by John Sayles
“What the fuck?”
Then Wayne Lee steps out from the woods and waves his hat. Not in triumph.
It is another huge bull, tongue out, head skewed sideways with its antlers jammed against the bole of a tree, hair at the base of its neck column slick with blood.
“I was just coming in here,” says Wayne Lee, his voice still a little shaky, “and I run right into it. Like, it could have gored me with those prongs.”
“You were walking with your finger on the trigger.” Brent has the Remington in hand now, making sure Mutt doesn’t shoot his idiot friend with it.
“I don’t think so.”
“Then how did it get there?”
Wayne Lee looks like he’s trying to recreate the moment in his head. “Self-defense?”
“I shouldn’t have left the safety off,” says Mutt. It is a statement, not an apology.
Brent tears the appropriate month and day from the tag provided with his license and fixes it to an antler with the rubber band holding the remnants of blasted Saran Wrap at the tip of the muzzleloader. He thinks he can see black powder burns on the huge animal’s chest. Make a note not to do any armed bank robberies with Wayne Lee Hickey.
“There’s still pretty much light– you think those other ones went far away?” Wayne Lee knows he has fucked the pooch six ways from Sunday and is wearing his best innocent-little-boy look.
“You know why they call it a once-in-a-lifetime license?”
“Oh. Right.”
“It doesn’t refer to the elk’s lifetime,” adds Mutt, who has squatted down to look in the glazed eye, tilting his head this way and that like he’s searching for his reflection.
“What do we do now?” Wayne Lee staring at the dead bull with something like awe. Like he might have to bury it.
“Mutt and I,” says Brent, standing up, “are going to walk the ten minutes to the ranch house and have a drink or three. While you,” and here he unsheathes his Outdoor Edge skinner and hands it to Wayne Lee, “are going to stay here with the kill.”
Wayne Lee looks at the knife in his hand. “You want me to, like, gut it or something?”
“Just sit here with it. If a pack of coyotes or a bear shows up, use that to cut your throat.”
MOST OF THE OILFIELD songs are country, which don’t do a thing for your dick. Even when the lyrics are racy, it feels like that top button is always snapped, like it hurts to have those words come out of the same mouth that honors God and Mama and the Red, White, and Blue. Even rockabilly, which has some backbeat to it, doesn’t work on the pole. And most of these young ones out on the rigs now are metalheads anyway– if sound was drugs they’d be blasting meth into their ears all day long.
She’s hot, can’t stop, up on stage doing shots
Theory of a Deadman on the attack, Jewelle goes up and down the chrome like a squirrel in heat, what Unique calls the aerobic part of her act, as the mud men and valve jockeys and tool pushers up at the rack whoop and wave paper money in the air.
Grab her ass, actin tough
Mess with her, she’ll fuck you up
The trickiest thing about the outfit was figuring out how to keep the hard-hat from falling off when you’re hanging upside down. She’s simplified the routine over the years, though guys down from Wasilla say the marital aids on the tool belt are still a legend. Jewelle leaps into a front hook spin, then slides down, down, down into a wide-leg squat that becomes a split, showing them almost everything.
You know what she is, no doubt about it
She’s a bad bad girlfriend
She slow-motion dives onto the floor now, dragging her crotch like it’s on fire and she has to rub out the flames and it hurts so good. They have the nipple law here in North Dakota, meaning only the little bump itself has to stay hidden. Jewelle uses a pair of butterfly bandages, careful to make an X and not a cross, on each, and they come off easy with a little baby oil and don’t cause a rash. She leaves the one-dollar offerings lying for now and crawls forward for titty tips– the regulars know to flash the denominations so she can see them before she’ll go squeezing anything between her boobies. There are so many men in the club these days it’s gotten pretty competitive, and she’ll panther-slink right on past a line of fivers to trap a twenty or a fifty. There hasn’t been any cheating yet, like that awful month back in Anchorage when the good three-color printers hit town and guys thought it was funny to stuff counterfeit bills in your panties. Jewelle loves the feeling of the bass line throbbing up through the boards when she slithers across the stage, easing her into the Zone that makes the whole deal bearable, at least for her twenty minutes out front. The strobe lights are good too, with what’s staring up at you never something you want to take a long, cold look at, and the free-form nature of her pole routine, songs in different tempos–never putting her couple dozen moves together in exactly the same way– keeps it in the moment instead of seeming canned. Until it’s time to collect the tips she doesn’t really focus her eyes at all, trying for what Mr. Tanaka at the dojo calls mushin, willing the drillers and Vic and Unique and Oxana and Yellow Earth and all the huge, gouging machines out there on the high prairie away and just becoming the music and the movement. Leaving the state of North Dakota for the state of No Mind.
But the final crawl is prelude to the next hour’s action and you have to pay attention. Tuck’s sweet, dopey, just-shaven face is the last thing Jewelle sees as her music fades, pushing her elbows in to hold her breasts around his fingers for an extra long moment and giving him The Look before backing away with the twenty on board. Tuck is the gentleman in mind when Vic added ‘A Gentlemen’s Club’ on the awning and spiffed up the VIP Room, promising the kind of hassle-to-profit ratio you’re always hoping for whether you date or keep it all in the club.
Jewelle casually sweeps up her singles, smiling and greeting some of the rack rabbits as Eddie comes up on the sound system, asking for the boys to show her a little more love. Whoops, applause, some more grudging Washingtons thrown in her path. DJs are a new wrinkle Vic has added since the Bakken patch started to really percolate, replacing the need to slip your own CD in the player behind the bar and hustle to beat your music to the stage. But now Eddie can cross-fade songs, cutting them short when there are lots of laps waiting for a workout, and any guy who brings a stopwatch into a club will have his ticket punched. Jewelle dumps the tips, loose and uncounted, into her lunchbox, snaps it shut and pushes into her floor shoes. Sultana is on now, one of the new girls, who is paying Vic well over a hundred a night just to work his spot and still kicking a piece of her lap dance revenue back into the staff pool. No complaints though, not with the place running twenty-four hours a day, six days a week, with a seemingly inexhaustible flow of oil workers dying to spill their pay for a little gab and grind.
He usually hangs back for a while, Tuck, while she does two or three table dances, monitoring the action from a distance but not in a creepy way. Some guys just like to watch, okay for the house with cover charge and drinks, but nobody a girl should waste her time on. Tuck just takes his time.
“I’m all yours, darling,” says a hefty guy with a walrus mustache, spreading his arms out wide. Jewelle gives him The Smile.
“What’s your name, handsome?”
“Chester.”
“I’ve had my eye on you, Chester. Grab the loops and we’ll get it on.”
Vic has put these handles that come off of health club machines onto all the chairs, something for the boys to hold onto while their zippers are getting polished, and keeping the really little ones from sliding out from under you.
Sultana’s music is way too techno to keep up with, so Jewelle leaves out the dance part of the deal and just begins to writhe, snakelike, rubbing her tits and belly against his front fat till his damn Bucking Bronco belt buckle pops out from his gut roll and she has to retreat, twisting around to ride em cowboy with her cheeks a while before finishing with the butt shiver she learned from Marvelous Marvella in Reno. Sultana�
��s songs top out around two and a half minutes, so even though Chester gives her a swat on the backside as she hops off, it’s a good quick twenty. She passes on a table of gesturing guys who’ve just climbed off the deck without changing, like she’s going to park her bare bottom on their sweat, dirt, and oil, and instead throws an arm from behind around the neck of a guy in geek glasses, who looks like he reads seismic charts all day, sitting with another guy who could be his twin. She pushes her bumpers up so one rests on each of his shoulders and whispers hot into his ear.
“Give a girl a ride?”
“How much is it?”
He’s pushed his chair out from the table to make room, so she’s been invited.
“Twenty for a song.”
“With this stuff I can’t tell where one stops and the next starts.”
She swings around and mounts him, sliding her fingers gently down his arms and placing his hands on the seat loops. “Neither can I, honey. I’ll just go till you make me tingle.”
She starts moving and before she can ask the ride his name, his twin, bending his head sideways to get a better view, pipes up.
“I had one in Houston,” he says, “biggest rack you ever seen. I think they were real, too. Some kind of Mexican.”
“This one’s nice,” says her guy.
Sometimes it’s shyness, sometimes they’re just rude, but fine, you don’t have to come up with any patter.
“Andy says that in Toronto you can touch them wherever you want.”
“For like, the same amount?”
“Yeah, but it’s– you know– Canadian money.”
Jewelle wriggles close and hits his lenses with hot breath, steaming them up.
“I can’t see.”
“Yeah, but do you feel this, baby?”
“And then in Mexico,” the twin continues, “like in TJ? They’re all for sale.”
“Andy worked in Mexico?”
“Nah, just a weekend trip. If I had my choice, I’d go to Thailand.”
“No tits to speak of, those girls.”
“But they know how to treat a man. I had one of those massages once, like just rubbing the muscles without any extras, and it got me so hard I nearly lifted off the table.”
“A cultural thing. Like trained to be subservient.”
“Yeah. I had one in Oklahoma once, from somewhere else over there, Southeast Asia, said she came off one out of every three dances.”
“All night long?”
“That’s what she told me. She had those nipple piercings– kinda scary– and tattoos everywhere.”
“You don’t have any tats,” says her guy, pushing his crotch up.
“I’m an ink virgin,” she says leaning back. There’s talk of building a sport complex here in Yellow Earth but for now she has to do her ab crunches in the tiny living room of the rental house, with Unique and Misty stepping over her to get to the kitchenette. Jewelle got here early enough in the boom to snag a motel room, but then one of the maids got a look at her work gear and ratted to the management, some kind of Christians, and they put her out. Like suitcases crammed with her stuff and out in the street. The house is expensive and too small for the three of them but you can park behind it so guys who scope out your car have a harder time stalking.
She braces her hands on his shoulders and does a belly-dancer roll. “Plus the drawings are so beautiful these days, I could never make my mind up.”
She’s the only dancer here who doesn’t have at least a tramp stamp or a little something on the ankle. She went overboard on her first implant and has downsized since then, wincing in sympathy every time Unique lets her DDs spill out, what the criminal who owned the first club she ever worked in used to call ‘sweater meat.’ That shit catches up with you, healthwise, and right now only her knees are a problem. Somewhere else she might go for a skateboarder theme and work some kneepads into the act, but guys here can’t get enough of the oil worker stuff. “Here’s a gal who’s set off more gushers than ExxonMobil–” Eddie shouts for the intro, and they holler and stamp their feet. “Got to push a lot of pipe to make Miss Jewelle pay off!”
“I hear they just got a new batch next door,” says the twin, and Jewelle decides the song is over, leaning close to thank her guy and pluck a twenty from the wad in his shirt pocket. Another girl might have had something smart to say, but snappy comebacks to clueless guys never make you anything extra. Tuck is waiting for her.
“Miss Jewelle,” he always says, obviously liking the sound of it, “you think I could tempt you into the other room?”
She takes his arm, leans up against him. “Aw, baby, I thought you’d never ask.”
There’s an art to bringing a good payer like Tuck along. It’s all fantasy, of course, even in hard-core porn you’ve got your space vixens and horny genies and love-potion plots, but in the VIP Room the fantasy is that it’s real, that only state laws, cruel fate, and a wide-awake bouncer are preventing your perfect union.
Tuck shells out the entry fee and leads her through the beaded curtain, holding her hand, then Scorch, buzzed from the floor, opens the soundproof door. It was a storage room for liquor when Jewelle first hit town, but now it’s another little world, low lights, slower, softer music and plushy chairs with plenty of room to maneuver. Jewelle is one of the girls who will come back here during the few slack times to douse the upholstery with anti-bacterial spray, and Vic will throw the black light on a couple times a night to check for suspicious stains. Lady Pamela, who roomed at the house till her tricks started showing up there, bragged about pushing the envelope when Otto was on duty, snoozing, but she’s over at Teasers now, and Vic has switched from red pleather to black velour on their work platforms.
“I’ve missed you,” says Jewelle. Tuck is up to twice a week already, but it’s Wednesday and she’s wriggled on so many clients between visits it seems like a long time.
“Me too,” he says, sitting on the chair furthest from Scorch’s throne. The other love seat is unoccupied, which Jewelle prefers. Some of the girls think it’s a contest, outmoaning you and shooting looks to your client, and the illusion of privacy just gets harder to maintain.
Beyoncé’s “Naughty Girl” is playing as she climbs aboard, Tuck wearing some kind of loose jersey pants he must have bought online because they sure don’t sell them next to the Iron Boy rack in Yellow Earth. The client is learning– save her butt some wear and tear and get himself a closer rub. Amazing how many of these guys, titty bar veterans all, still come in with their Levis and trucker’s caps and wonder why they’re not feeling the magic.
Jewelle starts to move, slow and easy, and her bottom is telling her this boy isn’t wearing underwear.
“You happy to see me?”
He smiles. “Always and forever.”
“Rough week so far?”
“I seem to be getting the hang of it. Only got chewed out three times today.”
“Those rigs are noisy,” she says, slowly swinging her head to brush her hair across his chest and throat. “People have to yell to be heard.”
“They haven’t fired me yet.”
Tuck is a local who’s caught on with a drilling crew, dumping big sacks of different stuff into the mix they send down the pipe, and wants to be accepted by the old hands. She’s never asked, but he feels married, and she hopes he leaves his ring in a good safe place.
“You’re too cute to fire.”
She pushes up high enough to let the side of her bare breast slip along his shaved cheek, almost accidentally. These long VIP sessions you have to deal it out slow, build some tension. Uncle Marvin, the only thing she ever knew to call him, back in Anchorage, used to do a running commentary on the state of his erection, with a nonstop flow of faster-slower, lighter-harder, that’s it, that’s it, no, over to the left a bit– but Uncle Marvin was good for a cool twenty thousand a year if you were “his girl.”
“Aw, that feels nice.”
“Feels nice for me too, baby.”
The track switches to Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer,” which a lot of the younger girls like. Jewelle turns so her face is down by his knees, just moving her ass in front of his face for a bit. He’s hard already, probably got a rubber rolled on in the men’s room. What’s that Boy Scout motto– Be Prepared? If he is married, his wife probably still does the laundry.
He is more than a bit of a Boy Scout, Tuck, waiting out in front to walk her to her car when her shift was over– you know, just to be sure you’re safe– till she told him it was absolutely forbidden and he might get her fired.
Jewelle twists around, shoulders on his knees, her legs over his shoulders, and rubs her bottom up and down his chest. He’s taking deep breaths now.
“You talk to Jasmine over the weekend?”
It takes her a beat too long to remember that Jasmine is the daughter she’s told him she’s supporting, back with grandma in a FEMA trailer in Ketchikan. Some of them want to be gallant, to help save you from ruin.
“There was something messed up with the Skype,” she says. “I could hear her but I couldn’t see her.”
“That’s tough.”
She tries to remember what grade she said Jasmine is in now. It’s either Jasmine or Jocelyn, and she’s grown over the years, must be nearly out of junior high, since part of the story is getting pregnant when she was fifteen.
Which she did, but that’s real life.
“You must be saving some good money, working here.”
Some idiot reporter came through and talked to a girl, high on whatever, who claimed to be making three grand a night dancing in Yellow Earth, when even the full-service gals don’t make half that. It hit the wire services and for a couple weeks the tips really suffered, guys busting their nuts on the platforms unhappy to be outearned by somebody shaking their moneymaker in a nice warm club.
“I got to pay a flat fee to work here,” she lies, “tipouts to the bartenders and bouncers, and you wouldn’t believe the rent they’re charging in town.” She spins around and leans against him back to belly, whispers hot in his ear. “But when you come in I love my work.”