“ Flossie, Jordan Kaye, Roberta, Sabrina, and Irene are all in this evening,” the woman said.
“Give him Sabrina,” Curriden said.
“Here.” The woman handed him No. 26 from the “take” hook under Sabrina’s name. “Payment, please.” Curriden paid. “Now yall may go down the hall to wait.”
So Curriden and I wove our way down the long corridor. It was furnished with four scummy fish tanks on hospital carts, calendar paintings of old plantation houses, and a worn strip of plum-colored rug. We passed several doors and entered a waiting room-a holding tank, more like-with folding chairs and a low table stacked with magazines.
Three soldiers sat in this room. No one talked or read a magazine. Two GIs looked bored. One had a nervous jiggle in his leg. Curriden and I sat down next to him. This PFC had a rash of razor nicks under his receding chin. He cut his eyes at us, then smiled real big.
“Gonna wear her out. Gonna do my steel-driving level best to split er clean in two.”
The corporal sitting next to him said, “Be lucky he don’t pop a knee before he gets in there.”
“Ha ha,” said the PFC. “What a kidder.”
Just then, it sledgehammered me I’d come to a brothel-I mean, I’d taken in all the accouterments, but now I understood Curriden meant to see me through a rite of passage. He caught me by the shirt and pulled me back down.
Down the hall, a door opened across from one of the fish tanks; a man in khaki strolled towards me to the waiting room, looked in at the five of us, and said, “Number twenty-five for Sabrina. Lady says she’s off at nine, whether her trick is or not.” He checked his watch. “I got eight till.”
“Sabrina,” the PFC said. “Whoa, that’s me!” He flashed his tag and stood up. For the first time since we’d entered, the floor stopped vibrating. “I’ll do her three times in eight minutes. She’ll be hanging on for dear life.”
Curriden grabbed the guy’s number and gave him a wadded-up dollar bill. “Pick a gal who don’t get off till later. Life’s too short to rush things.”
“Hey, gimme my number!”
“Uh-uh.” Curriden tipped him back into his chair with a soft three-fingered push and led me down the hall to Sabrina. The GI didn’t follow us-he had an extra buck and more sense than to mess with a guy as big and built as Curriden.
In the bulb-lit fish tank across from Sabrina’s room-all the light in the hall came from these tanks, dapples of cool aquamarine on the walls and floor-the fish swam in hypnotized and hypnotizing schools: fish with stripes or spots, fish with lacy wedding-gown fins and tails, fish with see-through skins and bones aglow like tiny Christmas trees.
Curriden knocked, the door opened. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a brunette, pale-skinned woman about my own height wearing a yoke-collared shirt with a Johnny Mack Brown bib and pearly buttons for a housecoat. Under that shirt, legs like pruning shears. Red-orange polish on her toe-nails.
Curriden gave her extra money. “Sabrina, Danny Boles. Danny, Sabrina Loveburn. Vito, Quip, and I’ll be downstairs eating, kid. Have you a time.”
“I’m off at nine,” Sabrina said as Curriden walked away.
“Not for what I just gave you, hon. Sides, he’s like to go off fastern a firecracker. Have a heart,”
“Come in, then,” Miss Loveburn said.
I stared at her toenails and might not’ve moved at all if a clatter of shoes on the stairs and a barrage of male voices hadn’t goosed me to it. Just as a gang of four soldiers burst through the door at the end of the hall, I stepped into Miss Loveburn’s room. She shut the door. The GIs knocked on every door in the hall, including hers.
“So yo’re a ballplayer,” she said. “One that don’t talk.” Curriden had told her, maybe even before we showed up.
I didn’t even try to answer. Her room had a low, narrow bed-more like a couch with no back or arms-a folding chair, a pole lamp, and a door across from the one I’d entered by. Like prairie dogs, the ladies of The Wing & Thigh had at least two exits from their burrows.
Over Miss Loveburn’s bed hung a glossy oil portrait of a Tahitian or a Samoan maiden in a sarong, with one brown breast showing. The sun going down behind her had exactly the same plump roundness as her nude breast.
Miss Loveburn’s violet eyes halted their gaze at the top of my skin. She was semipretty, with the looks of a pissed-off school teacher. If she hadn’t been birthday-suit-skinny under her Johnny Mack Brown shirt, I could’ve imagined her sitting tight-kneed in a Baptist church pew.
“Give me ballplayers over sojers,” she said. “Especially if they’ve just played a game. Not too many of yall pass up a shower afterwards. A GI, though, you never know about. Some come in smelling like cologne factories, some like geedee goat stalls, pardon my French. If they’ve scrubbed with a clean washrag, yo’re lucky-s bout the best you can hope for, barring a campwide flu and the weekend off.”
Miss Loveburn let her gaze drill into my skin. “Cmere. This aint something you can do by phone.” She shook her head. “If you don’t talk, of course, bout the only thing you can do by phone is dial it, right? Or listen maybe. You look like a decent nough listener. Cmere. Lemme smell ya.”
All her talk’d taken most of the scare out of Miss Sabrina Loveburn. I went to her. She put her hands on my shoulders and sniffed me under the chin and around the ears, a dog going over its owner’s trouser legs after a cat’s been by. While she smelled me, I sniffed her hair-wavy burn-brown wool. It smelt of cigarette smoke and talc. I liked it.
“Not bad,” Miss Loveburn said. “Kinda little kiddyish.” She went from my ears to my breastbone and from there over to my arm pit, sniffing from one spot to another. “Shower or no, yo’re starting to get a smidgen ripe about here.” She slipped her hands under my arms and stood straight up. “What do I expect, huh? A young he-fella cliding wi the climate. S okay, though. You’ll do.”
She sniffed my mouth. “Smoke already, huh? Shouldn’t.” She lifted my lip, to let the air polish my canines. “Turn these pearlies yeller. Least you don’t chew. Got a little hunger on yore breath, though. You hungry?”
I had a dinner date, but Miss Loveburn wouldn’t let go of my shoulders.
“Turnabout,” she said. “You say what swampy perfumes come off me bout now. Fair’s fair.”
To oblige, I smelt her forehead and eyebrows: talc, stale smoke, woman sweat, the oils of long-gone lovers. All pretty faint, nothing too foul. But from the room-from her bed-a rancider smell fanned out: sweat, stained linens, downstairs cooking.
“But you cain’t say, can you? Never met a dummy before-not sure I believe in em. Lemme see. Open.” She prised up my lip again and got me to open wide, then loosened the knot on my tie and peered into my mouth. “Relax. This is okay. You aint a gift horse, are you? Given who paid, I’m liker to qualify. No looking in mine, though. Fair’s fair, but smart’s smart and wise is wise.” She put the tip of one finger on my tongue. “Lips okay. Tongue okay.” She probed with a finger. I had to warn myself not to chomp down. “Throat okay. Vocal cords, ah, ah, open, keep it open, ah, I cain’t even see em. Someone cut em out? Yank em like burnt-through wiring?”
I shook my head.
“Then why this speechlessness, honey? It don’t become a young man of yore achievements.” Miss Loveburn walked me to the bed, where she tugged me to a sitting position on her right hand. Sitting, she lost the coverage till then afforded by the tail of her shirt. I saw the smooth white cables of her thighs, the dark bird-nest tangle at their join. I could feel her warmth. Until that moment, nothing about The Wing & Thigh as a fancy house or Sabrina Loveburn as one of its women had brought me anywhere near horniness, but I reached it sitting there, and she noticed.
“Spare me yore flusterment, Danny. I’ve raised the dead. For feisty young rams like you, all I’ve got to do’s breathe. Anyhow, nothing happens till I say the word.” I put my hand on Miss Loveburn’s beautiful knee. I leaned into her and nibbled her throat. “Tonight, Danny boy, yore Open Sesame aint Reese’s money or any ol guppy nibbles. You gotta say, ‘Love ya, hon,’ or ‘Shut my mouf.’ Otherwise, it’s no go. I don’t sell to crips-one-arms, hair-lips, dummies-as Reese hissef knows. So tell me you love me, Danl.”