Krueger was always on point. He had good ears, so if he heard someone talking smack behind his back, he’d turn around and give everyone shit.
I was a few heads back behind the crazy bastard, sandwiched between two of the quiet guys. One of them was our sergeant—Hooper was his name—and I just kept one eye on the sergeant and one on my feet.
Hooper was always deadpan. He never smiled, and even when the sun was at its most devastating, he’d never wrinkle his brow. He’d just squint like he was John Wayne. His movements were slow, deliberate, and his orders were quick and precise. He was able to tell who you were by the sound of your footsteps. I trusted him with my life.
I saw him flinch, like a cat hearing some noise you didn’t even know had happened, and I froze. Up ahead, a Bouncing Betty went off. Krueger’s upper half somersaulted through the air and came to rest in the mud. His legs and some of his torso all stayed attached, and it all got blown back a couple of feet. When that huge part of him came down it was feet-first, as if he had jumped backward, but then it crumpled down lifelessly, shattering any of the illusions we might have had that it was still possessed of spirit. We were covered in red like someone had set off a paint bomb. Two other men had been peppered with shrapnel—screws, bolts, bits of aluminum cans—and were groaning in the dirt.
Four men got mad and started firing into the green. The sergeant ordered a stop to that. Some guys didn’t do shit, just looked. Some guys cried. The sergeant walked up to a tree, crouched, and peered out into the jungle like he was a hawk. If anyone was out there, he would’ve seen them. He didn’t say a word.
I watched the sergeant and I cried. And I thought of Doris.
She and I were the big item in high school. I remember I would fidget to a higher and higher degree until three o’clock, when I finally got to see her. Doris and I always met out front of the school, and it was the same every day, the explosion of an almost spiritual happiness when her warm face would press up to mine, and we kissed. In my old age, I can see that the wait for her, that daily anticipation for the quitting bell, was almost as pleasurable as finally holding her, because it was the expectation of seeing her that always made for such a glorious payoff. We were going to get married when I came back. But that’s not a story I talk about.
The place on Carpenter Street was a three-story home—very well kept—and every room therein was a little bit different from the other. Some were soft rooms that had nice walls, pretty paintings, and silk sheets. Fluffy pillows. They were made to look like you could live there.
Some rooms were hard.
The hard rooms were painted black, or red, and had chains up on the walls and closets full of gadgets like handcuffs and whips, and God knows what. Vibrators, and all that crazy shit they use in the dirty movies. One room had a birthing table, with the things for someone’s legs and everything. Stirrups. I didn’t like that stuff. I didn’t like any of it. Neither did Alice. That’s why she had no scars to speak of.
Alice was twenty-eight. At least that’s what she’d told me, and I had no reason to doubt her. She was a natural blonde, maybe a little shorter than the average woman, and she had a simple, petite body. She never had any plastic surgery done on her, but none of the girls there at Mama Snow’s had work done on them either, I think, because Evelyn wasn’t that kind of town, and Alice was a native.
I’d been seeing her for three years. Usually it was the day after I got paid, but that wasn’t a hard-and-fast rule.
I liked her, and I like to think I got to grow on her too, not that I ever hoped anything would come of it, or that I had any fantasies of saving her from “the life.” It was nothing like that. More than anything, I think we just got used to each other. I liked her body and her personality. I liked it that we talked, now that we knew each other, and I liked it that once we got to grow on each other, she was comfortable enough with me to let her guard down and fall asleep on me afterward. It got so whenever I went to Carpenter Street, I paid for the night, not the hour.
What I was paying for was the time with Alice when she slept, not the sex, because that was … I’m not smart enough to know a good word for it, but the sex wasn’t the object of my desire. What was important to me was being in a soft, good-smelling bed with a beautiful woman who smelled good. What I paid for was the time when I felt like a normal man. An ordinary man who had a girl. I paid for the illusion, because the fact is that after Doris, I had no heart for another woman.
Once Alice picked up my routine, that I was there to see her approximately every six to ten days, she knew what to expect from me. She knew she wasn’t going to get hurt, and she knew
Sometimes I saw her at the gas station or something like that. If there was eye contact, she would smile and wave. I’d ask her how everything was going. I got warm on the inside when she actually told me about her real life, the one far away from Carpenter Street. I would tell her what was up with me, not that anything ever was, and I would ask her if she felt like getting a coffee with me, or a milkshake, because at this point I had stopped drinking, and my understanding was that she was a diehard nondrinker because of her mother. Alice would point out the line in the sand and say no. She always did. Not in a hard way, but in a way that made it sound like it just wouldn’t be appropriate. She had compartmentalized me.
I had my reasons for never having a girl in my life, and somewhere deep down and private, I guess she had her reasons for never having a man. Regardless, I always walked away sad.
Mama Snow was concerned that she had a stalker on her hands when I kept coming by and asking for Alice. There were typically four but never more than five girls working in the house on any given night, and I only ever asked for the one. The business was small but lucrative because the location was secure and the girls were clean. Mama Snow was a Haitian woman, probably in her fifties, though it was hard to tell. She was a big woman, but she had the kind of body that a boxer gets once he lets himself go. Soft, but no less dangerous.
Relics and artifacts of a quasi-religious nature decorated the front room of the house. Homemade candles with leaves and twigs buried in the wax burned twenty-four hours a day.
At first, Mama Snow came off like some voodoo queen and tried to give me a warning with her one good eye. Normal men would’ve been bothered by it, I’m sure, but I didn’t give a shit. I couldn’t be any more cursed than I already was, and there was only so much her goon—Leon—could’ve done to me on any given day, him being the weird creature of the night that he was. Sure, he was bigger than me, and tougher, but I was harder to take out than a goddamn cockroach, and I had a right hook that could knock walls down.
When Mama Snow warned me about asking for Alice, all I did was give her a look. Maybe in some crazy, voodoo way, she saw what was inside me, and from that day on, she was more than accommodating whenever I made an appearance.
I parked my truck down the block, walked up to the front door, and rang the bell. It sounded inside the house. After a full minute’s wait, the heavy, wood door opened, and the monster known as Leon blocked my path. Leon was from the Philippines. He had the build of a sumo wrestler, and his head was shaved bald. He sported a Fu Manchu mustache. His hands were so big he could’ve choked the life from a bull if he was pissed-off enough. He was wearing a black suit that would have been a tent on any other man.
“Leon,” I said, by way of hello.
He squinted.
“Alice around?”
He nodded.
“Nice talking to you,” I said. Then, as a joke: “I’ll see you at the beach.”
He grunted.
I stepped into the parlor, which looked like a legitimate parlor with wood furniture, pretty prints on the walls, and the forever-burning candles. I went up the stairs and down the hall. I opened the third door I passed, and inside was an old-fashioned bed with bedposts, drapery across the top. White sheets covered the bed, along with a feather-stuffed comforter. The walls were covered with wallpaper with a simple floral design, and three Cezanne prints in heavy glass frames decorated the walls. Soft light poured forth from an antique-looking lamp, and a candelabrum burned brightly on the dresser. There was a coatrack.
I took off my Stooges T-shirt and hung that up, then lit two cigarettes.
Alice came in a minute later, wearing slippers and a nightgown. For other men she dressed up some, I think,
