So maybe everything in the universe balanced out. Maybe there was some sort of scale everything got stacked on, and it evened out over eternity. He didn’t know. He never had been religious, but he’d never had anybody close to teach it to him either. Who knew? He might have liked it. He liked the stars and all that astrology stuff. Like which house your planet was in and all that. In prison they’d made them go to church on Sunday, and he’d always liked the gospel singing, which he’d cupped a hand to hear. But now he couldn’t remember any of the songs, just watching the big titties under the rich blue robes of the pretty black girls in the choir. Like that deputy sheriff that got him. She was a brick house. And hell. Who knew? Maybe under different circumstances…
He felt Rico take him by the collar and start dragging him. So much blood was leaking out of him that it was starting to soak all through his pants. He was about to get very light-headed. His head fell over and he couldn’t help it.
This guy wasn’t going to get away with this. Who did he think he was? Was the guy who owned the lions not home? Was he on vacation?
And all that time down on the prison farm, waiting to get out. Waiting for all the stuff he was going to do. Find a woman. Find out something about what a normal woman was like, since he didn’t really know. And now he never would. Not in this life.
But there had to be more to it than what he and Doreen had done. That was just sex. There wasn’t any lovemaking in it because there hadn’t been any love. That was just fucking. He’d had plenty of fucking. That was all animals had. Just making little animals. Oh but then some of them had dens. Maybe if he’d had a good den.
He slid on his back across the rough ground, and on his hands. The collar of his shirt was choking him, the way Rico was holding it. But in just a little bit, from blood loss, he didn’t know so well what was going on, only that it was very cold out here and that he was getting numb and that something was going to happen and then everything would be over and he wouldn’t be feeling this way anymore.
There were noises close to him but he didn’t know what they were. His butt was cold. His butt was wet. He remembered from long ago a bright parking lot with cars and trucks and somebody holding him up, horns honking, the smell of what he knew now had been gas and oil. He remembered Doreen sucking him off but hurting him on purpose with her teeth. Not being able to make her stop with his hands tied behind his back. Screaming on her bed, the world not hearing, the world never hearing, for years, and years, and years.
He was choking. Something had him by the throat. It was getting cold. He wished he could sleep.
Like in the warm barn.
Next to the happy fucking he’d heard.
Then somebody was speaking to him. Somebody was saying something to him, and for a time he couldn’t figure out what it was, and then he could. It was somebody asking him did he want to say anything before he shut the enclosure door and opened the cage door. And he couldn’t think of anything, so he just said: “Thanks, I think I can make it fine from here.”
And the cage door slammed, and another one opened, and then something big and hairy was on him, and it had teeth, and very bad breath, and then it felt like teeth closed on his head.
94
Wayne went down to the bar at the Peabody in the evening with his uniform on and grabbed a tall chair near the fountain. The bartender had a tag that said “Ken” and he got Wayne a cold Budweiser in a bottle and a shot of Quervo Gold with a piece of lime on a napkin. Wayne told Ken to start him a tab and Ken nodded and then left him alone. He was glad because he needed to think about everything before he did it.
His head felt okay now. He just needed to get it checked. Maybe it was nothing. Or maybe it was something they could fix. They could fix about anything these days. People had artificial hearts. People had synthetic knees. They had very good doctors in the navy. And they might let him out if there was something wrong with his head, but he wouldn’t tell Anjalee about that. Not right now. Not tonight. Other stuff was more important. And a medical discharge was not really anything to be ashamed of. It just meant that you got hurt during service to your country. It happened to people in the service even when there wasn’t a war going on.
He took a long cold drink of his beer and set it back down. There were more people starting to come into the lobby and the bar now and everybody seemed to be happy. There were Christmas decorations set up and there was a tree with lights in a corner and a bunch of probably fake wrapped gifts under it. He took another drink of his beer.
The thing was, he didn’t want to let himself get over there too early and get drunk. He wanted to go back around the same time he’d seen her before, since that was one of the few things he knew about her, the time she’d been there, which he thought had been between nine and ten.
So he was just going to sit here, be cool, sip some beer, sip a few shots of tequila, and just hang out, and watch the people, and then later on, when he got hungry enough, he’d go eat somewhere, and then he’d come back and give the bellhop a few bucks to call him a cab, and he’d tell the driver to take him to the place on Winchester. Gigi’s Angels. And maybe she’d be there when he walked in. There was a hope for that like a great happy birthday balloon in his heart. He could see her face in his mind. He hadn’t seen her naked, so he just imagined all that. And he’d already done that a lot of times.
He’d been rehearsing what he wanted to say to her. The first thing he’d ask her was did she remember him. He hoped she would. He was sure she would. The second thing he’d ask her was did she want a drink. And then they’d go from there. And if she wanted money to talk, he had plenty in his pocket. He was going to have to talk to her, a lot, to get her to understand what he was talking about. What he was talking about was life.
And maybe it wouldn’t happen all at once. Maybe he didn’t need to rush things too much. Maybe he’d only be able to get her address, so that he could write her, and he had to tell her about his situation, that he didn’t know if he was going to stay in the navy or not, but that he had twenty-one more months to think about it, and that he’d get some more leave in there somewhere, and that he wanted to come back to Memphis to see her, if that was all right. And that if he had to pay her again to go to bed with her, that it was all right, and he’d pay it gladly, but he wanted her in a bed this time, and not in that dirty place upstairs, but maybe here at the Peabody, up in his room, where it was private. Up in that nice bed within those nice walls, on clean sheets, in a place where he could talk to her, and tell her that he’d been thinking of almost nothing but her, and touch her face, and her skin, and her hair, and all the other wonderful things she had. That was his plan. But the plan changed, as the best-laid ones sometimes do.
95
Helen didn’t make it over four blocks before she ran a red light trying to get through under the yellow. Blue lights surged out from a parking lot and pulsed behind the Jag, cold cold light that washed into her heart.
And just like that, the commonwealth of Tennessee had her ass again.
96
Eleven o’clock found Wayne in loud music, almost drunk, and sitting on a bar stool away from the stage in Gigi’s Angels, and Anjalee wasn’t there. He’d been looking for her, and he’d asked almost everybody in there if they’d seen her, the bartender several times, and he’d already said he didn’t know where she was tonight.
He didn’t mean for this shit to happen. How in the hell had it? Did she work here or did she not work here? He never had seen her on the stage. Maybe she wasn’t a dancer. Maybe she was an off-duty dancer. Maybe he didn’t know what the fuck she was. He knew he needed another beer, though. He flagged down the bartender again. The music was really loud.
“You think she might come in later?” he said, when the bartender brought the fresh bottle. Some of his money was in a crumpled pile in front of him and he picked some bills from it and pushed them across.
The bartender picked up some of the money with a bored look and put one bill back in t
he pile. He spoke just as he was turning away.
“Like I told you, buddy. I don’t know where she is tonight.”
He motioned toward the stage when he stopped at the register. A slim redheaded girl was slinking up and down and around a pole with blue lights winking over her pale skin.
“There’s plenty other women in here. I can introduce you to one if you want to hook up.”
Wayne looked around. There were some girls sitting in men’s laps here and there. They were mostly naked. They didn’t seem to be dancing. He waved a hand.
“I think I’ll just sit here and see if she comes in,” he said.
“Suit yourself,” the bartender said, like he’d missed some great opportunity, and moved away to wait on some other people down at the end of the bar.
He should have eaten. It always messed you up if you didn’t eat. He should have gone right on down the marble steps to the street and found a place to eat, but he’d daydreamed different scenes with Anjalee that always ended in lovemaking, and he’d gotten comfortable where he was, and everybody was really friendly to him, and some even told him they appreciated what he was doing for the country, and the whole evening had seemed to turn into a big pre-Christmas party, and he’d just stayed on his bar stool, drinking beer, drinking shots, buying shots, telling the whale story to new friends.
But all those new friends were gone now. And he was drunk again. And she wasn’t here.
Sometimes when Wayne got to drinking, he got to feeling that people were looking at him. And he was feeling kind of like that now. There were five or six guys sitting at a table twenty feet away and they were husky young men, about like him. One had on a Memphis Fire Department T-shirt, so he figured they were all firefighters. He’d noticed a couple of them look at him. But that wasn’t really unusual. People always looked at a man or a woman in uniform because you didn’t see them that often out in the civilian world, just mostly in airports unless you lived in some place like Washington, D.C., where the whole city was full of uniforms.
He watched the dancer on the stage for a while. She was okay but she wasn’t anything special. Maybe when she came off the stage he needed to ask her if she knew Anjalee.
He guessed Henderson had been home for a while already. They should have swapped phone numbers. Then maybe they could have kept up with each other that way. He could have called Henderson’s house or Henderson could have called his house. His mother could have told Henderson where he was and how to reach him. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of that. But Henderson evidently hadn’t thought of it either.
He kept sitting there sipping his beer. He’d probably had seven or eight, counting the ones at the Peabody. And if he didn’t see her tonight, what was he going to do? Come back over here tomorrow? Yeah. He had ten days to do something. But he couldn’t afford to stay ten days in the Peabody. It was a nice hotel, yeah, but it was too high for an enlisted man’s pay. A Howard Johnson’s would be a lot cheaper. Or even a Motel 6. But it wouldn’t be any big deal to move, with just one duffel bag. Maybe he could find a motel near here. Cut down on cab fare. And then the other thoughts came back, the ones that were always nagging at him.
That this was crazy. To even be here. It didn’t make any sense. She was a prostitute. A whore. She fucked people for a living. But what had made her that way? What had gone wrong in her life that caused her to sell herself to men all the time? The questions he wanted to ask her were driving him nuts. And she might tell him to mind his own business. And she wasn’t even anywhere around to ask anyway. He hated to keep bugging the bartender about it. And at the same time he wondered if the guy might have a phone number for her. If she worked here, the bartender might need to call her to tell her to come in to work, might need to tell her not to come in to work, might need to tell her any number of things over the phone about her job. And did they punch a clock? Did they have insurance? Did the club get a percentage off a blow job? He guessed they did since she was using their building.
People kept coming in and there was more and more cigarette smoke floating around. The girl got off the stage and some people whistled and clapped but she didn’t come by where he was sitting, instead went over to the other side of the room and sat down in a man’s lap. He guessed he could get up and go over there and ask her if she knew Anjalee. Somebody in here had to know how to get in touch with her. That old girl might be the one.
He kind of kept his eye on her and drank his beer. He looked back behind the bar to see if there was any tequila back there and there was.
He looked at the bartender a couple of times but he was talking to some woman and not paying attention to his customers. Wayne tried to be patient. But he was getting a little aggravated. The bartender knew her. But he didn’t want to tell him anything about her. What did he care? What was it to him? Was he the boss? Did he own this place? Maybe he did. Or maybe he just worked here. He could ask him if he ever got his attention. He waited and waited and got tired of waiting.
“Hey, man,” he said, and raised his hand about halfway, but the bartender didn’t hear him. The woman the bartender was talking to saw him, though, because she looked at him, but then she cut her eyes back to the bartender and kept listening to whatever bullshit he was blowing.
Wayne took a deep breath and a big drink of his beer. He was about halfway done with that one. He might as well order another one when he ordered the shot. Keep from having to call him back again. If he ever got the shot ordered. He waited and waited some more, long time, long time.
“Hey, bartender!” he said, kind of loud, and the bartender turned mid-bullshit, and Wayne saw a flash of anger go across his interrupted face, then he said something harsh to the woman and came on over. He put his hands on the bar. He looked like a man trying to be an asshole. His reasons unclear. His scarred and warred-on face.
“You don’t have to yell at me, sailor. What you want?”
“Sorry. I want to get a shot of that tequila. And let me have another beer. I couldn’t catch your eye.”
The bartender muttered something and went to the row of bottles and pulled out the tequila and reached for a shot glass. He half-turned to Wayne.
“Lot of people in here, you know? I can’t watch everybody the whole time. All these dipshits.”
“I got you,” Wayne said. “It’s loud, too.”
“Fucking aye. And it’s just me.”
Wayne nodded in silent agreement while the bartender poured his shot. He set it down hard in front of Wayne and some of it spilled. He didn’t put a napkin under it either. Wayne sat there. The bartender got him another beer and opened it on the cooler-box lid and set it beside the shot glass.
“That’s nine-fifty,” he said, and stood waiting. Wayne gave him a ten and a couple of ones for a tip. The bartender was the one who’d fixed him up with Anjalee. Same guy. No doubt about it. He thought his name was Moe. Was it Moe?
“Have you got her number, Moe?” Wayne said.
The bartender had been turning away with the money but he stopped. He was still pissed. But he guessed his name was Moe.
“Whose phone number you wanting again?”
“That girl I was asking you about. Anjalee’s her name.”
“Oh yeah,” the bartender said, and nodded as he turned away, and muttered something about how he didn’t give out the girls’ phone numbers. Wayne wanted to talk to him some more, but a few more people came in and walked to the bar and the bartender had to start waiting on them. And a girl showed up with a tray and an order for drinks. Then another one came from the other side of the room with the same thing. And looking all around he didn’t see anybody in there who even vaguely looked like Anjalee.
So he turned back to his shot. The bartender hadn’t given him any lemon or lime, either one. And he didn’t want to do it without that. Only now he was tied up making all those drinks. Some more people were coming to the bar. Another girl was climbing up on the stage and a rock tune was starting up, some distorted and fuzzy moan
ing of wah wah waaah…
There were some lemons and limes both, in a tray on the back edge of the bar. Wayne could see them. They were sliced into wedges and he really needed one for his tequila. The bartender should have given him one.
Couldn’t he just reach back there and get one? He wanted to try and talk the bartender out of Anjalee’s number, because that would be a big help, but he didn’t want to do anything to piss him off now that he knew he had her number.
So he sat there and took a sip of his tequila, but it was pretty bad without a piece of lemon or lime to bite into, so he waited awhile and thought about it and then got up and walked a few steps down the bar and reached across the bar into the tray for a piece of lemon and the bartender saw him.
“Hey. Hey!” he said, loud enough for everybody at the bar to look around. “Keep your fucking dirty hands out of my garnish tray, sailor.”
“You were busy,” Wayne said. He had the lemon wedge in his hand. He could feel and see everybody looking at him and he felt like he’d been caught stealing. He could feel his ears getting red.