The walk to the stage is a dreamlike sequence of bright lights and narrow hallways, and then I’m standing backstage with the first few notes of “Look What You Made Me Do” playing. When Taylor Swift starts singing, I feel myself become a different person. It’s like at the Shack, or at the café, but exaggerated; at least at the Shack I have my clothes on, skimpy as they are.
I prance out onto the stage, head wagging, sassy and confident—or so I hope it seems to them—barely aware of what I’m doing. I can see Jack Michaels and a couple sitting below the stage, in a shadowed seat, his features hard to read. I can feel the air pricking my skin as I pump my ass, gyrate, shake my tits, and as I reach around for my bra strap I imagine I can see Mom’s face, staring at me, judging. Not judging me because of the stripping. If Mom was anything, it was a feminist who believed women should be able to behave how they want. No, but just staring at me waiting for me to come to my senses.
I’ve almost unclipped my bra when the music comes to a screeching halt, Taylor Swift abruptly cut off mid-word. Jack Michaels is on his feet. “Sorry, sorry, Daisy,” he says. “We have a guest, a very special guest. Mac White, it’s good to see you.” Jack reaches out his hand and that’s when I see him, a man almost as towering as Hound but not quite. It’s difficult to see him in the dimness of the room, but I notice that two ginger-haired twins stand at his shoulders like guardian angels, and there seems to be something smeared on his forehead.
“Don’t let me interrupt,” Mac says, dropping into a seat and leaning back as the lady who led me to the stage brings him a whisky. “Please, go on.”
“Mac is partial owner,” Jack explains to me, and then winces like he realizes he shouldn’t be explaining things like that to strippers. “But yes, let’s go on.”
All this time, I’ve had my hand on the strap of my bra. When the music was playing, pumping through me the way music does, making it so that tearing off the bra was just another part of the dance, it was one thing, but this stopping and starting stuff is, somehow, grimier. So now what? I just take off my bra for this stranger, show this stranger my tits?
I almost laugh. That’s the job, isn’t it? That’s what I’ll be facing every night if I impress in this audition. I start to hesitate as I walk back down the stage, getting ready to resume the dance, but then the ever-present voice of practicality speaks up: “But the money. What about the money?”
They start the song from the beginning, which is good since it means I can try and get back into the rhythm again. But as I dance, I find myself wishing that Hound was here, a primal desire that comes to me in no more than a vague image of Hound’s shadow falling over me as he stands between me and these hungry-eyed men.
But I push past it. I dance.
Chapter Twelve
Hound
I’ve hated going into my apartment this past week. I’ve been damn busy with work, tooling up people for Mac, and every time I come back here, sometimes covered in blood, sometimes with the smell of gunpowder in my nostrils, I’m just reminded of the man I was trying to be. The carnage lies all around me, the pages and the laptop keys, all of it scattered everywhere. I just walk past it, go to bed, get up and leave, purposefully ignoring it all. Another man, another fucking man. What a joke.
Today is the first time I’ve gone over all of it, collecting the torn pages of the books in a big black bag. Sometimes as I’m doing this I’ll come across a page with some highlighting on, maybe some notes, but it just seems stupid now. The only color I see is red, the red of bleeding death, the red of the pain I cause every time I go out on a job. The notes seem pathetic. All of it seems pathetic. People don’t change. Dad made me into a weapon. Mac honed me. And now I’m here, the man I’m meant to be. Might as well swallow all that shit.
But the house…Daisy. I find I’m not prepared to swallow that, not yet. If my dreams of becoming cleverer are a joke, that doesn’t mean I can’t buy a house. Thugs can buy houses, too, can’t they? And it doesn’t mean I can’t obsess about the green-eyed moaning giggling angel.
I’ve collected all the pages in the trash bag, tying it and leaving it at the front door, when my cell goes off. This past week, I’ve come to hate the sound of my cell going off, because it means that it’s going to be Mac, asking me to come by his bar so that he can tell me to go and hurt more people. He thinks I like it, I know. During our last conversation he said, “I’m sure this is the best week of your life.” And I just nodded, big dumb Hound. Nobody knows, except Daisy, that there might be more in here, and Daisy and I barely know each other at all. As I take my cell from my pocket, a thought hits me: a person I hardly know knows me better than anybody I’ve ever met. What does that say about my life?
It isn’t Mac. It’s Martin Lopez, my online course tutor.
“Hello,” I say.
“Henry!” Martin shouts. It sounds like he’s outside. I know he lives in New York. Maybe he’s standing by the water. “I was just checking in that you’re okay. You know we had the practice paper about The Great Gatsby this week, right? Yesterday, in fact, and checking the system I see you haven’t submitted it.”
As he speaks, I study my knuckles; there isn’t one which is unmarked, uncut, unbruised. “No, I haven’t,” I say.
“May I ask why?”
Because last night I busted into a warehouse where four men were playing a poker game on my employer’s territory and I blew out one of their knees with a sawn-off shotgun and smashed the other one’s face in with my fist, probably shattered his nose, and left the other two passed out on the concrete bleeding into the gutter.
“I haven’t had the time.” I think about telling him I’m quitting the course, but I can’t. Maybe part of me still wants it. Even if it is a pathetic joke. I pause, and then say, “I don’t know if I’ll be submitting it for a while.”
“Submitting test papers is the best way to track your progress,” Martin explains.
If you could see me, I say silently, you wouldn’t want to talk to me, Martin. If you could see the man on the other end of the line you would slam the phone down as quickly as you could.
“I know. But it doesn’t mean I fail the course, does it?”
I’m just shooting the shit, buying time for the sake of it. I’ve already failed. The books are shredded and I’m not going to replace them. All those fancy quotes and fancy literary theories will soon just be half-remembered phantoms, and then nothing at all.
“No, it doesn’t,” Martin says. “Of course not. But it might impact your performance in the real test.”
“Alright. Thanks for letting me know.”
Martin makes an awkward half-word sound, and then sighs. “Is everything okay, Henry? Is this a personal issue? You know, we have a number you can call if—”
I can’t help it. I burst out laughing. A number you can call! I imagine myself calling this number, where they usually deal with normal-student shit, like stress about the deadlines or feeling overwhelmed by the work or whatever, and telling them about my particular problems. I laugh loudly down the phone, and then because I feel guilty laughing at this guy who’s helped me out over the months, I hang up and laugh myself out. Wiping a tear of laughter from my eye, I mutter, “A number you can call.”
When the apartment is halfway clean—can’t be bothered to deal with the beer bottles or the takeout containers, or to put away the free weights—I climb into my jeep and drive to an apartment about half an hour away, where one of my men lives. His name is Denton Curtis, a man I’ve used for jobs in the past. When I press his buzzer, he barks down, “What sort of self-righteous motherfucker thinks he can hold down a man’s buzzer for two motherfucking seconds and get away with it?”
“Me,” I say.
“Damn Hound, you should’a said. I was two seconds away from sending down a bullet on your vending-machine ass, you fuckin’ giant.”
“Alright, alright. Open up.”
Denton wears a baggy Austin Spurs jersey with baggy white shorts, high-top spor
ts sneakers, and a perpetual white-toothed smile. Three or four silver chains clink at his chest as he walks, and he has the habit of shaking his head and laughing at anything anybody says. But he’s a damn good finder-of-people, in my experience.
“Take a seat, man.”
We sit in Denton’s living room, opposite his huge TV, sipping beers.
The TV is playing a Spurs game. I’ve never been a big basketball fan, but I can guess it’s not going well.
“Now would’ya look at this, Hound? These little fuckin’ fuckers spend the whole damn game polishing their sneakers and then decide at the last second to get their asses in gear, when it’s too damn late. That’s what I call lazy, fuckin’ lazy.”
“I’m here about Dean,” I tell him.
“Oh, yeah, yeah, lemme take a look.” He reaches down the side of the couch and picks up a manila folder. “No location on him—yet—don’t know if there will be one, either. I heard some rumblings in Silicon Valley about him. Weird, right? But these are old rumblings, years old, and all I can say is two techy guys have his name saved on their computers. Oh, motherfuckers!” He waves the folder at the screen, and then settles back down. “I don’t know where he is right now. Might be he’s got some ninja hiding skills you don’t know about, might be he’s lying at the bottom of a river somewhere. Might be he went up in flames. I dunno, man, not for sure. Gimme some more time.”
“Alright.” I reach into my pocket and take out his pay, with a little extra. “This is important, Denton. I need to find him because…” Because I find myself constantly drawn to his daughter. But I just let it hang, and then stand up. “Thanks for the beer.”
“Stay safe, Hound. See’ya later.”
I’m on the sidewalk when my cell buzzes again. I think it’s going to be Martin, but it’s Mac, his voice as no-nonsense as ever. “Come to The Red Room,” he says. “Now.”
Sometimes, the way Mac speaks to me makes me want to reach through the phone and crush his throat. I hate the sound of my own voice when I say, “Yes, okay.” Yes, okay, like I’m some kind of sniveling rat. As I drive to the strip club, I try and work out when exactly I stopped respecting Mac and started resenting him. It definitely has something to do with Daisy, that’s for sure. As I walk through The Red Room, I hear the start of some song that’s popular at the moment, some woman singing about how she killed a guy and it’s his fault, or something.
The place is empty, which means they must be holding auditions. I know that Mac likes to come here when they’re holding auditions so he can get a good look at the women. Sometimes he even has Ripper or Hitter go and tap them on the shoulder afterward and say, “The owner wants to see you.” And the old pervert gets most of them into his car with him. I nod to Jack and sit next to Mac, who doesn’t so much as look at me. I remember a boy who wanted to hear the word “Son” on Mac’s lips and feel like a rotten idiot. Then I look at the stage, and for a few moments I’m sure gravity has stopped working. Everything shifts, floats around, changes, and I’m left not knowing what the hell to do.
My first instinct is to be the Hound I’ve been my whole life, which would mean I’d go into Violence Mode and think about the consequences later. I’d smash Mac over the head with a bottle, glass anyone who got in the way, and get her off the stage. But then I see the moment where Daisy sees me, lit harshly under the too-bright lights. Her eyes go wide for the fraction of a second, locked onto me, and she shakes her head in such a subtle way I’m sure I’m the only person who notices. All the while she’s still dancing, gyrating her ass for these fucking perverts. She’s mine, I want to roar. She’s mine and you have no right to look at her.
Once I’ve swallowed the rage, I start thinking. If I fight now, what do I achieve? If I attack Mac now, Ripper and Hitter will jump on me. Fine, then I’ll kill them, too. But then what does that achieve for Daisy? Even if I can get her out of here for the time being, against her will, that doesn’t mean she’ll miraculously change her mind. Last week, when I dealt with that creep in the Shack for her, she wasn’t pleased. She was pissed. As stupid as you look… I realize I’m gripping my knees too hard, causing them to ache. It takes a surprising amount of effort to unclench them, sit back, and pretend that this is having no effect on me. As I sit here, I know I only have one real choice, and that’s just to sit still and let this happen. It’s what Daisy wants. It’s the only thing that ends this peacefully.
And so the torture begins.
I didn’t truly realize how much I cared about Daisy before now. Even if that makes no sense, I don’t give a damn. I care about her, I know it now, because listening to the men beside me grunt approvingly at her moves is driving me crazy.
“Good, isn’t she?” Mac says, finally glancing at me.
I think my face is composed enough to hide my recognition, but I’m not sure.
“Yeah.” I swallow. My throat’s dry. And these assholes haven’t gotten me a drink.
“Look at her move,” Mac says. “Smooth, sexy. I’m sure I don’t have to go into detail about what I’d like to do to her!”
“No,” I say, “you don’t.”
The song seems to be coming to an end. Daisy reaches her hand around to her bra strap. This is the moment where everything could turn blood-red. This is the moment where I won’t be thinking about the next hour, or even the next ten minutes. This is the moment where my mind will hone down to one instinct: stop her before these men see her breasts. I can’t let that happen. I tense up, all my muscles burning the way they often do before violence. Daisy sees this, hesitates, and then lets her hand drop.
“She isn’t showing her breasts?” Mac says, the disappointment loud and cloying in his old man’s voice.
“They don’t always show them,” Jack says, but I can hear he’s caught off-guard.
The song winds down with Daisy bouncing her ass on the pole and then coming to the front of the stage and waiting for the men to pass comment. This is fucked, this is really fucked. I think about smashing Mac’s face into the table, but I have to repress this urge. I have to just sit here. Man…this is fucked .
“So, Daisy Dunham,” Mac says, looking at a clipboard on the table between him and Jack. He pauses, turning to me. “Dunham. I wonder if there’s any relation.” He talks quietly, so only I can hear. I know the bastard is certain there’s a relation. I know he’s just watching to see how I’ll react. So I keep my face composed, don’t say a thing. I just shrug. Mac turns back to the stage. “That was a very enthusiastic performance, sweetie, but what happened at the end there? Shyness isn’t something valued in your kind.”
Your kind . I wish this man was dead. Out of the life. I thought he’d gotten out of the life. I was a blind kid, that’s what I was, just a blind over-trusting kid. I want to go back in time and throttle the moron who once tried to see this man as a father.
Daisy clears her throat and mumbles something I don’t hear.
“Speak up!” Mac snaps.
Ripper—or Hitter—snorts laughter.
“I just wasn’t sure,” she says. “Can I go now?”
Mac looks annoyed, but he waves a hand. Jack says: “Of course you can, Daisy. We’ll talk after all the auditions are completed. We’ll, err, have our verdict then.” He keeps glancing at Mac, nervous, as anyone shorter than seven feet would be around Mac.
“Okay. Thank you.”
Daisy turns on her heels and clicks away, and I know that Mac is staring at the way her ass shifts around her thong, and I know that it would bring me great pleasure to go into Violence Mode. But I have to be smarter. Even if all my books have been turned to kindling.
“Jack,” I say, leaving it until the next girl is getting ready to dance. “I reckon I’d like a private audition with one of your girls. You don’t mind, do you?”
I asked Jack on purpose, knowing he’d hesitate—it’s an inconvenience—and knowing that that’d piss off Mac. Just need to wait and let it happen.
“Well, Hound, you know…these aren’t ex
actly our girls.”
“If he wants to go back there and see what he can see,” Mac says, “then he can. I’m owner too, Jack.”
Being careful not to smile, I stand up and walk toward the changing room.
Chapter Thirteen
Daisy
“You used your real name,” Sarah is saying, but it sounds like her voice is coming from across a large gap. He was there, watching me, and there was a look in his eyes. It wasn’t judgment, that’s the most confusing part. “Why would you do that, you silly girl? Oh, Daisy Dunce! That’s a new name for you!” No, it wasn’t judgment in his eyes. It was just expectation; expectation that I’m worth more than this. What freaks me out so much is that it was a look not all that different to Mom’s, or the one I imagine Mom would give me. Does Hound think I can do better, just like Mom did?
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