Dancing With Venus

  Dancing with Venus

  Copyright © May 2010 by Roscoe James

  All rights reserved. This copy is intended for the purchaser of this e-book ONLY. No part of this e-book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without prior written permission from Loose Id LLC. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  eISBN 978-1-60737-588-3

  Cover Artist: April Martinez

  Printed in the United States of America

  Published by

  Loose Id LLC

  Chapter One

  The stars were gone, the moon had faded to a pale disk floating above the far horizon of the cityscape, and the sun was hard and hot two hours over Lake Michigan. Chicago, the great meatpacker, the city of steel, was awake and shaking its fist at the world.

  Jessie opened her eyes and waited for things to come into focus. A discolored ceiling with cracks in one corner brought to mind a spider's web holding a water stain in place. The smell of the old building conjured snippets of a mumbled, disjointed conversation. How 'bout a drink? I come to see you perform whenever you're in town… Not far away… Sure, we can stop and get a bottle… taxi…condom…

  She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and looked to her right.

  His hair was black with a pillow-head slop that reminded her of a Little Rascal kid. His shoulders were broad but not impressively so. The sheet covered his ass, and her recollection, while cloudy, was that there was nothing special underneath.

  Music played softly from a clock radio on the nightstand. Jessie closed her eyes and imagined the notes. They floated in a cloud just out of reach. Something classical. Something she couldn't name. Each pull of the bow across the instrument's strings danced on her chest.

  Her reverie ended with the music. The deep baritone of a Sunday-morning coffee-mug-hugging announcer intruded. “'Improvisations on a Theme for Cello.' That was from a live performance given by Miss Dionysius last year at Carnegie Hall. Next we have a more conventional piece from that same concert…”

  As much as she'd like to lounge in bed and listen, Jessie tuned the announcer out. No time… She slid off the side of the bed she'd won in their early-morning struggle of grunts and shoves, steadied herself on the corner of the nightstand, and searched the floor for her panties. She found them wrapped around the neck of an empty Jack bottle.

  Fifteen minutes later she stopped at a table beside the door to her strange bedfellow's messy apartment and perused some unopened mail. Jethro Sullivan. She cringed. She couldn't recall doing a Jethro before, and if she'd been sober enough to know, she might have found another candidate. Her Aunt Trudy would have said his name sounded too much like a cartoon character.

  The building was full of morning noises and unpleasant smells. A baby was crying behind an ugly brown door in the apartment across the hallway, a man sneezed somewhere to her right, and a TV evangelist was chasing demons on the next floor up.

  Down one flight, past a row of tarnished brass mailbox fronts she vaguely remembered being groped against, and out onto the three-step concrete stoop of one of Chicago's lesser examples of Victorian architecture, Jessie tried to get her bearings. The street was noisy and smelled like sewer and tar. The air was already hot and muggy. The bright morning sun made the top of her head feel like it would break off and float away. She could only hope.

  She plopped her Stetson in place, fished in her oversize purse for her mirrored Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses, and took refuge.

  A taxi appeared at the corner half a block away, and she tucked her purse under her arm and ran.

  * * *

  “Have you seen Bob?” Jessie leaned against the bar and watched a black kid she didn't know rack clean glasses behind the bar.

  “He's in the back.” The kid finished the glasses and walked off with a J&B box full of empty bottles.

  “Did he leave an envelope for me? Should have my name on it. Jessica Butler.” What she really wanted was something to make her head stop throbbing. She looked around the empty dive and tried to find the charm. The cozy atmosphere that oozed up onstage when she was singing. Just like Jethro, the Blues and Booze's morning-after appeal was lacking.

  Where's the fucking magic?

  She'd anguished for weeks over her upcoming pilgrimage. At first she'd ignored the oversize envelope that had found its way to the Blues and Booze. She hadn't been home for over a year and didn't relish her mother, the Good Ship Disapproval, sailing up her river. But the lure had proven too great. Wednesday past she gave in and sliced the top of the envelope open.

  “He said ya gotta talk to him.”

  She got her guitar out the stage prop room, leaned the love of her life against the bar beside her duffel bag, and headed for the kitchen.

  Bob Fletcher was sitting behind his cluttered desk in his T-shirt, going through bills. He looked like a surly black Buddha with a penchant for Cuban cigars.

  “Damn, Jessie, you look like shit.”

  “Drop dead, Bob.”

  Bob chuckled, chewed the business end of his cigar, and flipped an envelope across the top of the desk. Jessie stuffed the envelope in her shirt pocket and pulled out her smokes.

  “What's December look like, Bob? You still looking for coverage?”

  Bob stared daggers at a piece of paper with a lot of numbers on the back and grunted. “December's lookin' cold as hell, kid.” He dropped the offensive bill in a pile, knocked ashes off his stogie, and leaned back in his chair. “That's high season, Jessie. I don't know… I'll have to see what I can do. You know how it is. I've got the tourists coming in. Maybe you can drop your cut?”

  She jerked her feet off Bob's desk, pushed up from the old chair, and blew a cloud of cigarette smoke toward the ceiling. She smiled down coyly.

  “Not dropping my cut, Bob. Give me a call. See what you can do with the last two weeks in December and the first week of January. Do it 'cause you love me, Bob. Who else puts up with your shit like I do?” She turned and headed for the door.

  “If I book you in here in December, you're going to have to find something besides blue jeans and cowboy boots to wear. I mean it, Jessie. That shit's okay the rest of the year, but we get suits and swanky evening gowns in here during Christmas and New Year's.”

  “You tell me the last time B.B. King wore a low-cut full-length evening gown.”

  “Doesn't have to be a dress, Jessie. But even B.B. King wears a suit. I mean it, Jessie.”

  She flipped Bob the bird and left.

  “And get rid of that fucking hat! This is a blues bar! Not some goddamned rodeo joint!”

  Jessie gave the kid behind the bar the evil eye on her way out. She threw her duffel bag over her shoulder, her purse over the other, grabbed her guitar, and hit the street.

  Chicago had grown old. Or she had. She wasn't sure which.

  * * *

  At the bus station on Cumberland, Jessie made her way through the smokers, junkies, and soldiers gathered around the front entrance and got in line for a ticket. It wasn't that she couldn't afford to fly. She could. But she did most of her gigs traveling on Greyhound, and given the way things ended the last time she'd made a pilgrimage home, she didn't feel any need to rush.

  She put her duffel bag on the floor in front of door seventeen and found a place she could sit. The bus station was full of Chicago weekenders heading home. She put her sunglasses back on, pulled the front of her Stetson down, crossed her arms across her chest, and propped her feet on her guitar case.

  She had an hour to wait and she was too restless to sleep. She dug in her purse for some aspirin, chewed, and dry-swallowed two. She let her head nod and eyes dro
op, but generally watched for people to start gathering alongside their luggage.

  Fifteen minutes later the line started beefing up and she took up post beside her duffel bag. Before they hit Gary, Indiana, she was sound asleep. By two o'clock in the afternoon, they rolled into the station at Indianapolis. Her stomach was howling, so she sprinted across the back of the parking lot and bought some sliders and the biggest soft drink they had at White Castle.

  Jessie barely made it back before the bus left. She settled into her seat, enjoyed her meal, and let her mind wander. Twenty miles south of Indianapolis, anxiety jumped out and got a stranglehold on her.

  * * *

  The sun was hiding behind dark clouds that seemed to tug on the tree line in the distance, the grey dog was humming, and the other passengers had settled into quiet conversations or gone to sleep. The seat beside her was empty. A summer drizzle turned to a summer downpour as they continued south. Lightning off to the west was followed by muffled claps of thunder.

  It wasn't being alone, independent, and always on the road that made her chest feel tight and uncomfortable. It was the prospect of always being alone with nothing but her independence to keep her company that brought on the anxiety attacks.

  And then there was them.

  Jessie dug in her purse until she found her little black book. Not actually black. It was a small pink spiral notepad with the stub of a pencil slid into the metal binder at the top. She held it and tried to decide how her life had gotten so screwed up.

  At twenty-eight Jessie thought she harbored far too many regrets. She didn't know enough about other people's lives to have any idea. Since leaving home at twenty-two to pursue music seriously, she'd spent all her time wandering from town to town, small burgs and big cities included, and really had no idea what other people's lives were like.

  They started in high school right after that night. The night everything changed. This far removed the details of that night were sketchy, but where she put the blame wasn't. She no longer recalled the details of why she'd blamed her mother for her aunt's death. She only knew she had. Conviction could be much stronger than memory when you're thirteen years old.

  Jessie had gone to school one morning, still too young to make such heady decisions, filled with anger and determined to defile herself in the most unretractable way she could devise. She didn't want any take-backs. Nothing that kind words could fix. It wasn't about defiling herself. It was about telling her mother afterward.

  She'd picked Tommy Watson, the senior quarterback, for the deed.

  She'd walked into her mother's perfect kitchen that day after school and thrown her book bag on the counter beside a tray of cookies that were still cooling.

  “Hi, honey. How was school? Did you—”

  “I fucked Tommy Watson today. We did it behind the Dumpster at school. I think a bunch of kids saw us.”

  She could still recall her mother's face morphing into a mask of something—anger, fear—she was never quite sure. Whatever it had been had outshone anything Jessie could have imagined. Then the yelling had started.

  When the yelling stopped, her mother had tried to talk to her. The talk. The one about virtues and self-respect. Honesty and the good old what, when, and where of the down and dirty of sex.

  The last thing she wanted was to talk, so two weeks later it had been one of the Sanchez boys. That earned a trip to the doctor's office and the pill. She almost panicked when her mother went into the exam room with her. She didn't know what might be said, but the doctor was going to know the truth. Fortunately her mother hadn't shut up long enough for the doctor to get a word in edgewise.

  Her mother's reaction had rated a big number one with a bullet on her own personal hit parade. Jessie often wondered if things would have turned out different if her mother had known that Tommy Watson had turned her down flat. “Hell, kid, you ain't even got no tits yet. How old are you, anyway? Come back and see me when you grow up.”

  Tommy was right, and she knew it. She'd been tall for her age and flat as a board. Her legs were skinny, and her butt was as interesting as a washboard. Her ears stuck out, and she was covered in freckles from head to toe. Her strawberry blonde hair hung straight and uninteresting down to the middle of her back.

  She hadn't even bothered throwing herself at Fernando. She'd just borrowed his name.

  After that she'd devised a new way to torture her mother. She'd bought the frilliest, pinkest diary she could find and noted every one of her imaginary indiscretions in painstaking detail. Then she'd leave her diary lying around.

  What good was keeping the stupid thing if her mother wasn't going to read it?

  Jessie slid the pencil out of the notebook's spiral and flipped to the middle. In a meticulous, flowing script she noted the number—fifty-six—in the upper left hand corner. Beside that she wrote Jethro Sullivan's name. Then she proceeded to document, as best she could recall, her night of drunken debauchery with the man who had a water stain on his ceiling. When she finished she checked her notations carefully for facts. No physical description of Mr. Sullivan was included. Nothing personal about the man she'd picked almost at random from the raucous crowd after her last set. He was just a faceless name in the most recent incarnation of her pink diary. No longer meant to torment her mother, her little pink book was her scrapbook of promises not made and hearts not broken.

  She didn't think other women had little pink books full of faceless names. Her behavior had started as a propaganda campaign in her pink diary. A war of words aimed at her mother with the hope of… What? She no longer knew and wasn't sure she ever did.

  They were all just a blur. They were something that happened in her life like the passing of seasons or unstoppable changes in the weather. At times she thought that keeping them close, like favored enemies, was, ultimately, her way of keeping them away.

  The bridge at the Ohio River into Kentucky brought Jessie out of her reverie. They'd driven out of the rain, and she watched skiers chase boats up and down the river. The stop at Louisville was thirty minutes, and she spent that time at the smoker's corner in back of the parking lot talking to a trucker named Kevin, a man with a nice smile who was deadheading back to St. Louis. She thought, in passing, of giving Kevin the thrill of his life. She could tell he wanted to. She could always tell when they wanted to. A trip to St. Louis would delay the inevitable by at least ten hours.

  Jessie let the impulse pass and got back on her ride to perdition. By the time they left the Bluegrass State behind and crossed into Tennessee, the sun was getting low and she was curled into her seat, sound asleep in spite of the demons rattling around her head.

  * * *

  Jessie's cell phone woke her just as they pulled into Nashville. Groggy and sore from sleeping in a corner, she answered without looking at who the caller was.

  “What?” She was in a foul mood. When she identified the caller, she turned up the ire.

  “Hey there, beautiful.”

  “Who is this? Do I know you?”

  “How you doing, Jessie? Long time no talk—”

  Jessie snapped her phone shut, grabbed her purse, and pushed into the line of people getting off the bus. She knew Bernie would call back. What she couldn't figure out was why he was calling at all. Their last face-to-face had been over a year ago, and she distinctly recalled firing his sorry ass.

  She'd met Bernie in some dive in South LA. She was fresh off the farm, literally, and playing her second bar, just learning the ropes, when Bernie came up after her last set. There was a lot of smoke blowing up cavities not for public perusal, and she had a real live agent who was going to make her famous. His job was records. She'd continue to work the circuit and build a following, and Bernie was going to put her on every iPod in the world.

  That had been six years ago. She'd taken a lot of phone calls from Bernie that first year, listened to his high talking, even recorded a two-song demo. The last three years she'd heard from Bernie exactly once. That was at a meet-and-gr
eet in New York. He'd bought her coffee and she'd told him he was fired. He'd laughed the whole thing off, and she'd followed up with an official written notice scribbled on three panels of toilet paper stuffed in an envelope and sent registered mail. She hadn't heard from the man—until now.

  Jessie stretched and hit the ladies' room. Bernie called just as she was flushing. She flipped her phone open and held it close to the bowl.

  “Hear that, Bernie? That's what I think of you.” She heard him cursing as she closed her phone a second time. She grabbed a sandwich at the food counter and headed for the smoker's corner. This time when Bernie called, she just held the phone to her ear and listened.

  “Listen, Jessie. Don't hang up. I got us a gig.”

  She took a drag on her cigarette and waited.

  “In Los Angeles in two weeks. Studio work for a big name. There's gonna be a producer there who wants to look you over. Might be—”

  “I book my own gigs, Bernie. That was the deal. You were gonna get me the big record—”

  “But this is it! The real deal. This guy heard your tape. He wants you to do some album work for his singer. Then he wants to talk—”

  “I'll think about it, Bernie.” She closed her phone a third time. But she was smiling. She measured Bernie's sincerity by his persistence. He might not call back tonight, but if he called back in the next few days, then she figured there might really be an opportunity waiting.

  * * *

  At four in the morning, bleary-eyed and smelling pretty ripe, Jessie crawled off the grey dog in Memphis. She got her duffel bag and guitar and headed for the bus terminal exit. She put her Stetson firmly on her head so it wouldn't blow away and crossed US 51, where she dropped her bag and her guitar case and stuck her thumb out. The night air was cool and muggy. She could hear a train whistle in the distance and crickets chirping off in the shrubbery.

  There wasn't much traffic, and when three cars and a semi rolled past without stopping, she pulled her Marlboros out, sat on the edge of her guitar case, and lit up. Five minutes later trouble arrived. The police cruiser's light bar flashed to life, and the passenger window rolled down.