Chapter 12
When she awoke, she was lying on the rug with a blanket tossed over her nudeness. Alan Govern, clothing mussed, hair in need of brushing, sat with his head in his hands on the edge of one of the beds. When she moved he looked up.
"Welcome to the living," he said.
She was not quite sure she was living. The hallucinatory drug had taken control of her mind and was reluctant to relinquish its hold. She flashed in and out of the world of reality at odd moments, with frightening results. A simple movement, sitting up with the blanket tucked under her bare breasts, became a lengthy, unreal activity which extended her senses beyond the room to a place where birds sang.
"Stanley and Carl went out for some breakfast." He looked as if he could have used something himself. "If you're hungry, we'll go as soon as you dress."
She waited a moment. It was obvious that he was not going to leave the room. In a moment of lucidity she became aware of the used state of her body, the stickiness, the slight soreness which indicated sexual activity.
"Who was it this time?" she asked Alan Govern, "You?"
"Who was it what?"
"Never mind," she said. "Do you mind if I have a shower."
"Help yourself."
She got lost in the shower and he found her seated on the tile floor, a slack expression on her face. He had to shake her hard to make her stand, rinse off the soap and get out. Then she drifted off again and he had to dry her.
"I don't think we should try to take her to a restaurant," he told Carl Peurter, as the big man came in the door. Angel was dressed, but she was out of it again. "Where's Stanley?"
'That dumb slit?" Carl snorted. "Something's buggin' her. She took off the minute we got out the door?"
Alan frowned worriedly. "Took off? What the hell? You do something to rile her up last night?"
"Who?" Carl asked, the picture of innocence. "Me?" He grinned, remembering. The queer slit was really stirred up, all right. She'd acted as if he had killed her or something, except worse. When he knocked on the door of the room, after getting a good night's sleep, she didn't answer at first. Then he kept pounding and she finally came to open the door and the look she gave him was pure, liquid hate. There was so much hate in her eyes that it shook him, just a little.
"Hey, kid," he said. "I'm sorry. I got drunked out I guess. No real harm done, though, huh?"
She looked at him with that venom-filled stare and left. He told Alan, when that worthy mumbled his way up out of an exhausted sleep, that he and Stanley were going for some breakfast. Then he went to look for her and the passionate pink mustang she drove wasn't in the parking lot. Now it was going no then o'clock. The rally was set to kick off about one and Angel-baby's presence was required at the town square when the crowd gathered, anytime after one o'clock. He didn't have time to think about Stanley.
"Maybe you'd better go out and get us something," Alan told Carl, shaking his head as Angel began to chant nonsense words. "I'll stay with this one. Christ, you'd think we gave her a gallon of the stuff, huh?"
"Well, it acts funny with some people," Carl said. "Remember that nut at school jumped out the third story window?"
"I'm glad it's almost over," Alan said. "I'll be damned glad to head north again. Leave this slit with Stanley and take off like a big-assed bird, boy. You dig?"
"I'm with you."
"So I'll take some toast and about a gallon of coffee. Get the slit a couple of soft boiled eggs and we'll play feed the baby. See if some food will help bring her out of it"
He was seriously worried about Angel. In the minute dosages they'd been using, the stuff should not have lasted so long. His trip, for example, had ended hours ago. Of course, he was more inured to the stuff. He never knew anyone who was really hurt by the stuff. Oh, there was the nut who leaped out the window and there'd been other incidents along that line, but that wasn't really the stuff, itself. It was just that some people had hang-ups which came out while under LSD and that made for a bad trip. People hurt themselves while under the acid, but the stuff never hurt them.
Nevertheless, he didn't like the way Angel went in and out. Some of the scare propaganda put out by the nervous nellies against LSD cited cases where some people lost contact with reality permanently from just one trip. He didn't really believe it. He put such reports in the class with the nut up north who spread the false story about six guys going blind from staring at the sun while on a trip. Bunch of nuts in the world, boy.
When Carl came back with the food, he gulped a quart of coffee and ate four pieces of toast while Carl helped Angel with her food. Angel said she was sleepy. That suited him. He let her sack out, dressed in a cute little outfit which made her look young and fresh, short skirt, neat lines. He told Carl he needed to go for a walk.
Now and then a man needs some time to himself. We walked around the empty swimming pool. The spring sun was pleasant. Florida blooms made a sweet smell in the air and it was so quiet that now and then he could catch the sound of the surf from the beach.
It gave him time to think. Sometimes, after a trip, the thinking was tough. Sometimes, then, things seemed to be too much. He supposed that it was the contrast. He had come, in the space of a few hours, from a world where everything was jazz and truth and stuff to the world where it seemed, sometimes, as if everyone were out to get him. The Army would get him, that was for damned sure, just as soon as they announced the grades for the past quarter. And, by Gawd, he was sincere about thinking the war was for the birds. Who the hell was he to go over there and kill little men who were having a revolution or something? None of his affair. Deep down underneath there was the fear that some little man might kill him, but it was, he told himself, secondary to his belief that no man should kill another.
No wonder he was doing something. They wanted to kill him! They wanted to send him off and keep him locked up in a totalitarian society-that's what the Army was-rfor three years. They wanted him to play with their toys, their guns and bombs. No wonder he was doing something about it. What he was doing might not have much of an effect in the long run, but he was showing the world that there was someone who cared. His little bit with Angel Tomsk wouldn't change the course of history. He didn't think it was all that important. So Angel was the daughter of a man who had defected from the Commies. So what? More people around the world knew Dr. Spock, and his stand against the war hadn't changed anything. So he wasn't kidding himself about the importance of his mission, if you wanted to call it that. He sometimes thought that the fellows who paid the bills were more interested in revenge on Dr. Tomsk than in the propaganda value of a statement from his daughter. He knew that no matter what happened, they were going to send the movie film of Angel and Carl to the old man. That sounded like just plain meanness to him, but it wasn't his red wagon. Live and let live, that was his bag. Angel had the hots for Carl. She would have screwed him with or without the LSD and the camera, so what the hell. Who hurt who? It was Angel's fault, not his. He was just a kid doing a chore for a buck. And to take a crack at the bastards who wanted him to go kill babies.
Still, he'd be glad when it was over and he could head north again. It was too late to do anything about the school bit, but he'd find something to do. They'd offered him a job. He could take it. It required traveling around to different colleges, taking his experience to the masses, they said. Well, he could do it. It would keep him in steaks. Then, when the draft boys got too insistent, he could flip over the border to Canada and let them know about it.
In the meantime, he had a little job of work to do. He went back to the room. Carl was putting Angel through her paces. The chick looked bad, but she was doing all right reading the little speech she would have to make in front of the big crowd at the protest rally in the town square. It was really cornball stuff, Alan thought, as he listened. It sounded like something from an amateur theatrical, but he wasn't being paid to be a literary critic. He'd copied the statement down word for word on the telephone and the man who sent it to him also sent the money, so it would be read just as it was written. Who the hell was he to tell them that they sounded like a bunch of commie nuts?
While Alan Govern waited for the hours to pass and Carl forced Angel to read her speech over and over, Stanley Richmond went shopping. Once she was out of the motel room away from those animals, she could not go back. Nothing would have driven her back to that horrible place. She had money. With it she bought new clothing from the inside out. She also bought sanitary supplies from a drug store and then, laden down with her purchases, she took a room in a different motel and began to try to cleanse herself of the soil of the night.
She cried with horror and frustration when, during the course of a through internal washing, she discovered actual torn tissue. She would never be whole again. She, who had never even allowed a man to touch her breast before, would never be able to think of herself as pure again.
Cleansed inside, with several rinses, she soaked in water so hot she could barely stand it. She used two of the small bars of motel soap and still she felt filthy.
She had to end it, however. Her skin was raw from scrubbing. She was sensitive inside and the torn tissue in her vagina was painful. She dried herself hard, as if by punishing her skin she would be able to erase the memory.
She tried to sleep. It was impossible. She would doze off and then she'd dream. He would be coming at her again and he would be so huge, so threatening, that she'd wake up with her heart pounding and floods of adrenal fluid rushing sickeningly into her solar plexus. She had hated him from the time of his first touch, but alone, able to let the real significance of it soak in, she began to hate Carl Peurter with a violence which caused her fingers to clench so tightly that her nails dug into her palms.
And when the most horrifying thought of all came she screamed aloud. Her mental conditioning to her own Lesbianism had kept her from thinking of that terrible possibility before.
You see, when one thinks of man as competition and not as a sexual partner, when one has never felt drawn to a man and knows that she will never, never allow a man to get into her bed, she never, never considers the possibility of pregnancy. It doesn't happen to a girl like Stanley. She'd never given one minute's thought to a worry which is common to all girls who commit adultery.
Now, suddenly, there was a very real chance that she, who had never been tempted by man, could become pregnant from an experience which already held enough horror to make her cringe.
Stanley lay on a hard motel bed and stared wide-eyed at the ceiling and wished that Carl Peurter were dead. She wished that all men were dead. She hated them all. They were filthy, degraded beasts.
If one of them ever even so much as touched her again . . .
Well, what could she do? Unfortunately, she was weaker than men. She'd been helpless before the beast, Carl. She would be helpless aain if . . .
It was more terrifying then than it had been before. Any man who was bigger and stronger could do it to her all over again. She could not stop them. She could scratch and kick and leave her feeble marks on him, but if he were serious enough he could rape her. She leaped from the bed and paced the floor, considering means of countering this horrible threat.
It was nearly noon when fear and desperation drove Stanley out into the streets in her passionate pink mustang to look for a place to buy a gun. She went into a hardware store and approached the counter where a strong man with bull-dog features asked her if he could help. She almost fled. She told him she wanted a gun. He was very helpful. But she had to have a permit to carry a pistol. It was all very frustrating. She was at the mercy of men. They could do to her anything they pleased and she couldn't even carry a gun as protection lest they say she was being lawless.
As empty handed as when she entered, she left the store and drove until, with sudden inspiration, she sought that part of town where the pawn shops were. She found an impressive display of guns in the first one she entered and, to her disgust, was given the same sort of pitch by the little old man behind the counter. Of course, he would sell her a gun. But she'd have to ask the police for a permit.
On the counter near the pistols were several wicked looking daggers. With anger and frustration making her eyes flash, she picked one up. "I'll take this," she said.
"Lady, are you sure you want that?"
"How much?"
He told her. It fit nicely into the new purse she carried. It gave her a secure feeling. Now she had claws more effective than her fingernails. Let one of the animals try to harm her now.