Edward Lee - Creekers

Ouch! Phil thought. Some scam. But was that really all that was going on here? The dusty darkness unnerved him; he wished he could see the faces of the other patrons, to compare them with the pictures he snapped while staking out the parking lot over the past few weeks. But what unnerved him more was the crowd’s utter silence. Anticipation thickened in the air; Phil could feel it, he could nearly breathe it…

The stage existed as a single colonnade of dark, roving light.

Then the light went out.

Jesus, Phil thought. They were now sitting in pitch dark; all that his eyes could make out were myriad cigarette ends rising and lowering. The music—or noise really—plunged into a barely audible suboctave note which Phil could feel rattling in his throat. Very slowly, it rose and grew louder.

And even more slowly, the stagelight—now a deep blood-red—revived itself, increasing in a lapse of time that seemed minutes long.

But now the lone stage had a host…

A woman, draped in diaphanous veils, stood immobile as a chess piece in the axis of scarlet light. The music began to throb in a diastole, like blood through a heart; the sound was somehow gelatinous.

And the woman on stage began to move.

It wasn’t dancing; it was more like some macabre kind of performance art. Dexterously, she drifted along in the midst of the arcane music and light, invisibly shedding the segments of her veil. In the meantime, and in imperceptible increments, the light adopted new colors—algae greens, yolk yellows, livid purples—so languorously the entire spectacle took on the texture of a dark dream.

Eventually, the girl was naked save for a pinkish, translucent g-string.

The sludge-like light played with Phil’s vision, while abyssal noise-works distracted him further. It was a trick. At first he could note nothing abnormal about the girl, but as he trained his gaze, details began to surface as uncannily as magic. Features seemed to appear rather than be noticed. The girl’s left eye was tiny as a marble, the right large as a scarlet billiard ball. Otherwise her face was flawless.

But the rest of her, Phil could soon tell, was not.

Aw, God…

Her bare splayed feet divided into but a pair of squab toes. Her hands were the same: two-fingered. As she swayed her head to the sonic dirge, shimmering black hair fell momentarily away to reveal that she had no ears at all, not even holes or indentations where the ears should be. Her navel, too, was fully missing—no suggestion of any such thing on her midriff. Pert breasts danced in the light, each topped by a perfect, dark nipple, yet more nipples—a half-dozen on each side—tracked down her sleek torso and abdomen like teats on the underbelly of a wolf.

Phil never tasted his ten-dollar beer. The grotesqueries onstage chained his gaze; repelled as he was, he couldn’t look away for the life of him. More dancers came and went, each harboring accelerated genetic deformities, which, if anything, exceeded even Eagle’s previous descriptions. One girl had three arms (two of them normal, but a third tiny arm sprouting from her armpit like a dead branch), another none, and a third possessed arms that appeared totally boneless—slack tubes of flesh swaying this way and that, with shriveled fingers at their ends. Another dancer displayed multiple breasts, four per side, stacked like pancakes, not to mention a head that seemed clovened.

Each girl finished her set with an obligatory—and masturbatory—floor show. The three-armed woman openly caressed her pubis with two hands, while the third hand—atrophied at the end of the shortened arm—plucked at her nipples.

Phil thought he might vomit any minute.

The evening’s progress seemed to drip. The dark grew more murky as cigarette smoke thickened, and eventually the room became sweltering. Phil felt narcotized, shocked to numbness, as though in the aftermath of being bludgeoned in the head. On a few occasions, his eyes had acclimated sufficiently to see that every seat in the back room was taken. What a show, he thought despondently. A packed house. Eagle was right; this was where the denizens came. People who found arousal in the tragic misfortune of others. The kinks. The sickos.

One thing he noticed right off was that each dancer wore a garter, and attached to the garter was a small white card with a number on it. What’s with the numbers? he managed to wonder. What purpose could they serve?

When the show was over, Phil felt winded. I thought I’d seen everything on Metro. Boy, was I wrong. Stepping outside, into the fresh night air, made him feel released from a long sentence in jail. But he couldn’t let on how revolted he was; he must maintain the pretense to Eagle, and to everyone here, that he was just another busted, bent-out-of-shape redneck looking for kicks. Obviously the back room was a magnet for Crick City’s most jaded, and would provide a very serviceable fuel for his investigation. To infiltrate a crowd such as this, he must pretend to be a part of it.

“Happy now?” Eagle asked.

“That was pretty wild, man.”

Eagle shook his head. “You’re into that kind of shit?”

“These days I’m into anything that’s not dull. And that show definitely wasn’t dull, you gotta admit.”

“Christ, man, I couldn’t believe that one chick with no bones in her arms.”

“The gal with the eight tits was a kick, too.”

Eagle gaped at him. “Man, I never would’ve guessed you’d be into that. Lookin’ at those girls makes me wanna blow chow.”

Phil feigned a nonchalant shrug. “Different strokes, like they say. One thing I didn’t get, though. Why did they all have numbers on their garters?”

Eagle’s smirk creased his face. “Why do you think? They ain’t just dancers, Phil. They’re hookers. A guy sees one he likes, he gets the number and talks to the pimp after the show.”

“Who’s the pimp?”

“That Creeker kid at the door, Druck. He makes the arrangements. All the money, of course, goes to Cody Natter. That fucker’s something; he’s got himself a gold mine here. The girls who work the front stage are hookers too, but I guess you figured that. Anything for a buck. Ain’t that the American way? Natter’s even got his wife turning tricks. You did know that Vicki’s married to him, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” Phil said. “I heard all about that.” His next question, however morbid, wouldn’t let go. “How much you think she costs?”

“Vicki? Shit, she’s the prime beef of the front room, probably a hundred at least. Natter’s pretty selective about who he lets buy her.”

Buy her. The two words hit him like a kick in the chin. Probably uses her to finish off deals with his point men and dope distributors. Typical. “What about those Creeker girls?”

“From what I’ve heard, they’re even more expensive, ’cos this is the only place you can get ’em. Hard to believe guys would want to pay to fuck a Creeker.”

“But where? Where do they turn their tricks?”

“Right in the parking lot, in your car mostly. For a little extra, they’ll go home with you.” Eagle looked at him. “You’re not thinking of—”

“Naw, I’m just curious. This town’s changed since I been gone.”

“Yeah, man.” Eagle laughed. “And so have you.”

You got that right. Phil fished in his pocket for his keys. He’d made a lot of headway tonight; Eagle was a veritable tap of information, and he seemed to know a lot about Natter. Phil wanted to hit him up for more info but— Don’t push your luck. You ask too much too soon, he’l1 get wise. Taking it real slow was the name of this game. One day at a time, he told himself. “You coming here tomorrow night?”

“I got a late job tomorrow, so probably not,” Eagle said. “But I’m sure I’ll be in the next night.”