The Heavenly Table

58

CHIMNEY AWAKENED THE next morning with his arm around Matilda. It was the first time he’d ever woken up beside a woman, and he figured he’d remember this moment for the rest of his life, no matter how many more times it happened. He lay there for a minute, then got out of the bed. He put his clothes on and peeked through the flap, saw to his chagrin that the pimp and his man were sitting by the campfire drinking coffee and chuckling about something. To hell with them, he thought. Besides, he didn’t need to feel embarrassed; he had paid for it. Forty dollars for all night. The last time he had left the tent, to take a leak in the latrine out back, everything was shut down. It must have been four in the morning. The pimp was wrapped in a blanket in the front seat of his car, and the bodyguard lay snoring in the bed of the wagon. The other two tents were dark, and as he walked by the one the French model slept in, he heard her mutter something about a rubber man. When he got back to Matilda’s tent, he saw to his disappointment that she had put on a nightgown. He tried to think of something to say, but he didn’t know anything about love talk, and so he asked her how she started whoring.

“It’s a long story,” she said, “and it’s late.”

“How about if I give you ten dollars?” Chimney said. “Would you tell me then?”

Raising up on one elbow, she looked at him. “Why would you want to know anything about me?” she asked.

He reached into his pants lying at the foot of the bed and laid a ten on the nightstand beside her. “Just tell me,” he said.

Sitting up in the bed, she pushed her hair back out of her eyes. “Well, it’s your money,” she said. She was born in West Virginia, and her father died from the black lung when she was eight, leaving her mother with seven kids and a twenty-dollar gold piece. A week after his funeral, she packed their two bags and headed north to find work in a cathouse where nobody knew her. By the time Matilda turned twelve, all of her siblings were gone — either dead or in jail or married off — and her mother was sick with cancer. The last place she ever worked, in Fort Wayne, kicked her out when the clients began to complain about her bad smell and lack of enthusiasm, and they ended up in Louisville. When they first walked into the tiny one-room house her mother had rented down by the canning factories, Matilda remembered her saying, as she glanced around at the black mold on the walls and the ossified pile of gray dog shit lying on top of the ripped mattress, “So this is what the end of the line looks like.” Within a week, she couldn’t get out of bed anymore. It took all her strength to get from the bed to the chamber pot, and even then she only made it half the time. By chance, she heard about a pimp named Blackie who was doing business out of a wagon on the edge of town, and she gave a colored girl who lived across the street one of her last dollars to go fetch him.

When Blackie finally arrived the next morning, her mother had begged him, “You got to take my girl for me.”

He looked down at the kid scrunched up in the corner of the filthy room. “She’s too young,” he said dismissively.

“Bullshit,” her mother said. “I had my first chap when I wasn’t much older than her. I never heard of a pimp that let something like that bother him.”

“I got a thing against men who make money off little girls.”

“Well, maybe she could clean up or run errands or what have ye. She’s a good worker.”

“Look, maybe you’re jumpin’ the gun here,” Blackie had said. “Hell, you might snap out of it in a day or two.”

“Sure, I’ll be back to screwin’ fifteen or twenty a night before you know it,” she panted between efforts to catch her breath.

Blackie sighed and ran a hand through his shiny, perfumed hair. “Jesus, don’t ye have somewhere else you could send her? What about family?”

“They’re all gone,” she said.

“How old are ye, girl?”

“She’s ten, maybe eleven,” her mother said. “I can’t recall exactly.”

“Can she talk?”

“I’m twelve,” Matilda spoke up.

“You awful tiny for twelve,” Blackie said.

“She don’t eat much,” her mother said.

“You sure about this? You don’t even know me.”

Her mother fell back onto the dirty, sweat-soaked pillow. “Don’t matter,” she wheezed. “Even you’d be better than stickin’ her in some orphanage.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Blackie said. “At least there—”

“I do,” her mother cut in. “I was raised in one.”

The pimp thought it over for a minute, then said, “Well, what the fuck. I reckon.”

Her mother took several deep gulps of air, then said, “Thank God. If I was in better shape, I’d…” She began weeping, and Blackie turned and looked out the window until she was finished. Wiping her eyes, she asked, “How many girls ye got now?”

“Three,” he said. “But the one’s not workin’ out. Can’t get her to take a bath. If’n ye didn’t know better, you’d think she had the rabies.”

It was the last time Matilda ever saw her mother. Two days after Blackie took her back to his camp, they packed up and moved to another part of the state. She had to give him credit; he had waited until she was almost fourteen before he turned her out. Her first customer was a rich boy whose daddy wanted him to have a little practice breaking in a virgin, so he’d know how to go about it when he married. “He paid three hundred dollars for my cherry,” she told Chimney. “Now I’m lucky to make five a day, once Blackie gets his share.” Leaning across the bed, she blew out the candle on the nightstand, then she reached for his hand in the dark and pulled him down onto the bed.

He was putting his boots on when he saw the cab pull in. The driver was delivering Blackie a newspaper and a box of pastries from Mannheim’s Bakery, as he did every morning. Chimney finished buttoning his pants and rushed out to catch a ride before he left. “Good Lord,” the cabbie said, “you’re still here?”

“Yep,” Chimney said, climbing into the car.

“Hey,” Blackie said to the driver, “hold on a minute. I got something for you.” The pimp went over to the campfire and laid the deliveries down on a stump. Then he took a knife from his pocket and unwrapped what was left of a roll of honey loaf. He cut off a thick slice and handed it to the cabbie. “You ever try this?”

“What is it?” the man said, taking a cautious sniff at the greasy meat.

“That ol’ bologna salesman called it honey loaf. It ain’t bad.”

The cabbie laid it on the seat next to him. “I better wait till my stomach settles down a little before I eat anything June Easter is selling. I appreciate it, though.”

“What’d ye do, get on a toot last night?” Blackie asked.

“Aw, I drank some rotgut my cheap-ass cousin brought over to the house. I should have known better. My ulcers, they can’t take it anymore.”

“You need to coat ’em with grease,” Blackie said. “That’s what my daddy always did. Gravy, butter, lard, whale’s blubber, you name it, he tried it.”

“Yeah, that worked for me, too, up until a couple years ago,” the cabbie said. “If I had any sense, I wouldn’t drink nothin’ but beer from here on out.” Then he put the car in gear and started down the lane.

Chimney sat in the backseat looking out at the tree-covered hills shining here and there with silvery frost, mist lying like smoke in the low places between them. He’d never noticed before how pretty the land was around here. Riding in the open car, the morning air was cold, and he shivered, reminded himself to buy a decent coat before they got to Canada. Then he smiled. There had been a moment last night with Matilda when he thought he was happier than he had ever been in his life; and if he could have a minute like that even once a week, he reckoned he’d be satisfied. Suddenly, the thought of all those men sticking their dicks inside her this weekend — she had told him that Friday and Saturday nights, when most of the soldiers got their passes, were her busy times — made him half sick. But then he caught hold of himself as they passed over the bridge, and tried to look at things realistically. Christ Almighty, she was a whore, and that’s how girls like that make their money. And was that any worse than being a killer and a thief, when it came right down to it? The question puzzled him. He was still debating it with himself when the cabbie said, “Which one did you screw? The yeller-haired one?”

“No,” Chimney said. “I was with Matilda.”

“Matilda?” the cabbie said. “Oh, you mean the skinny little bitch. The one they call Cock Gobbler.”

“I don’t know,” Chimney answered, his face turning red.

“Me, I like ’em with a little more meat on their bones.”

“You’d probably enjoy fucking a hog then,” Chimney said.

“What’d you say?”

“I said you look like a pig-fucker.”

The cabbie narrowed his red-veined eyes and slowed the car down just as they hit the business district. “You got a smart mouth on you, don’t ye, bub?”

Chimney rested his hand on the little Remington.22 he had in his pocket. “Just shut up and drive.”

“You don’t tell me what to do in my own cab, you little shit,” the man said.

The boy looked around at all the people on the sidewalks. He hated to leave the sonofabitch off the hook, but now was not a good time to be losing his temper. There was too much at stake, he reminded himself. Besides, what did it matter what this dried-up bastard thought of anything? You could tell by looking at him that he was on his last legs, him and his goddamn ulcers. “Just let me out here,” he said, ignoring the cabbie’s glare. He let loose of the gun and dug two dollars out of his pocket, dropped them on top of the greasy slice of meat lying on the front seat.