Scout’s Honor: Chapter 6

Jonnie

His dinner shift over, Eddie strode to the VW beneath the stand of wind-twisted Monterey pine in the Inn’s employee lot. Troubled—and tempted—as he was by Roy’s offer, he knew sleep would only come through exhaustion. He slid open the van’s side door, whipped off his work shirt and slacks, and donned his baggies. He would swim hard until the twilight failed. He considered his body. His shoulders were broad and muscled, his waist narrow, almost hipless, his frame whippet-lean from a lifetime of swimming and indifferent eating. He flexed a bicep and nodded, knowing that, if not handsome, he was fit. Trotting to the darkling ocean, he waded through the shore break, diving into a wave when the water deepened. He swam straight out, twenty yards beyond the small breakers, and then turned toward Naval Air Station North Island, shaking off the sea chill. He swam parallel with the shore, trying to concentrate on his stroke, but the money had commandeered his thoughts. He saw himself attending a quality university instead of kowtowing to irritable dieters, standing on a carrier’s flight deck rather than hustling for dollar tips. The money would change his life: he could live in a college dorm rather than a VW, eat in a warm cafeteria instead of scrounging scraps from the Inn’s kitchen. He would be a man instead of a servant. Visualizing the smuggling’s bounty was easy, but no easier than foretelling a tiny slipup, a flat tire, an inquisitive highway patrolman. 

He swam on. 

With the light gone and his shoulders aching, Eddie clambered from the sea, showered—as he often did—at the beach’s public shower tree, and returned to his van, thinking calculus homework the key to sleeping. It worked. He dozed, but awoke hungry a couple hours later, and checked his Timex. The coffee shop would be locked, but the night man didn’t finish until midnight, the kitchen’s salt-rusted back door would be open. With luck, Eddie could find a piece of cold chicken in the walk-in cooler. He slipped on a worn polo shirt, returned to his dilemma, deciding the candle wasn’t worth the game. He would tell Roy he was out. 

He stepped into the back kitchen, said hi to the stoned dishwasher, and cast about for something to eat, finding the tinfoil-wrapped leftover steak the kindly chef had set aside for him. He heard glass shattering in the coffee shop, pushed open the kitchen’s swinging door, and saw Jonnie’s husband Dr. Collins wringing his soft hands, staring at a kaleidoscope of glass shards and puddled milk on the freshly mopped floor.

“Are you OK, Doctor Collins?” asked Eddie.

The myopic doctor peered at the youth. Despite the late hour, he wore his uniform: a bowtie and a white lab coat with a stethoscope draped over his narrow shoulders. In his mid-forties, the doctor had a kindly, soft-spoken, professorial manner and had perfected the knack of appearing to carefully consider his patients’ complaints. He thus inspired boundless confidence in his quackery, assuring the hopeful that starving themselves for a week—better, for two—would change their lives. He took off his thick glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose, distracted. “It’s Edward, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I seem to have lost my grip,” said the doctor, chuckling. Despite the flaccid joke, he seemed upset, his face flushed, perhaps with anger. “I’m sorry to put you out, Edward, but would you please take care of this for me. I must… I have an appointment.” The doctor hurried out.

Eddie fetched a broom, a dustpan, and a mop from the back. Returning, he heard a sob from inside the bar, a narrow twilit room that, despite offering nothing more intoxicating than Fresca, looked every inch the beachside Tiki lounge. “Jonnie, what are you doing here? What’s wrong?” 

“You got a lifetime, kiddo? I’ll tell you what’s wrong. Sit, sit here,” she patted the leather banquette next to her, daubing at her tear-streaked mascara. The Inn’s books, its last quarter’s operating statements, lay before her on the table. “Wait, first, go behind the bar. There’s a plastic jug labeled cleaning fluid under the larger sink. Way in the back. Bring it to me with a glass of ice. Hell, grab a glass for yourself. Hurry.” Jonnie retrieved her compact mirror, pouted at her ruffled image, sighed, and reapplied her lipstick. 

She filled the glass with the cleaning fluid, draining a third of it in a long gulp. Smiling sadly at her protégé’s amazement, “It’s vodka, Edward. How do you think I put up with these tiresome bitches every day? Pour yourself a little.” She clinked his glass, said cheers and they both drank. 

She’d met the good doctor when he was in college and she in high school. Pregnant by their fourth date, they’d married, she’d put him through medical school by waitressing, her mother watching over their babies. He had the dreams and she the drive. With his “guaranteed weight-loss program,” Dr. Collins would win the Nobel Prize and they would become rich. But Jonnie knew within months of the Inn’s grand opening that her husband’s “medically supervised” program was farcical—if not criminal—that their patients regained their weight as quickly as they lost it. But with neither interest in nor aptitude for numbers, she was years before realizing her doctor was a terrible businessman. To invest in schemes even more fanciful than his own, he’d bled the Inn white. 

“We’re this close to broke, Edward,” said Jonnie, gapping her thumb and forefinger. She stubbed out her Kool. “Forget this business. How many employees do I have?”

“About fifty,” said Eddie.

“And do you know how many headaches I have? Fifty. No,” she caught herself, smiled. “Forty-nine. You’ve never been a headache, not for a moment.” She rested her hand on his forearm, sipped her drink, holding his gaze. She of course knew the youth had a crush on her—she’d seen his longing expressions, forbade her catty assistants from laughing over his mooning. “You’re my treasure.”

“Wow, thanks, Jonnie.” Eddie’s face glowed. 

Reverting to her habitual breezy tone, she added, “And is every guest a total pain in the ass or what? I should work sixty hours a week so my idiot husband can invest in Arizona chinchilla farms?” 

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, learn from my mistakes. Forget the Inn and get into real estate.” With the vodka slowly gauzing her, she spoke expansively, tapping his arm to emphasize her life lessons.

“Real estate?” asked Eddie. 

“Half the money in Beverly Hills comes from real estate. The other half… real crime,” she said, laughing. 

“But how do you buy a hotel?” 

“You don’t. You buy a rundown house cheap, paint it, throw some petunias in front, and sell it. Desperate sellers will give them up for almost nothing down. How do you think we bought the Inn? I went from fixing up houses to a sixty-four-unit apartment building that we traded into this dump,” said Jonnie, her words running together. She snapped open her rhinestone cigarette case and frowned. She squeezed his arm, smiled into his eyes, and said, “Be a doll and get me another pack.”

“Sure, Jonnie,” said Eddie. He jumped up, feeling the vodka. He had poured himself a full glass and was the better part drunk. He stuck a quarter in the cigarette machine and pulled the knob for Kools, his mind stumbling from real estate to true love. He had long suspected Jonnie had no affection for the doctor, and now she’d proclaimed it. And how many times had she just touched his arm? Maybe, the vodka insinuated, maybe she loved him, too. Only one way to find out. His heart raced as he stuck his courage to the sticking place. 

Trembling, he strode back into the bar, plopped down on the banquette, threw his right arm around her shoulder, drew her near and—without warning—kissed her hard, squeezing her long thigh. 

“Edward,” cried Jonnie, her shock writ large. “My God.” She crossed her arms, leaned away, gulping open-mouthed. As with the unfolding of a terrible accident, the moment defied time, extending itself indelibly. But Jonnie grasped its tenderness—its humor—within seconds, giggled, then laughed out loud, shaking her blonde bouffant. “Oh, Edward, Edward, Edward, my poor boy.”

“I love you, Jonnie, I really do,” he swore, but her laughter, her fond motherly indulgence, had stubbed out his ardor. Mumbling sorry, sorry, sorry, he closed his eyes, dropped his head onto the table. “I thought…”

“You’ve had enough of this,” she said, sliding the tumbler away from him. She laughed again, tousled his curly hair affectionately. “I could be arrested for child abuse. Hell, I’m old enough to be your…big sister.”

“Oh, Jonnie, I’m so sorry,” he muttered to the table. He had not felt this empty since his father’s death. “Can you forgive me?”

“What’s to forgive, boychik? I’m flattered. It’s not every day a handsome young man makes a play for me. In fact, I’m so flustered I really need that cigarette,” she said, comically waving her hands to cool herself. 

With his forehead and broken nose resting on the cool table, he moaned. “I’m so sorry, I feel like an idiot… so terrible.”

She lit the Kool, sat back, and exhaled toward the Polynesian thatched roof above the corner booth. “It’s all my fault, I’m just too damn attractive,” she joshed, toggling his shoulders when he failed to respond. “Come on, sit up, it’s not the end of the world. Make this pitch when you’re twenty-one, when I won’t get arrested for statutory rape and… who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky.”

But it was the end of the nineteen-year-old’s world. Eddie had made the worst fool of himself, having misread her so completely. Knowing he was orphaned, had she simply appointed herself his mother’s understudy? Beyond her maternal sympathy, had she ever had any affection for him? No. He was such an idiot. And now Jonnie was laughing at him. He knew how she loved spooning her delicious gossip to one and all. She would polish the tale of her lovesick boy until it was shiny bright and then delight her company with its telling over and again. Within a day or two, half of the guests—all of the regulars—would be cackling every time he walked into the coffee shop. How could he ever face her again? He had to get away. Roy had the ticket.

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