The Song of the Blue Bottle Tree by India Hayford

Author:India Hayford [Hayford, India]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington Books
Published: 2024-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

GENEVIEVE

As spring rolled toward summer, I realized I wasn’t going to have enough money for tuition and books and still manage to pay my rent and eat unless I could earn a nice chunk of decent money before September. I made a couple of phone calls, arranged for a few days off, and asked Mercer for the loan of his motorcycle in return for him using my truck. He wondered why, of course, and I told him the truth: I needed extra funds for school and had lined up a weeklong job just north of Houston to make the money.

“The tires on the truck are bald, and I got my doubts about the transmission, too,” I explained. “I hate to ask, but I don’t dare set out on a trip clear to Houston in it. I’d take the bus except I couldn’t get there in time to work tomorrow night.”

“What’re you going to do down there you can’t do up here?”

“Bartend during the day, dance half a dozen nights.”

He shook his head. “Genevieve, you don’t need to go stripping anymore. I can give you the money for school.”

“That’s good of you to offer, Mercer, but I’m not going to borrow money. I don’t like debt.”

We argued a little, or rather he argued and I just let him do it. My mind was made up, and no misguided notions of propriety on his part were going to change my mind. To do him credit, he was less concerned with the respectability of my dancing than he was about the safety of me walking home by myself from a men’s club at three in the morning.

“The management has rooms for temporary workers just around the corner, and one of the bouncers will walk me to the hotel.” I didn’t tell him that dancers had to pay for not only the room, but the right to use the stage on the nights when they danced. It had taken me some firm talking, but I’d managed to get the owner to agree to a lower room rent than he charged the other girls and a waiver of the stage fee. I was a name draw, a moneymaker for the place, and Wiley B knew he was damn lucky to get me back there.

In the long run, Mercer borrowed a car from Gil and drove me to Houston on Friday morning so I could make my early performance on time. He suggested that he might stay and watch me dance, but I told him I got self-conscious working in front of people I knew. He said, okay, he’d drop me off at Wiley B’s, go to visit a friend who lived in Galveston, and head home on Sunday in time to go to work Monday morning. I’d work eight days and come home on the bus. We checked the bus schedule to see when he should pick me up at the Texarkana bus station, then he headed down the road, leaving me to my job.

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