“So this is what you were looking for!” she yelled at him, her suddenly passionate voice making her mask puff away from and then huff to her mouth. “You turn me down, you sniff at my friends and my ways, you’re above violence and sex, and all the while you’re planning to satisfy yourself vicariously, watching male-female!” For an instant before she slammed the door in his face, lightning seemed to shoot out of the lace-shirred eyeholes of the black mask. “At least I make my own thrills, you rotten little virgin!”
VI
THE crowd pouring down the corridor squeezed out of Phil his wincing recollection of Mitzie’s last crack. He slithered his way along the wall, rubbed by shoulder and hip, trodden by heel and toe, set coughing by gray-blue clouds of tobacco, weed, and so-called Venus weed, and regaled by such remarks as, “Aaha, he could of thrown her any time he wanted to,” and “What I don’t like are those dumb women referees!”
Phil finally wedged his way into an eddy of the crowd near a side corridor. He unhopefully gasped, “Juno Jones.” Old Rubberarm whispered throatily, “Come right in, Mack,” and narrowly arched his gray arm to let Phil duck through at that point, meanwhile bracing his slaty length against a general surge of the crowd and whipping back the tentacle-end of his arm to stop a gent in brown with tennis-ball eyes who tried to duck in after Phil.
Phil wiped his forehead and took a deep breath. He felt a little giddy standing just by himself. A woman came out of the door ahead. She was dressed with an aggressive dowdiness: shapeless long frock, button shoes, wide brimmed flower covered hat, fur neckpiece and gloves. She looked like somebody’s scrubwoman from past times out on a half-holiday. He didn’t realize who it was until the crowd behind him began to cheer and to chant, “Juno! Juno!”
She waved to them, but her eyes were on Phil.
“Gosh, I’m glad to see you,” she said, grabbing his elbow. Then she whispered, “Don’t ask questions. Come with me.”
The next moment she was hurrying him down the corridor away from the crowd.
The chanting of the crowd became disappointed and a bit sore. A shrill voice skirled over it: “Whatcha goin’ off with the little shrimp for?”
Juno turned around and stood solid. “Listen, you mugs,” she bellowed, and the crowd was silent while a telephoto spot glowed blindingly. “I know I’m your heroine and it makes me happy, but even I gotta have a love life! And don’t you be insulting it!”
As the crowd yelped with laughter and started cheering again, Juno pushed Phil through a door. “I hope you didn’t mind my saying that,” she told him. “They’re my fans and I gotta humor ’em.”
Phil shook his head a bit dazedly. He had expected her to stop as soon as they got out of sight of the crowd, but instead she was hurrying him along a narrow hall.
“Say, look here, Mister -” she began anxiously.
“Phil,” he told her. “Phil Gish.”
“Well, look, Phil, could I take you to dinner?”
“Sure,” Phil said.
“Good,” she said with relief. Nevertheless she kept peering about, almost apprehensively, and didn’t slacken their pace. “I know a good steak place. Quiet and they really know how to broil rabbit.” They reached a narrow, shadowy stairway. Juno steered him toward it. He started up, but she jerked him back. “Not that way, Phil, for gosh sake,” she warned him. “That’s straight to Billig and the wasps. This place I’m telling you about is on the bottom level.” And she started down. “We could take an elevator,” she said apologetically, “but this is better,” adding gruffly, “more private.”
At the bottom of the stairs a narrow door led directly into a long dark room with a counter along one side and a row of booths along the other. With its browned chrome finishes it had to date back to 1960. The customers were truckdrivers, police, and a less definable category. There was an elevator door next to the one they’d come out of. Juno wagged her big hand at a couple of people and shouted to someone, “Whiskey and chops, and make sure you burn the edges. What’ll you have, Phil?”
He realized he hadn’t eaten since yesterday and mumbled something about a yeast sandwich and a glass of soybean milk. She looked at him, but passed on his order without a comment, then took him in tow once more. She had to answer a few familiar greetings, but she didn’t spend much time on them and seemed relieved when she’d plunked Phil down in the booth nearest the front door, where the rumble of trucks was loudest and their headlights, mixed with the sodium glow, flashed on the scratched and dusty glastic. But there were, for a wonder, no jukeboxes or radios of any sort in the place. He also saw that the pushbuttons on the wall were labeled for out of date synthetic foods and had taped over them an “Out of Order” sign that must have been twenty years old itself.
He studied his companion across the table and realized for the first time that she looked dead beat. His glance began to trace on her large jaw the outlines of a recent bruise that was only partly concealed by hastily applied makeup. She dove into her pocketbook with a shy girl’s flusteredness and started to dab at her jaw with a powder-puff, but then gave up, put back the puff and slumped forward, her meaty elbows on the plastic.
“Don’t ever let ’em tell you the bouts are fixed,” she assured him glumly. “Zubek bust a gut trying to get me tonight.”
“You won?” Phil inquired.
“Oh, sure. Two falls, a spaceship spin and a free-fall – that means when you throw ’em up and out and they don’t come back.”
A tray came sliding along the bar. Juno went over and got it before Phil realized that it was for them. From the speed with which the order had been filled, he decided they still had radionic cooking in the place. Juno’s seared rabbit chops were as big as small steaks – it must have been an octoploid bunny, at the least – while her whiskey was intimidatingly huge and brown. He nibbled his yeast sandwich and found it seemingly okay, though it always made him a bit uneasy to eat restaurant food that didn’t pop out of a wall.
As Juno munched her chops and drank her whiskey, she told Phil snatches of the story of her life. It turned out she was a farm girl who had come to the city young and suffered the usual disillusionments. “How’s a girl going to get ahead these days,” she asked Phil, “especially a dumb ox like me? Not that I didn’t have a swell figure, but even then I was too big and strong. I scared the men I knew and I didn’t know then the ones who would have liked what I had. So I tried scrub mothering for a while – you know, birthing babies for wealthy dames who didn’t want to carry them the nine months themselves – but I knew there was no future in that. Ten years or so and I’d be sweeping up after some sweeping robot and trying to make throwaway paper dresses last a month. So I remembered how I could pin nine out of ten boys back home, and I entered some amateur wrestling contests and pretty soon they were grooming me for a pro.” She shook her head dourly. “You should have seen my figure; it really was beautiful before they put me on hormones.” She distastefully inspected her big hands, still white gloved though now gravy stained. “Even used pituitrin on me, the bastards.” She sighed and shrugged. By now she had reduced her chops to bones and was working on her second whiskey. “So that’s the way it was, Phil. Of course, I had to go and fall in love with a wrestler and marry the little skunk – most of the girls in the business make that mistake – but at least I eat rabbit, even beef, and a lot of dopes respect me.”
Phil nodded eagerly. “You’ve made a place for yourself. Security.”
“Are you kidding?” she asked. “Five years and I’ll be through, ten at the outside if I get to be a character.” She shook her head and leaned forward. “Actually it’s much worse than that. Male-female’s almost finished. Government’s going to crack down.”