I’d choked down one cheap beer, poured most of the other down the toilet when I’d used the bathroom. In the same span of time, fifteen minutes, Nona Jett knocked back four of them atop whatever she’d had before I’d arrived. I’d not gone the direct-question route, but opted for conversational, asking about high-school activities and so forth, settling in on the personalities of the kids in her class.
“I’m figuring Patti as one of the shy kids in your class, right? Quiet and solitary and –”
Ms Jett laughed, a hard, metallic sound. “Patti shy? Patti wasn’t nothing near shy. Least not with the boys.”
“She was social?”
Nona Jett circled her left thumb and forefinger, then one by one waggled her right fingers in the circle.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning Patti Selmot would fuck anything with a dick. She was plain as Hellman’s with that pasty face and big buck teeth…but when you’re dealing with teenage boys and they know sometime during the night the lid’s coming off the honey-pot, you’re gonna have boyfriends.”
I pictured a homely little girl trying to be popular by letting high school guys feel her up in the backseats of ragged cars.
“That’s sad,” I said.
A harsh laugh. “You’re thinking Patti was like this little curl of fluff being taken advantage of? She busted balls. If a boy was gonna dip his wick, he was gonna pay.”
“Money?”
“Whores take money. Patti liked to take something outta people.”
“Could you explain, please?”
“She might make a guy steal something. Stuff that didn’t mean a thing, like ‘Go get me a gold-colored picture frame.’ The guy’d sneak in a store and come out with a picture frame jammed down his pants. She’d look at it and laugh, then smash it in the gutter.”
“This was in high school?”
“Yep. Then she moved on to the sex stuff. She liked to do things that made people feel bad about themselves later. There was this gross fat girl in class and Patti said she’d give a handjob to any guy who asked the fat girl out then stood her up. Another time she made some boys line up and whack each other off. Said she’d make it with the first guy who came.”
I pictured a motley crew of acne-riddled slackers and dopers sniffing at Patricia Selmot’s heels like dogs round a bitch in heat. It was sad and ugly and all too common.
“Were these guys the, uh, class losers?”
“Hah! A guy could be captain of the football team, but she’d get him under her thumb and twist him down. It was that hot little bod of hers.”
“You mean she’s shapely?”
“She wears them old-timey sacky dresses on the tee-vee, but she’s packing heat. Got little tits, but they’re perkers, nips like gumdrops. Little butt as round as a sugar-baby melon. Long pretty legs…”
She seemed to realize something. Stopped short. She shook her head and blew out a plume of blue smoke. “She did that stuff for a while then moved up and on.”
“She moved out of town?”
“No. She learned what got favors from the boys in school worked even better on older guys with jobs and money and good cars. The last I saw of her, she was with one of the usual groups in a convertible, the guys in their twenties, one guy driving, the others acting like fools to get her to pay attention to them.”
“Always groups?”
“I never saw Patti with one guy, it was always three or four. She liked to walk around with them, showing off at us other girls. Them older boys always had their tongues hanging down, hoping she’d put out. She did. But only on her terms, buddy. They also had this cruel game they played.”
“Which was?”
“They’d drive into a town and Patti would hang around a Dairy Queen or a bowling alley lounge or drugstore place where guys didn’t know her. She’d tease them boys with her eyes and wiggle that round butt in them tight shorts. Walk past them and rub on the front of their pants. They’d forget that pasty face and want what all boys want.”
She paused to light another cigarette, continuing her story from a roiling nimbus of smoke.
“Patti’d get them boys to drive her out to some place in the country, rubbing against them all the way, promising they was gonna get the fuck of their lives. But when they pulled off the road somewhere, the rest of her crew would jump outta the bushes and give the guy a beating.”
I shook my head at how pathetic it all was; the rural version of rolling gays. I thought a minute, added like an afterthought, “You ever hear of the Alliance? Or Arnold Meltzer?”
She took a suck of beer. “It got started a few years ahead of me, but right in our very own school. Ever’body knew someone in it. The Alliance was on our side, like you and me. Mostly it was older guys makin’ sure people knew America was for us and not them. Kickin’ ass when they had to. Lib’rals and communists and such.”
“How’d Patti wind up with Reverend Scaler?”
A shrug. “I dunno. Just one day I heard she was getting married to Reverend Scaler. That surprised me, cuz I’d heard she had the hots for some lawyer-boy. But then I figgured she’d doped out that the Reverend could be somebody big if she grabbed control of things. That girl loved to control. If you ask me, she controlled him all the way to being rich and famous.”
“The Reverend’s church was nearby?”
“Just over in Siler, little white wood place. Scaler was in his early twenties.”
“Mrs Scaler’s a big deal, being on the television and all. This story you told…” I shot a look at a stack of People magazines on the floor. “No one ever passed this story on?”
“There was one girl in our class, she went on to college and everything. Writes those books you see at the Winn-Dixie, romance things? She was going to do a book about Patti Selmot. She was gonna write a…a…”
“Biography?”
“Yep. But when she started going back and asking people what they remembered and all, this whole car full of lawyers showed up and told her if she wrote the book, she better have proof of everything, or they were gonna make her so poor she’d think a can of beans was a Thanksgiving meal.”
“The writer dropped the project, I take it?”
“She didn’t want to be poor. But who fucking does? Patti sure didn’t.”
Dr Matthias put the label on the tube-like container, checked the information for accuracy, slipped the tube into the shock-damping package in his briefcase. It was full. In the morning he’d FedEx the package to the lab to get the tests started, the results on his desk when he returned to Mobile.
He began packing his clothes, the long journey over, a longer one about to begin.