Portland Noir - Kevin Sampsell [86]
Every day that week I saw someone different. After dark, I wandered through the parking lot of Area 69, stood inside by the racks of videos, the leather harnesses and handcuffs and dildos in plastic packaging, until someone asked me back to the booths. The time without Lila nagged at me, the socket left from a tooth pulled, the vague shape of what could be lost, but in an hour I could make $150, nearly three nights in Room 42. It was better this way, Lila said, than with Mark. Before she met him she would sit in the corner at Devil’s Point, the strip club on 53rd, and wait for someone to pick her up. The next day she’d be able to buy a new dress or go to the movies; she could make her rent in a day and a half. Now Mark took half the money and he wouldn’t let you go, she said, and he would know in a second if you’d been working on your own. He’d been locked up in Snake River after he pulled a fifteen-year-old onto the circuit, and the day after he was released he started running girls again. His probation officer was nowhere to be found. “This is better,” Lila kept saying. “We keep you a secret.” At night I stood in the shower until the water ran cold and then lay beside her until we both slept.
Mark came back four days later and I hid behind the shower curtain in the bathroom. “You start work again tomorrow,” he said. “And you never pull that shit again. I don’t ever want to see a fucking scratch on you that I didn’t give you myself.”
I could hear Lila, sweet and pleading. “Baby,” she said, and it was silent for a while. I closed my eyes, imagined a forest, my hands up in the trees, the cool of the leaves. I tried not to think of them kissing.
After a long time Mark cleared his throat. “We go back on the road tomorrow,” he said. “Have your shit packed.”
Lila’s voice was a murmur, something I couldn’t hear, and then she said, “I need you,” and panic welled up in me like a tide, a breathless gray.
She didn’t need Mark, I thought. That was how things would begin to go wrong, how they always began. My mother’s accident wasn’t really an accident. It was after my father had left her. For two weeks after he packed his things and took the car, she had laid on the sofa and watched daytime television, and spoke quietly, as though she was telling a secret. Then, on a Tuesday afternoon, we were walking on a busy street and she squeezed my arm. “Stay here,” she said, and smiled, and walked in front of a rattling bus, and I understood that the calm had been a deceptive one, the first freeze that leaves the lake solid and the fish still swimming, fast and alarmed, a foot below ice. What kept pounding at the back of my head was that I didn’t know when it had begun, that the first sign of ruin was something never recovered.
The door slammed but I stood in the shower until Lila came and pushed the curtain back. “He’s gone,” she said.
We had $300, slipped into the lining of Lila’s suitcase. The Greyhound station was a half hour away, just off the 20 bus.
Lila wanted to go somewhere warm. “New Mexico,” she said. “Or Arizona. Someplace dry as a fucking bone where we can get tan and gorgeous.” She kissed my cheek. “And never again here.” She gave me scissors and I cut her hair until it fell at her chin and she pulled a hat over it. “Do I look like me?” she asked. “Would you recognize me?”
I thought, I’ll always recognize you.
I slept deeper that night than I had in what felt like years. In the dark I reached out and felt the curve of Lila’s bare back, the raised scar on her shoulder blade, and then slipped into some dream that later I couldn’t remember.
There was a sound like footsteps, and then a quick cold, and then in the dark I was awake and the bed was empty. The door was open. Lila, I thought. A sound of tires squealing and I was up out of bed. I must have been a moment too late, because there was only the empty parking lot, and the city spread out around me like a bowl of lights, a thousand smoke-gray rooms and in each one a person, waiting.
It’s snowing