Dakota

by Gwen Florio

  “A thousand-mile round-trip deserves more than a few paragraphs,” she assured Bub, whose worried look had disappeared, replaced by his typically agreeable manner, now that her voice was back to normal. “Jorkki probably won’t hear anything at least until tomorrow. We’re already here. Might as well ask around about Judith and those girls.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Even though Thor had said he thought some of the strip-club dancers might be turning tricks on the side, Lola couldn’t face The Train. She opted instead for a place called the Sweet Crude, driving three times around the block before she worked up the nerve to walk inside. The Sweet Crude was in one of the prefab buildings that seemed to comprise half of Burnt Creek proper and all of its outskirts, set so low to the ground that a dancer who forgot herself and flung up an enthusiastic arm risked bruising it against the ceiling. Music pounded Lola’s eardrums. It wasn’t yet noon, but every barstool was taken by men who didn’t even look away to place their drink orders, so focused were they on the young woman whose very presence seemed a contradiction of physics, given that she remained upright when the size and weight of her breasts should have toppled her forward. Men crowded behind the stools, jostling for a better view, both of the dancer and of the levels in the drinks at the bar, hoping a near-empty glass signaled a soon-to-be-vacant seat. Bowls of peanuts sat beside the drinks, and the men dug into them with hard scarred hands and cracked the shells between their teeth. They spat them out without aiming, justifying the presence of a bikinied waitress whose sole job appeared to be to sashay behind the barstools with a whisk broom and dustpan, bending and presenting her impertinent bottom at regular intervals, sweeping diligently until someone tucked a bill or two beneath her thong, at which point she moved on to the next pile of peanut shells. Lola recognized one of the men at the bar as Dawg, the sheriff’s deputy, who turned on the dancer the same moist devoted gaze he’d bestowed upon the sheriff. Lola, trying to skirt the walls of the room, was glad he was so preoccupied. Yet despite the gravity-defying assets of Miss Double Derricks, the morning’s advertised entertainment, Lola still managed to attract attention. She willed an approaching man to walk past, but he blocked her way. His lips moved. “What?” Lola mouthed. Maybe she actually said it. She couldn’t hear a damn thing over Salt-N-Pepa’s shoopin’. The man took her arm and steered her toward the door.

  “Sorry,” the man said when they stood in the cold. A couple of roughnecks shoved past, openly assessing Lola before going inside. “I know it’s cold, but I can’t hear over the music. Here’s the deal. Sixty a night. That’s what you owe me for stage time. Plus a cut of tips. And don’t think you can squirrel them away somewhere. That’s what Summer thought and that’s why she’s gone and we’ve got ourselves a job opening.”

  The tip of Lola’s nose was going numb. “Sixty seems high,” she ventured.

  “Miss, we’re talking a thousand or more a night in tips. We’re the closest thing in Burnt Creek to a class act. You don’t like this deal, get yourself on down to The Train. You can keep your tips and pray to God they’ll cover the hospital bill you’ll end up with when that place is done with you.” He imparted the information with all the matter-of-factness of a conversation about the weather. Lola felt a chill that went beyond the thermometer reading.

  “I’m not here for a job. Look, is there someplace inside where we can talk—and hear ourselves think, too?”

  “Damn.” He turned and spat into the snow. “Miss Double-D isn’t going to like it when she hears she’s got to be Miss Double Shift today. You sure you aren’t looking for work? Haven’t you ever danced even a little? Maybe at your high school prom?”

  “Yes, I’m sure, and I didn’t go to my prom.” She led the way back into the bar, until he finally maneuvered himself around her and steered a course through the whiskey-soaked crowd into an office whose walls didn’t exactly muffle the din, but at least kept it manageable.

  DENNY BLAIR very nearly guided Lola right back outside again when she confessed to being a reporter. Only when she assured him, and then reassured him, that her story had nothing to do with his bar did he settle into a wooden swivel chair that would have looked at home behind a schoolroom desk. And in fact, Denny told Lola, he’d been a high school social studies teacher before the boom. “I got more sociology in fifteen minutes here than I did in twenty years of teaching,” he told her. “Back then, you wouldn’t have caught me dead in a place like this, even before I was married. Now look at me. I paid off my house in my first year at the Sweet Crude. When the owner took me in as a partner, I got a big enough bump so my wife could retire. You put your scruples aside real fast when it comes to things like that.”

  Lola could see him back in the classroom, a pilled cardigan hanging off his scarecrow frame, the chalk dust settling in his wispy hair. If Burnt Creek was anything like Magpie, it had never made the jump from blackboards to dry-erase panels.

  “It really doesn’t bother you?”

  “Only when my old students come in. Funny thing is, it doesn’t seem to bother them a bit. I guess we’re all making so much money now the old rules don’t apply.” He fiddled with a loose thread on his sweater.

  “Speaking of rules—what about the dancers? Is dancing their only . . . duty?”

  Denny Blair threw back his head and laughed. His sagging neck briefly tightened. Lola calculated that he was about the age her father would be if he had lived. She tried to imagine that gentle man, who treated cancer as though it were an annoying relative to be tolerated with an excess of civility, running a titty bar. She shook her head. Try as she might, the image wouldn’t come.

  “Do you mean are they hooking? Damned if I know. I’m sure some of them freelance. As far as I know, there’s only one place in town that does it in any kind of organized fashion and believe me, you don’t want to get crosswise with them.”

  “You mean the trailer,” Lola said.

  Denny’s eyebrows shot up. “For somebody who appears to have just walked into town, you sure figured things out fast.”

  “Not fast enough,” Lola said. The heat in the office made her drowsy. “Where would I find the trailer?”

  Denny was on his feet, holding the door open. The music rushed in. Sleepiness fled. “You wouldn’t,” he said. “Not if you know what’s good for you.”

  Onstage, Double Derricks swung sideways from a pole and twined her legs around a man’s neck, her crotch a mere inch from his face. The man’s hand moved automatically from his pocket to her G-string, slipping one bill after another beneath it. Denny made a little noise of satisfaction.

  “Wait,” said Lola. She pulled the clipping from her pocket.

  He studied the photo. “Don’t know her. Wish I did.”

  “Yes. She is—was—lovely.”

  “That, too. But that’s not the best part.”

  In a place like this, Lola wondered, what else is there? Judith hadn’t been particularly well endowed. But before she could frame the question, Denny pointed. Double Derricks retrieved a satin bag at the rear of the stage and transferred money from her G-string into it. Another woman pranced into the room and wiped down the pole with a hand towel. A long soft feather fluttered from a nipple ring; an abbreviated breechcloth flapped from her G-string. Her tan was spray-on orange; her black braids pulled away from a part whose roots appeared to be quickly reverting to their original blond. She shimmied toward Dawg and wound her fingers in his curls, pulling his boyish face close to her breasts, pushing it away just before contact. “Our very own Poke-a-hotness,” Denny said with a bit of a flourish.

  Lola wondered if she’d heard him right. Denny had the grace to apologize.

  “You wouldn’t look at me like that if you saw her tips. A real Indian girl could make more still. And if we could find a black girl, a Queen of Sheba—no, let’s call her Nefertitty—what can I say? I know it’s not politically correct, but these men are a long way from home. Everything else is different, so why not a little dark meat, too? But thi
s girl”—he handed the clipping back to Lola—“she looks young. Too young.”

  Judith did, wide-eyed and smooth-skinned despite what already had been years of drug abuse. Lola had seen her share of addicts, and always marveled at the way it hit them all at once, especially the women, still some mother’s baby-faced girl one day and then haggard and haunted beyond their years the next. Judith had died before that happened. Denny was right. Judith could have passed for a high school freshman. They were at the door. Lola braced herself for the cold.

  “Double D’s on break. Maybe you want to talk to her, too. She might know that girl.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Lola stepped back from the door before the words were out of his mouth. “Yes. Yes, I do. Where?”

  Denny didn’t even bother to shout over the music, just pointed to one side of the bar. A mountain of muscle sat on a stool beside a door, arms crossed over his chest, eyes nearly closed. “It’s okay,” Denny mouthed in his direction. The man twitched away from the door. Lola edged past, glancing over her shoulder for Dawg. His back was turned and he appeared to be shouting into a cellphone. She hurried through the dressing room door before he could turn and see her. She found herself in a long narrow space that was all mirrors and heaps of clothing, glittery G-strings mixed with mittens and heavy sweaters. Miss Double Derricks sat in a chair before the mirrors, leaning forward to rest her breasts on the counter.

  “Hand me that bucket, would you?” A child’s plastic sand bucket sat in a corner of the room. Lola retrieved it. The bucket was full of snow, barely melted. Miss Double Derricks scooped out a handful and rubbed it atop her breasts. “Ahhhh. That’s good. Mind putting some on my shoulders? My back’s killing me. If I’d have known how much it’d hurt to hold these puppies up, I’d have gone for C-cups.”

  Lola held the bucket over the girl’s freckle-splotched shoulders and shook out some snow. “For God’s sake,” said Double D. “Rub it in.” Lola patted at the snow. Double D twisted to look at her and Lola saw more freckles on her tilted nose and across her cheeks. Along with her wide blue eyes, they gave her the look of a curious child—at least from the neck up.

  “Those are huge,” Lola said, finally looking directly at Double D’s breasts.

  “Uh-huh.” Double D sat up and threw her shoulders back, bringing her breasts to attention. Lola thought of all the comparisons to cantaloupes and beach balls and, of all the improbable objects, jugs, and decided none did justice to the creamy globes rising from Double D’s seemingly inadequate torso.

  “Go ahead,” Double D said. “Touch them.”

  Lola shook her head. “No way.” But Double D already had caught Lola’s hands, bringing them to her breasts. “Squeeze.”

  Lola squoze. She’d expected a rocklike quality, much as if she’d grabbed the bicep of the bouncer by the dressing room door, but the flesh gave easily beneath her fingertips. “They feel real!”

  “Yep.” Double D nodded and her breasts rose and fell gently beneath Lola’s hands with the motion. “I paid extra for the high-quality job. Worth every penny, don’t you think? And just look here.” Double D traced the pink outline of her nipples, showing a threadlike white line halfway around each. “You can barely see where he made the incision. I had to go to Denver to get this kind of work. I wasn’t going to trust any old Dakota surgeon who grew up looking at cow titties. Took me a year to save up for them and they paid for themselves within my first few weeks back at work. Mr. Blair told me they’d be a smart investment and he was right.”

  “Mr. Blair?”

  “Denny.”

  Lola fished for tact. “It just seems odd that you’re so formal with someone who—”

  “With someone who sees me nearly nekkid every day? I know. But he was my teacher in high school and I can’t get over the habit of calling him Mr. Blair.”

  “Your teacher?” Lola tried to imagine prancing in a G-string in front of one of her own high school teachers. “Now that’s odd.” She joined Double D’s laughter. Double D had an appealing forthright manner, nothing like the weary cynicism Lola would have expected from someone in her line of work.

  “How long have you been doing this? My name’s Lola, by the way.”

  Double D leaned forward and rested her breasts on the counter again and smoothed more snow onto them. “What’s your real name? You here for the job? God knows, we could use an extra body or five.” She sat up and slid a hand under each breast and jiggled them, a regular cataclysm, then patted them dry with a towel.

  “That is my real name.”

  “And DeeDee’s mine!” she said, genuine delight in her voice. “That’s part of the reason I went for Double-Ds. It seemed like a natural. You know, most girls here use a different name for work.” She fished through a pile of brightly colored scraps of cloth and selected a bikini top whose abbreviated cups were shaped like yellow hard hats. “Tie this for me, will you? Not too tight—I’ve got to lose it halfway through the dance.”

  Lola knotted the strings loosely at DeeDee’s nape and in the middle of her back. “I’m not here for a job,” she said. “I’m a reporter.” And there it was, the look she’d expected all along, the wariness and suspicion and all the other emotions that added up to rejection.

  “Reporters,” DeeDee said. “We get nearly as many reporters in here as we do horny guys, and there’s hardly any difference. You all want something from us. Only difference is, the guys offer to pay. The reporters come from all over the country—even from foreign countries sometimes—to do stories on the patch. How it’s caused the breakdown of society out here. The dancers are Exhibit A. Me, I think they just want to see a little free snatch. That how it is for you? You like girls? Because we can just cut to the chase and you won’t have to waste your time asking me your bullshit questions.” DeeDee stood up, dusted gold glitter onto her eyelids and breasts, peeled off her G-string and selected a new one, bright yellow to match the hard hats. She threaded it between buttocks as high and firm and perfect as her breasts—without, as far as Lola could tell, the benefit of silicone—and adjusted it over her absolutely hairless crotch. Lola, who remained defiantly unwaxed, crossed her legs.

  “That’s all you get,” DeeDee said. “That do it for you?” She headed for the door, giving her ass a final defiant swing as she strode away from Lola.

  Who was so flustered she forgot to ask about Judith.

  It probably didn’t matter, she told herself when she was back in the truck, waiting in the warmth while Bub took a break to romp outside. Denny had recoiled from the reality of Judith’s youth. He might have made the considerable adjustments necessary to accommodate Burnt Creek’s new standards of morality, but the man had limits. Which, Lola thought, might not have been good news for Judith or any other young girl seeking her fortune, willingly or otherwise, in the patch. Lola sensed that beneath his tolerance of offensive names like Poke-a-hotness and Nefertitty, Denny still possessed an innate decency, one that would make work at the Sweet Crude bearable, if only just.

  Which left The Train.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The music in The Train was louder, the crowd bigger, and the room darker than the Sweet Crude. Lola patted a hip pocket. The revolver nestled like a talisman within. The bar and stage stretched the length of the old boxcar. On one side, the room opened into a flimsy addition, nothing more than a large space where men milled like cattle when the hay wagon comes around. Some lined up outside a curtained area. Lap dances, Lola surmised. There were no bowls of peanuts, no actual drink glasses. Cups at The Train were plastic, a fact Lola appreciated when one flew past her head and bounced off the chest of a man behind her. The cup was followed by its owner, fists windmilling toward his target. The bouncer chasing him down looked capable of murder. Lola peeled her feet free of the sticky floor and dodged, bumping into a man who raised his arms. To steady her, she thought, until his hands landed on her breasts.

  “Knock it off!” Lola shoved him away. He grinned. Lola checked an imp
ulse to reach for the gun. She looked around for the bouncer. But he was preoccupied with separating the cup flinger and the fling-ee. “I don’t care what she told you,” said the bouncer. A black beard bypassed his chin entirely and sprouted directly from his neck, reaching to the middle of a chest whose breadth was outdone only by his stomach. Lola thought of the starch-heavy meals she’d seen at The Mint, and figured the bouncer for one of their best consumers. His bulk was an immovable object between the men. “You got to wait your turn. Unless,” he said to the man who’d thrown the cup, “you want me to pull a girl off the pole.” His beard lofted into the air as he spoke, then lay back against his chest. “Maybe that one. What’s she calling herself these days?—Cherry. Yeah, that’s a good one. Anyhow, it’ll cost you fifty bucks more.”

  “Thirty,” the man said. “Cherry, my ass.”

  “Thirty,” the bouncer agreed. He beckoned a woman flailing around a pole like a trout on the end of a fly. She dropped to the stage, breasts flopping as she landed. Lola suddenly appreciated the structural benefits of silicone. Her hair was either soaked with sweat, or badly in need of washing. It hung in strings around her shoulders as she sidled through the crowd, letting hands land where they may, whether accompanied by dollars or not. The woman who replaced her hopped onto the pole without wiping it down, as the dancers in the Sweet Crude had done. Cherry stopped before the bouncer, wobbling a bit, seeking her balance. Her eyes wandered before finally focusing on the man in the bouncer’s grip. “Aw,” she said, “not him again. He’s a cheap bastard.”