by E. R. Frank
“Yes,” I sputtered inside his hug, his hot wet skin, my heart pounding with pleasure at how he’d just defended me.
He straightened to speak to all of us. “Ain’t nobody messing with my bitches.” He stroked my neck with his big hand. “See?” he whispered to me. “See how I take care a you?”
The fingers on my neck were the ones I was used to loving. The same ones that touched me so gently in all the right places and cupped my bottom and my face when he whispered how special I was. They had just beaten off someone who hurt me. I leaned in to hug Daddy again, so grateful and happy at how he took care of me. But Daddy stiff-armed me, holding me away.
“Get off.” He glanced at his watch. “We got three more coming in ten minutes.”
Oh. I swallowed back disappointment. I hadn’t thought he would put me back to work.
* * *
I worked and I worked. I don’t know how Daddy got so many men to come to our crowded motel room in the middle of nowhere, but it was a steady stream the whole day long. When daylight began to ease away from the bathroom window, Daddy came to get me.
“Get in that shower and get clean,” he said. “You did good.”
That meant he was going to take me. After all those johns and my throat hurting from being punched and being so dead tired. I took a shower. I had hot water, and I was thankful for that.
Daddy led me to his room. The sheets were clean. It was quiet. I tried to be thankful for that, too. He began by kissing my neck, where it hurt. “Daddy,” I started. He was kissing up to the underside of my chin. Usually I loved the warm tickle, but now it bothered me. “I don’t like being with dates,” I whispered. I said it so quietly, I wasn’t sure he heard.
But he paused and then mumbled through his kisses as he kept on. “Where you going to be without me?” He was making circles on my skin with his lips. Usually I loved that. Usually it just made me melt. “Living with that bitch keeping you home from school, making you take care a all them kids, beating on you for no good reason, her pervert taking it from you hard and for free.” He switched to using his tongue. It felt too wet, too big. “Or you out sitting on some bus stop bench, and some do gooder notice you and send your ass to a home or say you crazy and lock you up.”
It was true. I had nowhere else to go. And he didn’t have to take care of me. He took me when nobody else wanted me. He punched anybody who punched me.
“I don’t like turning tricks,” I tried, while he left my chin and neck and began to lick toward my belly button.
“What?” He sat up and back and then pressed himself on my stomach. “You like it just fine when you with me.”
“Feels good with you,” I told him, trying to remember the truth of that. “But all those dates . . .”
“Yeah?” He sat up. “Nobody forcing you,” he told me. “Go ahead. Get dressed. Send Brandy in. Then, soon as we home, you go on back to your Janelle.”
“What? That wasn’t what I meant. I don’t want to . . .”
He had his jeans on already. “You said you don’t like it here, then leave.”
I sat up too. “I don’t want to leave. Don’t make me leave.”
He picked up his phone and thumbed it. “Beef me again, and you out.”
I didn’t want to leave Daddy. But I didn’t want to be a ho, either.
It was like he had read my mind. “Once a ho, always a ho.” He didn’t even bother to look up from his phone. “That’s what you is. Ain’t nothing else for you now. You go out there without me and somebody likely to kill you or lock you up or put you in a crazy hospital. You want to live out your little life in jail?”
I shook my head, but he didn’t see me.
“You want to be strapped down to a bed next to somebody think she Jesus?”
I shook my head again. He glanced up.
“You want to break yourself to Whippet? And him gorilla you nine times a week?”
I knew I didn’t want to be beat up or worse every day. “I didn’t mean that I—”
“You better get straight what you mean,” Daddy said, tossing aside his phone and unzipping his jeans again. With his pants half on, he pressed me back flat again and slid his palm from my sore neck all the way down. “Get it straight, Beautiful,” he whispered, “or we done.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
MRS. DUBOSE FINALLY died, right as Daddy pulled off the highway by a rest area sign.
“Get up,” Daddy said. I tried to picture him reading to Brandy longer and longer each day the way Jem read to Mrs. Dubose, weaning her off her drug. How did Daddy help Brandy get clean? I couldn’t imagine it.
“I said, get up.”
I closed my paperback.
On the near side of the diner and the 7-11 were rows and rows of gas pumps. On the far side there were rows and rows of trucks. In the dark, it looked fake somehow, like a painting in a book, or the way I imagined the set of a movie.
Brandy lifted her head from the hammock of her shoulder belt. I saw her wipe drool off her cheek with her palm. She unbuckled. “I’m hungry.”
“L.A.!” When nothing came from the backseat, he flung an empty cranberry juice bottle. I had to dodge sideways so it didn’t hit my face.
I heard it thwap L.A., who made a noise and sat up. “Damn,” she said. “Stop it.”
“Move your ass.”
I thought he meant to the diner so we could eat and use the bathroom, but he didn’t.
“Brandy, you middle. L.A., you at the back end, and Dime, you there where the front at.” He was pointing through the window at that parking lot of trucks.
“You bugging?” L.A. asked him when she figured out what he meant.
I didn’t like the idea. It was one thing to go with dates in Daddy’s territory, but this wasn’t Daddy’s territory, and what if the rules were different here?
“You want us to go inside those things?” Brandy was eyeing the huge trucks all lined up, sleeping in the dim-lit dark.
“Whatever it take,” Daddy said. “Inside, outside. Just make me my money.”
“May I go to the bathroom first, please?” I asked as politely as I could manage.
Daddy tilted his head toward the ground. “Squat and take care of it.”
L.A. sucked her teeth. “Why you being so savage, all of a sudden?”
“Savage.” Daddy smiled, flashing his D. “You got that right.”
I looked across to the sleeping trailers and wondered why he wasn’t worried about us. He knew what I was thinking, like always. “You need something, you scream loud. Enough people around here, someone going to hear you, and your date know it. You scream loud enough, it remind him to treat you nice.”
Brandy glanced at me from the front seat, twisting her head.
Even L.A. was worried. “Easy for you to say,” she told Daddy.
He tapped her cheek. “None of you eating,” he declared, “until I see some coins.”
* * *
I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to get up on one of those giant steps and knock, or if I was just supposed to walk around or what. L.A. and Brandy weren’t saying a word, so I didn’t ask. But L.A. chewed on her fingertips all the way until we fanned out. It wasn’t pitch-black dark because lights from the diner and the 7-11 and the gas station and the traffic and even some of the trucks lit the air. But it was still night, and we tripped over each other a little.
Brandy shook her head at me as she peeled off, as if to say, Is this for real?
I went to pee first, because my bladder was about to explode. I went near the mass of trees on the far side of all the trucks. It was darker there, and I was glad because I didn’t want anybody to see me squatting. A girl climbed down from a tanker near me. I pulled up my panties and adjusted my miniskirt and watched. She was white with blond hair and a halter top and jeans and Uggs, which seemed strange in all this heat. A white man helped with the huge step. Then she picked her way through the narrow alleys of the trucks. Her purse swung and patted her behind gently as she w
ent.
The man caught me watching. He jumped at first. “Lot lizards every damn where,” he muttered. I didn’t know what he meant. I started to turn away. “I’m worn out,” he called to me softly. “But my friend will be glad to see you.” He pointed somewhere down the line. “He likes pretty brown girls.” He began texting something. “I’m telling him you’re on your way now.” I looked to where he was pointing and saw headlights flash. “That’s him.”
I didn’t want to, but I was starving. I looked around for L.A. and Brandy. I couldn’t see them anywhere. Then I saw Daddy, talking on his phone in front of the diner while looking out at the trucks. That made me feel better, to know that he might see which one I was climbing into. So I went.
* * *
It was different because the two pimps I saw were white and most of the johns were white and so were two of the other three girls. If the girls weren’t climbing up or down from the trucks, they were wandering around or in their cars: two in a van that looked maroon in the night and the other in an Escalade, a black one. They disappeared before it got light out. Daddy allowed us into the diner all together after the sun came up. He let us eat whatever we wanted. I ordered an omelet and chocolate chip pancakes. I watched Brandy. She was keeping her head down, just looking at her eggs and home fries. I hadn’t wondered for a long time about her not being black. I had even forgotten about it a little bit. But after seeing those other white hos, it felt strange. She seemed different all of a sudden. More white.
“Nice-looking bitches around here,” Daddy told Brandy. She just kept chewing.
“What’s the damn prize?” L.A. asked for the thousandth time. “Why we doing this?” She glared at Daddy over her waffles. “I do not like this shit. Some crazy man going to drive us away and chop us up.”
“Nobody going to hurt you.” Daddy shoved a cheeseburger into his mouth.
I saw a new family walk in. A white Daddy with a dark Bottom leading three dark girls. When they got closer, I saw they weren’t Puerto Rican or Dominican or black or even dark white. Also I saw they were tiny skinny.
“Chinese hos,” Daddy said. “See that.” There were some Asian girls back home. George had two. Stone used to have one and another one stabled with Whippet. But I think their girls were all a little mixed.
These were pure-looking. Korean, maybe. Or Chinese. I wasn’t too sure. They glanced at us and then glanced away when their Daddy said something. They sat down, and I heard them speaking softly to one another in a fast, whining language. He said something again, louder, and they stopped talking.
Daddy left cash pinned beneath his plate and then walked us out to the car. When we passed their table, the youngest one, about my age, glanced at her Daddy ordering more coffee and then quickly at the back of the Bottom walking away—probably to the bathroom—and then at Brandy. Just at Brandy. The Asian girl whispered something I couldn’t understand. “Hep. Heppeese. Stowen.”
Daddy didn’t hear, but L.A. did and so did Brandy. She slowed down, then sped up. L.A. started to laugh, and when she laughed I pictured myself picking up a ketchup bottle and slamming it into the back of her head. I didn’t really know then what that Asian ho said. Or why I was so especially mad at L.A. for laughing.
I didn’t figure it out until later, when I closed my eyes in the Escalade, Brandy asleep in the front, and L.A. stretched out behind me. I was so tired I could hardly hold on to it in my brain when I realized that what the girl had said was, Help. Help, please. Stolen.
* * *
You might wonder, Money would write, what kind of ho makes more of me. That is an interesting question without an answer everybody will agree on. I had heard Stone and George debate it at our kitchen table. Some say that the ho who is most foreign to the man makes the most of me. Others will swear that most men prefer white bitches, the more blue-eyed and blond-haired, the better. Hos of Eastern European descent and Asian bitches are said to bring in more of me than anyone, depending on where in this free country the transaction is occurring. Then again, there are always exceptions to a rule. Mostly Daddy claimed he had no interest in associating with his competition, especially such ignorant competition. But other times he chitchatted with them just like a girl. Some men will only purchase black hos. Others won’t look at a black bitch. It all depends. Knowing the rule and then knowing the exceptions to that rule is a moneymaker, a me maker.
This Daddy intended to make a lot of me off of knowing these kinds of things. Why not use his northern associates to bring some “Russians” down south? Stone said Daddy didn’t know a Moldavian from a Czech from a Russian. Daddy had said he didn’t have to know bullshit details because all those types of bitches were the same to dates. He knew business, and he knew his particular down south could use some fresh cuts of meat. He knew me.
* * *
Daddy let us sleep in the motel beds for four hours and then he had us up again.
“You back in the bathroom,” he told me, right before he went out to find some business.
“Daddy.” I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say, and I was afraid of saying anything to him, but I couldn’t help it. And he knew, the way he always knew everything.
He walked in with me and closed the door behind him. “I know I’m working you hard, Beautiful.” He pulled me close to him. “I know you tired. We going back to something better after we get us our prize and get home.”
“I just don’t—”
“Shh.” He rubbed my back. The bathroom was so small he had to hold me close anyway. It felt so good to be held like that, but the sink was jabbing into my spine. “I got a big plan,” he told me. “You going to be real happy when it get done. Just keep that complaining mouth quiet and trust you Daddy.”
“I don’t mean to complain,” I tried. “It’s just that I—”
Daddy thunked his fist on the side of my head, and the jolt exploded my skull and jabbed at my back, from the lip of the sink.
“I told you shut your complaining.”
I stood still, not making a sound.
He looked at me, disgusted, and for a part of a second I knew I hated him, and then he pulled me close again and pushed me away a little and kissed me long. “Don’t make me hurt you, Beautiful,” he whispered. I tried not to cry, but the tears came. I was so tired. Then he kissed me some more. “You know you my best. Don’t make me hurt you. I hate to hurt you.” He wrapped his arms around me and held me again, and I felt bad for making him feel so sorry.
* * *
About ten minutes after we packed up and drove away, in the daylight, I saw those Asian girls. They were getting out of a white van, walking in a row, like dark little ducklings, into a low, flat-roofed building that had MASSAGE painted in red on its front. Their Daddy and the Bottom Bitch were arguing about something behind them, but the girls never turned to look. They kept their shiny black heads tilted down and walked quickly, disappearing through the door. Something about the way they walked made me realize they weren’t as old as they had looked in the diner. They were young. Younger even than me.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I WAS COMING out of a dream where my mouth was filled with chewing gum, but it tasted nasty and was choking me. When I woke all the way up, I was drooling morning-breath drool. I sat up fast to wipe it away. Brandy was still sleeping, her head lolling. And L.A.’s feet were two inches from my face, where she’d somehow hooked them from the backseat across and over to my row. Daddy was outside pumping gas.
I looked beyond him and saw a highway. I looked opposite and saw a massive strip mall rest area with vehicles and people and dogs everywhere. I noticed a lot of vehicles had boats hooked up to trailers. I opened the door to humid air tinged with the taste of fuel and salt. Seagulls flapped against the wind in the sky, screeching.
“May I go to the bathroom, please?” I called to Daddy.
“Fast,” he told me. “Don’t speak to nobody.”
I could leave, I thought. I could disappear until he gives up trying to f
ind me. Would he give up or would he keep looking? If he kept looking and found me, would he beat me, or would he put his arms around me? Probably both. Where would I go, anyway? Maybe instead I could find an official somebody and tell them. But what would I tell them? Would you ask my boyfriend to let me stop working? And who would I tell? I was nothing but a ho.
I stared across the way at all the people and food windows and tables and chairs. A little brown girl perched on a fat woman’s lap. She was eating school-bus-colored crackers from a Baggie and leaning her head back against the fat woman’s doughy chest. The fat woman rested her cheek on the girl’s head. Maybe I could find the woman who smelled like barbecue potato chips, who tickle-scratched my shoulder, who read to me. Had she been my mother? My grandmother? Where would I look for her?
There was a spinning rack of paperbacks in the store next to the ladies’ room. I spun it, reading titles, watching them blur by. About a week ago in the Escalade, I came across the word chifforobe. I thought that might be some sort of dresser or bureau, but I wasn’t too sure. I wanted to figure it out, and more importantly, to find out what had really gone on between Tom Robinson and Mayella. I wished I could read Mockingbird in the motel, but there was too much work. We had been staying in this one—our second—for five days now. This time I was in a bed and Brandy was in the bathroom; a bigger bathroom than the first one. I wondered if Daddy was planning to take us to another soon or to pick up our prize, whatever that was. I wondered what would happen if I didn’t go back to the Escalade. Just stayed wandering around the pretzel stand and the book rack and in and out of the ladies’ room. Probably I would be arrested and put away for good. In jail or in a mental hospital. I spun the rack and spun it again. It was whirring around so fast, I thought it might topple over, but I kept spinning it anyway.