by Larry Brown
She nodded. His eyes were squinched against the smoke coming from the cigar and he turned and pointed to the opposite corner: “Over there’s one.” And he turned on his heel and left her, went back into the shadows from which he had come. She looked where he had pointed at one empty table sitting back against the wall. Men were starting to turn and look at her now. Other girls were moving among the tables carrying drinks and beer on round trays and they chewed their gum and appraised her critically as she moved among the tables and headed for the one chair she could see. Men were talking to her and she couldn’t understand what they were saying. On the stage the girl bent over with her backside to the audience and a lean man stood up and shoved a five dollar bill in the crack of her ass. She turned and blew him a kiss and walked across the stage with the bill waving from her behind until finally it fluttered to the floor. Two men were on Fay before she ever got to her table. One touched her elbow, the other her waist, and she pulled their hands away from her. They moved closer to her and she turned and backed to the wall and sat down with both of them leaning into her.
“You want a drink?” one said.
“What you want?” the other one said. “You want a beer?”
She looked from one face to the other and saw a waitress watching her and the two men as she headed over to where they were. Fay just wanted them to get away, didn’t want either one of them to buy her a drink because she knew then he’d want to sit down with her.
“I saw her first, you son of a bitch,” one of them said to the other.
“Tough fuckin shit, buddy,” the other one said, and then they were pushing at each other. She drew back as they tumbled over a table and upset it, drinks falling to wet the floor. People jumped up from around them and the girl on the stage hesitated in her moves. The waitress with her tray stepped around the two rolling and cursing bodies and stood next to Fay.
“Didn’t take you long to get something started,” she said. “You want something to drink?” She scratched behind her ear with a pencil and studied the two fighting men without interest. “One goddamn time in my life I’d like to work in a place that had a little class.”
“Why don’t somebody stop em?” Fay said.
“Somebody will. In just a second. Now you want something to drink?”
“Can I get a beer?”
The waitress suddenly took three steps back and got up against the wall as the big man in the black clothes bent over her panting admirers. Their shirttails had come out of their pants and Fay saw one’s hairy crack. The big guy hauled them to their feet by their collars and tugged them apart. They swung at the air halfheartedly, already winding down, but he held them for just a moment anyway and studied them, and then with one swift movement he slammed their heads together. It sounded like somebody dropping something wet that burst on the floor. He let them fall. They made not a sound and the music stopped. He turned his head to the stage.
“Turn that fucking music back on,” he said, and bent down and grabbed them up again by their collars and dragged them through cigarette butts and puddles on the floor toward the front door. Another tune started up, faster and louder than the last.
The waitress smiled a strange smile at Fay and rolled her eyes toward the bouncer as if to say He don’t play. She walked away. Fay watched him let go his hold on one of his customers long enough to open the door and hold it with his knee. He pulled the first one half erect and then booted him out the door, kicking him hard in the ass, then reached for the other one. That one left the same way and the door slammed shut. Once again the bouncer went back to his lair in the smoky gloom.
The white-headed woman had left the stage and a short girl took her place. She was very pretty with good legs and long brown hair and her beautiful breasts. She must have been a favorite because a great cheer went up when she came across the stage. She finished dancing to the number that was playing and then a slow song came on and she began to dance, waving her arms slowly, moving her hips gently side to side. They screamed and tossed dollars onto the stage. She turned and the lights on the stage dimmed, the voices hushed while she writhed upright. Colored round balls of light, yellow and orange and red, began to slide over her. She closed her eyes while they threw more money, balled it up and sent it toward her, the green wads sometimes bouncing off her back or legs to land and briefly on the stage roll and then come to a halt. Fay thought it was sad and beautiful. Wished she could move her body in that way. For Sam.
The number finished and the stage lights went off. It was totally black inside the joint for less than a minute and when the lights came on the stage was empty. The waitress walked over and set Fay’s beer on the table. The beer was about four inches high.
“What I owe you?” Fay said, opening her purse.
The waitress wasn’t looking at her when she spoke.
“Drinks are free for ladies tonight. You can tip me if you want to.”
“How much?” Fay said.
“That’s up to you.”
“Is a dollar okay?”
The waitress wore her disgust plainly on her face.
“I reckon so if that’s all you got.”
Fay dug a dollar out of her purse and put it on the tray. The waitress started to turn away but Fay put her hand out and touched her on the arm. She stopped and looked down at her arm as if she’d been burned.
“Yeah?”
“Is Reena here tonight? You know if she’s here?”
The waitress cocked one hip and rested the tray on it.
“Who wants to know?”
“I do,” Fay said.
“Yeah? Who’re you?”
“My name’s Fay. I been kinda stayin with her some.”
The waitress chewed her gum lazily, pushed it out between her teeth and popped a small bubble with it.
“Oh yeah? She ain’t said nothing to me about having company.”
“Is she here?”
“She might be. If she is she’s busy right now.”
The waitress seemed to be waiting for her to say something else.
“I thought I saw her car out front,” Fay said. “She never did come home and I just wondered if she was in here.”
“I’ll go look,” the waitress said. “Fay, right?”
“Yeah. Fay. Thanks.”
“I’ll come back by after while,” the waitress said, and then she moved away through the smoke and the tables. The beer hadn’t been opened but she popped the top and took a sip from it. It was barely cool. But she was inside. She could drink it slowly and wait to see if Reena was here.
Nobody else tried to come over and talk to her, but more than a few of them kept looking her way. She ignored them. She wondered if Chris Dodd had ever been in here. He probably had. A son of a bitch like him would probably just love a place like this where he could look at naked women and think about raping them.
She got to wondering about where the bathroom might be. Once in a while she saw a man get up and go toward the back, stay gone a few minutes, then come back. She put her cigarettes on the table to show that somebody was sitting there and with her purse in her hand went toward the back. Several men called out to her but she didn’t look at them. At the corner she turned to the left and went down a dark hall to the end where two doors stood. The music was still throbbing behind her. She pushed open the door marked WOMEN and turned to see if there was a lock on it. There wasn’t. She looked at it for a second. Surely nobody would come in on her. But she hadn’t thought she’d ever wake up with somebody fucking her, either. There was a stall and a concrete floor that was wet and an empty paper towel dispenser and a tall gray machine on the wall with a scratched plastic label that said 25¢. She tried to read the tiny words at the top. There was a picture of a beach and an ocean and some palm trees and a woman and a man reclining on a towel in their swimming suits. There were three knobs on the machine. She read slowly, out loud in a low voice: “Ribbed sen … shoo? Delight.”
Then she nodded. Oh. Fucking rubbers. Too
bad Sam didn’t have one on the first time they did it. He’d always used them later, after that first night. But it didn’t make any difference now, did it?
She opened the stall door and looked to see if it had a latch on it. It had one but it was busted.
“Shit,” she said. She could hear the music blaring out there. The men started yelling again so she guessed another girl had come on the stage. It didn’t look that hard, really. You probably wouldn’t even have to dance that good if you had a good body. Just get up there and twist around some while they threw money at you. She thought she could do that. She might even be good at it if she tried it out.
She didn’t want to stay much longer, but she didn’t want to walk back up that black street by herself now. If she got another beer she was going to have to tip that girl again. And she was kind of a smartass anyway. Was kind of looking down her nose to her, seemed like. She wondered if she turned tricks too. If all of them did. Sam had been right. It was best to stay out of places like this.
A big woman was on the stage when she came out the door and went back up the hall. A very strange looking big woman. Fay had picked up more than a few watermelons in Georgia that were not as big as the titties the woman had. It was amazing. She didn’t know they could get that big. And how the hell did she carry them around? They were so big that she just had to stand there and look at her for a minute. The men were going crazy, leaping up and yelling and some of them howling like dogs. It was a long black walk back, all right, but this damn place, shit. And what if somebody followed her out? What would she do then? She suddenly wished she had a knife, a Coke bottle, something. The only thing she had was a fingernail file and she could jab that in somebody’s eye if worse came to worst.
She made her way through the tables back to her own and felt some of them watching her again. The beer was gone when she sat down but her cigarettes were still there. She wondered why the waitress had taken it when it was plain to anybody who’d picked it up that it wasn’t empty, that she wasn’t done with it. And then she saw Reena coming by the bouncer back there who reached out an arm and stopped her. Reena had two Budweiser tallboys in her hands. She had on a short red bathrobe. The bouncer said something and she saw Reena shake her head. Then she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek and he patted her on the shoulder and she came out from behind the bar with the two beers. She was smiling at Fay. She tilted her head toward the big woman on the stage who was flopping her chest up and down, the customers still cheering her on. Reena made a crazy face and came on over and set the beers down, leaned over and gave Fay a hug.
“Hey, sweetie,” she said.
“Hey.”
“Let me get me a chair.” She went over to a table and got another chair and slid it over the floor and set it close to Fay. She sat down and reached for the beers, opened them and pushed one across the table. “Cheers,” she said, and knocked her can against Fay’s. She was either drunk or high, maybe both, some new combination Fay hadn’t seen before. “How long you been here?” she said.
Fay picked up the beer and took a sip of it. It was ice cold. Reena had on enough makeup that she couldn’t see the black eye very much, but the swelling was still there.
“Not long,” she said. “How’s your eye?”
Reena turned her beer up and drank a long swallow of it, took a breath, then turned it up again. Finally she set it back down.
“Damn I needed that,” she said. “Wanda come back and said somebody named Fay was out here to see me and I knew I didn’t know but one. How you been?”
“I been okay,” Fay said. “I thought today was one of your days to work at Denny’s.”
Reena reached for one of Fay’s cigarettes and stuck it in her mouth. Fay found her lighter in her purse and lit it for her. Reena inhaled deeply and blew out the smoke, tilted her head and blew it toward the ceiling. Behind her the big woman had gone into a hard bump and grind. To Fay her ass looked wide as a washtub.
“Aw shit. They fired me,” Reena said.
“Fired you? What for?”
“Little something on my breath. Who gives a fuck? Waiting tables for minimum wage?” She looked around. “I was the star of this place.” She sipped at her beer again.
“I walked down and got me a sandwich,” Fay said. “I saw your car so I came on in. I thought you might be in here.”
Reena swung her head slowly and Fay watched her. She didn’t seem happy like before as she eyed the people around her. Looking along with her Fay locked eyes with the bouncer. Those eyes seemed to pierce the gloom. Then he looked away. She felt something hard start in her chest, like almost falling asleep and thinking about falling from a high place.
“So what you gonna do?” Reena said. “You gonna strip or what?”
She made Fay nervous and she sipped at her beer and thought about it.
“I hadn’t really decided what to do,” she said. “I wanted to talk to you some more.”
“And I ain’t been around, have I?”
“Well.”
“You seen Chuck.”
“No. Not since the other day.”
“What day?”
“Yesterday, I guess it was.”
Reena lowered her head and Fay could see now that she was pretty drunk. She could see the bouncer watching her, too, but he was watching everything, his eyes moving around the room, constantly scanning. But she liked the way he looked.
“Who’s the big guy?” she said, leaning closer.
Reena raised up some, as if she’d been about to go to sleep sitting there.
“Who?”
“Don’t look at him,” Fay said. “The one over there in the corner. The one you were talkin to fore you come over here.”
“Oh.” Reena moved her head. “You mean Aaron?”
“He busted two guys’ heads a while ago. Throwed em out. I thought he’d done killed em.”
“Oh yeah,” Reena said. “Oh yeah. He’s capable of that, too.”
Fay shrank from hearing this. She didn’t dare raise her eyes to him now because she knew that if she did those eyes would be looking at her again.
So she faced Reena.
“You think he knows we’re talking about him?”
Reena puffed on her cigarette without inhaling, like she didn’t know how to smoke.
“That’s Aaron,” she said in a low voice that seemed to hold some sort of pride. “His brother owns this place. And he don’t. ’Low. No trouble. See the sign?”
Reena turned and pointed and Fay saw it hanging up there near the ceiling, wreathed in smoke, words she could barely make out:
BE NICE OR LEAVE
Reena grinned.
“By God he means it too.”
She bent over the table and picked up her beer again, and shifted her legs so that the flap of her robe fell open for a moment and Fay could see, couldn’t help but see, that she was naked below the waist beneath the robe. She saw Fay’s glance and covered herself and giggled.
“Guess I need to get dressed, huh?”
Fay didn’t know what to say but she knew now what Reena had been doing. She settled back in the chair and looked toward the stage again. The big woman had finished her act and was picking up the money from the floor and the men around her were clapping and yelling. With two fistfuls of money she walked off the stage and stopped and blew them a kiss as another girl was coming on. This one wasn’t even a woman. She was a young girl, probably no more than fifteen or sixteen. The music started up and the girl began to dance and Fay turned back to Reena. She was nodding, almost nodding out. Fay thought her face was going to fall on the table and she pushed her by the shoulder, pushed her upright. Reena gave her a dreamy smile.
“Time to go my darling?” she said.
“I think it is. Let me help you up.”
In a weak and faint voice Reena said, “That might be a good idea right about now.”
Fay took the cigarette from her fingers and stubbed it out. She put her own cigarettes in her purs
e and tried to take the beer away from Reena but she wouldn’t let her have it. Instead she pulled it to her chest almost like a pouting child and held it with both hands.
“All right,” Fay said, and she stood up. “Let’s go get your clothes.”
Reena motioned vaguely toward the bar.
“Back there,” she said, and she wobbled to her feet.
Fay got her purse and took Reena by the arm and then started trying to get her through the tables. It was tough going. Everybody in there seemed to be drunk by then and the little girl up on the stage had gotten down on her back and was pushing her middle up and down. Reena stumbled once and almost fell but she held on to her beer and Fay guided her by the arm and finally they were beside the bar and headed around the end when Fay saw that they were going to have to walk by the bouncer. He was there on his stool, watching everything, drinking a cup of what she guessed was coffee, but not paying any attention to them in particular.
“Back here,” Reena said, and Fay saw a door back there, and then they were going by him and he even moved his legs aside on the stool to let them pass. The bartender was mixing drinks back there and he barely gave them a glance as they went past. Fay looked at what was back there: a rubber mat on the floor, the butt of what looked like a gun sticking out from a waist-high shelf, tubs of ice and rows of glasses and a big cooler that was open and filled with rows of beer. A row of liquor. Reena pushed open the door and they went into a dim hall with scuffed black-and-white tiles on the floor. There were some doors on either side of the hall and Reena opened the first one on the right and pushed it open long enough for Fay to see the girl with the good legs down on her knees sucking a man with his pants and shorts down around his ankles and his shirttail over his butt.