Vital Parts Read Online Free PDF Page A

course it did very soon, defying Reinhart’s prayer that she would be run down. One face of Reinhart’s lech was murderous.
    Sweet pressed a switch that caused the window to lower itself silently. “Miss,” he called. “Over here, please.”
    Reinhart’s heart whirred like an outmoded air-conditioner. “Don’t, Bob, please don’t do anything embarrassing.” For he knew he would be blamed.
    Ignoring him, Sweet waited for the girl to arrive. When she did, and hung her moonface, draped in hair, at eye level, her chest receding, her breasts pendulous as cheeses in an Italian grocery, he said: “I’m lost. I’m looking for the local airfield.”
    She did something with her tongue. “That’s twenty miles away, across the river.” She ritualistically acknowledged the absurdity of it, with batwinged shoulders.
    â€œYou’re not thinking,” Sweet said coldly. “Obviously I don’t want the commercial airport.” Her dark-rimmed eyes wandered through the interior, passing across Reinhart as though he were an empty seat. She looked about fifteen. “I fly my own airplane,” Sweet went on. “It’s at the private field. If your ears are pierced you should never go without earrings.”
    She touched her right lobe; both were in fact concealed by the amber fall of hair, so Reinhart assumed Sweet was faking.
    â€œWhat’s your name?” Sweet asked accusingly. Then in a sudden move he smiled in frank warmth. “No,” he said, “don’t tell me. I’ll try to guess it from some of the things about you. You have Susan hair, long and fine and full of light. But your face is definitely Debby: pussycat nose. Your eyes, well, very exotic, Spanish I would say, like a girl’s I knew once in Old Mexico, very Rosarita. …”
    She seemed interested. Of course Reinhart’s taste would inhibit him from trying anything of this sort. He had never been glib with girls even when he was young, except perhaps when writing letters, but to look into a face and tell it fantastic rubbish had never been his game. Surely a girl knew she was attractive. Why would it not suffice to make a simple statement of want? Reinhart stubbornly adhered to his principle, though in fact he was well aware of its practical deficiency. Even years ago, when it stood to reason he must have possessed certain minimal charms, he had not scored as well as many stunted, downright grotesque contemporaries. At college the beauty queens were often pinned to troglodytes, prematurely balding or greasy forelocked, emaciates or lards, peering through bull’s-eyes mounted above pimpled cheeks. Many big Army assmen had bad breath and body odor and the manners of mobsters.
    But all no doubt with golden tongues—and didn’t care where they put them, according to the envious. But Reinhart was not one meanly to libel the winners. Nobody began a relationship with a genital kiss. A flow of language must precede, which properly made its point by having no literal sense. But that too was wrong. In the service Reinhart had known monosyllabic brutes who said little more to pickups than, “Let’s knock one off,” and did.
    Useless to chew it all again, the same gall-flavored paraffin for thirty years. At his present age it was perverted to desire minor female persons and any attempt to feed such a hunger was criminal.
    He was brought from the reverie by a joyful intelligence that, ha- ha! the teen-ager was not buying Sweet’s line after all.
    She had smiled and smirked and, finally, winced. She backed off two steps.
    â€œYou’re putting me on.”
    â€œSure I am,” Sweet brazenly admitted. “You make me nervous. You’re driving me crazy with your body. It’s the wildest thing I’ve seen in this crummy little town.”
    She shook her head as if to clear it. “God, the way you talk. Aren’t you kind of