Read Online Battleborn: Stories by Claire Vaye Watkins - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Claire Vaye Watkins
Tags: Fiction
Ads: Link
thought Manny wouldn’t find out.
Next in line is Trish, a part-time beautician who does most of the girls’ waxing in a heavily wallpapered salon in Nye called Serendipity. She charges them half price, and they tip her accordingly. Bianca is beside Trish, her hair painstakingly straightened and oiled, her waxy pink C-section scar peeking out from under her red panties. Her two daughters, preteens now, live with their grandmother during the week. They think their mother is a masseuse at a spa in Summerlin.
Lacy is next in line, and though Manny can’t smell her from where he is, she’s no doubt spritzed on too much Victoria’s Secret Love Spell body spray. Beside her is Army Amy, wearing silver hoop earrings, frayed Daisy Dukes, and a squarish camouflage hat. She’s topless, except for a pair of blue sparkly pasties shaped like stars stuck to her big nipples with eyelash glue. Amy is the ranch’s big name, the only girl here who’s done porn. It’s her picture on the billboards, the cab signs, the snapper cards passed out by illegals on the Strip.
Next to Amy, Darla wears a black bustier and a dusting of silver glitter around her eyes. She put the glitter on to satisfy Manny, who made her change out of the satin pajamas she wanted to wear. “Honey,” he said, “those things makes you look—and I’m only telling you this because I love you—like a lesbian.” She pretends to fidget with her garters now, looking innocent and eager at the same time. Her niche.
The girls are all angles: the apex of their plastic pointed heels, the thrust of their wet-looking lips, their jaws extended in stiff smiles, the jut of their nipples made erect from a hard, quick pinch just before Manny opened the door. Each angle is a beacon emitting its own version of the same signal.
Pick me, want me.
But the kid is fumbling with the brochures, not getting the message.
A lot of young kids drive out here on their eighteenth birthdays. They ring the bell long and hard in front of their friends, drunk on machismo and MGD from the mini fridges in their fathers’ garages.
Watch me become a man.
How quickly they turn to boys again when they come inside and see the girls in the lineup, all tits and perk like they think they’ve always wanted. Most kids pretend to be lost, ask for directions back to Nye or Vegas, as if they weren’t born and lived all their days within seventy miles of here. As if they didn’t know what this was.
But this kid has no idea; that much is clear. He looks queerer here than Manny did his first time, and Manny
is
queer. Vegas cabbies are as attentive as any to the fresh currency plugging the pockets of overstimulated tourists. They drive them out to the brothels without telling them what they are, just to get the fare. Manny doesn’t condone it, but when he hears the boy’s velvety European accent he thanks God for doing whatever it took to set this fine white-toothed boy down in front of him
.
• • •
M ichele isn’t sure how he ended up out here. He thinks he asked the cabdriver, back in Vegas, to take him to a bar where they wouldn’t check his age. And the way the driver nodded and tapped the meter, asking whether he had cash, Michele assumed he’d been understood. In Italy, the legal drinking age is sixteen. The first time a clerk denied him and Renzo, they had been in San Francisco for two days. Renzo stormed out of the store, flailing his short thick arms in the air, shouting in Italian, “You Americans too moral for booze all of a sudden? We will just have to steal it then, like damn little children.” Stupid, stubborn Renzo.
Michele shifts his weight from one foot to the other, the bulky white Nikes he bought at an outdoor shopping mall in Los Angeles looking too bright, like the shoes of a character on a children’s television program. He looks over the papers he was handed, front and back, absently pushing his hair from his eyes. He recognizes vocabulary words but can’t make
Next in line is Trish, a part-time beautician who does most of the girls’ waxing in a heavily wallpapered salon in Nye called Serendipity. She charges them half price, and they tip her accordingly. Bianca is beside Trish, her hair painstakingly straightened and oiled, her waxy pink C-section scar peeking out from under her red panties. Her two daughters, preteens now, live with their grandmother during the week. They think their mother is a masseuse at a spa in Summerlin.
Lacy is next in line, and though Manny can’t smell her from where he is, she’s no doubt spritzed on too much Victoria’s Secret Love Spell body spray. Beside her is Army Amy, wearing silver hoop earrings, frayed Daisy Dukes, and a squarish camouflage hat. She’s topless, except for a pair of blue sparkly pasties shaped like stars stuck to her big nipples with eyelash glue. Amy is the ranch’s big name, the only girl here who’s done porn. It’s her picture on the billboards, the cab signs, the snapper cards passed out by illegals on the Strip.
Next to Amy, Darla wears a black bustier and a dusting of silver glitter around her eyes. She put the glitter on to satisfy Manny, who made her change out of the satin pajamas she wanted to wear. “Honey,” he said, “those things makes you look—and I’m only telling you this because I love you—like a lesbian.” She pretends to fidget with her garters now, looking innocent and eager at the same time. Her niche.
The girls are all angles: the apex of their plastic pointed heels, the thrust of their wet-looking lips, their jaws extended in stiff smiles, the jut of their nipples made erect from a hard, quick pinch just before Manny opened the door. Each angle is a beacon emitting its own version of the same signal.
Pick me, want me.
But the kid is fumbling with the brochures, not getting the message.
A lot of young kids drive out here on their eighteenth birthdays. They ring the bell long and hard in front of their friends, drunk on machismo and MGD from the mini fridges in their fathers’ garages.
Watch me become a man.
How quickly they turn to boys again when they come inside and see the girls in the lineup, all tits and perk like they think they’ve always wanted. Most kids pretend to be lost, ask for directions back to Nye or Vegas, as if they weren’t born and lived all their days within seventy miles of here. As if they didn’t know what this was.
But this kid has no idea; that much is clear. He looks queerer here than Manny did his first time, and Manny
is
queer. Vegas cabbies are as attentive as any to the fresh currency plugging the pockets of overstimulated tourists. They drive them out to the brothels without telling them what they are, just to get the fare. Manny doesn’t condone it, but when he hears the boy’s velvety European accent he thanks God for doing whatever it took to set this fine white-toothed boy down in front of him
.
• • •
M ichele isn’t sure how he ended up out here. He thinks he asked the cabdriver, back in Vegas, to take him to a bar where they wouldn’t check his age. And the way the driver nodded and tapped the meter, asking whether he had cash, Michele assumed he’d been understood. In Italy, the legal drinking age is sixteen. The first time a clerk denied him and Renzo, they had been in San Francisco for two days. Renzo stormed out of the store, flailing his short thick arms in the air, shouting in Italian, “You Americans too moral for booze all of a sudden? We will just have to steal it then, like damn little children.” Stupid, stubborn Renzo.
Michele shifts his weight from one foot to the other, the bulky white Nikes he bought at an outdoor shopping mall in Los Angeles looking too bright, like the shoes of a character on a children’s television program. He looks over the papers he was handed, front and back, absently pushing his hair from his eyes. He recognizes vocabulary words but can’t make
Similar Books
