Kamikaze Lust (32 page)

Then, as if on cue, came a vision in white taffeta over lustrous cocoa-brown limbs, her hair braided and beaded just like Shade’s. She shimmied up to us under a sexed-up syncopation, a gloriole of spots and smoke rings, saintly in her transparent gown, and a resemblance so strong I had to fight the desire to jump up on stage with her. Did this make me sexist? Misogynist? I didn’t give a damn, with the way she swung her legs around the silver pole at the end of the bar, pirouetting like a championship figure skater, before she was back in front of us, on her knees in a slow, rhythmic grind.

I followed her back and forth, watching as she discarded her billowing robe, teased the straps of her bleach-white lingerie in her own dance of the seven veils, and if I’d become Herod to her Salomé, so be it. It was my head she was dancing for.

“We can buy her if you want,” RR said, but I shushed him away, pretended he was just another annoying interloper. Besides, I was sick of all the buying and selling. I wanted to give the rest of my money to Salomé and be poor again.

Salomé flung off her bra and was left in her garter, g-string, and white pumps. What talent set against the dreariness of the club. I reached into my pocket and took out a hundred dollar bill, thinking this had to be one of the craziest things I’d ever done. I rolled the bill tightly, waved my hand in the air, reeling with its power, its privilege. She came to me, bent at the knees, and I started to sweat. Fingers shaking, I stuffed the bill in her garter, unable to look at her.

“Wow! Thanks a lot,” she said, and her voice sounded as if she’d just inhaled a balloon full of helium. With those few words, the entire picture burst.

Salomé left the stage, Ben Franklin in tow, for a trip down lap-dance lane with some slovenly drunk. I eyed her for a little while, until I must have looked as bored as the rest of the men sitting beneath the cavalry of women in fancy pajamas.

“How does it feel?” RR chided me.

“You think it’s funny. So I gave a hundred dollars to a woman who sounds like Mickey Mouse.”

“She deserved it. You should have seen your face while she was dancing.”

“I wish she hadn’t said anything though.” I stood up and gave him a tug around his neck. “I’m going to the bathroom.”

The door had a big sign that said, “Girls Only.” I peed and went to the row of sinks where two dancers were preening. A slow night, they agreed, one helping the other find an unmarked patch of stocking to catch the snaps of her garter. Slow night? They hadn’t met the grasshopper from New York yet.

I bummed a cigarette from the bestockinged brunette, sympathized with her about the scarcity of stockings because everyone nowadays wore panty hose. “What’s a slow night?” I asked.

“Depends,” the other one, an older-looking redhead, said. “What do you do?”

“Actually, I’m unemployed.”

“Well, girlfriend, why didn’t you say so?” the brunette said, jumping down from the sink, yanking up her stockings. In a flash I had the rundown: no total nudity, free drinks, dances anywhere from five to ten minutes, lap dances negotiable, make anywhere from a few hundred to a thousand bucks a shift. “Nothing compared to the scene on the strip,” both women lamented, as if too many nights at The Rocking Horse had already squelched their dreams of rising through the ranks. As they spoke I couldn’t stop thinking about the cash I’d been making on my orgasms; how I’d given up for money what I’d never been able to do for love. The money wasn’t even real to me, as if it were worthless outside city limits.

Before leaving the bathroom, I took out my wad and handed each of the dancers one hundred dollars. “What are you, nuts?” the brunette said. The redhead raised her eyebrows, gritted her teeth at her friend.

“I’m with a guy outside, dance on his lap or something.”

“Together?”

“Sure, why not?”

I left the bathroom and found RR. We walked to a darker bar in the back, where I became more interested in the men watching the dancers than the dancers themselves. Disengaged, emotionless, the men mirrored the lackluster zombies who sat at the slot machines all night long. No wonder they kept the sex separate from the gambling. Too much of the undead at play was enough to depress anyone.

My gaze fell upon the empty, black walls and swung a while with the flickering light of the disco ball. I turned my head to the left and caught a fleeting murmur of familiarity. As if I were reacting to an image in a dream, I thought, Oh, no, Neil’s here. Slammed with a heavy techno beat, streaks of light, I blinked my eyes. This happens often: You’re in a place where you know someone else is, and you see that person on the faces of strangers. I stepped forward to get a better look. Stared down the pudgy face that could have been Neil’s, although I remembered him as being much thinner. He returned my stare, and even in the haze I could see those eyes so much like my own, that nose, Dad’s could-have-been-a-movie-star nose, if only the rest of the package had come through as well.

The last time I’d seen Neil was at Grandpa’s funeral, when he almost knocked over the casket fighting with Mom before the service. He was so obviously high, he couldn’t stay seated. I think that was the day he hit Grandma.

A heavy-metal clanking, words like prayer, kill, and slaughter backing up a dancer with leather chaps and pierced nipples, as Neil and I moved toward each other. Part of me wanted to kick him in the balls for the hell he’d put me through as a child, but I also felt sorry for him. Finding him here, I knew he hadn’t changed much. Me being here, now that was something to write home about.

He stood in front of me, balder than I’d remembered, with a gold chain hanging from his neck.

“Is Ma dead yet?” he said.

“Far from it, she’s getting married.”

“Oh.” He nodded his head up and down as if something made sense. “This a friend of yours?” he said, pointing his head toward RR who’d come up behind me. “You a private dick or the real thing?”

“Who’s this jerk?” RR said.

I took a deep breath. “He’s my brother.”

“Brother? I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“I’ve got two, actually.”

“Listen,” Neil said, a large vein pulsating in his keg of a neck. “I think I know who you are, and I don’t owe them shit back on the Coast. Ask anyone, it was all a set up.”

“He lives here? Why didn’t you tell me you had a brother here?”

“I don’t know, it never came up,” I said, realizing then that I didn’t want RR to know I had a brother, a mother, that I’d once had a father, too. Being with him was about being brand spanking new, like his furniture.

“You should have told me,” RR said.

“Why?”

“Because you should have.”

Neil slammed his hand on the bar causing RR and me to jump back a few steps. “All right, what the fuck is going on!” Neil screamed. “I want to know what you’re doing here, Rachel. If he’s not a cop, who sent you?”

I was about to answer when the two dancers from the bathroom joined us, and for some reason assumed Neil was the guy I’d wanted them to work over. They started hanging on him, calling him baby. His face reddened and on instinct I backed up. “Get the hell away from me!” he screamed.

“It’s okay, honey, she already paid,” the redhead said.

“Who?”

She pointed to me. Neil’s eyes flared. He swung his arm out in front of him, shoving off both the redhead and the brunette. The redhead fell back against the wall and hit her head. I wanted to drop to my knees and beg her forgiveness. It was all my fault, trying to buy her with RR’s money. I started moving toward her, but Neil stopped me.

“Get back!” he said.

RR pushed past my shoulder and, as if in time-delay, I saw him swing back his arm and crack his fist across Neil’s face. Neil tripped backwards. I was stunned, as if he’d hit me, too. I remembered Neil as being invincible. A part of me wanted to throw my arms around RR, but I sensed that was the last thing I should do. He looked even angrier than Neil did.

Within seconds, a couple of goons in black flight jackets were escorting the three of us out the front doors into a hostile torrent of sunlight. I hadn’t realized we’d been out that long. Neil rubbed his cheek and spit out a wad of blood.

“All right, let’s go, Bozo,” RR said.

“I want to talk to my sister.”

“What makes you think she wants to talk to you?”

“Leave us a minute.” I grabbed RR’s wrist, not knowing what I was I trying to do. I was so out of my league and in the goddamn daylight. This must be what hell is, neon and brimstone in the morning. My brother’s face in the light of dawn.

Thankfully, RR walked back to his Pathfinder. “All right,” Neil said. “What are you doing in Vegas, what are you doing
here?
”

“I’m on vacation.”

“At The Rocking Horse?”

I shrugged. “Yeah, I don’t know what else to say.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

“No, you don’t understand. I wasn’t planning on seeing you.”

“I don’t trust you, Rachel. Something’s up.” Neil reached into the front pocket of his jeans and took out his wallet. He handed me a business card. I quickly read the bold letters: Neil DeSilva, Betting Consultant.

“You’re still Italian?”

Neil winced. “You come by if you want, but leave your boyfriend home.” He touched his cheek again. “I owe that guy one.”

“Forget it, okay.”

He nodded reluctantly, and we said goodbye. I knew he was watching me walk back to the Pathfinder and climb inside. But RR wouldn’t move, let alone start the car. We sat silently waiting for Neil to leave the parking lot in his bright orange pickup truck. “What’s that?” RR pointed to my hands.

“His card.”

RR ripped it from my fingers. “A betting consultant,” he laughed. “Scumbag.” He dangled Neil’s card in front of me, but when I reached for it, he pulled it away. We played this hand a few more times.

“Come on, give it to me!”

“What’ll you do for it?”

I rolled my eyes, pleaded. He turned up his lip and pretended to tear the card. “Don’t!” I said. He smiled his fuckyou smile, and I knew I was defeated. “What do you want?”

His right hand pushing my head into his lap said it all. The smell of stale beer and ashtrays clung to his jeans. I unzipped him, hoping to rip out a few pubic hairs, but found him protected by his briefs. He was already hard when I squeezed my lips around him. “You think you’re so smart,” he said. “That you’re just playing.” I tried to break free, but the harder I tried, the harder he gripped my hair. I wanted to slice my teeth through his ten or twelve inches; what difference did it make, I still gagged. But I was afraid of hurting him so badly he’d hurt me even worse. His shoulders jerked forward and his breathing grew heavier.

“Look at yourself, Silver.” He pushed deeper into my throat. “Sucking cock in the parking lot of a titty bar.”

All I could think was I had to make him come, swallow him down, but I knew he was holding out for the finish, the proof on Silver Ray’s featured face. I cupped both of my hands around the base of his cock to keep from suffocating. His thrusts came faster, slapping against the back of my throat. I felt mucus dripping from my nose and wanted to vomit. Instead, I pushed both of my hands against his thighs and sprung up, heaving. He aimed, I shifted forward, and he hit the side of my neck, my hair, the collar of the jean jacket I’d borrowed from him. Not my face.

I wiped my neck with the sleeve of his jacket. He zipped up his pants, reached into his back pocket and handed me Neil’s card. I took it, disgusted with myself. Worse than doing it for money, this had been about my brother. “We can go now?” he said, tentatively, as if I’d been the one begging for it and he’d simply complied. “Well?”

“Yes.”

He started the engine and backed out of the parking lot. The strip, languid in the morning light, sagged behind us as if someone had pulled the life support on the entire city. I leaned my elbow against the window and stared out into the burnt bric-a-brac mountains, counting the Joshua trees all the way home.

THE THIRTY-FOOT COWBOY

RR stopped the Pathfinder in front of the address on Neil’s business card. Though he said he wasn’t happy about me visiting Neil, he sensed he couldn’t keep me locked away in his desert tower all day long. “How about one for the road?” he said. “We can do it right in front of his house.”

His anger from the parking lot returned, and after he’d been sort of sweet yesterday, letting me sleep a while, then cooking salmon for dinner. We ate by candlelight, watched a couple of John Wayne movies. Daybreak found me alone on the leather couch with a comforter draped over my fully clothed body. I was glad to be by myself, but couldn’t help feeling insecure. I got lost in that house without his hands on me.

“That was a joke,” he said.

“I’m laughing inside.” I jumped out and slammed the door behind me. The day was too perfect, hot enough not to need a jacket, with a light wind blowing. RR rolled down his window, stared; I wished for rain.

“What?” I balanced myself on the curb. He kept looking, as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t get it out.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Then go already. I can make it to the front door on my own.”

“Just remember, I know his phone number.” He fired the ignition. I watched the Pathfinder drift down the road, sandwiched between identical rows of stucco houses with waffled orange roofs. I took a deep breath and sat down on the curb until ten cars passed.

When I was confident he’d gone, I walked a couple of blocks to a busier intersection and called Shade from a payphone. I needed to hear her voice, needed to know she was still there. Her machine picked up. I felt my lips tremble and started rambling, words about it being too early, or too late. “Are you there?” I screamed. “Yes? No? Maybe? Shit!” I slammed down the phone, but held onto the receiver with both hands as if I were choking it. My head fell against the back of my hands. I shut my eyes and listened to the cars streaming by, the rap of jackhammers across the street. I was so alone.

Walking back to Neil’s, I passed the rows of houses like condos at a vacation resort, some with American flags hanging out front the way I remembered the stoops of Bay Ridge on patriotic holidays. But it was just another day in sprawling Las Vegas, where every day was the Fourth of July. It was still morning in America out here.