The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything by John D. MacDonald Page A

Seven
    After checking again to be certain the door was locked, and after a lengthy hunt for the final elusive light switch, Kirby Winter crawled to the middle of the giant bed. There was a troublesome fragrance of Betsy about the pillow. It was a warm night, with a murmurous traffic sound, a ripped-silk sound of far off jets, the adenoidal honk of boat traffic. The ten-o'clock news had displayed other pictures of him, still shots, grinning like an insurance salesman. And there was one picture of Wilma Farnham, looking severe. The newscast made them sound like the master criminals of the century. Informed sources believed that Winter and the Farnham woman had already fled the country. They had both made mysterious disappearances under the very noses of the ladies and gentlemen of the press. One could see them chummed up on Air France, snickering, tickling, getting bagged on champagne, heading for that stashed fortune and a simple life of servants, castles, jewels, furs and tireless lechery.
    He wondered about Betsy and Wilma. By now they would be deep in all their long talking, and he blushed to think of Wilma, distrait, uttering all her shy girlish confidences. "And all the time he really was terrified of women. You should have seen him run from me in absolute horror."
    He was physically exhausted, but he could not slow his mind down. He knew he would not sleep, but suddenly he was down in the jungly world of nightmare. Wilma, giggling, opened zipper compartments in long cool pale thighs to show him how solidly stuffed they were with thousand-dollar bills. Charla had little gold scissors, and she smirked and cooed as she cut the ears from little pink rabbits which screamed every time. She was bare and golden, oiled and steaming, and when she turned he saw the vulgar placement of the little tattoo which read "Ninny." He walked into the scene in the little gold telescope and found Uncle Omar there, off to one side, chuckling. Uncle Omar thrust a deck of cards toward him and told him to take any card, but when he took the card it was warm and heavy and moving, and suddenly he was back in an old car in a heavy rain of long ago, and he found the dream blending into a reality of some warm, solid, busy, rubbery creature burrowing against him, snuffling and giggling and snorting, raking him with small claws. In a few moments of night fright, he tried to dislodge it, thrust it away from him, but the very act of clutching at it, the agile roundnesses under his hands, turned fright into a sweet aggression, his mind—standing aside—awed, wringing its hands, finding no way to intercede.
    In a vague and troubled way, as he became aware of the helpless inevitability of it, he felt all the responsibilities of literary allusion, of equating it with fireworks, ocean surf, earthquakes or planetary phenomena. At the same time he was remotely, fretfully concerned with identity, wondering if it were Charla, Betsy, Wilma, but soon realizing that particular problem was, as of the moment, entirely academic. He just did not have time to give a damn.
    So it transpired without benefit of analogy, or time to create one, aside from the hurried thought it was rather like some sort of absurd, stylized conflict, like a sword fight to music where you duck in time and in relation to the imposed necessities of tempo. As the fight was both won and lost, in a white blindness, he sensed, from a long way off, her vast tensions, some spaced yippings, then a buttery melting of the creature quelled.
    And then there was a head beside him, wedged into his neck, tickling him, and a breath making long slow hot whooshings against his throat, and a hand that came up to idly roam his indifferent cheek.
    "Hoooo—boy!" she whispered. "Hooooo, Bernie ! Oh, you the doll of all times. The livin' most."
    "Um," he said, pleased that his heart had decided not to hammer its way out of his chest.
    "Suh-prize, suh-prize, huh, sweetie? Nice suh-prize?"
    "Um."
    "Couldn't make the damn