Wake Up With a Stranger (5 page)

Cletus Corey was known as a rather dangerous liberal among the three or four hundred students in the college. It was his theory that a minister of the gospel, in order to be really effective, should have a rich, empirical knowledge of the world and its works, even at the expense of minor virtues, and he was fond of pointing out that even Saint Francis of Assisi had been quite a rounder in his younger years. This theory of deliberate deviation for the sake of worldly effectiveness was disturbing enough in itself, but it was made doubly so by illustrative use of the saint, who had been a Catholic (Roman), of course, and was therefore not an acceptable example for young Christians living in the age of enlightenment. But Cletus was certainly
catholic
(meaning liberal) and he looked to all sorts and extremes of examples in the application of his theory to himself. He was able to admire both William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. He subscribed to the
American Mercury,
read H. L. Mencken with roars of delight, and passed
Elmer Gantry
around to his more liberal cronies. It was generally predicted that he would either be an enormous success or become an enormous cropper, but as it turned out, neither of these predictions was fulfilled. In time, at the request of the college authorities, he abandoned his theological studies, and shortly afterward, at the request of an impatient parent, he got a job and made quite a bit of money selling secondhand automobiles.

He left college at the same time that Wayne Buchanan left, and for the same reason. The truth is, the reason for their leaving was quite a scandal at the time, and it was all the unfortunate result of Cletus Corey’s applied theory. The ingredients of the scandal were juicy and really deserved the attention of more accomplished practicioners than Buchanan and Corey. They included a roadhouse, a stripper, drunkenness, and fornication. The roadhouse was a notorious highway spot known as the Blue Barn, because it looked like a barn and was painted blue, and it was strictly off-limits to students of the college, but Corey had been there before without subsequent retribution, temporal or divine, and he kept suggesting to Buchanan that it would be broadening and beneficial if he were to go also.

“It’s a kind of moral obligation to have some experience in these things,” he said. “In my opinion, it’s a pretty poor sort of minister who can’t trust himself to find out what life’s like just because he’s afraid it will corrupt him.”

This argument appealed to Buchanan. He saw himself standing strong and clean and unassailable, a source of salvation among the fleshpots.

“After all,” Buchanan said, “what if the prophets had ignored Sodom and Gomorrah and Babylon and such places as that? It’s perfectly apparent that the prophets knew all about them, and that’s why they were able to combat their evil and even save some of the sinners who would otherwise have been lost in them.”

“Now you’re getting it,” Corey said.

“What’s this Blue Barn like?” Buchanan said.

“Well, it’s just a big room with a bar and a lot of chairs and tables and a place to dance. There’s a small band Saturday nights, and they have a floor show at eleven and another around one. They must pay off to the cops or something, because there’s quite a lot of drinking and sometimes it gets pretty rough.”

“What kind of floor show do they have?”

“There’s this fellow introduces the acts, an M.C. he’s called, and he sings some songs that are really pretty dirty and disgusting, and there are a couple of girls who dance.”

“What kind of dance?”

“They just sort of move around to the music and make motions of various kinds and take off their clothes.”

“No fooling? How do they get away with that sort of thing?”

“Oh, well, there’s no law against it, so far as that goes.”

“No temporal law, maybe.”

“Sure, sure. I’m not saying it’s right, you understand. One of these girls is called Trixie, and she’s about as pretty as any girl you could see anywhere. It makes you feel real bad to see her dancing around practically naked in front of all those men and all. If the right fellow came along who could make her see how she shouldn’t do things like that, he could probably save her.”

“Well, that would certainly be commendable,” Buchanan said. “We mustn’t forget the parable of the black sheep.”

“Nor Mary Magdalen either.”

“That’s true. That’s certainly true.”

This line of thought was also appealing to Buchanan. He considered himself a right fellow in any possible contingency, and now, considering the practically naked Trixie, he actually wondered if he might not be receiving some kind of call. He could see himself saving her from the shame of ogles, and in his imagination receiving her gratitude and love — platonic, of course, unless he went so far as marrying her for her own good, in which eventuality there were additional purifying possibilities as well as a satisfying element of sacrifice.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said. “I’ll go out there with you next Saturday night just to see what it’s like.”

“That’s the stuff. I got a friend downtown who’ll let me use his car if he isn’t going to be using it himself. I’ll find out and let you know.”

“All right. It’s agreed, then, that we’ll go just to see what it’s like.”

As it developed, the friend’s car was available, and Buchanan and Corey drove out to the Blue Bam the next Saturday night on what was really, Buchanan kept telling himself, a kind of mission. Unfortunately, the management of the Blue Barn was not aware of their status as missionaries, which should have exempted them from certain obligations, and it was made clear to them at once that they would buy drinks or get out.

“It’s all right,” Corey said. “They’re not very strong drinks, anyhow, and you can sort of nurse yours along.”

What he didn’t say, however, is that the strength of a drink is relative to the resistance of the drinker, and Buchanan, having had no practice, had practically no resistance. He tried to nurse the first drink according to instruction, but it was the policy of the management to serve fresh ones at fairly short intervals, with or without a specific order, and after a while it began to seem imperative for the sake of appearances to empty some of the glasses on the table in order to get them out of sight. This he set about doing with the assistance of Corey, but they never seemed quite to catch up, and when eleven o’clock came, time for the first show, he was considerably more vulnerable to the corruptions of his mission than it is safe for a missionary to be. The M.C. was truly a disgusting fellow with no claim on Christian charity, and the first dancer, billed as Nanette the Naughty, was only a mild threat to asceticism. But when Trixie came gliding into light to the roll of a drum in an ice-blue satin gown, it was for Buchanan, though he had it to learn, a triumph of flesh in an hour of ruin. She was a slim and sinuous temptress with short curly hair that was almost white, and she gave the impression of being little more than a physically precocious child. Actually, though this was something else that Buchanan did not know, she was fully ten years older than she looked and had never been a child at all. She filled him at sight with a flaming and holy desire, at once with a need to save her from her sordid life. By the time she had finished removing the ice-blue gown, he was committed to a farce and assured of his shame.

“What a rotten crime!” he said, panting a little with an emotion that had nothing to do with his expressed indignation.

“Crime?” Corey said, failing for the moment to readjust to a missionary status. “What’s a crime?”

“Her dancing like that. A young, pretty girl like her in front of all these men.”

“Oh, that. Well, yes, it is, of course. It’s a downright crime.”

“I must talk with her, Corey. I simply must.”

“I don’t know that I’d do it, if I were you, Buchanan. These girls are pretty expensive when you get to fooling around with them.”

“What in heaven’s name do you mean? Are you suggesting that I want to … to buy favors from this girl?”

“No, no. Not at all, Buchanan. I only mean that the management expects you to buy them drinks and all if they sit with you at a table.”

“I don’t intend for her to sit with me at a table. I must talk with her privately.”

Corey, who was not exceptionally charitable and had read, besides, Somerset Maugham’s story of Sadie Thompson, looked at Buchanan with a growing and perhaps excusable cynicism. Buchanan, who had not read the story or even seen Jeanne Eagles in the movie, was nevertheless sensitive to the look and its implications.

“Is it your opinion that I am basely motivated in this matter?” he said.

“To tell the truth,” said Corey, getting directly to the point, “it’s my opinion that you’re drunk.”

Which was true. Buchanan was quite drunk from trying to catch up, but he was also more than that. He was exhilarated and inviolable and filled with holy fire. Rising unsteadily, he looked down for a moment at Corey with imperious contempt, and then, without a word, he turned and made his precarious way among the tables toward the door through which Trixie had gone with a twitch of her rear in the completion of her act. Beyond the door was a short and narrow and dirty hall with an exit at the far end and four other doors spaced along it, two on each side, and in the hall, lounging indolently, was a man with incredible muscles inside a soiled white shirt.

“Where the hell you think you’re going, sonny?” he said amiably.

Buchanan replied with dignity that he wanted to speak with Miss Trixie.

“I don’t know, sonny,” he said. “I’ll see what she says.”

He went back to one of the doors and knocked on it and talked through it and then returned to Buchanan.

“She says it’s okay to come in, sonny,” he said. “Have fun.”

Buchanan, scorning to draw inference from implication, went to the door and also knocked.

“It’s not locked, lover,” a rather brassy voice said.

Trixie had risen from a worn red couch to welcome him, and the only change she had made in her costume since leaving the spotlight was to remove the last two ounces of wispy material from here and there. She had, of course, no way of knowing that Buchanan was a fool, and, proceeding on an assumption to which she was certainly entitled by circumstances, she was simply prepared to supplement her income as she had supplemented it many times before in the only way she knew that did not involve prolonged drudgery. Moreover, having other things to do before her one o’clock show, she did not intend to waste time. In brief, Buchanan was quite probably one of the weakest protagonists of light against darkness since the time of Zoroaster. Afterward, sobered and revolted and terrified by an instantaneous conviction of mortal sin, he wondered why he had not noticed earlier that her feet were dirty.

“Bitch,” he said. “Dirty bitch.”

She was speechless for a minute with astonishment and fury in succession, and then her voice returned with a hiss.

“What the hell’s the matter with you? What kind of talk is that, I’d like to know. You come back here, you bastard, you get what you want, and then you call me names. Give me my money and get the hell out of here and don’t ever come back.”

“Bitch!” he said. “Bitch, bitch, bitch!”

She leaped at him and raked fingernails down his face, and he slashed back at her in a kind of blind hatred. She fell back on the couch and cursed and began to scream. Turning to escape, he ran into the arms of the muscled man of the hall, who began without delay to beat him without mercy. Agent of his corruption, witness to his humiliation, the Blue Barn Jezebel watched and laughed and cursed and jeered. Eventually, he was hauled to the door at the end of the hall and thrown out onto the ground. He lay for a minute or two without moving, tasting his blood in his mouth, and then he dragged himself to his feet and limped painfully around to the gravel parking area. Five minutes later Corey came out of the Blue Barn in a hurry and joined him.

“For God’s sake, what did you do in there?”

Buchanan sobbed and shook his head and said nothing.

“Look,” Corey said, “you’ve got to tell me what happened. Why did they want to know who we are and where we came from?”

Then Buchanan was really terrified.

“You didn’t tell them!” he gasped. “Oh, God, you didn’t tell them!”

“What would you have done with a big gorilla looking down your throat and threatening to tear you to pieces if you didn’t?”

“Oh, God!” Buchanan sobbed. “Oh, merciful Christ!”

Later, in his room at the college, trying desperately to be rational about it, he decided that the management of the Blue Barn was certainly in no position to invite the attention of the authorities or the wrath of the college officials. As a matter of fact, the existence of the Blue Barn was precarious and could hardly have survived a charge of corrupting embryo ministers, but he failed to take into proper account the vindictiveness of Trixie. On Monday a crudely spelled and printed note was received by the dean, and within the hour following, Buchanan was summoned and charged. Although he lied heroically, it was to no avail, for Corey in a separate session had told a conflicting story. Buchanan was flayed with Christian wrath and salted with Christian scorn, and he was sent smarting to his room to await the coming of his father.

He went to his room, all right, but he did not wait. He would rather have faced the devil himself than the man who had sired him. He left the college and caught a bus to St. Louis, and he never saw his father again until after the man was dead, at which time he went home to attend the funeral and collect five hundred dollars that had been left him in a final spirit of paternal charity. He worked at various jobs and was not very successful at any of them, and while he still had most of the five hundred dollars left, he married a very pretty young woman named Ellen Fischer. He married her and unconsciously hated her because she excited him sexually, thereby degrading him, and when they had a child about two years later, he unconsciously hated her also, because she would in her turn excite and degrade someone else.

Inasmuch as she was an attractive girl, she excited a good many boys, but it would be impossible to identify them. However, it would be possible to identify definitely the several who, on the other hand, excited her, and the first of these was a boy named Enos Simon.