Andrew Vachss - Dead and Gone

“Yes,” glancing at me in the mirror. Her eyes were heavily shadowed by then, a bluish-green color.

“Is this another disguise?” I asked. Meaning all the makeup she was piling on.

“Not yet. Be patient,” she said, now painting her fingernails the same shade as her lips.

“All right.”

“I want to go out later. Is that okay?”

“You don’t have to ask me if—”

“No. I don’t mean I am going alone. I want you to take me.”

“To eat, right?”

“No.” She giggled. “I am aware that you consider me a sow. Where I … live now, there is a little bar. It has a pool table. I always watch, never play. I would like to play. I understand it takes practice to play well. But I need to know the rudiments of the game before I can practice. And I hoped you would teach me.”

“What makes you think I—?”

“Am I incorrect?” she asked, gravely.

“No.”

“Ah.” She smiled, waiting.

“I don’t know a poolroom around here,” I lied, smoothly.

“There is one very close by. And there is another, perhaps ten or fifteen minutes away by car. Probably that would be best …” she said, thoughtfully.

“Because …?”

“Be patient,” she said, again, combing out her midnight-thick hair.

I lay back on the bed, slitted my eyes, watched as she climbed into a micro-pair of near-transparent panties, then sheathed her legs in sheer stockings with seams down the back. She turned to face me, looked over her shoulder at the mirror, snapped the elastic tops of her stockings experimentally, checked the seams. Then she put on a pair of gleaming black spike heels with ankle straps. Checked herself again. A piece of red jersey the same shade as her lipstick expanded from its tube shape to cover her bottom … and not much else. She slipped a black silk tank top over her shoulders. It fell short of the skirt’s waistband. A necklace of tiny beads the same shade as the lipstick and the skirt went over her head, then around her neck.

She leaned against the wall, extended one perfect leg just a little, shot her hip. “What do I look like now?” she asked.

“I’m not a fashion consultant,” I told her, seeing the trap surrounding the cheese.

“But not a little girl?”

“Not hardly.”

“Well, will you teach me to play?”

“I … Looks to me like you already know how.”

“You know what I mean, Burke.”

“I’m not sure I do,” I said. “The way you climbed into all that … stuff, it can’t be for the first time. If your point is that you’re not a little girl, I got it. I wasn’t confused about that before, Gem.”

“Yes. But … you said … lines. There are always lines. Some people are drawn to them. As if there was a mystical place near the border, where the lines are drawn. But you … you don’t want to go near such places.”

“No.”

“Because you once did and …?”

“There’s a difference between venturing close to the rim and being thrown there.”

“The … choices, again, you mean?”

“When you’re a kid, there are no choices. That’s the biggest fucking lie they ever tell. Like sticking a pistol in your face, cocking it, and asking for a loan.”

“Yes. It was that way for us, too. The choice—to be a soldier in the Khmer Rouge—it was no choice at all.”

“Adults have—”

“Stop it! I respect your pain. But it is not all the pain that the world knows, Burke. There could be no ‘resistance’ in my country. The people outside the cities, they never had weapons. They never had communications. The Khmer Rouge came with weapons. And with orders. If you did not join the killing, you were one of ‘them’: those who should be killed. You could try to flee. Many did. But how could you fight? Moral choices are for those with power. You can judge the monsters, not the victims. We were all children, then. Without power, without recourse. With no one listening for so long. So we did whatever we could to survive.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“We were all children,” she said again.

Then the schoolgirl who had cried for what had hurt me a million years ago came over to me. I held her against me while the woman in the hooker’s outfit cried for her lost and ravaged people.

I couldn’t comfort Gem. Couldn’t make it stop. So I did the only thing I could—stayed the course. She cried herself to sleep. Silently, the way she must have learned in the jungle.

She was so taut, she vibrated. I pulled the bedspread up so it covered her shoulders, kept my arm around her, waited. Her body didn’t so much relax as unstiffen. Slowly, in sections. She was breathing regularly, in measured little gulps, but so shallow that her rib cage hardly flickered. Gradually, her right knee came up, rested on my thigh. Her hand explored my chest. Finally, she tucked the tips of her fingers into my armpit and shuddered slightly, and her body went soft with deeper sleep.

I must have drifted off with her after a while. Her butterfly kiss on my cheek woke me. I looked over her shoulder at the digital clock on the side table: 11:44. We’d been out for hours. “It’s not too late,” she said against my face. “For what?”

“To learn to play pool!” she said, a sweet stubbornness in her voice.

“You mean tonight?”

“Yes!”

“Gem, look. I—”

“You said you would.”

“And I will. But let’s … compromise, okay?”

“How?” she asked, propping herself on one elbow, watching me.

“I’ll take you, okay? But not in that outfit.”

“Why not?”

“Come on, little girl. You walk into a poolroom dressed like that, I’ll be in a half-dozen brawls before we get near a table.”

“Huh!” she snorted. But ruined the effect with a giggle.

“Come on. All you need to do is—”

“I will change my clothes,” she said, almost formally. “But it took a very long time to apply all this makeup. I will not remove it.”

“All right,” I said quietly, wondering if she knew what her crying had done to the paint job … if she’d glance at herself in a mirror before we left.

I grabbed a quick shower. Changed into chinos and a pullover. I was just about finished when Gem came into my room, wearing a pair of jeans and a hot pink sweatshirt. All that was left from her streetwalker’s outfit was the spike heels.

And all the makeup was gone.

She saw me looking at her fresh-scrubbed face. “You won’t forget, will you?”

“Forget what?”

“What I looked like … before?”

“I doubt I’ll ever forget it, girl.”

“You will remember, while we’re out together, yes?”

“I promise.”

The poolroom was nothing like the joints where I’d learned to play as a kid. The tables looked ultra-modern, with the short ends canted at a spaceship angle. The pockets were some kind of hard plastic, not mesh. The lighting was ceiling-recessed, without individual drop-down lamps for each table. No beads strung overhead—each table had little dials you could turn to mark the scoring. The felt covering each of the tabletops was all different colors—every one except green.

And not a single no gambling sign in sight.

Even the music was pitiful pop and sappy soul. I was thinking maybe Gem could have worn her outfit without any trouble, but I kept that thought to myself.

We got a plastic tray of balls, took an empty table against the wall. I showed Gem how to check a cue for straightness, how to examine the tip to make sure it was properly shaped. She was gravely attentive, not interrupting.

I demonstrated how to make a bridge, how to cradle the butt end of the cue lightly in her right hand, how to stroke.