Thirty-one
John forced Jennifer to drive the car. “My driver’s license isn’t valid,” he confessed.
She laughed because he knew full well she didn’t have
one either. “Expired?”
“Can’t drive if you’re dead. John Cantrell died ten
years ago.”
“You should have told me that last night. I probably
wouldn’t have slept with you. How did you die?”
“I got confused for someone else during a fire,” John
said. “I tried to straighten it out, but they wanted identification and I
let it slide. Being anonymous proved to be a safety factor in my
profession.”
“Nobody knows who you are for real?”
“I’m not even sure who I am. I haven’t had ties with
anyone for years. All I have are memories, and I wonder at times how many
of those I can trust.”
“I heard Craig Netherman mutter something about the
Iranian. Is that you?”
John chuckled. “I got Thai and Arab on my mother’s
side of the family, American Indian and French on my father’s side. My
grandmother was the Iranian. I’ve got an international heritage, you
could say.”
“I want to meet them!” Jennifer said with a burst of
enthusiasm.
He looked at her with his sad, pale eyes. “They’re
all gone. I came along late in life. They got old and died when I was a
kid.”
John’s aloneness saddened her. “I’m sorry,” she
said.
“No need to be. You’re not much a blueblood
yourself, or do you think maybe you are?”
She flashed him a smile. “I have no way of knowing.
Just like you. My social worker, the one that tried to hit on me, told me
my mother died of cancer. She was only thirty years old. I think I had
an uncle, maybe, or an older brother from another marriage. I got this photograph in my things,
and he looks like my mother. I don’t know who my father was. If he’s still
alive, he might not even know he had a kid. When my mother died, my uncle
or whoever it was took me to California. Something must have happened to him, which I
suppose is how I got dumped in the welfare system.”
“You don’t need the establishment, kid. You do the
mainstream scene and the government controls your life and soaks you for
forty percent to boot. That’s no way to live.”
Jennifer laughed, knowing he wasn’t being entirely
serious. “What are you going to do without social security when you get
old, wack pensioners for greedy widows?”
“There’s no way I’ll make it that far. I’ve got both
ends of the candle burning.”
“Yeah. Me, too, I guess.”
John smiled at her. It was a strange, benevolent,
all-knowing smile, unlike anything she had ever seen before. John was not
at peace with a world to which he had never belonged, but on the inside,
he was like a dark and deep ocean, cold and tranquil. To see him smile
was to see a current of warmth stir in that terrible depth.
She was proud to have put it there.
Chicago finally loomed on the horizon, a dome of
dirty light against the darkening night sky. A few miles ahead lay Lake
Shore Drive and the skyscrapers overlooking Lake Michigan. Jennifer knew
they were headed for a far less attractive part of the city.
“Just ahead,” John said. “We’ll pull off here.”
“Do you know where we’re going?”
“I’ve got a good idea of where to start.”
John guided her through a series of turn-offs, each
road deteriorating from the wide, clean expanse of the interstate to a
brick side street walled by dingy buildings. “This is a bad part of town,” John said. “If I run
into trouble, keep your head down and stay put. We don’t want to get
separated.”
Jennifer didn’t like the way he understated the
potential nightmare. “We sure as hell don’t want to get separated.”
They parked the car in an alley behind a tavern,
weaving in and out of a yard-high accumulation of stinking trash on foot.
“I know the place,” John said. “Nobody will mess with the car here.”
“That’s because nobody in their right mind would
wallow through all the shit to get to it, right?”
Rats darted into the refuse like quick brown
serpents. John took her hand and guided her through a rusty steel door
and down a corridor reeking of unmentionable odors. The tavern was the
usual scene of dim lights, neon signs in bright colors and sparkling
bottles lining a mirror behind the bar.
John spoke briefly to the bearded, disheveled-looking
bartender. He passed over two twenty-dollar bills and was tossed a key.
“Home, sweet home,” he said, and led the way up a creaking staircase in
back and down a hall so narrow that Jennifer was forced to follow
single-file.
John unlocked the end door to a room of gray
wallpaper, torn linoleum of an indeterminate pattern, and one neatly made bed. He clicked on a table
lamp on the nightstand, snapped on the bathroom light and dropped wearily
to the bed.
“We left our things in the car,” Jennifer reminded
him.
“We have to go back out. We’ll catch something to
eat, and I’ll ask around for information.”
“How are we going to work this? I don’t mind being
used for bait, but I didn’t think we were going fishing in a sewer.”
John eyed her as if unsure how she was going to react
to the situation. “Dimitri ran with a fancy crowd, but it’s my guess
they’ve recruited bottoms in this area from time to time. A girl in this
neighborhood can fall through the cracks and nobody would ever notice. Or
care.”
Jennifer knew what a bottom was,
a willing partner to being hurt. She flopped down on
the bed at his side. “Can’t we start tomorrow?”
John reached for her as a thirsty man might reach for
a cold beer, then thought better of it. “We’re after the night life. We
can sleep over in the morning.”
“Night life as in vampires, or ghouls?”
“Just whores and pimps,” John said. “The only
advantage Francis and her girls have over the locals is their looks and
smarts, and you can’t take personal credit for that. Nobody asks to be
born.”
“There but for the grace of God?”
John gazed at her for a moment, as if mulling over an
unfamiliar idea. “You could say that for the roaches in the walls.”
“Nice thought.”
They locked their room up and went out to eat. John
selected a nearby bar that served a steak dinner. Jennifer ate in
silence, quickly acclimatizing herself to the atmosphere. A juke box
roared out through the colorful darkness, and a few couples spun about on
the dance floor.
John ordered a beer from the waitress and excused
himself. Jennifer watched him walk to the bar and talk to two women
who were keeping one another company.
“What are you doing?” Jennifer said when he returned
to the table. The two women were staring at her in peculiar fashion.
“I’m trying to sell your ass,” John said. “Dimitri
was a sadistic bastard, and the only bottom who’d risk a man like that is
a mostly unwilling one. You’re going to be just that sort of bottom, the
unasked variety, and it’s my guess they pay a hefty price for ignorant
young runaways someone can pass their way from time to time. If I find
buyers, they might know our Rosie.”
“You’re posing as a talent scout," Jennifer said with mock sarcasm.
John studied her. “You look too healthy to be the
right kind of girl.”
Jennifer sighed in dismay. “I know the scene,” she
said. “I can do wonders with a little bit of mascara and some looser
clothing.”
They stopped at a drugstore for supplies on the way
back to their room. Jennifer cleaned off the bathroom mirror and made
creative use of the mascara. Using her fingertip, she put dark circles
under her eyes and convincing looking bruises and needle tracks on the
inner surface of her forearms with ink and rouge. She stomped one of
John’s large shirts into the dirty floor before donning it to complete the
image.
“Christ,” John murmured when she made a
reappearance. “You look like shit.”
“Thank you. Now what?”
“I gave those ladies our address. Word gets around.
We’ll have potential buyers paying a visit. Look spaced-out and let me do
the talking.”
The two women had apparently paired off in the bar
for reasons not related to business. They came to John alone to do
business, one after the other. The first of the two was a hefty, vicious
looking woman in her early forties. She took the money John offered for
her time and glanced at the Jennifer fearfully. “What is it you want,
mister?”
“I’m looking for Rosie.”
“Don’t know no Rosie.”
“Ask around. Get back to me with useful information
and we’ll do business again. Big business. She’ll want the girl.”
The woman nodded and eyed Jennifer again. She wet
her lips and glanced guiltily at John. “I’ll take her. I’ll give you a
thousand bucks for the little bitch.”
John gave her a bored look and said nothing. The
woman spun about and hurried from the room.
“What would she have wanted with me?” Jennifer said.
“You don’t want to even think about it.”
Jennifer shuddered at the possibilities that came to
mind. “I hope this isn’t going to take long.”
“I don’t expect it to.”
Their second visitor was the younger of the two women
John had talked to at the bar, a more alert and concerned looking woman in
her early thirties. Again, John handed her some money and repeated his
request. “I’m looking for Rosie.”
The woman stared at him for a time. “You fucking
bastard. She’s just a child.”
“I’ll double that for an address.”
The woman glanced again at Jennifer. Angrily, she
shook her head and backed away. “Fuck you, you sick bastard.”
“Triple.”
There was anguish in her eyes when she glanced
one final time at Jennifer.
“I need an address.”
“I’ve got an address, but do you know this Rosie,
mister? Do you know what she’s into?”
“I know about her.”
“Do you know that nobody will ever see that kid
again?”
John counted more bills from his wallet.
The woman visibly shrunk in stature, defeated by
whatever need she had that was greater than the life of another human
being. “Club Paradise, you dumb-ass. Where the hell else would she be?”
John paid her and she left in silence. And in
tears. They listened to the creaking of her weight on the stairs.
“That was really sad,” Jennifer said. “What’s Club
Paradise?”
“Club Paradise would have been among my top ten
guesses. You’d be amazed at what passes for paradise among some people.
It would make a great Halloween haunted house for Girl Scouts, say about
your own age.”
“With real vampires and ghouls, I suppose.”
“We’re going to have to pull up roots and move a bit
closer. Words going to get around about us. No telling how this is going
to go down.”
Jennifer couldn’t sleep for the balance of the night,
feeling lost in this strange world of poverty, sickness, and despair.
Sirens wailed in the tepid darkness. She wondered why people bothered
with their fantasies of heaven and hell in a world that contained its own
extremes, sometimes contained within a heartbeat and a city block of one
another.
John stirred restlessly in his sleep during the
night. He reached for her whispering another girl’s name.
