“One of your dresses wouldn’t even come close to fittin her,” he said, “she’s a lot shorter than you.”
“You talk like she’s a midget or somethin.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, “she is.” He looked at the girl out in the yard. She seemed pitiful and alone. A small, lost child. But she wasn’t a child. She was a woman. He walked back down onto the grass.
“Y’all gonna take me with you?” she said anxiously.
“We’re gonna take you as far as Pensacola. Then you’re on your own. Now you got to get that clear, all right?”
“All right!” she said, and she tried to hug him, but she had the bottle in her hand and he skipped quickly away.
“Come on,” he said, “we’re gonna bathe you.”
“Bathe me? Why?”
“Cause you stink.”
“You gonna bathe me, honey?”
“No.” She followed him up onto the porch.
“Mrs. Mack,” he said, “this is Virgin Mary Duck.”
“I’m pleased to meet you, Virgin,” Mrs. McCrory said. “I’m gonna get one of my dresses for you to put on. Come on this way.”
“What’s wrong with my dress?” V. M. asked petulantly.
“It’s dirty, child,” Mrs. McCrory said.
V. M. followed Mrs. McCrory down the hall and into the bathroom. Mrs. McCrory turned on the hot water and the tub began to fill. “Is it a red dress?” Virgin Mary asked.
“I don’t think I have a red one. Maybe a nice pink one.”
“Shit. I don’t want no pink one.”
“Well, a blue one, maybe. I’ll let you pick it out.” They stood there while the tub filled up. Why, this is just a child, Mrs. McCrory thought. Lester Ray wants to take along a child, running away from home. I reckon he knows what he’s doing. The girl pulled her dress over her head and tossed it into the corner. Mrs. McCrory was startled. The girl had breasts, and a big bush of bright reddish hair down there. It was like seeing a full growth of pubic hair on an eight-year-old, with breasts to match. And the girl wasn’t much more than three and a half feet tall. She had a nice figure, but she was unfortunately ugly in the face. Well, Mrs. McCrory thought, she’ll probably grow out of it. Well, hell, what am I thinking? The girl is grown.
The girl climbed into the tub and sank into the water with a contented sigh.
“She ain’t no little girl,” Mrs. Mack said, when she returned to the kitchen. Lester Ray was drinking a cup of instant coffee.
“No, she’s not,” he said. “I told you, she’s a dwarf.”
“I thought you meant just little.”
“We’ll let her ride along as far as Pensacola, and then that’s it,” he said. “Whatever happens then, happens without her.”
“Why does she want to go with us?” Mrs. McCrory asked.
“I don’t know,” Lester Ray answered, “she just does.”
“All right,” Mrs. McCrory said.
The girl finished bathing and Mrs. McCrory helped her dry herself off. Virgin Mary picked out a green dress with little yellow flowers on it. It hung on her like she was a little girl playing dress up. They had to tie a big knot in the skirt up around her waist to keep it from dragging the ground. They were finally ready to go, and Lester Ray put his pillow case and Mrs. McCrory’s suitcase in the tiny trunk. He kept the bottle on the floorboard next to the driver’s seat. V. M. climbed into the back seat. She settled back. “All right, good lookin,” she said, “haul our asses off to Pensacola.”
5
1936
Minnie washed glasses and dishes, swept up, dusted, made beds, did anything Miss Ida Hooten needed her to do. It was not much different from what she’d been doing for Ruby Frost for the last four years, except that she no longer had to milk the cow and churn. Miss Ida Hooten ran the old Coronado Hotel in Cedar Key, that dated back to the middle of the nineteenth century and had withstood several bankruptcies and countless hurricanes, and still stood in the same spot where it had originally been built, turning its weathered-board walls in a kind of stubborn, passive defiance to the Gulf of Mexico, the source of the storms and the very reason and justification for the hotel’s existence in the first place.
Since its inception, the Coronado Hotel had changed its emphasis and its clientele several times. In its early days it was a boarding house for the commercial fishermen on the island who manned the fish and shrimp boats that plied the shallow waters of the Gulf, supplying the cities of Gainesville and Tallahassee with fresh seafood; for a couple of decades, after the lovely little island was discovered by wealthy vacationers from those same cities, as well as ones from further north like Atlanta and Birmingham, the hotel became a fashionable resort and was remodeled and expanded. Around the turn of the century, the railroad bypassed the key, choosing a route further inland, that took those same rich sun-and-sand seekers to areas further down the peninsula—Crystal River, Tarpon Springs, Tampa, Sarasota and Fort Myers—and during the first years of the Great Depression the Coronado stood vacant, battered by sea winds and inhabited only by sand crabs, until the arrival of Miss Ida Hooten. She refurbished the hotel and made it a house of prostitution, servicing the sons and grandsons of those original commercial fishermen who had once boarded there; by the time of Minnie’s arrival, the Coronado was thriving and had become the most widely known and most highly recommended brothel on the Florida Gulf coast.
Miss Ida Hooten (she insisted on the appellation) was born in Houma, Louisiana, and grew up there before she went to New Orleans to seek her fortune. She landed in the notorious Storyville district, where she gradually worked herself up to Madam in a house on the Rue Toulouse. When the Depression hit, she had quite a sizable fortune in cash, so she went looking for an investment on the Gulf Coast, making her way from Biloxi to Mobile, from Pensacola to Panama City, around the armpit until she came to Cedar Key, where she bought the Coronado Hotel. She recruited her girls from all over Florida; they were all beautiful, and none were over twenty-two or younger than eighteen, though the minimum age was open to speculation and, according to the Cedar County Vice Squad, was violated on a regular basis.
Miss Ida Hooten gradually learned Minnie’s story, as she was certain from the start that there was one. A beautiful young girl with one blue eye and one green eye simply turning up one day had to be rich with understory, and Miss Hooten patiently got it out of her. She observed Minnie (or Anna Maria; Minnie confided her Gypsy name to Miss Hooten) closely, watching her every move, talking with her, judging her. Minnie had an incorruptible goodness and innocence about her, in spite of her eagerness to commence her career as one of the Coronado’s prostitutes. Her parents must have believed that someone would care for her, that she would somehow be better off for having been left all alone in the wilderness, which she was, though in ways that her parents likely would never have dreamed. Or they might have thought she would die, starve to death,
