Chapter 37 #2
Not to say it was all orthodontia and amnesia.
Every woman in this place was here to make a buck, including me.
I noticed that some of the same boys who’d come in winking and flirting with the girls, once the deed was done, sneered coldly at them afterward.
This idea that a man would pay a girl for it but then be disgusted by her for it seemed more degenerate than what we were even running.
Near my table, a meaty-faced fellow with curls piled high to one side started screaming into a younger boy’s face.
I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but everything about the smaller one said quiet, from his round wire glasses to his delicate, slope-shouldered frame.
I wondered if he was a bird-watcher and if he’d been beaten up a lot in school.
I bet he’d cried when he found out that many birds die within a year.
“I don’t want to,” the younger boy was trying to tell the bigger one.
The older boy shook his head and screamed at him again; meanwhile, a small horror played in my head: What if me and Frances had been made to do this when we were seventeen or eighteen?
What if I’d had to egg Frances on to go upstairs and—.
I squeezed my eyes shut. I hated this business, I hated this night, and it wasn’t even eleven o’clock.
Minutes later I watched Flossy lead the delicate boy in the glasses into the darkness, and when they came back out twenty minutes later, his face was splotchy like he’d cried.
He vomited quietly into Mrs. Tartt’s azaleas.
Flossy came and stood at my table and barely over the music I heard her say, “Careful what you wish for, doll.”
By one in the morning, there were only a handful of boys left.
Parts of the yard had been turned to mud, and on the road, headlamps were moving north, taking the back way to campus.
I leaned over to see if any more were coming and saw the outline of a lone figure across the road, standing next to a parked car, very still, watching the house.
He looked like he had an overcoat on, or—could that be a dress?
Suddenly, a boy stuck his freckled face in front of mine.
“—said I ain’t here to dance, lady, I come for a whore.”
“I’m not for sale,” I said, jerking back from him.
The red-faced idiot punched me in the forearm. “Then get over there and bring me one that is.”
I slapped him hard across the face, and he stood there, shocked, his cheek bright as a tomato, and then one of the football boys grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the road, looking back at me like he was somewhat sorry for his friend’s bad manners.
Jesus. It took me a few seconds to recover from that. Then I leaned over again and in the quarter moon, I could still see the lone figure standing across the road. The car next to the person looked boxy, an older model of some kind. I started to get a sick feeling in my chest.
“Charlie, come here,” I called. She was standing on the porch steps, but as she came closer, the person got in the car.
“They’ve been out there watching us for a while,” I said.
The car rolled forward, headlamps off, and then turned so it was facing town—not the way the boys had come. It stopped. I made a move to get up, go see, but Charlie held me back. “Don’t,” she said. “Do nothing.”
The car snapped its headlights on and drove away. We had opened a brothel a few miles from the sheriff’s office and the new president of this state’s Anti-Vice League. I wasn’t sure if I trusted Charlie’s “do nothing” policy.
“The sheriff’s gonna come out here eventually, Charlie,” I said. “We know that as a fact. So maybe, like the girls said, we should do something to … prepare this place.”
“That’s why we have this ridiculous front in the first place,” she said.
Her face was turning plum. “It’s why I keep telling the girls the rules over and over, because the wrong person is bound to show up here.
We don’t know who or when, but for the next three weeks, this front has got to be rock solid. ”
After the last customer finally left around two that morning and we were all inside, I went around and double checked that every door was locked and the one without a key had a chair up against it.
In the quiet dining room, my ears still rang from the loud music, the beat still in my heart.
Thank God this night is over. Charlie set a roll of paper money on the green felt card table, and we both exhaled as it bloomed open.
It was a green budding miracle of presidents’ faces.
I was exhausted and starving. I dumped the Luzianne can out beside the bills.
It made a small mountain of change and a few dimes rolled off the table onto the floor.
“No picnic on your knees, is it?” Flossy said, watching me pick them up.
I felt a little ashamed. Flossy just laughed, though, and tipped over the Hurley Burley can, where they’d deposited the money from what they’d sold in liquor drinks, and kept on pouring in a clinking stream.
There was the sweet smell of Henry Tartt’s tobacco mixed with cash and change.
“How many drinks do you think we sold?” Charlie asked.
“It’s gotta be sixty or seventy,” Flossy said. “But we girls can’t be makin’ whoopee upstairs and drinks in the kitchen. This keeps up, you gotta get us some help, Charlie.”
Charlie nodded, though she had not smiled yet.
Ruby thumped in barefooted with her red heels hooked on her fingers. It seemed like bad judgment to have all the money sitting out, but maybe Charlie wanted them to see proof that the business was working. As if they didn’t know it.
Ruby raised a smeared eyebrow at what was on the table and asked Flossy, “How many, dick breath?”
“Seven,” Flossy said. The number made me shudder. “And I mighta dislocated a tonsil. You?”
“Nine,” Ruby said, “but three was just fist jobs.”
While the girls ate leftover potpie in the kitchen, Charlie sorted the bills while I counted nickels, dimes, quarters, half dollars, cartwheels, and a shoebox full of pennies some kid had brought in.
I recorded it in the ledger: sixty-three bourbons, ninety-eight dances, twenty-four cold drinks, fifty-three cigarettes, and the girls had turned twenty-nine tricks that tomorrow they’d probably act like were nothing, though surely they’d left behind an imprint of some kind, be it fingernails or a few moments of tenderness or, God help us, disease.
Charlie tucked each girl’s share of money into one of the envelopes pasted in the back of the Tartts’ books. Dixie and Trixie’s book was called The Glorious Adventure, which I’d enjoyed reading and would never quite think of the same, and Ruby’s was titled, of all things, A Preface to Morals.
After Charlie set aside an extra five for Mr. Binny, the partners’ shares came to fifty-seven dollars and ten cents each. That paid all the Calhouns’ back taxes, plus some, and put a good dent in what Charlie and Mrs. Tartt needed.
Across the table, Charlie said, “It was just one night, not time to celebrate yet,” and she pressed her lips together.
“Well it was a pretty good one,” I said and sighed. “And we’ve got a whole weekend left.”
She nodded and looked very close to smiling, but I could tell she wasn’t willing to do it yet. She likely wouldn’t until she had what she wanted in her arms and she was headed west.
There was a penalty for having a good night.
“Toss your dirty sheets down before you go to bed,” Charlie called up the stairs.
Flocks of white linens flew over the rail, sticky and smelling like bourbon and Brylcreem, stained with various shades of red lipstick.
Some had black cigarette burns and bloodstains and many had mud, presumably from boots the boys hadn’t bothered to take off.
One sheet came in halves, ripped clean in two.
While I’d sat watching the dancing, it’d been a war zone up there.
Charlie and I piled sheets in the washroom off the kitchen until the heap nearly reached my chin.
If we expected to fight another battle tomorrow, they’d all need to be washed and dried in the next fourteen hours.
Charlie tied an apron around her waist and knelt by the tub, blasting open the spigot.
“We’re gonna need some help, Charlie,” I said. “Especially if the whole weekend is like this.”
She nodded, staring at the water pouring into the tub.
“Well, we can’t send the sheets out. Those laundry ladies gossip too much.
What if—” Even before she said it, I was wishing she wouldn’t, though I’d had the same terrible idea.
“What if we asked Mrs. Tartt’s maids to come in?
They know how things work around here. You think they’re trustworthy? Or they’ll tell Mrs. Tartt?”
“Of course they’re trustworthy. And I don’t know how they’d tell her, she’s in Jackson, but …” I was trying to think of a better reason not to get them involved in this.
“Think they’re available?” Charlie asked.
Lie. Just lie and say they’re not. But everything on me was wilting, as I thought of Polly saying she couldn’t find more than a day’s work now and then and how nobody’d hire Picador because she was too old.
I sighed. “I think they’re probably … available,” I said.
“But I don’t want them to know what we’re doing here.
If they come, the girls have to stay upstairs, alright?
And—and they have to be gone way before we open.
” I nodded, thinking it through. “We’ll tell them we brought in boarders to earn money; therefore …
” I swept my hand across the mountain. “Sheets.”
Charlie pushed herself up, using the tub. “Birdie, they’re going to know, so we might as well tell them the truth.”