pushed her back on the blanket …

  THE LADY IS A LUSH

  ORRIE HITT

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Binge on a Blanket

  Title Page

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  The Promoter

  Also Available

  Copyright

  1

  IT HAD begun to rain when I left Andersonville. Now, a hundred and fifty miles south, the stuff was sheeting down. The windshield wipers on the big tractor were doing a good job but the lights seemed dim on the ribbon of concrete up ahead. I wondered if it was just the murky night or if I was going to have trouble with the battery.

  Highway 64 is a good truck road, mostly flat, and you can roll along at sixty without any trouble at all. That’s fast enough when you’ve got forty tons of steel on the trailer because if you have to stop you don’t stop in a hurry. If the chains aren’t tight and you hit the brakes real hard you can put most of the load through the back of the cab and your next of kin can order you a pine box.

  I lit a cigarette and thought about my next of kin — Amy, my wife. Some kin. She was twenty years old, a tramp who drank too much and played around when I was on the road. The only reason I hadn’t kicked her out during the first year of our marriage was the fact that she was going to inherit twenty-five thousand dollars when she was twenty-one. With twenty-five thousand I could break into business on my own — even if I started in a small way there would be more money in it than in hauling for someone else. Hays’ Trucking had started out with just two trucks and I didn’t see why I couldn’t do the same. If I paid cash for the equipment I wouldn’t be chewed to death with finance charges.

  A steep hill rose in front of me, one of the few on the route, and I kept the rig rolling until I had to shift gears. The truck had a stick shift, ten speeds ahead, and I liked it better than some of the automatics Hays had recently purchased. I knew it to be two years old but the mechanics in the shop kept it in good condition and it was dependable. I had been driving it for almost a month now, hauling bridge steel, and it had always been willing to get out and move.

  “You’ll be on this run until cold weather,” Hays had promised. “When it gets cold they’ll shut the job down and I’ll put you on something else.”

  “Okay.”

  I had been with Hays three years, hitting on with him a year before my marriage to Amy. Up to now, most of my trips had been to New York, hauling glass from the factory in Andersonville. The switch had made me happy, for the steel run paid more and the way things were going with Amy I could use the extra money. Our apartment was cheap enough, on the South Side, but she was always charging stuff and I was getting bills in every other mail. Some of the things she needed and some she didn’t but I tried to keep my temper down. Every time I got ready to have it out with her I thought of that twenty-five grand.

  “You’d think I was a baby,” she often said. “How come that court tied up the money? It was my father who was killed in the automobile accident.”

  I didn’t know the answer to this question — I couldn’t explain it to her. She had lived with an aunt after the death of her father — her mother had died while giving her birth. I had met her in a bar just before her eighteenth birthday. She had been drinking coke but I had slipped her a couple of fast shots of whisky and, on the way home, it hadn’t been difficult to encourage her to visit the park. I had scored easily and should have left her alone after that but I hadn’t. She had been more than adequate from a sex standpoint and, after her graduation from high school, I had married her.

  “You give me a kid and I’ll split your head open,” she told me on our honeymoon. “Kids may be all right but I’m not ready for any just yet.”

  The first year had not been bad but after that she had begun to drift, making excuses about visiting girl friends but actually getting tanked up in some bar. Mrs. Golden, who owned the apartment house had told me that since I had been hauling steel more than one man had spent more than one night with Amy. I had jumped Amy about it, not mentioning Mrs. Golden’s name, and she had struck back at me like a savage.

  “What about you swimming with that Gloria Hays?” she had stormed. “When you were working days you used to see her every evening down at the river. Don’t tell me you haven’t liked what you’ve been getting from her.”

  She had been right about my seeing Gloria and swimming with her at the city beach but not about the rest of it. Gloria worked for her father in the office, and I had never made a pass at her, though she was attractive enough. She had long black hair, soft brown eyes and at five-one she was a foot shorter than I. She liked to swim and her thirty-six inch bust looked good in a bathing suit. I won’t say I hadn’t had the idea of throwing a pitch more than once, but she knew I was married and I didn’t think she was the kind who played around. Some of the other truckers had tried to date her, the single fellows, without much luck. The only reason I saw her was because we both liked to swim and she generally came to the beach alone.

  I kept changing gears and the motor of the truck labored under the load of steel. Slowly we crawled up the hill through the rain. It was the last hill before Fulton, ten miles away. At Fulton I would stop at Sammy’s Rest for coffee and throw the bull with other drivers. Sammy’s was outside town limits and the big rigs stopped there because there was plenty of parking space. And if we stopped at one of the diners in town people trying to sleep kicked up a stink because we left our motors running and they made too much noise. Sometimes the cops gave out tickets for disturbing the peace and it was annoying. Most of us didn’t think it was legal but it didn’t pay to argue and we stuck with Sammy’s.

  Before the coming of the motels, Sammy had done a good business renting tourist cabins, but now almost the only such trade he got was from people who were trying to make a little love in private. Sometimes, he said, he rented a cabin two or three times during a night. Of course, this was outside the law but Sammy was never one to let a technicality stand in the way of a buck. He was approaching retirement age and meant to have as much money as possible before
he locked his front door and threw the key away.

  I finally got over the hill and the truck began to pick up speed down the opposite slope, the load of steel pushing the trailer hard. A patch of fog appeared now and then and I didn’t like that. Fog can be hell. I was due in Canton, the site of the bridge, at eight. It would take about two hours to unload the steel with a crane and then I would be on my way back to Andersonville, empty. After I pulled in at the terminal I would be off for a full day. That pulled my thoughts back to Amy.

  “You think I need a girdle?” Amy had asked me that afternoon.

  I had just awakened and she was in the bedroom, naked, standing in front of the mirror and combing her hair.

  “Hell, no,” I told her. “You only need a girdle when you have a gut and you don’t have any gut.”

  I went to her, stood behind her and put my arms around her, my hands on her breasts.

  “You must like them, Chip.”

  “They’re not bad.”

  “You men are all the same. You see a thirty-eight-inch bust and you go out of your minds.”

  “Well, you ought to know about several guys.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “You have every other night to yourself and I know you don’t sleep alone.”

  “Shut up, will you? You think I fall down on the mattress for every guy who comes along?”

  “No, just every other one.”

  We fought some after that, argued while I held her from behind and she finished with her hair. Fixing her hair turned out to be a waste of time. She stopped arguing when I carried her back to bed. Amy was always ready for love and it made no difference, daylight or dark. I could still feel the spot on one shoulder where she bit me.

  But it was the money rather than a shared physical satisfaction that kept us together. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t going to steal it from her. During my twenty-three years I had never stolen from anybody. But Amy wanted the things out of life money could buy and so did I. We had both leveled about this — if she invested in a trucking firm with me, married to me or not, she would share in the profits. I guess wanting money is a normal enough ambition when you have never had any for as long as you can remember.

  I never knew a father. He ran off with my mother’s sister when I was two and since then all I knew of him was what my mother told me when I was twelve.

  “He was no good,” she said. “He wouldn’t work. There was only one thing that he wanted to do.”

  “What was that?”

  “Never mind.”

  At fourteen I found out that she was not much good, either — at least in ways I could appreciate. She brought men up to the apartment and usually I was sent out. I used to wonder what they did. One night I found out. I went to the movies a little before seven o’clock, but I lost my money along the way and I had to come back to the apartment for more, hoping I would get it. She’d forgotten to lock the door and I just went in. They never heard me or saw me, the man and my mother. They were on the davenport and the man was doing something to her — and I didn’t stay to watch. I got out of there.

  I never had much feeling about her after that — there were always men hanging around and I guess we just didn’t need each other a lot. She wasn’t doing me much good and I couldn’t have been very good for her business. I was not surprised when she pulled up and left me when I was eighteen, not telling me where she was going or with whom.

  After that I lived in hallways and furnished rooms, jumping from job to job. My first break came when I went to work for Hays. For some reason we got along — I never tried to figure out why. I was getting some good runs and minding my own business.

  The night I met Amy I had just learned that a diner waitress I had been dating two or three times a week for almost a year and who had never even let me kiss her was pregnant by somebody else. I was feeling sorry for myself and ready to recoup lost ground when I ran into Amy. Amy hadn’t let me down. Amy had given me all she had to give.

  The weather kept traffic from the highway and that suited me fine. Some people say that truckers hog the road but that isn’t true. Most truckers will give you more room than people driving passenger cars. Nine times out of ten if there is an accident between a truck and a passenger car it’s the fault of the operator of the passenger car. But it’s nice to have the feeling sometimes that your rig owns the road.

  The rain was coming down in drifting sheets and visibility grew worse. I cut the tractor speed back to forty and was satisfied to be going that fast. The fog I had expected along the flats bordering the river had been driven away by the rain and a high wind. If the weather was still bad enough in Canton in the morning they might not unload the truck and I might have to stay over. The thought was not repulsive. I had stayed over twice before and there was a nice clean rooming house not far from the bridge-building site. One of the girls at the rooming house liked her beer and wasn’t bad to look at. All I knew about her was her first name — Judy — but she had practically told me the last time that if a guy played it straight down the middle, no strings attached, he might not have to sleep alone.

  I had my mind on everything but the road, when suddenly I saw a figure in front of me. Well, not exactly in front. She stood at the fringe of my headlights, a little off to the right. We were not supposed to pick up anybody but I touched my brakes lightly. It was a miserable night for a gal to be out in the sticks, stumbling along through the rain. And a road can be too lonely — just at that moment I could do with company.

  It took me quite a distance to stop the truck. Then I sat and waited. I’d taken as good a look at her as I could as I passed. I had an impression of blonde hair straggled by the rain and a thin dress plastered to a young body. But grandmas have young bodies these days and I wasn’t expecting much. I just couldn’t understand why any woman would be out here in the middle of nowhere tonight — or why somebody else hadn’t picked her up. But people are funny that way. A girl on a lonely road may be bait for a holdup, a trap. With me I didn’t care. I was big enough to fight anybody and if they wanted the steel on the trailer they could have it.

  I reached across the seat and opened the door.

  “Hello,” a faint voice said out of the night.

  “Hi.”

  “Mind if I ride?”

  “If I minded I wouldn’t have stopped.”

  “Help me with my suitcase?”

  I reached down and she handed me her suitcase. I tossed it back up on the wooden bunk where I slept if I got tired.

  She got in. With only the light from the dash to help me I couldn’t see much more of my passenger than I had by the roadside, but I could smell her, not just perfume, but something some women have that can best be described as just woman smell. However, the light from the dash did spill down over her legs and I could see that they were good and probably young.

  “Close the door,” I said.

  “All right.”

  She closed the door and we rolled forward, gradually picking up speed. It takes quite a while to get a heavy load under way and I didn’t speak to her again until I was knocking off forty.

  “Mind telling me what you were doing along the road?” I asked.

  “I expected that question and I don’t mind.” She had a nice voice, low and warm, the kind that belonged in a bedroom. Some women get the knack at forty.

  “I was coming back from summer stock and the man who was driving me got fresh. He parked near one of those picnic areas and I got out of the car, leaving him. He drove on, sore as hell,”

  “And nobody else stopped for you?”

  “A kid in a Corvette. He wanted to wrestle — thought we could have fun. I beat hell out of him.”

  “Not much room to wrestle in a Corvette. Me — I’ve got a bunk in back.”

  She was silent for a moment. Then: “How fast can you stop this rig?”

  I grinned. “Not very. If you and I started to wrestle we might wind up under forty tons of steel. That’s the load in the back. Don
’t worry. I mean to deliver it — and you, too.”

  “I guess the reason I flagged you was that I always thought truckers were honest. Also, I was ready to ride with anyone. That rain is pretty uncomfortable.”

  “Where are you going now?”

  “New York.”

  “Then that’s easy. You can get a bus from Fulton in the morning.”

  “Without money?” She sounded bitter.

  “You won’t get far in New York without money,” I said. “What’s this about summer stock? You an actress or something?”

  “I thought I was, but now I’m not so sure.”

  “You from New York?”

  “No. Scranton, Pennsylvania.”

  “I know Scranton.”

  “I came to New York last year,” she said. “Right after I got out of high school.”

  That settled it about her age.

  “Parents living?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe they’d send you some money,” I suggested.

  “I doubt it and I wouldn’t ask them even if they would. They thought I was crazy to leave home but — well, it was just something I had to do. I think I’ve got some talent and I’m not bragging when I say I’ve got a good figure.”

  “How come you’re broke? Didn’t you get paid in this summer stock thing?”

  “Not for the last two weeks. The plays were bad, the direction worse, and we weren’t getting any customers. The others left before I did but I stayed and tried to collect my money. I should have known better. The man who was in charge of the group left with the rest of them.”

  I thought of giving her a few bucks but decided against it. The rent on the apartment was due and for all I knew she was working me for the payoff.

  “There’s a place down the road,” I said. “Sammy’s. He needed a waitress the last time I was through and he may still need one. It may not be much but you’d be able to pick up a few dollars and get on your feet.”

  She was silent for a long time.