“And we, ah, are, ah, separate,” the boy says.
“You were separated,” Manny says.
“Now, I wait.” He nods to the bar, the brothel, the girls, as if they all have some arrangement.
“Wait for what?” Amy asks dully.
Michele is quiet for a moment, looking down at his large hands. “I wait, ah, for my friend,” he says. “For his return.”
Darla says, “Oh, you poor thing,” and puts her arms around his neck. She says, “Don’t you worry; they’ll find him.” She can probably smell him there, his cologne, his hotel soap. Cheap beer. Clean sweat. Salt.
Michele takes a swig of his Budweiser. “Yes, yes,” he says, then swallows. “Then I go home. With Renzo.”
Michele doesn’t go back with Darla that night. It’s slow. Geoff comes for Chyna, and afterward he presents her with another gift, a hideous gold-plated charm bracelet. Amy and Bianca take care of a pair of mortgage brokers from New Jersey, in Vegas for a conference. But Michele and Darla simply sit at the bar, talking. Under normal circumstances this would piss Manny off, one of his girls spending an entire evening with a man without taking him back. Under normal circumstances he would sit her down in his office and tell her, “You know I don’t like being the bad guy, but at the end of the day I don’t give two shits about making friends. Because, honey, if you don’t get paid, I don’t get paid, okay? Ask for the fucking order.”
That’s the way it has to be. These bitches would run all over him if he let them.
But tonight circumstances aren’t normal. Tonight the thought of Darla—or any of the girls—taking the Italian back to a trailer for an hour, maybe two, makes him feel sick with something like jealousy. It must be pure hormones—he hasn’t been laid in longer than he’d like to admit. Or perhaps it’s the terribly familiar way the boy looks at Darla, his face flushed with booze and all the want and wonder of a child. He’s seen that look before, on men two and three times this kid’s age, men who knew better. He’s seen Darla take everything they were willing to give, and more. That’s what he’s always loved about her.
When the cab honks in the parking lot at five a.m., Manny helps the drunk, sweet-faced boy down the front steps. As the sun comes up, he stands alone on the porch and watches the red taillights of the taxi shrink down Homestead Road, then up the hill toward Vegas. There’s nothing but the lolling violet mountain range and spiny yucca and creosote and that taut ribbon of road as far as the eye can see. Poor Renzo doesn’t have a chance out here, and sooner or later that beautiful boy is going to realize it.
Manny imagines the Italian looking back at him through the rear window of the cab. The ranch the boy would see looks like a dollhouse, down to its dormer windows hung with boxes of poppies and desert primrose. The wood siding is painted the bright fuchsia of deep flesh, the country trim a chalky lavender. Back east this building would be a bed-and-breakfast; in the Midwest it would be an antique store. But here there is a red light attached to the weather vane, rotating in the dawn. Here, it is what it is. Manny makes his way out back to the peacock coop.
Manny was hired to manage the Cherry Patch Ranch one day when he drove out from Las Vegas, where he grew up. He was eighteen, had been hustling for three years and always knew he was destined for something bigger, though it took a tranny john whipping him across the face with a stiletto for him to act on that instinct. Jim Hart—fifty then, with the girth and slope of an aging athlete and a full head of black hair just starting to gray—happened to be working the door that day, a stroke of luck, because Jim never worked his own door. Bad for business. Jim took one look at Manny and waved the girls off, saying, “Sorry, guy. We don’t have men in here.”
And Manny, prepared for this, said, “Why not? You’re losing money, honey. You want to know what I get for a hand job with Rentboys? Three fifty. A hand job. And that’s off-Strip, okay?”
Jim took him straight back to his office with Gladys, Jim’s assistant. After an hour Jim said, “Look, guy, bottom line: Every other Tuesday I load the girls into the van and we go down to Nye County Health and get them all looked at. Every other Tuesday. And no legal hooker, not in the entire state of Nevada, has ever tested positive for an STD. Not even crabs. It’s safe, clean sex. That’s the brand. I bring men in here… I’m not messing with a good thing. That’s all.” He tipped back in his chair and put his pen into his mouth. “But a fag madam. That’s unique.”
That was fifteen years ago. Manny walks past the girls’ fifth wheels lined in two rows behind the main house like eggs in a carton, with the courtyard and swimming pool between them. Beyond the fifth wheels are the single-wide trailers they call suites. The Oriental Room, the Hot Tub Room, British Campaign. The thick black wires of the intercom system droop between the buildings. The pool is ringed with knobby salt cedars and adolescent pomegranate trees. Manny drags Darla’s picnic table back to the courtyard where it belongs, in the rocky dirt peppered with screwbean mesquites and young cottonwoods. He plucks a cigarette butt rimmed with lipstick from a struggling patch of sod, puts it in his breast pocket; then he slips out to the coop.
On paper, Jim Hart raised Indian blue peacocks until 1970, when he got his operating license. Prior to that, as far as the government was concerned, Hart Ranches made its modest living selling the birds to zoos and private collectors. In reality, Jim hated selling the birds and found reason to do so as seldom as possible. When the cost of the food and upkeep was considered, the peacock business barely broke even.
The girls always brought in more money than the birds, but it was a long time before the Cherry Patch Ranch was much more than two single-wide trailers on either side of the wide, airy coop. Then, in 1970, as Jim and his friends in Carson City had suspected it might, the state legislature outlawed prostitution in Clark County. Jim remodeled, making the ranch straddle the county line, with the trailers and main house in rural Nye County, and the peacocks technically residents of Clark. By the time Manny arrived, the Cherry Patch was the closest a brothel could get to Vegas.
His second week, a courier came out and picked up three sedated chicks destined to roam some movie producer’s estate in the Pacific Palisades. Manny found Jim sitting on an overturned feed bucket by the coop, bawling into his hands. When he noticed Manny standing there watching, Jim leaned back against the chicken wire. “Goddamn it,” he said, and pressed the heels of his hands against his eye sockets as though he could stop his tears that way.
Manny squatted in front of the older man. “It’s all right.”
“I know that, kid,” Jim managed to say, before he crumpled forward again, crying and hiccuping like a child. Manny held him, stiff and awkward as a Joshua tree, half-stroking his head. He was no good at these things.
They stayed like this a while, and just as Manny’s thighs began to burn from squatting for so long, Jim calmed and his breath steadied, but he did not lift his face. Instead, he put his hand on the back of Manny’s neck and urged Manny’s head down toward his groin.
Working Jim’s belt buckle loose with one hand, Manny was grateful as a pet: here was something he knew how to do. Jim finished in Manny’s mouth, with a string of quick jerks that scraped the feed bucket along the ground, then zipped his Wranglers and wiped his eyes. He squinted out across the sagebrush. “Jesus H.,” he said. “It’s like selling off one of your kids.”
From that day on, Jim never sold another peacock. He named the remaining sixteen after Nevada’s sixteen counties. Washoe, the eldest female, died in the winter of 2003, when coyotes got into the coop. One of her mates, Lander, died of old age shortly thereafter, though on darker days it’s not hard for Manny to convince himself that Lander died of a broken heart. Now there are four females and ten males, including White Pine, a rare albino, red eyed and completely white, down to his feet and the tip of his thick, five-foot train.