Donald Pollock - The Heavenly Table

Along with unrequited lust, another part of Jasper’s fascination with the Whore Barn was just being able to see how the women operated. There had always been a prostitute or two in Meade — old Midge Daniels with her varicose veins and flabby honkers, and a colored girl named Jellybean who lived over on White Heaven — but they did their dealings behind closed doors. Here, everything was out in the open. The number of men who went in and out of the tents astounded him. The weekdays were sometimes slow, but on Friday and Saturday nights he often counted seventy or eighty. Young bucks, too, determined to get their money’s worth. Jasper had heard that you couldn’t wear one of those woman things out, but, Lord, that was a lot of pounding when you added it all up. And there were other things to be had, too, besides just what the pimp called a “straight fuck,” which, even to the virginal Jasper, began to sound a little boring after a while. For an additional dollar, the blonde would speak strange words in a foreign accent, and the skinny one would dress up like a schoolgirl, while the ugly one, if properly aroused, would swallow a man’s spunk just for the hell of it. No wonder she was so fat, Jasper thought. Just the other night when that wagonload of boys from Monkey Town tore into her, she must have slurped down a quart of the stuff. Oh, yes, it was such a clamoring, festive, noisy place, with the lighted lanterns hanging between the posts, and the pimp serving drinks at the little plank bar, and the bodyguard taking the money and keeping the lines moving in an orderly fashion. They even had a jug band playing on the weekends, a trio from Kingston that called themselves the Ginseng Gang. True, there was sometimes trouble, like the other evening when they had to pistol-whip the big-boned country boy from Clarksburg off the one called Matilda. For one reason or another, he’d decided that he was going to make her moo like a cow, and when she refused, he went a little crazy. You could still see his handprints around her throat the next night in the campfire light. But the way Jasper figured it, at an average of three dollars a shot, the Whore Barn was making more than enough money, no matter how much he heard Blackie bitch to Henry on slow nights about the clap doctor out at the army base cutting into their profits with his rubber hammer trick.

SERGEANT MALONE WAS sitting on a stool in front of the camp post office, his nose stuck in the Scioto Gazette, when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Bovard approaching. Jesus Christ, he moaned to himself, not a minute’s peace. It wasn’t so much that he disliked the lieutenant; hell, he was nicer than most of the college boys he had come across. At least he didn’t walk around like he had a broomstick shoved up his ass and his nose stuck high in the air like the Yale brats, Benchley and Smothers. And he had gotten Malone drunker than Katy’s cunt again two nights ago, so there was that, too. No, it was something else. He reminded the sergeant of those Englishmen he had watched with a telescope from a distant field hospital kicking a football out into No Man’s Land just as they began an attack, their heads swollen with glory and honor and all that other bullshit they were taught in their public schools. By the time the sortie was over, the only thing left of the entire regiment was that damn ball, bobbing around in a shell hole filled with bloody water and body parts. You might have gotten by with that sort of bravado in the past, but not anymore. Now there were machine guns that fired three hundred rounds a minute and mustard gas that turned the lungs to pink froth and generals who thought that if they only lost a few thousand men gaining an extra yard or two, why, they had achieved some great victory. Maybe it really would be, as some people predicted, the last war that would ever be fought.

“Anything interesting in the paper?” Bovard asked as he stepped up onto the porch.

“Not really, sir,” Malone said. “I just been reading about this Jewett Gang.” The lieutenant’s eyes, he noticed, were even more bloodshot than yesterday morning, and his face was flushed and sweaty, but he looked damn happy for a man who was so obviously hungover. In fact, he was practically beaming. Malone wondered if maybe he had visited the whore camp last night, perhaps gotten laid by the blonde the pimp billed as a genuine Parisian fashion model. From what he had heard, she was quite a hit with some of the officers. He held the newspaper up for Bovard to see. The main headline proclaimed in big black letters: SEARCH STILL ON FOR KILLER OUTLAWS. An interview with the local city engineer discussing the mental, physical, and spiritual benefits of indoor plumbing was the only other front-page story. The war wasn’t even mentioned.

“Yes, I heard something about them,” Bovard replied. Leaning against a porch beam, he pulled his cigar case from his pocket and offered the sergeant one. The Jewett Gang had come up in a conversation he’d had last night with an effeminate theater manager named Lucas Charles. They had bumped into each other in the Candlelight Supper Club, a quiet establishment that carried a decent brandy and was quickly becoming the lieutenant’s favorite watering hole. Lucas was girlishly slender and small-boned, with soft delicate hands and purplish bags under his rather corrupt-looking gray eyes. They had talked about this and that, and then sometime around eleven o’clock, he had invited Bovard to a room he kept above the Majestic Theater, just a bed with an unwashed sheet thrown over it and a red upholstered chair and scattered bouquets of dead flowers and half-empty jars of cold cream. A torn and faded poster of a once famous actor, twinkly-eyed and sporting a top hat and monocle, was tacked to the wall. “Ol’ boy performed here once,” Lucas said, nodding at the picture as he poured them a drink. “Fell in the orchestra pit twice, he was so plastered.” He shook his head. “Poor bastard. Couldn’t remember his lines anymore.”

“Whatever…whatever happened to him?” Bovard had asked nervously, glancing again at the bed. It had become apparent to him over an hour ago that he was being seduced, but now that push was about to become shove, he wasn’t so sure he wanted to have his first sexual experience with such an obvious sissy. Wasn’t being queer bad enough without being so damn blatant about it?

“Cut his throat in Cleveland a week later during an intermission. Made a real mess of the dressing room, from what I heard. I guess they booed him off the stage for the last time.”

The lieutenant took a drink from the glass Lucas handed him as he thought back on his own dark time in the hotel room in Columbus. Fortunately, before he slipped up and mentioned it, there was a knock on the door, and a man named Caldwell entered. He was even more disheveled and limp-wristed than the theater manager. A druggist by trade, he was dressed in a wrinkled white suit and carried a battered straw boater in his hand. A half-smoked cigarette was stuck behind his ear, and his blue tie looked as if it had been dipped in a mustard pot. Tossing the hat in the corner, he kicked off his shoes and produced a vial of tincture of opium from his pocket with a grand flourish. “Damn it, Clarence,” Lucas said, as he locked the door, “I told you to quit bringing that stuff over here.”

“Yeah, but you like it, don’t you?” Caldwell said, as he uncapped the bottle.

“That’s the problem,” Lucas said. “I like it too much.”

Bovard glanced uneasily at the bottle. Jesus Christ, not only were they homos, they were dope fiends, too. From what he had heard, just one little taste of that poison and you were forever after crawling the walls for it. A panicky urge to flee the room swept over him, but, in the end, the greater fear of being viewed as some sort of cowardly boor won out. And so he had stayed, and within thirty minutes of slugging down the drink Caldwell doctored up for him, there wasn’t another place in the world he would have rather been than in that filthy hole with his two new pals.