Between the Bridge and the River (12 page)

“What’ll we do?”

“Keep moving. I never liked it there anyway. It’s best when it’s just you and me. Blood is thicker than water.”

Leon turned and looked at his brother with tears in his eyes.

“You’re the only one I can trust,” he said.

Saul smiled through his own tears and hugged the brother he loved more than anything in the world. He loved him even more now that he had broken him.

Leon eventually cried himself to sleep in Saul’s arms and Saul held him until sunrise.

The boys felt that it was too risky to stay on the train. There were always rumors of mad psycho guards who would beat you to death for hitching a free ride, although in reality these bogeymen had disappeared in the 1930s. The boys didn’t know that and what you don’t know can hurt you. Beat you to death for dodging a fare.

They headed off into the woods with no idea of where they were going but with a certain faith that they would be provided for. A faith less to do with God and more to do with the fact that they were two white boys who grew up in the South. They knew, sooner or later, someone with old-time Dixie manners would offer them food or a bed or both.

Leon was still very jumpy and fragile from his trip and he almost fainted when a raccoon ran across their path, but Saul was there to soothe him and he listened to his fat brother coo in his ear as they both stumbled over bracken and roots on the forest floor.

They were in fact walking through the outskirts of the small town of Crawford’s Creek, treading on a forgotten battle site from the Civil War. In a minor skirmish there toward the end of the conflict, after Sherman had burned Atlanta and was mopping up the South, a party of twenty-eight Union soldiers were ambushed by a gang of renegade Confederate troops who had been hiding out with the locals. All twenty-eight were killed (hence the forgotten battle—no survivors
from the eventual winning side) and their heads were put on spikes in a giant circle in the forest.

The locals lit a bonfire in the center of the circle and everyone got drunk and danced, making believe that the South did indeed rise. The charred circle inside the severed heads became the clearing where the snake handlers eventually built their place of worship.

Critters and some starving, quiet, guilty rednecks from the town of Crawford’s Creek stripped the burnt flesh from the bodies, and the bones sunk into the earth over time.

The Civil War was the bloodiest war in history, they say. Usually Americans say that but we have already examined the reliability of American popular history, although it cannot be denied that the American Civil War was a particularly gory and unpleasant affair. Brother against brother, and everyone knows how vicious that can be.

The woods got thicker and greener, the dense canopy of leaves allowing only shafts of light to stream to the ground. The boys walked on slowly and carefully. They looked like Grimm children in an El Greco.

And lo it was that they walked from the darkness into the light. The Christian Reformed Fellowship of Born Again Snake Handling Pentecostal Baptists has their place of worship in the heart of the woods, almost a mile from Crawford’s Creek proper. A white wooden one-room structure by the side of a shiny bubbly stream. There is a little graveyard off to the side of the church where the faithful bury the finished.

Little bunches of purple pansies decorate the small whitewashed carved boulders that serve as headstones to mark the recent and the Confederate dead.

A fairytale church, but aren’t they all.

HOTEL ROOMS HAVE AN APHRODISIAC QUALITY
. It doesn’t matter how expensive the room is, it’s just the fact that you are renting a room for a short period of time means you can do what you want. It suggests a lack of accountability, it promotes the desire for wantonness and abandon. No one would ever know—well, maybe the hotel staff, but they are sworn to secrecy in an occult brotherhood as dark and tight as a mulatto ladyboy. Hotel staff are pilot fish, cleaning the crap and crumbs from orifices of the sharks in their charge. A cheap hotel room gives the seedy, sleazy vibe that many, especially rich, deviants enjoy but Fraser personally preferred expensive hotels. To Fraser an expensive hotel room was a clean plate. A chance to start again, and God knows he wanted that more than anything.

When Fraser stepped into Room 113 of the Four Seasons Miami, he felt that little rush of adrenaline, he knew fun was on the way. He quickly dispensed with the porter, Steve, a worryingly tanned and shiny plastic queen, handing him twenty dollars in order to avoid listening to a lengthy and desperate, illiterate pitch about the benefits of the trouser press. There is just something thrilling about the full mini-bar and the military-style bed-making and the little soaps wrapped in cellophane and the jar of macadamia nuts. The only time in life Fraser
ever ate macadamia nuts was when he was in a hotel. He wouldn’t even know where to get macadamia nuts in the real world.

He opened his leather case and hung up his black Boss suit, a miracle of German efficiency—it would free itself of all wrinkles if hung properly on a hanger for an hour or two. He took off his trousers and threw them over the chair next to the bed, selected a small bottle of Stolichnaya vodka from the minibar, mixed it with fresh guava juice, opened the jar of macadamia nuts, and turned on the TV to CNN.

The Cable News Network promised up-to-the-minute news reports twenty-four hours a day but, of course, there isn’t always news to report. So, in order to fill the airtime with something that felt like news, the Cable News people like to put on interview shows; after all, there are only so many human-interest “news” reports you can use to pad things out. Once you’ve seen one parrot that can ride a miniature bicycle, you’ve pretty much seen them all.

The interview show that was airing when Fraser turned on the television was hosted by a gentleman named Larry King, a pompous narcissist who thought he was a tough intellectual because he wore suspenders and had a voice that sounded like an aged camel in sexual ecstasy.

Larry was interviewing O.J. Simpson, who was complaining to Larry that people still were mean to him in airports and hotel lobbies, even though he had been cleared of the murder. Larry asked him if that was perhaps because they thought he was guilty. (Larry did, but he talked to politicians all the time, so dealing with self-justifying murderers came easy to him.) O.J. said that no, it was because they were jealous of his celebrity, and actually, in this case, O.J. was telling the truth, albeit unintentionally.

Most Americans are disappointed because they are not in show business. They’re depressed because they are not famous. This is why “reality shows,” i.e., shows where “real” people are the stars (the definition of
real
here is people who are ugly or poor or not famous), became so popular on American (and, of course, Britain is included in this, as it is now little more than an annexed colony) television.

Viewers want to believe that the fifteen minutes promised them in the famous sound bite by Mr. Warhol is just around the corner. The glorious day when they can Marry a Millionaire/Ordinary Guy/Beauty Queen/Midget and get front-row seats at the Golden Globes. Fraser watched Larry and O.J. blah for a few moments and became bored.

Fraser thought he should absorb some of the local culture and switched off the television. He reached across the bed and opened the nightstand. Inside was a Miami Yellow Pages, a telephone directory, which was a throwback to the days before the Internet. He looked up E for Escorts.

There is a language—perhaps not a language but a code—that goes with American prostitution. For example, in an advertisement for her services, an escort may offer a GFE, a Girl Friend Experience: This means the girl promises to kiss the client on the lips as well as the usual hooker stuff. You could also have a PSE, a Porn Star Experience: This means the girl will not kiss the client but she will have undergone an inexpensive and brutal-looking breast augmentation and she will allow him to ejaculate on her face.

Fraser noted with some mirth that no one ever promised a WE, a Wife Experience, presumably because most men who sought the services of prostitutes were already married and were already paying much more for their WE elsewhere. (Although Fraser had never been married, he had picked up a bitterness and cynicism about the whole thing from his angry drinking buddies in the Press Bar, many of whom had been divorced by their wives because they spent too much time drinking in the Press Bar with divorced guys.)

Even the term
escort
is important.
Escort
lets the prospective client know that he can expect intercourse, or Full Service, if he is willing to pay the requisite price. Hookers who advertise “Sensual Massage” will not allow clients to penetrate them but will perform hand jobs or fellatio.

Fraser was familiar with all this parlay, he was an old hand. He selected a full-page advertisement, a bad drawing of two women standing next to a stretched-out limousine with a private jet parked behind them. A giant champagne glass was also parked next to the jet, and at
the top of the page, the name of the agency—Miami Platinum. (It is a common belief among workers in the sex industry that customers will pay more for sex if the word
platinum
is involved. This is not necessarily true but if you are in the sex trade you are already desperate, so what harm can it do to look a little foolish.)

For some reason he felt a little guilty, a little adrenal, which was unusual. He had done this many times before in hotels all over the U.K. Whenever he was away on business, in fact. He contemplated not dialing the number. Maybe just have a bath and watch TV.

“What’s this about?” he said out loud to himself.

Thousands of miles away in Paris, even though it was getting very late, Claudette and George were still in conversation at Les Deux Magots. The mysterious intoxicating mist of human attraction had rolled in on them, causing them to stop and take stock of each other.

They were doing favorite authors. George said he’d read only one book by a Frenchman. Camus’s
L’Étranger
. He’d had to study it at school. Didn’t really get it.

Claudette said she thought it was a hateful piece of nihilism and that Camus wasn’t even French, he was Algerian.

“A Frenchman would have written a nicer book?” asked George.

“Of course,” smiled Claudette.

Fraser dialed the digits at the door of his undoing.

A woman answered. “Agency.”

“Is this Miami Platinum?”

“Yes, sir. How may I help you this evening?”

“I’d like a girl to visit my room.”

“Sure, honey.”

Fraser put his hand down his Marks & Spencer’s underpants. He was already a little turned on. By this time he had completely forgotten the deal he had made with God when his airplane was going through turbulence.

* * *

Fraser was disappointed when he looked through the peephole in the room door to see the girl from the agency. He had asked for a busty redhead and the agency suggested Tiffany. They had her call Fraser in his room—she sounded very sexy on the phone, although Fraser was long enough in the tooth to know that didn’t mean much. He had a passing acquaintance with Senga Trotter, a sexy-voiced “phone hooker” who drank in the Press Bar. She charged men a fortune to talk filth to them on the telephone but she looked like a walrus—really like a walrus—same color, same weight, and a mustache.

Tiffany set a price (two hundred dollars to come over, plus tip, which meant probably another two, three hundred, depending on how much Fraser wanted) and Fraser had asked her to describe herself. She told him she was twenty-five years old, red hair and green eyes, with a 36DD-24-36 figure.

Fraser understood this description, bar a little salesmanship, to mean Tiffany was large breasted and young. When he looked through the peephole before he opened the door, he knew he’d been conned, but he went ahead and opened the door anyway.

The woman who stood before him was at least forty years old. She had a thin, undernourished look and hard eyes that were partially cataracted by cheap green contact lenses. Her mouth was lipsticked to a bloodred gash—it looked like a wound. Her hair, admittedly a reddish color, had been dyed badly some time ago and some white was showing among the dark roots. Her fingernails were angry and red and chipped. In fact, she was angry and red and chipped. Her skin looked slack.

She wore a cheap copy of a Chanel suit and white stilettos. She smelled of cigarettes and Listerine. She looked like a barmaid in a dockyard tavern who had gone to apply for a mortgage and been refused.

“Hey.” She grimaced as Fraser opened the door.

“Hello,” Fraser replied, trying not to sound too pissed off.

“Is that an accent?”

“Yes, I’m Scottish.”

“Oooh, sexy,” mumbled Tiffany halfheartedly.

Fraser guessed that would have been her reply no matter what nationality he’d said. He wished there was someone he could complain to.

He was relieved when she left. He had settled for an extra sixty bucks and a hand job, and he couldn’t get her out of there fast enough. She offered to get naked but he talked her out of it, saying it was sexier with her clothes on, but the truth was he didn’t think he would be able to maintain an erection if he saw her naked. She was the opposite of sexual. All the sex, all her joy, had been wrung out of her years ago, there was hardly even politeness left. She worked his juice into a little napkin she got from the bathroom, and he thanked her and almost bustled her away.

Annoyed, he got more vodka from the minibar. He didn’t bother to mix it with anything this time. When the four little vodkas were finished he moved on to whisky. Fucking hell, what was he doing drinking vodka anyway, he was Scottish, fucking Scottish, pal, and don’t you forget it, let’s have a beer.

Fuck this TV, fucking Larry King with his fucking hair, fuck that nasty skinny hooker, I deserve better, he thought. Fuckit, I’m fucking going out.

And out he fucking went.

Miami was hot and clear like a movie. Pulsing gay techno beat from clubs and cars. Fraser, in his black Hugo Boss suit, wandered through the pasteled revelers like a nineteenth-century missionary. He was the anti-Presbyterian come on the quest for personal pleasure. He walked, walked and drank in bars, one, then another, always moving forward, always moving, always looking, he didn’t know what for and he wouldn’t have believed anyone if they had told him.