Delectable Mountains by Michael Malone

Author:Michael Malone
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2014-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

I Am Involved in Mystery

In a back room of the Red Lagoon, couples danced now. They jerked in a sputter of strobe light, bodies projected at the wrong speed, screened in awkward tableaux by the red, white, red, white flicker.

Recently Lady Red Menelade had built a discotheque, and some thought a brothel, behind the original barroom. Her husband, the manager, had not objected as she proceeded to take possession of the property. Had he not predicted her victory, down to the saltshaker, even before her arrival? Now validated in his fatalism, he gave his time to summer reruns of daytime quiz shows, watching them from his stool by the cash register on a small gray television, games played months earlier so that the deal had long since been made, the password guessed, the final jeopardy wagered. Yet each chance won or lost was here again on the screen, capable of endless repetition. It pleased him to watch the working out of destinies already foreknown and resolved, months, years earlier, as he knew his own had been. He almost never talked with the customers any more the way he used to.

The discotheque was large, dark, and hot. Lady Red had crowded a wide four-sided balcony with cheap tables from which drinkers could look down at dancers. Below were more tables ringing the dance floor, and at either end, a dais—one for the band, one for the two girls, the “go-go” girls, instructresses in gyring: illusions of a partner for those without one. They wore red bikinis splotched with sweat stains, spangled with fringe that had been carelessly, unevenly sewn on, or maybe it had frayed, or maybe night after night, anonymous hands had reached up and stolen a memento of the illusion.

I found an empty table next to the balcony rail, where I could look down on the girls and the customers. I saw Leila and Jennifer Thatcher sitting together. Jennifer was crying and shaking her head. Leila pulled her chair over, put her arm around Jennifer, stroked her hair, stroked her hand, kept nodding as Jennifer talked.

I watched the performers. One was a soiled blonde with too much flesh that was too soft now, even for her big frame, flesh that shook loosely without effort or interest as she moved bored muscles through the jerk, the pony, the monkey, the slide. Her muscles had memorized how to give the semblance, if not of energy, at least of life. When the red filter blinked off, her skin was that chalk white of someone who for years wakes up only when the sun is setting, whose shades may be taped to their runners and are never pulled up. Her eyes stared just above the heads of her customers. They were eyes an indifferent maker of mannequins might have painted on, and nobody was in them. I saw stretch marks on her stomach, and a long green bruise on the inside of her thigh. Joely told me later that she called herself

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