The summer had turned to a crisp-aired fall, which seemed to lift the spirits of the West Virginians around me and make the miners frisky when they came into the club. But it depressed me, and not only because I came from a hot, tropical climate. Buddy had deserted me. He had used me, finding a way around not paying for it while making me feel alive and wanted. Wanted just for me. But after that one tryst by the river, I hadn't seen him again.
And beyond that, Hoagie seemed to be moving to a new arrangement with the men who worked for him in the club. Hoagie was becoming niggardly with his pay to the dancers, and after a string of orgies in the club where Hoagie had allowed the crowd to get out of control and manhandle the dancers badly, the ones who had been working there of their free will began to drift away.
The experience of Estaban and the itinerant Hispanics he'd come to the club with seemed to give Hoagie an idea of how to increase his profit and lessen the dancer objections to the increasingly rowdy patronage. As the Caucasian and black American dancers drifted off, Hoagie was replacing them with Hispanics of questionable, at best, documentation.
It seemed an arrangement that worked to Hoagie's full benefit. Illegal immigrants would be almost as fully owned as I was. They couldn't complain beyond direct negotiations with Hoagie, who kept them cowed by his physical presence and an undercurrent of threat and cruelty. And, like me, they didn't require much investment and they had led such a difficult life that the arrangements at the inn were still better than whatever they had run from beyond the borders of the United States.
They also proved to be competent and eager service workers in the inn's dining room.
Of Estaban, the less said the better—especially in Hoagie's hearing. He had become almost an obsession with Hoagie, who virtually stopped taking me to his bed for several weeks in the early fall. It was always Estaban, and from what I could hear from my room across the corridor from Hoagie's nest, the fuckings became increasingly violent.
One night I could not sleep, having been awakened by Hoagie's drunken entry into the hallway from the club after a particularly chaotic night. Hoagie rarely became drunk, which was a good thing, as he was a mean drunk. But he awoke me with his slurred singing and his calling for Estaban. I heard him fling open the door to Estaban's room, and I heard Estaban's fearful responses to Hoagie's drunken commands and profanity. I heard Estaban cry out and whimper as Hoagie belted him one in the hallway outside my door. And then I heard the sounds of the rough taking from Hoagie's room. The pleas for mercy and patience from Estaban, the curses and rough demands from Hoagie, the cries from Estaban of being split asunder, and then the gurgle of Hoagies tightening grip on Estaban's throat. My hands went to my own throat at that point, and I had difficulty breathing just from the memory of Hoagie's ways and fetish. But most of all what I heard was the deafening silence thereafter.
The next day Estaban no longer was there, and the day after that, I passed down the corridor to find a couple of the dancers cleaning out the cell where Estaban had lived. Thereafter it became just another one of the cells where we took patron's for private sessions.
In Estaban's absence, I was surprised that Hoagie did not come back to me more than he did. But he didn't. And I was grateful for that. He was becoming increasingly violent in his sex taking, and more and more of the time he was drunk when he went looking for sex.
He still did bed me. But he was careful to do so only when he was sober. And he had a lock put on my side of the door to my room and told me to lock myself in whenever he was drunk. He said I was too valuable to him to muss up—that the patrons seemed to prefer me to the Hispanics who now predominated in the dancer pool. This too I should have been grateful for, but the change in staffing did, indeed, increase the demands of the patrons on my services.
Now when he was drunk, Hoagie would drag one of the illegal Hispanics into his room and I would cover my ears to the sounds of his rough taking. If from time to time one of the Hispanics just no longer was there, no one seemed to be the wiser or to think this worthy of comment. And Hoagie had now established a conduit—a source for almost expenseless talent for his club operations and for his wait staff pool in the inn's dining room.
As good as the Hispanics were at dining service, I was still much better, and, by Hoagie's direction, I invariably was assigned to the tables of the more important-looking diners. Thus it was that I was waiting on table the evening that the noted film producer, Walt Reardon, and his wife and son checked into the inn and appeared at dinner.
I had seen them roll in earlier in the afternoon in their big, black limousine. I'd seen their big, black chauffeur exit the driver's side and open the door to the backseat. What I'd seen emerging first was a shapely set of female legs. Mrs. Reardon was a real looker, but so pampered and polished and manicured that it was difficult to tell whether she was thirty or fifty. She stood there, cool as a cucumber, in her fitted tweed suit, sable-tail neck scarf and big-lens sun glasses, as the man himself disembarked. Reardon undoubtedly was in his fifties, but a very well-preserved fifties. A lion of a man, from his flowing gray mane down to his sleek, but powerfully built body. He carried himself like a man who was accustomed to pushing other men around, taking them on in battle, and returning with their heads on the end of his spear.
My breath was taken away, though, when a young man followed Reardon out of the limo. He was young, not much more than eighteen, and he was a lithe, willowy blond beauty. My thoughts went immediately to my young pilot. This young man had the same sense of diffidence and sensitivity about him. And yet he carried himself like he knew his full value in the world—which was considerable.
I was called gruffly back into the dining room, so I saw nothing else of them at that time beyond the beefy, dangerous-looking black chauffer walking toward the guest office. From where the limousine was parked, though, I assumed they were checking into the inn.
Of course, I didn't know immediately who they were, but one of the women in the kitchen saw me staring out of the window at them and walked over, took in the view, and whispered in my ear. "That's the award-winning movie producer, Walt Reardon, you know. He has a home up in the ski area up at Snowshoe. Probably there for the season. He often stops here in town for a night or two when coming up from Florida. This is the first time I've seen him at the inn, though. You'll need to look lively at table tonight. He's known to be quite particular."
"And so that's his son, is it?" I asked. But there was no answer, and when I turned I saw that she was gone, back to the kitchen.
This was a time when we were all staying out of Hoagie's way as much as possible—so I made a note not to screw anything up in the service that evening if the Reardons were seated at one of my tables, which I knew was likely. And Hoagie, as tightfisted as he was, had every reason for being in bad sorts. The basement club had been closed down for two weeks for needed renovations, the patrons having trashed it pretty good over the last couple of months, and not only was Hoagie short on the biggest-profit facet of his operation, but he had to cough up money for the renovations as well.
The service that night went fine. It was a help that the room was only half full throughout the evening. The Reardons were seated at the best table, in front of a fireplace set with a fire. They clearly were in a festive mood—at least the parents were. The woman was a stunning blond and, up close, she looked closer to thirty than fifty and thus must have been a stepmother to the young man rather than a biological mother. Indeed, the two didn't react to each other much—both centered on the father and seemed to be competing for his attention and approval.
The film producer was quite convivial that evening, and he talked freely with me as I was going over the unwritten daily specials and the wine list. He knew far more about food and wine than I did, but he didn't rub that in. The woman was sparkly as well and seemed taken with my Asian looks—wanting to know where I came from and how I had gotten here. And I spun the happy little tale I had manufactured to cover the occasional interest that was shown. For her and other dining room patrons, I was a member of the Thai royal family—which was so large and extended anyway that I could well be telling the truth—and was taking a break from my university studies to work my way around the States in flavorful jobs—perhaps to write a book about that when I returned to Thailand. The wife was enchanted and Reardon even showed interest. The son just sat there, looking at me under hooded eyes, a tight little smile on his full, sensuous lips. I sensed an entirely different interest in me than the parents were showing, and I had the sudden urge—which I quickly stifled—to lean down and whisper in his ear that upstairs I was Thai royalty, but in the basement of the building I was just a piece of ass that was easily affordable.
And thinking that thought, I looked again over toward the corner of the room, as I had been prompted to do several times during the service, to check on the bulky, black chauffer, who was dining alone, his eyes glued to my every movement, not even looking at the food he was slowly feeding into his mouth. I knew his kind and I knew his stare. He would have fit right in downstairs in the men-only club. His kind were the ones I watched for down there—and made every effort to stay clear of—promising to be demanding, cruel, and rough.
