by Billie Letts
“Oh no. I’m not. But here’s the thing. I lied to a policeman, then I stole her car.”
“The dead woman? You stole her car?”
“Yeah. I had to, ’cause me and my brother, Fate, we had to get out of town before—”
“Then you’re right, no question about it. The law is after you.”
“Yeah.” Lutie took another hefty drink. “And now . . .”
“You have a Social Security card?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“Why’s that good?”
“Because your name has to be the same on both documents.”
“Okay. How about Renee? I’ve always liked that name. Renee. I’ll have to think about a last name, but—”
“See, babe, we’ll have to use the name and Social Security number of someone who . . . well, someone who isn’t with us anymore.”
“You mean I’m going to use the name of a dead girl?”
“’Fraid so. But you can handle that, can’t you?” He watched Lutie drain her glass, then signaled Octane for another one. “Now, how old do you want to be? Eighteen? Or eighty?” he asked, trying to lighten her mood.
“I haven’t thought about it.”
“Well, now’s the time.”
“I’ll be sixteen on my next birthday, so—”
“Sixteen it is if you just want to drive. But if you want to be able to buy liquor or work in a casino, you have to be twenty-one.”
“Think I look that old?”
“No, but my boy is good with a camera. If you put your hair back like this . . .” He swept Lutie’s hair back from her face with his fingers. “There. You just aged a couple of years. Then we’ll use a little makeup here and here.”
When he ran a finger down her cheek, Lutie’s eyes filled with tears again. She wasn’t used to kindness from a stranger. She grabbed a napkin from beneath her screwdriver to blot her face, just as Octane put a fresh drink in front of her, took T.’s money, nodded, then retreated silently to the bar.
“You want to tell me about it? I’m a pretty good listener, so I’m told.”
“No, not really,” Lutie said as she started on her second drink of the morning. “My life just sucks so bad. I fucked over my little brother the other day, I got some bad news about my daddy, and I . . .” She hiccuped, wiped away new tears, then tried to smile. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to dump all this on you.”
“Hey, babe. I’m your friend. Who else you gonna talk to?”
“You and Fate, but he’s only eleven. Actually, you’re the only people I know here.”
“Oh, I’m gonna fix that, sugar. You’re gonna make lots of new friends in Vegas. I promise. Just leave it up to T. ’cause he’ll never let you down.”
Fate had spent most of the morning in the library, paying less attention to the books than the patrons, librarians, and staff, except for the hour or so he spent reading the Bible.
Each time he left his place at the table, pretending to go to the bathroom, search for another book, or get a drink of water, he quickly doubled back to see if he could catch someone leaving him another lunch sack or maybe a note with a warning or some directions to follow that would provide safety from detection for himself and Lutie.
But shortly before noon, with no apparent sign that his Samaritan was keeping him in sight, Fate left the library, heading for the campus of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, which he’d just learned was only blocks away.
He was trying not to replay the news Lutie had passed on to him, trying not to think about his father dying in a prison hospital some thirteen hundred miles from Spearfish. But he finally gave in and pulled from a library shelf a copy of the Merck Manual and read about hepatitis—the symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment of the disease that had taken his daddy’s life. And, oddly enough, Jim McFee had died on the same day that Floy Satterfield had dropped dead in Wal-Mart.
Then, for some reason he couldn’t explain, Fate had taken a Bible from the religion section, where he read over an hour from the book of Exodus, the book that seemed most liable to provide an answer to the question bothering him most—the significance of the date on which both Floy and his daddy had made their exodus from this world less than twenty-four hours apart.
But the more he read, the more confused he became, so he put the Bible back on the shelf and left the library.
He found the Marjorie Barrick Museum, the place he intended to spend the rest of the day, on the eastern side of the campus. He studied first the section of the museum containing weaving and basketry, but when he came to the native Southwest displays of jewelry, his mind wandered back to the earlier hours of the morning, when he’d seen Lutie putting studs in the new holes of her ears.
That’s when she’d told him about finding the laptop days ago, using the money from the pawnshop on herself—a pedicure, tattoo, airbrush tan, highlighted hair. She’d even shown him the sunglasses she had stolen. He’d listened to her without comment, which had only seemed to make her sadder. She’d even told him to get mad, throw a fit, asked him to try to make her feel worse than she did. But when he’d said nothing, just given her a hug, she’d cried harder than she had when she’d told him about their daddy.
Girls, he knew, were hard to figure out—sisters even worse—but, for this, he couldn’t even guess how he should have responded.
Sure, he was angry, he was hurt, but it seemed a little late to express either emotion. The harm had already been done. And it came as no great surprise. Lutie was selfish, mean-spirited, and immature. But what could he do about it? Nothing except try to survive and see that she did, too. They didn’t have much. But they had each other.
T. paid the taxi driver, then led Lutie into a place he called “the studio.” Outside, the building looked abandoned—windows boarded up, graffiti sprayed on the brick facade, and a business name, long ago painted on the entrance, diminished by time and weather until all that remained were the indistinct letters INC.
The first room they entered, probably intended to be a lobby, was empty except for a couple of folding chairs; a wooden table scarred with initials carved into its surface, scores of cigarette burns along its edges, and a few porno magazines piled near the center; a trash can containing empty beer cans, takeout boxes, rags smeared with dried paint, and a stiletto with a broken heel.
“Philo?” T. yelled.
“Yeah,” a voice answered from somewhere at the back of the building.
The smell of toner and cheap perfume overpowered the second room. Larger than the first, it was crowded with counters of cameras and film, hanging backdrops of faded canvas, miles of electric cord and cables, tripods, movable banks of lights, reflectors, and gadgets Lutie couldn’t begin to identify.
Against the back wall, she saw clothing racks hung with costumes—maids’ uniforms, slinky dresses and gowns, lingerie and shiny capes; shelves above the rack yielded a tangle of wigs, silk scarves, feather boas, exotic bras and panties, and net stockings.
One cardboard box on the floor was crammed with dolls, baby bottles, stuffed animals, rattles, bows of ribbon, lacy bibs, and panties for little girls. Another box held sex paraphernalia of the kind Lutie had seen at Sexual Pleasures, the shop she had stopped in a few days earlier.
“Hey, Philo, catch you in the middle of something?” T. said to a middle-aged black man who slipped into the room through a sliding door taped over with brown paper, a door he shut quickly behind him.
“I’m waiting for Biggy to change out a mike. This the girl?”
“Yeah, this is Lutie.”
“Okay, let’s get this done, Louie.”
“Lutie,” she said. “L-u-t-i-e.”
“Sit here,” he said to her as he twirled a round, backless stool to adjust the height.
Lutie did as he’d told her, then watched as he set up a tripod a few feet in front of her, loaded a camera with film, and clamped it in place on top of the tripod.
He was muscular, dressed in recently shined mules
, starched and creased jeans, and a blue tank that showed off his biceps and a torso with well-developed abs. His head was clean-shaven, as was his face, which sported no metal, not even an earring. He had no tattoos Lutie could see, and his only jewelry was a large, gold, expensive-looking watch.
Behind Lutie he moved into place one of the backdrops, this one in a nondescript gray. After that, he went back to the camera, glanced at her through the lens, then said, “Tilt your head up. . . . No, not that high. . . . There. Now, Lutie, turn just slightly to the right. . . . Good. Perfect.
“You said you wanted this for a driver’s license, right?” Philo asked T.
“Right.”
“Okay.” To Lutie, Philo said, “I want you to smile, but not smile.”
“How do I do that?” Lutie asked.
“Act like you just smiled at someone you don’t like—a phony smile, then slowly let it fade. I just need a couple of seconds. Think you can do that?”
“Yeah.”
The camera clicked twice in rapid succession.
“Now I’ll change the lights and we’ll take the same shots from the other side.”
“You look terrific, honey,” T. said as he stepped up to smooth Lutie’s bangs across her forehead. “Terrific. Beautiful.”
“And twenty-two? Do I look like—”
Just then, through the sliding door came a very small young man, weighing at most a hundred pounds, face studded with metal, hair pinked, wearing jeans whose crotch fell below his knees and a shirt that said Jesus Saves. Through the opening behind him, Lutie glimpsed a naked man and girl on a bed; she was flipping through a teen magazine, and he was examining one of his toenails.
“Dammit, Biggy. Can’t you knock?”
“Sorry, Philo, but I needed to ask you if you want Rita on top or—”
“I’m busy,” Philo said, obviously unhappy with the disruption. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
After Biggy left the room, Philo finished adjusting a reflector, got the shots he wanted, then said, “That ought to do it, T. Unless you wanted something else.”
“Yeah, since you’re set up, it wouldn’t take long for you to get a few more shots, would it?”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Something sexy.” He turned a smile on Lutie. “You wouldn’t mind that, would you, darlin’?”
“I don’t know. Like what?”
“Well, like . . . oh, say, three or four shots of you nude, but just from the waist up.”
“Now wait a minute,” Lutie said. “You told me—”
“That money didn’t matter, but this is a way for me to repay Philo for helping you out. And that’s what this is all about, isn’t it, sweetheart?”
“But I—”
“You gotta learn to trust me, Lutie,” T. said.
“I do. But I won’t do that. Not nude.”
“Oh, come on, now. Stop worrying about your little tits. Just pull out whatever you stuffed your bra with this morning, hug a teddy bear, and I guarantee you, I sell that picture to ten guys, nine of them will jerk off before their pants hit the floor.”
Lutie looked defiant. “I can find other ways to get an ID and a Social Security card. I don’t have to—”
“How, huh? You gonna work in a car wash? Flip burgers in some greasy spoon? Get real, Lutie. You pose for Philo, your bill is paid in full.”
“Who’ll you sell those pictures to?”
“What do you care, huh?”
“Well, I wouldn’t want people I know to see them.”
“Who do you know in Vegas? Your little brother, me, and Philo, who—by the way—isn’t interested in girls, big or little. Ain’t that right, Philo?” T. lit a cigarette, then said, “You don’t appreciate what—”
“No smoking in here, T. It damages the equipment.”
“Okay, but you know what I want.”
“Yeah. I know.”
As soon as T. went outside, Philo, his voice soft, his manner gentle, said, “You go ahead and get ready, Lutie, while I check things out in the next room. When I come back, we’ll get the photos T. wants. Won’t take a minute, then you can get dressed.”
“Okay.”
“And here. Take this.” Philo handed her a worn-looking teddy bear missing an ear. “His name is Tanker.”
Twenty minutes later, Lutie and T. walked out of the studio, she with a driver’s license, a Social Security Card, and a new name—Belinda Ferguson; he with three photos of Lutie, her small breasts bare, a pout on her face, and Tanker the teddy bear held against her neck, hiding her new tattoo.
After Fate left the museum, he wandered the campus, uncomfortable at first, half expecting to be stopped, to be questioned by some higher authority. Inside the museum, he had been comforted to discover families with children his age or even younger, but out here, he saw almost no one younger than twenty, students—their arms holding textbooks, their backpacks stenciled with UNLV, the straps cutting into their shoulders with the weight of whatever the packs contained.
Perhaps he could claim to be a child prodigy, an avant-garde composer or a nuclear physicist. But he knew he’d never pull that off. First of all, he didn’t have a student ID, he couldn’t even read music, and the only physicist he could name was Stephen Hawking.
Fortunately, though, when nobody seemed the least bit interested in him, after he began to feel invisible except when he absently rambled into someone’s path, he relaxed and began to explore more freely.
He avoided the law enforcement building, where he noticed a few men and women in police uniforms standing outside smoking, but ducked quickly into the law library and exited at his first opportunity. Then, on one of the pathways, he stopped before a large glass-enclosed bulletin board, where he discovered a printed list of scheduled exams and learned that the following Friday was the last day of the summer semester.
He followed three students, all girls dressed in shorts and flip-flops, notebooks and texts in their arms, into the building of communicative arts. But as the girls continued down the hall, he stopped at a closed door and looked through a small glass window into a darkened classroom where a film was playing to the few students inside.
“Excuse me,” a woman said to Fate, who was blocking the door. When Fate followed her inside, he slid into one of the many empty desks at the back of the room and watched the movie, a documentary about a bicycle policeman on the streets of Seattle. The narrative was in English and Wolof, a language widely spoken in Senegal—a fact Fate would discover later when he returned to his books of trivia. But the title of the film, he found out when the movie had ended, was Police Beat.
He would have liked to stay while the credits rolled, but when the classroom lights came on, he left hurriedly, before being subjected to questioning by whoever was in charge of the class.
Not far away, on the northwest side of the campus, he discovered a recently constructed school. According to a sign over the entrance, this was the Paradise Elementary School, and from a note taped to the door, he found that classes for grades K through six would begin on September 5, just weeks away.
For the rest of the day, Fate imagined himself a student at Paradise Elementary School, a name that echoed in his head like the notes to a piece of well-loved music, one so familiar to him that he could sing it in his sleep.
In the Desert Garden, Fate found four teams of Scrabble players, their games set up on tables and benches shaded by a pergola thick with the smell of cape honeysuckle. He watched the play, strolling from one group to another. The players, mixed in ages, were quiet with concentration, but now and then one would look up and, smiling, ask if he played. When he answered that he did but admitted to being inexperienced, some acknowledged that they were new at the game themselves, then invariably gave him an invitation to join them any Tuesday or Friday at two.
They couldn’t have imagined what their kindness, an invitation of inclusion, meant to him then.
A few blocks away from the campus, Fate passed beh
ind a Chinese restaurant as an employee, a man of indeterminate age and Asian features, came out the back door with several large plastic bags, which he carried to a Dumpster in a nearby alley. When he saw Fate watching, he said, “Hi.”
Fate nodded, then started walking away.
“Wait,” the man called. “I’ll be right back,” he said, his voice without accent.
Fate, sure he’d done nothing wrong, nothing for which the man might mean him harm, waited while the man went back into the restaurant, returning minutes later with a Chinese takeout box and a plastic-wrapped napkin with chopsticks and plastic utensils.
“Thought you might like to try our Singapore noodles with shrimp. Best in the city.”
“Well, yes, but—”
“We serve buffet every day until two when we close, reopen at five. Whatever is left on the lunch line, we throw out. And I believe you might like to try this.”
“Thank you,” Fate said, accepting the gift. “Thanks very much.”
“No problem.” Before he went back inside, the man said, “You come back tomorrow, and if you’re lucky, we might have some mushroom beef left. Or maybe kung pao chicken.”
“Well, I don’t know if I’ll be here. See—”
“I lived on the streets when I was your age. For three years.”
Before Fate could respond, the man turned his back and disappeared inside the restaurant.
By the time she’d filled out job applications at Mandalay Bay, the Venetian, and the Tropicana, Lutie knew the chances of her being hired as a cocktail waitress were next-to-nothing. Either her new ID failed to convince the people working in employment that she was twenty-two or the size of her boobs, even enhanced as they were with paper towels, made her an unlikely candidate for the profession.
She didn’t give up, not then, not until she’d tried at two more casinos, but at MGM, a hotel with over three thousand rooms, she applied for a job on the cleaning staff, the job of a hotel maid. If she was hired, she’d work for minimum wage plus tips, but she was told not to expect much. Gamblers checking out of the hotels, she heard, were not inclined to have more than change for the maids who cleaned their toilets, made their beds, and carried away their trash.