Dad shook his head and smiled enigmatically. “I can tell from your reaction that you are. That’s all right. The boys who lose it in high school always peak too early. But now that you’re going to be making your way in the world, you’ll need to know how to lay your claim when the time comes. I can help you with that. Take the mystery and suspense out of it for you.”
“I’m not sure I like where this is going.”
He laughed. “Don’t be scared. That’s the woman’s job.”
Kylee came and placed our bill between us in a black leather tablet. She smiled with her hands behind her back. “How we doin’, guys? Everything all right?”
Dad pulled out his entire bankroll and dealt a few large bills onto the open tablet. He said, “Tell me, Kylee. Any chance those friends of ours are working tonight? At the usual place?”
Kylee glanced from side to side and then down at the roll of money in Dad’s hand. “That depends. You got any particular friends in mind?”
“Possibly. What about our acquaintance with the long brown hair? I have a hunch she and my son might really hit it off.”
Kylee turned her head and looked at me in a way that I knew was insinuating something. She said, “It’s short notice, but I think she might be available later this evening.”
Dad dropped several more bills onto the tablet. “We’re about thirty minutes away now. See that she’s ready and waiting when we arrive.”
Kylee took the cash and hurried off to use the phone on the other side of the bar. I watched her as she placed the call, noticing the perfunctory way she carried out the task at hand, no differently than if she were taking down dinner reservations or putting in a produce order. Meanwhile, Dad raised his glass to me and nodded. He said, “Drink up. At your age, liquor can only help you get your money’s worth.”
We took the main road out of Porterville and followed it I don’t know how far into the country before turning onto another road that was completely removed from any reliable source of light. Dad switched on the high beams and switched them off just as quickly. He was sober enough to know not to draw attention to us, but drunk enough to slip up now and then if he didn’t keep his attention fixed on what he was doing. And so we drove on in silence much as we had for the better part of the day, him focusing on the road ahead, me half-sick and terrified of where the road might be leading us.
By the time we started heading up a long, unpaved driveway, I realized that I had no memory of actually getting up and following Dad out of the restaurant and into the Charger. The sudden frailty of my mind struck me as both scary and funny, though I lost all sense of humor about everything the moment we reached the end of the driveway and parked in front of a well-lit house with pink curtains in the windows. There were nicer vehicles than ours surrounding the house, as well as shabbier ones, but they all had the same rim of dirt around the tires from making the drive here on the dusty valley roads. After jamming the parking break into place, Dad pulled a flask from his jacket pocket and took a drink, his fifth or sixth in total for the evening.
He wiped his mouth and said, “When we get in there, don’t make eye contact with the other men unless they make it first. But treat every woman in the place like she’s an old girlfriend from a long time ago. I’ve already got a date lined up for you, so you don’t have to worry about fending off any sales pitches, but as a rule you should act the gentleman to all of them, even the ones who are too worn-out or ugly to earn their keep. You listening to me?”
I nodded gently and continued to stare out the window at the house. It was an old place, pre-Republic, with three stories stacked on top of one another in order of decreasing size like layers on a wedding cake. The pink curtains and bright yellow exterior only added to the impression I had that the whole house was one big frosted confection designed to be gobbled up by greedy children like the witch’s cottage in the fairy tale. I listened for screams, for the cat-like moaning of whores, but heard only the faint sounds of an erhu turning out pre-recorded Chinese melodies in a slow and longing style.
Dad said, “Don’t tell me you’re getting cold feet.”
I looked down at the floor mat, but my feet were too drunk to tell if they were hot or cold. “I said I wanted to find God. I don’t think this is the place to do it.”
Dad gestured outside with his flask still in hand. “God’s in there as much as any place.”
“How do you figure?”
“He made our flesh weaker than the flesh of a woman. So He’s always with us when our flesh leads us to temptation.”
“My flesh didn’t lead me here. You did.”
“That’s right. Because I don’t want you to get to be in your twenties and be so in awe of what women have between their legs that you become the slave of the first one to let you have it. I’d rather you sinned once tonight and got it out of the way than stay pure and become a lifelong neurotic.” He raised the flask to his lips, drank deeply, and coughed so hard that a fine mist of whiskey coated the inside of the windshield. Between the heat of the day and the constant drinking of the evening, his beard had come to resemble something wild and sickly; a gutter animal, rank and matted from exposure. “Though I suppose it’s your decision in the end. No sense losing your cherry if you’re not man enough to handle it yet. Say the word and we’ll drive back into town. I’m sure there’s somewhere around here we can get you a hot fudge sundae, if that’s less frightening for you.”
“No. I’ll go inside.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I just decided. I’ll do it.”
Dad reached over and patted my knee proudly. He said, “That a boy. You’ll see. People make a big deal about it, but there’s nothing more natural for a man to do. We were built for it, same as them.”
I got out of the Charger and staggered up the peastone walkway with Dad several steps behind me. When I got to the front porch, I waited for him to catch up so that he could knock or ring or recite whatever password would establish him as a member of the club. But then the door opened and a middle-aged Asian woman appeared behind the screen to greet us. She was squat and buxom and wearing a plain black dress that reached past her ankles, but with a makeup job that offset the funereal look of her clothes with muted pastels and eyebrows penciled into Egyptian arches. She seemed to look straight past me, smiling at my father with every tooth showing as her manicured hand pushed the screen door open.
She said, “Welcome back, Mr. Temple. We were pleased to hear you would be joining us. The girls get lonesome when you’re away so long.”
“I’ll bet they do.” Dad smiled and winked in her direction. All of a sudden he struck a strange and deceptively casual pose, standing straight with his thumbs hooked through his belt loops, rocking back and forth on the heels of his shoes. He looked like the salesman instead of the customer. “Tonight I’m here to help my son mount his first jenny. Our mutual friend led me to believe everything would be ready when we arrived.”
“And so it is. Livia is waiting in the parlor as we speak.”
“Good. Junior and I’ll be at the bar. Give us a couple minutes and then send her in.”
We stepped through the doorway and into a talcum-scented room with crepe paper lamp shades throwing colored shadows onto the walls. None of the ceiling lights were on, and so the whole interior of the house seemed caught in a state of perpetual twilight that would have been disorienting even if I was sober. Dad stepped in front of me and led us to a bar that consisted of two varnished folding tables fitted together at a ninety degree angle. He must have forgotten his advice about staying with the one that brought me, because he ordered us each of shot of whiskey. A fat Latino nodded and grabbed an unlabelled bottle off one of the shelves nailed into the papered drywall. Dad and I touched our glasses together and tossed the whiskey down our throats. It was the second type of liquor I had ever had, and all it did was make me shudder.
Dad said, “I remember my first time in a place like this.”
But he didn�
�t go on. He just stood leaning on the bar, looking out at the rest of the room. While a few of the girls were occupying the laps of other customers, most were spread out over several ancient, floral-print sofas positioned at different points along the perimeter of the room. They sat with their bare feet on the cushions or tucked into their skirts. Some were topless and others covered, but they all seemed to share their madam’s affinity for gaudy eye shadow, as though they were franchise workers obliged to wear the same matching uniform. I shook my head and looked at Dad.
I said, “Some of these girls don’t look a day over fifteen.”
“They’re young, but they know what they’re doing. Or else they wouldn’t let them stay.”
“Doesn’t seem right. As young as they are.”
“It’s a different culture here in the valley. Kids start screwing as soon as they sprout their first fuzz.”
Before I could begin to wrap my head around the sexual disparities between San Joaquin and the coast, the old madam returned, accompanied by a heavyset young girl with curls of brown hair running down her naked shoulders and back. She was pudgy in the face and a bit snaggletoothed, but pretty enough all the same. For as much as she stared straight at me, I could hardly bring myself to look her in the eye.
The madam addressed me directly for the first time. She said, “This is Livia, Mr. Temple. Livia, may I introduce Mr. Elliot Temple, Jr. Mr. Temple is just in from the coast. I thought perhaps you could entertain him for a while.”
The child-whore smiled and said, “I’m sure I could find something to do with him.”
Dad laughed in a boisterous, over-the-top sort of way; honestly, I’m surprised he didn’t go so far as to actually slap his knee, he was so caught up in the performance of being jolly. After a childhood in which I could scarcely remember him hugging me, he now came up behind me, gripped my shoulder, and whispered, “Go get her, buddy.” Livia roped her arm around mine and began leading me upstairs.
The more I replay the events of that night in my head, the more improbable it seems that I could black out some small moments and be able to recall others with such clarity and detail. The hike up the stairs, for example, as well as the first stages of my eventual undressing, was wiped completely from memory by the time I awoke in the morning. The next thing I remember after leaving the parlor was sitting on the side of a queen bed in my underwear watching Livia roll her stockings down her legs two inches at a time. Her legs were fine in the conventional sense, but all I could think of were pale sausages being torn raw from their translucent casings. Perhaps I wasn’t really drunk enough to black out. Perhaps it’s possible that, in wanting so desperately to forget my first foray into adult sensuality, my brain had tried suppressing everything that happened to me that night, but, finding itself unable to erase the most important and formative events, it settled for omitting the transitional periods, the in-between moments that connected one trauma to another.
Livia stroked my thigh and asked if this was my first time. Already embarrassed, I closed my eyes and shook my head before she had even finished asking the question.
“Who told you? Dad, Kylee, or one of the others?”
“No one told me anything, baby. I was just curious.”
“Right. Is that how you got into this line of work? Out of curiosity?” I looked at her again and saw that her smile had vanished. With as much sexual experience as she must have had, it was easy to forget that she was at least a couple years younger than me, that in all likelihood she was just barely old enough to enroll in high school. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. Or if I did, I’m apologizing for it now.”
She laughed abruptly, resuming her hand’s playful busywork around my swimsuit area. “No worries, baby. You’re funny. I like that in a man.”
She stood and walked to the old fashioned vanity table and retrieved a condom from the bottommost drawer. From behind, her nudity was frank and unpretentious; thighs and ass and furrowed labia all united in one seamless, all-encompassing erogenous zone. I tried to put myself in the mood to do what was expected of me. It wasn’t a physical problem; I had been hard since before she took off her skirt. The difficulty was in shrugging off the feeling of general misery that had been plaguing me since before we arrived, in persuading my mind to enjoy the pleasures of the body when all I could think of was Dad waiting downstairs, drunk and boastful, believing he had succeeded in making his son a man. Livia sat back down on the edge of the bed. She scooted closer and touched my arm tenderly.
“What is it, baby? What’s the matter?”
I wiped the tears from my eyes with both hands, but more came pouring out to take their place. I said, “I’m fine. Look away. Just give me a minute.”
“It’s all right to be nervous. Everyone is at first.”
I was practically hyperventilating at that point. I gritted my teeth and dug my fingernails into the mattress. “Could we just sit here? Please? Could we just sit here until the time’s up?”
Livia wrapped a strand of hair around her finger and drew the curls out as straight as possible. She glanced nervously at the different walls, as if the place were equipped with hidden peepholes like something out of a campy movie from the last century. She said, “Your dad’s already paid up, baby. If I don’t deliver and word gets out, the boss’ll paint my ass black and blue without a second thought.”
“The lady from downstairs?”
“She just keeps an eye on things. The boss is a big guy with a bad temper. I can’t risk him finding out we didn’t fuck.”
My breathing had returned to normal, but still I couldn’t stop myself from crying. She leaned into me and pressed her naked breast against my back. I said, “I don’t know…I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” and right away she started to hum soothingly while running her soft fingertips down my spine. This wretched young girl, inelegant child of the whorehouse, had become my caretaker in a moment of pain and humiliation. I had gone searching for God, and instead I had found a caricature straight out of pulp erotica, the oppressed and motherly nymphet who could satisfy any number of secret fetishes from the most perverted end of the spectrum. She waited until I had finished bawling before reaching into my boxers and slipping the condom over me.
“That’s it, baby. You just lie back and let me do all the work. You know any girl here would count herself lucky to have a go with you. So smart, so sensitive, so strong. A real gentleman. Not like most of the riffraff we get in here.”
I closed my eyes again and felt her wet lips form a suction-tight seal over my neck. I was going to die young, of that I was certain, and in the end all I would ever know about sex would be derived from secondhand gossip and a few minutes of sweaty straddling with an obese harlot. So be it, I decided. It was easier to endure with my eyes closed, resting flat on my back, imagining that the weight I felt pressing down on me was really the supernatural presence I had been seeking all along.
I gave the widows my demands and returned to the Blossom Road to await their response. One week may have been an overly generous amount of time to let them mull it over, especially with Russert waiting to hear from me, but I suspected it might end up working to my advantage; the longer they had to think about it, the more time they had to sweat. The threat of losing everything (farm, money, and all) would be too much for most people to handle, and with five scared women facing down the threat of ruin, I figured it wouldn’t be long before internal divisions began to undercut the united front they had presented me with when I spoke to them. As it happened, only two days passed before one of them came to see me in secret. She appeared outside my door in the late afternoon, a gangly roughneck accompanying her for protection.
I cleared some empty jars off the easy chair and said, “Please have a seat. Hopefully we can get this thing squared away before it gets any more awkward for all of us. The moment I saw you, I had you pegged as a refined and savvy lady. I hope I’m right.”
Jennifer lowered herself onto the very front of the seat cushion an
d crossed one leg over the other. Her bodyguard looked all around the room for another chair that didn’t exist, then leaned his back against the wall with his narrow thighs abutting the air conditioner. Jennifer said, “All I’m interested in is seeing this mess resolved in the quickest way possible. That, and ensuring that my children aren’t cheated out of what’s rightfully theirs.”
“I understand completely. Before we begin, though, perhaps your associate wouldn’t mind waiting outside. We’re getting into some very delicate information here, after all.”
“You don’t have to worry about Dale. He’s been my foreman since your father first brought me to the valley years ago. I trust him as much as I trust anyone.”
“Fair enough. Would either of you care for a drink? I’m afraid all I have is local homebrew, but maybe I can place an order with the front desk.”
Jennifer said, “Thank you, no. I’m fine.”
Dale stepped forward and studied the empty jars with his hands in the pockets of his jeans. He said, “I wouldn’t mind a little pick-me-up now that you mention it. From the look of ‘em, I’d say you got these offa those Sarafian boys up near Minkler. Am I right?”
“I wouldn’t know. An associate of mine picked them up while passing through the area. But you’re welcome to have some, Dale, as an associate of a wife of my father.”
Dale nodded amicably and passed me one of the half-empty jars from the nightstand. I twisted the lid off and passed it back to him for the first lukewarm pull. We carried on like that for a little while, passing the jar back and forth like regular old hillbillies, until finally Jennifer got us back to the business at hand.
She said, “First of all, I want to say that I appreciate where you’re coming from, and why you felt compelled to take such extreme measures to get what you’re entitled to. There are times when taking the moderate, tactful route only invites others to take advantage of you. I realize that now from bitter experience.”
I nodded and set the jar back down on the nightstand. “You can imagine my surprise the day I discovered everything my father had ever earned was tied up in these five small farms in the valley, each one with a different Mrs. Temple at the helm. Now try to imagine what I felt, besides surprise, when I learned the five of you had invested his entire estate in some half-cocked cooperative venture.”
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