A few years later, one of my clients—one of my special clients, but I’ll get to that—he called me Dollars. More irony, because dollars is all I was living for by then, and all I was good for. But he called me that because he said I looked like money when I put on some jewellery and those big Jackie-O sunglasses. Yeah, he called me Dollars. When he did that, I liked it. I felt like somebody. But it was only him who could get away with that and make me feel good for it. Like I said, I’ll get to that special client—in a bit.
Sad thing was, I nearly emptied out my Little Dippers’ account. I think it was probably eight months before I could get a man to come around and pay me what I was worth. There were some hand jobs and some blows in the dark and there was one bachelor party where I got paid extra for a circle jerk, but those were all secret things. Back alley stuff. No one wanted to be with the gal (paid or otherwise) who lived under the thumb of Denny Munn.
I didn’t understand the power that man had. He had some money saved up, the nicest car in town, except maybe for the Banatynes, but he didn’t hold office, or spend time with Chief Birkhead. He had enough sway to stay out of court over the beating he gave me. And I never pressed any personal charges. Not good for business to jail the johns. That was another of my personal policies.
I jest. But only because it was so dire for me. I was so bad off that I started taking my dollars from Denny again. He swore he was sorry. He swore he’d never do it again. I needed the money, you see. I needed to build up my Little Dippers’ to what it was. Not because I needed to get out of town or leave the island. The daughter of a whore who grows up to be one, well, she never really escapes from that. No, I needed it for insurance. A bank balance is the best kind of insurance policy a woman like me can have.
I’d drawn on it once, and by God, I’d be smarter the next time, but I was sure I’d have to draw on it again.
Time went on. Like I said, Denny promised he’d never strike me again. And he didn’t.
After a few years, I found my chance and I made sure he’d never hit anyone. Not ever again.
6.
I won’t go into the specifics. Mostly, because I don’t know them, but also because they’re not important, not anymore. I’m not sure if a lawman would think I’m an accessory or an accomplice. Maybe I share one hundred per cent of the guilt. From the perspective of the law, that might be true, because I knew exactly what was happening. I knew exactly what I was doing and if that’s the case, then I might share all that blame. I might.
But from a personal perspective, I carry zero per cent of the guilt.
I don’t feel guilty about what happened at all. I said that up front and I maintain it to this day.
I waited. Bide my time, I think is the expression. I drank my cherry juice and Seven while Denny downed his Tom Collins and I laughed at his jokes while the middle crust of men—those with less power and a willingness to sit still for bought drinks—also laughed. There’s always that certain grade of men who will sell most anything for a drink and a chuckle. They aren’t the shop owners and the deputies. They don’t run businesses or have lovely, church-going families at home. They have enough for a round or two and they’ll sit and listen to a Dirty like Denny, if it means they can bum a cigarette or hear a titty joke or sip a paid round.
Those are the kind of mid-listers that Denny attracted. Not my special client, not a guy like him. No, he wasn’t a top-end guy in terms of his wealth or his influence, but tops in the way he treated a woman, tops in the way he held his head up about town. Tops in the way he was always forthright and respectful with the world around him.
Again, I’ll get to the telling of my special client shortly.
Slowly, I came back to Denny. I had to. In those months and the year after my swollen, bloodied face, I only had my secret johns. I needed to live, Goddamnit. So I gave him his lip service. I did the same thing as those mid-listers, laughing at his twat-talk. I compromised myself.
I did my three special things to him in the order that he specified as he was laying his tens and twenties down on my nightstand. Slowly, at least in Denny’s mind, we got back to the relationship of buyer and seller we had before.
I asked him to buy me a new bed on a count of the blood stains on my old one. He did.
I asked him to hire Zeke to sand and refinish my hardwood floor at the behest of Johnny whose name was on the building’s lease. He did.
And I asked him for extras like a TV and a new radio plus a lamp to replace the one he broke in his tirade of blurry knuckles. Reluctantly, he did.
And he did it because, despite his wallops, his prized lady of the night, his Company Girl, she got her looks back. Her rear end and her natural boobs still pleased the eye when he took her on his arm down to the tourist places for lobster tail and fizzy drinks. He’d had his tantrum and made his point and got away with it.
And be damned if it wasn’t the easiest way for a girl like me to make fresh deposits in her Little Dippers’ account. I hated myself for doing it. But I did it. I guess you could say, I’d made a career of compromising myself. What was one more rung down the ladder?
7.
Must have been after Christmas, winter of ’68. This one, I do remember, on account of what happened. It was a big deal in DC, one of the stains on our island history, but, truth be told, not one of the bigger, nastier stains. When something happens to a guy like Denny Munn, who’s only known for his generosity when it comes time to pay the bar tab, most folks forget him in a matter of months, not years.
Dovetail Cove is at the south-west side of the island. I’ve not seen much more than the town and the beaches up the cove-side. I used to get hired to do parties up at the north farmland for the immigrant workers. It was usually the Americans and the Canadians that managed those fields who had enough to pay for me and some other girls to come and spend a few nights and make the rounds for their staff. A little work bonus, I guess. I put an end to those kinds of things when I had some close calls, but I looked into it again after my altercation with Denny. I would have done nearly anything to pay the bills in those months.
I took clients that I’d turned down in the past, guys like Everett Campbell who worked at Ethan’s Shop. He’d been trying to get in my pants for a few years. I finally relinquished because he heard I was hard up and he started making offers up above my new (lower) base price. I waited until he tripled his offer and, let me tell you, it was not a good evening. As ashamed as I am to admit it, I had him climb my back steps at least a dozen times in those months. And, yes, that is a euphemism. I don’t want to say much more about that...if’n you don’t mind.
It was this kind of desperation that I held on to, this kind that I remembered when the young man came in to LowBalls on a blustery night in January that year. I didn’t tell Chief Birkhead anything about this, mind you. Not then. And I’d deny it now, too.
DC doesn’t see snow every winter. Mostly, it’s just chilly rain. And when we do, it’s usually the wet kind that melts when it hits the ground. That year, we saw a few days of it. Brings the traffic we do have to a halt. And it started the same night that young man came in and two-fisted a couple of pints.
I sat with this man and I remember this part like it was yesterday. He said, “I’m looking for a feller who’s got lots of money and drives a Caddy. Big shot on this island, but not too big. I figured you might know him. If you give me an address or point me at his residence, I’ll hand you a twenty for your trouble.”
I saw it in that young man’s eyes. I didn’t know why—and I didn’t care—but I knew the devil had finally come for Ol’ Dirty Denny Munn. Whatever had paid for all those rounds he bought the mid-lister friends of his, whatever had paid for all those times I did my three things on Denny in the dark, it had caught up to him in the form of this guy drinking two beers in Johnny’s just as slow as you please. And I was not dumb enough to close the door when I saw it swing nice and wide for me.
I didn’t flinch. I knew I was going to tell this guy
where to find Denny. Knew it. All I did was haggle at the price. Hey, like I said, I’m good at what I do.
8.
After that, I don’t know the details. I do know that Denny never showed his face in Dovetail again. Never sidled up to the bar and had Johnny pour cold ones for his fair weather friends. Never smacked my meat like he owned the butcher shop. Never licked his yellowed fingers to make sure he wasn’t giving me two twenties stuck together.
I never laid eyes on him again. No one in DC did. Birksie pieced together that his Caddy had been seen up by the cemetery into the wee hours of the next morning and its plate had been on the docket for the first ferry the next morning. But it was gone, baby, gone after that.
Whoever that man was, he’d made Denny Munn disappear.
And for me, life got infinitely better in the spring and summer of ’68.
Denny became the stuff of legend. And, as time went on, memory of who the real man was had faded. The town took control of his big place up on Avery Road and men in town—my old customers—wandered back to me, no longer fearful that they’d get embroiled in some domestic situation with a fat-wallet guy like Denny. Again, I could turn away men like Everett Campbell. And I could hold my chin just a little higher for that.
My Little Dippers’ account grew.
My confidence did too. And so did my smarts. I never had any problems until the fall of 1974 when I met my special client. But that was a different sort. He was no Denny Munn. And that was the trouble.
Part II
Sean
“The desire of the man is for the woman,
but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.”
—Madame de Stael
1.
I met Sean Ketwood on the beach. Rather, I should say I first saw Sean on the main beach that tourists always still referred to as Neckline because the maps all called it that. We just called it The Beach. He was with his wife and his two young sons. He was long and lean, and had a deep tan on his muscular arms and the lines of his abs. He had a bright shock of curly red hair riding above his dark sunglasses. His smile was wide and bright white.
I first spoke with him at the liquor store on Broadway. I was picking up some beers to keep in the small fridge I’d bought for my room. It was another part of the arrangement I’d made with Johnny. My clients could come upstairs for a rum and Coke or a cold beer and I’d work it into my price but it would be lower than what they’d pay downstairs at Johnny’s taps.
It was a strange turnabout. I was a feature of Johnny’s Lowballs. But now my upstairs drinks were a feature of the Banks Corporation.
By the time Sean was my client, all the shock that such a man would leave the bed of his beautiful young wife for the company of a girl like me had worn off.
It was a mid week night in September when things started to go south.
2.
I awoke with a start. Sean, beside me, was crying in his sleep. I nudged him. “Hey,” I said. “Hey, hey,” I repeated less gently when he crinkled his wet eyes against my words and wouldn’t wake. I reached for a cigarette and my mom’s old Zippo. “Sean,” I said and gave him a bigger shove. He had me worried.
Finally, Sean opened his dark grey eyes and looked up at me. I hovered over him with a cigarette dangling from my lips. “Come on, kid. You’re having a dream.”
He blinked and, for a second, his eyes looked icy blue. I decided it was a trick of the candles we’d left burning. The room was filled with nicer stuff now, but the light somehow still looked the same as it had on the night Denny had gone up and down me with his fists.
“Was I?” Sean said, still blinking. He rubbed the inside corners of his eyes with thumb and forefinger. I checked the bedside clock. It was about quarter past one. “Yeah,” I said. “You were having a doozy. Clients aren’t allowed to cry after sex. It’s a personal policy of mine.” Then, I smiled and he mirrored mine.
“Especially after the mind-blowing stuff you do,” he said.
“Especially,” I agreed. I clicked the Zippo and lit my Export A. It was the same brand Sean smoked. Me and him, we’d discovered, had a lot of similar likes and dislikes.
I propped up my pillows against the iron rails of the headboard and flapped the sheets. Indian summer and no air conditioning. “Your wife know you’re here?” I said it like a joke. Of course she didn’t.
“Yeah. I told her. She’s fine with it.”
But Sean didn’t smile at his own joke. He sat up and adjusted his own pillows. I gave him my cigarette and he pulled a drag before giving it back. He exhaled and said, “Old lady thinks I’m up at Banatyne’s farm doing the wiring on ventilation turbines for a new set of Quonsets. Told her it was a job that ran into the night and started early next morning. I’m getting extra to have it done by the weekend.
“Uh-huh,” I said, looking off at the blank television and the screens that separated my bedroom area from the rest of the room. I could hear the bass of the music downstairs. It would be last call in about fifteen or twenty minutes and then Johnny would be shuffling the regulars out. Who knows, maybe the place was empty—it sometimes was by now in the middle of the week. Maybe Johnny was counting the day’s register in an empty bar and only turned up his music to keep him company. Maybe Johnny would be climbing the back stairs in a few minutes and coming to bed in his room next door to this one.
“What were you dreaming?” I asked Sean.
“I was?”
I looked at him and cocked my head. “Sean,” I said. “You were weeping like a baby.”
He thought for a moment, looking like he was sizing up whether he would share it or not. Finally, he did. “I was dreaming about this time when I was a kid. My Dad took me up to the power station. He contracted some electrical work and took me along to teach me some tricks.” Sean blinked again. I saw that flash of electric blue in his eyes. “I dreamed we were back in the tunnels. Down under the power plant. At least I think that’s what it was.” Then, he whirled his head and looked at my flowing drape caught in the breeze. “I-I miss my dad.”
I didn’t say anything. I let a minute or two pass. “You’re staying the night then?”
“If that’s okay,” Sean said. “Why you got someone else coming by?”
I gave him another look that said a smack was coming. But it was playful. I smiled.
“Sure you can,” I said. “Been doing the tango on weeknights for a few weeks now.” I said that like he should know what I meant. What I meant was that his wife was surely the wiser for his disappearing act at least one evening per week since mid-July. “We can get breakfast,” I said. “And one of these times you’re gonna have to enlighten me—” and I added, “kind sir.”
He took my cigarette and finished it. “About what—kind madam?” he said, breathing the smoke away from me. I had gotten lax about some of my personal policies. Letting my men smoke in here was one of them. I’d even learned to join them. I’d been a smoker all my reproductive-aged life, but I hated the smell of it in my clothes and sheets. Now I’d learned to live with it. Another rung down the ladder, I suppose.
“About the how’s and why’s of a good catch like you,” I said. “With those two little boys of yours and that cute piece of tail at home—why you want to be out here on the second floor of LowBalls on a hot Wednesday in September. With me.”
“I told you,” he said, with the utmost seriousness in his voice. “I’m supposed to be here. But I’m also not supposed to.”
He had said some of that before. And I understood it about as well tonight as I did then. And then he went on, adding the part that made me really think things were heading, as I said before, due south. He said, “The King commands me to. I’m supposed to spread out. He wants my boys but I can’t give them to him. I just can’t, Fan. You get that, don’t you?”
I thought of the night that Denny questioned me in this very room. Now, on this night, I decided to say the right thing—not that Sean would ever wind up and hit me, or any other wo
man. I said. “I get it, kid.” I stubbed out my cigarette in the tin tray and climbed atop him. I was still topless from before and felt him against me and my panties. He reached up and palmed my breasts. His strong, warm hands were soothing, even if my nipples came to attention right away.
“You ready again?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. And I was.
“Cost me extra?” he asked, smiling, but in that dark-eyed robotic way that he seemed to get with me when we were alone—which was nearly all the time.
“Not for you, kid,” I said. And I meant it. I didn’t like charging Sean at all. I’d seen his wife at the register of Harlow’s Grocery trying to figure out the best way to use her Sunday coupons. And especially when I enjoyed my time with him so much—in or out of the sheets. I was making good money again. Truth was, I could afford freebies for Sean. Weird form of charity, I know. But that’s how I felt.
The due south part was that he was talking crazy. But it was also that I thought that I’d fallen for him. Too damn hard to be just a crush. He made me want to quit seeing men for money. Nutso, right?
3.
Sean and I had gone at it every hour or so from one-thirty a.m. until six. The last time had been a standard position—him standing at the foot of the bed, me with my legs in the air. I was astonished that he’d been able to get it up that last time but he had. And it had been glorious. As he usually did, he waited for me. And when I was right at the cusp, he could sense it and he would finish off.
Redhead (Dovetail Cove, 1974) (Dovetail Cove Series) Page 2