Legends

“I would go back to Tuscany,” she said, clinging to him, burrowing into his neck so that her words were muffled. “I would buy a small farm and breed baby polyesters and shear them twice a year and sell the hair to make silk-soft cloth.”

“Polyester is a synthetic fabric,” Lincoln said.

Lucia’s hand came in contact with the leather of the holster nestling in the cavity in Lincoln’s lower back. She caressed the cold metal on the butt of the small-caliber automatic in the holster. “I will raise baby acrylics, then,” she said, annoyed at his nitpicking. Her fingers worked their way under the holster; when they reached the smooth scar of the healed wound she stopped dancing abruptly. “What gave you that?” she asked.

But Lincoln only murmured her night name, Paura, and she didn’t repeat the question.

Hanging out at the Kit Kat Klub the following night, Lincoln made a point of dancing with two other girls and taking the second one up to a room so that suspicion wouldn’t fall on Paura if he was compromised. Once in the room, the girl, a bleached blonde who called herself Monroe Marilyn, named her price. Lincoln counted out the bills and set them on the table. Monroe washed in a chipped bidet and insisted he wash too, and watched him to make sure he did. She took off the rest of her clothing except for a black lace brassiere, which she claimed to have bought in Paris, and stretched out on the mattress covered with a stained sheet, her legs apart, her eyes fixed on the filaments in the electric bulb dangling from the ceiling. In the bar below “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” started to play again on the jukebox. Lincoln shut his eyes and imagined he was making love to Paura. Under him, Marilyn moaned and cried out with pleasure; to Lincoln her sensual clatter came across as a recorded announcement, played over and over like the 45-rpm disk on the jukebox downstairs. He finished before “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” did.

“So you got your ashes hauled after all,” Leroy said when Lincoln came limping back to the booth and slid onto the banquette across from him. “You must of broken some kind of speed record. You need to get laid at least once a day not to be sex starved. The trick is to make it last as long as you can. That way you get more fuck for your buck.”

“You ought to write a lonely hearts column for the newspapers,” Lincoln said. “You could advise men how to solve their sexual problems.”

“I just may do that when I’m too old to take on the Federal gov’ment in Washington.”

“How old will you be when you’re too old for the good fight?”

“Thirty, maybe. Maybe thirty.”

Around eleven, an old man wearing a long shabby overcoat and a threadbare scarf wound loosely around his thin neck came into the bar to sell lottery tickets. He had turned up the same hour every night since Lincoln had been hanging out at the Kit Kat. As he stepped through the door, the hookers dropped what they were doing to crowd around him, hunting for lucky numbers on the lottery slips attached to his clipboard. When they’d each bought a ticket that suited them, the girls drifted back to the tables or took up where they’d left off on the dance floor. The lottery vendor shuffled across the floor to a vacant booth not far from where Lincoln and Leroy were sitting. The mulatto waitress filled a tall glass with tap water and set it down in front of him. The old man half bowed to her from a sitting position—the gesture seemed to come from another world and another century. A new girl Lincoln had not seen before came down the steps behind a corpulent Lebanese client and, noticing the old man with the clipboard in the booth, hurried over to buy a ticket. When the music went silent, Lincoln could hear their voices—he could even make out what they were saying. The girl was asking when the drawing would be held and how she would know if she’d won anything. The old man told her that he kept the stubs attached to his clipboard for months. Each morning he tore the list of winning numbers from the newspaper, he said, and made it his business to personally seek out winners who had bought a ticket from him.

The idea of a hooker hoping to strike it rich from a lottery ticket intrigued Lincoln. He wondered if her pimp would take half the proceeds if she did win.

Leroy was listening to them also. He reached across the table and tapped Lincoln on the wrist. “The hell language they talking?” he wanted to know.

Lincoln hadn’t realized they were talking a foreign language until Leroy called his attention to it. “Not sure,” he replied, although, to his astonishment, he found that he knew very well. The old lottery vendor and the hooker were talking in Polish, which was the language Martin Odum’s mother had used when she told him bedtime stories in Jonestown, Pennsylvania, a lifetime ago.

At the booth, the girl could be heard asking, “Ile kosztóje bilet?” When the old man told her how much a ticket cost, she carefully counted out coins from a small purse and tore one from the clipboard.