“Looks convincing.”
“That’s what I said. He’s our man.”
The Detective watched a fly land on his glass and rub its filthy legs together. His hand came down, rubbed it out into its next life as a street cop. He stubbed out the cigarette. Everything seemed broken and disjointed; he hadn’t had a real night’s sleep in months. On the junk, it was dreamless sleep, and off it: nightmares. One recurring nightmare featured a giant centipede that would crawl into the head of the bed at night, over the pillow, down across his face, and then climb down along his spine until it reached the crack of his ass. The centipede’s awful face would begin to nuzzle at the entrance. It was at this point that he always awoke, sweating and shaking with the ceiling falling down upon him and a feeling of impending unavoidable doom.
If there was a shrink in the town, it might have made sense.
Across the road, the Boys in Brown were entering the crime scene. They had come to take another look, let them get what they could from it, Joe thought. Slim Jim stood outside the bar with a glass in his left hand and a cigarette in the other. There was a hawk-faced man standing next to him talking. The Detective figured he was a pressman or a television reporter, whoever he was, Joe had not the desire or the cordiality to go over and introduce himself. He felt safer watching from afar like an old style gumshoe hanging onto the bar for clues.
“Hale, where did this Tammy like to hook, other than Slim’s?”
“She worked the street a lot.”
“Any bars?”
“The Blue Rose. Seventh Road. Last time I saw her with a tasty bit of skirt with a back tattoo inside the Blue Rose. You should have seen the Bristols on it, mate. What I’d give for a go on that.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I tried. She knocked me back. In high season, the birds can pick and choose mate. Besides, she probably heard about my epic performance. Last thing she’s needs is to be put out of action for the next two weeks,” he chuckled. “You know what the girls call me here?”
“Enlighten me?”
“The Destroyer,” Hale laughed.
“What was her name?”
“Who?”
“The girl with the tattoos.”
“Couldn’t tell you, mate. All I remember is the tattoo and body, man, what a body it is too. Gives me goose bumps just thinking about it. I may have another crack when the dough shapes up.”
Joe stood up and laid a purple five on the bar.
“Where you off to in such a hurry?” Hale said.
“Shopping,” Joe said.
SEVEN
BEFORE SETTLING on the houseboat, Taylor floated atop a sea of dysfunctional lives and shattered dreams. He had treated cases of anxiety, depression, drug-dependence, phobias, and eating disorders, all with notable results. He had always considered humans to be too hard wired to be self-obsessional and obvious, their problems inherited from the ones that should had cared for them. When treating the mentally ill, the first place to look is always the family. By using Eastern techniques of objective thought, he had succeeded in having his subjects remove themselves from the Western idea of self. He noticed a remarkable change when the further his patients embraced mindfulness; the less they became attached to what Taylor had called The Story. The Story was the story everyone had of their own lives, fraught with danger, and the characters intent on the protagonist’s destruction. The story never had a happy ending. It was one disaster after another. Taylor had taught his subjects to remove themselves from the story, however, he found himself sinking deeper and deeper into the story the longer he wallowed in Fun City.
Lost in his own story, perhaps?
Happy ending impossible.
“My father doesn’t love me?” A slow thirty-year-old sales clerk once said.
“Well, what can you do about it?” Taylor responded.
“My father doesn’t love me.”
“Well, if that is a fact, we cannot change it. And what does it matter if he doesn’t love you? How does that fact affect how you are in the present moment?”
“But…”
“Thank him for not loving you. Without it, you are free. You have somewhere to sleep, you have food, and that is the most that any of us can ever need to be happy. Love, is an abstract idea that is not to be recommended,” Taylor smiled. “Love is a disease.”
His years counselling lasted six.
Until he took it too far.
Jerry, a teenager with abusive foster parents and a paranoid disposition had, following an intense session, disappeared from his clinical practice and vanished from the lives of his friends and family. The incident, while not at all isolated in the profession, had caused Taylor to consider a career change.
A change he took.
Embraced, even.
A change he implemented with a houseboat, his wife, son, and the dream of writing a book that would sell.
Well, be careful of what you wish for.
The book sold.
He took to writing short stories at first. His manuscripts grew as his confidence blossomed, and after the tragic loss of his family, he sat down for an intense period of six months and wrote what was to become the best seller of that year.
The Boy in the Window, about a child whose mother suffered from a rare mental illness, Munchausen syndrome by proxy, sold six hundred and fifty thousand copies in its first year. The boy’s mother would make him ill in order to garner the sympathy from doctors and health care workers. The child grew up sick and resentful, an outsider, who later became a brilliant thinker. The Boy in the Window was based on his own childhood.
The fame brought with it invitations to functions and it brought wealth. After the death of his family, he attended award functions and champagne brunches until his ego had been overwhelmed. The Story had backfired. The money he used to free himself to the other side of the world where he was to write a novel. A novel that would make him enough money to fly back home again.
Right.
EIGHT
THE DETECTIVE walked along the seventh road scanning the road for The Blue Rose. The last shot was creeping up his back like a hungry lizard. He would need another shot, not eventually, but within the next few hours. He felt a loss, a tragic, nostalgic loss, the loss of somebody he had yet to meet in a place he had yet to go. Sometimes, he felt that time travel was not only possible in theory, but that it was happening all the time. Nobody was in the present moment, they were busy walking toward somewhere they wanted to be, or painfully living in the past; a past which can only be worth thinking about if the present was considered unbearable.
Everybody needed something.
Even the holy men.
Evening had fallen in Fun City.
Broken.
Timeworn hookers patrolled the streets like zombies in some post-apocalyptic B-movie; slow, predatory, evil, self-respect abandoned in some short-time hotel torn down in 1994. Only the shell remained. The human being had long since departed. An angry tenant last seen in a rice field upcountry. He walked past a pawnshop and looked inside at all the old belongings of broken lives.
Ghosts rumored to live among the living in Fun City, the old stories brought down from the villages. A long-limbed flicker in the corner of the Headman’s eye. White blouse with fingernails painted black. Long dank, black hair. Blackened eyes. She haunted the village of her childhood with her stories of easy money and naive foreigners. The hunger for cash broadcasted from her bitter pinched-up streetwise mask. The worn cheetah-skinned leggings, cheap plastic handbags, chunky metal gold-colored bracelets. These were not the packaging for hearts of gold. These were street costumes for Fun City’s eldest entertainers. The whores moving around the block in a final lap of failure before their daughters took over their patches in the next cycle of ecstasy and agony. They would train their daughters how to bleed the buffalo dry. How to lie, cheat, and steal. How to fake love. How to become bitter, cynical shells of anger, and how to keep sending the money to the P.O. How to �
�look for man with good heart.’
How to break it.
The detective was not looking for a maniac. If he were it’d be easy. He knew that they were out there. Thousands of them flocked to the resort. Yes, shit happened. It happened every day. Steroid freaks shot up and went on the rampage. Attacked pedestrians. There were balcony jumps. Suicides a daily occurrence in Fun City. Chicks with dicks. Boys in Brown. Russians. Stabbings. Balloon chasers. Gold hunters. Until this. Nothing came close to this. A dead whore sliced apart on top of a pool table. It was not the work of a maniac. It was the work of dark art and revenge. It was the work of a man with an agenda.
A dark fucking agenda.
The Detective walked on.
It was just how he had remembered it. Hunted men sat everywhere. Outnumbered by the predatory eyes of the bar girls, the lady boys, the zombies, and the cash carriers. Their hands shakily held bottles of beer and lit cigarettes. For some, it was the end of the dream and for others, it was just the beginning of the nightmare. A man with a long black beard and a body covered with tattoos couldn’t negotiate the distance from his bar stool to a motorcycle taxi. Bar girls helped him. It was both pathetic and beautiful. Living out his dying days in sin. In the next life, he would be reborn to Fun City as a street dog or a souvenir salesman.
An adolescent boy of twelve or thirteen walked past a tattoo parlor with a small leopard on a leash.
Beat that.
The Detective had studied the books of faith.
Desire demanded conflict. However, desire demanded much more than just that, it required mystery, beauty, money, and the fulfillment of greed. Without desire, only peace remained. Peace, what was that? There was no need for peace here. It was a freak show. Episodes of abuse, unheard silent screams. The bargirl wincing in pain, as she pictured the money at the end of the alcoholic red-faced customer ravaging the only thing she had that was worth buying. Her hands gripped the bedposts as the fat, bald foreigner entered her from behind. What would she spend the money on? The bottle of whiskey for her boyfriend. The boy from the village who drank to medicate. The game of cards, rotgut whiskey, the release from the trap, the motorbike, the abandoned child, the endless wheel of fortune. Or would she spend the money on a brief snatch of cuteness.
Yeah,
Hello Kitty.
Paul Frank.
Burberry.
A gift for the friendly Norwegian sending two hundred dollars a month.
He had good heart.
Why he no come back?
Because she was a whore.
And always will be
Unless,
It wasn’t worth thinking about.
It was a waste. The human waste dripped down to a reservoir of ruin and relief down the city drains where monitor lizards and awful pythons dwelt amongst the shite, tampons, used condoms: the excesses of Fun City, its center, its soul: a dreamless sludge of spent desire.
Joe glanced at them, wary not to catch their eyes. These men were not shocked. The night market had become home, the place where they drew their pensions and lived out their days wandering the alleyways and avenues of desire. They had seen it all. Old age, depression, illness, sickness, bankruptcy; mistakes too hideous for remonstration or regret. They had not only been around the block, they had built the entire estate and then they had knocked it down. They laughed at the legless beggars on skateboards and the broken-toothed prostitutes patrolling the streets. They had lost houses both here and in the west. Some had lost limbs too. They knew that the mafia looked after the beggars, that the women were not really poor, that the deaf women were not deaf and the blind were not blind. They knew that the crazy men who painted their bodies blue and paraded themselves in the streets for a coin or two were only half-crazy, half of the time, and the blue washed off. They knew that fish swam in the river and fruit fell from the trees. The schools were free and were worth it, the hospitals were somewhere you could go and die free. They knew everything about Fun City, yet, they knew nothing. They knew too much. They had lost children too. No one bought their drinks. No one bought them a new house in their home village. Where was their new 4x4? Respect was a remote abstract animal in a desert of thieves and whores. Brokers of tailor-made suits, shady tour agents, language schools, marriage brokers, estate agents, swam in the seas of impossible hope. In Fun City, men were reborn condemned. A phoenix from the ashtray. A handsome man. A knight in a crusty white stained singlet vest. With the right girl, they could become a king and build a castle in the country. They knew that was a joke. No, mister, he was not paying to fuck, he was paying to be fucked. And if you are going to be fucked, you may as well be fucked properly. Fun City was excellent at this. Yet the receipt of pleasure and the receipt of pain were two sides of the same coin. The answer was to keep distance and keep cool. Be brief, cold, and precise. The answer to a bargirl’s prayer was not the wet-eared Scandinavian with buckets of cash to declare. It was the grizzled old expat sitting in a bar on the seventh road. Grey-skinned, dark-eyed, sat alone in a bar plotting his own demise.
He wasn’t looking for the bar.
He didn’t find the bar.
The bar found him.
A lump of concrete with half a dozen pairs of brown thighs and a pool table.
A sign above the door.
The Blue Rose.
The Detective walked inside.
She was aged about twenty with features that grabbed at what was left of his heart and tugged. Her hair was cut the way women used to cut their hair in the nineteen sixties: straight fringe with a bob. Full lips. Those lips pouted like a passionate flower. The Detective wanted his mouth on that mouth. Her skin was the color of Belgium coffee. Snake hips, large bust. From the way she carried herself across the bar, the Detective guessed that she hadn’t finished seventh grade education and her father had left home when she was still a kid. She moved with the grace of an animal, barefoot in the jungle, wary of snakes and centipedes, these were her movements, rather than those of a sophisticated woman in the city.
Once she was a baby. Once she was a little girl. One day she would be dead. Then she would be put in a box and set on fire. She would be dust. Dusted. However, right at that moment, she was a shining star under the Fun City neon city lights. There were no stars in the polluted city sky, the stars were all in the streets and the bars, young women and men selling dreams and weaving spells. She was a bargirl in Fun City, one of thousands. Yet, some shone brighter than others did. She didn’t know it. The Detective couldn’t explain abstract thought to a woman with a grade seven education. Instead, he asked, “How old are you?”
She showed The Detective her I.D. Twenty-one years old. Female. She was from the poor northeast where they ate toads, rats, insects, and buffalo placenta. She had grown up living from the land, and now she had entered adulthood selling what the land had given her.
“Have I seen you before?” she asked.
“No, I would have remembered,” he replied in the local tongue.
“You speak well,” she said, not needing to add, “for a foreigner.” She was beautiful an exotic animal and she was flirting with him. He wanted to stop the game but he couldn’t, so he just sat there and let it evolve. It was the cigarette. The train. He knew she played the same routine with all the Johns and each one thought it was especially for him. The suspension of disbelief, the luring in of the monkey, the game. Softly, softly, slowly, slowly, like a spider on a web.
“One for me, okay?” She said sitting down on the Detective’s lap. “My name is Kelly. Whiskey coke, please.”
“Sure,” the Detective nodded toward the bar. “Help yourself.”
She stood up and returned moments later with a drink in her hand. “You not drink too?” Her accent was adorable.
“No, I gave up,” The Detective replied in the local language.
“Really?” she said. She stood up. She tipped her glass upside down and poured the contents onto the floor. “Okay, I give up too.” She smiled. The teeth were almost
perfect. Dimples appeared on her cheeks. The volume on the stereo rose. Johnny Cash. Folsom Prison Blues. Kelly stood and began her show. She raised her hands above her head and began to grind her hips in time with the music. The Detective sat and watched. She was dancing in front of him, wanting to be liked, to be loved, to be cured. There was something about this town. He began to understand what it was. He paid the bar a fee to release her. He took her back to his room. He knew it was a mistake, but mistakes were his business. Usually other’s mistakes, but she was different, she was fine, she was twenty-something and she was dancing in front of him.
She was the most dangerous animal in Fun City.
She undressed with slow animal movements once the lights were low. She sat on the bed in the lotus position, her arms and legs crossed. The Detective could feel the slight junk withdrawal encouraging him to participate in the oldest game of all. He made a slight movement towards her and she rolled across the bed and stood naked before him. Her body was lean, healthy firm breasts, long slender legs. She turned around and showed the Detective the most incredible artwork he had seen on a human body. From the small of her back, up to her shoulder blades, a delicate yet extravagant piece created, no doubt, by one of the monks at one of the temples. These images were supposed to warn away evil spirits, and he thought for a moment, that perhaps she considered him potentially evil. Tigers danced, dragons spun, spirits half human, half demon climbed across her reaching up to the palace where a wizard with four arms and long cascades of hair stood before a castle atop a mountain, smoke rose from crematoriums inside the castle. An imagined lost city, an astonishing universe, a world designed for the enjoyment of those that sailed her. She turned and sat on the bed without saying a word. He undressed and sat opposite her on the bed. He ran a finger along her cheek. She smiled and dimples appeared on her cheeks. He put one hand behind her head and the other on her thigh. She leaned back and lay on the bed, her legs widened. He began kissing her breasts and then worked his way down to her center. He aroused her young body. She gripped his hair tightly and drove him to her. She turned over and he explored the universe painted on her body.
The White Flamingo Page 3