Authors: Stephen Dobyns
The girl’s sweaty fingers squeaked on the pole. She drifted to a stop, putting her hands down low on the cold metal, then kicking her feet so they rose up and curled around the pole until she was upside down with the veils swirling over her head and the sequined V of her bikini bottom catching the light. She imagined the sequins sparkling, the men slowing their drinking to watch, the stupid pigs, the hairy scum. One man whistled, and one of her regulars yelled her name: “Misty!” She was Misty. She slid down onto her shoulders and did a backward roll and when she stood up the top part of her costume fell away into her hand. Tensing, she waited for the jokes about her flat chest, the jeering that sometimes came—not all the time, but enough to grind her guts. But this time no one shouted about tiny tits or banana body and Misty let the veils drop at the side of the stage, then did a slow cartwheel back to the pole as Mick Jagger sang about “some Puerto Rican girls who’re dying to meet you.” It amused her that the thousands of dollars Dolly had spent on gymnastics classes now let her be such a hotshot, as Bob called her, doing tricks that none of the other girls could match.
A handstand let Misty slide her feet up the pole again, gripping it with her thighs. As she turned, she extended her tongue, flicking it against the shiny metal, which tasted of salt from the other girls’ sweaty hands. A man pounded his fist on a table so that a bottle overturned, and he or someone else whistled. But she had detached her mind from where she was and thought how good it would be to get back to the apartment she shared with two of the other dancers, how she would take a long bath and listen to her Walkman in the tub—Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny on the CD
Beyond the Missouri Sky,
because away from the club she hated to listen to any music she could dance to. And she thought how she wouldn’t be working tomorrow and she would take the T to Revere Beach, then to a movie or the Cambridgeside mall, where she could walk and walk and look in the shops, but she wouldn’t buy anything—she was saving her money. She’d spend the whole day by herself and if anyone spoke to her she would tell him to fuck off, fuck off, because she’d been dancing too much, getting her ears too full of those people’s cheap noise. Isolation was what she wanted, because in two months at the club she had seen girls burn out on stage—dancer meltdown. It scared her because it seemed so easy and she thought, I could do that. I’ve got to be careful.
Misty arched back in a slow flip, then she spun away from the pole and sent her hands into a splayed-fingered ballet around the gold clasp that held the bottom part of her costume in place, inserting her thumbs under the elastic and pulling the waist band from her waist, letting it snap back, then pulling it again and holding it with her elbows out to the side, striding to the music along the perimeter of the meat rack. But because she’d been staring at the lights, she could see little except thick masculine shapes and the lights of the video games and three pinball machines along the back wall, and she realized that was a mistake because she wanted to find out if the man was here, the one with a sport coat and tie who had been coming for the past several days and drank only Coke and watched only her. He didn’t seem hungry or excited, though; it was as if he were seeing not a naked young girl but a piece of furniture, something not special or collectible, only part of his job. That had worried Misty and she thought he might be a cop, but Bob swore he knew all the cops and he’d never seen this guy before. Even so, Misty hoped she wouldn’t see him again, because if he wasn’t a cop or a nutcase, then he could be a PI. It was Gypsy who said he might be a PI, and Misty had to ask what that meant. “Private detective, dummy,” Gypsy told her, not mean but sarcastic, as was her way.
If the man was a detective, then Misty knew what would be coming next. Partly that frightened her and partly she felt relieved, because she already had four thousand dollars put aside, and though she meant to save more and have ten grand by Thanksgiving, she was worried she might blow it on something else or melt down or buy drugs and forget about her plan—about the only thing that mattered in her life, the reason she had been shaking her butt in men’s faces since the July 4 weekend, when she had started work, getting her ears full of the noise, the men’s talk, words that were meant to be sweet or sexy or macho but that made her hate them, made her want to reach into the men’s pants and rip away their pricks like yanking weeds out of the ground.
Misty went into a forward roll as Mick sang, “I guess I’m lying to myself because it’s you and no one else,” and when she came onto her feet she was holding the bottom part of her costume in her left hand and keeping the splayed fingers of her right mockingly across her pubic hair as men shouted. She turned her eyes away from the lights now because she wanted to see who was there, wanted to drag her eyes across each male face. She was naked except for the chain around her waist and the chain around her ankle. Her skin was a light bronze from the three times a week she went to the tanning parlor. No strap marks or bikini lines: she never showed her skin on the beach. Just above her buttocks and around her coccyx was her one extravagance, a tattoo of the biological symbol for woman in bright blue and red and the size of a closed fist so the scumbags would know they weren’t looking at a boy when they stared at her ass, the tight, muscular buttocks each forming half a golden peach. She bent forward and ran her spread fingers down her thighs to her ankles, gripping them as she turned a slow 360 degrees, showing her tattoo to the entire room.
Then, at the end of the bar, she spotted him in his tie and sport coat and this time he wasn’t alone. Misty recognized the other man even before she saw his mustache, knew him just by the curve of his shoulders, the thick graying hair he was so vain about. She believed she could have spotted him if the room had been pitch dark. Even at this distance she felt she could see the black hairs on the backs of his hands and the yellow flecks in his brown eyes, turd-brown eyes, she called them.
Misty began spinning around the perimeter of the stage with her arms outstretched. Several of her regulars called to her but she ignored them. On the far side from the two men, she fell to her stomach, then she wriggled snakelike across the tiles with her tongue darting and her fingertips fluttering against the cheeks of her ass. Reaching the edge, she pushed herself up into a handstand and came down with her back to the men, bending over with her legs wide apart, down, down until her hands rested on the floor and her peroxided hair dragged on the tiles as she looked back between her legs at the two men at the end of the bar, the one she didn’t know and the one she hated, pursing her lips and kissing the air, before gripping her ankles and dragging her red nails up the backs of her legs, leaving parallel scratches on the backs of her thighs till the heels of her hands touched her buttocks. She let her fingertips play against the black diamond shape of her pubic hair, let her fingertips caress the creases of her vulva, and all to the same precise beat of the song, “Miss You,” which was now coming to an end. Then she dug two fingertips of each hand into the bristly pubic hair and began to draw the flesh apart, holding her vagina open with two fingers of one hand as she inserted the index finger of the other, listening to men shout and hearing Bob’s angry voice because she had broken the club’s primary rule, the rule that stood at the head of a hundred other stupid rules and that would cost her the job, but what did it matter? This was her last night, she was already out of here.
The music stopped, not because the song had ended but because Lucy at the bar had flicked the switch. Misty stood up and walked to where she had left her costume and cigarettes, striding as purposefully as a soldier, with her chin raised. Men were shouting and whistling. She shook a cigarette out of the pack, stuck it in her mouth, and lit it, clicking the Zippo shut as she blew a mouthful of smoke at the ceiling. Then she walked quickly to the dressing room. She heard someone calling to her, “Jessica, Jessica!” But that wasn’t her name. Her name was Misty.
She went through a door that swung shut behind her and tossed her costume onto the table. Out there she had felt mean and proud of herself, but all of a sudden she could feel herself choking up as tears filled her eyes.
“What in the fuck’s wrong with you?” said Gypsy angrily. She stood in front of Misty, six inches taller in high heels and a mountain of red hair, with her artificial breasts shoved between the two of them like small haystacks scantily contained by pink polyester. “You’ve just thrown away your job—an easy grand a week into the trash. You know that Bob won’t take that shit.”
“I’m quitting anyway,” said Misty, wiping her hand across her eyes and going to her locker. She worked the numbers of the combination. “You can have my costumes if you want them.”
“Who’s the guy you were showing your pussy to? I hope he’s paying you big money.”
Misty pulled on her blue jeans. “My old man,” she said. She didn’t look at Gypsy.
“You were sticking your fingers up yourself for your father?” Gypsy had lowered her voice. There was still shouting out in the club.
Misty drew a blue University of New Hampshire sweatshirt over her head. It hung halfway down her thighs. “Not my father, my stepfather. My father’s dead.” Her voice was neutral—the practiced tone she thought she had perfected. She tied her money belt around her waist and shoved it under her jeans. Then she stuck her feet into her Tevas and adjusted the Velcro. She grabbed her green backpack off the hook and collected a couple of loose dance tapes from the shelf along with a squirrel-sized brown teddy bear that was missing an eye. The bear’s name was Harold; she couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t have him.
Misty wished she could wash the makeup off her face and body but she didn’t have the time. Maybe later, depending where Tremblay took her. She hoped the detective would stay with them. She was afraid of being alone with Tremblay. Misty dug a blue Red Sox cap out of her bag, then twisted up her hair and pulled the cap over it, turning the cap around so the bill pointed down her back. Taking a towel from a hook, she rubbed it across her mouth and face, trying to remove her lip gloss. The towel smelled of sweat and cheap perfume.
There was a hammering on the door and Bob entered without waiting for a response. He was tall and he shaved his head to look mean. “You’re done. You’re outta here!” He stood holding the door open. Misty could see her stepfather standing just beyond him. Tremblay was brushing his thumb against his gray mustache, and he wore a little smile to indicate he wasn’t surprised. He was never surprised.
“Where’re you going to go?” asked Gypsy, already taking the costumes from the other girl’s locker and putting them in her own.
“School,” said Misty. “I’m going to school. I’m going to start tenth grade.” She tossed the dirty towel at Bob, then walked past him without saying a word.
—
The bigger of the two men walking along the edge of the surf was laughing and scuffing his heels in the sand. It was a cool night on the first day of fall and the men wore dark jackets. The moon to the east was a little past full and seemed to lay a silver finger on the water off Revere Beach as the surf advanced and retreated with hisses and melancholy sighs. There was no wind.
“If you could of seen him, Sally,” he was saying, “I almost pissed myself. That would have made both of us. He was wearing these light pants and suddenly I seen this big wet spot. I couldn’t help it, I snorted right through my mask.”
The smaller man chuckled appreciatively, but all he wanted was to go home. It was past two-thirty and he had an appointment at eight the next morning to look at a greyhound puppy, “a guaranteed champion,” he’d been told.
“He didn’t even notice what he’d done. ‘Jesus, you piece of shit,’ I told him, ‘look what you done to yourself. Didn’t you have a mommy?’”
The smaller man chuckled again. His name was Sal Procopio and he was twenty-six. The guy with him, Frank, was a little older. Sal didn’t know Frank’s last name, or rather, he’d heard Frank give several—all of them French, so maybe he was a Canuck. For that matter, Sal didn’t even know if the guy’s first name was really Frank, so maybe that was phony as well. In fact, the longer he knew Frank, the less he knew him, as if each new fact took away a piece of knowledge instead of adding to the small amount already accumulated. Sal wasn’t sure how he felt about this.
Frank laid an arm across Sal’s shoulder, squeezing the muscle. With his other hand, he accompanied his story, spreading his fingers or closing them into a fist. “But, hey, I didn’t have a lot of time. The longer you’re inside, the bigger chance you take. You hear what I’m saying? What if a cop had wandered in? It could be anybody, some alkie wanting another drink. The chickenshits are worse than the tough guys. They don’t fuckin’ move! This guy just stood there and pissed himself. ‘What’s wrong,’ I tell him, ‘ain’t you seen a gun before?’ Asshole in a liquor store. You’d think he was a virgin. These guys get stuck up all the time.”
Sal tried to keep his feet out of the water but Frank kept bumping him. Although the tide was going out, every so often a large wave sent the foam right up to his basketball shoes. The two men were walking south. Few people were visible: some couples making out but no one nearby. Sal had brought girls to Revere a few times when he was a kid but he didn’t like getting sand in his Jockey shorts and he didn’t like being seen. People knew what you were doing. Even under a blanket, they could tell what was going on. If you couldn’t afford a motel, then you had no business with a girl in the first place, that was how he saw it.
Frank gave his shoulder another squeeze. “So I tell him to get a move on. I should never of been friendly in the first place. ‘We’re closing in ten minutes,’ he says. His back was to me and he hadn’t seen the mask. So I put the barrel against his ear, smacking him a little so I could hear the clunk against his skull and I asked him as sweet as I could, ‘You ever seen one of these?’ He cut his eyes toward it and I cocked it. That little double click—it’s almost like music. That’s when he pissed himself. Jesus, I laughed.”