Crooked Little Vein

Chapter 34

From a distance, the Strip looked like it was covered in a dozen different colors of blossom on a wet spring morning.

Up close, the blanket of petals turned out to be a thick coating of discarded handbills from pimps and porn operations, stuck to the road by rainfall.

Reduced to a pulpy sludge by dirty rain, they dulled the footfalls. We squelched our way through ANAL HOOK-ERS and PHONE DOMINATION under the ugly gray dawn light, walking from the street up to the hotel I’d found us.

Down from the pyramid of the Luxor, the European castles, and some wetbrain’s idea of Paris, this was Vegas’s newest development. Trix got a look at it and punched me in the arm.

The Freedom was a hotel within an outsize copy of the statue of Jesus that stands outside Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Only in this version Jesus was dressed in an Uncle Sam suit.

“We’re staying in the hat,” I said, rubbing my arm.

“You’re a pervert,” she hissed.

“Oh, that’s good coming from you.”

She wrapped her arms around herself and stalked ahead of me.

“There will be no sex for you until we leave this place,” she said.

I stood there alone in the eerily silent streets of Las Vegas and listened to my penis cry.

The ground floor was vast. You could have fit my entire street into the place. Bellhops with name badges bearing the title FREE MAN scuttled up to us and attempted to steal our luggage. The place looked still half-built, the massive American flags covering scaffolding and holes in dividing walls. We were checked in smoothly, but my attention was drawn to a collection of tents some three hundred yards across the floor.

“Refugees,” the receptionist snarled. “They got off the boat in California and took a Greyhound straight here. Someone said they saw the hotel on TV and thought we wanted their tired and their hungry. Who knew other people even had TV?”

Trix leaned over the polished counter. “I want to kill you,” she whispered.

I grabbed her arm and guided her away, sweeping the keycards off the counter as I went. She tried to shake me off, but I sank my fingers into her upper arm and marched her to the elevators.

“That hurts.”

“Stop fucking around.”

“I can’t believe you brought me here.”

“I thought it’d be funny.”

“It turns my stomach.”

“These people just work here. They didn’t build it.”

“Did you hear her?”

“So she’s dumb. You want to kill people for being dumb?”

“Yes.”

The elevator doors opened with a little Yankee Doodle Dandy chime. I put Trix inside it. Abraham Lincoln leered down at us from the ceiling.

“Look,” I said. “You don’t get to keep the parts of the country you like, ignore the rest, and call what you’ve got America. You didn’t vote for the president, right?”

“Fuck no.”

“No. I bet she did. Half the people in America did. More than half the people in America believe in God. You don’t get to just ignore that. I know you like telling me about new stuff and showing me that there’s a whole other society in America and all that shit. So now I’m showing you: this is what the rest of the people have, okay?”

She looked up at Abe and shuddered. “This is horrible, Mike.”

“If I coped with having a bucket of salty water injected into my balls, you can cope with this.”

“You’re teaching me a lesson. Jesus.”

“Actually, I just thought it’d be funny. The lesson just came to me a minute ago. And don’t blaspheme. You’re riding an elevator up to Jesus’ hat.”

“I’m going to be sick.”

“Have you got 666 tattooed on you someplace?”

“You may never get a chance to look for it again, Michael McGill.”

There was a plaster bas-relief of Jesus on the wall over the bed. The bed had a wooden slat down the middle that divided it in half. And the toilet played “Onward Christian Soldiers” when you lifted the lid.

“I think I can feel blisters forming on my brain,” said Trix, balled up and rocking slowly in the corner.