Halo continued doggedly: ‘They’ve taken his death benefits. And his pension. His wife and kid can’t have them. They’ve lost Chris and they’re losing everything else too. Now Air Maintenance say they might sue his estate to recover the compensation they have to pay out. They could lose their home.’
‘That’s not my problem.’
Halo was silent for a long moment. ‘I saw you on the TV a while back. You were on the news. Telling some New York witch to get off some pilot’s back.’
‘So?’
‘You get into trouble for that?’
Tom paused, glancing out at the godforsaken fuel tanks. ‘Some.’
‘Yeah, I thought you would. Soon as I saw it.’
‘What’s your point, Mr Jackson?’
‘Well, my point is, I need someone who’s not afraid of trouble.’
‘Good luck finding him,’ said Tom, and hung up.
*
The Rubstick was smaller and shabbier than the LA clubs, but once Tom sat down, everything was the same. Same game, same green tables, same people – men in net truckers’ caps or comped casino jackets, a few women, all too fat or painfully thin.
He bought in for two hundred dollars on a no-limit Hold ’Em table. First hand, he was dealt pocket sevens. Another came up on the flop and Tom was off. He walked out at ten thirty p.m. a thousand dollars richer than he’d been at eight o’clock.
Tom wouldn’t have left if he hadn’t got to be at the Amoco farm tomorrow at eight and he was still buzzing from the high of winning. Half a mile from the Motel 6, he spotted the Sawmill, with its flickering pink neon sign and, underneath that, ‘Gentlemen’s Club’.
Tom didn’t want to sleep. He felt better than he had in a long time. Since his rapid demotion to pipelines. Since he’d come home to find Ella sitting on the couch with her bags packed around her, and a cab running its meter outside.
‘Hi,’ he’d said.
‘I’m going,’ she’d said.
‘Where?’
‘Somewhere else.’
Shit, why’d he have to think about that just when he was feeling so good?
He swung into the Sawmill’s parking lot.
Inside, it was cramped and foggy and cold from the dry ice wafting lazily across the stages. Two Vietnamese girls were dancing, their eyes half closed with concentration, their hard, lithe bodies turning like snakes around the poles. They wore only G-strings, and their fake breasts looked hard and awkward, like they might come off in your hand.
Tom sat down and ordered a beer from an angular redhead in a sequined bikini. The music ended and one of the Vietnamese girls gyrated over the customers, opening her legs. The silver-haired man sitting closest to Tom stuffed a twenty up under the G-string, and squeezed her inner thigh at the same time. Tom saw the girl hide a wince and smile a reptilian smile at the man. She drew away from him, and displayed herself to Tom.
‘I only just got here.’ What the hell. He wasn’t paying for something he hadn’t seen.
The girl only shrugged and smiled. ‘Next time you pay me good.’
‘Yeah, next time.’
A new song played through inadequate speakers that couldn’t quite handle the bass, and two new girls came out. One was a pneumatic blonde with breasts the size of footballs. The other was a black girl with soft features, small breasts, a tiny waist and a big ass. The blonde started to work herself into a frenzy on the pole and several men got up and took seats closer to her. Tom stayed where he was. The black girl didn’t seem to notice that she’d been deserted. She continued her sinuous dance with her brass lover, seeming to enjoy the reactions of her own body, lost in a world of her own, and not making eye-contact with her bread-and-butter customers.
Tom felt like a voyeur.
When the music stopped, the blonde’s G-string was not enough to hold the tens and twenties she was getting. Tom and two drunken college kids were the only customers who’d stayed where they were. The college kids stuffed five each into the black girl’s G-string. Tom handed her a fifty.
She smiled and said, ‘Thank you,’ in a soft Southern voice.
Her name was Lucia and, for three more fifties, she came back to the Motel 6 and he held her all night long. At dawn he awoke, hardening in her mouth, and she earned her money then.
He took her to breakfast at a diner on the strip, watched her fill up on banana pancakes and insisted on paying for a cab to take her home.
When he got back to the room, she’d left the three fifties on the pillow.
Fuck, thought Tom, it comes to something when it takes a whore to make you feel all warm and fuzzy.
4
FRIK VENTER WAS stuck in traffic. The fact that he was stuck in traffic in one of the most beautiful places on the planet completely passed him by. He was too used to seeing Table Mountain with its cloth of cloud looming over Cape Town on his right, and the broad blue sweep of Table Bay on his left, for it to make a dent in his consciousness. All Frik Venter saw now was the back of the pick-up truck in front of him, which was packed with a dozen brown-skinned men in dirty work clothes, who apparently found him an object of some amusement. They stared at him boldly, then one would say something and the others would laugh so loudly he could hear them over his thrumming air-conditioning and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.
Frik tried to ignore them, even though they were only ten feet away and entirely filling his line of vision. After about fifteen minutes of humiliation, he saw his chance and changed lanes. A woman in a Toyota Yaris sideswiped his Merc and – in the silence after the bang – he could hear the workmen almost hysterical with laughter. To add insult to injury, the line of traffic he’d just crashed to leave, started to move.
*
Frik Venter ignored the accusing glances of the first-class passengers and closed the cockpit door behind him. ‘Sorry, Vernon.’
‘You okay? Heard you had a bump.’
