Matt leaned his chin on his balled fists, watched her intently across the table. The music hummed like a buzz saw, a hive of venomous hornets. The music threatened, abused, and everybody ate it up like it was normal. No, just common. Not normal.
“That’s why you can really help me,” Matt said. “What can I do? You saw how she threatened you for just walking out of the radio station with me.”
“Was that it? The bitch was jealous of me?” Letitia started laughing. “If she only knew —” Tears replaced the sweat beads on her cheeks. “Oh, Matt. You are my project, boy. I am not going to let anybody take away from you what they took from me when I was just a kid. Just a kid. I guess you’re just a kid, too, in some ways.”
“If I give in, everybody around me’s safe. I know she’ll keep her word, because she knows that their safety will sear me as much as their danger if the price is right. Or wrong.”
“She’s mean. She’s bad. She might do anything, right?”
He nodded.
“Then you have to be ready to give in.”
He drew away, sheer repugnance pushing him back like a fist.
“No. But on your terms. Your innocence is her price, right?”
He nodded.
“Then you have to lose your innocence. Even if she holds a gun to your mother’s head, then you can give in and she hasn’t won what she really wanted. She’s not the first one! That’s what they want, to get to you before you can say yes or no, to make you a fool forever, hopeless, weak, stupid!”
“But it would be a sin.”
“So sin! That’s better than being a victim. A martyr. Sin and get what — confessed, and it’s all gone. Don’t you believe that? Isn’t that what Catholics believe?”
“Yes, but —”
“Yes, but. I didn’t have any ‘yes, but’ when I was seven years old. I just did the best I could and it wasn’t good enough. You’re older. You’re smarter. You outsmart that wicked woman. You put yourself in a condition that whatever she gets from you, it isn’t what she wants. And don’t you dare get so damned nice that you fail to protect yourself. You owe it to every kid who never had a chance to do better than that. You take away what she wants before she has a chance to get it. Get it?”
Matt nodded numbly. Letitia was right. If someone holds a weapon at your head, disarm the weapon. Especially when the weapon is yourself, your better instincts, your conscience, your integrity.
“I get it, Letitia. Thanks.”
“Okay.” She sat back, gathered the externals that were Letitia and Ambrosia and his producer together. “You want my extra celery stick?”
“Thanks.”
“I’d help you out myself, you understand, but it’s better for our professional relationship —”
“You’re absolutely right.”
“You have any…candidates?”
“A few. Maybe.”
“Honey, just look at the nightly groupies.”
He frowned.
“I know the Elvis shtick isn’t for you. But there must be a nice girl somewhere —”
“It’d have to be absolutely secret. To protect…her.”
“That’s done all the time, particularly in Las Vegas. This ho ain’t God. She ain’t everywhere all the time.”
“No.” But sometimes it felt like that. The obsessed could be pretty pervasive.
“You can lose her and lose your virginity at the same time. I know you can.”
Matt eyed her soberly. One Bloody Mary-soaked celery stick wasn’t going to undo the condition. “Am I some sort of surrogate for you here?”
“You bet your sweet ass you are. Just let me know when the deed is done. Ambrosia’ll play something real special for you on the rah-di-o.”
DAD: Desiccated and Dead
I am happy to hotfoot it out of the feral territory. I am even happier to hop onto the back bumper of a bus downtown and get a ride almost all the way to my destination.
In another city, buses and traffic would be scarce as hens’ hangnails in the middle of the night. Here in Vegas, things are always jumping, from dice to bailees.
I have to catch a cross-town bus and there it gets tough. Beyond the Strip schedules slow down appreciably.
Still, the moon has barely bar-crawled past the top of the sky when I trot the last few blocks. I had never noticed this before in my travels about the old town, but I find myself suddenly beyond the three-story apartment complexes and one-story strip shopping centers that fan out from the famous Strip in all directions.
Instead I confront a ten-foot-tall wall of shrubbery, like oleander but bigger, thicker, and taller. The sort of testosterone-overdosed vegetation you expect to find comatose princesses behind. When I reach a cross street it is unmarked. It too is lined by an endless length of stone and iron fence, diminishing like train tracks in the distance.
Now this is definitely not the Las Vegas I know and love, and sometimes loathe. All the streets around here are the usual suburban sprawl, and Las Vegas has sprawled more than most urban areas, being that the landscape here is flatter than a tapped-out tortilla, so there is nowhere to go but up and out.
So I start ambling down the lane. The night is dark, but the moon is yellow and the leaves come tumbling down. Still, my builtin night vision is in fine shape. I notice that a lot of long green has gone into furnishing the grounds beyond the fence…not only the cash kind, as in long, green paper money, but long green grass. The upkeep on what the English call sward costs a bundle in this desert burg.
I know this is the right place because it is littered with small stone slabs, the upright kind that usually mark where a person is buried.
Strange that I have never before noticed an in-town plant-a-tarium, so to speak. That may be because my kind is so seldom interred. In fact, as I move down the road, I spot a pair of iron gates with the heavenly host on guard duty in the form of plaster statuary. On one of the big stone pillars is a brass plaque, and inscribed on the plaque in raised letters are the words “Los Muertos.”
Now, when you live in a city called Las Vegas, and there is another burg of the same moniker in New Mexico, which also has a town called Las Cruces; when, in fact, Los Angeles is just three hundred miles west of where I now stand, you tend to get used to Hispanic place names and do not think twice about what the words mean, although there is often a religious connotation. Las Cruces means “the crossroads” and Los Angeles means “the angels.” Even the early Spanish monks must have known Las Vegas was never going to live up to any Biblical ideal, except maybe Sodom and Gomorrah, because its name just means “the meadows” and there is nothing holy about that.
But Los Muertos…a few hours ago and in broad daylight I would have strolled by without a second thought. Now, though, I think. And it comes to me that muertos must have something to do with death, or the dead.
So I am in the right place, the Dead Place. Now all I have to do is figure out how to get into where nobody ever gets out.
I sit down under an overarching oleander bush and am rewarded by the hiss and sting of a venomous serpent on my rear end.
I bristle and leap around to face the attacker, which is a little too little too late, apparently. Ask not for whom Los Muertos is named: it is named for me. A sinking feeling in the pit of my pith tells me I may be done for. There is no antidote for snakebite way out here, alone, in the dark.
Unfortunately, I am not alone in the dark. I gaze into the chilling sight of a dark open maw with two world-class Dracula fangs bared for a second, totally unnecessary, lethal strike.
“You are sitting on my train, Pops,” the snake hisses. “Move or I will staple you to the nearest prickly pear.”
“Midnight Louise! What are you doing here?”
“None of your business,” hisses my darling daughter-not, closing her maw to reveal her piquant little black face, which is purely feline.