Victory Over Japan by Ellen Gilchrist Read Free Book Online Page B

arms, paying no attention to her small resistances, until finally she was stretched out under him on the earth and he moved the dress from her breasts and held them in his hands. He could smell the wild smell of her craziness and after a while he took the dress off and the soft white cotton underpants and touched her over and over again. Then he entered her with the way he had of doing things, gently and with a good sense of the natural rhythms of the earth.
    I’m doing it, Rhoda thought. I’m doing it. This is doing it. This is what it feels like to be doing it.
    â€œThis doesn’t hurt a bit,” she said out loud. “I think I love you, Johnny. I love, love, love you. I’ve been waiting all my life for you.”
    â€œDon’t talk so much,” he said. “It’s better if you stop talking.”
    And Rhoda was quiet and he made love to her as the sun was leaving the earth and the afternoon breeze moved in the trees. Here was every possible tree, hickory and white oak and redwood and sumac and maple, all in thick foliage now, and he made love to her with great tenderness, forgetting he had set out to fuck the boss’s daughter, and he kept on making love to her until she began to tighten around him, not knowing what she was doing, or where she was going, or even that there was anyplace to be going to.
    Dudley was waiting outside the trailer when she drove up. There was a sky full of cold stars behind him, and he was pacing up and down and talking to himself like a crazy man. Maud was inside the trailer crying her heart out and only Joe had kept his head and was going back and forth from one to the other telling them everything would be all right.
    Dudley was pacing up and down talking to Jesus. I know I had it coming, he was saying. I know goddamn well I had it coming. But not her. Where in the hell is she? You get her back in one piece and I’ll call Valerie and break it off. I won’t see Valerie ever again as long as I live. But you’ve got to get me back my little girl. Goddammit, you get me back my girl .
    Then he was crying, his head thrown back and raised up to the stars as the jeep came banging up the hill in third gear. Rhoda parked it and got out and started walking toward him, all bravado and disdain.
    Dudley smelled it on her before he even touched her. Smelled it all over her and began to shake her, screaming at her to tell him who it had been. Then Joe came running out from the trailer and threw his hundred and fifty pounds between them, and Maud was right behind him. She led Rhoda into the trailer and put her into bed and sat beside her, bathing her head with a damp towel until she fell asleep.
    â€œI’ll find out who it was,” Dudley said, shaking his fist. “I’ll find out who it was.”
    â€œYou don’t know it was anybody,” Joe said. “You don’t even know what happened, Mr. D. Now you got to calm down and in the morning we’ll find out what happened. More than likely she’s just been holed up somewhere trying to scare you.”
    â€œI know what happened,” Dudley said. “I already know what happened.”
    â€œWell, you can find out who it was and you can kill him if you have to,” Joe said. “If it’s true and you still want to in the morning, you can kill him.”
    But there would be no killing. By the time the moon was high, Johnny Hazard was halfway between Lexington, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio, with a bus ticket he bought with the fifty dollars he’d taken from Rhoda’s pocket. He had called the poetry teacher and told her he was coming. Johnny had decided it was time to see the world. After all, that very afternoon a rich cheerleader had cried in his arms and given him her cherry. There was no telling what might happen next.
    Much later that night Rhoda woke up in the small room, hearing the wind come up in the trees. The window was open and the moon, now low in the