My last thought was, Shouldn’t have bluffed the fucker…
Chapter Eight
Somebody was asking me a question.
A woman. A girl. Some kind of female…
I couldn’t make it out, but I felt hands on me, small, struggling to get hold of me, trying to lift me, but I just wanted to sleep.
“Come on…come on…get to your feet. They might come back…”
As those words came into aural focus, so did the pain, starting with a blinding headache. I opened my eyes, saw a blur, and shut them again. I was on my side, on something hard, but moving only made it worse. My instinct was to stay put.
“Get up…”
The hands pulled on me, and I found myself standing, through no real effort of my own, a broken puppet whose improbable limbs went in every direction but the right ones, operated by an unseen puppeteer, and the headache eased just a little to let in the pools of pain that were throbbing in seemingly random regions around what had once been my body.
“You have to help…They’re coming back…”
That was when I remembered where I was, if not who I was, and what had happened before I took my nap on a brick bed, specifically that I’d been beaten bloody, and not long ago, because the blood was still warm and wet in my mouth and on my face.
I willed my feet to support me and my legs went along with it and my eyes focused enough to tell my savior was the little blonde stripper I’d done the favor for. She was in a black silk baseball-type jacket and her makeup was off and her hair was ponytailed back and she looked about twelve. She also looked scared shitless.
“You have a car?” she asked.
What the fuck was this, small talk?
But I nodded.
“Parked close?”
She was on my right, helping my legs hold me up. With my left hand, my wrist limper than Paul Lynde’s, I gestured toward the street.
“Ponty,” I said.
She was walking down the alley toward daylight and the street. “Pontiac?”
“Boo,” I said. Not trying to scare her: trying to say…
“Blue?”
She paused at the mouth of the alley where daylight blinded me. A few moments, and I could see, sort of. Nobody on the street. Not a car moving. Not a pedestrian. I willed my neck to turn two inches to the right and said, “There…”
“Two-tone blue?”
“Yeah.”
We were close to it. She only had to drunk-walk me twenty feet before leaning me against the side of the Sunbird. She looked all around her, like a frightened bird, while one of her little hands dug in my front pants pocket, digging, searching. Not as much fun as it sounds.
I heard the jangle of the car keys as she drew them out and she unlocked the door on the rider’s side, and stuffed me in, shut me in, and came around and got in on the driver’s side.
“I don’t take my car to work,” she said.
I had no comment.
The Sunbird was moving.
“I’m only a few blocks away. Usually walk it. But I can’t walk you that far.”
Interesting information, but again, I let it pass. I was busy waiting to see if my head would come apart in pieces like a barrel with the rungs removed.
“Stay awake,” she said. “Stay awake till we get there.”
The unpaved side street she pulled onto made for a rough ride. I understood how a pinball machine must have felt when a ball was running around loose inside it and smacking into things. But it kept me awake.
She pulled up at a mobile home, yellow and white, not very big. A red Mustang circa 1969 was parked out at the curb, where rust was eating it. No sidewalk, no trees. A row of mobile homes, maybe six, but who was counting?
“Candy,” I said. I was not requesting food.
She was struggling to get me pried out of the rider’s side and onto my feet. “What?”
“Your name.”
“You don’t miss much, do you, Jack?”
She remembered my name, too.
She was walking me past the Mustang onto and across a tiny front yard where crab grass was trying to grow and failing. Like a bad hair transplant.
The hardest part was her getting me up the three wooden steps, and not having me fall back down them while she held onto me with one hand and tried to unlock the door with the other. She couldn’t quite get the key in the slot and finally just pounded a tiny fist on the wood and yelled, “Honey? Are you up?”
She waited, and then the door opened. A little kid, maybe three-and-half feet tall, blond, blue-eyed, blank, in Star Wars pajamas, opened it. He didn’t seem surprised to see his mother lugging a strange man with blood on him. It was that kind of town.
The kid didn’t pitch in after that, except to shut the door behind us. He returned to the floor in front of the little TV on a stand where he was eating a Pop Tart and Sesame Street puppets were doing a better job of staying upright than I was.
The trick after that was her navigating me around and through an elaborate wooden train track that took up a lot of the midget living room’s threadbare green carpet.
She moved me down a little hallway, sideways because there wasn’t room for two abreast, and then guided me into a small bedroom, putting me on my back on top of a sunflower bedspread.
I passed out.
Some minutes later, I woke up and was wearing nothing except my jockey shorts. The bruises weren’t showing much yet, but she was checking me over, and had a little bowl of warm water and a washcloth she was using to clean the blood off my face.
“I don’t think you have any broken bones,” she said.
“Ribs are sore.”
“Could have a broken rib. There’s an emergency room in River Bluff, if that’s what you want.”
I shook my head, which was a mistake.
“Shit,” I said, as the blinding headache knifed across the back of my eyes.
“Your nose isn’t broken,” she said.
“Should be.”
She wasn’t in the baseball jacket now. She had on a B-52’s t-shirt and denim cut-offs. Did I say she looked about twelve? Without her makeup.
“You got any aspirin?” I asked. My lips felt thick. My tongue felt thicker.
“No. Better.”
She got up and I admired her ass as she receded down the hall. This did not mean I was feeling better. Lenny Bruce told a joke about a guy in car accident who lost a foot and made a pass at the nurse in the ambulance. Difference between men and women.
I took the two pills she brought me and swallowed some water. “What was that?”
“Percodan.”
“…Thank you.”
I passed out, or went to sleep.
Take your pick.
When I woke up, I realized the little bedroom had blackout curtains. I felt stiff, and I felt sore, and I had a dull headache, but not throbbing. I wondered how many hours I’d been out. Sunlight was peeking in around the edge of the dark curtains, so it couldn’t have been too very long.
She heard me stirring, and came in to check on me. She had a different t-shirt on, a pink Cyndi Lauper one, but the denim cut-offs looked familiar.
I asked her, “What time is it?”
“It’s about ten.”
Ten a.m., huh? I was a resilient motherfucker—a couple hours sleep, and good as new. Not bad for thirty-five.
“Friday,” she added.
“No. This is…Thursday, right?”
“No. You slept round the clock. Except for twice when I woke you up, led you to the bathroom, then fed you Percodan.”
“Fuck. No wonder I feel like somebody emptied me out and filled me with molasses. I don’t remember you doing that at all.”
“You weren’t very talkative.” She perched on the edge of the bed. “You look better. You don’t have a black eye or anything.”
I flipped the covers back. The deep blue bruising crawled in amoeba-like blotches over half a dozen places. I was breathing deep and the ribs weren’t hurting
, though. Small miracle I hadn’t busted one. That is, had one busted for me.
I covered and sat up, which didn’t hurt any more than falling down a flight of stairs. She propped an extra pillow behind me.
“Hungry?” she asked.
“I could try to eat.”
“There’s left-over alphabet soup from Sam’s lunch.”
“Sam’s your kid?”
“Sam’s my kid.”
“Alphabet soup please.”
“Grilled cheese sandwich, maybe? Milk?”
I was a kid home sick from school.
“Grilled cheese, perfect. You wouldn’t have any kind of Coke, would you?”
“Diet Pepsi.”
I wasn’t going to insult my hostess. “That would be swell.”
She sat and watched me eat off a tray in bed and I began to feel vaguely human. The little boy came in, wearing a red t-shirt and blue shorts, and tugged on his mother’s arm and whispered something, and she went off and tended to that kid for a while.
When she came back, I was done eating, and I found a place for the tray on the little nightstand. “Why are you doing this? Why did you help me last night? I mean…night before last?”
“You helped me.”
“Candace,” I said, trying to impress her by not shortening her name to the more stripper-like Candy, “all I did was let you give me a free table dance. I have a feeling a lot of Good Samaritans would have done that.”
“You didn’t take advantage. You were nice. I’m a good judge of character.”
No, she wasn’t.
“Anyway, I’ve seen how people just disappear around the Lucky. And I didn’t want that to happen to you.”
“Those two bouncers who jumped me…do I remember you saying they were heading back for me?”
She nodded. “I’ve seen them do that before. They take somebody in the alley, work them over. Then they pull a car over and throw the poor person in the back seat or trunk, and drive off.”
That didn’t mean Jerry G had intended having me killed, just that they were going to dump me off the premises. A ditch somewhere, or a parking lot across the river. Or, they could have killed my ass, and tossed me in the river. Either way, Candace was a rare angel in Haydee’s.
“Why do you work there, Candace? You’re a pretty, intelligent girl. You could do better.”
She smiled and laughed. “I’m pretty, but I’m not that smart. I never got better than C’s, and I dropped out my sophomore year. I have a little boy to support, who the H knows where his father is, and I hope to do better for myself, so for right now? Nothing pays better than dancing at the Lucky. Not for me.”
I didn’t want to insult her, but I had to ask. I tried as delicately as possible: “That’s all you do at the Lucky? Dance?”
She didn’t take offense. “I’m not one of Jerry G’s party girls. They don’t make all that much more than I do, anyway, by the time Jerry gets his slice, and they risk a lot. Some of their customers can get rough.”
“Rougher than your biker pal?”
“Way rougher. That’s real sad, those girls. Jerry G gets ’em all hooked. Free drugs at first, then so much of their pay goes to it, they just sort of spin their wheels. I don’t take drugs. I don’t even smoke grass, anymore. Not around Sam, anyway.”
Good-naturedly, I reminded her, “You have Percodan around.”
“I work long hours, on my feet, shaking my bottom, always around a lot of smoke, and sometimes I get bad headaches. I can buy those pills at work, but I’m careful. You can get addicted to that shit, y’know.”
“I don’t smoke or drink much or do drugs,” I said. “I’m the clean-cut guy you’ve been dreaming about, Candace.”
She grinned; her gums showed a little, as her teeth were rather tiny—it was endearing. “What are you, a priest?”
“I didn’t say I was celibate.”
“I didn’t think you were.” Still grinning. “I was sitting on your lap the other night, remember?”
“I remember…I hope I don’t get you in any trouble. I’m sure your boss wouldn’t be thrilled with you, if he knew you’d bailed me out.”
She shook her head; the ponytail flounced. “Nobody saw me. We’re fine. We’ll just get you healed up and healthy, and you can find some other town to have fun in.”
I didn’t argue the point.
We chatted for a while, and she told me her long-term plans, which were to save enough money to sell the trailer, move to Des Moines where her older sister lived, and go to beauty school. She wanted to buy a nicer car, too. She had about ten thousand saved, and another fifteen thousand or so would make her dreams come true.
Which reminded me.
I’d had eleven thousand in cash on me. Surely part of the point of that roust in the alley had been to retrieve Jerry G’s poker losses; but I didn’t remember that happening. Not that I would, busy as I was getting the shit kicked out of me and bleeding out my nose and mouth.
“Could you bring me my pants?” I asked.
“You’re not getting up already?”
“No, I just want to check something.”
She jerked a thumb. “Well, I’m washing them, your shirt and pants. They were pretty filthy from that alley. But there was some stuff in the pockets.”
After disappearing briefly, she came in with my wallet and a thick fold of bills.
“You must have won,” she said, eyes big.
I counted it. Nothing was missing from the wallet, including the phony credit cards I was using.
Christ, they’d half-killed me, and left all that dough on me? Maybe they intended to clean me when they returned to take me for a ride. Or maybe the beating hadn’t been about the poker game at all. Maybe Jerry G’s pride in his own poker playing was too high to allow him to help himself to another player’s rightful winnings, even when he was planning to have that player beaten like a red-headed stepchild.
“What kind of boss is Jerry G?” I asked her.
She was perched on the edge of the bed again. “If you don’t cross him, he’s no problem. He doesn’t take a cut of my tips. If I sit and talk to a client, and get him to buy me a drink, that’s split between the house and the girl.”
“What does he pay you to dance?”
“Nothing.”
“You shitting me?”
“No. It’s strictly the dollars in our g’s, and the table dances and V.I.P. lounge tips. And we don’t date the customers. Jerry G says, if we want to do it for money, he’ll get us a little trailer out back.”
“What about Gigi?”
“Jerry G’s pop? He’s a nice enough old guy. He used to be a horndog, I hear—they say he used to audition all the girls who were tricking. But he’s been sick, lately.”
“How sick?”
“Well, I don’t know. But he goes to the doctor once a month. Otherwise, he hardly comes down from his suite. He sometimes has breakfast with Jerry G, at that little café downtown.”
“Not at the Wheelhouse restaurant?”
“No! Jerry G stays away from the Paddlewheel and the Wheelhouse. There’s a real rivalry there. The girls say Jerry G hates that guy, Cornell. Richard Cornell?”
“Ever been to the Paddlewheel?”
“No. That’s one world. The Lucky is another.”
“Pretty rough world, for a sweet kid like you.”
Her smile was a chin-crinkler. “Are you flirting?”
“Not yet. I just mean, prostitution, gambling, narcotics…”
“Those kinds of things have been around forever. Didn’t you ever hear of Sodom and Gomorrah?”
“Sodom, anyway. Doesn’t bother you?”
“I’m responsible only to myself, Jack. I have a nice body, and I don’t think being naked is sinful or evil or anything. If it makes men happy to see me dance, to feel my boobies in their face or put their hands on my bottom, that’s okay by me…long as they pay the freight. I have a kid to provide for. I don’t trick, and I don’t let anybody touch me i
n my private place.”
“Nobody ever?”
“Now you are flirting.”
“Maybe a little.”
She sighed, looked at her hands, which were folded in her lap. Her nails were painted hot pink. “Look, I know the Lucky is a rough place. It’s like…everybody has to put their time in, in some hellhole in this life. It’s an awful, corrupt place, and Jerry G is like the little Godfather of the place.”
“Running downtown Haydee’s Port isn’t that big a deal in the scheme of things, is it?”
“Oh, it’s more than just the Lucky Devil—like, Jerry G runs all kinds of narcotics up and down the river. They have boats that look like, you know, summer outing kind of stuff. But you’d be shocked at how much of that…evil stuff moves through this tiny little town, and all across the country.”
“Were you raised a churchgoer, by any chance, Candace?”
“I went to a Baptist church when I was at home. I haven’t been in years. I don’t like church, really. But I believe in Jesus. Do unto others and all that stuff.”
“You must, hauling my ass out of that alley…You got any more of that Percodan?”
“I’ll get you another dose. But be careful—you don’t want to get hooked.”
I took the Percodan and went back to sleep for a while. When I woke up, the clock on the nightstand said one, and sunlight was still edging in around the dark curtains, so I didn’t figure I’d slept another day away or anything.
What was interesting was the presence of Candace next to me, under the sheets. Shouldn’t have surprised me, since this was her bed, after all, and she worked nights, and had to catch some rest some time.
She was sound asleep, even snoring a little, and wearing another t-shirt and sheer panties. She was nestled against me, with her head on my chest, my arm around her, her slender arm draped across my side.
I was just staring at her, wondering what my life would have been like if a sweet kid like this had married me back in the Nam days, and not a cheating little cunt.
I was also thinking about my close call—without her sweet nature and Baptist upbringing, I might have been dead right now, dumped in a ditch or maybe in the drink.
Quarry in the Middle Page 10