Routes

by John Okas

  A voice inside Sarah tells her she should move on, that Snake Eye Flats is no place for an unwed teenage mother runaway, that posing in the Pit Stop in her ruffled panties and parasol could be a dangerous game, plumb foolish. She associates voices telling her not to do something with the Father in Heaven—as well as the one on earth—and she won’t listen to them. The revolution going on inside of her calls her to consider personal safety a symptom of salvation, something she has cast to the wind. She is caught in whirlwind gusts from her own high command of destiny. Earning her own money gives her a taste of freedom and a sense of satisfaction. After nineteen years of putting on a good girl face, of being the model saint, this show of brazen naughtiness is like a breath of fresh air to a suffocating person, cool water to a thirsty one. She cannot stop until she’s had her fill, and then some.

  The manager of the Pit Stop quickly grants that Sarah will be good for business, and after some dickering signs a contract promising her fifty cents a head and a room upstairs. The room is wretched. Afraid that rats and roaches may get to Gloria Sarah takes her down with her that night at nine when the show must go on. She stores the basket case baby in a large cabinet behind the bar, steps behind the curtain, and re-emerges in her panties, twirling her parasol. For want of a stage she must pose on the bar. She steps up from a footstool to a chair to a barstool gracefully as she can, to be where every loathsome sidewinder in that smoky room can see her. The men at her feet sitting at the bar, look up at her hungrily, and she is filled with a loathing for them makes that it easy for her to put on her haughtiest face and twirl her parasol in their faces, taunting them. When they have backed off a bit, she is filled with an urge to expose herself. She turns her back on the crowd and pulls down her fancy pants, revealing to them in the flesh the finest artists’ choice for the most perfect shape in the world: the human female derriere. She gets a feeble satisfaction from wagging her tail in the wind.

  It’s plain by the reaction of these low livers that they have no sense of aesthetics and a totally negative appreciation of art. They see no difference between her behind and that of some cheap flesh pot floozy. The confusion inside her spreads to the men. The rabble she arouses turns on her. A whisky bottle flies and smashes the mirror. “Yahoooo!” The men at the bar pull her down and grab her. She squirms and breaks her parasol over their heads but it doesn’t stem the attack. They pull off her underpants entirely and put their dirty hands on her. Then, boys will be boys, they begin to fight over which one will have her first. The big slob who has her has to let her go to do some punching to keep her.

  Unhanded Sarah knows she only has a few moments to escape. Good thing she had the good sense to keep Gloria close by. She ducks down, takes the baby out of the basket, and is able, by crawling along the floor, careful not to cut herself on all the broken glass, to keep a low enough profile to find her way out the back door.

  It never rains in Snake Eye Flats, than it pours. Rats, it’s raining now, here it comes, a good soaking downpour. And she can hear the artists discovering that their model has snuck out on them and that they are beginning to pursue her higgledy-piggledy in their drunken stupid way. Any port in a storm, she sees a light in the back room of the Purple Stage office and goes toward it, sneaking silently in the darkest shadows of the alley, the scene of the dog fight, earlier. The rain washes away the dogs’ blood, and in the process soaks her. She cuts her feet twice on broken whisky bottles as she splashes along in the splatter of mud. Luckily her pursuers are too drunk to think of looking for her in the darkness, crouched under the lit stage office window. Eluded, they break up, some going off down the street to throw up and masturbate and look for her, others back to the bar to fight and curse and get drunker. When the coast is clear, she raises her head and looks into the window. By now she is wise enough to check first to make certain that she is not getting herself out of one tight spot and into another. Along this road men of honor are few and far between.

  She sees three men in the office. The two who wear badges are rude frontier types, worn-out denim on the seats of their pants, vests that don’t fit, filthy behind the ears. The man in the middle, sitting at the desk, seems to have some authority over them. About forty, he wears a pinstripe suit, and several diamond rings. he sports a thin mustache, and has a leering smile which reveals an intriguing gap between his two front teeth. He is peeling off leaves from a large head of cabbage and passing them to the palms of the lawmen.

  Uh oh! Sarah’s knuckle knocks the pane. The sound sends the law into an alert: someone has seen the payoff. They go for their guns and run around the building until they discover the mud- and blood-splattered mother and child hiding behind some old boards in the alley.

  Sarah’s arrest is good for something. For once Gloria complains with a healthy wail. She begins to cry from being cold and wet and now bumped around as the men roughly cuff her mother’s wrists around her. “There’s some hope for you yet, Baby,” says Sarah trying to soothe her with her manacled hands.

  Once they have their suspect rounded up out of the rain and into the bare light bulb of the stage depot office for questioning, the men are amazed to see exactly how beautiful who they have landed is. There in front of them shivering, filthy and wet, blood in her toes, is a naked girl, and a peach of one at that, white-skinned, firm-fleshed, with the face of an angel. She is shaking and taking scant cover behind a blue quilted baby, also soaked, crying in a basket.

  It’s to the devil in the pinstripe suit that she must appeal. He is rather handsome, not shining and beautiful in the way of Corn Dog, but dangerously sharp, like a dagger. “Please excuse me, sir, but I was not planning on robbing you and I was not spying on you either, I promise you that. I was only looking for some help for my baby and me.” She twists her wrists and uncovers the head of the tan little girl in the big blue comforter. “This is baby Gloria, and I’m Sarah Black.”

  Mister Pinstripe’s smile is a flash of scheming incisors. His insidious look lets her know that he’ll be happy to lend a hand to a young lady in distress.

  “I’m Judge Achilles Fleet,” he says, rising. He takes his overcoat from the rack and wraps it around her. The coat is camel’s hair, thick and warm, and smells of clove and orange spice cologne. It is big enough that she can easily fit Gloria in with her. “Besides being regional manager for the Purple Line, I’m a Justice of the Silver State circuit court, Miss Black, and so I must ask how such a fine looking young lady as yourself came to be crawling around naked in the mud of a place like this?”

  Sarah’s defense is ingenuous. “I’m an artist’s model, Your Honor, trying to work my way to the City by the Bay. I was posing for figure studies in the establishment next door when all hell broke loose. My baby and I barely got away with our skin.”

  He takes two more twenty dollar bills from his cabbage roll and passes them to the law. “Thanks, boys, for the protection. I think we can trust that Miss Black’s story is true. Set her free and be gentlemen about it. From what she says you’ve got some disorderly conduct to straighten out down in the Pit.”

  When the lawmen shuffle off to keep the peace His Honor says, “It may surprise you, Miss, but even though I’m a business man and a public servant, I still like to take time to appreciate a thing of beauty. I would be honored to have you pose for me. I have a motor car parked out front and a house in the hills just outside of Charsville.”

  Prepaid. He peels off two hundred dollars and holds them out.

  It’s a huge sum and a step in the right direction. Charsville is where she’s headed. And from where she stands going with Fleet is a step up, too. What is she going to do, all alone with a baby, stripped of everything in a horrible town in the middle of the night? Better to sell herself to Fleet than stay in the stage depot and be crawled over by the snakes when the law chases them out of the Pit.

  Corn Dog, she prays, be as free a thinker as they come, please understand why I’m doing this.

  She accepts the invitation. “I’ll do th
is private session, sir, but it is for art’s sake. I don’t want to lead you on now. The depth must remain in the perception of the viewer.”

  “Naturally.”

  She takes the money and then her first car ride.

  When she sees Gloria safely and soundly asleep, bedded down in Fleet’s guest room, she breathes much more easily. She continues her sighs of relief in a bath of bubbles Fleet provides.

  The lips of the girl from Zion have never touched alcohol. Tonight they taste champagne. Time for the session, Fleet wants to admire her on the bear skin rug in front of the fire. Numbed by the bubbly wine she feels separate from the girl baring herself on the warm fur.

  “You certainly are giving my sense of proportion a treat, Miss Black,” says Fleet. “Let me see if I can sketch you.”

  He makes some lines on large sheet of paper and throws down his pencil into the fire. “Bah!” He says. “My eye has difficulty transcribing what my hand can’t touch. Maybe I would make a better sculptor, an artist who must feel his subject, and get an idea of forms by using his fingers.”

  A gentleman in words only, Fleet does not wait for the model’s consent but rushes her. The split personality is demure, her objection is faint. She hesitates for a moment, but in the haze of alcohol Corn Dog seems like a dream, or from another life. She reaches down between the Judge’s legs and half-willingly takes her work in hand for the first time.

  Los Pecados

  Sarah leaves the back road behind and takes the tack of hitching rides in motor cars. Through Judge Fleet she has no trouble finding men who are eager to give her a lift. If opportunity knocks she goes for it. If the price is right she cannot afford not to do a session. If the session gets touchy, amen, she sees no other way to handle the situation than to go with the flow, the path of least resistence, and pursue her career breaks as they present themselves. Will Corn Dog, waiting for her in the City by the Bay, understand what is possessing her to do these things? It is all happening so fast, she has no time to understand it herself, why she would chose to sell what she would rather give away to the brave for free.

  The routes she travels are circuitous, the men take her out on spins that last a night or two and then return her to Achilles at his house in Charsville. Half of the pea is surprised at herself for going along with it when Fleet lends her to his friends or throws her in as a fringe benefit in a business deal, and she must get shiftless, stretch out on a bed somewhere and let all manner of strange lusts expire in, on, and around her. But to her other half, that she would do such things is no surprise at all. Her wayward side is half familiar to her. Even though she does not love the men she books, she hardly finds the bookings themselves wholly disagreeable. Surely, she is getting better revenge on her father than she ever dreamed possible. The way the freethinker looks at it, two wrongs make a right, the same way that double negatives make a positive: she does not not like it when men say they care with money. And she makes up for all those years she spent looking like a saint, by committing some of the sins she had on her mind.

  Of course she does not get the same big bang out of it that the men do. The pleasure she takes in modelling is not one of the flesh. The less physical contact she has with the men the better. Her kick is showing herself off to eyes she feels unworthy of her. She always pretends to look down on the men she poses for, she knows the expression of overconfidence so well because it is the look she grew up with, the lip service of disdain which comes from hiding one’s sins behind a mask of one special among God’s chosen, the choicest. As before her expression is her own self-contempt turned inside out. The smirk cuts both ways, each side of her thoroughly disapproves of the other. Nevertheless she finds the superior attitude a necessary one for surviving in the modelling business. She is never treated roughly and always well paid. Yes, the wages of sin are not meager. Within a few weeks of going around in circles with Fleet and his cronies she has almost a thousand dollars in Gloria’s diaper bag. While honest folks wait on bread lines bootleggers have money to burn.

  During the remainder of May and June the mother and child spend weeks in some towns, weekends in others, and then there are days when they go through as many small ones as the baby needs a change. Yes, the little Bee bounces around a lot, but whether she is cramped in a close closet or odd storage space, or bumping along the open road in a rumble seat, swathed in comforters and laid in a new wicker basket car seat, sucking milk from a bottle, she seems right at home, or at any rate as quiet as if she had never been born. Sarah takes to a bottle herself, drinks when she is working to wash the memories of the buck’s ear of corn, and when she is not to quash her worries about Gloria’s slowness.

  For dead weight Gloria can’t be beaten. In her seventh month she gains it as fast as a watermelon. She is by no means overweight, one wouldn’t think she’d be so heavy to look at her. Her strong heavy bones and solid, well-defined muscles have something to do with it, but there is more: her body has a special attraction to the earth, as if gravity had an extra pinch in her case.

  Since her mother’s arrest in Snake Eye Flats she has generally been a wee bit livelier. She still sleeps three quarters of the day and four quarters of the night, but looks around some during her brief waking periods. At dawn, noon, and dusk she takes whole cow’s milk, fruit and cereal which Sarah must prop her up on pillows to spoon into her. At least she gurgles and smiles faintly before she goes back to sleep. Sarah is encouraged by that, still, there is a long way to go before the mother’s concerns are eased. Gloria hardly shows the physical progress and signs of intelligence that are considered normal for a baby her age. Even her gurgling and her smile are only half convincing. The bubbling is so automatic, nonchalant, it might just as easily be a twitch in her digestive system as an attempt to speak, and her smile is so shrinking it could be a small gas pain, or even a great one that the baby is too numb to feel.

  Sarah paid little attention to her baby’s looks at first, since they were so overemphasized by the prejudice of her father, and from then on Gloria’s peculiar slowness has taken precedence over her appearance in her mother’s eyes as her most striking feature. But as she grows a bit her good looks are a hard thing to ignore. Languid as she is, the daughter of Corn Dog could not be a more compelling.

  There is balance and proportion in the face of the sleeping beauty. Her nose and eyes and mouth, her chin and cheeks and brow, are full, calm, and collected. There is an effortlessness about her, a unique purity, and a simplicity, which if it is retardation, is in a class by itself for reason of its special sweet clarity, its timelessness. Everything is dense about her but her eyes; her pupils are clear, bright, and black, and her irises, set like jewels against her homogenous honey tan skin, have a bewitching and bewildering iridescence owing to streaks and speckles of hazel, chocolate, raven, emerald, and ultramarine. Her hair is thick and wavy; overall dark brown as gravy, yet it too shows splashes of color here and there which complement her eyes.

  And as the baby grows, the men Sarah books at her modelling sessions, these gangsters, political officials, and hustlers can’t help but comment whenever the slow shifting honey Bee makes one of her brief appearances in company.

  “You got some kid there, doll, going to be a looker, take it from me. She’s as sweet as they come, and pretty too, really. Look at those peepers! You don’t find a pair of eyes like that in ten million. Nah, they’re one of a kind.”

  As long as the girl is good looking, they don’t seem to mind a bit if she is dumb.

  On the fourth of July, Sarah finds herself in a town called Poco Casino celebrating with Fleet. She remembers the fireworks a year ago and the promise she made to the Brave. Was it just a year ago? She thinks, it seems like a lifetime. Poco Casino is a small Silver State town, on the border of the Golden State, but it is big enough to be on a railroad line, and Sarah has more than enough money to get on that train and go as fast as possible to find Corn Dog, who, if he’s waiting, and she knows he is, must certainly be wondering where she
is by now. He will be worried, and as trail-wise as he is, he will have little chance to track her down.

  Why then do I continue in this depraved sidetrip? The split pea asks herself, but one half never completely knows what the other half is thinking or doing. Her thoughts lead her in two directions, toward Corn Dog in the Bay Area and around the Silver State in circles. He will wait, she thinks about Corn Dog, he always did. This life of rambling and gambling is so Collieresque, so poetic, who knows when I’ll be able to have experiences like this again? Probably never. She longs to go to her love, but at the same time she is swept up in her circumstances.

  Fleet announces that he’s going to Los Pecados, the Silver State’s holy city for black market racketeers. He has an appointment on the bench there. “What say, doll, you want to work El Casino Grande?” Fleet rolls his “r’s and says his “e” like “a” in a way that makes Sarah feel like taking risks.

  Sarah Sarah quite contrary thinks, and thinks twice about it. There is a cannonball which runs from Los Pecados to the City of Angels, and from there she can connect to the Coast Line and get up to the City by the Bay.

  The mistress of many men is unpossessed by all but the one in her heart. She prays to a high flying bird, going westward home. “Cornie, if you think ‘fast’ means speedy headway rather than a loose and free lifestyle I can’t honestly say I’m coming as fast as possible to see you. But whether I’m with you or not, my love for you is firmly fixed, the fastest. I can’t keep my mind off you even while I’m freethinking. A few months in Los Pecados will mean plenty of money, several thousand dollars. And won’t my arrival be more the merrier if I have the five hundred of yours I lost tenfold over? When I stand back from myself, I guess it looks as if I’m turning into quite a tramp, but, Cornie, you understand, don’t you?”