Paradise Burning (17 page)

“
Hi.” The husky voice that interrupted
his concentration on the dancers was more tentative than
seductive.

“
Delilah!” His thoughts seemed to have
conjured her out of thin air. “Are you working here now? Sit down
and tell me how you’re doing.”

Delilah eyed the chair Peter indicated as if
it were a snake. “I don’t want Max to think I’m workin’ the room,”
she muttered, her head ducking down as she refused to meet Peter’s
eyes.

“
Sit,” Peter ordered. “You’re having a
drink with a friend. If Max objects, I’ll explain. Now tell me how
things are with you,” he said as Delilah pulled back the chair and
slid into the seat as if she expected the bouncer to loom over her
at any moment.

“
I ain’t workin’ here yet,” Delilah
said, perched on the edge of the chair as if for swift flight. “I
jes’ come by to watch. See how the girls do it, y’know. Max says he
don’t need no one right now and, besides, I can’t work ’til I’m
clean.”

Peter got a good look at Delilah’s headful of
tiny braids as she tucked in her chin, ducked her head still lower.
“So are you working on it?” he asked.

“
Yeah.” Her voice was nearly lost in
the blare of music supporting the gyrations of the bare-bosomed
dancers. Reluctantly, Delilah lifted her head, though she still
didn’t meet Peter’s eyes. “But it ain’t easy, y’know. When I’m
usin’, the johns sort of all look alike. They’re just business,
y’know. Don’t matter what they want, what I do. It’s just a little
time, a little money, and then I get to do some crack or crystal or
coke, and whole damn shit starts all over again.”

Delilah’s eyes slid to the dancers, then
around the room, which was hazy with the smoke the air conditioning
couldn’t quite handle. Not a single one of the avid-eyed males,
including the bouncer, was watching anything but the platform where
a lithe, well-endowed, and arrogantly indifferent Fawn was
currently the featured dancer. “But when I’m not usin’,” Delilah
continued, the johns are mean and ugly and I feel like a week-old
turd, y’know what I mean?”

“
Yeah,” Peter breathed, “I do.” He was
glad Delilah had resumed her study of the tabletop because he too
couldn’t keep his eyes off Fawn. With one hand on the pole, the
fragile young dancer was leaning out over the two men at the front
table, bouncing her assets within a foot of their faces. From
twenty feet away Peter could see the bulge of their eyes, the sheen
of sweat on their foreheads. And Peter, the author, had no trouble
putting words to the rhythm of what Fawn was thinking as she dipped
lower and lower, until the men’s mouths were gaping open, so
mesmerized they’d forgotten to reach for their wallets:
Take that and that and that, you motherfucking
bastards. Get yourselves off and pay up. Haul out Ben or Ulysses
and then haul ass, so I can bounce my boobs for the next bunch of
you dumb horny shits.

“
She don’t like men much,” Delilah
said, as if reading his thoughts. “When I’m not workin’, I can take
‘em or leave ‘em, but Fawn, she jes’ hates. Real bad.”

The Peter Pennington who had written about
nearly every subject on earth, whose opinions were sought for
Sunday morning TV talk shows, found himself in limbo. He wanted to
give comfort, find some magic to make degradation go away. But
whatever salvation was out there, these girls were going to have to
do it themselves. Platitudes and sympathy weren’t going to cut
it.

“
However low all this is,” Peter said
with a nod toward the stage, his voice as harsh as a hanging judge,
“it’s a damn sight better than the streets. You stay on the
streets, Delilah, you’ll be lucky to see twenty-one. Clean up or
drop dead, girl. It’s your choice.”

Delilah toyed with the drink Peter had
ordered for her. “I was watchin’ Dancin’ With the Stars last week,”
she said with seeming irrelevance. “They was all so beautiful. The
gowns, the way they moved. I can’t do that,” she added simply.

“
You don’t have to,” Peter countered
more gently than before. “All you have to do is make love to a
pole.”

Delilah’s head came up, her dejected frown
dissolving as her lips quirked up at the corners. Humor brought
light to her dark eyes. “Make love to a pole,” she giggled. “Now
that’s real funny, y’know. I’ve made love to a lot of poles, but
none of ‘em were as long as that one.” She nodded toward the tall
metal rod where Fawn was finishing her act with a split which had
the effect of causing her G-string to disappear and the eyes of her
already gaping audience to pop. “Well, I guess you couldn’t really
call it makin’ love,” she qualified softly, her smile fading.

“
Hey,” Peter countered over the lump in
his throat, “that pole up there is a hell of lot safer than the
other. And real love isn’t likely to come along on one of your
‘dates.’”

“
I know.” Delilah’s fingers were
suddenly shaking so hard Peter could see the sloshing of the liquid
in her glass.

He leaned forward, wondering
desperately why his gift for words seemed to have deserted him.
Writing about prostitution from the roof-top aerie of his cupola at
Amber Run was one thing. Dealing with its victims, face to face,
was something else again. “Delilah,” he said, “you’re too young to
remember that slogan from the seventies:
Black is Beautiful—
”

“
Not in my neighborhood it
ain’t.”

Peter opened his mouth to challenge her
disillusion, then snapped it closed in defeat. Who was he, Mr.
White Success himself, to offer up
Black is
Beautiful
in a world that had said, sure, black women
could be in the workplace as long as they wore their hair like
Oprah and spoke with the cultured accents of James Earl
Jones.

“
We having a reunion?” Fawn drawled,
cocking a hip close to Peter’s chin. She had thrown on a large
man’s shirt—in lavender chambray—that enveloped her all the way
down to her knees.

For which Peter was infinitely
grateful. He had not thought himself squeamish about the female
figure, but his intimacies had been one-on-one and conducted in
private. That he had trouble looking away from Fawn’s exhibition
came as a shock. He was appalled. He
knew
this girl. He even knew she hated men. And
why. And yet he’d sat there with his mouth hanging open, listening
to Delilah while his dick twitched and threatened to come to life.
Now that Fawn was standing there, right next to him, all covered up
in that fag shirt, he felt sick. Ashamed. And better able to
understand what made prostitution the world’s oldest
profession.

Peter summoned his most impersonal smile.
“You looked good up there, Fawn. And, Delilah, you get clean and
learn to dance. Next time I come I want to see you up there on the
platform, okay?”

“
I’m surely tryin’. You come back in a
couple o’ months. I’ll be up there.” But deep in Delilah’s dark
eyes Peter caught the message:
Hey, don’t
bullshit me, man!

He stood. His professional facade barely
holding firm, he slipped a folded fifty dollar bill onto the table
in front of each girl. Their time was valuable. A commodity. But
now that he knew them better . . .

As he walked out, Peter felt goosebumps creep
up his spine.

Mandy pushed back her chair and shifted her
gaze from the computer to the corner room’s magnificent view. Giant
live oaks, alive with birds, squirrels, and air plants, hugged the
house as if cradling it against the world. An opening between the
tips of the leafy branches offered an unobstructed view of the dark
and slow-moving Calusa River, framed in lush jungle greenery.

Mandy’s lip curled, a sigh huffed out. Here
she was in one of the world’s idyllic spots, and all she could feel
was guilt. Compared to Fawn, Delilah, and Jade, Amanda Armitage was
a pampered princess.

The girls haunted her, their faces
continually popping up, weaving in and out of the succession of
trafficking articles she was reading online.
Blast it!
She’d broken a basic rule of research
and gotten too close. Close enough to be singed by emotions she
didn’t want to have.

She’d spent an hour with Jade and, as Peter
found with Fawn and Delilah, there was nothing overtly wrong.
Except the whole miserable concept of their lives. There was no
other way, Jade insisted. No other way her children were ever going
to have a better life.

Depression as dark as the river settled on
Mandy’s shoulders. She wanted to shout, “Abort, abort,” as she had
to Kira, but it had been too late then, and it seemed to be too
late now.

Nadya
. The name
echoed in her head, as strongly as if spoken aloud.
Nadya
. Perhaps it wasn’t too late for
her mystery sprite.

Stupid
. Nadya,
after a brief vacation fling in the U. S., was likely back in
Russia doing whatever she did to make a living.

Man-dee!
Nadya’s voice echoed in my mind.

“
Go away!” Mandy hissed, glaring down
at the river that seemed like a black hole ready to swallow her
soul. She had enough problems of her own without taking on the ills
of the world’s oldest profession or manufacturing problems that
simply didn’t exist.

Face it, Mouse. Your life’s as murky as the
river.

So where did that leave her?

Peter wanted a reconciliation. Or thought he
did. Mandy supposed men had biological clocks too, though they
seemed to run on a slower cycle than a woman’s, which raced through
a quarter-century of child-bearing years as if it were twenty-five
months.

But what did Amanda Armitage want? How
far would her stiff-necked New England pride allow her to bend? And
could anything penetrate the scar tissue surrounding her heart? Her
work was prized for independent thinking, for original and creative
approaches to difficult problems. Yet with Peter she seemed to fall
back on the kneejerk reactions of her childhood training.
Stiffen your spine, Amanda. Hold up your head. No
one is better than a Kingsley. Or an Armitage. AKA is
God.

Cold comfort.

It was lunch time. Mandy took one last look
downriver, trying to penetrate the tangle of oak, pines, palms,
palmetto, wax myrtle, elderberry, and gallberry. Trying to catch a
glimpse of Nadya, of the house that surely had to be there,
somewhere between Amber Run and Calusa Campground.

Once again, nothing. As if there was no life
on the far side of the river except an occasional heron, egret, or
a turtle sunning itself on a log.

Every day before indulging in a half hour
with Claire and Baby Bubba, Mandy fixed Peter a simple lunch and
carried it up to his third floor office. Though decidedly against
her principles, she knew that if she didn’t, he wouldn’t eat at
all. But it was humiliatingly wifely, and she gritted her teeth
while climbing the stairs.

At AKA someone brought
her
lunch.

Peter was so absorbed, he never looked up, so
the pat on her fanny came out of the blue. Mandy squeaked, glared
at the back of Peter’s head, at the broad shoulders hunched
suspiciously low over his keyboard. Shaking her head, she escaped
to the sunny uncomplicated welcome of the Amber Run Model
Center.

When young Bradley Blue saw Mandy, he
chortled and raised his arms in the simple faith of a child who
recognizes the adult leaning over him can be counted on to pick him
up. Mandy, as always, was enchanted. Not that she hadn’t wrinkled
her nose a time or two while watching Claire change her squirming
infant, but Mandy was hooked on babies. In spite of the crow she’d
have to eat to get one of her own.

Okay, so the process of making one wasn’t so
bad either. Her weak, foolish body tingled at the thought. It would
be so easy to give in, give up. And wave goodbye as Peter flitted
off to the next bright flower in an infinite garden.

Damn it!
Taking
Peter back would go down just about as well as eating an actual
crow. Unplucked and raw.

Was she a stubborn fool? Probably. Her head
and her heart were at war, and so far the hard-headed
Armitage/Kingsley brain was triumphing over the more malleable
emotions of Mandy Mouse.

She held Bubba up to the rear window of the
model’s greatroom, so he could watch the waterfall she hadn’t been
able to find the first day she was here. It tumbled from the hot
tub on the deck outside into the intricately tiled pool some six
feet below. Bubba loved the waterfall. It was always good for
gurgles of glee, waving hands, and unexpected surges of motion as
he tried to zoom out of Mandy’s arms, through the glass, and into
the beckoning bubbly water.

Because of the danger of flooding, the
pool at the Model Center was raised off the ground. Mandy suspected
Peter had not built one like it because his land was even lower and
closer to the river.
But if we raise the
pool only a few feet higher than the model’s . .
.
?

Blast!
What was
she thinking?
We
nothing.
There was no
we
.

Bradley Blue, Jr., gave an indignant wiggle,
and Mandy realized she’d tightened her grip to the point of
discomfort. “Sorry,” she apologized. “It’s your own fault, young
man. You’re so full of charm, you’ve got me totally sold on
babies.”