The Erection Set

She poised her pen over the lined pad and gave me an annoyed grimace. “Ill be very glad to ...”

“I know you will, kitten, but I won’t,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ll see you again.”

Behind me, the stout man in the pin-striped suit coughed behind his hand and I moved out of the way. He said his name was Meehan and he was expected at the conference. The receptionist pushed a button on her intercom, made the inquiry, then admitted him through the gate with a practiced smile. I went back to my car and drove away from the parking lot. On the other side of the building a double line of men were strung out for a good hundred yards. Two other men were taking down their information on clipboards, then admitting them into the main building.

The time was sixteen minutes after two in the afternoon and Barrin Industries looked for all the world like a thriving enterprise. I drove around the factory complex, took a side road through the old section up to a saloon, went in and had a beer and, halfway through, picked up my change and made a phone call from the booth at the back of the bar.

Sheila McMillan laughed when I told her who I was and dared me to come out for lunch. I told her to climb a tree and to meet me at Tod’s if she wanted to really know how her husband got that scar on his skull and when she said she would I hung up, finished my beer and drove down to Bergan and High, parked and went in where the moths were still gnawing at the stuffed dead heads of all those beautiful animals.

All the old men were gone now. The sun was on the other side of the room throwing a rosy glow through the dirt-streaked windows and the heavy tones of the Dante Symphony from Tod’s radio had quieted the three at the bar. I wouldn’t let Tod change stations and the mood had diminished the baseball talk, turning it into nostalgia and latrinograms of what might happen to the big smog mill on the riverbank and Tod didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.

Hell, he knew Sheila even if nobody else did. He had known Cameron Barrin and he had known my old man. He remembered my mother and he knew Cross. Now he was knowing me and trying to put all the pieecs together and all he could do was look at the two of us back in the comer sitting together and all he could imagine was the wires touching and the bomb going off with him in the middle and everybody else fat and happy minding their own business.

She didn’t have to turn up in those crazy hot pants under the leather skirt. She could have worn stockings instead of letting all the skin show. The fringed buckskin jacket didn’t have to be tied with a rawhide thong that let her breasts peek out almost to the nipples showing all that tanned flesh from the top of her navel to the jutting rise of her bosom. But it was.

“Why is Tod looking at me like that?” she asked me.

“You’re a walking orgasm, doll,” I said.

“To him or you?”

“Skin isn’t new to me, sugar.” I told Tod and he looked back at his customers. “You’re sure kicking him around.”

“Legs or tits?”

“All one big package, and he can only take a little bit at a time.”

“Which one first?”

“You mess with Tod and you’ll get your face splashed up.”

“So I’ll mess with you.”

“I can do worse.”

“Talk.”

“Look at me,” I said.

“I am.”

“Don’t you know yet?”

“You must be kidding.”

“Sorry, baby. It’s real. Watch it.”

Her smile came on so slowly it was like the sun rising. I watched her lift her drink and sip at it deliberately, with eyes so deeply blue it was incredible washing over me like a gentle, laughing waterfall.

“Tiger?”

“Of a sort. Just be careful. Even tigers can purr.”

“You’re a mean one.”

“Don’t go to too much trouble finding out,” I said.

“Somebody’s been telling you lies, Dog.”

“Don’t you think they’d waste their time trying that?”

“Would they?”

I nodded.

“How did Cross really get that crease on his head?”

“He probably told you the truth. I hit him with a rock. I was too young to do anything else. My baser instincts took over at the moment.”

“Oh, how he hates you.”

“Nuts. He hates the Barrins.”

“Only you’re not a Barrin.”

“But I’m the one with the rock, remember?”

Sheila held her glass up and looked at the sunlight coming through the ice and the liquid. A spectrum of color danced across her face for a moment, then she put the glass down. “You know what he’s going to do to you?”

“He’s going to try,” I said.

“All the way.”

“That won’t be enough,” I told her. I finished my drink and waved for Tod to bring me another. “Are you as pretty all the way naked as you are now?”

I watched her eyes change shape, then go back to their original oblongs and heard her laugh. “Prettier.”

“Hair color the same?”

“Identical.”

“Leggy?”

“All beautiful thighs right up to my whoosis, then down again.”

“Nipples sensitive?”

“See them pointing at you?” she smiled.

“Come fast?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Often?”

“Certainly.”

“Only when you’re doing it to yourself?”

She twisted the glass in her hand and held it up again. The sun had gone down and there weren’t any multicolored spectrums showing on her face now. “You really are a tiger, aren’t you?”