Instead, here he stands, listening for helicopters searching for his friend, lost somewhere in the Nevada desert. But the helicopters wouldn’t be searching at night; the police had said that at the station. It wouldn’t do any good.
He imagines Renzo tilting his head back in the darkness. Looking up at the faraway mechanics of the galaxy, listening for helicopters that aren’t there. The night before he disappeared, Renzo had pointed to the stars, an arm of the Milky Way adjacent to their own. He called it proof of something. He expounded on the ideas put forth in the books he read, about futility and hopelessness, ideas Michele had long since tired of. Renzo fancied himself a person with a cruel intellect and an unceasing sense of scale.
The cabdriver shouts from his window, saying something over and over again. But he’s speaking English, and Michele understands only when the driver jabs his index finger, pantomiming pushing a button. Where am I? he wonders. And what kind of bar has a doorbell?
• • •
The buzz of the bell reverberates deep inside Manny’s throat. The girls—showered, shaved, plucked, bleached, perfumed, lotioned, and powdered—arrange themselves in the neon-lit lobby facing the front door, waiting for him to open it, introduce each of them, and encourage the client to pick a date. Darla hangs back, waiting for her place at the end of the line. She thinks she gets picked most from that spot, Manny knows. Every girl would rather be picked from the lineup than have to go push for a date in the bar, even Darla, who’s a damn good pusher. Being picked from the lineup is a sure thing, cash in hand. This is how Manny convinced Darla to quit dancing in the first place. “Girl,” he said, shouting to her over the squeal of distorted electric guitar inside Spearmint Rhino. “Stripping is like waiting tables, okay? Come work for me and you’ll never have to beg for tips again.”
Manny claps his hands. “All right, ladies. Remember, they don’t come in here for interesting, okay? They come for interested.” This is the first client they’ve had all night and they need the business. He opens the door. “Welcome to the Cherry Patch Ranch.”
On the front step stands a good-looking kid with smooth olive skin, glossy black curls and eyes as bright and blue as the swimming pool out back. Manny hands him a packet of brochures and a menu, ushering him across the threshold. “Is this your first visit to the ranch?”
“Hello,” says the kid softly, reaching to shake Manny’s hand. “It is nice to, ah, meet you.”
“Well. It’s nice to meet you, too. You’re welcome to have a drink at the bar or choose a girl and let her take you on a tour. All these lovely ladies are here to make you feel at home.” Manny introduces the girls by their working names, the only names known here, a rule they need never be reminded of. Down the line they each say hello. They give a little wave and smile, and Manny can almost hear it in the space between their clenched teeth, louder than ever before for this polite, smooth-skinned kid with an exotic accent. Pick me.
First is Chyna, a heavy half-breed Shoshone in a plaid ruffled jumper outfit. Geoff, one of her regulars, brought the outfit for her as a present, hoping she’d give him an extra date for free, which she did, straddling him near dawn in the bed of his truck where they wouldn’t be heard on the intercom system wired throughout the trailers, where they thought Manny wouldn’t find out.
Next in line is Trish, a part-time beautician who does most of the girls’ waxing in a heavily wallpapered salon in Nye called Serendipity. She charges them half price, and they tip her accordingly. Bianca is beside Trish, her hair painstakingly straightened and oiled, her waxy pink C-section scar peeking out from under her red panties. Her two daughters, preteens now, live with their grandmother during the week. They think their mother is a masseuse at a spa in Summerlin.
Lacy is next in line, and though Manny can’t smell her from where he is, she’s no doubt spritzed on too much Victoria’s Secret Love Spell body spray. Beside her is Army Amy, wearing silver hoop earrings, frayed Daisy Dukes, and a squarish camouflage hat. She’s topless, except for a pair of blue sparkly pasties shaped like stars stuck to her big nipples with eyelash glue. Amy is the ranch’s big name, the only girl here who’s done porn. It’s her picture on the billboards, the cab signs, the snapper cards passed out by illegals on the Strip.
Next to Amy, Darla wears a black bustier and a dusting of silver glitter around her eyes. She put the glitter on to satisfy Manny, who made her change out of the satin pajamas she wanted to wear. “Honey,” he said, “those things makes you look—and I’m only telling you this because I love you—like a lesbian.” She pretends to fidget with her garters now, looking innocent and eager at the same time. Her niche.
The girls are all angles: the apex of their plastic pointed heels, the thrust of their wet-looking lips, their jaws extended in stiff smiles, the jut of their nipples made erect from a hard, quick pinch just before Manny opened the door. Each angle is a beacon emitting its own version of the same signal. Pick me, want me. But the kid is fumbling with the brochures, not getting the message.
A lot of young kids drive out here on their eighteenth birthdays. They ring the bell long and hard in front of their friends, drunk on machismo and MGD from the mini fridges in their fathers’ garages. Watch me become a man. How quickly they turn to boys again when they come inside and see the girls in the lineup, all tits and perk like they think they’ve always wanted. Most kids pretend to be lost, ask for directions back to Nye or Vegas, as if they weren’t born and lived all their days within seventy miles of here. As if they didn’t know what this was.
But this kid has no idea; that much is clear. He looks queerer here than Manny did his first time, and Manny is queer. Vegas cabbies are as attentive as any to the fresh currency plugging the pockets of overstimulated tourists. They drive them out to the brothels without telling them what they are, just to get the fare. Manny doesn’t condone it, but when he hears the boy’s velvety European accent he thanks God for doing whatever it took to set this fine white-toothed boy down in front of him.
• • •
Michele isn’t sure how he ended up out here. He thinks he asked the cabdriver, back in Vegas, to take him to a bar where they wouldn’t check his age. And the way the driver nodded and tapped the meter, asking whether he had cash, Michele assumed he’d been understood. In Italy, the legal drinking age is sixteen. The first time a clerk denied him and Renzo, they had been in San Francisco for two days. Renzo stormed out of the store, flailing his short thick arms in the air, shouting in Italian, “You Americans too moral for booze all of a sudden? We will just have to steal it then, like damn little children.” Stupid, stubborn Renzo.
Michele shifts his weight from one foot to the other, the bulky white Nikes he bought at an outdoor shopping mall in Los Angeles looking too bright, like the shoes of a character on a children’s television program. He looks over the papers he was handed, front and back, absently pushing his hair from his eyes. He recognizes vocabulary words but can’t make sense of them in these odd couplings. Straight Lay. Chair Party. Reversed Half-and-Half. Not for the first time since he arrived in America four weeks ago, he wishes he had taken his language classes more seriously.
He turns to the man who answered the door—who, it seems, has been talking incredibly fast. Michele tries to explain himself but doesn’t have the English. He makes useless gestures with his big hands and says finally, “No, ah, I am not . . . I am Italian.”
“That’s okay,” Manny says, his hand on the boy’s shoulder.
This, Michele understands. “Okay,” he replies.
“Have a drink.” Manny shows him across the room to the bar.
“Ah, yes. A drink.” Finally. “I like Budweiser. How do you say, King of Beer?”
• • •
Manny doesn’t card him. It’s a slow night, better to keep him around than lose the customer. Better for business. You never make money on people leaving you. Jim taug
ht him that.
Most of the girls see no business in the scared-looking teenager and return to the karaoke machine they’d paused when the doorbell rang. But Darla, Army Amy, and Lacy follow him to the bar. Manny fixes them their drinks. They jostle sweetly for a place at the boy’s elbows, but Darla jostles sweetest.
“How do you say your name?” she asks, leaning into him.
“Meh-kay-lay,” he says, drumming the syllables on the bar with his long middle finger.
“Meh-kay-lay. Like that?”
“That is it.” He bends to kiss her hand. “Very smart lady.”
Darla reddens. “Shut the fuck up.”
“What is . . . ?”
“‘Shut the fuck up’? It’s like ‘be quiet,’ or ‘I don’t believe you.’”
“Who you don’t believe?”
“You,” she says.
“No, you,” he says. “You shut the fuck up.”
The boy drinks steadily. He pays for each beer with a smooth new twenty, gesturing for Manny to keep the change. Later, after the boy has gone, Manny will overhear Lacy and Darla gossiping in the hallway. Lacy will say, “Jeez. That kid must have spent eighty bucks on Budweiser.”
Darla will correct her. “A hundred and twenty.”
At the bar the girls ask Michele all about Italy, the fashion, the tiny cars, the Mafia. They make like they hang on his every word, but if you were to run into one of these girls on her next day out in Nye, at the grocery store or having a smoke outside Serendipity, not one would be able to tell you a thing about the climate of Milan or where Michele was when Italy won the World Cup. Because while he is talking they stare at him and nod in all the right places but think only this: Pick me, pick me. Oh, God, let him pick me.
Manny hasn’t been much better. He lets his eyes rest on the boy too often, watching that full flush mouth having trouble with its English. The hands. The curve of the chest. He polishes the same pint glass for five minutes, sets it down, then picks it up again. He needs to keep busy or his thoughts slide into forbidden territory. Is it the heat that does it, or the dehydration? What does forty-eight hours without water do to a body?
He can’t take it anymore. He sets the gleaming pint glass on the bar too loudly. “What were you doing out there?”
• • •
Michele tells them in slow, hesitant English how he lost Renzo. They’d gone to see the endangered desert pupfish, which their guidebook said live only at Devil’s Hole, a supposedly bottomless geothermal spring outside Nye. “Foro del diavolo,” Renzo had said, the danger dancing in his eyes.
But Devil’s Hole was not anything, Michele says now, only a bathtub-size pool of hot water in the middle of nowhere, the rare fish just guppy-looking glimmers in the shadows. Renzo thought so, too. At the spring he was ill-tempered, railing that their entire trip had been ruined. He suggested—no, insisted—that they at least salvage the day by hiking out to the nearby sand dunes. “Go without me,” Michele had wanted to say. But he could see the ochre peaks of the dunes swooping across the horizon; they seemed that close. And there was a trail even, meandering through the crumbly bentonite hills. Renzo had complained of this too, the trail; he wanted authentic desert, pristine wilderness. He kept asking, “Why must Americans turn everything into an advertisement?” That was the last thing Michele heard him say.
They’d been hiking only an hour, Renzo charging forward, Michele struggling to keep up, neither speaking to the other. Michele stopped to take a drink of water, to shake a rock from his shoe. When he stood up, his friend was gone.
He called for Renzo to wait, but there was no answer. He spit on the ground and watched the earth swallow the moisture. It was too hot for this. He followed the trail back and waited for Renzo in the air-conditioned rental car. But Renzo never came.
• • •
And we, ah, are, ah, separate,” the boy says.
“You were separated,” Manny says.
“Now, I wait.” He nods to the bar, the brothel, the girls, as if they all have some arrangement.
“Wait for what?” Amy asks dully.
Michele is quiet for a moment, looking down at his large hands. “I wait, ah, for my friend,” he says. “For his return.”
Darla says, “Oh, you poor thing,” and puts her arms around his neck. She says, “Don’t you worry; they’ll find him.” She can probably smell him there, his cologne, his hotel soap. Cheap beer. Clean sweat. Salt.
Michele takes a swig of his Budweiser. “Yes, yes,” he says, then swallows. “Then I go home. With Renzo.”
Michele doesn’t go back with Darla that night. It’s slow. Geoff comes for Chyna, and afterward he presents her with another gift, a hideous gold-plated charm bracelet. Amy and Bianca take care of a pair of mortgage brokers from New Jersey, in Vegas for a conference. But Michele and Darla simply sit at the bar, talking. Under normal circumstances this would piss Manny off, one of his girls spending an entire evening with a man without taking him back. Under normal circumstances he would sit her down in his office and tell her, “You know I don’t like being the bad guy, but at the end of the day I don’t give two shits about making friends. Because, honey, if you don’t get paid, I don’t get paid, okay? Ask for the fucking order.”
That’s the way it has to be. These bitches would run all over him if he let them.
But tonight circumstances aren’t normal. Tonight the thought of Darla—or any of the girls—taking the Italian back to a trailer for an hour, maybe two, makes him feel sick with something like jealousy. It must be pure hormones—he hasn’t been laid in longer than he’d like to admit. Or perhaps it’s the terribly familiar way the boy looks at Darla, his face flushed with booze and all the want and wonder of a child. He’s seen that look before, on men two and three times this kid’s age, men who knew better. He’s seen Darla take everything they were willing to give, and more. That’s what he’s always loved about her.
When the cab honks in the parking lot at five a.m., Manny helps the drunk, sweet-faced boy down the front steps. As the sun comes up, he stands alone on the porch and watches the red taillights of the taxi shrink down Homestead Road, then up the hill toward Vegas. There’s nothing but the lolling violet mountain range and spiny yucca and creosote and that taut ribbon of road as far as the eye can see. Poor Renzo doesn’t have a chance out here, and sooner or later that beautiful boy is going to realize it.
Manny imagines the Italian looking back at him through the rear window of the cab. The ranch the boy would see looks like a dollhouse, down to its dormer windows hung with boxes of poppies and desert primrose. The wood siding is painted the bright fuchsia of deep flesh, the country trim a chalky lavender. Back east this building would be a bed-and-breakfast; in the Midwest it would be an antique store. But here there is a red light attached to the weather vane, rotating in the dawn. Here, it is what it is. Manny makes his way out back to the peacock coop.
Manny was hired to manage the Cherry Patch Ranch one day when he drove out from Las Vegas, where he grew up. He was eighteen, had been hustling for three years and always knew he was destined for something bigger, though it took a tranny john whipping him across the face with a stiletto for him to act on that instinct. Jim Hart—fifty then, with the girth and slope of an aging athlete and a full head of black hair just starting to gray—happened to be working the door that day, a stroke of luck, because Jim never worked his own door. Bad for business. Jim took one look at Manny and waved the girls off, saying, “Sorry, guy. We don’t have men in here.”
And Manny, prepared for this, said, “Why not? You’re losing money, honey. You want to know what I get for a hand job with Rentboys? Three fifty. A hand job. And that’s off-Strip, okay?”
Jim took him straight back to his office with Gladys, Jim’s assistant. After an hour Jim said, “Look, guy, bottom line: Every other Tuesday I load the girls
into the van and we go down to Nye County Health and get them all looked at. Every other Tuesday. And no legal hooker, not in the entire state of Nevada, has ever tested positive for an STD. Not even crabs. It’s safe, clean sex. That’s the brand. I bring men in here . . . I’m not messing with a good thing. That’s all.” He tipped back in his chair and put his pen into his mouth. “But a fag madam. That’s unique.”
That was fifteen years ago. Manny walks past the girls’ fifth wheels lined in two rows behind the main house like eggs in a carton, with the courtyard and swimming pool between them. Beyond the fifth wheels are the single-wide trailers they call suites. The Oriental Room, the Hot Tub Room, British Campaign. The thick black wires of the intercom system droop between the buildings. The pool is ringed with knobby salt cedars and adolescent pomegranate trees. Manny drags Darla’s picnic table back to the courtyard where it belongs, in the rocky dirt peppered with screwbean mesquites and young cottonwoods. He plucks a cigarette butt rimmed with lipstick from a struggling patch of sod, puts it in his breast pocket; then he slips out to the coop.
On paper, Jim Hart raised Indian blue peacocks until 1970, when he got his operating license. Prior to that, as far as the government was concerned, Hart Ranches made its modest living selling the birds to zoos and private collectors. In reality, Jim hated selling the birds and found reason to do so as seldom as possible. When the cost of the food and upkeep was considered, the peacock business barely broke even.
The girls always brought in more money than the birds, but it was a long time before the Cherry Patch Ranch was much more than two single-wide trailers on either side of the wide, airy coop. Then, in 1970, as Jim and his friends in Carson City had suspected it might, the state legislature outlawed prostitution in Clark County. Jim remodeled, making the ranch straddle the county line, with the trailers and main house in rural Nye County, and the peacocks technically residents of Clark. By the time Manny arrived, the Cherry Patch was the closest a brothel could get to Vegas.
Battleborn: Stories Page 6