Scout’s Honor: Chapter 14

The Pinto

Eddie’s leg was asleep. Tingling—numb from the hip down—it had pressed too long against the coils of rope and folded canvas in the semi’s cab. He raised himself from the cracked seat and shook his unfeeling leg, massaging it. He glanced at the garrulous trucker, a wiry man with sideburns that razored along his jaw line. Peering ahead into the black desert night, the trucker was pushing his eighteen-wheeler hard. 

“That’s Elko up there. Remember I told you I got me a gal at the Pinto? Ain’t just a customer to her neither. Said I was special. Shit, probably wants me to spend the night, give me a long-haul rate. Maybe you ought to get one.” The trucker bathed himself in after-shave, stuck a flattened tube of toothpaste in his mouth, and, unscrewing the cap between his teeth, sucked on it. “You ain’t much company, kid.” 

The Pinto Club was a wind-bent trailer park clustered behind a wood-framed house that faced the highway. The red lights alone suggested the club’s raison d’etre. From experience, the trucker slowed some distance from the brothel and turned his rig around in the graveled lot, parking it head out nearest the exit.

“This way we ain’t eating everybody’s dust. Lock the door.”

Eddie’s leg buckled when he hopped from the cab and he collapsed onto the hard gravel, catching himself with his hand, grunting his pain. He sat up and examined his palm, sharp pebbles embedded in the skin, the sting cutting through his catatonia. In the forty-eight hours since he’d fled San Diego, he’d been more numb than his leg, his every action instinctual, unthinking. A quarry in flight. 

 “Hey, kid. Where’d you go? Lock that door—Miller ain’t leaving his rig unlocked in front of a whorehouse.”

“Down here, I just—”

“I’ll lock the goddamn door myself.” The trucker strutted around the pinging motor. “Give some asshole a ride and he won’t even—oh. You, OK? You fall or what?” 

“I’m OK, sir. Just need to wash my hand.” Eddie rose to his feet, shook his tingling leg, and grabbed his knapsack. He locked the truck’s door, taking care not to slam it. Unconsciously, he scanned the parking lot for squad cars. “Thanks for the ride.”

“Told you not to call me sir,” the trucker said, looking pleased, if uncomfortable with the title. He swept his greasy, curly dark hair back with his fingers, then wiped his hands on his jeans. He wore his keys on his belt loop and his jeans a couple inches above his crotch. “You can wash up inside. One thing they got is plenty of soap. Where’d you say you was heading?”

“East.”

“A lot of east that way.” The trucker thumbed across Nevada. “Whole damn country. Come on, Honey’ll let you wash up. Hell, she’ll probably wash it for you.” 

Eddie followed the trucker into the Pinto and scrutinized the dark, scented room, wary of lurking police. The living room’s ceiling was low, its peeling red wallpaper flocked, and its windows blacked out with aluminum foil. Two candelabras graced a flimsy bar that ran along the back wall. The middle of the forlorn room was open, as if for dancing. Two women were playing cards on a plastic-covered couch. They were as remarkable for their nonchalance as their undress. The older woman wore white panties, a lacy black bra, and red high heels. The younger, a platinum blonde lost in her twenties, wore a fraying bikini and a palette of makeup. 

“You boys ain’t looking for virgins, are you?” The older woman cackled, pulling her cards to her impressive bosom. A worn John Coltrane album played on the record player, competing with the swamp cooler’s whooshing.

“Hell no, Honey. I’m here for Dee Dee, she knows I was coming.”

“I remember you, handsome. She’ll be free—” Honey caught herself, laughed, fluffed her jet-black hair. “I mean she’ll be through in a few minutes. Sit down and keep a hold of it. How about you, cutie? You got a reservation too?”

“No, ma’am. I just need to wash my hand. I fell outside,” said Eddie. 

“You don’t want a date?” She arched a painted eyebrow at him.

“No. Just my hand.” He showed her his bloody palm. 

“So you just want a hand job?” Throwing her head back, she laughed as if she were on stage, roiling her ample stomach. “‘Oh, no, Mama, I just went in to get my hand washed.’ Soldier-boy, I can die happy, I’ve heard them all now.”

“I’ll go. I’m sorry.” Eddie was out the door and halfway across the gravel parking lot before thinking about finding a hose to rinse his hand. Glancing about, he shook his shoulders against his growing fatigue. Beyond the gibbous moon, the stars were bright, far brighter than those at home, and he searched for Orion. He craved a familiar landmark, something untainted by Mexico. Something clean. 

“Hey soldier,” the younger woman called from the door. She had slipped on a white cotton bathrobe. “You can wash inside. Honey didn’t mean nothing, just we ain’t never seen soldiers in here only wanting water. Let me see your hand. Come here, I won’t bite you.” Her sweet voice suggested she was neither as hard nor as old as she looked. 

“Do you have any Merthiolate?” 

“Hell, we got our own doctor, comes every Thursday, but I don’t know if he’s any good. Let me see it. Been a while since I helped a man above the waist.” She giggled. “Give it to me.” She cupped his hand with hers and inspected it. “Need to see it in the light. I was supposed to be a nurse. Come on.” 

He followed her through the living room, past Honey and the grinning trucker, and down a red-bulb-lit, low-ceilinged hallway. Her clean, spare room had few decorations: a window blacked out with foil, a double bed with its spread folded over a trunk at its foot, a sink in the corner. A warped plywood shelf sagged above the sink, weighted with bottles, powders, creams, oils, and polishes. Above the clutter, a gilt-framed mirror hung loose off the wall like a painting. 

“You didn’t bump your head, did you?” She patted his crewcut. “Bring that stool over here and sit down.” She turned on the water, letting it warm to her touch, and then she was asking about his life, but he was quiet so she talked about hers instead, telling him her name was Eden. 

“Really, it’s Karen, but we got stage names, you know, like actresses. We’re entertainers, too. Fact, soon as I save up enough, I’m moving to Reno and taking dancing lessons to be a showgirl. Hold your hand still.” Plucking the pebbles with eyebrow tweezers, she studied Eddie’s closed face and recognized another lost soul. Another runner. Did his father beat him, too? “The real reason we have these silly names is so no weirdos can get after us. But Eden sounds nice, don’t it? Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, but I don’t like snakes. Besides, who ever heard of a party gal named Karen?”

She worked with pleasure, saying whatever occurred to her, expecting nothing from the hurting boy who she’d decided was AWOL. Concentrating on her work, humming, murmuring, she felt the soldier gradually drift off and relax his hand in hers. After a while, she coaxed him into removing his horn-rim glasses, hoping he would think her prettier if she were out of focus, and then she remembered staring back at herself from a scratched gas station mirror the night her alcoholic mother had locked her out.

Eddie heard the girl as if she were visiting someone else in a shared hospital room while he was delirious, slipping in and out of consciousness. A tear welled up in his eye, but he blinked it away. He had killed two policemen while breaking the law, while smuggling cocaine. He was guilty and they would catch him and drive him straight to the gas chamber. It was hopeless—the police, the FBI, the dealers, someone would seize him any minute. 

“I don’t care if you’re baptizing that boy in there, Eden, long as you’re getting paid,” Honey cawed from the hall. 

“He’s paying, course he’s paying,” she said, raising a middle finger at her boss through the closed door. “Honey, since it’s so slow, could I give him a special for an all-nighter?”

Honey scratched a wide thigh and smiled, flicking her tongue over a missing tooth. “Two hundred.”

Shushing Eddie with a finger to her lips, she replied, “He says he ain’t got two hundred, but can go a hundred. I’m doing it.” 

“You get that money now, hear me?” Pleased with the uptick in the evening’s fortunes, Honey swayed on her high heels down the hall to listen to the trucker’s duet with Dee Dee. 

“Don’t worry about it, sugar,” Eden said to Eddie. “I got the money. I got four hundred sixty-seven dollars saved up.”

“No. I mean, I can’t. Got to go.”

“Be still, I ain’t finished yet. If you think you’re hitching a ride in front of the Pinto this time of night, you’re a lot dumber than you look. Sides, we ain’t doing nothing.” She straightened her shoulders, envious of her soldier’s posture. “I only do it for pay. So don’t get your motor running.” 

“Why would you do that for me?”

She thought about answering, about telling him they were two of a kind, but her guard had been up for so long. “You got a name?” 

He looked her in the eyes for the first time and shook his head.

“You can make one up, don’t matter, already figured you’re running. You AWOL? Sorry, I didn’t mean to ask nothing.” Vietnam casualty counts competed on the nightly news with stories of frightened boys racing to Canada. 

“Joe,” said Eddie.

“You ought to pick a better name than Joe. There, I’ll tape it up in the morning, let it air out tonight. You’re staying.” Her rising inflection betrayed her hope. “I’ll give you a ride to the bus station in the morning. If you need mone—”

“I don’t need any money.” 

Eden put away her tweezers and the sewing needle, zipping them into a pink plastic manicure kit. “You need a back rub, Joe. Yeah. Take your shirt and jeans off and get on the bed. You can leave your skivvies on, we ain’t doing nothing. Don’t look, I’m changing. I hate this damn bikini.” With occupational indifference to nudity, she slipped out of her bikini, pausing to let him disobey her, sulking when he didn’t. She shimmied into her favorite nightgown—the winter flannel she wore when she wasn’t entertaining.

“I seen clocks wound looser than you.” He lay face down and she straddled him. She worked on his broad shoulders, stretching her arms the length of his back, pressing her fingers against hard knots. “Could do better if I didn’t have these nails.” She kneaded his neck with her palms, cooing about her dreams, about dancing in Las Vegas, about being admired for her talents outside the bedroom. 

Exhausted, Eddie drifted away from his last forty-eight hours. He had driven blindly from the horrific killings until he remembered Mrs. Doyle’s bomb shelter. He’d found it hidden beneath the bougainvillea, pleaded with God to watch over the cache, praying he could trade it for his life. Then he’d raced downtown, to where lost men drank from paper bags. He’d rolled the windows down, left the keys in the car. Carrying only the coffee can and the .45, he’d forced himself to walk—not run—to the rail yards, arriving as a freight train coughed to life. He had scrambled onto an empty boxcar, had no luck shutting its metal door, then smalled himself into a corner and hugged his knees, swearing he would not sleep. He’d awoken the next morning in Sacramento and thrown the gun from the Tower Bridge into the willow-green river.

Eden giggled and raised her nightgown so her flesh pressed against his as she straddled him. Cat-like, she rolled her arched back forward, grinding her pelvis against him. “Joe… Joe?” She shook her head when she realized he was asleep, mumbled, “Shoot, if all they ever got was back rubs, the job would be OK.”

He awoke in the blackness, a stream of sunlight beaming through a pinhole in the window foil. She lay sleeping on her side. He eased the sheet up and beheld her lush guitar-shaped figure, the warmth of her body causing him to bulge. He sighed, thinking her angelic without makeup. His crotch ached at the sight of her breasts and the curve of her hips, and he shut his eyes, telling himself he had to go. A moment later, they popped open when she stroked his underwear. “Not letting that go to waste,” she murmured, tugging at him, taking charge. 

She fell back asleep when their cloudburst passed. He dressed in silence, pulled a hundred-dollar bill from a hidden pocket and set it atop the shelf. Then, pitying her more than himself, he dropped five more hundreds on the rumpled bed. He’d eased open her door before realizing he’d forgotten the drug store eyeglasses that, along with his crewcut, constituted his thin disguise.

He’d walked a mile into the rising sun, turning to face each car with an outstretched thumb, when a dilapidated Peugeot with a clothes hanger for an antenna pulled over. The driver studied him as he approached, ready to speed off if her impression were wrong. In her mid-thirties, the earthy woman wore a tank top over patched jeans, her frizzed hair tied off with a red bandanna. 

“Where you heading, ma’am?” asked Eddie. 

“Ma’am? Far out. What’s your sign?” She peered over the top of her round sunglasses.

“What?”

“Your astrological sign, like, your constellation,” she said. 

“Aquarius.” He stood a respectful yard from her car door, his hands clasped, recalling Inn conversations that revolved around the stars at the hour of his birth. Conversations in which he’d kept his opinions to himself. 

“Bummer. I flashed on you as Capricorn all the way. What’s your birthday?” 

“January 22nd, ma’am.”

“Well, far out, I only missed it by a day. I’m going to Salt Lake to pick up my old man and then we’re tripping to Chicago. Where’s your head?”

“You mean where am I going? Back east.”

“Climb in. You a soldier?”

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