Claire Watkins - Battleborn

On the sixth night, Michele is sitting close to Darla on the cheap red sofa in the corner, watching the other girls sing karaoke, when the buzz of the doorbell sounds throughout the bar. Michele notices for the first time small black blocks—they must be speakers—arranged throughout the room: above the glass shelves behind the bar, over the neon-lit lounge area, tucked up where the low ceiling meets the wall. The girls ebb to the front lobby, running their hands all over themselves while they walk, checking hooks and ties and the backs of earrings, adjusting their panty hose and breasts and hairdos. Darla stands up, runs her tongue over her teeth, and rolls something oily and fruit-scented onto her lips.

“Where you are going?” he asks the back of her.

Army Amy calls over the clacking of plastic heels on the laminate dance floor, “Don’t you worry, sugar. We’ll take care of you.” She winks.

Without leaving the couch, Michele watches a thick-armed man step through the front doorway. Plastic mirrored sunglasses dangle from the man’s neck by a fluorescent-colored cord. Flecks of cement speckle his work boots. He points to Darla and says her name. The two walk by the bar, arm in arm. She grins like a pageant contestant, a beauty queen. When the man isn’t looking, she blows Michele a kiss. This girl is trouble. Renzo would have loved her. Renzo was always looking for trouble.

Listen to him: Renzo was . This is what unsettles him, how easily the past tense comes now. The police had said, There is a chance . Maybe if the heat doesn’t get too bad . Even as Michele nodded, his tongue rolled silently through conjugation exercises . He’s young , the cops have kept saying. He’s athletic . And in his head, each time Michele has corrected them: He was young. He was athletic. Just this morning, Michele called the police station, and the woman who answers the phone said she was sorry, that there was no news, they would call the cell phone as soon as they found his friend. “But don’t you worry,” she said. “God works in mysterious ways.”

And as if he dreamed in English, Michele replied, “Yes, He did.”

All those years confusing the past perfect, the past continuous, the simple past, and now it comes to him, here. Now he thinks in the frantic notes he took before he quit trying altogether. Simple past: use when an action started and finished at a specific time in the past. The speaker may not actually mention the specific time, but he does have one in mind.

After the lineup, Manny returns to the bar with Army Amy. Michele joins them. Amy sets her overtanned tits on the bar, and they rest there like two globes in a skin sac. “I need a goddamn date,” she says.

Michele smiles broadly at her —the big, openmouthed smile of a foreigner pretending to know what’s going on.

Amy traces her finger up and down the boy’s forearm. “Why don’t you pour this kid a real beer, Manny?” Manny fixes Michele a pint of Boddingtons. The kid looks at the cloud of head billowing to the top of his new beer, mildly bewildered.

“Budweiser is piss,” Amy says. “It’s a joke here.”

Michele takes a long swallow of his new beer. “When she will, ah, return?”

“Darla? Depends,” says Manny. He calls back to the office. “Gladys, what’d she log?”

When he first started, Manny had asked Gladys whether she ever listened in on the suites, “You know, for fun?” Gladys only scoffed and said, “Fun? Baby, I’ve seen it all. My best client was a county commissioner. He used to drive his Buick all the way down from Tonopah once a month, just to have me tap on the floor with his dead wife’s peg leg. This was before you were even born.”

“Hold on,” she says now. They hear the click of the old intercom buttons as Gladys patches in to the suite. “Nothing special, baby,” she calls. “Just a suck and fuck. A grand.”

Manny whistles. Half of that is his. “Damn. That girl’s got a gold mine between her legs.”

“Big deal,” says Amy. Through her tank top she grips a breast in each hand and lifts them to Michele’s face, first one and then the other. “Think what she could do with some assets.” Michele looks away, and who could blame him? No one outside the industry would call Amy a beauty. She has big biceps and a bench-press chest left over from her time in the army, where she was supposedly a Green Beret. Whenever a new ad comes out, she flashes the proofs to anyone who will look, listing all the places the billboards will go up: off I-15 near Indian Springs, by the turnoff to the test site, on 395 in Stateline for all those rich, horny Californians. On the latest, Amy is saluting and smiling above the words, Visit Army Amy for an honorable discharge!

Amy swirls her finger in the foam of Michele’s beer. “When I was her age, I had to work for my money. I was hosting big parties. I’m talking twelve, thirteen hours of straight fucking. You learn a lot that way.” She sticks the finger deep in her mouth and licks it clean. “You want me to teach you, Luigi?”

Michele shakes his head.

“Come on. Won’t cost you no grand.”

He takes a drink of the Boddingtons and says, “Shut the fuck up, you.”

Amy straightens on her stool. “I know you want to make an honest woman out of her, Luigi, but your little prom date is—how do you say?—sucking some Teamster’s cock right now. Get it?”

Michele knocks his pint glass over, and beer soaks her wife-beater. Amy jumps back, dripping.

“I am sorry,” he says. “Very sorry.” He lays cocktail napkins impotently on the spreading puddle of beer.

She sets her jaw and leans in close to him. “I bet you’ll fuck me now, you wop drunk.”

“That’s enough,” says Manny.

“Me?” says Amy.

He wipes the spill with a dry rag. “Go change.”

Amy gathers the hem of her shirt and wrings it out. “I know what you’re thinking, Manny. Don’t bother. She’s got this kid’s dick on a string. And you?” She laughs. “You’re shit out of luck.”

The empty pint glass rolls off the bar and shatters on the laminate.

Manny looks straight at her. “Go change or go home.”

Amy stomps out the back door. Manny comes around and helps Michele pick up the glass from the floor. A few girls have gathered around. Lacy tries to help, but he waves her and the others back to the couch, to a pair of Southern truck drivers they called in off the road with the CB in the office. Something tortured and twangy and sour rises from the jukebox.

Michele, squatting on the floor, leans into Manny, so close that Manny can feel the boy’s breath on him. “When she will finish?” Michele asks.

Looking back, this is the moment when he should have known how truly fucked he was. But this is closer to the boy than he’s ever been, and he can’t help himself. He only wants to touch him. He presses his rag to Michele’s wet T-shirt. It’s impossible, but he feels the boy’s warmth underneath, the striations in the muscles of his chest. He feels his heartbeat. “One hour.” He removes the rag and holds his index finger in the air between them. “One hour.”

Michele finishes his replacement beer, and another. By the time Darla says good-bye to her Teamster, logs her cash with Gladys, and joins the boy at the bar, he’s a heavy, lethargic kind of drunk, leaning on his elbows, his eyelids wilted. Manny watches Darla rest her head on his shoulder, chewing on the stir straw poking out from her cranberry juice. No doubt she can feel the warmth of him, the pulse of blood in his neck. “Did you know that tug-of-war used to be an Olympic sport?” she says. “I could do that.”