Lay Saints

by Adam Connell

He got off the horse, turned it around, gave it a good smack on the rear. The horse ran back to the farm without him.

  The first big building was a hospital. Calder saw opportunity.

  And since then he’d always felt at home in hospitals, more so than at the morgues and graveyards. Hospitals were mostly alike — their smell, the whiteness, squeaking floors, wandering patients pulling wheeled IVs, doors that anticipated your entry, cantilevered beds, the constant beeping, the concern and the tears and the placating, and, above all, the busy ease of the staff.

  His next city was Ames, population 51,557. Following that, Cedar Rapids, 124,417.

  He knew he couldn’t spend his life in them, hospitals, no more than he could have stayed in one tiny town after another.

  Calder said good-bye to the Van Winkle Ardsley, wished her well, decided to make Adelard his problem, and even had a solution.

  back to top

  SIXTEEN

  Friday, late Vespers

  Calder, in a very good mood, got to the club around eight and it was full. Because it was Friday and it was raining.

  He wanted to ask for Tamm but thought it might be too early; he didn’t want to interrupt her at what appeared a peak hour. He found a chair in the middle, hard to reach and hard to leave from.

  There were more women in the audience than he remembered. The men, the women, they were all watching the stages with glazed expressions. Calder looked up and he saw why. The Winged Lady was dancing on the center circle.

  She didn’t use the pole. She wore no clothes to strip off or tease with. Armin Van Buuren’s “Love You More” was getting louder. The Winged Lady stood and swayed to the music. Her shoulders rising and falling in a slow sensual shrug that lifted and expanded her breasts, then brought them back to her torso mockingly. Her hips rose and fell, but back to front in the most minor of thrusts that was maddening to watch. Her hands, her strong fingers curled as if probing whatever erogenous zone of yours you wished she’d excite.

  The purple and yellow and green lights, all shining at once, made crystals of the beady perspiration on her skin.

  Calder was impressed. He’d never seen a dancer entrance so many by doing so little. She had a lazy beauty. He wondered why the club wasn’t named after her. Yet he wasn’t drawn to her the way he needed Tamm. The Nicotine Queen was real, the Winged Lady a manicured mirage.

  The song began to fade and the Winged Lady accelerated. Her arms took on new life and her bare legs stepped right and left, going nowhere but exposing her thighs and waxed vagina. The lights strobed. Her body shook, spraying the stage with sweat. Precious sweat some of her audience would gladly have tasted.

  The two dancers on the adjacent stages ended their ignored routines to watch.

  The Winged Lady culminated with a shivering stretch towards the roof as if taking flight. The music stopped, the strobing lights were snuffed. The club was dunked in darkness for half a minute, then the houselights came on.

  The crowd woke up, suddenly, like from a drunken weekend to instant sobriety. A cheer rose between them, then howls. A few whistled with index fingers and thumbs to their lips.

  The Winged Lady, seeming for all the attention quite bored, blew them a kiss and left the men and women, in their own way, tumescent.

  The other two dancers started their routines anew, vying for admirers, dueling for the Winged Lady’s scraps. One on the right, she was dueling well. Tress, a skinny Japanese woman with marvelous breasts except you’d never know it because of her hair. I don’t think there’s anyone has actually seen all of her at once. That lovely straight, black, insidious hair. Grown down to her ankles, all five and a half feet of her. Uses it clenched in her hands like a fan dancer, like Sally Rand, methodically blurring her body.

  She wears a silver chatelaine hung with tiny bells that chimed as she moved. Noise to distract you from the flesh you’re not seeing.

  On the left, Kitten wasn’t dueling too well. She’d been on since lunch and her gyrating was sluggish. Still, she did perform a few turns of her signature move: she twirls on the pole like it’s the Maypole dance, all those kids with their ribbons frolicking round in a circle. For Kitten, the ribbons are her braided hair easily braided to the pole.

  Waitresses came out and took orders for drinks, appetizers. Calder went towards the bottom left stage and stopped in front of Iommi, a massive bouncer. Also the Stone.

  “Can I leave a message for the Nicotine Queen?” Calder said.

  “No.”

  “Like to let her know I’m here.”

  “No.”

  “I’m a friend.”

  Iommi laughed. “I’m sure you are, she’s friendly.” He stared past Calder as though Calder had vanished.

  “Could you at least tell her Calder’s here.”

  “I’m not gonna tell her anything, and I’ll tell you why.” He looked down at Calder. “She’s inside behind me, shaving, or whatever it is they do before coming out. Takes mindfulness, what they do out here. Believe it or not, your choice. It’s an art. My job, right here, I make sure they can focus without the interruption of suckers. You seem mildly nice. Quit being a sucker.” He folded his arms over his chest. They were like overlapping logs.

  Calder was annoyed and considered going into the man’s head.

  Iommi said, “You’re still here. I don’t wanna snap your neck.”

  Calder was about to change the man’s mind when Briggs and Lundin emerged from backstage and walked around them. And stopped.

  “You I recognize,” Lundin said.

  “Take him off my hands, L,” Iommi said. “He’s just some vermin.”

  “I don’t think he is,” Briggs said.

  “I just wanted to let Tamm know I was here,” Calder said, sandwiched between the men.

  “Well I just saw her,” Lundin said, “and I mean all of her, and she’s fixing to leave. Day shift today, and day shift’s over.”

  “She know you?” Briggs said to Calder.

  “Want I should boot him, L?” Iommi said.

  “Nah, we’ll wait for her on the couch.”

  Calder went first, Briggs and Lundin rudely guiding him. At the couch Briggs put his hands on Calder’s shoulders, turned him around, forced Calder to sit down. Men were getting expensive lap dances on either side of him. Briggs and Lundin bullied two patrons and brought over their empty chairs. Briggs was preoccupied by the lap dancers (one of them was Tress, her client buried under her mane) but Lundin was focused on Calder.

  When Lundin’s thoughts tentacled forwards Calder’s first reaction was shock. He dropped his safeguards completely and thought only of the club, of Tamm, of the two men in front of him. Anything other than complete innocence would have given him away.

  “You working for Sotto?” Lundin said.

  “I work for myself.”

  “What’s Int 3001?”

  “You tell me,” Calder said.

  Lundin looked at Briggs. “He’s playing possum.”

  “He’s not so good at it,” Briggs said.

  “Stop staring at the women,” Lundin told Briggs. “Sotto, the Int.” He stared at Calder.

  Calder smirked; he couldn’t help himself. He was supposed to feel threatened, but didn’t. “You’re a terribly thin bouncer,” he said to Lundin.

  “We represent the owner,” Briggs said.

  “That getup, I thought you’d be representing God,” Calder said.

  Briggs crossed himself, then said, “And we want an answer as to why you were at Adelard’s house.”

  “You were there?” Calder said. He touched Briggs’ mind but knew it to be true anyhow.

  Lundin moved his chair closer, flipped it around, put his forearms on the seatback. “What was your business at the house?”

  “I lobby,” Calder said, sheltering his lies under truth. Lundin would be searching. “Some people they, I was hired about traffic. Too many drunk drivers, not enough pop checkpoints, or enough strict cops or high enough quotas.” He convinced h
imself, himself, to believe this. That’s a very hard trick, Fish.

  Lundin’s head tilted. “Traffic.”

  “Not this Int 4001,” Calder said.

  “Three thousand and one,” Briggs said.

  “Four? Three? What’s so special about it?”

  Briggs looked at Lundin who was a long time responding. Finally, “Nothing special to you,” Lundin said.

  Calder leaned forwards. “Then get the fuck out of my space.”

  Briggs laughed.

  Calder said, “What are you, some kind of hard-knock tough-love priest?”

  “I’m like no priest you ever met.”

  “I’ll bet,” Calder said. “In a strip club.”

  Lundin placated Briggs with a glance. He said to Calder, “Why do you think the Nicotine Queen would want to pass time with you?”

  “Because I’m handsome and I’m fascinating.” Calder thought he could take the black one, the one Iommi called L, he was borderline scrawny. That made him Lundin. But he didn’t know about the fib priest, Briggs, and together no way.

  “Are you her brother?” Calder asked Lundin.

  “She look black to you?”

  “So stay out of it.”

  “You wanna be her boyfriend,” Briggs said. “Save the poor girl from this seedy life? Spend any time with her you’d see she’s worldly in a way ambassadors would envy. She will shit you out, my friend, in no time, and you will be regretting the experience.”

  “Allow me to tell you about her last boyfriend,” Lundin said, sliding his chair closer.

  “Come any nearer I’ll kick that chair over with you in it.”

  “Oh c’mon, L, it’s time,” Briggs said, standing.

  “Sit back down,” Lundin said, still staring at Calder. “Tamm’s last lover. Had family money on the West Coast. Oil, land, silicon chips, whatever it is they have there that you get rich off. Enough of it for his very own airplane and pilot, too. A pilot. That’s cash, that is flush with cash. Would fly this rich asshole out here every weekend, watch her dance, take her out, buy her jewelry. Make love on his plane before heading home. Some people, they use motels. Him, he’s got a jet.”

  “She told you all this,” Calder said.

  “It’s my duty to know. I don’t work for her, I work for the club.”

  “We watch out for these girls,” Briggs said. “They’re like sisters to us.”

  Calder said, “Yeah, I seen the way you’re looking at your sisters,” inclining his head at the quiet, grinding dances going on beside him.

  “Lundin!”

  “Stay seated and shut up,” Lundin said to Briggs. To Calder: “The man stops coming, and this upsets our Nicotine Queen. She’s not dancing with the same verve, and now it’s management’s upset. We flew out there.”

  “The both of us,” Briggs said.

  “The man was married,” Lundin said.

  “Three gorgeous kids,” Briggs said, even more serious, as if having three beautiful children was a sin.

  “He loved his wife, he really thought he did,” Lundin said. “Wasn’t never gonna leave her for Tamm.”

  “Somehow you knew this, too,” Calder said. “Your duty to know.”

  “I know lots.”

  “We had a talk, is how,” Briggs said.

  “Brief but intense,” Lundin said. He slid his chair closer, despite Calder’s threat. “After, Briggs held him down and made him watch me jigsaw his wife’s face with a knife from the kitchen. The deep variety of cuts don’t heal right.”

  “He cried but she didn’t,” Briggs said.

  Lundin said, “Felt so guilty, what we’d done, what he made us do, not only did he leave the Nicotine Queen, the man never cheated on his disfigured wife again.”

  “Because you could be certain of that, in the definite, the way you two know things,” Calder said.

  “Definitely certain, the way we know things,” Briggs said. “Now after all this, ask yourself if you should go home.”

  Calder crossed his legs, shook his head, leveled his best stare at Briggs. “I don’t have a wife. Not even divorced from one.”

  “I sense that,” Lundin said. “I sense you’re very alone. Not even family for you. That doesn’t mean I trust you. I don’t trust you.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Keep our story in mind while you’re with her,” Briggs said.

  “You were doing something at the Council Speaker’s,” Lundin said. “You were there with a reason, you were. I don’t believe you. Lobbying.”

  “You gonna give me a lap dance or can I get up?”

  “He’s not properly scared,” Briggs said. “Should’ve told him about Ynes instead.”

  “Who cares, Ynes? Plum? Plum has nothing to do with this,” Lundin said.

  “But it has the better tone.”

  “He understands,” Lundin said. “I’m nothing but eyes and ears.”

  “And the priest’s all fists, I get it,” Calder said. “Now let me up before there’s an altercation. I’d lose but I’ll be sure the two of you remember it.”

  “He’s giving me his mean face,” Briggs said.

  “I just came here to see Tamm,” Calder said.

  Briggs and Lundin stood up. “Who’s stopping you?” Lundin said.

  They left Calder with the two empty chairs.

  SEVENTEEN

  Friday, Matins: 1st Nocturne

  Tamm found him sitting with a stranger at one of the side tables. She kissed Calder on the lips. Calder, surprised, kissed her back. The stranger, even more surprised, was waiting for his turn.

  “That’s for coming early,” she said and squeezed Calder’s cheek.

  “My grandmother used to do that.”

  “Wasn’t sure maybe you’d already had enough of me.”

  “It’s always so cold in here?”

  “Keeps our nipples perked,” she said. “Let’s go somewhere, it’s early.”

  Outside, under the streetlamp, Calder could better see what she was wearing. Her version of a red Chinese brocade gown: hemmed above the knees, too tight at the waist, a dangerous V cutting deep down into her chest. It looked like something she could dance in, or had made herself with a Singer sewer.

  “I like a cigar club not far from here.” She took his hand, folded her fingers into his. “You don’t mind? Hands?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  She led him south down Amsterdam Avenue. “What’d you think of the Winged Lady?”

  “Of who?”

  “The Winged Lady, dancer in the middle with the tattoos on her back.”

  “Didn’t see her tattoos today.”

  “Sometimes she doesn’t turn around,” Tamm said.

  “Everyone seemed, and I hate this word, enthralled. But goddam if they weren’t. You have to wonder, is she a fucking human narcotic way she affected everybody.”

  “She is beautiful,” Tamm said.

  “The way a mannequin can be beautiful,” Calder said. “Not much of a dancer.”

  “Doesn’t have to be, not her.”

  “I don’t care about her.”

  Other pedestrians gave them berth, the way some considerate New Yorkers do, not wanting to sever a couple holding hands.

  “Your shift? How was it?” Calder said.

  She swung his hand a bit. “Typical stuff. I squeezed in three shows, practiced to some new music. The other girls, their performances never change and their clients like that. Their clients, they come in expecting the same cause it’s what they want.”

  “Their fantasy in repetition,” Calder said.

  “I suppose. Flirted and fawned with the lunch crowd, me, they bought me drinks. Gave out some dances. One had halitosis, another smelled of beef and cheese, like a Philly cheesesteak. And I have to get close to their faces.” She laughed, but it sounded like some old tired laugh to some old tired joke everyone at the table’s already heard. “It’s very glamorous what I do.”

  The cigar club, Panama Havanas, was
on the top floor of a swanky (I love that word, swanky) hotel, the hotel’s name just a single letter, I forget which. Panama Havanas’ unoriginal decor was mostly wood with some glass, and soft chairs. The greeter knew Tamm by name, led them to the enormous walk-in humidor.

  “Know what you like?” Tamm said.

  “Dominicans are good, aren’t they?” Calder said.

  “He’ll have a Nat Sherman Bolivar and I’ll have my usual,” Tamm told the tobacco sommelier standing unobtrusively by the door.

  Out on the balcony, she clipped her cigar and his. They lit them up. Tamm claimed a recently vacated corner. It was a cramped space up there, but it was warm out, and the people amiable and relaxed. They smoked in silence awhile.

  “You know not to inhale it, right?” she said.

  “I am not a complete novice.”

  “Yes you are.”

  There wasn’t much of a view, so Calder watched the city below. “Till I came here,” he said, “I never saw streets move with such purpose.”

  “My little lost bumpkin,” she said, putting her hand to his cheek.

  “Hardly.”

  “I know, sweetie,” she said and gave him a playful double slap.

  He took another puff of the cigar, trying not to look too important doing so. Seems to me like you can’t smoke a cigar without looking like a banker.

  She stroked his curly hair. “There’s a talk we should have, and I tend to have it right away,” she said.

  “About what you do.”

  “I really like you.”

  “And does it bother me.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You like it, what you do?”

  “I like the exercise, I like the girls I work with. It’s safe and it is steady.”

  “It’s not steady,” he said.

  “For as long as my body holds out. Then I’d like to open my own club, for women only down in the West Village. They don’t smell as bad, women, or have halitosis or meat and cheese on their breath.”

  “I’ve met plenty of strong women,” Calder said. “In the olfactory sense.”

  She punched him in the arm.

  “Let’s say we women have it less often. But that’s years away. I was gonna be part of a famous modern-dance company, I mean I wanted to be, but I’ll never be famous. I have my fans and it’s nice.”