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 betterâespecially 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 upâthat 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 conduitâa 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 worldâwhich was considerable.