Chapter 23

When the alarm went off in the morning, neither of us had moved very much and I felt stiff and sore from it. But her arm was still around me, and her other hand was on my tool while I had my free hand around her butt. That hadn't happened to me since I'd left Bessie, and that was a long time before.

By then, the other guys were getting around. I got on clean clothes, went out, got my keys from Dewey, got in the trunk of the car and got out a galvanized five gallon bucket. I took it inside the room while Lillian was still getting around, threw my dirty clothes and some laundry soap in it and filled the bucket the rest of the way up in the shower. "What are you doing?" she asked.

"My laundry," I said. It was an old carnival trick that Carnie had taught us years before – by which I mean clear back on Okinawa. "I'll take this back out to the car, put a piece of old inner tube on it to keep the lid on, and let it ride in the trunk for a while. When we get in this afternoon I'll rinse the stuff out and string a clothesline. "I have to do it like this about every other day."

"Huh," she sniffed. "I never thought about that, but then I guess I've never been on the road much to have to learn about it. I think I'm going to enjoy being on the road with you guys."

"Just a hint," I told her. "If you're going to be on the road with us, it'll help out and we'll all appreciate it if you'll pitch in when there's work to be done. Everybody else will be pitching in, you should be, too."

"All right, I guess," she sighed. "I don't mind working. Maybe it's better that way."

Pretty soon we got on the road, with several of the guys riding in the back of the pickup until we got to the track. Like always, we were pretty well loaded up from the night before, and it didn't take us long before we were headed up the road.

We stopped about an hour out at a moderately decent looking truck stop – at least, it had a lot of trucks parked around it, which meant that they had a large parking lot, even though the only thing the sign said was "EAT." We headed in and got some tables. Lillian and I wound up at a table for six, along with Frank, Spud, Dewey, and Buck.

We sat there shooting the bull for a few minutes. At this point I hadn't told Frank and Spud about Lillian telling me that she'd been a hooker and this wasn't the time to make that announcement. "Dewey," I said. "I've got two questions."

"What?"

"I thought I hit that joker pretty good with my fist," I said. "But I figured there was no way I could have dropped him like that, until I saw you standing there with that crescent wrench. That's a heck of a thing to have up your sleeve. Just what the hell were you doing with a crescent wrench in the winner's circle, anyway?"

"Oh, my car got handling goofy about halfway through the feature, so I parked it and I was working on it," he said. "Then I thought I'd go over and congratulate you. I didn't want anyone walking off with the wrench, so I took it with me. No big deal. What was your other question?"

"Well, what did you do with that guy last night, anyway?"

He got a big old grin on his face. "I thought that was kind of neat," he said. "Especially since I was the one to think of it."

"Dewey, this sounds better and better," I said. "What did you guys do?"

"Well, we were just going to haul him out in the country somewhere, strip his clothes off and leave him in a ditch," he grinned. "But as we headed out into the country, we came to these train tracks. It was a double crossing, and a train was waiting for another train to pass going the other way on the far side. There was a boxcar with its door open right in front of us, and I turned to Spud and said, 'That gives me an idea.'"

"He had this great big grin on his face," Spud laughed. "It didn't take me any thinking to see what he was thinking of. Well, we got old slugger boy out of the back of the pickup and stuffed him in the boxcar. We'd already taken off his boots and used his shoestrings to tie his hands and feet together. We no more than got him in the boxcar when the train started moving. He's probably not going to come around for a while. Hard to say, but he might be good for Memphis before he comes around."

"If we get real lucky," Dewey smiled. "He'll come to with a yard bull waving his fist in his face."

"Yeah," Spud laughed. "No I.D., no money, no shoes. If he gets caught by the right yard bull he might get thirty days for vagrancy."

"Oh, you guys," Lillian laughed. "I love you both. It couldn't happen to a better guy. I owe you lots, and I'm going to enjoy thanking you."

I have to admit that we all got some laughs the next few days when we thought about Dwight – which is what Lillian told us his name was. Just about whatever happened to him was going to be a tough story to live down.

I have to give Lillian credit – she didn't try to hide who she was or what she had been. In fact, she admitted that while Dwight may have been a first class asshole, she at least owed him some thanks for getting her out of that whorehouse in Chicago. I expected to get some static from Frank or Spud about having picked up a hooker to bring along with us, but when I got a chance to talk to Frank by himself, he said it was just fine with him so long as she didn't cause any trouble on the crew. If she did she was going to have to be out on her ass.

Lillian made it clear to me right from the beginning that she was not a one-man woman. "The worst thing about Dwight," she said at that breakfast table the first morning, "Wasn't that he hit me, but that he couldn't stand the thought of me being with another guy. I like variety. That's part of how I became a hooker in the first place."

She meant what she said. She stayed with me the next couple nights, but the following morning she told me, "Mel, I think I'll spend the night with Dewey tonight. You won't mind sharing a room with Perk tonight, will you?"

"No, I guess not," I told her. "At least if he doesn't snore."

There really wasn't a whole lot I could have said differently. I think a man likes to think that he owns a woman, that she is his and his alone, but Lillian had made clear from the beginning that she didn't play the game that way. I'd figured this was coming, and at least she was being honest and open about it.

"I knew you wouldn't mind," she smiled at me. "I'll be back with you tomorrow night."

"You take it easy with Dewey, now," I grinned at her. "The last girl he spent the night with was walking a little funny when she left in the morning."

"Oh, good!" She grinned. "That sounds like fun!"

Sure enough, when we got back to the tourist cabins that night, she headed off with Dewey. Things were a little more complicated than we'd expected. Perk had picked up a girl at the track that evening, but he sidled over to me and said that it wasn't going to be all night, and that I might as well have a couple beers with the rest of the crew. With any kind of luck I wasn't going to have to sleep in the car that evening.

A bunch of us found a quiet little bar nearby, so quiet that the jukebox only ran once or twice. "Seems kind of strange to have you with us," Scotty commented. "You don't mind her being with Dewey?"

"Not really," I told him. "That's just how she is, and whether I like it or not isn't going to change anything. I suspect you'll get your turn sooner or later if she stays with us that long."

"Strange woman," he shook his head.

"I don't think so," I told him. "She just thinks like a man in a lot of ways. Imagine if you were traveling with a crew of thirteen horny women. Wouldn't you try to work your way around to all of them?"