Beautiful, Naked and Dead mm-1

by Josh Stallings

  I sat at the bar, next to an old fisherman and a fat cat who was being hustled by a redhead in a short neon blue lycra dress that might as well have been spray painted onto her plump frame. As the room swam around me, I told myself I was looking for traces of Kelly, the truth was…when I was lost, I returned to what I knew, or some psych bullshit like that. Maybe the speed and booze and death had made me horny, who the fuck knows how this fucked up brain worked, not me that’s for damn sure…. A skinny Asian gal swirled out of the haze, her small naturally proportioned breasts were a real turn on in this sea of monster ta-tas. She aimed toward me, dancing up swaying her hips. From a distance she looked like a lithe wood nymph, all legs and arms and the promise of unbridled sensuality, just the ticket for these weary bones. But the closer she got the younger she got, a baby at best, but her eyes were old and cold. She was the walking wounded, one more victim of the life. Sliding up, she latched herself onto my thigh. “Want a nasty, grab-your-cock-suck-on-my-tits lap dance? Come on, big guy?” Behind her smile lurked those dead eyes. “Don’t worry ‘bout the bouncer,” she leaned in whispering into my ear, I could smell cheap perfume. “I know a dark corner in the lap room, I will rock you so hard, baby, I really want to make you come. I want to feel your cock in my hand, between my legs. Come on, baby.” Her tongue licked my ear to show she really meant it, I guess. I decided this was one lonely ride I didn’t need to take. Handing her a twenty I walked out.

  I could feel the speed crashing out of my system as I stumbled across the boulevard. I made it to the room before I puked into the toilet, I washed my face and fell into the bed beside Cass. She stirred once then went back to softly snoring. With neon lights blinking on the ceiling I drifted in the deep warm blackness of sleep.

  Tijuana is baked hot, close buildings in the centro district make the air pungent with the stink of humanity. Cheap bars and strip clubs line Avenue of the Heroes. After the Root I spent my leave time down here, drinking and fucking and trying to find that blissful play of pure numb. Now it all feels different, gaudy and tarnished. A long snaking line of marines stretches down the street. Some of the soldiers are in their dress whites, others wear sweat stained flack jackets and soiled olive drabs. Many have rifles strapped over their shoulders. Every few minutes the line shuffles forward a few feet, then stands waiting, bored. I move down the line, studying the faces, looking for anyone I might know.

  Sergeant Tibs, a jolly Black Marine from the Root, is standing in the middle of a busy intersection. MP’s block the taxis from crossing. Horns blare. I touch Tibs’ arm. He turns his face and I see the hole in his forehead. He took a round from a sniper two days before ship out. His eyes are milky and lacking any shine. He opens his mouth to speak, red dust drifts out past his cracked lips, but no sound.

  I run away from Tibs, up the line. In the shacks by the river the head of the line disappears into a tin walled building. A young Muslim woman in a black burka stands guard on the door, her hand tightly grips an AK47.

  The line snakes past the front door and down an ally. They are lined up to a back door. I move past them like a ghost. Through a curtain, men are standing around a table, they all have dollars in their hands. Moving through them I see a young soldier pumping away on some girl. I can’t see her face, but I get a queasy feeling when I see her brown curls. The young grunt finishes and the others cheer him. As he climbs off her I can see her face… it’s Kelly.

  “Hey baby, how are you,” she says smiling up at me.

  I try to speak but my throat closes off.

  The next in line climbs on her, covering her face with his chest.

  I run out into the street, only now it’s Hooterville, the Lebanese ghetto. Towel-heads point and laugh at me. The crowd parts and I see the little boy kneeling over his dead mother. She sits up and reaches out a bloody hand. She points an accusing finger at me and lets out a high-pitched wail.

  I jerked up in bed, my body covered in sweat. The late afternoon sun flooded the room with its painful radiance. Where the hell was I? The dream still felt more real than this strange hotel room. Slowly the last few days came back to me like flashes from a fever nightmare. A rank odor wafted up over me. It smelled like something had died in the bed beside me. Sniffing around I discovered to my shame and disgust that the smell was coming from me. All the poison I had put in my body over the last few days seemed to have leaked out of my pores. My body reeked like a barroom floor on Sunday morning. Flicking my eyes around the room I noticed something was missing, Cass. While I’d slept she must have skipped out. I wasn’t really sure how I should feel about that, pissed or relieved?

  A shower, a cup of coffee and some food in that order, and death to anyone who tried to stop me. As the warm water soothed my muscles I thought about Cass. Maybe I didn’t owe her or Kelly anything. Maybe I should drive home and forget I ever met either of them. I made a promise to my fantasy of a girl who never existed. In the only movie ever made worth watching, “The Wild Bunch,” Sikes asks why their friend is hunting them so hard, and Pike says, “He gave his word.” But Sikes says, “To a railroad!” and Pike roars, “It doesn’t matter who you give it to.” Words I lived by I guess. Walking away wasn’t an option, at least not one I could live with.

  The first thing I noticed when I stepped out of the bathroom was the wonderful smell of hot coffee. Cass sat on the bed. She flicked her eyes up and down my scar tattered naked body, a smile forming on her lips. I quickly pulled on my jeans. My white belly hung over my belt line, I don’t know why I was shy in front of her, but I was. I pulled on a tee-shirt. On top of the old television set were two large coffees, some bagels, lox, thinly sliced tomatoes, and onions.

  “I figured you drank it black, if not you can have mine.”

  “Black’s fine.” The food tasted good and the coffee even better. Mid-bite I realized I was glad Cass had come back, as dark and twisted as it was, she gave my life direction.

  “So, big boy, when you’re done wolfing down the fine food I brought you, where do we start?” Clearly she was enjoying watching me tear into the food.

  “We start by buying you some new clothes. Something that doesn’t shout hooker quite so loud.”

  “You don’t like the way I look?” she said with a coy pout.

  “I just don’t want to spend my time beating off the dogs.”

  “But you like the way I look?” She struck a pose meant to send me drooling. She had on a silver leather miniskirt and a purple tube top, no bra, so her nipples were giving me a weather report. I turned my attention away from her. Lacing up my Doc Martins I clipped the.38 into my boot holster. “Come on say it, you like the way I look.” I let my eyes travel from her feet, up her body to her eyes.

  “You’re alright.”

  “Alright? You and I both know you’d give your left testicle to hit my fine stuff.”

  “You are one classy broad Cass, now let’s roll.”

  Down on Market Street I bought her a nice Donna Karan knock off, she said it was too big, she wasn’t used to dresses that didn’t hug her every curve. The dress made her look sweet and a bit innocent. Truth is she would look great in a potato sack. Next stop, a shoe outlet to trade her seven inch spikes for a nice sensible pair of Bass walking shoes. Sure she could move quick in the new shoes but I had to agree with Fred Astaire, “God makes legs, but it takes a pair of heels to make a gam.” In flats she barely came up to the scar above my nipple. She looked more like my daughter than my partner in crime. I bought myself a casual un-constructed tan suit. I was going for middle level exec but looking in the mirror I realized I looked more like a Viking killer in a suit. Most people don’t look past the outlines, they see a suit and read businessman, they see a tattoo and leather jacket and they read trouble. Someone should tell them Hitler and his crew wore real nice suits. At a quick glance Cass and I could pass for tourists or dot commers on a break, as long as they didn’t look too deep into our eyes.

  Our first stop was the main branch of the San Francisco
Library, they stored back issues of the SF Chronicle on a database. An officious young clerk pointed to a bank of computers and told me to look it up. I stared at the screen for a long painful moment. I hated computers, they made me feel stupid and old. I was an analogue man living in a digital age. My hands hovered over the keyboard, my eyes flicking over the screen, it was all garbled gibberish to me. I could feel rage growing, it was like when I was in school, Moses the dummy. It took all the self-control I could muster not to grab the monitor and throw it across the room.

  “Move over sport, let me show you how it’s done.” With a rapid flurry of keystrokes she was into the system. She winked at me, clearly proud of herself. I shrugged, like it wasn’t a big deal. We searched back to the week they had left town. After two hours we hadn’t discovered any dead men or any links to the mysterious Mr. Torelli.

  Leaving the library no wiser, we went down to Fisherman’s Wharf. I bought a steamed and cracked crab, a loaf of French bread and a couple of bottles of Bass ale. In a park down by the bay we sat looking out at the water. It was a clear day, we could see all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge. There is no graceful way to eat crab, it is a messy, dig your fingers in the shell kind of food. Cass laughed, her eyes sparkling as she fought with her meal, it was the youngest I had seen her look. She picked a piece of crab meat off my beard and popped it in her mouth.

  The sun glittered off the wake of a ferry, returning from Alcatraz. The rocky prison sat peacefully in the bay; it had been Al Capone’s last home. How many ghosts roamed those pain filled iron halls? I’d done a four-year stint in Chino, for a joyride in a stolen Mercedes. I was twenty-two and all alone. I hooked up with a Chicano cat named Tommy, he wasn’t in a gang. The Aryan brothers called me a race traitor, the blacks hated us because of our skin. Inside you either joined or fought, so we watched each other’s backs, lifted weights and kicked ass when called to. Tommy taught me to go insane in battle, the crazier the better. Let them know you don’t give a fuck, laugh and howl when you attack. I learned to become a berserker, that was the Viking term for the first wave of soldiers they sent in, wild men who went insane on their enemies. I remember this skinhead coming after me in the yard. I let him hit me, felt my blood rising, let him hit me again until somewhere deep down I snapped. I let out a wild war cry, wrapping my arms around his trunk I lifted him off the ground, slamming his body into a light stanchion. Pushing his neck into the crook of my arm I crushed down on his throat. I could see his brothers moving in and I felt his body go limp in my arms. I was outside my body watching it all go down. If Tommy hadn’t arrived I would have killed the man. Tommy let out a wild laugh, setting himself for battle he danced between me and the Aryan brothers, a skinny shiv in his hand. Letting out a screaming laugh I dropped the gasping punk to the ground. I scanned the group, looking for my next victim. The skinheads let us walk, gave us a pass that day. What do you do with crazy bastards who don’t give a rat’s ass what you do to them; how do you threaten the insane? I wondered where Tommy was now, did he ever make it out of the life, was he living in the suburbs with a wife and the kids he dreamed about? Was our time together just a bad dream he finally woke from?

  Cass tossed pieces of French bread to a building group of seagulls. She laughed as they caught the bread in midair. For a brief moment, the scars that made her seem so old were erased and I could see the girl she would have been if the world were fair. I was filled with the desire to make her world safe and just, a world where men didn’t fuck little girls and make them old before their time. A world I knew didn’t exist for people like us. Ok, that was only half of what I was thinking, deeper down in my shadow self I wished I was one of the men who got to fuck her. The sun fire in her hair, the way her firm body showed through the demure dress. She’s Kelly’s sister, how fucked am I.

  “You’re doing it again,” she said.

  “Doing what?”

  “Staring at me.”

  “What, I’m not supposed to look at you now?” I said looking back out at the water.

  Tossing the crab shells into a trash can we headed back to the Barbary Coast. Strip clubs were an addiction for most men. If Kelly had met Gino there odds were he’d come back. The Coast was quiet, a few early birds sat at the bar and chatted up the day girls. I ordered a Gimlet, a gin and Rose’s lime juice and promised to pace my drinking. Cass had a diet coke and a bowl of pretzels. Jane the bartender was a stout girl, she had on low-rise jeans and a short shirt, showing off her sweet fuzz dusted round belly. She reminded me of a juicy peach, inviting you to take a thirst-quenching bite. When I asked her about Gino, she put a finger to her temple, pretending to think. “Your friend Benjamin Franklin might know a Gino,” she said with a cute smile. I dropped a hundred on the bar. She lifted it to her ear. “Oh really, no…” she said talking to the bill, then looked over to me. “He told me, Gino used to come in here, but he hasn’t been around for a while.”

  “Does our friend know what he looked like?” I asked.

  “Um,” she said listening to the bill again, “He said Gino was pushing sixty hard, with a bad dye job. Always wore nice suits, and tipped well.” With that she dropped the bill into her tip jar.

  “Do you think your friend Grant might know anything else?” I said dropping a fifty on the bar.

  “You don’t look like a fed, and you sure don’t tip like a fed.”

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “Only if you like cheap suits and a lousy pension.”

  “I’m just a guy, looking for a guy, hoping you can help.”

  “You are not just a guy.” She flashed me a smile. Cass looked from Jane to me, then got up and headed for the ladies’ room. “I don’t think your girlfriend likes me.”

  “Do you care?” I asked.

  “Hum, no, I guess I don’t.” She let her fingers dance along my hand. Something about being with a pretty girl made other pretty girls want you. It’s like you have a seal of approval. They want to know what the other girl sees in you. I caught her finger in my palm and pulled her closer to me.

  “Tell me about Gino, why are the feds looking for him?”

  “What will you give me if I tell you?”

  “My undying appreciation.”

  “I was hoping for something a bit more, um, concrete. But that will do, for now,” she said with a meaningful grin. “He used to come in every Friday night, eight o’clock on the dot. He was into some kind of internet porn, but in the boom days, who wasn’t? He hired some of the girls to work for him. They said he paid good, even better for rough stuff. Four or five months ago he stopped coming in, I just figured he moved back to Chicago. But then the feds came sniffing around, so who knows what happened. Did I do good?”

  “You did great.”

  “Are you going to give me some candy?”

  “Which girls worked for him?” I said with a slight chuckle, god, she was cute.

  “Shelly and Crystal, maybe others. Shelly moved to LA, but Crystal is on the schedule for tonight. She may even surprise us all and show up.”

  “Thank you,” I said, putting the fifty into her tip jar.

  “You’ll be back.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I saw the way you looked at me.” She traced her body with her finger, circling her belly. “You will be back, and not just to talk to Crystal.”

  “Time will tell.” I said and walked away. I caught Cass coming out of the ladies’ room and together, we walked out into the street. With the last golden light of the setting sun banks of fog rolled up over the tall hills, blanketing the Victorians in softness. We walked down to Chinatown.

  “One of the dancers came into the bathroom, she just stared at me.”

  “Maybe she was coming on to you.”

  “I don’t think so. I think she recognized me.”

  “Damn… I shouldn’t have taken you in there.”

  “That bitch Jane would have been happier if you hadn’t, could she have been any less subtle? And what was t
hat shit with the talking to the bill?” she said, setting her jaw. I would be flattered if I didn’t know I was just a prize the girls were fighting over. I didn’t have any value until they noticed someone else noticing me. Kelly had got it right, my only value was as a protector, like a big mean dog. We ate at a small Chinese restaurant. I had no idea where she put it, but Cass could pack the food in. Half my size and she matched me bite for bite. We had greasy pork fried rice, broccoli beef, lemon chicken, egg rolls, pressed duck, fried wontons and a gallon of green tea. Well fed and feeling comfortable we walked back toward the hotel. Cass slipped her arm into mine, the fog swirled around us haloing the streetlights in the mist above. To any passers by we looked like lovers on a romantic date. “Moses?” Cass asked in a soft whisper.

  “Yeah?”

  “If we met, on the street, or in a park… Would you like me?” I knew what she was asking, the question we all asked. If we met in the straight world, would we be of worth.

  “Yes, I think I would,” I said. She smiled and snuggled her blonde head against my ribcage. The fact was I’d have liked her anywhere. But if things were different, I doubt she would have noticed me.

  Back in our room she jumped onto the bed. “Want to play tent, big boy?” She flipped the blankets up, letting them drift slowly down. I shook my head fighting to hold down my grin. I washed my face and got ready to go back out. We had agreed it would be best if Cass stayed away from the Barbary Coast.

  “Why don’t you stay in tonight?” she purred from the bed.

  “Clock is ticking, we have to find them before they find us.”

  “If you fuck that bitch, I’ll smell it on you,” she said, hard and cold.

  “Stay in the room. And…”

  “I know, don’t open the door for anyone.” I gave her my.45 with no doubt she would plug anyone stupid enough to break in on her.