by Sam Wiebe
Paula’s features are so perfect they look painted on. Deb, my best friend, is beautiful in every way that Paula is not. Deb’s shorter than me and has hair in different shades of blond that spikes in all directions, and apple-red cheeks even when she hasn’t been outside. Paula’s body is willowy and Deb’s body is warm and soft, the kind of body that makes you think she’d be a great mom someday.
Paula’s been A.C.’s woman for years. Deb got with him just a few months ago.
I’ll confess, when A.C. bumped Deb, I started hanging out with her just to get under Paula’s skin. I was tired of how the other girls fawned over her. She reminded me of all the girls I’d hated in high school. I’d been an honor roll student, and the popular girls who’d once been my friends had stopped hanging out with me when I started smoking, stealing, and getting arrested. Paula reminds me of my old life too, but not in the same way Deb does. Paula reminds me of the bad parts. The parts I wanted to leave behind when I quit school three weeks into the tenth grade and ran away from home, a town house in the slums of the city on a street with no trees.
So I looked right at Deb, and asked her how she was getting along with her wife-in-law.
She looked at me, stunned, and then decided what to do. She snorted. The kind of over-the-shoulder snort that works best when you toss your hair at the same time.
Later I discovered I really liked Deb. I told her I used to be a gymnast and she said, “I used to do gymnastics too,” and she said it so quiet, with a bit of a smile, it was like she was telling me a secret.
We worked the high track bounded by Nelson, Seymour, Helmcken, and Richards. We shared the block with a pub where people threw their peanut shells on the floor; a strip club with the oldest, most washed-up dancers you’d ever seen; a corner store that sold single condoms, cigarettes, KY lube, and scratch-and-wins; a nightclub for yuppies; and a pretty wooden two-story house. A little old man lived inside. Outside are birdhouses. Tons of them. He’d built them to look like little people houses, human bungalows and ranchers and country inns, this man with thick hands and a headful of white hair. His hand-painted sign read, I’d rather be happy in my crazy world than to be sane and sad.
* * *
I live in a condo on West 14th and Oak by the Jewish market where you can buy the best perogies in the city. I own a mountain bike. Drive a Beemer. Deb lives down the street. When she laughs too hard she sprays beer out of her mouth. Because I’ve started hanging out with her wife-in-law, Paula looks at me through that thin veneer of prettiness, and smiles at me in that I’d-stab-you-if-I-could way.
But I’m smart, I make money. Girls wonder how I do it.
Paula doesn’t say nasty things to me. She knows better. I get my respect. I knew Paula was fucked up. I never knew how much until the night in the Korner Kitchen when she was hissing in my ear, telling me about the robbery.
The streetlamp shines down on Deb and me and the corner store. All the action for us starts in the Helmcken Street parking lot, because if a trick won’t pull over and take a cab from there, that’s it for the date before it even begins.
I like working on Helmcken. From here we can see the Korner Kitchen, the window sill littered with a line of Styrofoam takeout cups, can see who’s going in, who’s coming out, who’s spending more time taking coffee breaks than working.
A.C. told Deb right in the middle of their having sex, while A.C. was pumping it in and out, just like that he said to Deb, “Paula doesn’t make love like a woman.”
Deb tells me this in the cold, under a streetlamp, flicking her cigarette into traffic. Girls stand around the block, their elbows touching like paper dolls, two of us on one side of the alley, three or four girls on the other.
Deb puts on bedroom eyes and imitates a man’s voice. She says, “Now you make love like a woman. And then he gave me the ring.”
Paula doesn’t make love like a woman. What does she make love like then? An alien? A zombie? I’ve seen her on doubles, when two girls take one guy (“One starts at your nose, one starts at your toes, and we meet in the middle”), or when two girls do a date with two guys in the same hotel room. But, naturally, there’s no comparing what a working girl is like with a trick and what she’s like with her man. You have to call both “sex” because there’s no other word to use. But “sex” with tricks is about as interesting and erotic as peeling potatoes, especially since we mostly do fake lays. As in, there’s no penetration. As in, we make the trick fuck our hand and they can’t tell the difference, because they’re wearing two condoms and there’s so much KY slathered everywhere.
Now you make love like a woman.
Does Deb moan as she stares into his eyes, no shame in her own pleasure? Gazes locked as she comes, her eyes not letting go of his?
I imagine Deb on her back, looking at A.C., the roundness of her potbelly, the soft rolling hills of her breasts. He grabs her ass, fingers digging into her flesh. What does it feel like to make a man lose control like that? The sun rising through the curtains. The room smelling like sex. Maybe it makes you feel grateful. To know you’re part of something bigger than yourself.
The two-carat diamond, rose-cut, catches the streetlight. They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Maybe if you turn out late—the difference between turning out at fifteen and turning out at twenty-five—you’ll just always do stupid things on the track by accident. You’ve already lived too much square life to not have bad habits. Like carrying a wallet or wearing a diamond ring to work. But I put aside Deb’s stupidity and try to take pleasure in her excitement. I nod politely and give her a big grin.
* * *
Paula bought A.C. the Mercedes he drives. A.C. has a reputation for having his shit together; he doesn’t smoke crack, saves his money. Jesse Diamond, my people, is not together. But at least he never hits me with a closed fist, always an open hand.
Pimps sell you love, and considered from a mathematical angle it’s a tidy arrangement, considering we get money from the tricks we turn for something a lot of them want to pretend is love too.
When I first came to Vancouver on a PCL bus and a ferry, to work the streets in a new city, I wanted to see if the high track stories I’d heard were true, that girls, for instance, regularly made a g-note a night.
I wanted to see what the high track was like and keep all my money. Not pay some man to tell me I looked “fine” over dinner in the new ho clothes he’d bought me so I could earn him bank on the track. I’d dabbled with pimps in Victoria, but I’d always worked as a renegade.
So I lied on the high track when the girls asked, Who’s your people? I made one up. It felt like a game.
But the high track’s not a place to lie and get away with it, so when things became nasty, I chose Jesse, to save my ass. I’ve been with him ever since. Jesse Diamond isn’t all bad. Tracksuit, long Jheri curls, and a Morris Day mustache. The night we met I had the feeling that anything could happen. The air seemed as full and rich as a piece of cake, and I wanted to swallow it whole or at least slip a piece into my pocket. I’d met better-looking guys, but he could talk, and he made me feel beautiful.
* * *
A.C. has given Deb—his tip—a diamond ring.
“She already hated me,” Deb says. “I wonder what she’ll do now.”
Ever since Deb came along, Paula seems more hollow than she used to be, and colder. Her head like a porcelain doll’s seems more like a glass flask about to explode. I watch her, waiting for it.
She’s changing. There’s a current of nervous energy underneath, high-voltage. Everyone can see that A.C. has a soft spot for Deb. For real. And Paula’s humiliated.
Deb can’t keep to herself what’s making her happy, and soon everyone knows about the ring.
* * *
Paula’s regular has a wardrobe full of fetish gear: leather cuffs, spreader bars, x-frames, sleepsacks, nipple clamps, gags, and whips. He’s into bondage and obedience training. Paula orders him, at twice the normal hourly rate, to lick caber
net spills off his kitchen floor tiles with his tongue, and then punishes him for his defiance if he takes more than a second or two to get down on all fours. Typically she flogs his ass, making him pay her for the privilege. Paula keeps his beatings below the neck, so no one at his law firm knows.
There’s nothing wrong with spanking a guy or whipping him for money. I’ve done it myself. Kinky starts at two hundred dollars and goes up from there. Though I usually feel like laughing halfway through. I just can’t take myself seriously when I say, “Crawl across that floor, slave, and call me mistress.” I have one regular who gives me over a thousand dollars when he smokes crack. I just think up nasty things for him to do and stash the cash—until he runs out of money or coke. The last time, I hurt him more than he wanted; it was an accident. I hadn’t realized the buckle was whipping around and hitting him where it shouldn’t have been, in the ribs. His bruises were so swollen they were wet-looking.
Most of my regulars are salt-of-the-earth types. One talks to me about Akira Kurosawa films and shows me photos of the commune where he grew up. Another gave me an electric guitar, another a Günter Grass book as a present. I have regulars who are loggers, or fishermen, who tell me about all the places they’ve been and all the places they’d still like to see.
Paula. She’s different. But you already know that. Paula passes the pictures around in the Korner Kitchen.
We’re in the last booth. She’s squashed herself in next to Deb. Andrea sits with her ankle-length black sable across from us, and I’m thinking, Why us? Why now? But it’s because the diner is full of girls and designer purses and compacts brought out over the scarred tables to fix lipstick and powder noses, and there’s nowhere else to sit. Everyone came in like bees in a hive, and now I’m stuck in a booth with Paula and Andrea, when all I wanted to do was sink into the softness of the red vinyl seat and massage my toes.
On any given night in this cheap diner on the track, a girl might be crying on the pay phone, another girl in the bathroom might be pissing blood from a beating she got the night before, another girl sitting in one of the horseshoe-shaped booths at the front might be adjusting her waist-length hair to hide the crisscrossing of stitches on her head from a bad date’s crowbar, and groups of women with brand-new breasts might be discussing the pros and cons of enlargement surgery with those who haven’t yet had the procedure, saying things like, Yeah, now I got no feeling in my nipples. But, you know, whatever. Discussing the merits of different brands of hairspray, laughing at anyone gauche enough to use one bought at a drugstore, or rolling in the aisles like professional wrestlers, one woman vice-gripping another in her long, lean, tanning-salon-perfect thighs, before grabbing a sugar canister and bringing it down on the other girl’s head, knocking over a gashed stool that’s been repaired with yellow police tape.
Squashed in like this, I can’t move my elbows. This gives me an excuse not to reach for the picture Paula tries to pass me, but it makes no difference to her. She lays it faceup on the table for everyone to see.
I notice burns around his nipples. Angry red circles outlined with black, charred flesh in the center. More on his inner thighs, his balls. They look like smallpox, the pictures I’ve seen in books of dying people. She passes me another one of them pouring gross stuff on him like ketchup and motor oil. Her and her friend Sherri. I can’t imagine how much that must have hurt, stinging its way into his burns, his open wounds.
Paula makes me sick. The kind of sick that makes you want to punch someone and walk away.
Next they light more cigarettes and run them over his body, little burning caterpillars leaving ash trails.
At this point in the story, part of me wants to get up and leave.
So many burns that his body looks disfigured, twisted in discomfort. You can’t see his expression in any of these pictures. You can see his face—that there is one—but not enough to tell what he’s thinking. Can you ever?
He isn’t smiling, and he isn’t asleep, even though in some of the pictures his eyes are closed and his head is craned to the right, away from the camera. But his arched body gives away that he is awake with pain.
There are no pictures of the flames. But there are pictures of what he looked like afterward.
Paula and Andrea keep passing the photo back and forth silently.
I begin to cry without meaning to, the way your eyes water when you’re really mad.
“Mother Teresa, here,” Paula says.
They stole everything they could carry away. They took his microwave and stereo and paintings off the walls. They took his lamps and barware. Sculptures they liked and sculptures they didn’t like. They loaded it into Paula’s car, and before the lawyer passed out he told them the combination for the safe.
I admire Andrea’s thick skin. Her internal fortitude. Paula shows me another photo.
“How much did you guys get?” Andrea says, her eyes beaming.
“Who cares?” I say. “Seriously.”
“Who cares?” Paula repeats. “What the hell?” She said it like you’d say, Bird shit? Bird shit on my windshield?
“Keep your shitty pictures,” I say.
“I don’t think I could do that,” Deb finally speaks, “no matter the money.”
Paula beams. “That’s why I’m me and you’re you.” She pauses. “Thank God.”
What power does Paula think this gives her over Deb? Part of me understands not wanting to be broken. But if Paula thinks Deb now regards her with awe, she is wrong.
“Did you leave him there?” I ask, changing the subject. I haven’t come here to give Paula any glory.
“Yeah, duh.”
“Fuckin’ barbecue,” I say. I want to be hard. I want to be tough.
“God, that’s gross,” Paula says, like I’m the witch.
I swallow. “I guess it takes all kinds,” I say. Did I mean him asking for it, or her giving it to him?
“He wanted us to.”
If someone asked me to set them on fire. To kill them. Let them die. What would I do? “Did you at least call 911?” I say to everyone at the table.
Deb hugs me. The waitress comes to take our orders. Andrea gawks at me as if I’m joking. But some days the world’s beauty hurts. You have to let it. Not care who sees. Who hears.
Deb rubs my shoulder.
“We put out the fire, stupid. What do you think? We killed him?”
“Let it out,” Deb says. “That’s right.”
Deb would have called 911. Deb would have waited with him until the ambulance arrived.
“Then, get this,” Paula nudges me with her elbow, “he actually says thank you.”
All’s I know is this. It’s been three days since Paula and Sherri did that date. Sherri’s still not back at work. Maybe they made so much money she’s able to take the time off. Or maybe the experience screwed her up. I don’t know which. Do you always give someone exactly what they want? Certain experiences turn us into people we never thought we could be.
* * *
“You make love like a woman,” Deb says, imitating A.C. again. “So what’s that mean? Paula’s not a woman?”
I think of the photos. I tell Deb she better watch her back.
PART III
NIGHT VISIONS
The Demon of Steveston
by Kristi Charish
Britannia
I crouched down over the white plastic bag and carefully teased it away from the baby formula bottles, all sealed, still filled with the grayish-beige liquid.
“The formula might be what did it,” I said, surveying the cordoned-off docks for the fourth time, trying my best not to look at the body or the open dead eyes, lined with a smattering of heavy, dark eyelashes. “Unnerved them. I can’t see why else they’d leave the body here.” I stood with a small groan, my rubber shoe taps scuffing against the dew-laced dock. The plastic bags stirred with the morning breeze that buffeted the sea grass flats off the Britannia shipyards. “That or the milk stains.”
�
��Jesus Christ,” Murray whispered, more prayer than statement.
I shoved my hands in my pocket to keep Murray from seeing them fidget. I suspected he’d called me out here for charity more than necessity, but still I felt obligated to muster my best. I squinted against the sunlight coming off the water, only now high enough to sting my eyes, and tried remembering the last time I was up at daybreak. I didn’t feel the need to apologize for the cigarette I lit, stashed in my pocket months ago for a rainy day.
Or a dead body.
“Runaway, prostitute—or a little of both?” Murray asked.
A long drag did wonders to calm my jitters. I forced myself to scan the woman’s meager possessions once again—and then her.
Young Asian woman, hair bleached within an inch of its life, small frame yet I’d guess athletic. Dressed in a vintage-looking cargo jacket, combat boots, and a matching canvas backpack lying off to the side. Her skin only now starting to lose color. Not dead long.
On a hunch I turned her ankle to check the brand of her boot. It took a lot of money to look that disheveled. As I suspected it was expensive. I could see where Murray’s mistake had been made; the diaper bag could have been a backpack.
“She isn’t a street kid.” I indicated the embossed mark on the heel. “Not with these boots.”
He swore and stepped out of earshot before pulling out his phone.
“I banked on her being a heroin hippie or a fentanyl elf,” he said when he returned. “Figured she was Native.” As if that was an explanation in and of itself.
“Chinese. And you’re a racist asshole.”
Murray had the good grace not to argue. It was an unspoken rule that if a victim were an addict, runaway, prostitute, or combination of the three, no one blinked an eye if you phoned in the investigation. Murray had a full caseload, and with no ID he’d been hopeful—999 times out of 1,000 when a girl was found like this, it was one of the three.
