The slashes of red lipstick across their mouths made them look like gradeschoolers who had gotten into their mother’s makeup. Cash knew the tallest was the Tweed girl and the scared-looking one wearing a pale blue hotpants outfit had to be the girl from Milan. She wondered where the other three were from.
She rolled over on her side and the bed creaked. The girls all jerked and turned to look at the bedroom door while one of them put her finger to her pursed lips.
Cash joined the girls in a motionless watch of the door. When no one came in, they all seemed to relax a tiny bit. One of the girls lit a cigarette and shared it with the others. Cash felt for the pack of cigarettes that should be in her jean jacket pocket. It was still there. Without creaking the bed again, she got a cigarette out and lit it. She flicked the ashes into her bare palm and then rubbed them into the leg of her jeans.
The girls eyed her. She eyed them back. When Cash’s cigarette was down to the filter, one of the girls in go-go boots crept across the floor, stopping just once on a floorboard that squeaked. She took the butt from Cash and dropped it into the ashtray they were all sharing back where she’d been sitting.
Cash had a thousand questions, but it was clear the girls were not given to talking. She looked again out the bedroom window. They were on the second or third floor, judging from the tree branches visible outside. It was night, but Cash had no other judgment about the time. She relaxed into the mattress and listened to the other sounds of the house. Occasionally she could hear a car drive by outside. A downstairs door opened and closed. Muffled male voices could be heard in other parts of the house.
There was another double bed pushed against the far wall, but no one was on it: the girls were all huddled on the chairs and vanity bench. It looked like everyone slept and dressed in here. Clothes and high-heeled shoes were strewn across the floor. The vanity itself was covered with makeup and used tissues. Cash looked at the girls and mouthed silently, “I have to pee.”
They all shook their heads no. Cash reached down and unbuttoned the waistband of her jeans. That damn LeRoy must have put something in the cup of coffee he had given her. And here she had been worried about Danielson all this time. Shit. Maybe they were all in on this—this must be the white slave market Mo told her about. But shit, she wasn’t white. What was she doing here?
Footsteps came up the stairs and passed the bedroom door. The girls didn’t move. Cash heard a door open and shut and then a toilet flush. There was a bathroom on this floor. Damn, hearing the toilet flush put her bladder into overdrive. What were they going to do, kill her? Damn, she had to pee. As she heard a door open again, she jumped off the bed and rushed to the door. She twisted the door handle and pulled. Nothing. The door was locked. As she heard the footsteps outside the door get closer, she started to pound on the door. The five girls groaned, a deep collective sigh and pulled closer together. “Hey, I gotta pee,” Cash yelled.
The footsteps stopped outside the door. She heard a male laugh and the steps went down the stairs outside the door.
Cash turned and looked at the girls. “What, they won’t let you pee? Do any of you talk? You’re Janet, aren’t you?” she asked looking at the Tweed girl.
The girl nodded quick.
“And you’re from Mi-lan, Milan—however you say it, right?” Cash said looking at the youngest of the girls. She too shook her head yes. “So, who are the rest of you?”
No one answered. They looked at each other and at the door.
“Oh, jesus, I gotta pee. What time is it? What day is it?”
One of the girls pushed a three-pound Folgers coffee tin can out from under the vanity.
“What? I’m supposed to pee in that?”
The girls nodded their heads. Cash then noticed a line of coffee tins under the vanity.
“Do any of you talk?”
The girl from Milan whispered, “It’s better if we don’t. Just pee, we won’t look.”
And they all turned their heads away or looked down at their knees.
Cash grabbed the coffee can and thanked god it was empty. She moved to the side of the bed away from them and squatted down between the bed and the wall with the window. She looked at them over the bed’s mattress. They kept their eyes averted. It took Cash a good minute before she could actually pee. Soon the sound of a stream of urine hitting the bottom of the tin can filled the room. The heat from her piss warmed her butt.
Damn, no toilet paper. She shook her butt back and forth, pulled up her undies and jeans in one swift move, stood up. It was a good thing she only had to pee.
She looked at the girls, wondering what else they’d had to endure. When and how did they eat? They looked clean so they must get to use the bathroom once in a while. What if they needed to do more than just pee?
Cash put the lid back on the coffee tin, then turned and looked out the window. She pulled the yellowed lace curtains to the side. There was one streetlight down the block a ways. She could see St. Paul Cathedral’s dome a few blocks over. The golden sheen of the state capitol was blocked from view. The outside windowsill was brick. Cash leaned her head against the glass and looked at the side of the house as best she could. It looked to be made of brick.
She tried to open the window, but it was nailed shut. She figured it would be. A locked door and nailed window. Crap. And she was hungry.
At least that was something Cash knew how to handle. She had spent many days hungry. Foster parents enjoyed using food, or the withholding of it, as punishment. She could go days without eating if she had to. She looked around the room. There were cups and glasses sitting on the vanity and floor. The girls saw her eyeing the cups. One of them reached back to the vanity and held a glass of water out to her. Cash walked over and took a couple of small sips. Enough to quench her thirst but not enough to empty the glass. Then she sat back down on the bed.
The girls were dressed like the women she had seen working the streets down on Dale and University. But those were older women. Those women seemed comfortable in their skimpy clothes, high heels and talked loudly and boldly—to each other, the men in the cars and even the undercover cops. These five girls were half-naked and terrified.
They reminded her of herself in one of the foster homes early on. In that home, the mother always found a reason at the end of the day to have the foster father whip her with his leather belt. Over a dinner of roast beef and mashed potatoes, the mother would give a litany of wrongs Cash had committed during the day. She had sassed back. She had used up toilet paper in the bathroom and hadn’t replaced the roll. She had given the foster mother a “look that could kill.” It didn’t matter if the accusations were true or not. By the end of the meal, the father was worked up into a wrath.
After a few months, Cash found herself hunching over at the dinner table. Her body flinched at any movement either parent made. If they passed her the mashed potatoes, she flinched. If they walked behind her chair, she automatically curled into herself. The smallest noise made her jump. The mother seemed to get perverse enjoyment when Cash showed any fear. The father whipped her harder when she screamed or cried.
It had taken her years to overcome her body’s response to noise and loud voices. She had trained herself to stand completely still in the face of rage or sudden movement, to remain unresponsive, to not even blink.
But these girls had never experienced anything like Cash had gone through. Nothing in their lives had prepared them for what they were now experiencing. When Cash got back up off the bed and walked toward them, they huddled closer together.
“What happens if you make noise? If you talk to each other?” she asked quietly.
“They just want us quiet,” one of the girls whispered.
“Do you know what time it is?” Cash asked the group, her voice still lowered.
They shook their head no in unison.
“Seven p.m.? Midnight? Guess.”
The Tweed girl whispered, “Maybe two, three in the morning.”
“How l
ong have I been here?”
“They brought you in this morning, around noon,” another answered.
“Who brought me?”
The girls all shrugged.
“You don’t know or you don’t want to say?”
They looked at each other and shrugged again.
“Do you ever get out of this room?”
They all nodded.
“Is this some kind of white slave market?”
The girl from Milan started crying. The girl next to her put her arms around her and cradled her.
“Shut up,” she hissed at Cash.
“Well, damn, I just want to know what I’m dealing with.” Cash sat back down on the bed, the springs creaking. She looked toward the window again. Saw the top of the cathedral. Her Ranchero was down there on the street. It couldn’t be that far away. And her .22 was behind the seat. For a brief moment she lost herself in a daydream of the .22 in her hands, shooting through the door and running down the stairs. The other girls running after her. Well, that’s not going to happen, she thought.
“How many other people are in this house?” she asked.
One of the girls held up five fingers. Another one pointed as if straight through the wall and held up four fingers.
“There’s more girls here?” Cash asked.
They all nodded their heads yes.
Cash sat and thought about that for a bit.
“Who are these guys?” she asked.
Again, all of them looked at the door.
“Speed freaks, I think,” one of them finally whispered. “Sometimes they smoke marijuana, but mostly they’re skinny and scrawny and jumpy. Sometimes they give us little white pills that keep us awake for hours.”
“Or black capsules.”
“Are they making you sell yourselves for sex?”
The Milan girl started crying and shaking. The girl holding her held her tighter and shushed her, glaring at Cash. Cash shrugged. “I only just asked.”
“Not her,” the girl said.
“Not yet,” said another of the girls.
The Milan girl started gulping, holding in her wails, but her body shook uncontrollably.
Cash lit another cigarette. This time just tapping the ashes directly onto her jean leg.
Cash heard a couple sets of footsteps coming up the stairs. All five girls froze. A key turned in the lock.
Two tall, very thin white guys stepped through the open door. Their long hair was greasy. Their faces unshaven. “Come on, chippies. Bathroom and food break. Grab your cans.”
The girls teetered upward on their high heels, moving en masse towards the open door, each of them with a Folgers can. Cash stood to follow.
“Not you, squaw. Sit back down. Gordie here will be back for you in a sec.”
Cash felt the rage start in her belly and flow through her chest, then up through the base of her neck. As soon as the women were escorted out of the room and the door was locked behind them, Cash walked to the door and put her ear to the wood. She tried the handle. No luck. She heard all the steps go toward the bathroom, but the door never shut even as the toilet flushed five times. Cash heard the girls set their coffee cans down outside the door, then all the footsteps tromped down the stairs.
Cash searched the room, rifled through the clothes in the closet—all of the garments were short and thin, sparkly or psychedelic. The makeup was for white faces and the lipstick bright red or fuchsia pink. The sheets on the bed needed washing and the flat, grey-stained pillows didn’t have pillowcases.
Cash tried the window again. It still wouldn’t budge. Now that she could take a longer look, she could see there was nothing outside the window but a straight drop down from the second floor. The house next door was a good bit away with no lights on in any of the windows. Think, Cash, think.
She heard men’s footsteps coming up the stairs. She moved quickly away from the window, standing at the foot of the bed she had been sleeping on.
When the door opened, it was a different man than the two who had taken the girls. This must be Gordie. He was thin too, though not as tall as the other two. His teeth were tobacco-stained, odd to see in a guy who was probably still in his twenties. His hair was just as scraggly as the others, but he was wearing a braided leather headband.
“Well lookee here, the old man got us a squaw.” He looked her up and down. Walked between the two beds so he could view her from the side. Cash stood still. “Wow. Look at that hair.” He pulled her braid.
“No titties though,” he said, flicking her chest. “Have to get you some falsies.” His laugh was cruel. His eyes absent of humanity. They reminded Cash of the feral cats she had seen on numerous farms. “Do you talk? No?” He made some war whoop noises with the palm of his hand over his mouth. Laughed again like a maniac. Cash knew her eyes had turned black with hatred. She looked quickly at the wall in front of her instead of at him. It was “the look” that had gotten her beaten many times in foster homes. She had learned to look away, not engage, look down, shield the look with her eyelids.
He grabbed her chin. “What’s the matter, don’t you like me?” He pushed her backwards onto the bed. “Yep, you and me going to have a little fun,” he said as he unbuckled his belt and the top button of his jeans.
He leaned over her on the bed and shoved his left forearm over her chest, pinning her down. As she was gasping for breath, he stood up, quickly unbuttoned her jeans and pulled her jeans and panties off in one full grab and spread her legs.
Cash felt her entire being go cold. It started in the pit of her stomach and rose to her eyes. She became cold with icy hatred. He pushed his forearm over her chest again as he unzipped himself and dropped his jeans farther down on his hips. Cash felt his hard penis brushing up her bare leg as he tried to get himself into position to penetrate her.
She looked at him, in his inhuman eyes, and in a calm still quiet voice stated, “I imagine you don’t take too long. Guys like you rarely do.”
She felt his penis go limp against her leg.
And she saw the rage build in his eyes. His forearm was still across her chest. He used it to lift himself up and slap her full force across her face. He stumbled to standing, pulling his jeans up over his limp dick, then lifted her by her shirt off the bed and backhanded her again. “Bitch. Squaw. Whore.” Inside her icy cocoon, Cash barely felt the blows. She had been here before. She knew that a beating always ended. She knew how to endure. He screamed and punched and spewed spit on her face. His greasy hair flew in strands around his red face. Finally he threw her, still half naked, back on to the bed and stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him, and locking it as forcefully as a skeleton key could turn in a lock.
She got up and pulled her underwear and jeans back on. She couldn’t find her shoes. Couldn’t remember if she had ever had them in this room. She sat on the edge of the bed and held her head in her hands. She breathed shallowly. She had gotten into bar scraps in recent years, but no one had beaten her since the night Wheaton had rescued her from the last foster home. When he had found her sitting in the middle of a wheat field, in a truck used for hauling grain, contemplating slitting her wrists after a similar attack by the foster dad, Wheaton had rescued her. He had taken her from that home, set her up in the apartment she still lived in, telling some lie to the landlord about her being his niece or daughter who was ready to be emancipated and wouldn’t cause any trouble whatsoever.
Cash didn’t know how long she sat on the edge of the bed. Reliving past beatings. Reliving past aches and pains that eventually healed. Finally, she stood up and walked over to the vanity mirror. Her braid was a tangled mess. Her cheeks swollen where he had hit her. She felt her face and nose. Nothing was broken. Her ribs hurt, and she was sore as hell. She found some water in one of the glasses and emptied the glass.
She could use a beer. She rummaged around on the vanity and found a half-smoked cigarette. She didn’t know where her pack had gone. She lit up and took a big drag. The nicot
ine hit her lungs and calmed her nerves a tiny bit.
She heard a girl scream. A long, tortured piercing scream. It tightened all the muscles in Cash’s belly. Cash took another deep drag on the cigarette. The smoke was stale coming from the last half of the butt, but it comforted her nonetheless. She tiptoed over to the wood door and pressed her ear against it. At first she pressed so hard all she could hear was her own heart pounding in her ear. She moved her head a fraction and was able to hear the muffled sounds of girls crying. One of the girls, whose cries bordered on screams, was clearly hurt. Men’s voices were interspersed with harsh laughter. There was an acrid smell that drifted up the stairs combined with the smell of marijuana Cash recognized since it seemed to be the smoke of choice for her brother. Cash backed away from the door and sat down on the vanity. She dug around and found a whole cigarette, menthol, but she was beyond having a preference.
She lit up and looked around the room, a little bit at a time. It was big. Cash estimated it at around twelve by fourteen feet, with hardwood floors and lots of dark woodwork. One large front window, covered with a flimsy lace curtain, faced the street. Another window, narrower, faced the house next door. The wallpaper was old. A creamy yellow with tiny red roses running from floor to ceiling. An eight-light brass chandelier hung from the middle of the ceiling. Three of the lights were burnt out. The closet was big enough for someone to lie down in, but it was strewn with clothes, with a few lonely ones hung on wire coat hangers. The rest of the room held a six-drawer dresser and two double beds. A vanity and bench. Each bed had a fitted sheet, a top sheet and a threadbare blanket. Rumpled on top of each was also some kind of tufted bedspread.
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