SE Hinton owns The Outsiders.
Baby, Let Me Take You Home
"You have no idea who I am, do you?"
She knew exactly who he was, and she didn't think it was such a damned big deal. He was maybe midlevel on the Tulsa food chain, but nothing beyond the city limits or even south of the river. On the south side, they had their own aspiring criminals, and their criminals never had to get their hands dirty.
So, there was that to respect him for, she guessed. Tim Shepard had to get his hands dirty. He knew the meaning of hard work, even if the only kind of work he did was the kind that got other people hurt. Right now, she was at the top of his list for being one of those people.
So, she bluffed. She shrugged her shoulders.
"Are you a friend of Dally's?"
"Dally don't have friends," Tim said. "Dally's got accomplices. Same as me. Yeah, I know Dally. Next time you see him, ask him about Tim Shepard."
She bit on her lips to hide her relief. He was turning her loose, and without laying a hand on her. He was leaving it up to Dally to spin her a tale of the kind of trouble she was about to escape.
"Too bad. You ain't bad lookin'," Tim conceded. "I know who you are, though, and I know who your brother is, and I ain't lookin' to pull down that kind of trouble."
When she didn't move, he reached and took the bottle of beer from her hand, claimed it for his own, and took a drink. He gestured behind her with the bottle.
"Door's that way, sis."
"How am I supposed to get home?"
"How the hell did you get here? Ain't my problem. Just get."
"I caught a ride after work with a friend. She's long gone."
"Smart friend. Smarter than you. So, you ain't got a ride and you're stupid. That makes two things that ain't my problem. Stockyard's across the road. Ride a horse."
He raised his eyebrows and took another pull from the beer bottle. She gave a fleeting thought to working up some tears, or asking to use the phone. Anyone with half a brain would hide their phone during a house party, but the occupant of this particular house was not a fountain of wisdom by any stretch of the imagination. Still, his reputation for stupidity reached just as far as Tim's for taking advantage of tipsy, unattended girls. If Dally was telling the truth about the things he could buffalo Buck Merrill into, she figured she could hustle up a ride.
She asked, "Is Buck here?"
Tim looked annoyed. "Shit, you know Buck but you don't know me? Seems I need to make a visit over to Crutchfield and remind you dumb fuckers who the Shepard is in the Shepard gang. I don't know where Buck is. Try the kitchen. There's a door to the outside there, too. If you can't find Buck, get the hell on out that door. Seriously, baby, any door will do."
She stepped around him and walked towards the kitchen. She could feel his eyes. He had turned and sat back on the table to drink the rest of her beer and evaluate her ass as she crossed the room.
Buck Merrill was in the kitchen, and it didn't take an empath to tell he was in no shape for driving. He was sitting at a flimsy table with three other guys playing cards. She didn't recognize the game. She knew the state of inebriation, though. He wouldn't be able to keep a car on the road, and most likely wouldn't be able to keep his hands to himself either. This level of drunk could go from zero to angry and entitled in the blink of an eye.
Before she could flee, Buck blinked and gave her a long look-ever.
"What can I help you with, darlin'?" He asked.
"Nothing. I was just looking for who I came with."
"Who'd you come with?"
"Sylvia Avery."
Buck smirked. "In the back's my best guess. The back bedroom or the back seat of some poor fucker's car. In the back of something. Want some help finding her?"
He wasn't fitting the buffoonish description Dally spun of him at all. She guessed he cleared six-two in his Ropers. He was so thin that a strong wind might have blown him away like tumbleweed, but he surely possessed a bullrider's upper body strength. If he could hang on with two thousand pounds of pissed off trying to toss him in the air then he could easily pin her down, knock her stupid with one punch, and do whatever he wanted after that.
"No thanks. I need to call my brother."
"Who's your brother?"
"Her brother's Darrel Curtis, and no way in hell is she calling him." Tim said from over her shoulder. "She'd no more have to make that pretty bottom lip quiver and there'd be no convincing him that we'd never laid a hand on her."
"So what's stopping us?" Buck asked. "I mean, if we're looking down the barrel of that gun anyway?"
"What's stopping us is that it ain't necessary as long as we can find her another ride out of Dodge, dipshit. Can you drive?"
Buck grinned, barring the space where his teeth should've been. "Shit, man, I can barely tell her from her shadow at this point. You want my keys?"
"That's the last goddamned thing I want," Tim said. "Yeah, give 'em."
It was what she got for getting pissed off at Darrel and trying to show him she knew a thing or two about a thing or two. Sure, she knew how to ditch work and she knew how to catch a ride with the fastest, most foul-mouthed girl in town. She didn't know jack, however, about what to do when that girl left her standing alone with her beer in the middle of a house party on the shady side of the stockyards.
"I'm not twelve, Darry," she'd been arguing mere hours earlier, attempting to justify why she should be allowed to attend a much safer, more sane brand of party.
"Somedays, I'm not so sure, Dawn. Maybe you're eighteen in cat years. Would explain why you're so damned catty."
He wasn't even taking her seriously. He was grinning at his own wordplay with his back to her while he shuffled the breakfast dishes in the sink.
"Eighteen, Darry. I'm eighteen. I'm really only asking your permission to be polite at this point. Makes you look good in front of the boys."
A muscle in his shoulder twitched. She'd tweaked a nerve with that one.
"At this point, you don't even need to be living here anymore, do you? You've conquered high school, joined the working world. Find yourself a halfway decent guy to marry you, and we could be rid of each other."
She had no idea where to take that argument. From the sounds of things, he would be happy to be rid of her. And, yet, it had to be some kind of mind trick he was playing since it had all begun with his denying her his permission to attend a party on a weeknight.
"Maybe there'll be someone at the party willing to marry me."
"Doubt it. Knock you up and let you live off of food stamps for the next eighteen years, maybe. I've been to those parties. Wasn't there looking to find a marryin' kind of girl."
"You're a prince. You ever knock anyone up?"
"Do you see a girl I barely know the name of shuffling around here with a kid who looks strikingly like me? I ain't that kind of guy. I can't say as much for some of the guys I used to party with."
"I'm going."
"You're not. Those parties get busted. You can't get arrested. None of us can get arrested. Be a nice girl. Go to a movie."
She hated that- being told to be a nice girl. Nice meant compliant, obedient, we tell you how to wear your hair and how long to wear your skirt. No matter how you sliced it, it all came down to making it easy for some man somewhere. Either be easy or be invisible.
She was wishing she could make herself invisible sitting in the front seat of Buck's Thunderbird next to Tim Shepard. Tim, she figured, was probably wondering if she was easy.
"I ain't taking you home," he said, taking the cigarette from between his lips and speaking through the smoke.
Her heart leapt a little. He elaborated:
"I ain't going to let him see you with me. I'm dropping you at Mathews' house. That ought to be sufficient punishment to keep you from ever wandering into my neck of the woods again."
"Why do you think you get to punish me? Who died and gave that your job?"
"From what I hear, sweetheart, your old man died and your ma too. Seems to me that life itself is punishing the hell out of you. I'm just a spoke in a great, big wheel."
She wanted to tell him to fuck himself for bringing up her parents, but then she figured he had done it just to get a rise out of her. She launched an assault of her own:
"How come you're so scared of my brother?"
His mouth curled in a smirk.
"I ain't scared, sis. I just know when I'm punching above my weight class. In this case, literally. Don't take a rocket scientist to see that your brother could break me in half."
"You think Two-Bit won't tell him?"
"From what I hear, you can handle the Two-Bit problem on your own."
She crossed her arms across her chest, Tim took a satisfied drag on his cigarette, amused by her silence.
"Not that I'm implying that you have or would have to use your feminine wiles or flash him your tits, or nothing. From what I understand you didn't even have to put out, and you're still leading him around like a half-starved hounddog. Shit, I guess you do have him about half-starved. For something."
"You don't have to talk like that."
"I don't have to, but I like to. You want me to say something nice- you're so darned pretty, Dawn Curtis, you'll have Mathews trippin' all over himself to do you a favor?"
"I'd rather you didn't say anything. Just shut your trap and let's enjoy the silence."
"Doesn't strike me that you're in any position to be making demands, sis. You want a smoke?"
He offered her his half-spent cigarette. She shook her head.
"You want to pull over and smoke a jay? Or not pull over and smoke a jay? Tell Two-Bit your eyes are all red from crying 'cause you just missed him so damned bad."
Dawn waved her hands to tell him she didn't care. Not being an explicit no, Tim took it as a yes. He leaned across her lap and popped the button to open the glove compartment. The car swerved a little and he righted it, but not before ashing in her lap. She brushed the ashes off, and reached over to hold the wheel steady while he dug around for Buck's dope in the black hole of stray papers, empty cigarette packs, and spent shell casings.
"Who saves this shit?" Tim grumbled. His fingers landed on the purple softness of a Crown Royale bag. He closed the glove compartment, sat up straight again, and uncinched the bag with two fingers.
"Here." He tossed the bag into Dawn's lap. "See if that was worth almost running us off the road for."
Buck, it appeared, was almost flat busted. The bag contained a crushed, half-empty pack of papers and two joints. Dawn took one and held it out to Tim.
"Good work, Sherlock," he said. He pulled the lighter out to see if it was still hot from lighting his cigarette. Satisfied that it would light, he handed it to Dawn and said, "Ladies first."
She took it from him and had inhaled before it dawned on her that maybe he was trying to get her blazed in order to soften her up. The thought made her choke and she coughed out a chest-full of smoke.
Tim laughed.
"Here, leave that to the professionals then," he said and took the joint from her. He continued, holding the smoke in as he spoke in a gruff whisper, "Although from what I hear, you're at least middle management where that's concerned."
"You hear a hell of a lot, Tim. Where do you hear all this bullshit?"
"Love a woman who cusses like a cowhand...I hear plenty from Two-Bit for starters. Plenty from Dally, too, although he's given to works of pure fiction. Still, was him who told me you were cute, and you wouldn't turn down turnin' on. I guess he had that right."
"Yeah, well, he doesn't say shit about you," Dawn told him. Which was a lie. Talking about Tim came almost as second nature to Dally as breathing. He invoked Tim's name at the most awkward and inappropriate times- the way a girl brings up a guy she has a crush because she just can't bear not speaking his name for another minute.
"Well, what do you want to know? Any great, burning questions you want answered before I drop you on the doorstep of some lesser breed of man?"
"Why're you talking to me? I mean, I'm guessing this is what- for you- qualifies as polite conversation. Why not just shut up and listen to the radio? Why not just run me out of Buck's and let me take my chances on the highway?"
"I'm not a fuckin' animal. Holy Christ. Have you seen what drives up and down that highway? God's honest word- I was thinking about making a move on you until someone said your name. Once that idea was purged from my mind, I didn't have the heart to just leave you hanging. Seems I was meant to get you into a car one way or another tonight. Just not in the way that I had intended."
"Because you're afraid of my brother," she said, and smiled at her reflection in the window.
"Because I respect your brother as a man who knows what the weight of the world feels like, and as a man who could most certainly beat my ass." He handed her back the joint and told her, "Go easy now, sis".