by J. Boyett
“Put sheets on it,” commanded Joyce. “And change them between every rut.”
“Okay, fine. Three percent. An even four-fifty. The math’s easier, anyway.”
“What’s with all the shoes and shirts and shit on the floor?” asked Mal, once they were back in his bedroom.
Ken opened the door to his walk-in closet. Most of its contents had been kicked or thrown out into the bedroom, although a few shirts and pants still dangled on their hangers. Squeezed into the closet, lying on the floor, was another thrift store mattress, this one more ancient than the last. Its urine stains formed the map of an alien world. “This is the third office,” he said. “It’s a little tight, so you’ll probably have to bend your knees to close the door. I got the shortest mattress they had. Whoever does it in here owes me one percent. That’s a dollar-fifty.”
“Dibs on the closet, then,” said Mal. “You’re going to get sheets for this mattress, too, and it’s still only going to be a dollar-fifty cut.”
“Sheesh, all right. Why not? I’m made of money.”
“Well, Ken, this is all very. . . .” Joyce paused, searching for the precisely wrong word. “Elaborate.”
Ken feigned hurt. “But what about the sign?” On the front door he had taped a piece of white posterboard, upon which he had crudely executed the word brothel in a boisterous three-dimensional bubble font, with blue, purple, orange, and brown markers.
Sherry didn’t realize they were joking. “It’s all right,” she said magnanimously, putting one hand on her hip and cocking it. Ken rolled his eyes at Joyce as he led them back to the living room.
“Oh!” said Joyce. “I almost forgot to ask about the spiked bat!”
Ken snapped his fingers. “Crap! And that’s the main event, too!”
“Is it ready?”
“Naw, but don’t worry, it will be by showtime. But y’all hold up, don’t leave yet. I’ll read you the speech I’m going to give all the customers about it.”
“Speech?”
“Yeah, you know, some dazzling garbage to scare the bejesus out of them from the get-go, so they don’t get any ideas.” He rushed off, leaving the three of them in the living room.
None of them had anything to say to the other two, but Sherry shrugged off that inconvenience. “Y’all, isn’t this wild! I swear, this is exactly the kind of crap my family is always getting into. Like, I really hope we don’t end up like my cousin did in Orlando. Her name’s Gabby. I know, what a stupid name! Anyway, her name’s Gabby, and, like, she was a hooker too, in Orlando, except, you know, not in as safe a way as us. Like, she did it really dumb. Anyway, what happened was—this is after all that hooker stuff, though, this is when she stole a car—I mean, she didn’t steal it, I believe her, but she was mixed up with all these weird scuzzy dudes and—anyway, what happened was—”
Ken hurried back into the room. In his hand was a piece of notebook paper so crumpled, creased, and limp that it looked like it had been balled up in the pocket of some jeans that had been tossed into a washing machine. “Okay, y’all, here’s the caveat all the customers are going to get.”
Sherry smiled tightly. “Ken,” she said. “Excuse me. I was talking.”
“I know, hold on, I was up all night writing this.” Ken held the paper up in front of his face, cleared his throat, and began to declaim in a monotone, eyebrows drawn together as he did his impression of someone who’d only just learned to read. “Gentleman, you now see here in my hand a spiked bat.” He held up his empty hand, posing like the Statue of Liberty. Glancing at them he dropped out of oratorical mode to say, “Pretend I got it already.” Then he continued: “In elementary school I was a star Little Leaguer, and in those days of yore I was oft known to knock the ball out of its cover, just like Robert Redford in that movie The Natural. Believe me, my friend, that gift has not been lost. If you are a good man, of true heart, like Launcelot in that movie Excalibur, then you need not fear me. But if ye be a Mordred, beware my lusty smiting. If you are good, I will merely sit on this sofa and eat my cheesy poofs, avec docility. But should mine ears detect even a whimper of fear or horror from this nice young lady, I will burst into the appropriate room like the wrath of God and wallop thee with this here spiked bat.” Once more he raised the imaginary bat. “Sir, I am but a small man. But lapse not into foolishness, for the spiked bat is a large man, and his throbbing instrument of both love and murder will seek out thy softest parts, to be sure. To be sure, should you incur its wrath, never or rarely again will you suffer injuries more painful, or more embarrassing to explain to the police, or to your bodacious mom when you ask her for her credit card so you can pay off the doctor. That having been said, sir, I hope that you shall sample our delicious wares with both honor and restraint, and cum and go in peace, so that we may remain friends and continue in this supercalifragilisticexpialidocious arrangement, or relationship.” Lowering both the paper and the imaginary spiked bat, he looked at Joyce. “Should I say ‘thine’ instead of ‘thy’?”
“I think ‘thy’ is fine. I don’t think it matters.” She raised an eyebrow. “You spent all night writing that?”
He nodded. “It was mainly a process of revision.”
4.
On opening night Joyce took some extra time to make herself up and so was running late. She spent twenty minutes choosing which of her three perfumes she should use, and painstakingly applied some eyeliner her grandmother had given her for her birthday. Holy shit, what had she done? On a whim she’d become a whore! A real one, not just an easy lay in the backseat, but a slag who accepts cash in return for sex with total strangers. Fuck it, though. While she had technically “known” pretty much all the guys she had ever fucked, had that made any difference?
She briefly hoped that Ken had recruited guys so hideous and nasty that there would be no protests when the girls simply walked out. Immediately she felt ashamed of her weakness, and was on the verge of flouncing defiantly out of the dorm when her blood turned to cold mucous and she realized she had not yet really made herself presentable: not shaved her bikini line, etc. What if she hadn’t remembered until she was doing the deed, exposed to some bumpkin’s cruel laughter? She made herself even later, what with stripping off her clothes and shaving in the shower. Plus she had to brush her teeth. She leaned into the bathroom mirror and plucked stray eyebrow hairs till she cried. And there was a small cyst on her leg which she attempted to pop, but she only managed to inflame it. She almost forgot to reapply the perfume before leaving—she’d tried hard not to get her eyeliner wet in the shower.
When she finally got to Ken’s his front door, still bearing its brothel sign, was propped open. “Glad you could join us,” he said, his voice oozing mock-scorn. “It’s only the premiere. Won’t you come in?”
“I thought I’d be fashionably late.”
Three dudes sat cross-legged on the stained carpet. Joyce smiled at them, with a hint of a leer. They weren’t ugly enough for her to get out of anything. Besides, Mal and Sherry were already snuggled up under their assignments’ arms, hands resting on the guys’ denimed knees. Sherry nevertheless looked at Joyce with an expression that made it clear she expected to be rescued if the need arose. Mal seemed distantly amused. At least Joyce had been spared the necessity of choosing which guy she would go with. The odd man out looked sheepishly at her, a chubby boy with a red, slightly pock-marked face.
“All right,” said Ken, “now that Princess has finally arrived, maybe we can get on with things. I guess introductions are in order. So, Joyce, Mal’s mark is Phil, Sherry’s is Joe, and this lonely dude is Gregory. Y’all, this is Joyce.”
“Oh, yeah, we, uh . . . I know who Joyce is,” stammered Gregory.
Joyce studied him. If they had met, he’d failed to make an impression on her. Then again, he was a forgettable type. Suddenly she realized that none of the guys she had ever slept with had seemed as sweet as this virginal little whoresniffer, and she sank down to the carpet and curled up beside him, as K
en dashed out of the room. Joyce continued to smile coquettishly at Gregory—she was afraid that if she changed her expression she wouldn’t be able to get it back—and tried not to be alarmed by Ken’s sudden exit. Mal and Sherry didn’t seem concerned. Their boys didn’t look any better than Joyce’s, physically, and they didn’t have his sweet aura. Gregory had turned even redder and was staring at Joyce with open wonder. This whole prostitution gig wasn’t bad. Nobody seemed able to think of anything to say, though.
Joyce noticed that everyone else had a big blue plastic cup of red wine just as Ken reappeared with a cup for her. She took a big swallow. It was probably from a box. Ken sat on the floor before them, in the spot that in a normal living room would have been occupied by a television. In its buried roots his expression was probably a smile. He said cheerfully to Joyce, “Mal was just telling us that she died in high school.”
Joyce blinked and turned to Mal.
“Only for a minute,” Mal explained.
“A whole minute?” said Sherry. “Because, you know, I heard that can cause brain damage.”
“It may not have been that long. I wasn’t conscious, you know, seeing as how I was dead. Later, the other kids told me it had been about a minute, but they weren’t sure.”
“Oh, I don’t mean it’s impossible. Brain damage might start after one minute, but an awful lot of people stay dead longer than that. Like, two minutes, or five minutes, or maybe even ten minutes. They just get more brain-damaged, is all.”
“Mal?” Joyce said. “What the fuck’re you talking about?”
“I sort of died once in high school. My heart stopped along with my breathing, for just a minute. More or less. Everybody else’s already heard the story. It’d be rude for me to repeat it.”
“Aw, but little old me didn’t hear it,” Joyce said. “These boys won’t mind if you tell me what happened.” She batted her eyes vigorously at the johns, which was meant to be a grotesque parody of the situation. But then she realized that, in these circumstances, the gesture passed. Her Betty-Boop-on-crack fit the moment perfectly, and no one batted an eye but her.
Mal glanced over the three guys, then locked eyes with Joyce and began her tale. “It was some lame canoe trip in the tenth grade. My church youth group. One weekend we went to float the river. Out near the Ozarks, you know. Way out in the woods. There was one pool where the water was cold and where most of us beached our canoes—these rented plastic canoes—and went swimming in our clothes. At first I thought the water was dirty, because it was brown. Then I realized the rocks at the bottom were brown and the water was perfectly clear. In one corner I found a half-decomposed white salamander, maybe a foot long. He was on his back in a shallow part of the pool.”
“Okay,” said Joyce. “So the salamander tried to kill you. . . ?”
“Fine, I’ll get to the point. We all swam in our clothes. The chaperones got pissed because they said being wet would reveal our body-shapes indecently. They were Baptists. We were all Baptists. I was surprised, since I’d figured that being totally dressed made it impossible to be revealing. Besides, I was wearing like a fucking cast-iron bra.
“So there was this boy in the youth group, Robby. He was a real horn-dog around me. Sometimes he was sweet; like, the Sunday School class always had doughnuts and orange juice, and he would always get me some. You know, ‘Hey, Malinda, can I carry your Bible?,’ that kind of thing. Lots of times, he touched me. On the arm. On the back. On the lower back. On the lower lower back. I’d tell him to fuck off—except I never did exactly, because we were usually at church, and back then I never would have said ‘fuck,’ period. Instead I mostly ignored him, except once in a while I’d whine and say ‘Hey’ or something lame and shrug him off. Even that was enough to mortify him. Never enough so he’d quit for real, though. He was kind of a scuzzbag.”
“Now, now,” Ken warned, “that’s not very good whore-talk.”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry, guys. Anyway, Robby appointed himself my canoe partner, and I was too much of a pussy to fight about it, especially in front of all those other kids, who thought Robby was really sweet and shy and that I’d be lucky to get a boy like him. He was one of our own. We’d all been in the same youth group together since we were four. So he sat behind me in the canoe. There were more than ten canoes altogether, but we were pretty spaced out, and the river curves around a lot, so there were plenty of times when a single canoe could be isolated. Way to go, chaperones. Anyway, whenever we were out of sight, Robby would get all touchy-feely. I’d hear him put his oar down in the canoe and then I’d hold my breath until I felt his fingers on my neck and shoulders. He’d say he was going to give me a massage because I’d been working so hard. His fingers were like spiders—you know. And he wouldn’t just massage my shoulders, he’d massage my whole back. And he had a pretty broad definition of ‘back.’ It went all the way around to my sides, high up under my armpits. Basically all the way around to my tits. And he was nice and solicitous of my lower back as well. He was such a sweetie that he’d stop at nothing to relieve my lower back stress, including sticking his fingers down the waistbands of my pants and panties. Most of the time I’d suffer quietly and try to keep rowing. Or I’d whine and wiggle and he’d quit for a second. Finally, when he tried to stick his hand down the back of my pants for the fourth or fifth time, I turned around and screamed at him to keep his nasty fingers out of my butt and called him a sicko pervert. I really screamed, too. I felt crazy.”
Ken was listening with uncharacteristic attention. Sherry sighed. “Jeez, it’s hard to imagine you losing your cool and yelling at anybody.”
“It was the last time I ever really did.”
“Because he killed you, right?” said Joyce.
“He did kill me. Everyone on the river must have heard me scream—sound carries over water. He turned blood red. Meanwhile, I’d dropped my oar in the water. It was like my hands had just snapped open while I was screaming at Robby, without me noticing, and the oar had fallen out. It was already floating off, so I half-stood up and leaned out of the canoe to reach for it. And Robby rocked the canoe, as hard as he could without tipping it—just an impulsive bit of spite. I tumbled out. You know how dinky and shallow these rivers get sometimes. Most of this one wasn’t very wide. When he tipped me out, we were near the bank and there were a bunch of rocks just under the water, and I smashed my head on one and it knocked me out. So there I was, unconscious, floating face-down. Drowning, basically.”
“You mean that asshole didn’t even drag you out of the fucking water?” demanded Phil. Although outrage would have been a sound amorous strategy, his seemed authentic enough.
“He freaked out. It wasn’t that he was all cold-blooded, and definitely not that he’d meant for me to drown. And the only thing that kept him from screaming even louder than I did was that he was crying too hard. He did try to turn the canoe around, all by himself with the one oar, so he could go back and find one of the chaperones and get help. He figured he had a better chance of meeting one coming the other way than of catching up with one of the ones ahead of us.”
Joyce laughed. “In this big-ass emergency he tried to paddle back upstream?”
“Yup.”
“Why didn’t he just jump out and drag you to land?”
“It’s the type of guy Robby was. Anything he could do, he figured someone else could do better. And he assumed that something as important as rescuing a drowning girl was too big to be trusted to a guy like him. Which turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“What a dick.”
“Well. Anyway, one of the chaperones came floating around the bend. This cool youngish guy, named Kent. When it wasn’t the Lord’s day he worked as a paramedic. He saw me floating face-down and jumped in and swam after me. Dragged me ashore, gave me mouth-to-mouth and CPR. When I woke up, he told me that my heart had stopped and that I hadn’t been breathing, and that we ought to say a prayer of thanksgiving. Which I pretended to do with him, to be polite
.”
“Mouth-to-mouth?” said Sherry. “Was he cute?”
“Yeah. But his wife was in his canoe watching us the whole time.”
Joyce stared at her. “Mal, I can’t believe you never told me this story.”
Mal shrugged. “It was a few years ago.”
“A whole other lifetime?” said Joyce. “I mean, since you died and all.”
“I guess you could say that.”
“Damn,” said Joe, with nervous impatience, and the other boys echoed him, giving less and less of a shit.
Ken’s uncustomarily bright eyes stayed fixed on Mal until he was sure her story was finished. Then he jumped to his feet. Spreading his arms, he boomed, “Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready for the opening night of our whorehouse?!”
The johns all raised whichever hand was not around their girls’ shoulders and hooted. The girls raised their plastic cups of wine and said “Yeah,” or “All right.” Joyce felt Gregory’s meaty hand tighten low on her shoulder. She remembered to be frightened.
“All right,” said Ken. “I know you guys are in a hurry to, like, get your rocks off. And you girls want to get laid and get paid. But first I got to explain the rules of the house.”
Sherry rolled her eyes ostentatiously and said to Joe, in a theatrical whisper, “He thinks he’s really funny. . . .” Watch out, thought Joyce.
Ken gave Sherry a look. “I am.” He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out that same rumpled, soft piece of paper. The customers watched as he laboriously unfolded it. “The rules of the house are all written on here,” he explained.
Ken held the paper up close to his eyes, squinted at it, and made as if he were about to start reading. But he stopped, looked at them—his audience—held up a finger and said, “Just a second.” Then he jumped into the next room, the kitchen. From her vantage point, Joyce could see him reaching behind the fridge and fiddling with something. “What the fuck?” muttered Phil, sounding as worried as he did pissed. Ken re-entered the room, holding propped on his shoulder the spiked bat. Joyce gasped to see it; it struck her oddly as a thing of true grandeur. Really, it was only a regular wooden baseball bat, a beat-up scruffy one, and through the fat end Ken really had driven a big rusty nail. Or, no, not a nail. A big rusty spike.