Harry and the Bikini Bandits by Basil Heatter - Chapter 04

1971 Genre: Vintage Sleaze / Casino Heist

A wildly erotic novel of intrigue, suspense, and adventure...

There's a lot to be said for my Uncle Harry. Mostly unprintable. All my life I'd heard about him, and from a distance he was a kind of legend. But the moment I signed on as one-man crew to his beat-up old bucket, Jezebel, I found my hero of the sea was really a pirate. Broads and booze kept him afloat between capers—and so far, his luck was holding...

But this new harebrained scheme—to heist the loot from an island gambling casino—was the daffiest—and most dangerous yet.

And there I was. Right in the middle. Up to my virginal ears in naked nymphs and Nitrous oxide—with nothing between me and the future but a leaky getaway and a pot of gold that was fast disappearing behind Harry's private rainbow.

CHAPTER 4

"You'll bunk aft," Harry said.

He was in his bunk, reading Thoreau. A yellow cat lay on his belly. I looked aft to where he had pointed, but all I could see was a rusty old one-lung engine that looked ancient enough to have been the original model for Robert Fulton. Was I supposed to sleep on that? But then I observed a little space behind it, and by getting down on my hands and knees I could see a beat-up-looking mattress kind of stretched out in the bilge.

"Not exactly the new Queen Elizabeth," said Harry, "but at your age what's the difference?"

"I'll just stow my gear."

I crawled aft, leaving half-an-inch or so of scalp hanging from a rusty nail. I staunched the flow of blood with a handkerchief and wondered what it would be like in that hole with the engine going. I decided, if it was all the same to Uncle Harry, I'd sleep on deck.

"I want to tell you about this cat," Harry said when I crawled out. "Her name is Scotty and she is one great little cat."

Scotty rolled a yellow eye in my direction. I could tell right off she hated me.

"Only thing is she has fits now and then," Harry said.

"What kind of fits?"

"Tearing blue fits. When a fit is on her you'd better stand clear. She'll mess you up worse than barbed wire. What brings it on more than anything is cheese fondue. Don't you ever give this cat any cheese fondue."

"No sir." What was cheese fondue anyway?

"As for that goddamn monkey . . . "

"His name," said Miss Wong, descending the companionway steps, "is Ho."

"I'll make shark bait of that animal," vowed my uncle. "About a size double-O hook ought to fit him nicely."

"I wonder what size would be right for you, love," said Miss Wong with a sweet smile.

"The main thing you have to remember about that monkey is don't ever bend over while he's anywhere within jumping distance. That's the randiest monkey in the world. Right now he's trying to screw this cat. One of these days she'll claw his bloody balls off."

She said something in Chinese. Whatever it was Harry appeared to understand. He responded with a lewd grin.

We ate our dinner under a ragged hunk of canvas spread over the cockpit. Miss Wong wore blue jeans torn off very short and one of Harry's faded old cotton handkerchiefs knotted behind her shoulders. Her navel peeked out of her rounded tummy like a kumquat in a dish of heavy cream. What we ate was called a Jezebel Special. I had watched her make it. She dipped slices of baloney into a mix of English mustard and eggs. Then she covered the slices with cracker crumbs and fried them in deep fat. When they were done she served them on toast covered with a sauce made by adding cream to the original glop.

I was awfully hungry and I ate it, but I could see why the cat had fits. We couldn't keep her away from it. She had a funny method of attack. She started with Ho, whose long tail hung below the level of the cockpit seat. She got hold of the end of that stringy bit of fuzz and gave it a nip. The monkey let out a holler and began cussing blue murder. Miss Wong cradled the monkey in her arms and murmured to him in Chinese. Harry, in a tone of disgust, told them both to shut up. And while all that was going on Scotty was well into the Jezebel Special.

Cat or no cat, I cleaned up what was left.

Miss Wong was indignant because of Harry's lack of sympathy with what had happened to the monkey, and so right after dinner she and Ho disappeared dockside.

Harry stretched out on the cabin top with a cigar that smelled like burned brake bands.

I did the dishes.

There wasn't much of a view from the galley because a huge white motor yacht called Charisma had come in alongside. She had a professional skipper rigged out like an admiral, and three flunkeys running around on deck. Orders were transmitted from the bridge through a bull horn. It was all, as Harry said, tossing his ashes in the yacht's direction, "very Gung Ho."

The owner lounged on the after-deck in a wicker chair. With him was a very blond lady who looked like a strawberry soda. I mean all that creamy skin and pink sun-suit The owner wore a blue blazer with some kind of yacht-club emblem on the breast. He looked about thirty pounds overweight and discontented. He was drinking steadily. Whenever his glass got down to the last inch it was automatically refilled by one of the white-coated stewards. When he glanced in our direction he looked as though he had smelled something bad. All the time they sat there I did not see them exchange two words.

But then he suddenly began to sing. His voice was awful. This is what he sang:

Oh I used to work in Chicago in a department store.

Oh I used to work in Chicago but I don't work there anymore.

But not just once. I mean like forty times, over and over. The blonde gave him a look that could have pinned him to the mast. The more she looked the more he sang.

When he finally gave up it was because he was unconscious. I mean he just folded. The glass fell out of his hand, and he slithered out of the chair and down to the deck like a bowl of jello. He began to snore very loudly. The blonde signaled to the bridge, and two of the stewards appeared to haul him away. It reminded me of those pictures you see of mules dragging a dead bull out of the bull ring. They gave you the feeling they had all been through this plenty of times.

As for Harry, he might have been forty miles at sea. He never even looked in their direction. All the same I had the feeling that he was very much aware of that strawberry soda in the pink sun-suit And she of him. I mean he never looked straight at her but you could sense something between them like with a good quarterback and a receiver working into the end zone.

He tossed away his cigar. It left a nice black mark on the otherwise spotless topsides of the yacht. Then he took a small corncob pipe out of his pocket and filled it out of a little sack of tobacco. While he was at it he looked back at me and winked. What was he up to? I was so interested that I just kind of hung there in the companionway with the dishtowel in my hand.

"Want a puff of this first-rate Mexican grass?" he bellowed at me.

I couldn't believe my ears.

"Are you deef?" he yelled. "I offered you some of this high class Tia-Jauna Gold. Speak up!"

"N—no, sir."

"No sir what?"

"I don't smoke."

"Spoken like a proper little sea scout," he said in a namby-pamby voice. "I ought to boot your lard ass over the side right now. We all smoke a little pot on this vessel, Number Three. Even that fucking chimp."

He was laying it on with a shovel. But why? Then I began to understand. The blonde had been drawn like a fly to honey. She had come to the rail and was staring down at us. Then Harry gave her the business. I mean he looked straight at her for the first time. It was some look. I had the funny feeling that his eyes had gone a sort of milky color and that his red beard actually bristled. He grinned at her and I could swear he had fangs. Even from a distance I could see the goosebumps on her arms.

What was it he reminded me of? Back home somebody kept an old billy goat in a field near the train station. That was a pretty foul goat. You could smell him a quarter of a mile off, and if you ever gave him a shot at your back, you were ass over head right then. The trouble with him was he was so lecherous. It was like he was one big hard-on from stem to stern. I mean he gave off sparks. It was like all the pipes of Pan were playing through Peckinpaugh.

Harry was more like that damn goat than anybody you ever saw.

The Charisma blonde stared at him pop-eyed as if the devil had suddenly appeared before her. It was like she didn't know whether to run off screaming or jump straight into his arms. In any case, I don't think the decision was hers. It was like she was already hypnotized. A moth to the flame. I mean her wings were already singed.

Then he spoke to her, and she stood listening with her head cocked to one side as if it was far-off music she heard. Whatever it was, it was between them; I couldn't catch a word. He spoke to her again, very softly, and she moved closer. She shook her head once or twice but he kept on with it. Finally she gave a little nod and moved off to the gangway and down onto the pier. She walked off into the fringe of pines without looking back.

Harry puffed a little more on his pipe and then got up and knocked the ashes out against the Charisma's side.

"Keep an eye on the ship, Number Three."

"Yessir."

He stepped ashore with the air of an admiral reviewing the fleet. I felt like saluting him as he went off down the pier.

Now how had he done that? It was practically like he had just snapped his fingers and she had obeyed. What I couldn't understand about it was that he was so ugly. I mean he was hairy and naked and not very clean. Maybe it was that stuff he was smoking. Maybe she had gotten one whiff of that and gone off stoned.

He had left the can on deck. It looked like a regular tobacco can and was labeled Sir Walter Raleigh. But of course he would keep it in something like that; I mean who would suspect it. I looked all around to see if anybody was watching before I opened the can. It looked like plain old tobacco. I sniffed at it and it smelled like tobacco. I tasted it. It was tobacco.

I decided he must be some kind of genius.

When Miss Wong came back from her walk she didn't even comment on Harry's absence. She had a graceful, smooth way of moving and it was a pleasure to watch her. She fixed a little bed for the monkey and tied him to the mainmast so that he could not sneak out to get at the cat. He cussed for a while but then shut up.

She came back to the cockpit and smiled at me. "You look tired, Clay."

I had been on the road since dawn and I was about the most tired guy in the world.

"Not especially," I said. "Why don't you go to bed?"

"Harry told me to keep an eye on things." I didn't know if it was all right to mention that he was gone, but she could see that anyway.

"I'll keep an eye out for you." Her eyes had a nice way of crinkling when she smiled. Being on a slant and all made them especially charming. Maybe she just wanted to be alone with him when he got back.

"I might just stretch out for a bit," I said.

She nodded.

I crawled into my sack behind the engine. The pillow wasn't too clean, but it had a nice smell of some kind of perfume. There were two bobby pins on the mattress. I wondered which one of the girls I had seen in the picture had bunked there. It might have been the tall dark one with her hand on Harry's shoulder—the one with the tight shorts and the almost invisible bra.

During the night I thought I heard people hollering at each other but I was too tired to care.