Claire Watkins - Battleborn - Stories

Manny presses his fingers to her tit. “A little.”

“Good.”

• • •

That evening, as the sun sets, a cab drops Michele at the ranch. He is twenty, the same age as his missing comrade. He’s a student of civil engineering, a field he chose because he did not have the grades for medicine or the head for law. In a family like his, a boy has only so many options.

He pauses at the gate and looks up at the sky. A dense swath of stars cuts diagonally across it. If this trip had gone as it was supposed to, he and Renzo would be at the Grand Canyon right now. If everything had not in an instant become so horrifically and hopelessly fucked, they would have flown home in August, and when friends asked about his summer he would have told them of the unfathomable American landscape, the innumerable American drugs, the indefatigable American girls. Or, if he was feeling wistful, he might have said simply, It was beautiful. There were more stars out there than I’ve ever seen.

Instead, here he stands, listening for helicopters searching for his friend, lost somewhere in the Nevada desert. But the helicopters wouldn’t be searching at night; the police had said that at the station. It wouldn’t do any good.

He imagines Renzo tilting his head back in the darkness. Looking up at the faraway mechanics of the galaxy, listening for helicopters that aren’t there. The night before he disappeared, Renzo had pointed to the stars, an arm of the Milky Way adjacent to their own. He called it proof of something. He expounded on the ideas put forth in the books he read, about futility and hopelessness, ideas Michele had long since tired of. Renzo fancied himself a person with a cruel intellect and an unceasing sense of scale.

The cabdriver shouts from his window, saying something over and over again. But he’s speaking English, and Michele understands only when the driver jabs his index finger, pantomiming pushing a button. Where am I? he wonders. And what kind of bar has a doorbell?

• • •

The buzz of the bell reverberates deep inside Manny’s throat. The girls — showered, shaved, plucked, bleached, perfumed, lotioned, and powdered — arrange themselves in the neon-lit lobby facing the front door, waiting for him to open it, introduce each of them, and encourage the client to pick a date. Darla hangs back, waiting for her place at the end of the line. She thinks she gets picked most from that spot, Manny knows. Every girl would rather be picked from the lineup than have to go push for a date in the bar, even Darla, who’s a damn good pusher. Being picked from the lineup is a sure thing, cash in hand. This is how Manny convinced Darla to quit dancing in the first place. “Girl,” he said, shouting to her over the squeal of distorted electric guitar inside Spearmint Rhino. “Stripping is like waiting tables, okay? Come work for me and you’ll never have to beg for tips again.”

Manny claps his hands. “All right, ladies. Remember, they don’t come in here for interesting, okay? They come for interested .” This is the first client they’ve had all night and they need the business. He opens the door. “Welcome to the Cherry Patch Ranch.”

On the front step stands a good-looking kid with smooth olive skin, glossy black curls and eyes as bright and blue as the swimming pool out back. Manny hands him a packet of brochures and a menu, ushering him across the threshold. “Is this your first visit to the ranch?”

“Hello,” says the kid softly, reaching to shake Manny’s hand. “It is nice to, ah, meet you.”

“Well. It’s nice to meet you, too. You’re welcome to have a drink at the bar or choose a girl and let her take you on a tour. All these lovely ladies are here to make you feel at home.” Manny introduces the girls by their working names, the only names known here, a rule they need never be reminded of. Down the line they each say hello. They give a little wave and smile, and Manny can almost hear it in the space between their clenched teeth, louder than ever before for this polite, smooth-skinned kid with an exotic accent. Pick me.

First is Chyna, a heavy half-breed Shoshone in a plaid ruffled jumper outfit. Geoff, one of her regulars, brought the outfit for her as a present, hoping she’d give him an extra date for free, which she did, straddling him near dawn in the bed of his truck where they wouldn’t be heard on the intercom system wired throughout the trailers, where they thought Manny wouldn’t find out.

Next in line is Trish, a part-time beautician who does most of the girls’ waxing in a heavily wallpapered salon in Nye called Serendipity. She charges them half price, and they tip her accordingly. Bianca is beside Trish, her hair painstakingly straightened and oiled, her waxy pink C-section scar peeking out from under her red panties. Her two daughters, preteens now, live with their grandmother during the week. They think their mother is a masseuse at a spa in Summerlin.

Lacy is next in line, and though Manny can’t smell her from where he is, she’s no doubt spritzed on too much Victoria’s Secret Love Spell body spray. Beside her is Army Amy, wearing silver hoop earrings, frayed Daisy Dukes, and a squarish camouflage hat. She’s topless, except for a pair of blue sparkly pasties shaped like stars stuck to her big nipples with eyelash glue. Amy is the ranch’s big name, the only girl here who’s done porn. It’s her picture on the billboards, the cab signs, the snapper cards passed out by illegals on the Strip.

Next to Amy, Darla wears a black bustier and a dusting of silver glitter around her eyes. She put the glitter on to satisfy Manny, who made her change out of the satin pajamas she wanted to wear. “Honey,” he said, “those things makes you look — and I’m only telling you this because I love you — like a lesbian.” She pretends to fidget with her garters now, looking innocent and eager at the same time. Her niche.

The girls are all angles: the apex of their plastic pointed heels, the thrust of their wet-looking lips, their jaws extended in stiff smiles, the jut of their nipples made erect from a hard, quick pinch just before Manny opened the door. Each angle is a beacon emitting its own version of the same signal. Pick me, want me. But the kid is fumbling with the brochures, not getting the message.

A lot of young kids drive out here on their eighteenth birthdays. They ring the bell long and hard in front of their friends, drunk on machismo and MGD from the mini fridges in their fathers’ garages. Watch me become a man. How quickly they turn to boys again when they come inside and see the girls in the lineup, all tits and perk like they think they’ve always wanted. Most kids pretend to be lost, ask for directions back to Nye or Vegas, as if they weren’t born and lived all their days within seventy miles of here. As if they didn’t know what this was.

But this kid has no idea; that much is clear. He looks queerer here than Manny did his first time, and Manny is queer. Vegas cabbies are as attentive as any to the fresh currency plugging the pockets of overstimulated tourists. They drive them out to the brothels without telling them what they are, just to get the fare. Manny doesn’t condone it, but when he hears the boy’s velvety European accent he thanks God for doing whatever it took to set this fine white-toothed boy down in front of him.

• • •

Michele isn’t sure how he ended up out here. He thinks he asked the cabdriver, back in Vegas, to take him to a bar where they wouldn’t check his age. And the way the driver nodded and tapped the meter, asking whether he had cash, Michele assumed he’d been understood. In Italy, the legal drinking age is sixteen. The first time a clerk denied him and Renzo, they had been in San Francisco for two days. Renzo stormed out of the store, flailing his short thick arms in the air, shouting in Italian, “You Americans too moral for booze all of a sudden? We will just have to steal it then, like damn little children.” Stupid, stubborn Renzo.