by J. Boyett
“Well, it’s all still balled up in the pockets of my dirty clothes. I actually haven’t done laundry since we started the whole brothel thing, you know.”
“See, that’s what comes of too many clothes. Makes you soft and lazy.”
“Fuck off.”
Sherry drifted back. Soon Ken rejoined them too, having managed to become flushed, red-eyed, and sweaty. Sherry threw up her arms: “Excuse me. I thought you were supposed to be the designated driver.”
Ken took another pull off his beer bottle. “Yeah, sure, no problem.”
“But you’re drinking! You’re drunk!”
“I’m buzzed. But I’ll be drunk soon, yeah.”
“But you’re the designated driver!”
“Yeah, I know. I’m the one designated to drive. Okay. I agree to drive. But I never said what condition I was going to drive in.”
Sherry stared at him, eyes bugging out. Then she spun around and flounced off to mingle some more.
Ken wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “Bet you I could take her out back and fuck her.”
Joyce smirked. “That’d be a neat trick.”
“Not so neat.” Ken turned to Mal. “How you doing, Mal?”
She’d crossed her arms. “I’m cool.”
Ken wandered back into the bowels of the big house, stalking whatever havoc was there to be wreaked. Although there seemed to be no prohibitions on smoking indoors, Mal and Joyce stepped out onto the porch with their cigarettes. There had been a porch light, but someone had smashed the bulb. It was a clear night, and this far out in the country there were actually stars, bushels of them spangling the sky. Mal said, “There’s trouble brewing between Ken and Sherry.”
“Yeah, I know. Neither one of them seems much interested in making things easier.”
“Well, Ken knows he has nothing to be scared of. Soon it’s going to blow up. It’ll take our little venture with it, too. I figure that’s the only reason Ken’s been holding back.”
“Well. If Sherry dropped out, I don’t see why you and me couldn’t keep going. That’s the way Ken wanted it originally anyway.”
“But Sherry won’t just go. She’ll stay and let herself be tortured until she’s totally fucked up. I don’t think Ken’ll resist torturing her much longer. And it’ll be a big noisy unpleasant process.”
“Oh. Yeah, that too. . . . So what’re you saying? We ought to get day jobs?”
“You don’t need a job.”
“I know. I was just kidding.” Then, a little shyly, she said, “You need a job, though, don’t you?”
“I’ve already got one.”
“What? You mean the brothel?”
“No. A real one. I work nights, since we’re doing the fucking in the afternoon.”
“What job? Since when?”
“Three days ago. I work over at Foxy’s.”
“Foxy’s?”
“That strip club just off I-30, right after you leave Faulkner County.”
“Holy fuck. I’ve driven past it before, but I’ve never. . . . What do you do there?”
“I’m an electrician.”
“What? Really?”
“No, not really. I’m a stripper.”
“Wow.”
“I’d been playing with the idea before the brothel started. And I decided to go ahead so I’d have something to fall back on when the shit hits the fan with those two and it stops being worth the headaches. It’s no big deal. I guess actual whoring is a baptism by fire as far as sex work goes.”
“What was the interview like?”
“I danced naked for the boss during off-hours.”
“What music did you dance to?”
“Something awful. I didn’t know it.”
“Can you bring your own music?”
“They said I could. But why bother?”
“This is so cool. Do you have a stage name and shit?”
“Yeah. Lilith.”
Joyce laughed. “Does anyone get it?”
“Nobody’s seemed to yet.”
“Yeah, I guess they wouldn’t. Bunch of redneck farmers and truckers.”
“Oh, no. They’re not all country people. There’re all kinds of guys in there. Every sort.”
“Still. You ought to do a strip-tease to Sarah McLachlan or one of those other Lilith Fair women. That’d be bizarre.”
“No. I’m not that MTV, Wiccan Lilith. I’m the old Lilith, the Kabbalah Lilith, the one who flies through the desert and’ll fuck you to death.”
Joyce didn’t know what the Kabbalah was. She took out a fresh cigarette and lit it off her old one. “Dude, I can’t believe you’ve been a stripper for three days and didn’t tell me yet. I mean, we see each other every day.”
Mal just looked at her. She said nothing.
They would have changed the subject anyway, but crashes and screams from within the house did it for them. The girls hurried inside, and came to a halt when they saw Ken lying on the floor on top of a smashed coffee table, blood trickling from his nose, trying to catch his breath because he was laughing so hard. Over him loomed a huge frat boy with bunched fists. Joyce recognized the Greek letters on his shirt—Sig Tau, the same fraternity as that creepy Atchley. The Sig Tau scowled down at Ken. “Keep laughing, faggot.” Ken obeyed. “Keep it up.”
Other frat brothers advanced out of the crowd, fists equally clenched, and soon there were four of them towering over Ken. Mercifully Atchley was not one of them—maybe he was upstairs, laughing at the whiteheads on some twelve-year-old girl’s butt. Joyce wondered what Ken had said to trigger his beating. She also wondered if they ought to interfere, Ken being their friend, nominally. But they were girls, which probably offered them an out. Joyce decided to take her cues from Mal, and glanced over to check her reaction. Mal was watching impassively. So Joyce did the same, for now.
The lead frat guy grew neither more nor less ominous. He might have seemed stuck in stasis, except for the threats that continued to leak out of him. “You think it’s funny?” was what he was saying now. “You think it’s fucking funny, punk? Huh? Huh? Do you?”
“Yeah,” Ken cheerfully confessed, and started to work his way back up to his feet. The frat boy and his goons watched his struggle with sullen clay eyes. Joyce felt acid roiling in her stomach, because if one of these thugs kicked Ken in his ribs or something while he was regaining his feet, her pride wasn’t going to let her play the gender card. She would have to march over there and actually try to punch somebody.
But the quartet remained stone-still and gorgonized, almost like gentlemen, as Ken rose. He kept weirdly laughing. So did the crowd; the four frat boys, Joyce, and Mal seemed the only silent ones in the house. Most jeered and hooted, thrilled or amused by the imminent spectacle. Joyce saw Sherry on the other side of the ring that had formed around the combatants. Ken’s latest snub (and doubtless a thousand others) was still fresh in her mind, and she’d had enough beer and wine coolers to forget herself. Now her face twisted and spat as she howled for Ken’s ass, looking like a savage Goldilocks at a bear-baiting.
Ken was standing again. Instead of assuming a defensive or combative position, he stretched, pulling his arms high up over his head and standing on his tip-toes, all the while laughing in the frat boys’ faces. The leader of the quartet curled his lip back like a bizarro Elvis and said, “What’re you laughing at?”
Ken sighed and shook his head at the boy affectionately. Then, shockingly fast, he bent over and reached out and swooped up one of the broken table legs, and when he came upright again he leaned it jauntily against his shoulder. Jagged splinters of wood projected from the broken end of the thing, and Joyce nearly gasped to see how like the spiked bat this makeshift club looked. Many in the audience really did gasp, and the frat boys jumped back, startled for a moment. Pride and public opinion, though, would not let them off the hook. They eyed him warily.
Ken swung the table leg suddenly, but then, instead of striking anyone, he popped its smooth, sti
ll-varnished bottom end into his mouth, thick as that wood was, and began to jerk it slightly and rapidly back and forth, pantomiming fellatio, moaning muffled through the wood, screwing up his eyes, gyrating his hips and with his free hand clutching his penis ecstatically through his jeans. The spectators, after a brief quiet moment of adjustment, erupted. There was laughter, but for the most part the reaction was a cacophony of angry howls and disgusted, indignant protests, along with a fair bit of fake retching. Joyce’s innards crumpled—surely Ken had crossed some sort of line somewhere. He might even get himself killed, this time. She glanced at Mal, who had lit a new cigarette and was coolly watching with her arms crossed.
The frat boy—the leader, the original one—could hear the hungry cruel righteousness of the mob, could see that it was now or never, and indeed that the kismet of bloodlust ordained that it must needs be now, and so he stepped forward, muttering “You fucking faggot” (not that anyone could hear him over the commotion), reaching out to swat that indecorous stick from Ken’s hand. Ken was facing this frat boy, which also meant that the table leg pointed directly from Ken’s mouth to the frat guy’s nose. As the guy drew close, Ken suddenly, and with great force, jerked the table leg straight out of his mouth and thrust it forward along an invisible rail, burying the ragged splintery end in the boy’s nose with a loud crunch. The boy screamed and everyone else hushed. There was that unreal shock that accompanies a person’s first glimpse of a movie star in the flesh. The frat boy’s deputies lurched forward. They were bigger than they were fast. Ken, holding the table leg now like a baseball bat, hauled off and hit the guy on the left flank in his left ear with the blood-speckled broken end, leaving a welt along his jaw. The guy on the right he took out with an uppercut, swinging the club up into his chin with something akin to a golf stroke, except with a really short golf club. There was a little cloudburst of blood then, raining up. Joyce caught another glimpse of Sherry across the way, screaming with her eyes wide in horror. The middle deputy, having had time to observe the threat so unexpectedly posed by this faggot, managed to land two quite respectable, heavy punches on Ken’s face. Unfortunately for him, Ken was by this time pretty much plumb crazy, and too adrenalized to notice any setbacks shy of vivisection. He walloped his opponent once with the table leg, but the angle was bad and it was only a glancing blow that didn’t do much damage. What did work, though, was the kick to the nuts. Once Ken had his adversary doubled up, he began to pummel the guy’s beefy face with the club.
Joyce shook herself and decided it was time to get the fuck out of Dodge before somebody really did kill Ken. Had it occurred to her to wonder whether Ken ought to be saved, she might have paused long enough for anything to have happened. But she was running on reflexes. Grabbing Mal’s upper arm—it would have been the hand, but Mal’s arms were still crossed and so her hands were tucked in behind her elbows—she shouted “Come on!” and dragged her colleague along with her into the arena. Mal rolled with it. Joyce grabbed Ken’s arm and again yelled “Come on!” She didn’t expect any cooperation from him—God knows what might have happened if she hadn’t gotten it, since, glancing across the room at the staircase, she saw a whole platoon of well-fed white boys hustling down, faces hard and swollen with affronted murder, looking down at the carnage and, it seemed, at her. Most of them wore those same Sig Tau shirts. When Ken saw them pouring down the stairs there was a small tug of resistance on Joyce’s hand as he paused and happily exclaimed “Ho, boy!” But he allowed Joyce to yank him out of the house. They ran for the car. Ken kept almost stumbling, and, seeing how drunk he was, Mal demanded his keys, which he handed to her in mid-stride. From behind them came outraged half-articulated howls. Luckily, Ken’s parents were rich enough that his car had electronic door locks with a remote control on the key ring, meaning that when they got to it they were all able to tumble in right away. Had it been Joyce behind the wheel, they would have lost precious seconds while her hands shook too violently to fit the key into the ignition—had it been Ken he would have wasted time doing something funny and dumb until they got a rock through the windshield—Mal slid the key into the ignition as if she were a robot built for the purpose, started the engine, and switched on the headlights. Those frat boys really were running after them, screaming. One of them had a wooden stick that he was waving overhead like a crazy person. Mal moved the car three inches in first one direction, then another, until it was plain that, thanks to some bad parking jobs, they had been hemmed in. The bloody shrieking frat guys drew nearer. Mal said “Sorry” and slammed on the accelerator, bashing her way through the too-narrow gap left by the two cars in front of them, smashing Ken’s right headlight and making a horrid screeching noise. For a vomitous moment Joyce thought they were going to be stuck there, but the swampy ground was soft enough that Mal was able to shove the other two cars a bit to each side as the paint came screaming off all three of them. Then they popped out like a cork, the frat guys jumped out of the way, and Mal fishtailed around to the road. Behind them, for just a second, they could hear the frat boys jeering at them over the damage to Ken’s car—the guys apparently assumed that, just because the car was expensive, someone would care about it.
Mal drove fast the first minute or so, just in case they were in for a car chase. Then she slowed down. Joyce forced her hands to steady themselves and lit herself a cigarette. Only after she’d already taken two puffs did she think to roll down the window. When she pressed the button to do so, a cold blast of wind buffeted the right side of her face, and she jumped, as if she hadn’t been expecting it. “Can I have a cigarette?” asked Mal. After Joyce passed her one, she said, “Thanks.”
Ken was sprawled in the backseat, arms spread out and head leaned back, silent and meditative. Before the two front windows were rolled down, Joyce had been able to hear his breathing, which had not been rapid, shallow gasps, but satisfied intakes and releases of air. Now, without raising his head, he spoke up, strong enough to be heard over the steady roar of the wind. “We have to go back,” he said.
Joyce ground her teeth and stared out the window, ashamed of her cowardice. Mal said, “You can drive yourself back after Joyce and I are at the dorm.”
“Aw. Party-pooper. Anyway, I’m too drunk to drive. Just ask Joyce. I bet she’ll say so.”
Joyce laughed and let out a cheer. “Fuck, Ken, I don’t think you’ve ever been too drunk to do anything.”
“But we got to go back. We got to go pick up Sherry.”
“I think she’ll get along without us,” said Joyce sarcastically. Mal did not deign to reply.
“Naw, really,” Ken said. The patch of space before them that was illuminated by the headlight seemed very small. “I mean, what am I going to say to Sherry? The next time I see her?”
8.
The damage to the car was no big deal. Ken told his mom that it had been swiped for a joyride and later found in its current state, keys dangling from the ignition. Nah, dusting for prints wouldn’t do any good—without thinking, he’d gone ahead and put his hands all over the keys and steering wheel and everything. Anyway, there’d probably been a thousand people in and out of that car, each one leaving his or her fingerprints behind. Mom knew what a popular guy he was. Despite scolding him a little for being too trusting and open-hearted, his mother showed a great deal of sympathy when he called to let her know about the whole thing, and insisted that Ken borrow her car while his own was in the shop. She and his father could make do with just one. When she dropped the vehicle off, she was horrified to see his swollen black eye. But Ken gallantly refused to divulge the culprit’s name, explaining that it was a good friend who had gotten drunk and then forcefully resisted Ken’s (eventually successful) efforts to drive him home, and who had since manfully and copiously apologized.
The girls arrived at Ken’s place for work two days later, just like always. Right before the sessions began, a tearful Bryce showed up, and Sherry had to be called out to get rid of him. After a heated conversation in the fro
nt yard, eye-rollingly observed by Ken through the window, still-weepy Bryce was persuaded to leave, and Sherry came back in, teary-eyed herself. She granted her john a sullen and distracted fuck that wasn’t worth the money.
That first day back Joyce kept watching Ken and Sherry for some sign of extra tension, Sherry having so recently screamed for his blood. But there was nothing. Well, Ken did grab Sherry’s boob and give her a mild titty twister, sending her into a short screaming fury, but that was all in a day’s work for Ken. And Sherry, for some reason, did casually ask Joyce for the full name of Ken’s little high school girlfriend. Joyce automatically gave it to her, and afterward felt vaguely stupid for having done so.
The next working day Joyce had to be a half-hour late because she had her mid-term conference with Dr. Morgenthau. Ken made a stink about it, but Joyce insisted it couldn’t be helped. The conference was routine, so much so that Joyce had the eerie sense that their previous, fraught meeting had never happened. Joyce was doing okay but Dr. Morgenthau knew she could do better, etc. When she got to Ken’s, Atchley was sitting on the loveseat, palms resting on his spread knees. Mal and Sherry were noisily fucking in the back part of the house, so there was no question of switching johns with either of them. Atchley leered at her and said, “How much for you to blow me, bitch?”
Ken was sitting cross-legged on the floor, the spiked bat leaning back against one shoulder, the crumpled notebook paper in his hand looking more and more the worse for wear as the weeks went on. He jumped to his feet and said, “Cool, let’s get started,” and took his position and began to read in his monotone: “Gentlemen, you see here in my hands a spiked—”
“Come here, Ken,” Joyce snapped, marching past Atchley to grab Ken and pull him into the kitchen. There was no privacy, with only a thin wall and no door separating them from the john, but Joyce felt a psychological comfort from being in a different room. “I’m just going to have to start the speech over again,” protested Ken.