“They all come around. A girl like this is sitting at home, thinking how she’s gonna stretch the lousy few hundred bucks she gets paid at fucking Walmart. Then she sees in the want ads where she can make two grand a night. Two grand a night! Flexible hours. And stripping doesn’t seem so bad, when you think about it. You done that before, right? But that time, you called it love. And it’s only for a little while, so’s she can get a leg up.
“But you know that doesn’t work out. Instead of saving the money, she buys some things. Some clothes and shit, some nice stuff for her kid. She quits Walmart, cause the pay is shit. Maybe she starts using, just to take the edge off. You know, it’s hard, you need to take the edge off. So now she needs the money.
“And then she starts to feel some power. Coke’ll do that to you. She thinks, look at all them fools staring and drooling. So what the hell, they’re only pictures, right? Anybody jacking off to their computer screen’s got no place looking down on me. The coke makes her feel pretty good about things. Most of the time, she feels all right. And it’s just once or twice, so’s she can get a leg up.”
Barker refilled their glasses. Zane’s tongue had gone numb and he was beginning to lose track. He noticed that Barker put the cap back on the bottle one-handed, without looking. But Barker was doing all the talking. Zane was doing all the drinking, and clinging to any object that appeared to be stable. The closest object to hand was his glass.
“So she needs more money. It’s my body, she thinks, I’ll use it. It’s just sex, you done that before, right? You’re already doing lap dances.” Barker motioned to the screen. “Give this girl five, six years, she’s on crack and turning tricks to earn her next fix. And it’s only so’s she can get a leg up. Only ’til things start working out for her.
“Now, you’re probably wondering where I’m going with all this.”
Zane was wondering not only where Barker was going, but where he was at present. He felt strongly that he should rewind the tape, and get back to territory he more clearly understood.
“Let’s get back to the part about me being a genius.”
“We covered that. Stay with me. This is the thing. Without me, all this girl’s got to look forward to is some dead-end job and a boyfriend beats the shit out of her. Anyone else in this business, they chew her up and spit her out and she’s on the street. But me, I’m going to keep her out of those troubles. I’m going to keep her working for as long as she can work. I’ll give her jobs. There’s always something.”
Barker put his glass down and then rubbed his eyes as if he was getting a headache. Zane felt that perhaps he was supposed to interject, but couldn’t think what to add. The first thing that came to mind was “you want to clamp those glue joints firmly,” and that had nothing to do with Barker’s rambling or, indeed, with anything at all. Barker took his hand from his eyes and snapped his fingers at Zane and continued where he had left off.
“And you’ll hear people saying, it’s that Richard Barker. He’s the guy that fucked up that kid. All the do-gooders and feminazis all saying, we need to shut him down. Like suddenly I’m the one who started it all. Shit, it’s probably her daddy fucked her up. Me, I’m a legitimate businessman.
“Did I make this system? I just work here. Some people are gonna make a lot of money and get rich, and some people are gonna keep fucking up and stay poor. All those do-gooders might want to ask why those people keep fucking up. Me, at least I’m offering a leg up. I’m not pushing dope on them. And I’m not importing crack-heads from Thailand and Russia. I’m working with local talent. Fuck, Zane. I’m giving back to the fucking community here!”
Barker paused and took a sip of his Scotch, his eyes appraising Zane over the rim of his glass. Zane struggled to make sense of the logic that led from his genius through Coleridge and the nature of art to the workings of the sex trade and ultimately to Richard Barker’s role as a pillar of the community. Things were getting wobbly. It might have been the whisky.
“I really think we need to get back to the part about me being a genius.”
“So you can demand more money. Abusing my hospitality. Gimme your glass.”
Zane handed it over. Getting home was going to be problematical.
“I’m serious. This shit is going to happen. I don’t put girls on crack. I don’t hand out needles. I’m not forcing anybody. You got to remember what I always say: this is a family. I’m not like the others. I take care of my own. Without me, shit, they get a couple years, they’re washed up.
“You see where I’m going with this, Zane?”
Zane’s tongue felt thick and numb.
“I don’t think I’ll be driving home.”
Barker shook his head as if Zane was a dog that simply could not be trained to sit.
“This girl, she’s going to come around, and she’s going to do more than solo. She’s going to do it because she’s going to need to do it. And we’re gonna be there for her, because she’s a part of the family. Right? We always got jobs for our girls. Jade keeps an eye on them, and we make sure they get what they need. Our girls don’t have to leave the family.”
He nodded at a point over Zane’s right shoulder and Zane twisted his head to see Jade standing behind him in the doorway. “All done your little chat?”
“I think we’re done. And don’t you worry about driving home, Zane. Jade’s gonna drive you. You’re part of the family.”
Zane knocked back the rest of his Scotch and put the glass on the desk.
“Speaking of the family, how’re you getting along with Melissa?”
“Just swimmingly,” said Zane, and regretted it. The sibilants proved insurmountable. A simpler response would have sufficed, something straightforward, such as “okay,” or perhaps “good.” You live, you learn.
“That’s good. I want that girl to stick around. She’s got a lot of potential. A lot of potential.”
Zane stood, stooped to pick up his camera bag, and lost his balance. Jade caught him by the arm. He was surprised by the strength of her grip.
“I think you see where we’re going with this,” she said.
Jade drove a black BMW with leather seats and an engine that Zane could barely hear. The interior still smelled new. She remarked on the quantity of Scotch he had downed during Barker’s dissertation by way of cautioning him not to make a mess of the leather. He had difficulty holding his head erect, felt he was sinking, the seat swallowing him. The leather, an undead cow, takes revenge for a lifetime of hamburger.
“It’s nice you’re getting on so well with Melissa.”
Barker called a spade a long-handled digging implement for manual excavation but it remained unmistakably a spade. No need to keep hammering this nail. Zane said nothing.
“Famously, is what I hear.”
Obviously you haven’t been keeping up with the news.
“We get along.”
“You get along.” Jade smiled, tapped a manicured fingernail on the leather cover of her steering wheel. “Tell me something: have you ever had a friendly conversation, or do you always behave as if you’re under police interrogation?”
“My client declines to answer.”
“Zane, you do make me laugh.” Jade failed to laugh. She drove with precise care, barely over the speed limit, her every movement deliberate and controlled. “You’ll probably say that it’s none of my business. But Rich is pleased.”
How perceptive: it is, in fact, none of your business.
“I wasn’t aware Rich took such a close interest in my personal life.”
“Rich takes an unusual approach to things.”
A masterpiece of understatement. Pardon me if I find all this interest in my private life disturbing. It is, in Melissa’s idiom, creepy as all fuck.
“We don’t get along nearly as well as you seem to think.”
“Oh, I hear things.”
A source close to the incident has spoken under condition of anonymity. Zane let that go by. Jade looked over at him
briefly as if to gauge the effect of her words.
“I know all about you two. I make it my business to know what’s happening with our girls. It prevents what I call ‘mishaps.’” She uttered this last word with a delicate distaste. Mishaps do occur, have occurred, but are not to be spoken of in polite company. “What I want to know is, do you actually see what Rich is getting at?”
His head felt decidedly wobbly, a delayed reaction as his final glass of Scotch worked its way into his bloodstream.
“Why don’t you just tell me what everyone’s getting at?”
“I thought as much.” Jade smoothly shifted down through the gears, approaching a red light. “Rich has one very great fault. He sees himself as an ideas man. He hatches grandiose schemes. He talks endlessly without getting to the point.”
The light turned green.
“So get to the point.”
“Rich trusts that you will see where he’s going, because he thinks you are uncannily perceptive. For my part, I think you’re a dunce.”
How refreshingly direct, if not precisely tactful. The supper table, chez Barker, vibrates with lively conversation. Barker pontificates; Jade tells him to shut up and eat his mashed potatoes, before they get cold.
“So you’re going to get right to the point.”
“Exactly. Do you know why our girls are here?”
“The details are fuzzy. I gather it has something to do with Walmart.”
“The short answer is that they are losers. They are girls with problems, who can’t take control of their own lives. Who can’t take responsibility. So there’s a kind of unpredictability to their relationships.”
This was not getting to the point. Jade had spent too much time around Barker.
“And you expect a mishap.”
“Exactly. I expect a mishap.”
She turned to him and beamed. A dull pupil finally grasps the principles of long division; gold stars all round.
“I don’t think we’ll see any mishaps.”
Zane calculated the risk of a mishap at approximately zero. He and Melissa had no relationship to go awry.
Jade returned to tapping her finger on the steering wheel. She steered fastidiously, with her fingertips.
“Rich sometimes gets funny ideas,” she said. “Rich values your talents, as he does Melissa’s. And on that point, at least, I have to agree with him. He has some notion of keeping the both of you happy.”
“And otherwise?”
“I think what will keep you happy is a steady paycheque. Melissa is another problem.” She pulled up short in the street below his apartment and he cracked the door open to get out, but she carried on speaking. “I am not looking forward to cleaning up after things go bad.”
Zane got out and then leaned down to talk through the open door. “I don’t think you need to worry.”
“I certainly hope not.” Zane closed the door, and she drove smoothly away.
Melissa was off the wall.
A couple of beers turns into a couple more beers and at some point you lose track. Some of us handle it better than others, which is largely a matter of practice; cocaine is another matter entirely. Melissa giggled, made jokes, splashed water at him in the kitchen. She spoke quickly and her eyes were unnaturally bright, radiating heat and light. She kept excusing herself to go to the bathroom. Zane wondered why she felt the need to hide what she was up to, but he decided not to ask. You don’t want to push your luck. The brakes are long burned out and all you can do is hang on, Casey Jones, and hope this thing stays on the tracks.
At some point after her steps got wobbly, Melissa recounted the misadventures of her roommate, who went by the name of Clarissa. Clarissa’s adventures were invariably sexual. She was a young woman of considerable athletic grace and prowess. Clarissa’s most recent adventure involved a boyfriend who liked to take pictures. This young man wished to expand his horizons and Clarissa, being an obliging girl, had invited Melissa to participate in the general fun and games.
“So I said, what the hell.” Melissa elaborated no further. “So now she owes me one, you know? If I ever wanted her to, you know, return the favour, with anyone.”
Zane realized this story had no punchline. He found Clarissa’s rhyming name an improbable coincidence.
“Clarissa sounds like a very friendly girl.”
“You want to meet her?”
“Sure, sometime.” He waved his hand vaguely, realizing only too late the implications of his response. He addressed himself to his beer bottle, a less complex interaction. There’s no graceful way out of this one.
Up until now Zane had been able to stick to concrete facts. You have this girl, Melissa; she drinks; she gets drunk. She takes other things. Now we must face the question of what these facts signify and where they lead, what these facts expect and what they intend. These tales of brave Clarissa. Additional facts complicate the picture: Barker, Jade, a certain difficulty swimming with millstones. Mishaps loom.
The lingering effects of Zane’s abdominal wound, or of the confusion that followed it, left Melissa’s questionable virtue in no danger. The equipment was not serviceable. Which was not to imply that the man in the mirror, the same Zane who kept the apartment free of razor blades and other weapons of self-destruction, was incapable of using her as a lab rat, to see if anything had changed. There was no way to know.
“Shit, Zane, you’re a real wet blanket. It’s impossible to have fun with you.”
“You’ve discovered the truth at last.”
Yet Melissa’s bounce did not diminish. She finished her beer and went to the bathroom. He didn’t hear the toilet or the tap. On her way back she picked up two more beers and stopped in front of him and planted her feet and thrust her hips forward.
“Truth or dare.”
“What?”
“Truth or dare.”
“Get real.”
“I want to find out what makes the great Lucas Zane tick.”
“And you think I know?”
“Dare.”
“What?” The facts were spinning out of control.
“Dare me.”
“What’s next, spin the bottle?”
“You got a bottle?”
We have no shortage in this department.
“This shit is for kids.”
She affected a pout and flopped onto the couch next to him. He moved to the left to make room and she giggled and followed. Things were getting out of hand in the rabbit warren. Zane ran out of room to retreat, and stood up.
“Just stop. It’s not funny.”
“Party pooper.” She stuck her tongue out at him and got up and made for the bathroom again, walking with the studied care of one whose balance is mildly askew.
This kid is a disaster in the offing, a walking mishap. You don’t want to get mixed up in her terminal wipeout. Might as well leave the Boy Scout guide to knots lying around the apartment, opened to the chapter on nooses, a straight razor for a bookmark. Getting entangled in Melissa’s problems will be a little more complex than razor blades but every bit as final.
A crash and a shout from the bathroom, a spate of swearing. Zane knocked at the door and called out to ask if she was okay, received only more swearing in reply. When he opened the door, the first thing he saw was the blood. Melissa stood at the counter gripping her right fist, bleeding copiously onto white porcelain. Pieces of mirror and splashes of blood decorated the counter and the floor. Her face was white.
Broken glass on the floor. It is essential to stay in control. To stay in the here and now. Zane took her by the elbow, steered her to the kitchen, away from the blood and the glass. In the kitchen he found a clean dishtowel and pressed it against her hand.
“Seven more years of bad fucking luck,” she said.
“I don’t think this was a question of luck.”
He lifted the towel off her hand. The cuts were superficial, where the glass had slashed her knuckles.
“What did you do, punch it?”
He started the tap and held her hand under it. As the water hit the cuts she swore and yanked her hand back but he gripped her wrist and held it under the water.
“Don’t be a such a baby.”
“It fuckin’ hurts.”
“No shit.” He took her hand out from under the water and inspected the cuts closely, looking for slivers of glass. “Why’d you go and do that?”
“I didn’t like what I saw.”
“How d’you like it now?” He pressed the dishtowel on her hand again. “Press down on that.”
Zane made for the bathroom. An apartment bedroom in Sarajevo, the broken glass of the window scattered over the floor. The body of the sniper lay on the floor with dark blood pooled around his head and Zane stopped to take the picture that was there, of the man’s body lying in the blood and the shards. He didn’t stop to consider that he was standing in the light from the window until the bullet came, so close that it lifted his hair. He hit the floor, on top of the body and the glass, cut his palms going down, thinking, idiot. Pain wracking his guts, his insides tightening, still alive. You’ve been here too long. You’ve been here too long when you start to act like you’re bulletproof. When your unconscious self decides it’s time to make a separate peace. When you can’t trust yourself to keep yourself alive.
His guts twisted at the memory. The chill of sudden sweat. You are in your apartment, in Toronto, and the stripper in your kitchen requires first aid. Just another tranquil domestic scene in the Zane household. The Band-Aids are where you left them, dear, next to the cocaine. He found a box of gauze, one formerly sterile dressing (package torn), and a near-empty bottle of antiseptic in the medicine cabinet. Time was, you had a fully stocked first aid kit. Povidone-iodine solution, pressure dressings, wound closure strips, tincture of benzoin. Then it ceased to be necessary. You get to be casual about these things, living in Toronto.
In the kitchen, Melissa had taken the towel off her hand to inspect the cuts. Fascinated, as if the hand in question was not hers. Blood dripped onto the floor.
“I told you to keep pressure on that.”
“I didn’t mean to break your mirror.”
Combat Camera Page 8
