. . All this while killing time in Cleveland, waiting for the Mansfield john to show up to collect the girl, because against all odds he had sent payment in advance for an evening of pleasurable escort after succumbing to Shank’s well-polished pitch:
The girl’s name is Meg. Hell, name her whatever you want, but I’d like you to call her Meg when you greet her for the first time, my friend. Said girl being in the prime of her youth, fresh as a daisy and raring to go. She’d practically escort you for free if I weren’t around to mediate her desires, my friend, he said from a phone booth outside Ypsilanti, watching the girl as she sat in the car, fixing her face in the mirror. The Mansfield john’s number had come from a list of potential clients he’d been keeping, names and numbers whispered to him as he and Meg rambled aimlessly around the Great Lakes. OHIO MEN IN NEED, it said at the top in block lettering. Below were six names. He’d tried four of them already, with no luck, but this time he felt the guy taking the bait — a sense of urgency formed at the other end of the line as the Mansfield john succumbed to the image he had painted: a bright young girl entwined in a skein of sexual confusion, open to just about anything. A girl born out of the loins of Akron, smothered by a father’s touch, and then cast out to fend for herself. (He’d left out the boring details: the way he had come upon her small body curled up, asleep, beneath an overpass outside Port Huron; the long journey they’d taken around the rim of the state of Michigan, following the mitten, staying as close as possible to the waterline. He’d left out her delicate neckline and the shallow hopelessness of her gaze and the way he’d educated her in how to make use of her flesh to earn funds. He’d left out his former religious training at the Grand Rapids Bible Institute and the way God had failed to give him a precise indication of His Will.)
After that, he’d begun to zero in on a price, speaking to the image he had conjured of a somewhat dainty man in neat trousers, with the kind of studied, dreamy comportment you’d expect from a farmer who had gone into the seed business and left fieldwork behind for good; there was a hint of yokel in the Mansfield john’s voice, a bit of hick around his tongue tempered by churchgoing and Sunday-school teaching. Yes, there was most certainly some Bible study in the formality of his elocutions, and there was fear in the amplitude of his voice — just loud enough to sound natural. In the phone booth, Shank imagined Mansfield as a man with neat hair, parted clean on the lefthand side, held with a shellac of brilliantine, cut tight above the ears. His wife would be in the family room watching television, aware of her husband in the kitchen, maybe even listening in on his side of the conversation, which to her would seem naturally cryptic because he often made deals on the phone, talking about seed prices, the best hybrids to plant, the way to intercrop carrots with corn. With this in mind, Shank took care when the dickering began and told Mansfield, Just say soy if you’re going to bid lower on Meg, and alfalfa if we hit the magic number. Eventually the john said, softly, Yes, alfalfa is the way to go because it’s a versatile crop, alfalfa will do just fine in your soil if you’re lucky with the weather, and Shank said, Good, we’ve got a deal and you’ll be saving this little girl’s life, Mansfield, you understand, because she’s putting money away for college after being kicked out of her home for no good reason. Then he instructed the man where and when to meet, adding, Just give us a nod. You’ll see us standing around outside the Holiday Inn, and then go on and check in and I’ll send her up to you. You’ll know us when you see us. I’ll be the one with the big shoulders, and she’ll be the one with the sweet derriere.
Here we are, Shank thought (or maybe said) outside the hotel, waiting out yet another john delayed by his guilt and his doubts and the time it takes to check his morality at the door, driving north, praying for forgiveness, taking a rain check on his deeper principles while the dull fields fly eagerly past the bug-speckled windows. As Mansfield drives, alone in the car, his face will be composed — the same look he might have when teaching his Sunday-school class — as he reaches up once or twice to straighten his cuffs, or his tie, and assures himself that if he maintains a certain formality he’ll be able to justify anything he might do in this good world. When he gets to the hotel, he’ll be so enthralled by his own desire — acute, as solid as carved stone — that the rest of his life, the house and the business and his upstanding place in the community, will become nothing but a small white dot behind him, zipping away like the last of an old television image.
A bolo tie at his throat, fresh-pressed plaid shirt tucked smartly into his chinos, the john will unchain the door, let it swing open, throw his arms wide, and say, Come on in, Meg, offering up a room truncated and narrow, papered in gold foil, periscoping to a view of Lake Erie from fifteen stories up. She’ll go directly to the window and stay there, with her back to him, as long as possible, looking out, trying to fashion some drama. From the violent johns she’s learned that it’s best to build up an assemblage of gestures, somewhat vaudevillian and slapstick, around the act itself in order to preempt the hard, cold dynamics that otherwise set in naturally. (She would’ve got that from her father, an old tool-and-die guy; an awareness of the importance of the fine gradients, of using a micrometer, measure twice, cut once, and all that. .) Most johns were as hard as tungsten, as square inside as an unworked block. Behind her, Mansfield will cough a couple of times, unhitch his belt, and then approach her hesitantly. Beneath his facade of neat and upstanding morals will be a horrible goatlike presence, a humping energy that will arrive musky and damp, pressing up against her, moaning, reaching around to tweak her breasts. That much is certain. This john’s a connoisseur of dry, Shank had warned her. He likes it sandpapery and rough, no lubrication, none, nada.
As Shank waited for her down in the hotel lobby, he began to feel himself edging into pure speculation. He knew little about what really went on up in the room, but he had a basic idea and he could imagine, in general terms, how she coped. Most likely she’d:
1. Find a crass rigidity, all bone and sinew, in the brashness of survival.
2. Abolish the formality of her own flesh. Reduce herself down to an essence — hips, the arch of her foot and shoulder blades, the part in her hair, the fine down on her earlobes, the nape of her neck.
3. Assume a protoplasmic mobility; the creep of the protozoan, one-celled hydra, primal and original and eager to consume itself for lunch.