Guppy turned onto a dark dirt road that from all appearances would lead nowhere. “We’re almost there,” Al Burgess said to Jolly, his words low on his breath. Jolly’s stomach tightened the same way it had for the last two days whenever he thought of this trip with Guppy and Al and Eddie Culp. He had spent some time imagining what it would be like—Canal Street, the nightclubs and all—but no clear picture came, and it would be embarrassing to ask anyone.
The road dipped and turned back on itself, and there in a brilliance of neon stretched Canal Street, unpaved, but wider and more blazing than any street in town. “There she is!” howled Guppy to the night.
“Jeez, it’s beautiful,” said Jolly, surprised. The remark brought hoots of laughter from the others. “Yeh, and it’s beautiful what they do to you in bed, too!”
Guppy drove midway down the block and parked among several dozen cars that lined the street before places named The Cabana Club, or El Toro, or The Mickey Mouse Cantina. Leaning in the doorways of many, or seated on the low window sills, were Mexican women who called short shrill greetings to the cars that passed slowly along the street. In the semi-dark little could be seen of them but the outlines of their long, fluffed hair and their bodies tightly curved into satin dresses or ruffled in native blouses and full spangled skirts. Their voices sounded happy and set for fun. A strolling band of
mariachis
interwove their hybrid voices and guitars from the sidewalk with the gay amplified music of the bands and jukeboxes inside the clubs. The green and blue and red neon winked and chattered welcome.
“Come in, boys,” one of three women called from the doorway of La Cantina. Her voice was not harsh, but too familiar.
“OK, baby,” said Guppy. As he passed first through the door he lay the flat of his hand across the woman’s chest, bare in a wide expanse of skin that glowed yellowly in the light. She flicked away his hand as lightly as she would a fly and said something in Spanish to her companions. The three giggled.
Inside, La Cantina was comprised of one large square room along one side of which ran a bar with white-coated bartenders moving phlegmatically behind it, their black hair in long polished curls above their young faces. Jutting out to nearly the center of the room was a raised dance floor. The band, enshrouded within a sort of three-sided cabana, played every note at fullest volume, two brassy trumpets duplicating a Latin melody above a bevy of guitars and rattled, shook, scraped, or crashed rhythm instruments. Bright yellow lights shone on the deserted dance platform and faded into blue eclipse along the far side of the room and in the corners.
“Now, Fingers,” Guppy said, launching one great arm over Jolly’s shoulders, “don’t buy a drink for ever’ bitch that asks ya, and don’t go off in the tules with the first one. Remember, the best ones are busiest, and ya might hafta look around good first.” Guppy’s speech didn’t mean much to Jolly. It really made little sense at all to him, but he found a place and stored the advice along with a good deal of other new knowledge that had hit him in the last five minutes.
Most of the small tables crowded about the room were occupied. At several sat couples, usually two couples, their heads together, laughing. At one table they edged past, Jolly saw a black-haired girl sitting on a young sailor’s lap, her head tilted behind his, her eyes closed. He was startled to see the sailor’s face laid against her chest, his eyes gazing blindly at one bare breast he held up from her blouse, cupped in his hand.
“Jeez, did you see
that!”
he whispered to Eddie Culp.
“That ain’t nothin’,” said Eddie. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
Sitting at some of the tables were lone girls and women, never more than two at a table, languidly smoking cigarettes or sipping small green drinks, their eyes moving steadily over the men and boys as they entered the room. Occasionally one or both would rise and move to a table at which sat two or three customers. Sometimes they sat with the customers; sometimes they moved back to their own tables.
“Here,” said Guppy. “Let’s set here.” He pulled back a chair from an empty table close to the edge of the dance platform. “They oughta be havin’ a show perty soon.” No one objected to Guppy’s choice of table, nor to the order he gave the waiter.
“Cerveza,”
he said. “Carta Blanca.”
“Four?” the waiter asked.
“Yeh.
Quatro cervezas,”
said Guppy.
“Don’t they care how old you are here?” asked Jolly.
“Hell, no,” said Eddie Culp smiling. “You can have anything in the house if you got the money.” He winked at Jolly.
The band stopped playing and a short hefty man in a pale blue flannel suit with wide lapels and full, almost bloused trousers walked quickly to the center of the dance platform carrying a small microphone in one hand, and with the other he held the black cord to the side so he wouldn’t step on it. He addressed the crowd first in Spanish and then in English.
“Hot damn. The floor show’s gonna start,” said Guppy.
Their waiter arrived with four beers in short, pale bottles. “One dollar,” he said.
The band began again, louder than ever, a fast tune accentuated with much hammering and scraping of native instruments. From through the curtains beside the band there entered a tall, smiling woman, her head thrown back proudly, entirely encased from neck to toes in a tight black velvet gown that just matched her hair and that she wore as she stepped around the perimeter of the platform once.
“God, she’s beautiful,” said Jolly.
“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” said Eddie, his eyes on the woman in black.
As if by magic the black gown fell completely away from the woman’s body, and she kicked it back toward the band. The room filled with shrill whistles and shouts.
“Christ, they get down to brass tacks in a hurry here, don’t they!” shouted Guppy. “Off with the rest, baby!” His voice rose over the general din.
Jolly watched incredulously as the music shifted to a slow, heavily accented beat, and the woman paced about the platform, skipping slightly on every first beat, her body and arms swaying with exaggeration. When she turned again she held in one hand the red fringe that had encircled her hips, but to the disappointment of her audience, the red fringe had concealed but another, narrower one.
Jolly was unaware of the voice at his ear until she placed a hand on his arm and spoke more loudly. He turned to find his face not four inches from that of a woman leaning down beside him and was aware all together of her beaded eyelashes, the dark powder over wrinkles, and a heavy scent of perfume and perspiration. Her hair hung long on her shoulders, curled in a style long out of fashion (at least in Cortez), dyed dark red except near her skull where it was black.
“What?” said Jolly, drawing back his face. “What did you say?”
“You got cigarette for me?” She minced her words.
Jolly looked toward Guppy and Al and Eddie, but their backs were to him, their attention on the dancer who continued to peel off bits of fringe and glitter. He turned back to the woman. “Sure. Sure, I got a cigarette.” He pulled one from his pack. “You need a light?”
She only smiled and held the cigarette to her lips. She sat, slowly, on the edge of the vacant chair between Jolly and Guppy. She leaned forward to meet the match Jolly extended after some fumbling, and his eyes followed the cleavage of her breasts until it disappeared at what he believed was the last possible instant.
Guppy chose that moment to whirl around and shout “God! Look at them—” He stopped when he saw the woman beside Jolly. His mouth closed slowly over an unformed word. “Jesus Christ, Osment. I
told
you not to let the first one get to you. What the hell’r you doing?”
“Nothing,” Jolly said. “I—that is, she just asked for a cigarette.”
“Oh, my God.” He looked the woman over. She continued to watch Jolly’s face. “Scram, you old bitch,” Guppy said. “Beat it. Get your worn-out ass outa here.”
“Guppy, you can’t—you shouldn’t talk like that to a woman, for God’s sake,” said Jolly.
“Shit,” Guppy snorted. “You!” He punched her on the upper arm. “Beat it! Vamoose!” He waved his hand in her face.
She turned to Guppy and spoke rapidly in Spanish, her words clipped and angry.
“What did she say?”
“Hell, how should I know? Get rid of her, Fingers. She’s old enough to be my grandmother. Git!” he spat, as one would talk to a chicken.
She watched Jolly closely and smiled. She leaned close to his ear and said “Forky me?”
“What?”
She laughed. “Forky me. Three dollars?”
The meaning of the request outlined Jolly’s mind once and then came to roost squarely. He looked to Guppy. “My God. Did you hear—” but Guppy’s attention was on the lady of the very little clothes. Jolly drank from the beer bottle slowly. The beer was warm and tasted flat. He looked at the table and shook his head. “No,” he said. “No.”
From the corner of his eye he saw her hand grind the cigarette in the ashtray, and then he felt her rise from the chair and withdraw, leaving only the heavy sweet perfume. Jolly let out his breath and raised his eyes to the platform where the dancer was making her final pop-out from between the curtains, totally nude. She wiggled her brown behind to the audience and disappeared. The applause was clamorous and blatant, but short-lived.
Al Burgess was silent, as usual, but Guppy and Eddie swung back around in their chairs and exchanged comments on the varied abilities and endowments of the dancer. The lights grew gradually brighter, and the band members dispersed through the curtains.
“Let’s get outa here,” said Guppy. He tilted back his head and drank from the beer bottle until it was empty. He set it on the table and shoved back his chair. “Let’s go looking,” he said.
Out on the board sidewalks again, Jolly breathed gladly of the night air. “God, that’s a noisy place,” he said.
Guppy laughed. “Al, you and Eddie didn’t see, but old Fingers came damn close to fallin’ in back there. Jolly,” he added earnestly, “we ain’t here to make international
friends,
fer chrissake. Don’t pay no attention to them old bags. They’s plenty a good, young ones, but like I say, they’re workin’ hardest an’ ya gotta look for ’em.” He marched at the head of his little troop, surveying the likelihood of each club entrance as they passed. The door-standers spoke to them, sometimes gaily, sometimes sullenly. Jolly walked on the outside, away from the buildings. “Here’s the place,” Guppy said finally. “You remember, Al. We had a helluva time here last trip.”
“Yeh,” said Al.
“What was that one’s name? You know—Maria, or something?”
“Melinda,” said Al.
Guppy entered the club. “Yeh,” he said. “I sure hope she’s still here.”
This club was smaller and lighter. There was no dance platform and no band. Across the room, near two tables where five boys wearing university sweaters were drinking beer and laughing quietly with five of the black-haired girls, a
mariachi
trio played quiet guitar music. The room was decorated with Mexican tin wall ornaments, ritual masks mostly, and with several painted murals done in flat bright colors with the figures of gauchos and beflowered senoritas in the typical Mexican distortion. It was not crowded, yet there were six or eight unoccupied girls sitting at the tables, besides the couples and quartets at other tables or on the high stools at the bar.
“Quatro cervezas,”
said Guppy, straddling a chair turned backward to the table. “Carta Blanca.”
As the beer was served they were joined by two girls from a nearby table, and then a third. They were all younger than those in the previous place, and one of the three was actually pretty but wore heavy purple lipstick.
“This is more like it,” said Eddie, moving his legs from under the table and patting them to indicate to the girl at his side that she was to sit there.
“Set down, baby,” said Guppy, drawing a chair near to him. The girl smiled and asked for a drink. “Sure, baby,” he said and cupped his hand under her near breast. She giggled and removed his hand, drawing it beneath the table to her thigh.
Al did not offer the third girl a chair. Instead, without speaking, he stood, and taking the girl by the hand he led her across the room to a blue door through which they disappeared.
Guppy laughed. “Well, I guess Al’s the first one down tonight.” His other arm encircled the girl’s neck, and his hand came to rest on her other breast, where it stayed.
Jolly drank his beer, which was colder than the first but still distasteful to him. Eddie and Chippy had their minds fully occupied. He heard the girl on Eddie’s lap laugh at something he had whispered to her. He watched as she slipped her hand down beside her own hip, between Eddie’s legs. “You big,” she said and laughed again.
Supposing that that activity was something one did not watch openly, even in a Mexican whorehouse, Jolly turned away and scanned the room. His eyes alighted on a girl seated a little distance away, by herself. She was staring directly at him, and her eyes did not waver as he looked at her. Jolly smiled for no reason other than habit. The girl did not smile, but she pulled another chair back from the table a few inches and stared.
He walked to the girl’s table and said,
“Buenas noches,”
and then felt ridiculous. “Hi,” he said.
She smiled then. “Hello,” she said. “Sit down?”
“OK.” He sat on the chair stiffly. “Would you like a cigarette or anything? A drink?”
Her laugh trembled darkly for a moment. “No,
gracias,”
she said, and Jolly had the feeling she spoke English as well as she did Spanish. “What is your name?”
“Jolly.”
“Jolly?” she repeated. The “j” was softer than he had said it.
He laughed. “That’s close. What’s your name?”
“Oh,” she said and wiped a spot of wet from the table with her finger, “I am called Dolores.”
“That’s a pretty name. I like that.” The conversation lagged. Jolly drank from his beer and started all over again. “Sure you wouldn’t like something?”
“Que?”
She lifted her eyebrows. “What?”
“Never mind.” He traced a circle and two dots on the wet side of his bottle. She folded her hands on the table and spoke. “You have come before, here, yes?”