by Brady Udall
The parlor of the PussyCat Manor, dim and cool as an underground chamber, smelled like cigarette smoke and money. The only true light came from a hanging lamp in the corner and the neon beer signs flickering over the bar. Everywhere you looked, there were half-dressed women: some lounging on the red velvet sofas, a couple standing in the faint glow of the jukebox, deliberating over the selections as if studying a sacred text, and one, a striking black girl with glitter in her afro, sitting at the white baby grand in the corner and tapping out “Go Tell Aunt Rhodie” with one finger.
Golden walked through the door and all the women looked up at him. He blinked and turned to leave.
“Come back here, honey!” cried the black girl. “We ain’t gonna bite you, not less you pay us to!”
The other girls shrieked with laughter, and one of them intercepted him before he could make it outside. “Come on, why don’t you give yourself a minute,” she said. “We’re all very nice and you can take your time deciding.” She was a rosy-faced blond girl wearing a pink kimono open to her navel.
Golden took a breath. “I’m not. It isn’t. I don’t have anything to decide.” Defeated, and knowing he would be unable to make himself any clearer than that, he chose a spot on her forehead and stared at it with conviction so as not to risk a glance at her cleavage.
She took him by the elbow and guided him toward a hallway whose entryway was hung with strings of clicking glass beads. They passed through the beads, which raked at Golden’s hair and slithered across the bridge of his nose and around his shoulders. With her hand on his arm like that and those breasts swaying at the edge of his vision, he would follow her anywhere.
Finally, at the end of the hallway, after passing a series of doors from behind which came all manner of odd and startling human noises whose nature he didn’t care to speculate on, Golden was able to wrest his elbow from her grip. “I’m the contractor on the new building.” He held up his yellow hard hat for corroboration. “I’m here to see Miss Alberta.”
“Miss Alberta’s the matron here,” the girl said. “She doesn’t see men, not anymore.”
Golden sneezed twice, loudly and furiously, and a female voice from behind one of the doors called, “Bless you!”
“I’m not here to see her,” Golden whispered to the girl. “I’m here to talk. To her. The owner, Mr. Ted Leo, told me she’s the one to see when he’s away.”
“You sure you don’t want anything else?” the girl said. “Since you’re working for Ted Leo, we’ll give you a deal, two for one or throw in something a little extra.”
“Oh, thank you, my.” Golden’s face bloomed into a third stage of heat. “We’re in the middle of something out on the site, and I really just came to talk to Miss Alberta.”
The girl went in search of the matron and Golden took a leather chair directly across from two women who stared at him openly and whispered to each other without looking away. One wore a garment that looked like it had been made from spare mosquito netting, and the other had on shorts, a cut-off tank top, and glue-on fingernails—each one painted, if Golden was not mistaken, with a miniature likeness of the American flag. Above the couch hung a painting of still another woman, this one fully naked and bigger than life. She was lying on her side on a Persian rug, looking back over her shoulder, a swollen grape between her teeth, her large, old-fashioned behind glowing with an unholy light.
With no safe place to settle his gaze, he looked around the room and pretended to note the sheetrocking job, the doorjambs that were inches out of plumb. He took a pen from his shirt pocket, studied it as if it were an archaeological treasure of profound significance. He turned it over in his hands, clicked the button several times, and when he dropped it, acted for all the world as if it hadn’t happened. Thirty seconds passed and the girl in the mosquito netting picked it up and handed it over. “Dropped this,” she said.
“I’m sorry. Thanks. I’m truly sorry,” he said.
Finally, Miss Alberta showed up, obviously in a sour mood, shouting down the hall at someone named Chester and snapping her fingers at a girl who had fallen asleep on one of the couches. Golden jumped up from his chair with a force that caused it to topple backward.
Except for her showgirl-style fake eyelashes, Miss Alberta looked like any chunky middle-aged woman you might run into at the post office: permed auburn hair, flowery blouse, cheap silver rings on every finger. Behind the eyelashes were hard little eyes like two watermelon seeds.
She leaned back and eyeballed him up and down as if he were a Christmas tree she was considering for purchase. She came right out with an accusation: “You’re the inspector, aren’t you.”
“No,” Golden said. “I don’t believe so.”
“I thought we were dealing with Bennett these days. We have an agreement. You slippery boogers aren’t supposed to show up unannounced.”
Golden explained he wasn’t an inspector, that he disliked inspectors as much as she did. Again, he held out his yellow hard hat as proof.
“Then you’re here for business?”
“Yes,” Golden sighed. “I—”
“Then go sit down and wait your turn like the rest. Big ones like you make us all nervous.”
“Ma’am,” Golden said.
“One wrong move from a lumberjack like you and it’s off to the emergency room for one of my girls. Don’t think it hasn’t happened before. I should start charging by the pound with some of you boys.”
Golden cleared his throat.
The scowl left her face for a moment and she gave a slight grin. Golden’s tongue-tied discomfort, it was clear, was improving her mood immensely.
“So are you going to tell me what you want or should we stand here all day?”
“My name is Golden Richards.” He pointed vaguely toward the door. “I’m the contractor on the new building. Mr. Ted Leo told me in his absence I should speak to you.”
“You might have mentioned that in the first place, Mr. Richards, before I gave you the business. Every day of the week I have to deal with such a lineup of knuckleheads you wouldn’t believe, so you’ll forgive me for presuming the worst, which is the only way to manage things around here. Follow me to the office, where we can have some privacy.” The office, a tiny room stacked with papers, files, and ledger books, was just off the main parlor. “Please,” Miss Alberta said, gesturing to the only chair in the room, upon which there appeared to be a stack of at least a dozen rubber penises encased in shrink-wrap plastic.
“I generally like to stand,” Golden said, stepping to the side. Anyone caught hanging around in a whorehouse, he thought, deserved exactly this.
“Oh, the darn dildos!” Miss Alberta cried, as if she’d forgotten to put away her knitting. She scooped them up and dumped them on the counter next to a wall-mounted corkboard filled with thumbtacked notes, receipts and reminders. Pictures of several chubby children—her grandkids, by the beady-eyed look of them—were taped all over the walls. She put on a pair of bifocals and jotted something in one of the ledger books. “We just got a new order and haven’t had time to put things away. Can I get you something? Coffee?”
He shook his head, but not in response to Miss Alberta’s question; he was trying to shake loose the word dildo, which had lodged in his brain and blocked his flow of thought. Dildo. He mouthed the word and looked up with a start to see if Miss Alberta had seen him. He’d heard the word used once or twice around the work site, but it never really meant anything to him. He’d always figured a dildo was some kind of bird.
“I hope Ted Leo is being civil with you, he can be difficult to work for, that man.”
Golden shook his head again until a few words found their way out of his mouth: “No. Ted Leo’s been good, real good.”
“And how’s the building going?”
“Fine.” Golden nodded. “Going fine.” The truth was they were weeks behind schedule, he’d lost one of his electrical contractors, and he was having trouble with his in-house crew, which was why he
had ventured into the PussyCat Manor in the first place.
“I was wondering if one of my men, his name is Charles Odlum, has been in here. Most people call him Leonard.”
“Can I ask why you’d like to know?”
“I hired all my men on the condition they wouldn’t, you know, frequent the establishment. They’ve been compliant, but I’ve gotten a report about Leonard—”
“You object to the idea of a brothel, Mr. Richards?” she said, her voice whittled down to a fine point. “Maybe you’ve forgotten you’re building one.”
“No, ma’am. I just don’t want it to be a…distraction for my men. They can do what they want in their spare time, but the fact is we’re working on a site with a…an operational brothel on it. You can see the difficulty, I hope. It’s up to me to draw the line on something like this.”
In fact, the brothel had become a bigger distraction than he could have imagined. Though the actual building, just over a shallow rise, could not be seen from the job site, the lighted sign, with its depiction of a busty cartoon cat stroking her fluffed-up tail, was visible at all hours of the day. The brothel, and what went on inside it, was by far the most popular topic of conversation among the men. They referred to it as the Poontang Palace and Ye Olde Nunnery, and speculated endlessly on the girls’ names, their various specialties and physical characteristics, and what might be the highest-priced items on the menu (The Full-Body Tongue-Wash? The Interracial Triple-Team?). Naturally, all the sex talk—not to mention the ever-present and extremely sexy cartoon cat—made the men horny. Some of them, in fact, seemed to be suffering from acute horniness, a horniness raised to elevated and possibly unhealthy levels. Golden did not want to admit to himself that the ban on brothel visits was making it worse.
Last week, for example, Golden had come out of the trailer to find Leonard Odlum humping a trash barrel. Leonard was a hyperactive redneck from eastern Oklahoma with the attention span of a kitten. Never without a cheekful of chaw and his trusted companion, the Dixie cup in which to spit it, he was always bouncing on his toes, performing disco dance combinations and yelling incomprehensible phrases at people who were out of earshot. And on this day, it seemed, he was humping a trash barrel.
When Golden asked what he was doing, Leonard said, “Who? Me?”
Holding his spit cup aloft with one hand and grasping the edge of the empty steel barrel with the other, he thrusted and caressed his crotch against it with an air of abject helplessness, the barrel occasionally making a hollow ringing like a broken church bell: Tong Tong Tong.
“Come on, get back to work,” Golden called, weakly. “Before you hurt yourself.”
“I’m on break,” Leonard grunted, “and this is what I’m doing.”
Down at the gate two drivers from the gravel pit were standing next to their dump truck, pointing at Leonard and laughing. Releasing his grasp on the barrel, Leonard turned to Golden, his hips still twitching slightly, holding his spit cup above the fray. Golden took a step back.
“See here?” Leonard said. He looked down at his pants, appalled by what he saw. “Lookit. It just keeps on like this, you oughta be glad I came across this barrel before you showed up.” He walked around in a circle, his twitching crotch leading the way. “You let us at those hookers ever’ now and then, this wouldn’t be happening!”
Golden couldn’t tell if this was all an act or if Leonard was in genuine distress. When Leonard started to reacquaint himself with the barrel again, Golden retreated to his trailer to hide until Leonard was finished. Several other workers had shown up to cheer and whistle. One of them yelled, “I hope the intercourse is consensual, Leonard!”
Now, according to several of the crew, Leonard had moved on from the barrel to the real thing; over the past two days he’d bragged to just about everyone he’d come across that he’d gone over the hill and got himself a hooker named Boutique, who he’d lit up, he’d said, like a High-9 slot machine. He had insisted from the beginning that making red-blooded men like him work in the close vicinity of so much available pay-for-pussy without being allowed to partake was a violation of his basic human rights. “This is America,” he’d yell at anybody who’d listen, “ain’t it?”
“I’m not trying to be a bother,” Golden told Miss Alberta, “but I’d like to make sure my man actually came in here before I confront him about it. It would make things easier for me.”
“No doubt it would,” Miss Alberta said. “But we take privacy very seriously here, Mr. Richards, and we don’t make a habit of revealing who our clients are, even when the request has been so politely made by a gentleman such as yourself. If that answer doesn’t suit you, you can take it up with the Supreme Court, or the honorable Ted Leo, who will tell you the same thing.”
Before Miss Alberta was finished, Golden was already backing out of the room like a crab. When he got to the doorway, he clapped on his hard hat, which was, he realized, the exact color of some of the dildos. “I didn’t know there were rules for things like this, or I wouldn’t have asked.”
Miss Alberta took off her bifocals and slumped into her chair with a sigh. In an instant her tone changed from judgmental and severe to oversweet, as if she were speaking to one of her moon-faced grandchildren. “Honey, that’s quite all right. Not everybody’s up to speed on whorehouse ethics these days. You finish that nice new building for us, and don’t worry too much about your men. What we do, it helps men, it relaxes them, makes them happy.” She opened a cupboard, pulled out two containers: one a ceramic candy dish full of homemade butter toffee, and the other a blown-glass chalice over-flowing with little disks packaged in shiny foil. Polite gentleman that he was, Golden selected one of each.
“If you’d ever like to come back,” said Miss Alberta, “remember to bring that condom with you, we’re requiring them now, and we’ll take good care of you. If not, might as well have one of my toffees. They’re better than sex anyway.”
Outside, the bleached afternoon light blinded him; even in March the shock of heat and sun was like being hit across the forehead with a shovel. He walked out into the parking lot, blinking and grimacing, until he could see well enough to locate his pickup. He got behind the steering wheel and Cooter jumped into his lap, wiggled his entire body with excitement.
Golden stared at the shiny package glinting in his hand like a polished doubloon. The only other time he’d seen a condom up close was at the tribal fair in Page, Arizona, several years ago. He’d been waiting in line for snow cones with eight or nine of the kids when Donald Mifflin, a roofing contractor Golden had worked with on a couple of projects, walked up and cried, “Why lookee here! Hey-hey! If it ain’t the great Golden R.!” Donald Mifflin was of the species of construction man for which Golden had little tolerance: the fat and hairy and loud kind, the kind full of hale bravado and endless lines of bullshit.
“So!” shouted Donald, gesturing with his corn dog to the crowd of sweating, impatient children. “All these nippers belong to you?”
Golden gave a noncommittal chuckle; he had learned long ago not to engage strangers or acquaintances about his family situation.
“Seriously now,” said Donald. “They all yours?”
Golden looked down at the kids, who stared back up at him, waiting patiently for him to claim or disown them.
“Ehhh.” He sighed. “Yep. All mine.”
Donald held up his corn dog and, mouth screwed up in concentration, dug into his back pocket for his wallet-on-a-chain, from which he extracted a small square packet of green foil and handed it to Golden. On the packet was printed in ribbons of cursive, Gentleman’s Best!
“What is this?” Golden said.
Donald looked around meaningfully at the children, stepped forward, and in a whisper just quiet enough for everyone within a fifty-foot radius to hear, said, “This, my friend, is so you don’t go fucking yourself out of a spot at the dinner table.”
With that he gave Golden a clap on the back, a wink and a nod to the kids, and shambled
off in the direction of the bumper cars.
Though Golden had never heard anyone in the church address the topic of condoms specifically, The Evils of Birth Control was a subject taken up often and at length. Birth control was high wickedness and pure selfishness, an abuse of mortal agency, a corruptor of men, a destroyer of civilizations. It poisoned the fountains of life, made mockery of God and all His commandments, the most fundamental of which was to multiply and replenish the earth. The condom, then, in its shiny little wrapper, was the embodiment of worldly vice, the antithesis of everything for which the church and its proudly prolific members stood.
That afternoon at the county fair Golden had tossed the thing into the nearest garbage barrel as if it were the maggoty remains of a mouse.
But today, in the hot cab of his GMC, he considered the gold foil package for a long time. On the front it said, A PleasurePlus Prophylactic, and on the back, For the Pleasure of Sensual Living. After a while he noticed he still held, in his other hand, the toffee he’d sheepishly fished out of Miss Alberta’s bowl. He offered it to Cooter, who sucked on it thoughtfully for a few seconds, rattling it around in his teeth, before giving a shudder and spitting it out onto the seat.
Golden took out his wallet. He looked at himself in the rearview mirror; what he saw there offered no encouragement or reproach, no shocking news about the state of his soul. He opened his wallet. Slowly, he slipped the condom inside.
7.
NUMBER ONE: DANIEL
BORN DEAD AND FOUR MONTHS PREMATURE, WEIGHING ALL OF ELEVEN ounces and no bigger than her own hand. His skin was a deep, startling red covered with fine blond hairs that clustered in a dense little crop at the top of his head.