Righteous03 - The Wicked Read Free Page A

kind of bar. Three almost-nude women gyrated on a stage. The closest was an attractive but hard-faced blonde woman with breasts jiggling like over-filled water balloons, rigid and at a right angle from her body. The woman caught Eliza’s eye, gave her a leering smile and wrapped her legs around the metal pole that thrust obscenely from the stage. Eliza looked away. She almost turned around and walked out.
    No, you’re not giving up now. You’re strong and you can do this. Eliza pretended it was Jacob’s voice urging her forward, and this gave her just enough courage to go on.
    And then she spotted her brother, David, sitting alone near the stage, with a drink in front of him and a stack of five-dollar bills. Eliza slid in next to him, but he didn’t look up, and instead kept his eyes fixed on the dancer.
    “Can I sit down?” She had to shout to be heard over the pulsing music.
    “Sorry, no lap dance,” David said, without bothering to look at her. “I’m practically tapped out.”
    David took one of the five-dollar bills and shoved it in the stripper’s g-string, already feathered with bills. For this, she gave him a private show that lasted ten, fifteen seconds, before she moved away in an overpowering cloud of perfume, with a strut and a sneering look at the men around the stage that said, You can look, but you can never touch.
    Eliza found herself repelled by the woman, but then the stripper turned toward the back of the stage to give way to another dancer and the mask slipped. For an instant, Eliza saw behind the catty expression to a tired woman near the end of a long shift. It was a look Eliza saw every night at the restaurant. A student who’d been racing back and forth to the kitchen all night who now needed to go home and cram for his biology final. A woman anxious to get home to her husband, just back from deployment. This stripper, Eliza realized with a pang of shame at her initial judgment, might have a sick child at home, or a rent check due. When the woman reached the back of the stage, she wrapped her legs around the pole and thrust in time to the music.
    “Man, those were some ugly tits,” David said.
    “Then why did you pay her to shake them at you?”
    “Boobs are boobs. Even the bad ones aren’t half bad.” David shrugged, finished his drink with a clink of ice cubes, then waved for the bartender to get him another. He still didn’t look in Eliza’s direction. “Yeah, they’re probably all fake in this joint.”
    She found herself studying the blonde woman again. All she had to compare them to were her own and no, her breasts didn’t look anything like that. “But how can you tell they’re fake?”
    “Come on, boobs don’t stand up like that. Those suckers float like helium balloons, except they’re harder than the bunions on my grannie’s feet. I can still feel where she whacked me in the head, probably leave a goose egg. Do you girls all have to get boob jobs? I think the average guy prefers them natural, even if they’re on the small side.”
    “I wouldn’t know anything about that, and anyway, I’m not exactly comfortable discussing my breasts with my own brother.”
    David turned with a sharp expression which widened into surprise. “Eliza? Goddamn it!”
    “That’s not really necessary. You seem to be damning yourself well enough on your own.”
    “Who sent you, Jacob? He can kiss my ass. And pass my well-wishes to the old man. He can kiss my ass, too. Oh, and all his wives too, and all my brothers and sisters and half brothers and half sisters. All the whole inbred clan can kiss my apostate ass.”
    “Is the vulgarity really necessary?”
    David scoffed. “Liz, you’re in a strip club. In case you didn’t notice, you left Utah about twenty miles back. And you left the nineteenth century as soon as you drove out of Blister Creek.” He looked her up and down. “At least you got rid of the prairie dress and pony tails, that’s something, I guess. Oh, right,