Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [173]
He quickly transformed his emotion into one of righteous outrage. Temple Dowling didn’t turn them into prostitutes. Poverty and hunger did. Was that his fault? Should they starve? Would that make the world a better place? What gave Holland the right to look down on him? Wasn’t he intelligent enough to understand that most men who are attracted to children seek innocence in their lives?
He stopped, his mind seizing up as though he had experienced a brain freeze. He shouldn’t have used the word “children.” He was never attracted to children. He was not a pedophile. He just wanted to be with teenage girls while they were blooming into women. What finer creation was there than a young girl? What greater tragedy was there than seeing them left to the mercies of America’s street culture? Or seeing them turned over to degenerates like Sholokoff, who made addicts of them and used them in porn films? Why was Temple Dowling the scapegoat? He had never treated a woman or girl badly in his life.
He drank his glass empty. The sky had darkened over the mountains, as though a lavender rain were starting to fall where the sun had just set. Where were his men?
“Would you like another, sir?” the bartender asked. He wore a white jacket and a red bow tie and black pants. His face had no color, not even the shadow of a beard, but his hair was as black and liquid in appearance as melted plastic.
“Yeah, hit me again,” Temple replied. “What’s all that noise next door?”
“It’s a young people’s organization of some kind.” The bartender’s cheeks were sunken, his mouth like a button.
“Listen to it. That’s a lot of kids.”
“Can I order you something from the grill?”
“They seem to be having fun,” Temple said, still distracted by the celebratory mood next door.
“The hotel gives them the space for their meetings one night a week.”
“That’s pretty nice.” Temple gazed out the door at the teenagers going in and out of the lobby, the shadows of the potted palms sliding off their skin and hair and the flowers some of the girls were wearing.
“It’s called Alla-something,” the bartender said.
“Can you order me a steak?”
“Yes, sir. Right away.”
“I like it pink in the middle,” Temple said.
He worked on his vodka and waited for his food and listened to the pianist play “Claire de Lune.” The pianist was dressed in a summer tux with a red boutonniere, his long fingers floating above the keys in a cone of blue light. Santa Fe was a grand place to be. The Spanish ambience, the wooden colonnades and earthen jars on the terrazzo entrances to the shops along the street, the stars twinkling above the vastness of the mountains—why should a man be afraid in a country as wonderful as this? Or why should a man be ashamed of what he was? He agreed with the liberals and libertines on this one. A man didn’t choose his sexual inclinations. They chose him. Didn’t Jesus say there are those who are made different in the womb?
The girl who came into the lounge from the lobby and sat down next to him at the bar had the face of a pixie, with a pug nose and an uplifted chin and thick dark red hair that was tied in back. She wore a sequined cowboy shirt and tight stonewashed jeans tucked into boots that came almost to her knee. “Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” Temple said.
“Can you help me out?”
“You kill anybody?”
“I’d like to. At least if I have to go back in there.”
“Where?” he asked.
“To the Alateen meeting.”
“What’s Alateen?”
“A meeting that’s a guaranteed cure for insomnia. I got sentenced to it by the court.”
“Why’d the judge send you there?”
“My boyfriend totaled his car and left me unconscious inside it. My boyfriend is not only a needle-dick but a lying shit. I told the judge if he believed my boyfriend, he was a shitbird,