“That’s what my buddy thinks,” I said. “And I’m starting to believe it. The view seems to have a consensus of opinion.”
“But you’re going in anyway?”
“Yes.”
“This ain’t no daughter of yours?”
“No.”
“This woman whose daughter it is ain’t your wife?”
I shook my head.
“This gal ain’t no stepdaughter?”
“Nope.”
The old man shook his head. “I hate them pimpin’ sonsabitches. I ain’t got nothing against pussy, and I reckon some gal wants to sell it, that’s her business, but this place ain’t so cut-and-dried. I think a gal wants to leave, they don’t just let her leave. I think she wants to go, they ought to let her go. It ain’t the pussy sellin’ bothers me, it’s the lack of free will.”
“I take it this place has been here a while?”
“Many, many years. Used to be run by a madam named Lilly Filigree, and I think most of the girls there chose to be there then, and from what I know, she treated ’em good. When I was a young man I went up to there myself, rode a little tail up the canyon oncet or twicet. But now, last ten years or so, it’s just business. All business, and it ain’t the girls’ business.”
“Anyone ever tried to close the place down?”
“Oh yeah, back when there were enough people in this town to fill a church, a bunch of self-righteous old biddies tried to shut it down. Mostly ’cause their men were up there getting their ashes hauled now and then.”
“They didn’t have any luck?”
“Sheriff, he kind of slapped the madam’s wrist now and then. Ran some of the girls in around election time. But it didn’t mean nothin’. But it’s not that way now. Not just a bunch of ladies makin’ a buck for a fuck. Folks run that show, they ain’t sweet. Used to be a colored lady up there ran it. She came after Filigree. She was as mean as a goddamn crocodile. Seen her a few times in town. Always wore this big old sack dress.”
“A muumuu,” I said.
“You say so. She went away and there was a cowboy midget and a big bastard runnin’ it. Midget liked to come to town so people would look at him. Strutted around like a banty rooster. Right proud of himself, he was.”
I thought about Red and his expensive Western-cut suits. I thought about the lady in the muumuu, resting in a box at the bottom of some lake in Arkansas. Maybe still in the muumuu, shit-stained as it was.
Taxi Man spat into the soft drink bottle, said, “Figured that midget and ole bigin’ was runnin’ things. Then they were gone too and there’s a fellow up there now scares me just to see him come into town and sit in the barbershop. He don’t even pretend he does anything other than sell pussy. But hell, there ain’t nobody ’round here cares. This ain’t where he gets his action. It’s them conventioneers and such pay his bills.”
“I see.”
“No you don’t. You go up there and fuck around, and that monster gets hold of you, they gonna find you in some rock quarry with a .44 slug behind the ear.”
“Cheery scenario,” I said.
“Not really.”
“Any chance you’re going to tell me where this place is?”
“All right,” he said. He produced a stubby pencil from his pocket, wet it with his tongue, used it to draw a map on the fly page under the title of one of the paperback books. I thanked him, took the book, put it in my back pocket.
“Had any balls, I’d go with you,” he said.
“It’s not your problem.”
“Things like this ought to be everyone’s problem.”
“I guess.”
“Maybe if I was younger.”
“Sure.”
I started out the door and he called out, “Hey, boy, you watch your ass.”
“Thanks,” I said.
12
At the motel I told Brett and Leonard what I had learned.
Brett said, “I don’t get it. Everyone knows it’s up there. This taxi man, he says he knows the girls are sort of prisoners—”
“Sort of,” I interrupted. “Tillie got into this by choice. This is the sort of business you don’t know who you’re going to end up with. Not just in bed, but in business. One day you’re selling your product and paying a percentage. Next day you’re owned and selling your product and you get a percentage, and sometimes maybe the customer gives you a black eye. A disease.”
“But the cops?” Brett said.
“There’s one local cop,” I said. “He probably makes more money a year than all the whores do, and he don’t make it on law enforcement.”
“So they get away with it,” Brett said.
“Yeah,” I said. “And the place has a reputation almost like a landmark. Kind of a hangover from the past. Lot of people think, well, they’re just sellin’ meat, what’s the problem?”
“So,” Leonard said, “the next step is?”
“Way I see it,” I said, “is I could go up there now, pose as a customer and try and take Tillie out. But I think it’s better we wait until tonight. That way, I pull it off, we can hustle her out of town with some dark to help us.”
Leonard nodded. “That sounds all right. You go in there, though, you go in with a gun. I didn’t haul all these weapons down here for nothing.”
“Actually,” I said, “I hope you did.”
“You know what I mean,” Leonard said. “I’m going to be nearby, and not with any handgun neither.”
I looked at Brett. She sat quietly, churning her own thoughts about.
Shortly before dark Leonard and I walked down to the Coke machine next to the motel office. I put coins in the machine and got myself a Diet Coke, Leonard a Dr Pepper, and Brett an orange drink. I gave Leonard the Dr Pepper, slipped Brett’s can into my coat pocket, pulled the tab on the Diet Coke and drank some of it.
“How do you think Brett’s doing?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Leonard said. “She’s hard to read.”
I looked out at the highway. Leaves were being blown downhill by a sharp cool wind. The gold and red and brown leaves whirled and whipped above the highway in the fading sunlight like dying birds, floated down and stuck to the cement. Cars came by and tossed them up again. It began to sprinkle gently.
“You watch her,” I said.
“I will.”
We went back to the room, drank our drinks, and I read some of the Western Taxi Man had given me. Leonard paced, went to the bathroom numerous times. Brett lay still on the bed. Once when I looked at her and smiled, she looked at me as if I were nothing more than the nasty wallpaper behind me. It made me nervous.
It went like that for another hour, then the daylight faded. I closed up my book. Leonard handed me the little .38 and I put it in an ankle holster and strapped it on and pulled my pants leg over it. Leonard stuck a revolver under his shirt and gave Brett one. She looked at the pistol with an expression that was hard to figure. Maybe she was thinking about Tillie. Maybe she was thinking what I was thinking. I was scared.
Brett slipped the gun into the holster Leonard provided, strapped it on under her coat. Leonard rolled all the big guns back into the blankets, except for the double-barrel. He held it up and looked at me. “Honky spreader.”
We gathered up our goods. Leonard carried the shotgun down close to his side. It was raining when we went out. We put the gun-stuffed blanket in the trunk, tossed the luggage in the back. Leonard put the shotgun with the luggage. We stopped up front of the office, and I went in and checked us out of the motel.
In the car I got out my flashlight and opened up the paperback Taxi Man had written on. I studied the map and told Leonard how to go. The rain pecked at our windshield and the wet leaves slapped against it and tangled in the windshield wipers, wadded, and were tossed away.
We drove on into Hootie Hoot. Up Main Street and past the taxi stand. I tried to look and see if I could see Taxi Man at his post behind the card table, but it was dark and the street was poorly lit and
it was raining hard now.
On up the street we went, out of Hootie Hoot. The rain began to die. I studied the crude map inside the paperback, and we followed it to a blacktop road that turned right. We took it, went along on that for five miles, then turned left on another blacktop. This one was narrow and wound down amongst scrubby Oklahoma trees wound tight with darkness and nesting crows.
We went along the blacktop for ten miles and the trees broke on either side and there was a great hill up ahead and the blacktop quit there and turned into a gravel road, and at the top of the hill the half moon, which had finally shone itself through fading rain clouds, seemed to be balancing, like half a loaf of round white bread, on its rim.
We kept going. Down on the other side the hill fell away into a wide pasture and in the center of the pasture was a big old white house. It was well lit from the inside and by porch lights, and on either side of the house by two tall pole lights that shone on the pasture and revealed it was full of cars and rain puddles.
The house was three stories with columns and a long wide porch that wound all around it. It had a new roof sprouting four brick chimneys. One for each side. All four were breathing smoke. You could see the smoke against the moon, which now sat just above the house like some kind of soiled halo.
“Business is good,” Leonard said, and stopped at the bottom of the hill and rolled down his window and spat outside. He took several deep breaths. I could hear music coming from the house, and I could hear some laughter and some other sounds. It seemed to be a raucous place.
“Well, brother,” Leonard said, “what’s the score?”
“Park far out. I’ll walk.”
“And when you come out,” Leonard said, “I’ll be too far away.”
“I know. But they see y’all sitting out in the car, it’ll make them wonder.”
“You’re trying to say these boys may not like niggers?”
“You said it first, remember.”
“I tell you what I’m gonna do,” Leonard said. “I’m going to give you the time to get down there. Then I’m gonna give you fifteen minutes to line up things, like you’ve come to shop. Then I’m going to move on down about halfway and park. I’ll be on the right. Where you see the gap in those cars. That’s where you want to head. You’re not out of there in twenty minutes, or I hear some kind of hootenanny goin’ on, I’m comin’ in.”
“That’ll just cause more trouble,” I said.
“Not if they’re gutting you with a knife,” Brett said.
“I guess that’s a point worth considering,” I said.
I got out, started walking toward the house.
The wind gathered up the scent of incense and passed it on to me. It was a nice smell. Any other time I might have appreciated it. The music was country. Tanya Tucker. It was cranked up so loud it seemed to be responsible for the leaves blowing off the trees.
When I was on the porch, a guy big enough to fill a bus and stick his ass through the door came outside and made the porch creak when he walked. He was wearing a dark suit with a white shirt and a dark tie. He had a head about the size of an atlas globe and his hair was cut so short, in the porch light I could see razor scrapes on his blue-veined head. He smiled at me.
“Hello,” he said. “Come on in.”
“Thanks.”
He walked down the porch, around it, out of sight. Inside was a brightly lit foyer, and the music was really loud. Tanya Tucker was over with and some guy whose music I didn’t know was singing about something I wasn’t listening to. Loud as that music was, it wasn’t as loud as the thumping of my heart, the pounding of blood in my temples. The incense was so strong in the foyer it made me sick.
A woman in her sixties, carrying about two hundred pounds, and not carrying it well, wearing a multicolored, loose-fitting dress that had all the style of a horse blanket, sort of sprang up in front of me. She had blue hair and loose dentures and too much powder and rouge on her face. She looked as if she ought to be somewhere else, baking cookies.
She said, “Young man. You come for a good time?”
I hesitated, fearing she might think she was supposed to be my good time.
“Yes, ma’am, I suppose I have.”
“Well, there’s a small cover charge. Any other charges, that’s between you and the girls.”
I realized then she was a door greeter, sort of like they have at Wal-Mart. Need a shopping cart? Want to buy some pussy? Man, that was cold. A sixty-year-old woman to warm you up. Like Grandma guiding you around on your first day at kindergarten.
“How much?”
She told me and I gave her some of my bouncer money.
“You need to come into the sittin’ room, son. Look around. See if there’s anyone you like. The girls are real friendly.”
I went past her, through a half-open door and into the sitting room. It was busy in there. Lots of men, all white, were sitting on couches and lots of girls were flittering around them, as if the men were magnets and they were flecks of iron.
The men’s talk was loud, to compete with the music, to try and not show nervousness. I figured there were plenty of husbands in here who weren’t regular whoremongers, but who were trying to start out in style. Most of the men in the room looked to be either businessmen or farmers, and all but one looked to be past thirty.
The women were all young and looked to be whores, of course. You could tell from the lack of clothes. I checked each one individually, trying to determine if any of them were Tillie. Well, maybe that wasn’t why I looked so carefully, but it was part of the reason.
Over by the crackling fireplace was a Steroid Jock wearing an expensive hand-tailored suit, but that didn’t make it pretty. He had chosen to have it made out of a kind of olive green material the texture of grape leaves. His head was square, like a block, and it was topped with black hair cut close to the scalp. His ears reminded me of radar tracking devices. He was talking to a handsome blond man in another hand-tailored suit, only this one was blue and smooth and more tasteful. Then again, who was I? A fashion critic?
The guy in the blue suit was huge too, but it didn’t show right off, he was so well proportioned. I realized utility instead of fashion had more to do with the hand-tailored suits these guys wore. You looked like they did, you couldn’t pick a suit off the rack. The guy in the blue suit was watching me, like a bird stalking a worm. He had one hand on the mantel and he was playing with a smoking pot of incense.
I glanced around the room and saw more of the boys. Not the customers. Just these big sonsabitches. They were trying to look casual, but they looked about as casual as warthogs in jockstraps and snowshoes. There were six of them altogether, packed into those expensive suits, housing enough steroids inside their flesh to accommodate the entire Mr. Universe competition. I wondered how many more like them were upstairs. I thought about the one on the porch. Maybe he and Leonard were sitting on the steps right now, talking about the moon.
Naw.
I took a deep breath and put a smile on my face and started walking among the women, like I was shopping. A redhead looked at me and smiled. Bless her heart, I’d seen more sincerity in the grin of a presidential candidate.
I grinned at her, just to be sociable, but tried to discourage her by turning away and looking at my watch. Only problem was I wasn’t wearing one.
How long had I been inside now?
Five minutes?
Ten?
Soon, Leonard would be moving the car closer, and not long after that he’d be inside looking for me.
I turned slightly and the redhead was at my shoulder. She wasn’t gorgeous, but she was cute. She had a lump of a nose, good teeth, and freckles to go with the red hair, which was the color of copper and probably that way naturally. She was a little thick in the hips, but if she’d been wearing more than thin black panties that wouldn’t have been noticeable. Another ten years those hips were going to give her trouble.
She had me by the elbow. She said, “You need some
company?”
“Well, I’m looking for somebody.”
“Here I am.”
“I’m looking for someone named Tillie. I hear good things about Tillie.”
She frowned. “You don’t hear good things about Darlene?”
“Well, I don’t hear bad things about Darlene. It’s just I’m looking for Tillie.”
“I don’t know any Tillie.”
I tried to remember the photograph I had seen of Tillie in Brett’s house. “She might go by Till. Something like that. She’s a redhead too. Big-breasted.”
“That’s it. You don’t like me because I have small tits.”
I knew she could care less if I liked her or her tits. She was doing what she was supposed to do. Drum up commerce.
I saw her glance toward the fireplace mantel a couple of times, looking at the guy in the blue suit. He glanced at us, then looked away, checking out the rest of his business. And I was sure it was his business. Or at least the one he was running for Big Jim. I figured he was the big guy Taxi Man had told me about.
“About this Tillie?” I asked.
“There’s no one named that here,” she said.
“Not even upstairs?”
“You really want this Tillie, don’t you?”
“I’d like to try her. I’ve heard good stuff.”
She shook her head. “Sorry, no Tillie. You get bored and I’m not playing the horizontal tango with some redneck’s weasel, you look me up. For two hundred dollars I can make you forget Tillie, or damn near anybody or anything.”
“I’ll remember that.”
She winked at me, went to join a couple of guys who had just entered the room, and they were damn glad to see her. One of them instantly had his arm around her, and I heard her laugh like she had just heard the funniest goddamn joke ever told.
Time was running out. Already Leonard was slipping shells into that double-barrel. Beard the lion in his den, I thought.
I went over to the guy in the blue suit. I said, “There’s a girl I’m looking for. A Tillie. She here?”