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Show 144 "What do you do?" "Whiskey and wild wild women." "And you're not responsible, huh? \lery convenient." "You get tired of a r^le though." "Who am I talking to tonight?" "Me. Chess." "Good. I like Chess." She liked to laugh too, tilting her head back and her skin flushing, her white throat washed over with rose. Mouth closed, her lower lip was heavily full, curved, moist. She was from Virginia and had ridden some on those funny little eastern saddles, and I told her about riding in the West, how one spring a bunch of us farm boys had ridden on weekends in a group, me on a bigiroan quarter horse which I could hardly stop from running, and all of us racing across our fields and meadows, riding bareback, whooping like Indians, swooping over the earth. When the piano player came back and started playing some of the same tunes again, she said let's go for a ride. "OK. First I've gotta inspect the head." "Me too. Meet you at the door." Outside was one of those nights in Paradise when the moon is in her heaven and all's right with the world. In her little coupe we drove north on rationed gas, feeling bouyed up and pleasant but not at all drunk, slipping over the smooth expensive streets and then going on further north through the balmy democratic air. That beach along there has since been given over to the rich to exploit with hotels so grossly vulgar that a gigantic tidal wave would be a blessing, but in 1945 such pollution had not yet spread that far north and we easily outdistanced it, beyond the hotels where she |