Twin Brothers

by Mia Ford

  “Great. I wonder what the tabloids are going to say about us getting in this hearse together.”

  “Oh my gosh. It’s not a hearse.” I said laughing.

  “No. I’m teasing. It is really nice.” Diamond was rubbing her hand over the dark leather when suddenly she stopped. “You guys didn’t do anything nasty back here and now I’m sitting…”

  “No. Don’t be gross. We save that for Joshua’s sports car.”

  “Whew! Okay. What about Marty?”

  I stopped and couldn’t help but get a little dreamy for a second.

  “He’s a little more traditional.”

  “Oh, isn’t that sweet. Just oral till you kids meet each other’s parents.”

  “You are so gross!” I squealed, happy to have my friend back.

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. I meant just anal.”

  “No way! You are a sick individual! Totally!”

  The limousine drove around through the city. We laughed and talked watching the people who tried to see in the tinted windows as we rolled past.

  “Natasha. I just want to say one thing.” She took hold of my hand and her eyes had tears in them. “Whatever happens, whatever you choose or whatever these two men do just know that I love you. I want nothing but the best for you and if you ever need me for anything you can just call. Anytime.”

  “Di, you sound like you’re worried I might get lost at sea or something.”

  “I’m just saying. No matter what happens or what anyone tells you I’ll always be your friend and I’ll always be right there if you need me.”

  As I waved good-bye to Di when we dropped her at her apartment and the limo was now taking me home, I couldn’t help feeling like she knew something she wasn’t telling me.

  Whatever it was had her nervous. That made me nervous. Little did I know just how far things could unravel in a matter of days. Little did I know how far minds could unravel. I am now convinced that desperation is the creator of monsters.

  JOSHUA

  Going in to work was like stepping foot in your family’s trailer home for Christmas after you’ve been in Paris for three years.

  People looked at me as if they didn’t recognize me. That is, those who were brave enough to make eye contact with me. Some of the old familiar faces came and shook my hand. Some just gave me a nod. My brother, who is always so diplomatic, welcomed me in front of the board of directors. But I could tell by the way he avoided looking at me that he wasn’t thrilled I was there.

  Note to my future protégé: If people are uncomfortable when you are around it means you’ve got something they want. My brother was always uncomfortable when I was around. But, he managed to hide it pretty well while he told of the company treading along in the black and plans for the future.

  There were a few squawkers who always complained.

  “We’ve got three contracts that have yet to break ground and have been tied up in arbitration for almost two years now.”

  “The property that was acquired in Prague has not enticed any of the locals to apply. We’re sending our people over there at three times the cost.”

  “The new legislation pushed through at the eleventh hour by that S.O.B. in the White House is going to cost our southern branches to reconsider the their distribution procedures.”

  Waa. Waa. Waa. A bunch of babies.

  I sat back at the opposite end of the conference table, swiveling in my chair watching them all. Some of the directors were cool customers. They listened pensively, every once in a while smoothing out their ties or nodding their heads in agreement with something my brother said.

  Then there were the worriers. The cry-babies, no matter how golden their parachute was, it just wasn’t enough. They freaked out if even the slightest setback caused them to only reap about 1.7 return instead of the 1.8 return they had gotten last year on their billion dollar investments.

  And then, there were the sweaters. The fat old farts who had known our father, who were as old as they were overweight and sweated non-stop just because breathing was an extreme cardio workout for them.

  How did this group of misfits become our Board of Directors? Once again The Universe provides the answer. Surround yourself with people less competent and you’ve got job security. Thankfully the major decisions were left up to Marty and me although, my brother rarely consulted me on anything. He was a work-a-holic to the bone. His whole life was this place and well, dear old dad would be proud of him. When wasn’t he?

  I looked at my watch wondering when the hell this snooze-fest was going to end. These meetings were so boring.

  Thankfully I had my memories of the previous night to dwell on while I pretended to pay attention to the prospectus in front of me and the charts and spreadsheets in between.

  What was that girl’s name? Well, she wasn’t really a girl. She was just some meth-head looking to make enough to get her through another day in her meager existence.

  I knew when Natasha said she was tired that the Universe would send me something to play with in the meantime.

  Not that I would do to Natasha what I did to the meth-head. What was her name? It’s going to bother me until I think of it.

  She wasn’t as eaten up as some of them I’d picked up, being a newbie to the streets. I could tell because she hopped in my car and thought that I was her big break. It was going to be like that piece of shit movie with the rich billionaire who fell in love with a hooker. It can happen. Really.

  Velvet! That was her name. Like the cake she had said, soft and moist on the inside. I nearly gagged and had to choke back the laughter that was creeping up my throat.

  “Is this your car?” she asked, running her hand along the seats and up my thigh.

  “Yes it is.”

  “Wow. You rich?”

  “Yes I am.” Her eyes lit up. Yeah, Velvet thought if she let me do whatever I wanted she’d have some sugar-daddy set up.

  Note to my future protégé. When you hire someone to do a job expect them to do the job and then pay them. If they don’t do they job, they don’t get paid.

  “What are we doing here?” she asked when I pulled into the warehouse I had owned for the past decade. I liked to bring my new friends there.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not some serial killer. There’s no plastic restraints or tarp in the back seat. “I just like to be alone. I like my privacy.”

  Of course the girl looked in the back seat when she thought I wasn’t looking. There were the tell-tale signs that she was in bad need of some kind of fix.

  Personally I hated drugs. Couldn’t stand them or the people that used them. They were weak, pathetic individuals who wanted to be victims. They wanted to live this way.

  “So.” I said as I walked into the warehouse in front of Velvet. When I flipped on the light she instantly saw the lounge area I had set up in the nearest corner. “Make yourself comfortable.”

  Walking over to the couch she sat down on the edge of the couch. The lighting wasn’t the best and it highlighted her bruises and scratches and weeping sores that were crusted over with make-up. In a dark alley she might have looked pretty. But under even the faintest fluorescent lighting she looked like someone had sewn together various human parts collected from a leper colony.

  “Can I get you a drink?”

  “Sure.”

  “What would you like?”

  “Anything is fine.” Her voice was nervous. She was itching to make an exchange so she could be on her way to her dealer.

  “Anything…coming right up.”

  I brought her some water. She smelled it before she took a drink as if her finely tunes Spider-senses would pick up any drug I might have slipped in it. I don’t think pure H2O had touched her tongue in months so it was funny to watch her reaction as she almost choked.

  “Hey, come over here.” I said, jerking my head in the direction of a darker corner of the warehouse. “Are you ready to have some fun?”

  As expected, she didn’t say much.
I was kind of glad. Velvet wasn’t really a talker. The girl I was with last night that was a different story. She wouldn’t shut the hell up. But Velvet was a little more cautious.

  “Don’t worry.” I coaxed her. “I told you, I’m not some serial killer. I’m just a little eccentric, that’s all. I’ll admit it. We all have our little quirks and ticks, right?” I smiled at her but she barely met my eyes.

  When I flipped the other switch she saw that there was just a chair there. One single chair. No long table of surgical instruments. No yards of rope and chain but just one little harmless chair.

  “Have a seat.”

  “Just sit there?”

  “Yup. Just sit right there.”

  She shuffled up to the chair and sat down on the edge.

  “Get comfortable, honey. We’ve got some talking to do. Tell me,” I walked up to her, squatted down and took on of her disgustingly boney hands in mine. Her nails were all chewed and the dark blue polish was chipped.

  “Tell me when you lost your virginity.”

  “What?”

  I took out a roll of money and watched as she practically began to salivate.

  “Tell me.” I said, peeling a twenty-dollar bill off the roll.

  “It wasn’t anything special.” She said, clearing her throat and flipping her stringy brown hair behind her. “We knew each other in high school. We went out a couple times and one night his parents weren’t home and we did it in his bed.”

  I looked at Velvet, tilting my head to the right and smirking at her. Squeezing her hand just a little I pulled her forward and whispered.

  “You know I don’t believe you.”

  Her eyes blinked and shifted nervously.

  “It’s the truth.” She said defiantly.

  “I don’t think you’d know the truth if it came up and slapped you upside the head.” My hand found its way to the side of her skull where I had to crack her a little forcefully. “Now, let’s try this again.”

  I peeled off another twenty dollars and laid it on the floor on top of the other one. Velvet swallowed and began her tale of woe.

  As I had guessed, she had been molested when she was ten or eleven by her mother’s boyfriend. He would slither into her room at night while the old lady was sleeping. This vile piece of shit got at her a couple times a week for a couple of years. She was over eighteen now.

  “So, your dreams of becoming a lawyer or a doctor were pretty much blown.” I interrupted her tale.

  “I didn’t want to be a doctor or a…”

  “What did you want to be, when you were a kid? I don’t think you grew up wanting to be a strung out twenty-dollar hooker?” I said, chuckling just a little.

  Her eyes began to water. She didn’t speak.

  “Tell me. What would you do if you saw your mother’s boyfriend now? Now that you aren’t a little girl anymore?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. I guess Velvet didn’t have much of an imagination. Some girls go crazy when I ask them what they’d do to the blokes who put them on this path. They scream and cry and talk about ripping balls off and watching them choke on their own gore and whew…enough to make a civilized boy like me blush.

  Velvet was a little different.

  “Did you love him?” I asked her. That was the million dollar question. The water works really started then. It was a riot.

  “So, Velvet, tell me. How many men have you been with since you started this lucrative career in the world’s oldest profession.

  “Dozens.” She whimpered. “Look. Is this all we are going to do because I’m tired of playing twenty questions. If you need your rocks off then let’s get started but I’m not…”

  I peeled off another twenty and another and another. She stopped and just watched. How long had it been since she saw more than one twenty dollar bill in front of her? I really could wipe my own ass with these and never miss them. Velvet, on the other hand would happy to take those shit covered bills.

  “How many guys have you been with since you hit the streets?”

  “Dozens?”

  “Over a hundred?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And what did you do?”

  Now this was interesting to watch. At first, Velvet shrugged her shoulders and looked at me as if she had never seen someone so dumb in their life.

  “It really isn’t that hard to figure out, pal. You must be a trust fund baby because if you don’t know…”

  I smiled. I had to admire her spunk. Normally, I would have slapped her silly for getting smart with me but I take the blame for the way I phrased the question. This one needed a little more instruction in order to give me what I wanted.

  “No. Tell me what they did to you. The ones you remember the most. What did they do to you?”

  There was no far off dreamy look in her eyes about a simple john who found her every Thursday on his way home from driving a big rig. And crazy as it may sound no millionaires paying her for a week of doing nothing but putting out. Shocking, I know.

  Instead, Velvet gave me more than I ever could have asked for. She told a truly horrific tale of coming face to face with two guys who, had they not gotten so piss drunk would have killed this girl for sure.

  She met them under a viaduct. It was raining. Business was slow, of course. And for some of their booze she offered a knobber to both. Fair enough trade for transients living under a viaduct, if you ask me.

  But, well, after she held up her end of the bargain these two gentlemen tied her up. They talked about gutting her. They talked about raping her. They seemed to like to do a lot of talking. And as they talked they got thirsty and drank and drank until finally, they both passed out.

  Velvet got out of her bondage. They tied her with a couple of old t-shirts or something, she said. And instead of taking the bottles they had been swigging from and bashing their skulls in she just ran away.

  “I finally made it home.” She sobbed. “But I knew I’d have to get back out on the street in order to live. So…”

  “Well, if you learned anything you learned to stay away from viaducts.” I said, chuckling a little. “Tell me, where is home?”

  She described the Walona Motel. It was a run-down place that screamed for the 1970’s with its dated mint green and orange sign and long, long curved awning to protect the royalty that would sometimes show up and the huge rectangular windows for each room where the curtains were always pulled shut.

  One or two men with gold chains and guns in their pockets were almost always loitering around the entrance. Women in jeans and t-shirts with bodies that had long ago given up on being firm walked back and forth along the busy street waiting for a car, any car, to pull up to them. Junkies would scurry like cockroaches into and out of the rooms they polluted for weeks at a time. Velvet had a room there that she shared with another whore splitting the twenty-two dollar a night fee and whatever smack they could score.

  “Do you think this is what your mom wanted for you?” I asked, feeling the burn in my legs as I continued squatting in front of Velvet who was trying hard not to cry in the chair she was sitting in.

  I had the endurance of a thoroughbred racehorse. Feeling the ache in my legs just meant I was getting stronger. But Velvet, well, I knew that chair wasn’t comfortable. I knew her back had to be hurting and her behind was uncomfortable and her neck was stiffening up. But she only slightly shifted.

  Finally, at the mention of her mother she began to ball and snot all over the place. She had no father. That was no big shock.

  Finally, after letting her cry over her own pitiful existence I stood up.

  “Okay. This has been fun.” I said. “Let’s go.”

  I turned and strolled confidently to the door we had come in from. Flipping off the lights as we went I walked out the door first and made sure it was locked tightly behind us.

  We got back in my car and I drove her to the lonely, pitiful corner I had picked her up on.

  “Look.” I said in my most understanding
voice. “It sounds like you have been through a lot. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.”

  Immediately the wheels started turning behind Velvet’s eyes. This was it. A big miracle was about to land in her lap. A handout bigger than any government could make. It was priceless.

  “I’m not going to make you suck my dick. Here.” I handed her the four twenties she had seen me count out for her at the warehouse. Leaning across her lap I opened the passenger door and watched as her face became a mass of confusion and pain. I could barely keep myself from laughing out loud.

  “You take care now.” I said nodding toward the open car door. Velvet started to cry, crumpling up the dollar bills and stuffing them deep into her coat pocket she got out of the car.

  As I drove away I laughed so hard I had to pull over for a second just to regain my composure.

  I have to say that Velvet earned every penny of that eighty dollars. I was happy to pay her. She was a good sport and gave me a pleasant experience to fantasize about as I sat through the boring state of the business address by my brother. But Velvet’s expression when she got out of the car was too much and I couldn’t hold back the chuckle during Marty’s meeting.

  “Anything you’d like to add, Josh?” he said, glaring at me.

  “Nope. I’m good.” I said, smiling and looking at my watch.

  “Yeah, well. It’s been a long morning. We’ve got lunch on the way. Why don’t we stop here and pick up after we’ve all had something to eat.”

  Of course, the sound of the dinner bell got every hog at this table running.

  I needed to talk to my brother but as soon as the door opened his pitbull secretary Denise was there with half a dozen messages, her little notepad to scribble in and an attitude toward me that made me want to slap her across the face. When she finally went back to her own corner like a spider scurrying back into its web, I slipped into my brother’s office.

  We had a nice little chat about the new secretary that had been working here for over six months now. How was he going to feel knowing I got her hired?

  “Well, it proves it is possible for you to do something right.” He said, barely looking up at me from behind the great oak desk that used to be our father’s, and that was now Marty’s.