“I’m just trying to stick to my place,” said Cherry.
Roxy said: “Nobody’s skimming you, Star. You could tell.”
Tweakers know tweakers.
So far, Star’d steered clear of the needle and the pipe, only sniffing. She’d kept her high cheekbones, tawny-haired, stop-traffic beauty, her teeth, and her tight T&A, no tremor in her pony legs when she stripped. But her eyes were always black holes.
“Catch some sleep,” Roxy told the beauty in the way back.
“Sleep is when they get you,” said Star.
“You can really get got when you’re tweaked,” said DezAray.
“Don’t care then.”
DezAray stared out the windshield: “There’s a whole lot of out there out there.”
The western third of the state was the Rocky Mountains marching down from Canada, pine tree crags soaring more than a mile above sea level. East of the mountains meant scrub-grass prairies and chessboard-brown-and-gold fields of rotated crops, which if you weren’t born there looked like one terrifying, big empty.
In the two weeks Roxy’d gone to community college in Miles City, some 413 crow-fly miles from where the white van now rumbled, a teacher had said Montana held seven regions, each bigger than many other states. Where she was now was the Hi-Line, named for the railroad built after the Civil War by a tycoon who got free land along his tracks from the federal government, got the feds to create cargo and passengers for his trains with public-land giveaways to homesteaders who didn’t understand it rained next to never out there. Before Roxy’s lifetime when the glaciers melted, forty-below-zero blizzards roared over the prairies a few times a year. Most homesteaders fled, died, or went crazy. The ones who stayed leathered up tough.
Like me. Roxy’s eyes found the van’s mirror. What the locals saw when she stripped was some lanky bitch with chopped hair the color of dirt, nothing special behind, and up front too small for more than five-dollar tips. Ice eyes. And no matter the hoots, hollers, and creep games, nobody ever saw more than what she was tough enough to sell.
Except Paul.
Dead rabbit on the road.
Bear swerved to run over it. His mirrors showed mountains shrinking forty miles behind them. They’d rolled east out to the prairies, blew through Browning on the Blackfeet reservation, barreled through Cut Bank like that town wasn’t there.
Coming up on the left horizon, Roxy saw three blue humps, the Sweetgrass Hills, mini-mountains left over from dinosaur days. Her heart punched her ribs. Keep it together. She stared out the windshield. “Here come the space aliens.”
Like an army of giants ten stories tall, a hundred windmills with spinning white blades rose from the prairie, big-money invaders that — in harmony with Montana’s history — were built elsewhere and sent electricity spun from the local wind out of state.
A dozen miles beyond the army of windmills waited Shelby. And Paul.
“Yay, I got cell service! Okay,” DezAray said, waving her cell phone registered by Luke through some gonna bust it account, “promise I’ll work my geeks, but first I need me some Candy Crush.”
Every circuit girl had a website for credit-card chats and “private” downloads with viruses run by some hacker in Russia. Once Luke’s crew had gotten all they were gonna get from a cyber-sex troll, that citizen might find his credit crashed and bank tapped, a touch of that coming back to Luke to be washed in his Payday Dollars Now yellow shack on Bozeman’s strip of warehouses, seedy motels, and bars. Luke kicked a slice of the hacks’ score to the women he put online, minus any vig they owed him.
Then there’s the cash from dates.
Roxy didn’t do that.
“Yet,” Cherry had whispered to her a week before in Lincoln, the truckers’ and Unabomber town in the mountains halfway — eighty-three miles — between Missoula and Great Falls, the city a hundred miles southeast of where Roxy rode in a white minivan. In Lincoln, Roxy’d caught Cherry sneaking back into the diner from the highway patrol cruiser parked out back, from the badge who had a kink Cherry parlayed into lawman tips that got her nods from Luke. But that badge wasn’t clocked to meet up with Cherry on this circuit.
Cherry saw herself caught in Roxy’s eyes, put her finger to her smeared ruby lips: “We all got secrets.” Roxy ratted Cherry out to nobody. That night Cherry gave Roxy a nod, told her how life wasn’t yet.
Now on that April morning, the white van rushed past the wind-farm army of towers. Shadows from the spinning blades slashed Roxy.
Cherry told the driver: “Your belt’s packing the take just fine.”
“Shut up ’bout my belt or you’ll get it,” growled Bear.
Cherry ignored him. Gave Roxy a look about... about the take?
There’s the take and there’s the books.
The books are the circuit’s fee plus a cut of the door at bars, bachelor blowouts, or frat-house gigs, negotiated taxes on beers and booze, payouts for gas and motel rooms, and “independent contractor” fees to the stable. The books are for the law.
The take is everything else. A cut of all the presidents tucked into G-strings or tossed on a beer-stained floor. Half the dollars from dates cleared by the road boss that Roxy still said no to. DezAray said yes to such gotta pay dates from the kind of guys who mocked fatty back in high school, so who’s laughing now, huh? “Cherry-picked,” they all joked, referring to the big shots who were reeled in by the blonde with big breasts and big ideas. Star let any guy with the right cash hang her up in whatever night he wanted. But the major dollars in the take came from the envelopes that nameless mooks brought to Bear as they traveled the road, cash laundered into the books as gross income.
The books and the take — what they say you do and what you really get.
White letters on a green road sign: Shelby, 7 Miles.
Bear’s eyes goaded Roxy from the rearview mirror: “Maybe I’ll stop.”
Shelby’d been a gig on the circuit last month.
A mesa rim flowed off to Roxy’s left. Up on the right, she saw the truck-sized flapping American flag near the highway crossroads, one road through town, the other to Canada or toward Great Falls past the electrified chain-link fence of a private prison.
The books claimed they’d done great the first night of their double-header gig in Shelby at Jammers, a former trackside slaughterhouse renovated to a bar with a liquor license acquired from a gone-broke tavern in pollution-poisoned Libby, 246 miles away in the pine-forests-and-mountains northwestern corner of the state. Jammers’ owner clung to Shelby’s dreams that wind-farm workers and prison guards someday were gonna drop enough dollars in town to banish the whitewashed windows from Main Street.
Roxy woke up in a motel, Cherry asleep in the next bed, the others zonked in their rooms. The night before, opening night in Shelby, Roxy’d scanned a mere handful of faces nursing beers as Bear emceed “our Big Sky’s best exotic dancers.” They worked the poles, two shows, couldn’t have pulled in enough legitimate dollars to pay for their motel rooms, but it wasn’t worry about dollars that woke Roxy early, it was the wind.
“Fucking never stops blowing here,” Bear’d grumbled.
The wind felt crisp and fresh, felt good, felt free on Roxy’s face.
She did what you never do in a small Montana town: walked.
Near ten a.m. on a spring Tuesday, strolling the highway to where it curved into Main Street. Houses with peeling paint. Vacant lots. A church. A quarter-mile of flat-faced stores, a bank, empty curbs for parked cars. She thought about taking the bridge over the train tracks where a freight whistled through ’bout every other breath, but stayed on the main drag where teenagers cruised loops in quests they couldn’t name. This town nestled in a rolling prairie valley supposedly housed three thousand — plus souls, felt shrunken from its used to be. As two white-haired ladies shuffled into the lone café, Roxy saw—