“Sure,” I said. I didn’t care, one way or the other.
At the least, I was getting free drinks, and at the most … I couldn’t even imagine. Before long, the girl in the body stocking and the girl in the red thong came over to our table. The Red Thong carried a bottle of whiskey and two shot glasses. Body Stocking took a seat on Anthony’s lap. The red thong came up to me and straddled me in my seat.
“Hello,” she said.
She nestled into me while Anthony and Sharon talked, and she poured out a shot of whiskey into the shot glass. Then she passed the bottle to her friend, and she did the same. Anthony was running his hands up and down that girl’s body, and no one was doing anything, no one came over to throw him out of the joint for getting fresh, so I put my hands on Patty’s hips and rubbed her legs.
She knocked the shot back, then came forward and put her mouth to mine. She spit the shot into my mouth. I drank it out of her, then sucked at her sweet lips for what was left. At my right, Anthony was doing the same.
It had been years since I had a drink, and after that long, that one shot hurt me like fire. It burned my throat, my chest, and burned a fire behind my eyes, like a preview of what hell would be like. I could immediately feel the stuff swishing around my brain, making me a little stupider than I usually am, but I didn’t care, because my friend was dead and my life had gone completely down the toilet. I’d lost my job, the girl I loved didn’t want anything to do with me, and unless the Rose Killer popped up somewhere and said, “Here I am,” the wolf that lived in the place where my soul used to be was going to kill some innocent person in five days. I think I was entitled to a drink.
In the back of my mind I saw one of Pearce’s memories. In it, I was a little bit younger, a little more angry, and he was pointing at me, saying, “God gave you a choice, man. You don’t have to drink.” He truly believed it.
We had seconds on the wet kisses, and then the girls left the table, leaving the bottle of whiskey behind. I started laughing, caught up in a rush of hormones like a teenage boy.
“You like?”
“I love,” I responded.
“It’s crazy, isn’t it?”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Women,” he said. “For hundreds of years these creatures have struggled with the ‘male establishment’ to have their equal rights and their equal wages, and to not be seen as women in a man’s world. They’ve tried to do whatever they could do to erase the supposed myth of chicks being sex symbols. Burning bras and all that. But one look at any magazine blows all that women’s-lib shit right out the window, and then you walk into someplace like this and you see that absolutely nothing has ever changed and it never will. Women are always going to be looked at in biblical terms, as seducers, as temptresses, as creatures who can’t be trusted, and it’s all their own fault. It’s amazing. They’re all crazy. Every single one of them.”
“That’s a pretty dank view, man. Especially after having a drink fed to you by a girl that looks like that.”
“It’s true. I mean, I’ve worked in big cities, man. New York, L.A., all over the place. And lately, I’ve been going all over the goddamn country for this photo book, and truly, there are some unique places in this world, but it really is the same everywhere. It really is. It’s sad.”
“I know,” I said. “It
“I’ll drink to that,” said Anthony. “Lord have mercy.”
“Never has, never will.”
We knocked back our shots.
“What’s it cost to screw in this place?”
“More than you and I have,” said Anthony. “But that’s the point. Keeps the low-bloods away, and the few yuppies in this town coming back. The yuppies know that they’re the only ones that dip their wicks in these broads. I guess it makes them feel like these broads are some more things that they own. That pair of wet kisses was twenty bucks, times two, plus tip.”
“Damn. And you don’t want anything in return? You’re a better man than me.”
“Probably not,” he said.
“How did you find this place? You’re not even from around here.”
“I keep my ear to the rails. I listen. And I look. I like being nosy, I like exploring. That’s the whole point of the book, is the finding of places that no one’s ever seen or heard of. Kind of like an unknown America kind of thing. The obscure. The little things that people don’t see, I see. And I take pictures.”
“Like that tree.”
“Yeah, like the tree. My cover shot.”
“Have you taken pictures in here?”
“Why? You want copies?”
We laughed.
“I asked, but they don’t allow cameras in here, but,” he said leaning in close, “that doesn’t mean shit to me. I got all kinds of equipment in my car. I got a camera the size of a typewriter, and I got a spy camera the size of a pen. If I want a picture, I get it. I’ve been doing this a long time. I don’t fuck around. Before this, I always did fashion photography for magazines, and I tell you the God’s truth, the kind of women in that business are all whores, every single one of them. You look at any model in a magazine, and you can pretty much take it to the bank that she fucked her way into that picture, onto that cover. It’s amazing. So you take your pictures, and you get your perfect shot. You take some pictures for fun while she’s naked, you know, because it’s basically a given that you did your thing with her, and you know the pictures are going to look great, and then when she sees them, she doesn’t want you to have them. Meanwhile, she’s fucked half the building, but a couple of pictures drive her up the wall because she’s worried about her reputation. What the hell is that?”
“Who knows?”
“Women,” he said. “You see the girls in here? You give any girl the chance,
“Whatever.” His rant was starting to get to me. “Maybe you’re just bitter.”
“Bitter? What could I be bitter about?”
“Who gives a shit? You could be bitter about coming off like a queen, or not getting laid, or who knows? You sound like a fucking pig.”
“Oh yeah? As I recall, you more than welcomed that wet kiss from the chick in the thong, Marlowe. You’re right here with me, so don’t play high-and-mighty with me. We’re in this shit together. We’re kindred spirits. It’s just that I’m the one that’s keeping this real. I’m not bitter. I’m a realist. You seem to have some romantic fucking view of sex relations, but you don’t practice what you preach, so don’t give me that shit about bitter. If anything, I prefer the word ‘sardonic.’ It’s much more sophisticated.”
“Whatever.”
I laughed. Of course I was bitter.
“There you go. Actually,” he said, “you know what? There’s only been one town in this whole country that I’ve been to that didn’t have one loose woman in it, one brothel, or one strip joint, or even a girl painted up like a fucking whore. Marshall Falls.”
“Huh?”
“Marshall Falls, New Mexico. If there’s one place where women haven’t degraded themselves, it’s there, and believe me, I looked.”
“I’ve never even heard of it.”
“Of course. That’s why I went there. The population is maybe a thousand, or less, even. Right in the middle of nowhere. You want to know how the town got that name?”
“No.”
He laughed. “I’ll tell you anyway. It’s a good story.”
“Don’t.”
“A hundred fucking years ago, this Robin Hood–type bandit named Marshall—they don’t even know his full name—bit the bullet there. He had a band of thieves together that robbed the trains that rolled across the vast lands, and with the goods, well, he basically took care of this little, starving community of religious types. Not
