Текст книги "Boy in the Water"

Автор книги: Stephen Dobyns

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

The music began again. The girl dropped her cigarette and ground it into the tile. By the time she was on her feet she was already into her dance, sashaying up the remaining two steps and across the stage, her eyes focused on the spotlights so everything would be a blur when she looked away. The music was the long disco version of the Stones’ “Miss You,” and she matched her steps to the staccato precision of the drums and bass, snapping her fingers and lifting her knees so they flashed in the lights. She thought of the music as antique—the song was twenty years old—and she imagined that her parents had once danced to it, her father taking Dolly’s hand, then spinning her away.

The girl kept her head raised as she moved to the chrome pole in the middle of the stage. She was the cool one who never let her eyes drift below an imaginary line, as if beneath that line were only fog, like early-morning fog at Rye Beach. When she table-danced, men would often say, “Why don’t you look at me?” And sometimes they whined and sometimes they called her “Bitch.” She wanted to say, “Fuck you,” but she’d just smile as if her thoughts were in exotic places, Zanzibar or Rio de Janeiro. And when the men tucked ten– or twenty-dollar bills under the thin gold chain around her waist, she would stroke their cheeks just once and draw her nails lightly down the stubble on their faces, but she still wouldn’t look at them.

Gripping the pole with her right hand, the girl swirled around it with her head back and her nearly white hair streaming behind her. She had pinned it up but, as she spun, her hair came free and she could feel how the men grew attentive, as if her hair’s very loosening were a sign of her wildness. The girl focused on the mirrors on the ceiling above the stage, watching the pretty, heavily made-up face of her reflection stare back at her. At one moment she was amazed by her beauty and at the next by what she saw as her ugliness: her lips not enough of this, her nose not enough of that, and the blue of her eyes insufficiently dazzling. She wore a mixture of pastel-colored veils that fluttered in the breeze from a fan at the edge of the stage: a two-piece costume made by an ex-dancer who had gotten fat and now designed costumes for other girls, polyester delicacies whose only function was to be ripped away in a fantasy of sexual abandon. The veils whirled and eddied around her in varying shades of blue, green, and red—pulsings that let the girl imagine herself a multicolored bird of Eastern mythology, beautiful but deadly. The stage was eight feet wide and formed a runway between the tables where the men sat. The dancers called it the meat rack. As the girl spun round the pole, the veils separated and came together, giving glimpses of her tanned body and revealing her small breasts—too small to the girl’s mind, small and undeveloped, almost boyish. They embarrassed her, but after all, she was only fifteen.

As she spun, she kicked off one slipper, then the other. Her movements were a mixture of sensual languor and military precision as she keyed them to the rhythm of the song: “I been sleeping all alone; Lord, I miss you . . .” She had begun work that day at one and now it was rush hour on a Monday afternoon, September 21—men leaving work in Boston and heading to suburbs along the North Shore. A few would stop for a beer and to watch a pretty girl show her naked body. Some would pay to have the girl dance for them alone—one man at a table with a beer and a shot and the girl weaving back and forth with her pubic hair trimmed into a heart shape or diamond shape, whatever had become the newest fashion among the girls, the same way they would get boob jobs or even lip jobs and rush to one surgeon after another. And this girl, too, though she needed every penny she earned, had gone to get implants—it only made sense, she told herself, because her breasts were so small. The doctor had refused, saying she was still growing, but he didn’t say anything else; that is, he didn’t report her, though he could tell she wasn’t eighteen.

The club had no windows, so it could be any time of the day or night. Mostly it seemed like one unchanging minute. One dancer replaced another, one song replaced the next, and even the men looked the same in their longing and feigned boredom—small but endless variations of the same sixty seconds till the club closed at one in the morning and the girls went off to whatever domestic deficiency they called home. By then the girl would have danced on stage a dozen times and, if she was lucky and the club was busy, she would have danced at a dozen tables. She would have washed a dozen times and changed her makeup a dozen times and still she’d feel the places where men had touched her ass or tried to rub against her breasts and tell her what a fox she was or what a bitch and how they wanted to push her down on the floor and do things to her. One fat man had come back night after night to say how he wanted to piss in her mouth, until she had complained and Bob had told the man not to come back, because he wasn’t spending any money. But if the man had been buying drinks, then Bob would have told her to get used to it and what the hell did she expect. She would have accepted it because Bob knew that her ID was phony, but he wouldn’t let her go unless there was a problem, because he got his percentage and many of the men liked babies, liked little girls, even if their tits were small and they looked like boys from the back, the cheeks of their buttocks tight and shiny.

The girl’s sweaty fingers squeaked on the pole. She drifted to a stop, putting her hands down low on the cold metal, then kicking her feet so they rose up and curled around the pole until she was upside down with the veils swirling over her head and the sequined V of her bikini bottom catching the light. She imagined the sequins sparkling, the men slowing their drinking to watch, the stupid pigs, the hairy scum. One man whistled, and one of her regulars yelled her name: “Misty!” She was Misty. She slid down onto her shoulders and did a backward roll and when she stood up the top part of her costume fell away into her hand. Tensing, she waited for the jokes about her flat chest, the jeering that sometimes came—not all the time, but enough to grind her guts. But this time no one shouted about tiny tits or banana body and Misty let the veils drop at the side of the stage, then did a slow cartwheel back to the pole as Mick Jagger sang about “some Puerto Rican girls who’re dying to meet you.” It amused her that the thousands of dollars Dolly had spent on gymnastics classes now let her be such a hotshot, as Bob called her, doing tricks that none of the other girls could match.

A handstand let Misty slide her feet up the pole again, gripping it with her thighs. As she turned, she extended her tongue, flicking it against the shiny metal, which tasted of salt from the other girls’ sweaty hands. A man pounded his fist on a table so that a bottle overturned, and he or someone else whistled. But she had detached her mind from where she was and thought how good it would be to get back to the apartment she shared with two of the other dancers, how she would take a long bath and listen to her Walkman in the tub—Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny on the CD Beyond the Missouri Sky, because away from the club she hated to listen to any music she could dance to. And she thought how she wouldn’t be working tomorrow and she would take the T to Revere Beach, then to a movie or the Cambridgeside mall, where she could walk and walk and look in the shops, but she wouldn’t buy anything—she was saving her money. She’d spend the whole day by herself and if anyone spoke to her she would tell him to fuck off, fuck off, because she’d been dancing too much, getting her ears too full of those people’s cheap noise. Isolation was what she wanted, because in two months at the club she had seen girls burn out on stage—dancer meltdown. It scared her because it seemed so easy and she thought, I could do that. I’ve got to be careful.

Misty arched back in a slow flip, then she spun away from the pole and sent her hands into a splayed-fingered ballet around the gold clasp that held the bottom part of her costume in place, inserting her thumbs under the elastic and pulling the waist band from her waist, letting it snap back, then pulling it again and holding it with her elbows out to the side, striding to the music along the perimeter of the meat rack. But because she’d been staring at the lights, she could see little except thick masculine shapes and the lights of the video games and three pinball machines along the back wall, and she realized that was a mistake because she wanted to find out if the man was here, the one with a sport coat and tie who had been coming for the past several days and drank only Coke and watched only her. He didn’t seem hungry or excited, though; it was as if he were seeing not a naked young girl but a piece of furniture, something not special or collectible, only part of his job. That had worried Misty and she thought he might be a cop, but Bob swore he knew all the cops and he’d never seen this guy before. Even so, Misty hoped she wouldn’t see him again, because if he wasn’t a cop or a nutcase, then he could be a PI. It was Gypsy who said he might be a PI, and Misty had to ask what that meant. “Private detective, dummy,” Gypsy told her, not mean but sarcastic, as was her way.

If the man was a detective, then Misty knew what would be coming next. Partly that frightened her and partly she felt relieved, because she already had four thousand dollars put aside, and though she meant to save more and have ten grand by Thanksgiving, she was worried she might blow it on something else or melt down or buy drugs and forget about her plan—about the only thing that mattered in her life, the reason she had been shaking her butt in men’s faces since the July 4 weekend, when she had started work, getting her ears full of the noise, the men’s talk, words that were meant to be sweet or sexy or macho but that made her hate them, made her want to reach into the men’s pants and rip away their pricks like yanking weeds out of the ground.

Misty went into a forward roll as Mick sang, “I guess I’m lying to myself because it’s you and no one else,” and when she came onto her feet she was holding the bottom part of her costume in her left hand and keeping the splayed fingers of her right mockingly across her pubic hair as men shouted. She turned her eyes away from the lights now because she wanted to see who was there, wanted to drag her eyes across each male face. She was naked except for the chain around her waist and the chain around her ankle. Her skin was a light bronze from the three times a week she went to the tanning parlor. No strap marks or bikini lines: she never showed her skin on the beach. Just above her buttocks and around her coccyx was her one extravagance, a tattoo of the biological symbol for woman in bright blue and red and the size of a closed fist so the scumbags would know they weren’t looking at a boy when they stared at her ass, the tight, muscular buttocks each forming half a golden peach. She bent forward and ran her spread fingers down her thighs to her ankles, gripping them as she turned a slow 360 degrees, showing her tattoo to the entire room.

Then, at the end of the bar, she spotted him in his tie and sport coat and this time he wasn’t alone. Misty recognized the other man even before she saw his mustache, knew him just by the curve of his shoulders, the thick graying hair he was so vain about. She believed she could have spotted him if the room had been pitch dark. Even at this distance she felt she could see the black hairs on the backs of his hands and the yellow flecks in his brown eyes, turd-brown eyes, she called them.

Misty began spinning around the perimeter of the stage with her arms outstretched. Several of her regulars called to her but she ignored them. On the far side from the two men, she fell to her stomach, then she wriggled snakelike across the tiles with her tongue darting and her fingertips fluttering against the cheeks of her ass. Reaching the edge, she pushed herself up into a handstand and came down with her back to the men, bending over with her legs wide apart, down, down until her hands rested on the floor and her peroxided hair dragged on the tiles as she looked back between her legs at the two men at the end of the bar, the one she didn’t know and the one she hated, pursing her lips and kissing the air, before gripping her ankles and dragging her red nails up the backs of her legs, leaving parallel scratches on the backs of her thighs till the heels of her hands touched her buttocks. She let her fingertips play against the black diamond shape of her pubic hair, let her fingertips caress the creases of her vulva, and all to the same precise beat of the song, “Miss You,” which was now coming to an end. Then she dug two fingertips of each hand into the bristly pubic hair and began to draw the flesh apart, holding her vagina open with two fingers of one hand as she inserted the index finger of the other, listening to men shout and hearing Bob’s angry voice because she had broken the club’s primary rule, the rule that stood at the head of a hundred other stupid rules and that would cost her the job, but what did it matter? This was her last night, she was already out of here.

The music stopped, not because the song had ended but because Lucy at the bar had flicked the switch. Misty stood up and walked to where she had left her costume and cigarettes, striding as purposefully as a soldier, with her chin raised. Men were shouting and whistling. She shook a cigarette out of the pack, stuck it in her mouth, and lit it, clicking the Zippo shut as she blew a mouthful of smoke at the ceiling. Then she walked quickly to the dressing room. She heard someone calling to her, “Jessica, Jessica!” But that wasn’t her name. Her name was Misty.

She went through a door that swung shut behind her and tossed her costume onto the table. Out there she had felt mean and proud of herself, but all of a sudden she could feel herself choking up as tears filled her eyes.

“What in the fuck’s wrong with you?” said Gypsy angrily. She stood in front of Misty, six inches taller in high heels and a mountain of red hair, with her artificial breasts shoved between the two of them like small haystacks scantily contained by pink polyester. “You’ve just thrown away your job—an easy grand a week into the trash. You know that Bob won’t take that shit.”

“I’m quitting anyway,” said Misty, wiping her hand across her eyes and going to her locker. She worked the numbers of the combination. “You can have my costumes if you want them.”

“Who’s the guy you were showing your pussy to? I hope he’s paying you big money.”

Misty pulled on her blue jeans. “My old man,” she said. She didn’t look at Gypsy.

“You were sticking your fingers up yourself for your father?” Gypsy had lowered her voice. There was still shouting out in the club.

Misty drew a blue University of New Hampshire sweatshirt over her head. It hung halfway down her thighs. “Not my father, my stepfather. My father’s dead.” Her voice was neutral—the practiced tone she thought she had perfected. She tied her money belt around her waist and shoved it under her jeans. Then she stuck her feet into her Tevas and adjusted the Velcro. She grabbed her green backpack off the hook and collected a couple of loose dance tapes from the shelf along with a squirrel-sized brown teddy bear that was missing an eye. The bear’s name was Harold; she couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t have him.

Misty wished she could wash the makeup off her face and body but she didn’t have the time. Maybe later, depending where Tremblay took her. She hoped the detective would stay with them. She was afraid of being alone with Tremblay. Misty dug a blue Red Sox cap out of her bag, then twisted up her hair and pulled the cap over it, turning the cap around so the bill pointed down her back. Taking a towel from a hook, she rubbed it across her mouth and face, trying to remove her lip gloss. The towel smelled of sweat and cheap perfume.

There was a hammering on the door and Bob entered without waiting for a response. He was tall and he shaved his head to look mean. “You’re done. You’re outta here!” He stood holding the door open. Misty could see her stepfather standing just beyond him. Tremblay was brushing his thumb against his gray mustache, and he wore a little smile to indicate he wasn’t surprised. He was never surprised.

“Where’re you going to go?” asked Gypsy, already taking the costumes from the other girl’s locker and putting them in her own.

“School,” said Misty. “I’m going to school. I’m going to start tenth grade.” She tossed the dirty towel at Bob, then walked past him without saying a word.

–

The bigger of the two men walking along the edge of the surf was laughing and scuffing his heels in the sand. It was a cool night on the first day of fall and the men wore dark jackets. The moon to the east was a little past full and seemed to lay a silver finger on the water off Revere Beach as the surf advanced and retreated with hisses and melancholy sighs. There was no wind.

“If you could of seen him, Sally,” he was saying, “I almost pissed myself. That would have made both of us. He was wearing these light pants and suddenly I seen this big wet spot. I couldn’t help it, I snorted right through my mask.”

The smaller man chuckled appreciatively, but all he wanted was to go home. It was past two-thirty and he had an appointment at eight the next morning to look at a greyhound puppy, “a guaranteed champion,” he’d been told.

“He didn’t even notice what he’d done. ‘Jesus, you piece of shit,’ I told him, ‘look what you done to yourself. Didn’t you have a mommy?’”

The smaller man chuckled again. His name was Sal Procopio and he was twenty-six. The guy with him, Frank, was a little older. Sal didn’t know Frank’s last name, or rather, he’d heard Frank give several—all of them French, so maybe he was a Canuck. For that matter, Sal didn’t even know if the guy’s first name was really Frank, so maybe that was phony as well. In fact, the longer he knew Frank, the less he knew him, as if each new fact took away a piece of knowledge instead of adding to the small amount already accumulated. Sal wasn’t sure how he felt about this.

Frank laid an arm across Sal’s shoulder, squeezing the muscle. With his other hand, he accompanied his story, spreading his fingers or closing them into a fist. “But, hey, I didn’t have a lot of time. The longer you’re inside, the bigger chance you take. You hear what I’m saying? What if a cop had wandered in? It could be anybody, some alkie wanting another drink. The chickenshits are worse than the tough guys. They don’t fuckin’ move! This guy just stood there and pissed himself. ‘What’s wrong,’ I tell him, ‘ain’t you seen a gun before?’ Asshole in a liquor store. You’d think he was a virgin. These guys get stuck up all the time.”

Sal tried to keep his feet out of the water but Frank kept bumping him. Although the tide was going out, every so often a large wave sent the foam right up to his basketball shoes. The two men were walking south. Few people were visible: some couples making out but no one nearby. Sal had brought girls to Revere a few times when he was a kid but he didn’t like getting sand in his Jockey shorts and he didn’t like being seen. People knew what you were doing. Even under a blanket, they could tell what was going on. If you couldn’t afford a motel, then you had no business with a girl in the first place, that was how he saw it.

Frank gave his shoulder another squeeze. “So I tell him to get a move on. I should never of been friendly in the first place. ‘We’re closing in ten minutes,’ he says. His back was to me and he hadn’t seen the mask. So I put the barrel against his ear, smacking him a little so I could hear the clunk against his skull and I asked him as sweet as I could, ‘You ever seen one of these?’ He cut his eyes toward it and I cocked it. That little double click—it’s almost like music. That’s when he pissed himself. Jesus, I laughed.”

Sal tried to laugh as well, but it ended up more like a grunt. He’d been out in the car ready to take off at the first sign of trouble, even though he’d sworn to wait. This was their fourth job together and Sal wanted out. In the morning, he’d get this greyhound pup, train him, and make a bundle. It was honest work, pretty much. His only worry was that Frank would get mad when he said he didn’t want to drive anymore. He’d seen Frank’s temper in a bar about two weeks earlier. Frank hadn’t been drinking but that only made it scarier, that he’d try to beat a guy to death cold sober. If he hadn’t been pulled off, Frank would have killed the guy, just beaten his head in with the pool cue. And what had the guy done, for Pete’s sake? Called him a loony when Frank got mad and threw down his cue. Five bucks on the game, and Frank was ready for the slammer. Shit, Sal had been called worse than that, a whole lot worse.

Frank stepped away as another wave came up the beach. The foam glittered and slid toward them. “But the kid wouldn’t do shit. He wouldn’t get the money and wouldn’t budge. A red light on the video camera kept blinking. So I grabbed his hair and shoved the pistol right into his mouth so it jams against his tonsils. ‘You got two seconds,’ I told him. No way was he going to fuck with me, piss or no piss. He straightened up, though he was bawling. Nodding and gagging all at once. At least he emptied the cash register.”

“How much?”

“A couple of grand or more. We’ll count it out.”

The two men had met at a bar across from Wonderland in May. Frank was from New Hampshire, at least that’s what Sal thought. He was about five ten, with a narrow face and thick dark hair that he slicked back with gel. Frank wouldn’t say much about himself. Sometimes he talked about cooking, so maybe he’d been a cook. He told a lot of jokes and had no trouble talking to women. He was always upbeat, or pretty much. He didn’t seem to have a job and Sal figured he made his money at the track, until Frank asked him to drive for him. Before that Sal had already told him about his troubles with the law. Frank had been sympathetic, like he’d had cop problems of his own. And Frank didn’t drink much or do drugs. He seemed like a guy who was always in charge so Sal figured he could do the driving. After all, he’d be sitting in the car; if anything bad happened, he could drive away. That was in June. Now Sal didn’t trust Frank anymore. He’d seen him in fights, he’d listened to stories that he’d thought were total bullshit, then he got to be unsure. Frank didn’t have a lid, was how Sal put it to himself. If he thought of doing a thing, he’d do it. He was like a drunk but he never got drunk and Sal almost laughed at that, though he didn’t feel like laughing and only wanted to get his cut and go home, have a glass of milk, eat a couple of Devil Dogs, and hit the sack.

Frank carried a small backpack. His Chevy pickup was parked in the lot. Sal’s was farther up along the curb. They always met at Revere Beach. Frank had talked about being followed and being careful, and at first Sal had thought that sounded smart. But now he thought, who the fuck was going to follow them? Earlier Sal had meant to tell Frank that tonight was his last job, but he didn’t know how to bring it up without sounding chickenshit. Then he thought, why say anything? The next time Frank called, Sal would say he couldn’t do it, that he’d had enough. Then he thought of moving, getting a whole new place, so he wouldn’t have to see Frank again. The more he thought that, the more he liked it. He liked the idea of Frank calling and there being nobody home.

“Did I tell you the one about the two cannibals who cook themselves a clown?”

“Yeah, you did,” said Sal. “‘This taste funny to you?’ I liked it.” He tried laughing again but his throat hurt. The sand curving ahead of them was divided into two shades of darkness, showing how far the tide had climbed the beach.

Frank was laughing. He put his arm across Sal’s shoulder again, hugging him to him. “You know, I did a guy the other night.”

“‘Did a guy’?” Sal felt Frank’s fingers gripping his shoulder.

“Yeah, I fixed him.”

“You shot him?”

“Doesn’t matter how I did it. It got done, that’s all.” Frank kicked up a spray of sand. “What’s more it felt good. Felt like I was creaming my jeans. He was a guy I’d known a long time. I hadn’t seen him for a while, but he’d been in my head. He was from Manchester, like me. Buddy Roussel—shit, I’d known him way back in school. Ran into him in a club.”

“What’d he do?” Sal tried to step away and got his feet wet.

“Jesus, what didn’t he do? He got me in trouble in school when some equipment was stolen, a bunch of bats mostly, a couple of old gloves. Then he told this girl some stuff about me, that I’d slapped another girl, which was a lie. She’d tried to hit me and I’d put up my hand, that’s all there was to it. I couldn’t even get work because of him. There was a kitchen job I applied for and Buddy said something to the owner. I couldn’t find out what he’d said, but it was total bullshit. I’d done lots of cooking. I was good at it. But it didn’t make any difference. Buddy’d already been at the guy. A fast-food joint, what do they cook anyway? Burgers and ice cream—that’s not food, not real food anyway.”

“Sounds like a long time ago.” Sal’s stomach felt like it got when he was outside in the car and Frank was in the liquor store with his gun—partly it was cold, partly it was fluttery.

“Yeah, what goes around comes around. Course I was willing to let bygones be bygones, but he had to shoot off his mouth. He said he figured I was locked up somewheres. What’d he have to say that for? He had a girl with him, like he was saying it just for her. So I made like I was leaving and waited outside. I got him when he came out. Just like the end of a movie. Boom—The End of Buddy Roussel, starring Francis LeBrun. He was still with the girl, but she didn’t see my face. Shit, she was too busy screaming at Buddy to get the fuck up off the sidewalk, like she didn’t even know he was dead yet, the stupid cow. But I don’t know what Buddy might have told her. Like my name or where he knew me from. Anyway, now I got to change my game plan sooner than I meant to. I got a cousin north of Plymouth and I’d already been talking to him about a job, something legitimate. The trouble is, it means the end of our party. No more liquor stores for a while. I hate to disappoint you.”

A young couple were wrapped up in a blanket with only their toes showing. The men didn’t speak as they walked past. Frank was still scuffing his heels as if he enjoyed making cuts in the sand that the tide would erase. No more liquor stores, thought Sal. He wondered why Frank was telling him this stuff. Again he thought how he wanted to get his share of the money and go home. Tomorrow he’d start looking for a new place. Even Providence wouldn’t be too far away. It didn’t matter that Frank was leaving. He could always come back.

“This cousin of mine, Larry, he’s never been in trouble. He’s a real good cook and even took some classes up in Vermont, at least for a while, but it was too chichi, you hear what I’m saying? Fuckin’ sauces up the wazoo. Now he’s cooking at a school. He said he’d give me a job any time I wanted, full time, part time, it didn’t matter. Larry’s dad was the brother of my old man, the cocksucker. Both dead now, but he was okay. Worked in a hardware store. He gave me my first hammer when I was six or seven. Means a lot, your first hammer.” Frank paused to light a cigarette.

Sal saw Frank’s face flare in the light of the Bic: dark eyes squeezed half shut against the smoke, dark hair combed back from his forehead. Why’s he telling me this? Sal asked himself. He glanced back at the couple on the blanket about fifty feet away.

“That’s too bad about you going away,” said Sal. “We were doing all right.”

“Yeah,” said Frank philosophically. “Everything gets fucked sooner or later.”

“You really killed this guy?”

“Deader’n a doornail.”

“Didn’t it bother you?” Sal tried to keep the surprise out of his voice.

“Sometimes there’s a fuss, and I hate fuss. This time there was no fuss. First he was there, then he wasn’t.”

Sal wanted the night to be over. He wanted to be someplace with other people and lots of activity. “It’s about time to split up the money, wouldn’t you say?” They were again walking side by side on the packed sand. Frank’s cigarette made a red streak as he moved it to his mouth. Sal could feel his wet socks bunch between his toes.

“I got bad news about that,” said Frank, sounding apologetic.

“You mean about the money?”

“Yeah, the money.”

“You mean you didn’t get as much as you thought?”

“No, I got it all right. He had a whole bunch of fifties.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“I just don’t want to give you any.”

Sal didn’t think he’d heard right. “Say again?”

“This going-away business, I don’t know how much I’ll need. So, you know, I’m going to keep your share.”

“I thought you’d be getting a job.” Sal forgot that his feet were wet, hardly heard the splash of his footsteps.

“Actually, I got two jobs. I met a guy who offered me a sweet deal at this place. He looked me up a couple of weeks ago. Wants me to do a number. I didn’t have to go find him or anything. He’d heard of me in Portsmouth. Where I was before here. Did I tell you what they call a female clone?”

“Yeah, a clunt. I thought you were going up to this school to cook.”

“Jesus Christ, can’t you keep anything straight? Why the fuck would I stick myself up there in the boondocks unless I had a good reason? The number came first, the cooking came second, Buddy Roussel came third. The school’s going bust; they’re dying for students. They’ll take anybody day or night. It made the whole business a piece of cake.”