“What about Sweeney?”
Annie stood. She pulled a pair of sunglasses and a baseball cap from her knapsack and stepped out of the booth. With the cap slung on backward and the sunglasses riding on her snub nose, she looked about fourteen. “Sweeney? I don’t think so. Look, Baby Joe—”
He met her in the aisle and threw an arm around her shoulder, hugged her close to him. “Look nothing! You better—”
“Shh.” Annie stood on tiptoe and placed a finger on his lips. “I probably shouldn’t even have told you. You’re not going to write about this, are you?”
“Don’t insult me.” He walked her to the door, stood inside while she stepped out into the blazing late afternoon heat and shrieking tumult of midtown. “But you better call, hija.”
Annie laughed. “Don’t insult me! Friday—”
“I’ll be waiting.”
He stayed on at the strip joint after she left, checking his voice mail for messages, then leaving word at the paper that he’d be back late that night. He had a show to cover at Failté, a tiny downtown back room where a new band from Ireland would be playing after midnight. But there was a lot of ground to cover between now and then. It was almost one hundred degrees out on the pavement, and he’d already started a tab here. So he stayed.
Baby Joe hated places like this—too clean, too many suits, the dancers all commuters from Rutgers and SUNY Purchase working to pay off their student loans. Not to mention ten bucks for rail liquor and a DJ playing the Top Ten from the Jukebox in Hell. Still, he moved to a seat in front of the stage, knocked back a few more drinks and watched and thought about Annie and Sweeney and Oliver Crawford, about Hasel and Hasel’s widow and Angelica Furiano. During a break, he talked with a dancer who was doing her thesis on the films of Ed Wood. Baby Joe bought her a seven-dollar ginger ale and gave her the name of a guy in Atlantic City who’d worked on Glen or Glenda.
After that he lost track of time. Outside the air took on that lowering orange-purple glare of city night, the sky between the high-rises colored like viscera. But inside all was rainbow light and smoke, the a/c cranked all the way down to sixty, so that he began to feel sorry for the dancers, their goose-pimpled flesh and the way they clutched at their cheap silk kimonos as they strode offstage. He’d actually started to fuzz out on the girls, lost in his own dreamscape. It was seeing Annie again, and thinking about Oliver and the others—something he’d been doing too much of since Hasel’s death. He dipped his head to light another cigarette—he had myriad packs tucked into his pockets, like a hiker padded with trail mix—tossed the match on the floor, and swiped his long hair back from his eyes. And whistled.
At the edge of the stage, near the mirrored alley leading back to their dressing rooms, three girls stood watching him. Not the kind of girls you usually saw at places like this, either. They were far too young and brown, slender and restive as mink, their long dark hair pulled into topknots from which stray tendrils trailed like smoke. They reminded him of child prostitutes back in Manila, girls he’d seen washing in the runoff from hotel laundries. These three looked way underage, their bodies muscular and lean, small-breasted like young girls’ bodies but with swelling hips. They were barefoot, and naked except for copper bracelets about their tiny wrists and ankles and silver necklaces upon their breasts. They stood side by side by side, staring at Baby Joe with narrow black eyes and smiling.
“Dios ko,” he murmured. “New floor show.”
He stared back at them and finished another drink. His mouth tasted burned from too many cigarettes, and the vodka was starting to give him a headache. He knew he should think about paying up and heading out to Failté, but he wanted to see what those girls were up to.
He didn’t know how long he’d been watching them, but after a while he realized that the music had changed, from a monotonous downtown club standard to something he couldn’t place. One of those eco-techno anthems, all soft percussives and breathy vocals in a language nobody could understand. Only in this music there was the rhythmic pulse of the sea and a faint hissing sound, steady and measured as his own breath.
“Hey,” whispered Baby Joe. The girls didn’t move. There was none of the usual chatter between performers, just those intense dark eyes boring into him. “Nice.”
A moment later the girls took the stage. Not a replay of the same slow grinding dance he’d been watching all afternoon, but like circus acrobats vaulting into a ring. They leapt onto the raised platform, springing airy and careless as children through the smoke, their bare feet slapping the mirrored floor. Once there they seemed surprised: they stared giggling down at their reflections, pointing and hiding their faces behind their thin brown hands. Baby Joe glanced around to see if anyone else thought this was strange, but no one seemed to take any notice at all. The place had grown more crowded, but most of the clientele was jammed up against the bar. He turned back to the stage again.
One of the girls was listening to something—a cue, perhaps—poised like a Balinese legong dancer, her hand cupped around her ear like a curved leaf. With a cry she whirled on one heel and darted across the stage, stopping to raise her head. With murmured exclamations the other two raced after her, and began somersaulting and twirling, leaping to catch one another and racing apart again, like beads of mercury skimming across the floor.
Baby Joe watched them, breathless, his heart pounding. Their bracelets slid up and down, their anklets clattered as they danced and laughed, fingers brushing their girlish breasts and curling black hair tumbling about their shoulders. It was like watching the courtship of mayflies above a stream, all slender legs entwined amidst the ghosts of wings. In and out, up and down, until their steps assumed a pattern, the sound of their bare feet a muted tantara that was both summons and warning, and utterly hypnotic. And there was a voice as well, a woman’s voice, so low and musical it might have been inside his head, whispering.
It is time. It is time…
Baby Joe jerked upright: where had he heard that before? He shuddered and fumbled at his jacket, searching for cigarettes. His mouth was dry; he needed another drink, but before he could signal the waitress one of the girls ran up to him and struck him under the chin, giggling, then darted off again.
“Dios mio.”
Baby Joe began to sweat. It wasn’t just her touch, those tiny fingers skimming above the loose collar of his T-shirt, or the way her hair had momentarily fallen across his face, warm and oddly tensile. He looked about, even more uneasy; as though he had remembered a dream from his childhood in another language, a garbled message he had not until this moment understood.
All around him the room looked the same—too bright, the men at the bar stupefied with drink or lust, the waitresses yawning and chatting with the other dancers. But when he turned at the stage again it was like he was in a different place. The mirrored floor broke into motes of silver and brown as the dancers whirled and leapt, feinting and dodging some unseen foe. There seemed to be other things in the air as well—flies maybe, or were they cockroaches?
No. They were butterflies, great violet-winged butterflies that floated between the girls, as though the dancers’ soft cries had somehow been made carnate. Now and then a girl would leap as though to grasp one of the lovely creatures, but their slim fingers always closed on empty air. Then it seemed they would employ ropes to snare the butterflies: Baby Joe watched in dreamy amazement as thin brown cords whipped about the girls’ heads as they pirouetted and struck at the swallowtails above them. And somehow even this bizarre capering was familiar to him; as was the smell of something burning, sweet and pungent like katol incense, and the echo of that insistent voice.