by Seth Pevey
Min Ji bounced into a seat next to G.D. “So, what are we going to do with them?” she asked. “How about a ransom? Have a look at this kid’s watch, man. He might be worth something.”
He put a long, thin arm around her.
“Let’s sleep on it, shall we my dear?”
Twenty
A person treading water in the middle of a lake has no cause to stop and reflect on the nature of lakes. Does she care how deep the lake goes? Ponder the truth of water? Is there any future besides maybe, just maybe, a sliver of shore on the horizon? Too distant and hazy to even see, but there all the same; abstract, because a treader’s future is measured in endurance, not in dreams. All she can think of is to keep her head above the water by any means necessary.
A treader of water has few choices, if any.
Tina Green wasn’t normally one for rumination, indulgent self-reflection or the like. Life had never afforded her much time for that. Her recent years had been a series of external calls to action. Do this, go there, earn that, get away from so and so. The search for meaning and purpose was a luxury, and one she’d never lavished in.
Tina had been treading from day one. Once in a while, others passed by on their boats, floating without effort, and started asking silly questions like why. Felix Herbert was just such a one.
She didn’t resent him for it though. It was not his fault, nor was it in her nature to harbor ill-will for those better off that she. She wasn’t even sure he was all that better off, but she could sense that immense naivety in him. It could only have come from a life spent floating. While he may have had an easier run, she thought he wasn’t the type who took it for granted. Probably not. Nor did he seem to look down on her there where she desperately gasped for air. In fact, he seemed to see her with a certain charity that was almost appalling, blindly unaware of all the baggage that came with a life like hers. All he saw was a woman dropped in the middle of a lake, and he seemed to want to reach out to her.
And here she was, doing something she wasn’t well versed in: the rumination, the reflection. Now she had cause to simply sit and think, in that long lull between dances, during which she was supposed to walk up to tables of strange men and offer them drinks and private dances. But now that she was taking some time to think about herself instead, she had determined that she might rather not. It had never been a phrase to cross her mind before now.
Now she found herself staring at her fake eyelashes in the mirror of her dressing room after hours, looking at the heavy rouge and caked white powder, and no longer seeing a version of herself that she appreciated.
It was equal parts upsetting and magical.
She’d arrived a bit early. It was ten AM when Mick opened the doors that Tuesday. No big festivals or conventions were in town, and it was a weekday morning, so Mick was letting some of the older girls work. They were girls who were on the wrong side of thirty five, who had given the best years of their lives to the pole, but who had now been almost entirely cast aside. Tina liked to talk to them. They knew things, and she was in a curious mood. She sat in the dressing room drinking coffee with one of them who was pushing forty.
Jolene from up north, who went by the name “Jo-Jo” on stage, had put on too much glitter again. The layers of sparkle around her eyes were robotic, disco, off-putting. She may have been wise in her four decades, but she was known for her scattered brains. She often burned her hair with the straightener, performed lap dances and forgot payment, and was no longer trusted with the cash register.
“So…what’s been new with you kid? I haven’t talked to you in a while.” Jolene asked her.
“Oh…not too much. Well, actually that’s not true. I’ve kinda started seeing a new guy.”
“My my…do tell. What kind of a guy are we talking about here?” Jolene leaned forward. There was nothing the older woman was quite so fond of as talk of romance. Even as they were growled over by roughnecks, drooled on by tanked tourists, stuffed with folded dollar bills: romance remained a thing separate from all the groping and dark-eyed lust.
“Well…let’s see. He is a like a private detective. Young. Younger than me by a few years. He likes dogs, just like I do. Seems real innocent and sweet, like he has a sort of boyish quality. But honest you know. Real honest. Like he tells things just the way they are. He is sensitive I think but kinda…naïve maybe?”
“Aww honey he sounds adorable. Do you have a picture?”
She shook her head. “It is kinda early. We aren’t even really official yet I don’t think.”
Jolene’s glitter did not mask her disappointment. She pointed a long, pressed-on nail at Tina. “Be careful messing around with young boys. You might wake up one day and find you need a real man…And then where will you be? What does he drive?”
Tina thought about it for a second. “You know, I don’t really know. His partner drives him around in an old El Camino.”
Jolene raised an eyebrow. The speakers came on and the MC began testing the volume levels with an auto-tune heavy rap song. “Tina, you ever give any thought to getting out of here?” she yelled over the racket.
Tina pulled up close to her mirror, looking into her nose pores, at how wide they were growing, and set about filling them with powder. “Yeah Jolene. I’ve been thinking about a lot of things lately, actually. You know, I love animals. I wanted to apply to veterinary school. But I don’t even have my GED yet. So we are talking eight years of school. At least.”
“What about a vet tech?”
“Yeah…maybe…anyway, it is all just a pipe dream right now. I can’t afford any of that stuff.”
Jolene rolled over on her wheeled stool and put a hand on Tina’s knee. The older woman’s cloying perfume was a bit on the heavy side. “That’s why you got to be real careful what kind of man you get mixed up with, kid. Wicked careful. The right one can help you be…your best self. But the wrong one…the wrong one will ruin your life.”
Tina glanced around the room to make sure no other girls had come in.
“Speaking of…you ever heard of a man coming in here…Well, it sounds kind of silly, but the man believes in voodoo. Or something like that. I think maybe he has dated a few girls from here. I keep hearing about him.”
Jolene winked at her and crossed her legs, filing down a particularly troublesome hangnail. “There’s all kinds in here, honey. Voodoo? Sounds like you’ve been hearing some tall tales. Closest I’ve had is a load of tourists drunk after a Voodoo tour, maybe. But what I do know is that there are a long string of want-to-be pimps that use this club as their personal hunting ground. I’ve heard of all sorts of men coming in here and whisking off girls over the years. Drives Mick crazy. Handsome, tall men. Men with businesses, boats and houses on the lake. Dangerous guys, too. Most usually, they run through a couple of girls and then leave them high and dry. That’s what happens more than anything. Never happened to me though, cause I’m wicked smart.”
They laughed together.
Tina shook her bangs from her eyes, plucking at a few troublesome hairs. “This guy in particular, though. Well…I told you my new boyfriend is a private investigator…anyway, he thinks that this Voodoo guy might have seduced a few women from the club here and maybe…actually….hurt them.”
Jolene stopped her filing and turned to her. “You don’t say?” The older woman made the sign of the cross against her chest. “Well, it’s a dangerous game we play kid, that’s for sure. What girls are we talking about here.”
Tina nodded. “Like maybe Min Ji… you remember her?”
Jolene’s crow’s feet deepened, the glitter breaking apart into tiny tectonic plates of candescence. “That little Asian thing? Shit…I knew she was green but I’d sure have talked to her…as rude and sassy as she was. You couldn’t tell her much of anything.”
“And now I’m just…worried about my boyfriend.”
“Aww, kid.” Jolene looked at her warmly, catching the anxiety in her voice, perhaps. She reached out. “Don’t wor
ry. God has a plan for us all.”
The two of them embraced. Tina could feel the perfume stinging her nostrils, but the tears that came pouring down her cheek, ruining her makeup, didn’t come from that. She hadn’t expected talking about this would cause such a surge of emotion.
The warm moment over, she dialed Felix. Straight to voicemail. Mailbox full.
She was preparing to try again when interrupted by a racket in the front of the house. She could just identify it as her boss, Mick, shouting a string of curses. Not that unusual.
Jolene made a big deal of rolling her eyes for Tina to see, and then said, “Sounds like he is having a fit. Why don’t you go up there and see if you can help. I find it is best to just smile and wait for him to tell you what’s the matter. Going up and asking a bunch of question just makes his temper worse.”
“Aww Goddamn, get that fucking thing out of here before he shits and pisses all over the carpet,” she heard Mick shouting. Tina peeked out into the main lounge and saw her boss standing with his arms spread wide near the front door. Mick stood as if facing off with some low interloper, like perhaps he was attempting to bounce a handsy dwarf. But the doorman pulled back the curtain, and in that flash of sunlight, Tina could see the offending silhouette. A surge of joy, followed by a quick jolt of trepidation, and finally, a sense of doom set in on her.
She ran towards the silhouette.
“Hey Scrappy!” she exclaimed. “How did you….”
But the dog didn’t jump up and slobber her like it should have. Instead, it gave out a low whine and weakly wagged its tail. She looked behind it, to the door, hoping for Felix’s shadow to follow. But it did not.
Mick looked like he was preparing to give the dog a kick, so Tina thrust herself between them before he could develop the idea any further. The bald, muscular club owner gave her an incredulous look.
“Is this your fucking dog girly?”
She ignored him, bent down to be on eye level with Scrappy, crouching so that she felt the waves of heat and swamp smell coming off of his fur. It was clear the animal had been through something. He was dirty and his fur was patched. The pads on his feet were nearly torn off, and he’d left red smudges of blood on the floor where he had entered. His panting was far too rapid and he whimpered when she touched him along the shattered rib. After a few moments the dog lay down on the ugly carpet and went limp.
“Aww, he’s all tuckered out,” Jolene said, coming up from behind, not registering the look of horror and fear on Tina’s face.
“I’m leaving Mick. I’ve got to get him to the vet.”
He snorted. “Toss him in the alley and get your ass on stage, girly.”
Other girls had started to watch. The bartender had put down his glass and stared at her, arms akimbo. “I’m leaving, she said. He needs help.”
“I scheduled you to bring in swinging dicks, not mutts to bleed all over the place. What the hell is with you lately? Put on some more makeup because you are on in five.”
But she was a woman with choices. The weight of it dawned on her then, as she looked squarely into Mick’s red-nosed face.
“Bye Jolene,” she said, a wave of sick exhilaration filling her up from the soles of her feet to the top of her head.
They all stared. Tina stumbled out the door under the strain of the animal’s substantial weight, her biceps trembling as she held him against her breast. Abandoning her high heels for stability, she slogged barefoot and unsteady through the septic muck of the Quarter, headed down Royal Street, to the only vet in the neighborhood. Its location was well known to her: it was a place she had dreamt about many a day, walking past on her way to work, imagining that she had already arrived. In the dream she would step into that address for a long day of work in a clean, well-lit place. She’d wear scrubs and make eye contact with couples scared and desperate. The fantasy was also peopled by the warm, moist eyes of creatures who needed her help—needed her brains and her skills, needed her fully-clothed knowledge and her steady, comforting bedside manner.
Two blocks in, Scrappy was not breathing. She could feel the stillness of his chest. The helplessness of her situation arrested her.
By the time she got to the front door of the clinic, the dog’s tongue had gone white and his legs were weakly kicking the air. She laid him down on the sidewalk and bore witness to a long, final whimper, a death rattle pushing the last air out of Scrappy’s lungs once and for all. Tina bit her lip hard and stared down at the poor creature.
The veterinarian must have been alerted by the waiting room secretary. She stepped out onto the curb in tennis shoes and a white, clean jacket. She wasn’t much older than Tina, but taller, more confident perhaps. She bent, put a hand in front of Scrappy’s face and wordlessly closed her eyes. Finally, she shook her head, smiled sadly at Tina.
“I’m sorry,” the vet said.
The tears came spilling out. “Do you do cremations?” Tina asked. It was all she could think to say.
She’d never been hurt by anything quite so much, not even in a life that had been nothing if not a long series of emotional injuries, disappointments, and failures of one kind or another. Nothing, not her father’s Irish exit from her life, not her mother’s weaponized shame, not her failure to complete high school, had hurt a fraction so much as seeing that stupid dog lying dead on the curb. It had crushed her.
But more than that it made her angry, furious even.
The broken ribs had to have been done by someone. Odds were good that it was the same guy Felix was chasing. The possibilities played out in her mind. And now she was all that was left, the only one who’d received this message.
She stood on Canal Street, deliberating on exactly what to do. She was still in her work clothes, though the vet had kindly given her a white lab coat to wrap around her body, squeaky plastic shoes for her feet. She wore them proudly among the crowd as the tears dried in the weak March breeze.
The downtown police station was off of Tulane Avenue, she remembered, and found herself walking towards it in her new getup. She strolled past the hospital with her head held high. The lunch crowd had come out in their white jackets and scrubs and lined up at a series of food trucks idling by the curb. She blended right into them as she made her way.
When she arrived to squeak the linoleum of the station’s lobby, she floundered. Exactly how was she going to put this? Excuse me officer, as you may see if you take a peak under my coat, I’m an exotic dancer, and my dog just died. The guy I like is missing out in the swamp, and I need you to send a team of armed policemen there to rescue him and avenge my dead puppy. Oh yeah, and Voodoo...or something.
Well, it would have to be something like that anyway, wouldn’t it? No one had as much respect for the truth as a stripper did. Here she was and she would say the naked truth: no frills or tassels to doll it up. The police would respond to that, wouldn’t they? The truth of it would simply shine so bright through all the bullshit that they would be saddling up before she could get another word in.
The man behind the counter, with his slow heavy eyes and suspicious demeanor, didn’t make her feel much confidence. She took a deep breath and launched into it anyway.
She told him the whole story as best she knew it. How Min Ji had gone missing. How Felix was a private detective who was investigating the disappearances. She name dropped Melancon, to no reaction. Then she went on to how the investigation had led the two detectives to Oyster Shell Road out on the Pearl River, where they had gone and not returned. That must be where they are. When she got to the part about the dog’s death she broke down and cried again, tearing open the wound anew and struggling against the hurt.
But the man behind the counter did not reflect her anger, pain, frustration or sadness. At least, his eyes did not respond with signs of empathy or alarm; they did not even lift from their heavy-lidded chambers. The eyes only looked at her like she was a tangled bit of fishing line.
At the very least, he passed her a wad of tissue.
“He was killed. Somebody kicked him and he ran and then died from it. And he’s not my dog. He’s my…my boyfriend’s.”
The man’s lazy eyes finally decided to make a move, tracing an arc like the way the sun traces its line through the sky.
“Did you see someone kick your dog?”
“Well…no.”
“And how long did you say this boyfriend has been missing.”
“Well, I guess since yesterday.”
The man pushed a clipboard towards her. It grated across his desk and the dark fish of his hand flapped on it a few times before he put it back in his lap.
“Why don’t you leave us some information here and…”
“No, no, you don’t get it. They might be in serious danger.”
“Because of a dog.”
“Yes. And well…I have a feeling they may be in bad trouble, and…”
“Just put it on here,” the man said, his eyes bouncing on the clipboard with finality.
The flaccid paperwork filled, she found herself back out in the daylight and moving towards the club, but not before taking a quick detour to the hardware store just across from the park. She had her mind made up.
Tina Green stood on Bourbon Street taking a long look at the so called “gentlemen’s club”, and thought a great while about some of the choices she had made in her life: big choices that had seemed not to be like choices at all, little choices that passed by like trestles viewed from a speeding train.
There were ways in which you chose to become, or ways in which it simply happened to you without any will involved. She stood and stared at the neon lights, at the GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS signage and its large, garish letters. All that neon. The barker, Jim, stood by the door and looked at her with crossed arms. She stared back at him, but she did not go inside. She chose not to darken that doorway again with her guitar shaped silhouette. Never again, in fact.
Instead, she went right through the restaurant next door, where they knew her. She walked through the kitchen to friendly greetings, and out back to the shared courtyard, just back to the place where she knew that Mick kept his white Jeep Wrangler.