These Women Page 9

  But that’s not how it works. This is her room, her rules. Her order of business.

  “Sit, baby.”

  She tosses her head side to side, trying to take back the game. Trying to take control.

  “You’re too good to sit?”

  Jujubee winks, wags a finger.

  “Don’t play.”

  He reaches for her arm. He grabs her wrist. Not hard.

  Jujubee stares at his hand on her skin.

  The lights go out. She can’t hear the music. The Fast Rabbit fades away. And she sees Kathy’s face bloated and bagged just like Lecia’s in the photo the cop accidentally showed her. She sees Kathy in the lot near her parents’ house—discarded, battered. She sees her lying on the ground, her body twisted.

  It’s as if she can feel Kathy’s struggle, just like she used to think she could feel Lecia’s. She can feel the man grabbing her, restraining her, wrapping whatever it is around her neck to strangle her. She can feel the plastic bag go over her face.

  She can feel Kathy bite, kick, claw. She can feel her raw, ragged desperation, her frantic need to escape.

  “What the fuck, Jujubee.” Julianna opens her eyes. Dean’s got her by the waist and has dragged her into the hall. She looks at her hand and sees several of her nails are broken.

  “Don’t you fucking move,” he says.

  He pulls back the curtain to the room. The man with the wild eyes is pressed against the far wall. There are scratches on his face and arms.

  “She’s fucking loco. I didn’t even touch the—”

  Dean holds up his hand. But the man keeps talking, stuttering about how Julianna wouldn’t do her job, was half-assing it, then straight up attacked him, clawed him like the puta she is.

  Dean turns to Jujubee. “Ju—what’s your side?”

  “He wanted to do me like Kathy. He wanted to do me like he did her. He wanted—” Julianna can hear the hysteria in her voice. It’s as if she’s standing outside herself watching this scene. And then, crash, she’s back together.

  “He did what?” Dean asks. “He did who?”

  “Nothing,” Julianna says. “Nothing.” They’re all the same. All the fucking same.

  “What do you mean nothing?” The warning in Dean’s voice is unmistakable.

  She shrugs. What does it matter who put his hand where and what he meant by it? They’re all a bunch of pigs. Rapists and killers and whatever the fuck. Their dirty hands, their dirty minds. Their appetites. Their sweat and breath. Their smell. Their—

  She stands and spits at the guy.

  Dean yanks her arm. “Out. Now.”

  She fumbles for her purse. The contents scatter across the floor. She rakes it all back in. Except for her phone, which she holds up, points at the man still cowering in the private room—his face rigid and angry.

  Click.

  3.

  JULIANNA PINWHEELS OUT OF THE FAST RABBIT, TOSSED BY Dean. She catches herself before she stumbles out onto Western.

  The street is dead. It smells like smoke and ash. She checks her phone. It’s almost one A.M. The only business is back at the Fast Rabbit or at one of the two motels the street girls work. But there’s nothing for her in these places—nothing keeping her in this stretch of Western. Time to go home. Not to the apartment where Coco or Marisol or whoever else will return cash heavy and ready to party, but home to her own house on Twenty-Ninth Place.

  Julianna’s left all her tips. There’s a split second when she thinks of getting the bouncer or one of the girls to retrieve them for her. But the smell of the place—the perfumed antiseptic spray that covers the stench of other people’s sex and hunger—turns her stomach. She has no cash for a cab, so she’s on foot.

  She takes out the baggie and polishes it off in one go, then turns north.

  Twenty blocks. Just about two miles. With the llelo running through her system she can knock it out quick. The smoke from the fires up in the hills hangs in the air.

  Julianna knows what she looks like out here in her white heels, tight jeans, pink halter. She knows why the few cars that pass, pass slow.

  She approaches Martin Luther King, where cars are pulling in and out of the Snooty Fox Motor Inn, taking advantage of the three-hour rate. She keeps her eyes ahead, trying to block out the action.

  At the corner a car pulls to a stop along the curb—a gray Honda Accord. Its windows are tinted. The light changes. She crosses MLK, but the car hangs back.

  She’s at the far edge of her own neighborhood now. Not too far from Jack’s Family Kitchen, where she’d ditched Dorian. She’s working her lower lip as she walks, chewing it hard. She’s ashamed of her own nerves.

  Not that Julianna works the same beat as Kathy, but she plays by the same rules. If you think too hard about danger, there’s no going to work, there’s no getting the job done. There’s no strapping on your heels and putting yourself out there.

  Danger is what happens to other people.

  Danger comes when you acknowledge it.

  The Honda’s back, creeping alongside Julianna, even-wheeling her. She casts a quick glance to let it know she’s not interested, she’s not what the driver thinks she is. Whoever’s behind the wheel has gotten her mixed up with a different sort of woman.

  At the next corner the light is red and a few cars are moving east-west so she has to wait. She can feel the Honda alongside her. She waves it away. When she crosses the street, the car doesn’t follow.

  There are a handful of girls out. They meet Julianna’s eyes as she passes, give her the nasty once-over. Julianna doesn’t tell them they’re welcome to their corners. Doesn’t dare say the game is all theirs. But she’s glad they’re out—more distraction for the Honda driver, who’s back on her heels again.

  She glances over her shoulder. The car flashes its headlights. Then it peels away, speeding past her, squealing right on Fortieth.

  She runs a hand over her lips, which are chewed and swollen. A good thing she’s done with this shit—a good thing she’s not working tomorrow or ever again.

  Her feet are starting to ache. A mile is about her limit in these heels. She’s going slower, limping. Another busted girl on the walk home.

  It’s ten blocks now through the landmarks of her childhood—the shuttered salons, pupuserias, strip malls. Julianna pauses in the doorway of an empty storefront to give her feet a break. She wedges her finger between her shoe and her heel, freeing the skin from the clammy lining.

  She finishes adjusting her shoe. She can feel the blisters and the trickle of blood pooling below her heel. She steps out of the doorway. There’s one car heading south on Western.

  She steps onto the street. There’s a flash and a squeal of rubber on concrete. She looks to her left to see a set of headlights bearing down on her. She leaps back to the curb, scrambling for safety. But the car doesn’t give ground, chasing her right onto the sidewalk, pinning her in the doorway.

  The headlights blind her. The engine rumbles. Julianna hears the door open. She shades her eyes as a man steps out—all backlit and shadow.

  Her heart, already racing from the coke, is quickstepping in her chest, rising in her throat. She feels as if someone’s choking her.

  “You bitch.”

  Julianna cowers. She slinks back into the doorway even though she knows she’s only trapping herself.

  “Puta.”

  She puts her hands over her head. The chemical taste of the llelo rising in her throat is making her gag.

  “You stupid fucking whore.”

  The man’s face emerges from shadow and Julianna’s heart thumps as she recognizes his wild, wandering eye and the ribbons of blood she left on his cheeks. The man from the Fast Rabbit raises an arm above his head. He’s holding something dark and round.

  Julianna has enough time to close her eyes before the bottle connects with her forehead and she spins into black.

  4.

  CLICK.

  Julianna’s face stares back at her, startled by th
e flash—lips chewed, pupils bugged and black swamping her irises. There’s a nasty cut above her right eye that’s going to swell. She wipes blood from her lashes and squints at the screen. The woman she sees looks savage and raw—not Julianna, not Jujubee, but someone unfamiliar. A person who’s been scraped from the inside out. Now she can see that there’s dirt in the gash on her forehead from where she hit the sidewalk. She’ll be lucky if it’s not infected. She swipes the image away and looks at the clock readout. By her count ten minutes have passed since she hit the ground.

  It takes her fifteen minutes to reach her parents’ house. She takes the smaller streets, away from Western, away from the supposed safety of streetlights and reliable traffic. There’s no one on Gramercy or Cimarron to see her staggered approach, no one to wonder at the way she shields her face from the empty block.

  She reaches Twenty-Ninth Place and stands across the street from her house under the canopy of a magnolia tree. She stares into the darkened windows, watching for signs that anyone is awake. She wants to make sure she enters unseen, slips up the stairs, into the shower, and into her bed without meeting her family.

  Because they can see them on you, they can smell them on you. No matter how many times you wash, no matter how much time has passed, every man has left his mark, every man has left his fingerprints, imprinted himself. The best you can do is clean yourself up, scrub down and pretend. Which is what Julianna needs to do.

  Kathy wasn’t afforded that luxury. Discarded dirty, not just with the grime from the alley, but with the filth of her clients. A dead hooker, not a dead mom, not a dead woman. A disrespect almost worse than murder.

  Julianna waits, peering in the windows to double-check that her mother isn’t in the kitchen and that her father hasn’t fallen asleep in front of the television in the front room, that Hector isn’t smoking weed out back with Isobel, his forever girlfriend.

  From down the block comes the sound of grinding metal as a car hits the cracked pavement hard, then jolts on. It screeches past Julianna and squeals to a stop before running the stop sign—nose partway into the intersection. Then it reverses, weaving back in an unsteady line until it stops in front of her house. The car is shaking with bass and reverb.

  The passenger-side door opens and a large man hauls himself out—a soft, bulbous profile silhouetted against the weak light over the dash. He staggers to the back door and yanks it open. There’s a pile of bodies slumped on the seat, the wreckage of a long night.

  The man reaches into the car and pulls someone out—Armando.

  Julianna’s father stands unsteadily. There’s stirring in the car—two women come to life, talking over each other in a mix of Spanish and English. One bangs on the driver’s seat, the other half falls out the open door.

  Armando’s trying to pull himself together but it’s not working, so the big man has to help him around the car and through the gate to the house. Julianna’s focus isn’t on her father, though, it’s on the two women in back. They’re full figured, curves that have become rolls. The one closer to Julianna is wearing a skirt so short Julianna can see the tattoos snaking down her upper thigh. She dangles her feet in their strappy heels out the door and lights a cigarette.

  This is what happens. One day you’re fine and fierce and still able to pretend you’re in control, that men want you because they want you, not because anything can be had at a price. Next thing, you’re big and battered, lying in the back of a shitty town car, rolling around with dudes like Julianna’s dad or worse. Dudes who think that because they have jobs, families, something steady somewhere else, they are better than you, they have a right to you. Dudes who think that because they have enough cash to pay for you or your drinks or your dinner, they have every right.

  Julianna can see how it will go. She’ll get straight for a bit, take a job outside the life but the money won’t work, won’t make anything come together for her. Then one of her friends will invite her to a party and next thing she’ll be back with the old crowd, breaking dawn and living hard. Soon she’ll take a second job, something for tips, and eventually she’ll be playing in the shadow of the game—not a street hooker, never that, but someone invited to motel parties where the line between party girls and paid girls gets fuzzier as dawn creeps in.

  And eventually the better part of the game will pass her by. She’ll age, lose her looks, grow soft and heavy with too many years of sweet booze and cheap meals. She’ll never work the streets, but she’ll grow dependent on guys like her father for a good time. Soon she’ll be waiting for them, needing them, hoping they’ll come to call.

  Julianna hears the rusted hinges followed by the bang of the gate to her house slamming shut. The woman in the back of the car brushes ash from her leg. Her head lolls back. “Where the fuck are we?” she asks.

  The driver dismisses her with a wave of his hand.

  Soon the big guy who dragged Armando home is back. “Get your ass back in the car,” he says, kicking the woman’s feet. “Move your colita.”

  She tosses her cigarette at him. He gets in the shotgun seat. The car sags under his weight. The door slams and they speed off, leaving Julianna staring at her father passed out on the steps, his arms splayed like he’s on the cross.

  She opens the gate and sits at his side. “Papi? Papi?”

  Armando smells like cheap car air freshener and even cheaper booze. And something else—the smell of the changing rooms at Sam’s Hofbräu, the Fast Rabbit, even the apartment she shares with Coco and the rest of them. The smell of sweat and women’s perfume. Her stomach rises.

  “Papi?”

  He stirs, mumbles something, and waves a hand in her direction.

  “Papi, no way you’re sleeping out here for the whole block to see.”

  “Who the fuck—”

  “Didn’t anyone never tell you, don’t shit where you eat?”

  There’s no response.

  “Papi!” She digs a finger into the flesh and fat above his ribs—twisting her jagged, broken nail into his shirt.

  He groans and tries to roll away.

  But here’s the thing Julianna’s good at—the rough customer, the drunk customer, the one who won’t get off, who comes too close, who won’t leave, who tries to take what he wants by pressing into you hard. She tosses her heels aside and stands barefoot on the step above her father’s head. She squats down and wiggles her hands under his armpits.

  She slides him up the two steps toward the front door. She finds her keys, then rolls her father inside.

  It’s hard work and the drugs raise her pulse so she’s panting. She kicks Armando’s legs so he’s inside the house, then closes the door. The sweat on her forehead makes her cut sting.

  Armando looks like he’s been dropped from several stories up, splayed and motionless. Julianna wants to get him into the shower, erase the night and the smell of the other women, roll him onto the couch and tuck him in, shield her mother from what she surely knows. But it’s too much work and he doesn’t deserve it. She takes a pillow and a small blanket from the couch.

  She squats down and tucks the pillow under his head and tosses the blanket over his bulk. Then she kicks him in the side. “I should have left you on the street,” she says.

  Julianna tiptoes through the house, passing her own room. Hector’s door is open a crack. She pushes it wider. He and Isobel are sleeping in the king-size bed that takes up most of the room.

  Hector is on his back, an arm and a leg hanging toward the floor. He’s getting fat, Julianna thinks as she watches his belly rise and fall under his white undershirt. Isobel sleeps on her stomach. She’s wearing a pair of Hector’s boxers and a large T-shirt. She’s flopped over toward Hector, one of her arms stretching across his waist, her long black hair spread across the sheets behind her.

  Julianna tiptoes into the room and slides along Hector’s side of the bed. She inches open the drawer of his nightstand and feels for his canister of weed. A helicopter passes overhead, its searchlight slicing
through the dark.

  The helicopter’s carving a tight circle—its searchlight bouncing over Julianna’s house in one-minute intervals, the hammering of its blades rising and falling. She palms the weed and closes the drawer.

  She pauses once more at the door, watching Hector and Isobel. The searchlight skims their sleeping bodies—caressing Isobel’s smooth, unblemished skin, her untainted arms, the edge of her jaw, her delicate fingers, the soft curve of her calves.

  A fucking miracle, Julianna thinks, to sleep so goddamned unaware of the chaos outside, the person being chased by the cops and the violent sound of the chopper chewing the air. How amazing to be able to sleep next to someone, peaceful and comfortable and numb to the world around you.

  Julianna takes out her phone.

  Click.

  5.

  THE WEED MUST HAVE KNOCKED HER OUT. SHE SLEPT THE whole day, waking in the evening to grab something to eat from the fridge, smoke some more, then crash again. Nearly thirty-six hours pass before she gets up for good. She spends half an hour in the shower, coming close to running out the hot water, scrubbing herself until her skin hurts. She finds a pair of Hector’s old boxers and a tank top from when she was in high school, both a tight fit around the curves she didn’t have back then.

  Armando is sitting at the kitchen table eating a chuleta and beans, Alva’s specialty and the only thing she cooks with any regularity now that she is managing the car rental at the airport.

  The TV is on in the background—a special report about the fires devastating the country from Santa Barbara down to the Hollywood Hills. Sparks and ash are floating over the city like snow, igniting smaller blazes as far south as the 10.

  “How you feeling, Papi?”

  Armando looks up from his plate, fixing Julianna with his large black eyes, searching her. “¿Qué es? An interrogation?”

  “I can’t ask my father a question?”

  “You can if it’s a good question.”

  “I just want to know how you’re feeling.” Julianna’s brain is foggy from so much sleep, her limbs untrustworthy after too many hours in bed.