“An iguana?”
“That’s him.”
Through the town, over a bridge, on for a couple of miles, and he stopped at a low, rectangular building with an illuminated Pabst sign, and a Coca-Cola machine by the door.
The parking lot was half-empty. Shadow parked the red Toyota and went inside.
The air was thick with smoke and “Walkin’ after Midnight” was playing on the jukebox. Shadow looked around for the crocodiles, but could not see them. He wondered if the woman in the gas station had been pulling his leg.
“What’ll it be?” asked the bartender.
“You Jack?”
“It’s Jack’s night off. I’m Paul.”
“Hi, Paul. House beer, and a hamburger with all the trimmings. No fries.”
“Bowl of chili to start? Best chili in the state.”
“Sounds good,” said Shadow. “Where’s the restroom?”
The man pointed to a door in the corner of the bar. There was a stuffed alligator head mounted on the door. Shadow went through the door.
It was a clean, well-lit restroom. Shadow looked around the room first; force of habit. (“Remember, Shadow, you can’t fight back when you’re pissing,” Low Key said, low-key as always, in the back of his head.) He took the urinal stall on the left. Then he unzipped his fly and pissed for an age, relaxing, feeling relief. He read the yellowing press clipping framed at eye-level, with a photo of Jack and two alligators.
There was a polite grunt from the urinal immediately to his right, although he had heard nobody come in.
The man in the pale suit was bigger standing than he had seemed sitting on the plane beside Shadow. He was almost Shadow’s height, and Shadow was a big man. He was staring ahead of him. He finished pissing, shook off the last few drops, and zipped himself up.
Then he grinned, like a fox eating shit from a barbed wire fence. “So,” said Mr. Wednesday. “You’ve had time to think, Shadow. Do you want a job?”
Somewhere in America
LOS ANGELES. 11:26 P.M.
In a dark red room—the color of the walls is close to that of raw liver—is a tall woman dressed cartoonishly in too-tight silk shorts, her breasts pulled up and pushed forward by the yellow blouse tied beneath them. Her black hair is piled high and knotted on top of her head. Standing beside her is a short man wearing an olive T-shirt and expensive blue jeans. He is holding, in his right hand, a wallet and a Nokia mobile phone with a red, white, and blue face-plate.
The red room contains a bed, upon which are white satin-style sheets and an ox-blood bedspread. At the foot of the bed is a small wooden table, upon which is a small stone statue of a woman with enormous hips, and a candleholder.
The woman hands the man a small red candle. “Here,” she says. “Light it.”
“Me?”
“Yes,” she says, “if you want to have me.”
“I shoulda just got you to suck me off in the car.”
“Perhaps,” she says. “Don’t you want me?” Her hand runs up her body from thigh to breast, a gesture of presentation, as if she were demonstrating a new product.
Red silk scarves over the lamp in the corner of the room make the light red.
The man looks at her hungrily, then he takes the candle from her and pushes it into the candleholder. “You got a light?”
She passes him a book of matches. He tears off a match, lights the wick: it flickers and then burns with a steady flame, which gives the illusion of motion to the faceless statue beside it, all hips and breasts. “Put the money beneath the statue.”
“Fifty bucks.”
“Yes.”
“When I saw you first, on Sunset, I almost thought you were a man.”
“But I have these,” she says, unknotting the yellow blouse, freeing her breasts.
“So do a lot of guys, these days.”
She stretches and smiles. “Yes,” she says. “Now, come love me.”
He unbuttons his blue jeans, and removes his olive T-shirt. She massages his white shoulders with her brown fingers; then she turns him over, and begins to make love to him with her hands, and her fingers, and her tongue.
It seems to him that the lights in the red room have been dimmed, and the sole illumination comes from the candle, which burns with a bright flame.
“What’s your name?” he asks her.
“Bilquis,” she tells him, raising her head. “With a Q.”
“A what?”
“Never mind.”
He is gasping now. “Let me fuck you,” he says. “I have to fuck you.”
“Okay, hon,” she says. “We’ll do it. But will you do something for me, while you’re doing it?”
“Hey,” he says, suddenly tetchy, “I’m paying you, you know.”
She straddles him, in one smooth movement, whispering, “I know, honey, I know, you’re paying me, and I mean, look at you, I should be paying you, I’m so lucky…”
He purses his lips, trying to show that her hooker talk is having no effect on him, he can’t be taken; that she’s a street whore for Chrissakes, while he’s practically a producer, and he knows all about last-minute rip-offs, but she doesn’t ask for money. Instead she says, “Honey, while you’re giving it to me, while you’re pushing that big hard thing inside of me, will you worship me?”
“Will I what?”
She is rocking back and forth on him: the engorged head of his penis is being rubbed against the wet lips of her vulva.
“Will you call me goddess? Will you pray to me? Will you worship me with your body?”
He smiles. Is that what she wants? “Sure,” he says. We’ve all got our kinks, at the end of the day. She reaches her hand between her legs and slips him inside her.
“Is that good, is it, goddess?” he asks, gasping.
“Worship me, honey,” says Bilquis, the hooker.
“Yes,” he says. “I worship your breasts and your eyes and your cunt. I worship your thighs and your eyes and your cherry-red lips…”
“Yes…,” she croons, riding him like a storm-tossed boat rides the waves.
“I worship your nipples, from which the milk of life flows. Your kiss is honey and your touch scorches like fire, and I worship it.” His words are becoming more rhythmic now, keeping pace with the thrust and roll of their bodies. “Bring me your lust in the morning, and bring me relief and your blessing in the evening. Let me walk in dark places unharmed and let me come to you once more and sleep beside you and make love with you again. I worship you with everything that is within me, and everything inside my mind, with everywhere I’ve been and my dreams and my…” He breaks off, panting for breath. “…What are you doing? That feels amazing. So amazing…” And he looks down at his hips, at the place where the two of them conjoin, but her forefinger touches his chin and pushes his head back, so he is looking only at her face and at the ceiling once again.
“Keep talking, honey,” she says. “Don’t stop. Doesn’t it feel good?”
“It feels better than anything has ever felt,” he tells her, meaning it as he says it. “Your eyes are stars, burning in the, shit, the firmament, and your lips are gentle waves that lick the sand, and I wworship them,” and now he’s thrusting deeper and deeper inside her: he feels electric, as if his whole lower body has become sexually charged: priapic, engorged, blissful.