He tied her to the bedposts with the belts from the hotel robes, and he fucked her until she cried out from an orgasm, then he dozed off beside her, only to awaken half an hour later with a scream.
Shh, she said, holding him with one arm, the other still tied.
Absently he wondered how she’d freed herself.
Are you okay, she asked.
Eskia gasped, coughing, the taste of rust on his tongue as he woke from the dream. It felt like he was back in it all.
Asia hugged Eskia from behind. Hush, she whispered, hush now.
Eskia leaned back into her, felt her full breasts pressed into his back. God, he thought, she smells so good.
Will it help to talk about it?
No, he said simply, no.
There was something in his voice that chilled Asia, made her want to recoil from him.
He reached behind him and ran his hand down her thigh, feeling her shiver. Are you cold, he asked.
Why?
He wanted to say, Because you’re shivering. Instead he looked at her, noting the orgasm-softened face, her eyes tender in spite of herself, and said: What do you think Sunil would say if he knew his friend made you come?
She scuttled back from him abruptly; face shocked as though he’d slapped her, one wrist still bound. What the fuck, she said.
Precisely, he said.
Fuck you, Asia said. Fuck you!
You just did. Multiple pops, remember? Although since you also popped you should refund some of that money.
She spat at him and struggled to untie her other wrist.
Eskia wiped his face and looked at her for a moment. He opened his mouth as though to speak, but instead he punched her full in the face and her neck snapped back, her head hitting the headboard. He swung at her again, but she recovered quickly and moved so he only caught her a glancing blow to her eye. Still it puffed up shut.
She knocked the phone from the beside table, hit the concierge button, and screamed as loud as she could. Eskia stopped midpunch. He could hear the concierge’s voice: Mr. Kent, is everything okay? Asia screamed again and passed out.
Eskia jumped up and dressed hurriedly. He had about three to five minutes before hotel security got to his room. Las Vegas casinos didn’t fuck around with the security of their guests. Safety was imperative for business.
He grabbed his small bag stuffed with cash and passports and walked out leisurely, heading for the elevators. In his thick glasses, he was invisible, and he only had to step aside as security guards barreled past him in the hallway headed for his room. As he stepped into the elevator he wondered why all casino security guards wore red jackets.
Outside the casino, Eskia walked a sweat-fueled pilgrimage down the Strip. Down heat-melted sidewalks, gum-stained, dirty, littered with fliers for escorts and shows, through the crowd of overweight sunburned tourists, past the drunks and homeless, past the partly inebriated gambling veterans, ever south.
Thirty-four
Outsider art guarded the exterior of the bar — horses, dinosaurs, and aliens shaped in everything from scrap metal and wood to plastic, concrete, and plaster. Inside, bras in every color and every size — dirty, tattered, stained, and gray from age and wear — drooped down from the ceiling like tired flags. Even though they were higher than head level, Sunil kept ducking, afraid to find himself trailing through the years of sad, pathetic drunken moments the bras represented. A disproportioned Buddha, an odd creature neither frog nor toad, and rabbits with cold maniacal plaster eyes guarded the edges of the bar.
The walls inside were made of wood and every surface was covered with old coasters sporting beer logos. The floor was a mix of cork, sawdust, bare concrete, and fraying rugs. Where the roof sloped at the back into what looked like an anteroom, two decrepit and rickety pool tables sat, their racked balls gathering dust in the gloom. Behind the bar, bottles of liquor struggled for ascendancy. There were two taps — Budweiser and Heineken. A small pug-faced dog squatted on the bar top drinking milk from a saucer.
It seemed like everything inside, even the air, was coated with grime, determined dirt that nothing would ever clean. Sunil instinctively reached into his pocket for his handkerchief.
Put that away, Salazar said, settling onto one of the barstools. You’re embarrassing me.
Sunil ignored him, dusting the barstool before sitting down.
The bar was far from full, but nowhere near empty. There were a few men and women littered around, drinking by themselves or with one another. Sunil guessed they were regulars.
Heineken for me, and whatever my friend is having, Salazar said to the barman.
Same, Sunil said.
We’ll also take two burgers with fries, Salazar added.
The barman, a sour-faced man about fifty with long, stringy, greasy blond hair balding at the crown, a faded denim shirt, and jeans stiff with dirt, dipped some glasses in water, shook them out, and pulled a draft for each man without saying a word.
Listen, Salazar, Sunil said. I want to ask you something personal.
What?
Have you ever been married? Any kids? Do you have a girlfriend?
No to all three, Salazar said.
May I ask why?
We’ve known each other two years and we never had this conversation before. Odd. I don’t do well with women. What about you?
No. I’ve never been married, but I do have a girlfriend of sorts, Sunil said.
A man, drinking by himself at a table in the corner, got up and walked over to them. He had the heavily muscled look of a recent ex-con and all the black spidery tattoos of prison.
We don’t get many new faces around here, he said.
You trying to violate your parole, Salazar asked. Fuckers like you are always on parole.
The barman came back with two burgers and fries. Salazar put a fry in his mouth, got up, and walked across the room to the jukebox. Selecting a Charley Pride record, he shoved some change in and came back to the bar. The music transported Sunil back to the shebeens of Soweto as he ate. Packed full of sweaty, desperate men and women drowning unspeakable sorrows in the homebrew so strong it could take your voice with one shot.
After White Alice left, Sunil picked up a job at a shebeen. It was owned by Johnny Ten-Ten’s uncle Ben, and Ten-Ten arranged it for Sunil out of sympathy, and for Nurse Dorothy’s sake, he said. Sunil went to school and came straight to work at the shebeen every day until about eight p.m., and then after a dinner of Bunny Chow with Uncle Ben, he went home to do his homework. The money from the bar helped him pay the rent and keep the house Dorothy had worked so hard for. He imagined she would get better and come home to live there with him. He was fourteen.
Three years passed like that. Sunil worked washing glasses, sweeping floors, and running errands. And then dinner with Uncle Ben, always Bunny Chow; he ate it so much he came to love it too — the way the lamb stew soaked its way through the hollow chamber of the loaf of bread. Bunny Chow and Cokes; he could have as many Cokes as he wanted, but no alcohol. Uncle Ben was strict about that.
Never drink this shit, Sunil, he would say, spitting through the holes where several teeth used to be. It will rot your liver, your brains, and your soul.
But you drink it, Sunil said.
So now you have proof of what I’m saying, Uncle Ben said, laughing.
Every day they played this game, and yet somehow Sunil never got tired of it.
One day, Ben asked Sunil to stay late and help him close up. Ben had never asked before, so Sunil stayed. He had never seen the bar this late. It looked different, felt empty, everything sounding hollow. The music was off, and what little sound there was, in the harsh lighting, was amplified: the swish of Sunil’s broom across the floor, the grating of metal chairs being pulled across concrete and then stacked, the insistent buzzing of flies around pools of spilled beer and bits of food, the tap running as the metal cups were washed by Ben’s wife, a dog in the distance barking to the ghosts of night, a Casspir rumbling by on patrol a few streets away.