who had worked with pimps had gotten much less than that. Miss Hooten believed in keeping her girls happy.
Minnie was excited. Just this once would net her $235. But she was thrilled just to finally get to do it and find out what it was like, and she was pleased that forty-one men had forked over ten bucks apiece just for the chance of going to bed with her. They had been looking longingly at her ever since her plump little breasts had made their first appearance at the Coronado Hotel.
“They weren’t all men,” Paula told her. They were talking about the forty-one who had bought chances.
“They weren’t?” Minnie asked.
“Three of them are women,” Paula said.
“How’s a woman gonna deflower me?”
“Oh, they’d find a way,” Paula said.
That information bothered Minnie only moderately, since she had heard the other girls talking and she knew they considered that being with a woman was only different from being with a man, not any less pleasurable and certainly not unnatural, as Minnie was inclined to feel it was, since somewhere in her past she had been told that it was strange and not right. She supposed, though, that she would get used to it. She was not locked into anything she had learned in her previous young life, since this was a new life with all new rules and possibilities. She was just anxious to get on with everything and she didn’t really care who her partner was as long as he wasn’t some pervert who wanted to knock her around and hurt her.
The day finally came. The lounge was crowded with men, and when Minnie came in there was wild cheering and applauding and stomping. The smoke from their cigarettes and pipes hovered against the ceiling. She became nervous and started having second thoughts when she saw the men’s eyes; they looked like wild animals’ eyes must look just as they are about to be released from a cage. Miss Hooten had dressed her in a frilly blue dress, with white lace at the collar and at her wrists and around the hem of the skirt. The bodice was tight, so her breasts were shown to good advantage.
I must be pretty, Minnie thought. Since so much had been made over her, she had lain awake at night trying—and failing—to see herself as men saw her. Up until now she had been shy and extremely self-conscious about her eyes, her eyes that had got her rejected by her own family and that everybody she came in contact with felt the need to comment on, as though when they looked at her that’s all they saw, a pitiful little girl with mismatched eyes. The eyes had provided a buffer for her shyness, though, when she was a little girl; nobody ever saw Minnie, they just saw a blue eye and a green eye, so the real Minnie was shielded from them as surely as if she had on a suit of armor painted blue and green. Her deviant contrasting eyes may have made her ugly, but they protected her. They allowed her to withdraw into herself as a counter to anyone who might want to reject her again, as she was convinced everybody wanted to do. Because of her eyes, she was alone in the world, cut off from everybody normal.
It would take Minnie a long time before she stopped thinking of herself as a freak. Her family had branded her, as certainly as if they’d pressed red-hot steel to her flesh. She didn’t think about her family much any more. The pictures of them in her mind had grown faint, vague, like photographs wasting in sunlight. Her father’s misshapen felt hat, jammed down on his head, and her mother’s cotton dresses, worn everywhere she went because they were all she had, were two of the few details that stuck in her mind. She couldn’t even remember what her sisters looked like, as though all that had happened to her, starting with old Alexander Mossback Frill, had erased a part of her mind, the part given over to memory, the part that assures us all that we are alive and that we have been living a life, accumulating remembrances of events and people that shaped us and that add up to who we are. That part of Minnie was fragmented, almost gone, had been since the moment they put her out of the car, so that when she lived with the Frosts she began being somebody new. She did not decide to do it; it seemed to be already decided for her. And she just was. The crawling through the window in the middle of the night (something she did not have to do and knew she didn’t; she could have left anytime she wanted to) was like being reborn into a new Minnie. She reinvented herself. She even found herself creating memories to fit who she had become, though those memories proved to be ephemeral and were soon replaced by others that were equally fictitious and vaporous. So her life was like a series of dreams that you wake up from and can never recall again.
It was Captain Donohue Taylor Sledge whose name was called. Immediately Minnie looked at Miss Hooten, who gave her the slightest wink. Of course it was a put-up job. She didn’t care; it was not her business, though she didn’t know that Captain Sledge had paid Miss Hooten an extra fifty dollars to win the raffle. (Later it would occur to her that Captain Sledge had probably paid extra to win the raffle, and Miss Hooten never made any effort to share that money with Minnie.) Everybody cheered and clapped him on the back. Captain Sledge was muscular, of just under medium height, with wide shoulders made bulky from years of working on his boat. His completely bald head was sun-burned, along with his face, and he had a little black Van Dyke beard around his mouth. His skin was ruddy, weather-beaten. His legs beneath his shorts were covered with wiry black hairs, and he wore a thin off-white linen shirt that tied at the neck. He had soft brown eyes. He was forty-six years old. That is: exactly twenty-nine years older than Minnie.
He escorted her up the stairs to wild cheers from the lounge. The old wide floorboards were so uneven they squeaked, even squawked like you were stepping on a small bird, when you walked on them, and you could stump your toe even under the fake oriental rugs that covered the floors. They went down the hall to the room that Miss Hooten had fixed up for the occasion, lacy green curtains, a matching spread on the bed. If Minnie was nervous she didn’t show it. Captain Sledge sat in a straight chair and watched Minnie take her clothes off. She was all that he had expected, compact, smooth, shaped as though with the fine hand of a master sculptor. Her erect little nipples stuck straight out. The hair at the bottom of her stomach was as thick and rich as the hair on her head.
“Take your clothes off,” she said, a slight trembling of her voice threatening to betray her. Minnie stretched out on the bed and opened her legs, the way Paula had done it that day. She could hear the faint male voices from the lounge below, occasionally punctuated with a laugh or a bellow, smell the high bitter cigarette smoke mixed with the thick, sweet cigar and pipe smoke that seeped upward through the cracks between the wide boards of the floor. She watched Captain Sledge remove his clothes. She marveled at the size of his dick (she might as well begin to employ the words for it that she had learned since she’d arrived there): it was much longer and thicker than the one Paula’s client had had. Captain Sledge approached the bed, and like Paula’s client, he, too, dropped to his knees and buried his face between her legs; Minnie tensed, then threw her head back and relaxed into the warm manipulations of his tongue.
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