“That’s good.”
“I came here because the woman I care about has a daughter who’s a prostitute and she wants out, and a guy told us this is were she is. Me and her, and a friend of mine, we come here to find her and take her home.”
“So you ain’t after pussy?”
“No. Well, I mean, not that way.”
“You want this gal from the whorehouse?”
“If she’s there. I don’t even know she’s there. I don’t even know there’s a whorehouse.”
“You don’t know much, do you, boy?”
“Frankly, I don’t.”
The old man rummaged around in his shirt pocket and came out with a nasty-looking hunk of a chaw. He chewed off a bite and worked it around in his jaw and studied me for a while. He got up and turned off the television set. He went over to the little refrigerator and got out a soft drink and twisted the top off, said, “Want a CoCola?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That would be nice.”
He pushed the drink toward me and I took it. He picked up the soft drink bottle with the fly in it and spat down the bottle neck, splashing the fly off its island and into the nasty brown ocean. He shook the bottle and watched the fly go under.
We sat that way for a while, me sipping a Coke, and him chewing and spitting into his bottle, shaking that fly around in the spit. He said, “You found this whorehouse, what were you going to do?”
“I told you that.”
“But you didn’t say how. Let me tell you somethin’. This house you’re lookin’ for, it exists. It’s down the road a piece. There’s busloads come to that house. It’s out in the sticks ’cause it don’t bust up no big laws out here. That’s the way they like it around here. They want stuff like pussy shacks out of sight and out of mind. There’s people drive from Oklahoma City just to drop their goodies there. There’s conventioneers hit that place on the way to Oklahoma City and back from. It’s busy. And it’s not a casual kind of place neither. Least it ain’t if you really know how to look around.”
“I’m not sure I follow you.”
“The guys run that place, they ain’t just big thugs, they got guns. They’re not going to take kindly you takin’ one of their whores. I think they might twist your arm behind your back, make you yell calf rope, then break your arm off and stick it up your ass. Then they might shoot you and bury you under a rosebush somewheres.”
“That’s what my buddy thinks,” I said. “And I’m starting to believe it. The view seems to have a consensus of opinion.”
“But you’re going in anyway?”
“Yes.”
“This ain’t no daughter of yours?”
“No.”
“This woman whose daughter it is ain’t your wife?”
I shook my head.
“This gal ain’t no stepdaughter?”
“Nope.”
The old man shook his head. “I hate them pimpin’ sonsabitches. I ain’t got nothing against pussy, and I reckon some gal wants to sell it, that’s her business, but this place ain’t so cut-and-dried. I think a gal wants to leave, they don’t just let her leave. I think she wants to go, they ought to let her go. It ain’t the pussy sellin’ bothers me, it’s the lack of free will.”
“I take it this place has been here a while?”
“Many, many years. Used to be run by a madam named Lilly Filigree, and I think most of the girls there chose to be there then, and from what I know, she treated ’em good. When I was a young man I went up to there myself, rode a little tail up the canyon oncet or twicet. But now, last ten years or so, it’s just business. All business, and it ain’t the girls’ business.”
“Anyone ever tried to close the place down?”
“Oh yeah, back when there were enough people in this town to fill a church, a bunch of self-righteous old biddies tried to shut it down. Mostly ’cause their men were up there getting their ashes hauled now and then.”
“They didn’t have any luck?”
“Sheriff, he kind of slapped the madam’s wrist now and then. Ran some of the girls in around election time. But it didn’t mean nothin’. But it’s not that way now. Not just a bunch of ladies makin’ a buck for a fuck. Folks run that show, they ain’t sweet. Used to be a colored lady up there ran it. She came after Filigree. She was as mean as a goddamn crocodile. Seen her a few times in town. Always wore this big old sack dress.”
“A muumuu,” I said.
“You say so. She went away and there was a cowboy midget and a big bastard runnin’ it. Midget liked to come to town so people would look at him. Strutted around like a banty rooster. Right proud of himself, he was.”
I thought about Red and his expensive Western-cut suits. I thought about the lady in the muumuu, resting in a box at the bottom of some lake in Arkansas. Maybe still in the muumuu, shit-stained as it was.
Taxi Man spat into the soft drink bottle, said, “Figured that midget and ole bigin’ was runnin’ things. Then they were gone too and there’s a fellow up there now scares me just to see him come into town and sit in the
