Andrew Vachss - Pain Management

“Yeah . . . ?”

“She’s not a runaway. Maybe she was, once. But she’s got to be thirty, at least. Been hooking out here even before I came.”

“On the street?”

“Sure,” he said. Meaning, “Where else?”

I couldn’t picture the girl who’d braced me in the parking lot with a street pimp. She was too brassy-sassy for that. And way too fresh-looking. So I came in sideways. “I guess the johns couldn’t miss all that red hair.”

“Red hair? Not Peaches, man. She sports a natural. Not many do that anymore—it stands out.”

“She’s black?”

“Peaches? Does Nike suck?” he said, the Portland street-kid equivalent of “Is the Pope Catholic?”

“Hmmm . . . I must have been confused that night,” I told him, giving a cigarette from a fresh pack to one of the kids who stopped and stood in front of us, wordlessly.

When the kid moved along, I tried to divert Bobby Ray off any trail he might have thought he’d discovered. “How’d you get into this?” I asked him.

“This?”

“Outreach . . . whatever you call it.”

“Oh. Well, it’s a long story. But I’m sure you could put it together easy enough.”

“You were out here yourself, once?”

“No, man. I had a home. A foster home. That’s what saved my life.”

“I’ve been in a few myself,” I said, my voice level, inviting more info. I didn’t think it would be a good idea to mention what happened in one of the foster homes I’d done time in. Or that I’d used one of Wesley’s credos to get out of it: “Fire works.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “I’ve heard it all. Foster homes are just warehouses for kids, run by people who do it for the money. Or even abuse the kids themselves. You know what? Maybe that’s true for some of them. But the one I was in . . . man, they raised dozens of kids. And I mean radically fucked-up kids. Like I was.”

“Drugs?”

“Drugs? Maybe my mother’s drugs, I don’t know. Me, I was two years old when I came there. And I never left.”

“I thought they usually bounced foster kids around from place to place.”

“Nobody was going to bounce anybody out of Mom’s place,” he said. “She was a tiger, man. Once they dropped you off, you were hers, that’s all there was.”

“Your bio-mother,” I said, watching close as he nodded at the term, “she never tried to get you back?”

“When I was around eleven, she did, I think. There were some people coming around, and I had to go to court, talk to the judge, and all. But it was nothing.

“She was . . . I didn’t remember her. She was mad about that. Like it was my fault that I didn’t. Anyway, she said she’d give me up if she could have some pictures taken with me. I didn’t know what that was all about. But my mom—Mrs. Kznarack was what everybody called her—she said, Sure, go ahead, Bobby Ray. So I did. But as soon as . . . as soon as my ‘birth mother’ left, the fun started.”

“The court wanted you to be freed for adoption, right?”

“Yeah! How’d you . . . ? Ah, never mind, I guess that’s the way it always is. Usually is, anyway. My mom, she wasn’t going for that. I can still remember her yelling at the judge. At all of them. She said the time for me to be adopted was when I was little, but they kept putzing around, giving my bio-mom one chance after another, and now who was going to adopt me, eleven years old?”

“How come she didn’t just—?”

“Oh, she did, man. I see where you’re going, but Mom was way ahead of you. They told her the plan was adoption, and that’s the way it was going to be. So Mom told them, cool, she’d adopt me. There wasn’t a thing they could say. . . .”

“Had she adopted a lot of—?”

“Look, man,” he said, his voice turning hard for the first time since I’d met him, “this is my mom we’re talking about, not some Mia Farrow wannabe, all right? Foster mother, adoptive mother, didn’t make a damn bit of difference to her. Or to me.”

“She sounds like one hell of a woman,” I said by way of apology.

“She is. And Pop’s no slouch himself, although he lets Mom do all the talking.”

“Working guy?”

“ Hard -working guy. He’s a stonecutter. Best around.”

“I thought that was a lost art.”

“Pop says it’ll never be lost, so long as someone’s doing it. He taught us all stuff, but we didn’t all have the gift for it. My sister Helene, she’s the one he picked to carry it on. She’s a genius at it, man.”

“The foster kids those people had, they all turned out so . . . ?”

“You’re cute, man. But I’ll tell you straight. Some turned out better than others. Like in any big family. But not a motherfucking one of us hurts their kids; you understand what I’m telling you?”

“Yeah. That DNA doesn’t mean squat when it comes to how you act.”

“On time!” he said, offering me a palm to slap. “Mom and Pop proved that one. Too bad the shitheads running the government never snapped to it.”

“Too bad there aren’t more like your parents.”

“Truth, man. But there’s a lot more than there used to be, if you get what I’m saying.”

“Sure. Your parents couldn’t have had that many kids, but they raised a whole pack of them. That’s what counts.”

“That’s what counts,” he repeated. “And that’s why I’m out here. What I do, it counts, too.”

I didn’t know what the girl’s note about finding the “Borderlands” meant, but I knew she wasn’t going to be working at Starbucks to save money for the trip.

I’d been trolling for Rosebud mostly on foot, using the Ford to get me to the starting spots. But if I was going to play it like she was out there using her moneymaker, the Ford’s plain gray wrapper wouldn’t do. It just screamed “unmarked car,” and I needed to make my approach from downwind.

When I ran it down at dinner one night, Gordo offered me his ride. I was grateful—I knew how much he had invested in that car. Money was the least of it. But the Metalflake maroon ’63 Impala was as distinctive as the Ford was anonymous. And its dual quad 409 had a sound that stayed with you.

I thought of a station wagon, but it wouldn’t go with my face. I could use some of that Covermark stuff Michelle got for me on the bullet scar, and the missing top of my right ear wouldn’t show. No one would see the mismatched right eye, either; there has to be some decent light for anyone to notice. But the one eye they’d make contact with would tell them I wasn’t a citizen.

Flacco said they had plenty of cars in the garage. People who came to them for custom work expected their rides to be tied up for a while.

I took a look. Finally, settled on a white Cadillac Seville STS. Central Casting for the role I’d be playing.

I started that same night. They don’t mark the prostie strolls on tourist maps, but you don’t need to be a native to find them. I just nosed the Cadillac in ever-widening figure-8 loops, using a down-market topless bar as a starting point. It didn’t take long.

They work it in Portland the same way they do in every city I’ve been. Brightly colored birds with owner-clipped wings to keep them from flying away, fluttering at every car that cruises by slow. Like Amsterdam, only without the windowboxes.

The more subtle girls worked about half dressed; the rest of them put it all right out there. Lots of blond nylon wigs, torn fishnet stockings, and run-down spike heels. Cheap, stagy makeup around bleached-out eyes. A shabby, tired show that needed the murky darkness to sustain the illusion. Pounds of wiggle, not an ounce of bounce.