Bull Mountain(56)

“I’d rather not talk about it, if that’s okay. I’m just here for a job.”

“Is that a fact?” Sarah picked up the carafe and poured the remaining coffee down the sink without asking if Marion was finished with it. “Isn’t it funny?” she said.

“What, Sarah? What’s funny?”

“How life is, you know? How all through high school you and all your perfect little friends never even saw me in the halls, never even gave me a second thought, and now here you are, needing something from me. I just think that’s funny, is all.”

“Yeah, it’s hilarious.”

Sarah snatched up the application from the counter. After a minute of cycling through a gamut of disgusted expressions, she tossed it back on the bar. “You’re kidding, right? I mean, you know there’s no way Punjab is going to hire you with your history.”

“What history?” Marion said softly, involuntarily scanning the empty diner.

Sarah mocked her and looked around the diner as well, then leaned in with her own low tone. “Everybody knows about you, Marion. The whole Gulf Coast knows what happened with you and your father.”

“He’s not my father.”

“Whatever you say, honey,” Sarah said. She crossed her arms and peered straight down her mud-splattered piggy nose.

“It’s not just what I say. It’s the truth. Nothing happened.” Anger was seeping in around the edges of Marion’s voice.

“Not the way I heard it.”

“I don’t care what you heard.”

“Not the way everyone else heard it, either. Your old man do that to your face? You guys have a lover’s spat?”

“Fuck you,” Marion blurted out on instinct. Her words dropped on the counter like a cinder block. Sarah’s sneer twisted into a smile—a freckled pig smile.

“Listen, Marion, I’m going to do you a favor here, since clearly you are lost and in need of some direction. You know the Time-Out over off I-65?”

Marion could taste acid building in her mouth. She fought the urge to spit it in Sarah’s face.

“I can see that you do. That’s good. I hear they’re always looking for girls like you. I bet they even got a late-night slot where that mangled-up face won’t be such a big issue. I mean, let’s be honest. Nobody goes there to look in a girl’s eyes, right? So why don’t you take your scary face, your family business, and your burned-up twat down to where you belong and do what it is you do. This here is a diner. We serve food. We ain’t hiring whores.”

Marion saw what might happen next in her mind’s eye. She grabs two big handfuls of Sarah’s tight red ringlets, pulls down and bashes her smug grin into the bar. Her nose busts like a ripe tomato, but Marion doesn’t stop. She keeps bashing Sarah’s head down over and over into the black-and-white-tiled counter. Screaming at her, wailing like a banshee about how she was molested and almost raped by her piece-of-shit stepfather, about how she was the f*cking victim. She keeps bashing and bashing until the fat girl’s face is nothing but pulp and her lifeless body goes limp. Marion lets it slide to the floor.

But that’s not what happened.

She just stood up, wiped the corners of her eyes on a napkin, and left the diner.

Punjab heard the bell on the door chime as Marion walked out, and came out of the kitchen.

“Where did she go?” he asked.

“You weren’t thinking of hiring her, were you?”

“Yes. I was thinking about it. She seemed nice. A little sad, but nice.”

“Well, then, Mr. Punjab, I think I deserve a raise, because I just did you a huge favor.” Sarah handed the application to her boss and crossed her arms. “Read it,” she insisted. Punjab put on his glasses and read the form.

“Marion Holly?” he said, a little taken aback. “As in Roy Holly’s girl?”

“That’s the one.”





CHAPTER





17




MARION HOLLY

SOUTHERN ALABAMA

1981

1.

The lights inside the Time-Out Gentlemen’s Club washed its patrons in sickly pale shades of pink and green. Other than the girls onstage, who were painted in thick layers of glitter and pancake makeup, everyone in the place looked like they were made of warped, sweaty plastic—carnival versions of reality. Not that they were anything to look at anyway, even in the daylight. Most of the gentlemen that frequented the Time-Out were long-haul truckers on the tail end of marathon crank binges, or obese married men from a county over with baseball caps pulled down low-profile in hopes of not being recognized—losers and degenerates, the lot of them. The place always smelled like a gas station bathroom someone had tried to clean up with a bucket of cheap Avon perfume, and the unwashed bodies of a dozen greasy men, sitting around tables scratching themselves, pawing stacks of single dollar bills, didn’t exactly help.

Marion set her drink tray down on top of one of the big PA speakers at the back of the stage, near the restrooms, and scanned around the bar for any empty glasses in need of refilling. Louis would be here any minute to make a long and shitty night a little less long and shitty. When it dawned on her that, for once, no one in the place was gawking at her, she slipped a finger under the neon-green string of her thong and pulled the uncomfortable thing out of her crack. She didn’t understand why she had to wear the damn thing. It accomplished nothing. She gave herself a good scratching along the back seam and lit a cigarette. She nearly hot-boxed the entire thing by the time Louis appeared at the bar. The barkeep, Todd, pointed in her direction and Louis made his way over. Marion dropped her smoke on the concrete floor and squashed it out under the toe of the ridiculous six-inch heels they made her wear.