Preston Allen - Las Vegas Noir

The stripper set the bag of groceries and other supplies down on the kitchen counter. Now she understood why they had gone to the twenty-four-hour Wal-Mart and bought a fry pan and paper plates. A bottle of Crisco. Crip led the little girl to the mattress and made her lie down. There was a clean sheet on the mattress, and he covered her with it.

The stripper, who was called Sapphire, threw up her hands. “Shit. I’m gonna need more than this. I’m gonna need lettuce and apple juice. Some cups. Some milk. Some of everything. Shit, you got nothing in here, Crip.”

He gave her three more hundreds. “Get whatever you need. Get it quick and get back here. And don’t curse in front of the kid no more, you hear? Don’t make me hafta smack you around a little bit.”

While the stripper was gone, he sat down on the floor next to the little girl on the mattress. He listened to her sweet, innocent breathing.

He said to her, “Sleep, little girl. Sleep.” Poor thing, to have a father like that. Poor little thing. Bad parents was one of those things Crip put on his Don’t like it list. Owing money was one of those things he put on there too. Hurting kids? Well, that was at the top of the Don’t like it list. But that was one of those things he had control over because this time, it was he who was the babysitter.

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, he had a mother and a little sister and a babysitter who was not in her right mind. He would watch her do things to his sister that he should have told his mother about, but didn’t. He loved his baby sister Ta’Shana and he did not believe the woman when she said that she was Ta’Shana’s “other” mother, but he didn’t do anything about it. All day long the babysitter would keep changing Ta’Shana’s clothes, dressing her in outfits that she had snuck into the house in her bag and asking him, How does she look now? Doesn’t my baby look nice now? And he would say, She looks fine, and go back to watching cartoons with a heavy heart. When the babysitter opened her shirt and pulled out her creamy peanut butter brown breasts, he would feel a coiling of his privates in his pants. She would sit there with her shirt open tugging her thick brown nipples and asking him how they looked. Were they big enough yet? Did they look big enough to suck on yet? He would say, They look fine, and not do much else because he really did not know what to do about it at six or seven. Then she would pick up Ta’Shana and push one of the thick, wrinkly nipples into her mouth, and say, There, there now, my baby, as Ta’Shana sucked. This troubled him so much that he would go into his room and stand in the corner like somebody had put him on punishment.

He always blamed himself for what happened the day the babysitter’s boyfriend came over, because he should have told his mother about all the other stuff, he should have told her, he should have told her, but he didn’t.

The babysitter’s boyfriend, who was not supposed to be there when his mother was not home, had snuck over many times before to be with the babysitter, so he was no stranger. This time, like all the others before, the boyfriend and the babysitter took their clothes off and got on top of each other on the couch and started pumping and huffing and growling and panting and screaming and laughing and shouting profanity.

Crip, who was called Leon back in those days, had seen it all before so he went into the room he shared with Ta’Shana and closed the door. A few minutes later, the boyfriend and the babysitter burst into the room and started punching him and slapping him around, accusing him of being disloyal and spying on them, and they said they knew all about his plans to tell his mother on them, but they knew a way to punish his black ass, Oh, they knew a way — they would take their baby and leave him behind. He cried and screamed and pulled at them and begged them not to take his sister, as they grabbed Ta’Shana from her crib and dressed her in a sailor suit and red shoes the babysitter had in her bag. They laughed at him and slapped him some more. He ran into the kitchen and came back with a butcher knife. He was going to stab them and save his sister, but the boyfriend snatched the knife from him, then picked him up and threw him against the wall three times. It could have been more than three, but after three is when he blacked out.

When he woke up, he was in a hospital. There were police there. There was his mother crying hysterically. His sister was gone. His body was broken. His face. His legs. A few years later, his mother was gone too. Out a window.

Two nights in a row, Crip got to his throne four hours later than he normally did. On the third night, he did not show at all. On the fourth night, when he got there four hours late again, Snake was waiting for him.

“What the fuck?”

Crip said, “What do you mean, what the fuck? ”

“I mean what the fuck when I say what the fuck. Where you been? What’s been happening to you?”

“The hell with you. What are you, my mother?” Crip pushed past him and sat down on his throne, and set his hat and cane in his lap. He scowled at Snake, which usually would have been enough to scare him off. But tonight, something was missing in his scowl. Snake stood his ground. Crip grumbled, “What do you think has been happening, man? What do you think? I gotta take care of the kid. I gotta feed her. I gotta make sure one of the girls is there with her while I’m here. Last night, the kid was sick. Had a temperature of a hundred and one. Sapphire was supposed to come sit with her. That bitch Sapphire never showed up. I’m gonna wring her neck when I get ahold of her. I got this kid, what am I supposed to do? Leave her there watching TV all night?”

“You got a TV now?”

“Yeah, I bought a TV. And a VCR with tapes. Cartoons and stuff. Yeah, that’s right. Is that a problem? What am I supposed to do? She’s a kid.”

Snake said, “You should just tie the brat up like you do the rest of ’em. She’ll still be there when you get back.”

“She’s a kid. You think I’m gonna tie up a kid?”

“I would.”

Crip’s voice was cold as ice. “I would fucking tie you up, Snake. I would tie you up real tight. So tight you couldn’t breathe.”

This time the scowl was working. Snake backed away with his hands raised in surrender — he backed all the way into the club. It was only when Snake was gone and Crip sat back down that he realized he had stood up out of his seat as though ready to go after Snake. Little Josh Ho the security guard and Candy Apple were staring at him. They had never seen him talk so much. He gave them the scowl too, and they went back to doing their jobs.

On the fifth night, he had to get there early, he just had to, but he got there late once more (Sapphire didn’t show again — he had to wait for Diamond to show up, but she showed up high, so he had to wait for Ebony Rainbow, who was drunk, but what the fuck, he had to get to work), and just as he got there, lucky break, he saw the father go into the club. Crip put on his hat and he gripped his cane, and he waited. When the father came back out, with a blackened eye and a kerchief against a bleeding nose, Crip gripped him by the arm and took him around back where the cars were parked. He drove off with him in his Lincoln, took him to an alley that was nice and dark. He said to him: “You know you have a sweet kid. Do you know what you have?”

The father whimpered, “Ohmygod. What have you done to her? What have you done?”

“I’ve done nothing to her,” Crip said. “What have you done to her? She’s got no mother. She’s got no grandmother. And you, you, look at you. She’s got no father. Do you realize the Gold Man will kill you? He will do it. I’ve seen him do it. I’ve helped him do it. He will kill you, and then what’s gonna happen to your kid? Look at me. I grew up with no mother, no father, no beauty to me at all, and this goddamn limp. The world is an ugly place. Your beautiful girl will become a whore, I can tell you that. She will suck dick and take it up the ass from the ugliest forms of life you have ever seen, and I know because I have seen these ugly forms of life. I live with ’em. I’m one of ’em. We’re like this goddamn city. We’re all dressed up, and we twinkle with all these bright lights, but behind it all we stink rotten like a sewer. You’re her father. You’re supposed to protect her. You’re supposed to give her a chance at the good life. This kid, you know what she tells me she wants to be when she grows up? She wants to be a nurse. I tell her, Nurse? Why not be a doctor? She says, Okay, I’ll be a doctor. I can be anything I want to be, she says. And she can be, but not if her father is throwing away every penny he has in these goddamned casinos. Casinos are for suckers and men who want their daughters to sell ass. I don’t wanna see that happen to that kid, do you hear me?” At that point, he had the father by the collar and was shaking him. The bloody kerchief fell from his nose. “Do you hear me? Do you hear me?”