Max Collins - Quarry in the middle

She waited, and then the door opened. A little kid, maybe three-and-half feet tall, blond, blue-eyed, blank, in Star Wars pajamas, opened it. He didn’t seem surprised to see his mother lugging a strange man with blood on him. It was that kind of town.

The kid didn’t pitch in after that, except to shut the door behind us. He returned to the floor in front of the little TV on a stand where he was eating a Pop Tart and Sesame Street puppets were doing a better job of staying upright than I was.

The trick after that was her navigating me around and through an elaborate wooden train track that took up a lot of the midget living room’s threadbare green carpet.

She moved me down a little hallway, sideways because there wasn’t room for two abreast, and then guided me into a small bedroom, putting me on my back on top of a sunflower bedspread.

I passed out.

Some minutes later, I woke up and was wearing nothing except my jockey shorts. The bruises weren’t showing much yet, but she was checking me over, and had a little bowl of warm water and a washcloth she was using to clean the blood off my face.

“I don’t think you have any broken bones,” she said.

“Ribs are sore.”

“Could have a broken rib. There’s an emergency room in River Bluff, if that’s what you want.”

I shook my head, which was a mistake.

“Shit,” I said, as the blinding headache knifed across the back of my eyes.

“Your nose isn’t broken,” she said.

“Should be.”

She wasn’t in the baseball jacket now. She had on a B-52’s t-shirt and denim cut-offs. Did I say she looked about twelve? Without her makeup.

“You got any aspirin?” I asked. My lips felt thick. My tongue felt thicker.

“No. Better.”

She got up and I admired her ass as she receded down the hall. This did not mean I was feeling better. Lenny Bruce told a joke about a guy in car accident who lost a foot and made a pass at the nurse in the ambulance. Difference between men and women.

I took the two pills she brought me and swallowed some water. “What was that?”

“Percodan.”

“…Thank you.”

I passed out, or went to sleep.

Take your pick.

When I woke up, I realized the little bedroom had blackout curtains. I felt stiff, and I felt sore, and I had a dull headache, but not throbbing. I wondered how many hours I’d been out. Sunlight was peeking in around the edge of the dark curtains, so it couldn’t have been too very long.

She heard me stirring, and came in to check on me. She had a different t-shirt on, a pink Cyndi Lauper one, but the denim cut-offs looked familiar.

I asked her, “What time is it?”

“It’s about ten.”

Ten a.m., huh? I was a resilient motherfucker-a couple hours sleep, and good as new. Not bad for thirty-five.

“Friday,” she added.

“No. This is…Thursday, right?”

“No. You slept round the clock. Except for twice when I woke you up, led you to the bathroom, then fed you Percodan.”

“Fuck. No wonder I feel like somebody emptied me out and filled me with molasses. I don’t remember you doing that at all.”

“You weren’t very talkative.” She perched on the edge of the bed. “You look better. You don’t have a black eye or anything.”

I flipped the covers back. The deep blue bruising crawled in amoeba-like blotches over half a dozen places. I was breathing deep and the ribs weren’t hurting, though. Small miracle I hadn’t busted one. That is, had one busted for me.

I covered and sat up, which didn’t hurt any more than falling down a flight of stairs. She propped an extra pillow behind me.

“Hungry?” she asked.

“I could try to eat.”

“There’s left-over alphabet soup from Sam’s lunch.”

“Sam’s your kid?”

“Sam’s my kid.”

“Alphabet soup please.”

“Grilled cheese sandwich, maybe? Milk?”

I was a kid home sick from school.

“Grilled cheese, perfect. You wouldn’t have any kind of Coke, would you?”

“Diet Pepsi.”

I wasn’t going to insult my hostess. “That would be swell.”

She sat and watched me eat off a tray in bed and I began to feel vaguely human. The little boy came in, wearing a red t-shirt and blue shorts, and tugged on his mother’s arm and whispered something, and she went off and tended to that kid for a while.

When she came back, I was done eating, and I found a place for the tray on the little nightstand. “Why are you doing this? Why did you help me last night? I mean…night before last?”

“You helped me.”

“Candace,” I said, trying to impress her by not shortening her name to the more stripper-like Candy, “all I did was let you give me a free table dance. I have a feeling a lot of Good Samaritans would have done that.”

“You didn’t take advantage. You were nice. I’m a good judge of character.”

No, she wasn’t.

“Anyway, I’ve seen how people just disappear around the Lucky. And I didn’t want that to happen to you.”

“Those two bouncers who jumped me…do I remember you saying they were heading back for me?”

She nodded. “I’ve seen them do that before. They take somebody in the alley, work them over. Then they pull a car over and throw the poor person in the back seat or trunk, and drive off.”

That didn’t mean Jerry G had intended having me killed, just that they were going to dump me off the premises. A ditch somewhere, or a parking lot across the river. Or, they could have killed my ass, and tossed me in the river. Either way, Candace was a rare angel in Haydee’s.

“Why do you work there, Candace? You’re a pretty, intelligent girl. You could do better.”

She smiled and laughed. “I’m pretty, but I’m not that smart. I never got better than C’s, and I dropped out my sophomore year. I have a little boy to support, who the H knows where his father is, and I hope to do better for myself, so for right now? Nothing pays better than dancing at the Lucky. Not for me.”

I didn’t want to insult her, but I had to ask. I tried as delicately as possible: “That’s all you do at the Lucky? Dance?”

She didn’t take offense. “I’m not one of Jerry G’s party girls. They don’t make all that much more than I do, anyway, by the time Jerry gets his slice, and they risk a lot. Some of their customers can get rough.”

“Rougher than your biker pal?”

“Way rougher. That’s real sad, those girls. Jerry G gets ’em all hooked. Free drugs at first, then so much of their pay goes to it, they just sort of spin their wheels. I don’t take drugs. I don’t even smoke grass, anymore. Not around Sam, anyway.”

Good-naturedly, I reminded her, “You have Percodan around.”

“I work long hours, on my feet, shaking my bottom, always around a lot of smoke, and sometimes I get bad headaches. I can buy those pills at work, but I’m careful. You can get addicted to that shit, y’know.”

“I don’t smoke or drink much or do drugs,” I said. “I’m the clean-cut guy you’ve been dreaming about, Candace.”

She grinned; her gums showed a little, as her teeth were rather tiny-it was endearing. “What are you, a priest?”

“I didn’t say I was celibate.”

“I didn’t think you were.” Still grinning. “I was sitting on your lap the other night, remember?”

“I remember…I hope I don’t get you in any trouble. I’m sure your boss wouldn’t be thrilled with you, if he knew you’d bailed me out.”

She shook her head; the ponytail flounced. “Nobody saw me. We’re fine. We’ll just get you healed up and healthy, and you can find some other town to have fun in.”

I didn’t argue the point.

We chatted for a while, and she told me her long-term plans, which were to save enough money to sell the trailer, move to Des Moines where her older sister lived, and go to beauty school. She wanted to buy a nicer car, too. She had about ten thousand saved, and another fifteen thousand or so would make her dreams come true.