And then there were idiots like her last trick tonight. She thought about him while the sky faded to gray and she walked slowly home. This guy, how stupid was he? What was funny, he even knew how stupid he was, and he kept talking about it with himself. First thing, after they got past the price and all that, him still leaning out his car window: “So, sweetheart, you clean?”
“Just took a shower, hon. You’re my first tonight.” She said it even though it was a lie and even though she knew that wasn’t what he meant. But she was feeling cross and cranky and wanted to jerk this guy around a little, make him say it.
“Yeah, that’s nice, but what I mean, you got a certificate?”
“What kind?”
“Jesus, girlie! You have AIDS, or what?”
“Oh, that.” Like she was bored, she dug in her purse, pulled out an HIV test card dated four months ago, showing she was negative. Silverfish got tested every six months, and she made the johns use condoms if she could. So her card was real. But the john said, “How do I know that’s real?”
“Beats me. It is, though.”
“I’m supposed to believe that because a whore tells me?”
“You’re not supposed to do anything you don’t want to.” She started to walk away.
“Hey! C’mon back. I didn’t mean anything by it. I’ll take your word for it. You look honest. C’mon, you and me, let’s go park someplace.”
So she got in, and they parked, and he had no imagination so it was a pretty easy trick, and now she was walking home, thinking about how even though her card was real she had no way to prove it to him, and he knew that, and he didn’t want to take a whore’s word for it but in the end he did because he said she looked honest. Herself, she’d have thought the silver hair might be a tip-off that some things about her might not be on the up-and-up. But it wasn’t about how she looked, silver or honest or anything else. It was about him wanting to get laid. So he believed what worked for him.
She narrowed her eyes when that thought came to her. He believed what worked for him.
A couple of days later she asked Jacky-boy if he’d have taken Lady Mary on if he’d seen her before Roach.
“Well, sure.” Jacky-boy leaned forward on the sofa and helped himself to a slice from the pizza she and Rainbow had ordered. Silverfish was annoyed because the slice was off her half, the anchovy half, but she didn’t say anything. Rainbow winked at Silverfish and reached for a pepper slice. She was resourceful, Rainbow. When she found out Jacky-boy hated peppers she started always getting peppers on her half, in case he showed up while they were eating. Silverfish had considered adopting that strategy, but she didn’t particularly like peppers herself.
“And if she was on her own now?” Silverfish persisted.
“I guess,” Jacky-boy said. “She’s little and she’s cute, except if she keeps getting beat up on like she is, she’s not gonna be cute long. But Fish, honey, I know you’re not asking me to mess with Roach? He’s a shit and I’d love to see him go down, but I’m not in that business.”
“But if Roach threw her out?”
“Can’t see that.”
“But if he did?”
Jacky-boy wiped sauce off his mouth. “You have enough school to know about ‘hypothetical’? That a word you ever heard?”
Silverfish shook her head.
“Hypothetical’s when you’re talking about something but it’s never gonna happen. Like, you know, snow in July, that’s hypothetical. So, in the hypothetical situation where Roach throws her out and doesn’t change his freakin’ mind the next day, I’d take her on. Rainbow, pass me a Coke.”
“Hey, Rainbow,” Silverfish said, casual, one morning a few days later, both of them just coming in, no one else home yet, “how come you don’t get tested? You and Danielle and Flash?” That wasn’t her real question, but sometimes you don’t start with your real question.
“What kind of tested?”
“HIV, girl.”
“’Cause suppose you got HIV and you know it? What you gonna do?”
“I dunno. Get medicine, I guess.”
Rainbow stared. “Fish, I never knew you was dumb. They got no medicine for that. You get it, you’re good for a while, years maybe, but then you die. If you know it or you don’t know it, it’s the same thing.”
“But what do you do if a trick asks? I got a card from the clinic says I’m clean, but what do you do? Don’t they ask you?”
Rainbow snorted. “Yeah, and just you try asking them one time.”
“Yeah, but still. You can’t show you’re clean, maybe they decide to go with someone else. You lose the trick.”
“Jacky-boy give me a card. Danielle and Flash, too. Look just exactly like that one you got, but didn’t nobody have to pull blood out my arm for it.”
“A fake?”
“Hell-O, Fish. Welcome to the world, baby girl.”
“You know where he got it?”
“What? The card? Some guy he know downtown.”
“You know the guy’s name?”
“Uh-uh.” Rainbow eyed Silverfish, interested in this sudden new direction. “How come?”
“Well, I got a problem. See, I lost mine.”
“So? Tell Jacky-boy. He get you one of these.”
Silverfish shook her head. “It’s, like, the fourth thing I lost. After my cell phone, and my driver’s license, and a little pin he gave me. I don’t want him to get all pissed.”
“Oh.” Rainbow nodded slowly. Because Jacky-boy was so hard to rile, when he finally got mad at a girl he really went off. There was always the danger he’d kick her right out. They all knew that and they were all afraid of it. The time Silverfish lost the cell phone, Jacky-boy blew up at her. All the girls were there when it happened and they all remembered. Being thrown out by your pimp, being damaged goods working these streets unprotected or going with whatever bottom-feeder would take you on after that, was a bleak prospect none of them wanted to face. So Rainbow could be counted on to be sympathetic if Silverfish’s big fear was of getting on Jacky-boy’s bad side.
“I’m gonna go get tested again,” Silverfish said, “but the clinic says they got a waiting list, a month.” That wasn’t true; for an HIV test the walk-in clinic would take you anytime. But Rainbow wouldn’t know that.
Rainbow, always resourceful, said, “I see what I can find out for you.”
Silverfish had never had a driver’s license and Jacky-boy never gave her a little pin. But Rainbow wouldn’t know that, either.
Two days later Rainbow handed Silverfish a paper with a name and address on it. “He ain’t cheap. You need money?”
“Thanks, honey. But I got some saved up.”
Jacky-boy gave the girls allowances. Some of them spent it all on shoes and makeup, but Silverfish was careful with hers. She kept herself looking good, of course — the johns had to want you — but her only extravagance was hair dye. She thought about the hair dye, and the care she took with the job she did, and on her way downtown she bought herself a wig.
She explained to the guy downtown what she wanted. It wasn’t exactly what he thought she wanted from what Rainbow told him, so Silverfish went through it twice, to make sure he got it. She gave him her cell-phone number and, just to be really safe, told him a name to use if he had to call, and a message to leave so he’d sound like a john making a date but she’d know it was him. Jacky-boy had never once messed with her phone — though he’d made her pay for the new one herself after she lost the first one — because she followed the rules, always answering right away when it was his ringtone, even if she was with a trick. And she always told him the truth about where she was, because sometimes he was watching from somewhere and just calling to check up. But still, she gave the guy downtown this secret code. You never knew. A few days later he called, and she went downtown during the day, after Jacky-boy had come by the apartment and already left. She was supposed to be sleeping, and she knew she’d be tired when she went to work that night, but she’d feel much better with the guy’s papers in her purse.