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In a dry, desert hamlet called Crystal Springs, there is a local
attraction called the Museum of Brothel Art. And in that museum,
a glass case stands next to an actual runway once used to display
whorehouse girls for selection.
In that case, there is a skeleton with eyeless sockets and a wide,
lurid grin that tries to make you out, when you first go up to
get a closer look, to be the exact fool you are for showing such
morbid interest.
So, you move on to glance over the walls covered from floor to
ceiling with newspaper clippings about the trials, judges, and
cases surrounding local brothels for the past fifty years. You
forget about the skeleton for the moment because your concentration
is taken up by an article detailing the rise and fall of a former
prostitute now claiming to have been paid, on numerous occasions,
for service rendered to Jimmy Swaggart. The story ends with an
attractive brunette (pictured) leaving the business to go back
to school for her GED.
But that was over thirty years ago, and you wonder whatever became
of her. Whether she found someone to marry, to have children.
Or whether she went back to the business after a while, when there
were no better offers on the table, because even with the GED,
that and a subway token would only take you so far.
Aware of your avoidance, the skeleton seems to reach out for you,
but you, you weren't born yesterday. You do not just let yourself
be turned around like some yokel fresh from the farm. You saunter
over to the oaken bar at the far end of the room where two aging
desert men huddle over a newspaper and cigarettes. Both are bearded,
but one is thin, flushed of substance, while the other is porcine,
wetter.
You ask the wetter, "What's with that skeleton over there?"
Not like the question hasn't been asked a few times before, he
raises his head, runs a stubby hand through his beard and smiles
as if he were either about to shoot something or contemplate shaving
the few straggly hairs at the end of his chin.
"Well, the way I heard, that’s a whore who worked in the Lockspur
brothel. Notice how she ain't got no hands?"
I hadn't noticed, but looking back, even from across the large
room, I can see that he is right. There are no hands. The lower
arm bone just ends with nothing attached where the wrist and digits
should be. I turn back, suddenly wrapped in the story, hearing
the wetter's words, but living in the telling, like I was right
there, seeing her at the Lockspur house, almost a century ago.
I watch two men, one tall, wiry, well-dressed, with a pointed
goatee, the other shorter, stumpier, more plainly outfitted, dragging
a woman along in worn white shift, hair running like sallow rain
over the high-boned crevice of cheeks. They are dragging her by
the wrists down a dim hallway, past a row of silent bedroom doors.
She is tall, dirt-blonde. Her face is contorted, explosive, yelling.
"No, no, I didn't. It wasn't me, you goddamn lily bastards. I
didn't take it. Never! Never!"
"Shut yer yap, missy," the tall goateed one hisses, full of an
odious menace, waxed whiskers close enough to graze the side of
her face. "What you done is steal from me and that goes against
the very grain of human decency."
He shoves his hand heavily into the small of her back, making
her wince with pain, and cry out. "An' what's worse, we been through
all this before. Now, damned if you don't go right on and do it
again."
She twists in his hold, bare arm flailing, but the stumpy one's
hand shoots out to grasp her forearm and twist it behind her back
as a tearing rasp punctuates the movement, the seam of her shift
separating, leaving a frayed opening beneath the armpit.
She wriggles with a futile fire, sweat blossoming from the pores
of her flesh, spilling out in a sweetly acrid scent, which, in
any other time and place, might have been distilled to its base
root of desire.
But these men, they are too far inured to her sex to take that
bait. Truth to tell, they hate her sex for its very usury of theirs,
so they are actually repelled by her as they continue dragging
her back toward the kitchen while she alternately cajoles, screams,
entreats, threatens, twists, and begs, before weakening enough
for them to be able to pull her forward and bend her over the
broad kitchen table.
Just for the hell of it, the stumpy one swipes her buttock with
the palm of his hand, causing her to think that maybe the dispensation
of their justice will be to merely rape her and use her the way
she has always been used.
A softening delusion washes over her that, even as the tall one
with the goatee pulls her arms forward, stretching them out over
the table, holding them down firmly against the scarred table
wood, she will not die. They will not kill her. They will be content
with merely forcing their foul organs into hers, beating her maybe,
or just pushing her to the floor when they are done to kick her,
spit on her, the way they did the time before. And so, be satisfied
with giving her to understand that she is a prostitute and nothing
more, like livestock, and, for one of her kind, stealing is as
stealing does, but, as she has her uses, they will let her live
to feed them all another day.
It is not until she twists her head up from where it lays sideways
that the full extent of what lies in store makes her open her
mouth, but emit nothing. The goateed one is removing a meat cleaver
from its woodblock stand while the stumpy one already has her
forearm held down in place, clamped fast to table's surface.
Without preamble, the goateed one raises the cleaver above his
head and returns it earthward with a sickening impact. The strike
is clean and accurate, detaching her hand from her arm as cleanly
as the head of a chicken from its body, and sucking all the air
in the room in the process, like a numbing dissection of mind
from body.
Time stands in perfect suspension as blood begins to pump feverishly
from the prostitute's severed arteries. A tidal scream overflows
the cavity of her mouth, demolishing reality beyond all recognition
even as the stumpy one moves to the other arm, holding it in exactly
the same position to wait for the goateed one's second cleaver
blow.
In another moment, both her hands lie severed, blood gushing from
the second as militantly as the first, while her screams fade,
swallowed into the night like a train diminishing into an infinite
distance.
Her face shrivels like sunken cellophane into itself. She is a
skeleton already, eyes bobbling like wet marbles, lips slack with
inanimate horror.
"You'll steal n'a more, missy," utters the goateed one, staring
impassively at the blood still pumping from the motionless arm
stumps in short, rhythmic spurts, running off the table onto the
floor as stringy tendrils at the end wave in the crimson flow.
The stumpy one moves away to join the goateed watching her life
ebb away, her consciousness receding in direct proportion to the
loss of blood.
All the while, she issues small, childish whimpers denuded of
substance from a face that seems twisted upward into a curio smile
before she slides inexorably backwards, down along the table’s
sullen muted surface without protest.
Oh, how easily she crumples to the floor, arms dangling in glazed
distraction. Which is how her masters leave her, half-sitting,
half-lying against one of the table legs, staring at nothing and
everything all at once, while the parts of her left behind remain
where they are, on the table, idiotically out of reach.
Her shift is quickly inundated with her blood, but she does not
move because her body has become nothing more or less than an
abstraction, a dumb and cruel mockery of her own fading consciousness.
Eventually, after she has lapsed into the dimming lifelessness
from which she will not return, the two men pick up her up and
seal her in a brothel wall where she will rot and rest for the
next several dozen years, only to be found and put on display
here in the Museum of Brothel Art, Crystal Springs, Nevada, population
4,389, and counting.
But you know, the actual horror of it isn't so much the abject
brutality as the plain fact that you, me, anyone, can disappear
into this desert just like that. Baker, beggar, alderman, thief,
it makes no difference. That dry, sumptuous lady of colors, she
kisses your feet with her tongue of sand, raises your eyelids
and sews them open with the brilliance of her sunny fire, drenching
you in the infinite wounds of her sky and raining salt down upon
the pain and loneliness of every hollow, animal hunger.
So, that being left unsaid, but implicitly understood, the wetter,
porkier barman turns back to his newspaper, having told you everything
he is willing to tell. And you know, true or false, it doesn't
matter. After all, perhaps it has been your mind that has fomented
the better part of this story's embellishments. Yet, it somehow
tastes true, like the hard and desolate irony of this desert where
mercy is as scarce as water, and death just seems to stretch with
an elastic complicity through one narrow oasis of space and time
after another.
Where, on your way out, you almost hit a hare on the small ribbon
of road, which serves as the only exit from Crystal Springs. You
stare straight ahead as the car screeches to a skidding halt,
brake pedal pressed to the floorboard, as if, somehow, the mechanics
of your car and his body were transcended from all earthly sensibility.
But your intrusion does not cause the hare to move. He merely
stares at you without understanding, or even fear, of the death
that could so easily have reached out to claim him. So, you wait
until, in his own good time, he leaps with a great thrust of his
haunches into the desert proper and is gone.
At which point, you pull to the side of the road.
Get out.
Sit on the hood of the car.
And there, though you have no idea of what you are doing, you
pray. Pray not to escape the irreconcilable nature of this or
any other existence, but merely to be delivered from whatever
is left for its scavengers to feed upon. |
