Twilight Girl Read Online Free Page B

slacks and white T-shirt, Lon's size. And Violet hugged another girl, a pug-faced peroxide blonde. Violet shrieked, "Swee-tie-eee!" at another group and made her sensuous way to the rope curtains that divided the barroom from the room in which the shadow-forms of kids danced to a recording of Lonely Street. The kids, the kids... Violet glanced over her shoulder once to wink at Lon, to let her know, it seemed, that she knew the kids and the kids knew her and weren't they all having the craziest time? Like Eddie, thought Lon. Eddie going to Disneyland with the family after having gone before with the Cubs—anxious to point out the sights and let everyone know in a loud voice that he had been there before. Like a queer lavender Elsa Maxwell, Violet greeted the loved and the unloved, the staked and the cruising, disappearing finally into the packed room where the shadow-shapes clung to each other. Now she was singing in unison with the record: "Perhaps upon that Lonely Street, there's someone such as I..."
    Lon sipped beer. Sipped the new bitter taste and marveled at the way dry palm fronds and a raffia backing on the bar had given an exotic air to a cement-block garage.
    Someone had painted a Hawaiian hula scene on the wall above the bar. Someone had sketched a likeness of Rags on the opposite wall, and had framed it with bamboo. This is the way the clubhouse will look. This is the way we'll fix up the recreation hall on the Island! She swigged from the bottle again, mellowing with the sense of a long-gone traveler at last arrived home. For the threesome at the other end of the bar were not unlike the traveler she had seen in mirrors, her own self.
    They wore tan peggers, nonchalantly unpressed. Two in plaid flannel shirts, one sharper in an open-throated white job with a turquoise sweater vest. Lon envied them the clipped haircuts, the strong scrubbed faces. And ignored the lazy eyes and droop-cornered mouths.
    "I still claim you owe me two-bits," one argued.
    "The hell you say."
    "You remember that girl, right here at this bar?”
    "Oh, Jesus, yes."
    "You bet me a quarter I couldn't make her.”
    "You didn't.”
    "Oh, didn't I?”
    "I'll be damned."
    "I've got a witness." The first of them turned to the silent one. "Did I make her, Chuck?"
    "If you don't know, I'm not gonna tell you."
    They roared at this and then the loser paid her bill. "Here's your goddam quarter. Just tell me one thing. Was she butch or fem? Christ, I couldn't tell!"
    "Smorgasbord. By the time she went home I wasn't sure which I was!" Eyebrows wriggled up and down, implying secrets that could not be unveiled. Regular guys, remembering a girl and laughing it up. Regular guys, flicking kitchen matches with their thumbnails for a light, burrowing hands in the front-zipped pants for a crushed cigarette pack and belting each other in the back to punctuate a bellylaugh. Regular guys, and less than twenty years before, unknowing nurses had checked the wrong box on the hospital form that offered only Male and Female. For perhaps the choice was incomplete.
    Halfway through the brown bottle, Violet came back. "I got a place at their table. This girl, kid—Jeez, she's society an' everything. Boy, would I like to get next to her. She's here with some crazy dark one. I hate t' say this, but this girl, wow, is she sharp." Violet spilled the words breathlessly. "I got a spot at their table. Pray for me, kid." Leading Lon from the bar toward the curtained room, frenzied with her dim hope of a conquest that escaped Lon. "Make out like I'm your girl. Act real nuts about me."
    They wove their way through the dancers. Pretty girls and crones at sixteen, old hands and neophytes, insatiable and satiated; Lon saw them in the darkened room where dreams were woven, seeing through the untutored, all-sensing eyes of the young, the clip-haired butches who looked as she herself must look, yet knowing the purpose of their maleness, shuffling to the agonized cry— "Where's this place