Читать книгу The Last Queen of the Gypsies - William Cobb - Страница 11

5

Cedar Key, Florida

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, or be killed by wild animals in the swamps. They must not have seen what was in her (Minnie, herself, told Miss Hooten that she had been a skinny, ugly little girl, a “freak,” she called her younger self), must not have remarked her intelligence, or her sensitivity, or else they did recognize it and it frightened them terribly. “It’s history,” Minnie told Miss Hooten, “I quit crying about it a long time ago.”

Cedar Key was accessible only by water, separated as it was from the mainland by salt marshes and the Cedar River, a wide stream that began nowhere and went nowhere and was prowled by several giant manatees. There was a ferry that ran four times a day, from the foot of Race Street across to where the straight sandy dirt road that ran through Rosewood, twelve miles to the east, ended abruptly at the water’s edge, this the selfsame road that Minnie had taken four years before, along with Silas Frost in his wagon, from the anonymous crossroads where he had found her to the Frost household in Rosewood. From which, after four uneventful years of milking cows, washing clothes, and helping with the cooking, she had eventually found her way to Cedar Key and Miss Ida Hooten.

Minnie had to content herself for the present with only being a maid for the older woman. It was not that Miss Ida Hooten did not see the potential in Minnie; she was pretty, and she was shaping out nicely, and those eyes were a definite advantage. Miss Ida Hooten herself was a tall woman, slim, with high proud breasts and a crown of curly red hair. Her face had numerous moles on it, as though it had been splattered with brown paint. She smoked roll-your-own cigarettes and rarely left the confines of the hotel, instead sending Minnie to the grocer’s market down the street or to the liquor store. The other girls saw Minnie’s potential as a whore as well.

“Them eyes,” said Margaret Hilton to the girl, “they gonna do you right.”

“Yeah,” said Clare. “And you gettin yourself a nice rack of boobs, too.”

The biggest problem, as Minnie perceived it, was that she did not look as old as she was. She spent hours studying her face and her eyes in the mirror. Even with the filling out, she still looked like a child. Miss Ida Hooten did not consider that a problem at all. Her plan was to begin selling Minnie, in her own little frilly room upstairs, as a virgin being deflowered over and over again. It was a trick she had picked up in Storyville, using animal blood after the real first time. With that gimmick, and the mismatched eyes, Minnie was sure to be popular and certain to generate a lot of cash.

“But Miss Hooten,” Minnie said, “suppose the man comes back? You know . . .”

“Oh, they don’t care, dear. It’s the fantasy of it. Some men will deflower you several times themselves and be the happier for it.”

The older girls had piqued Minnie’s curiosity about what went on in the upstairs rooms.

“It’s a great way to make a living,” a girl named Barbara told her, “especially if you like to fuck.”

“I don’t know if I do or not,” Minnie said.

“Chances are you will,” Barbara said. “The only ones here who don’t like it are the dykes. But they manage to put on a pretty good act.”

By 1939, Cedar Key had become a mecca for the sport of deep sea fishing. With the waning of the depression and the new monetary feasibility of it, the sport was becoming popular again, and men and groups of men came from all over the Southeast to fish in the Gulf. Where once the harbor had been crowded only with fishing boats and shrimp boats, they now had to share with sleek charter boats. These men—salesmen, professional men, sportsmen, along with the men who worked the local fishing industry—made up the clientele of the Coronado. Much to Minnie’s surprise, even some women came to the hotel to purchase the wares of the prostitutes. Even though she had been raised early on in migrant camps and had slept nightly in the same room with her parents, and had, indeed, observed her sister fucking in the bushes with a boy, Minnie was virtually a naif in these areas.

One spring afternoon, as Minnie was putting clean glasses in their places in the downstairs lounge, there was a charter boat captain named Donohue Taylor Sledge drinking rum at the bar. Captain Sledge was middle-aged, with a flat belly and broad shoulders, and his head was completely bald and glistened in the dim lights of the lounge. “How much for that one?” Captain Sledge asked Miss Ida Hooten, indicating Minnie with a toss of his head.

Miss Hooten was perched on her stool behind the cash register at the end of the bar. “That one ain’t for sale,” she said.

“Why not?” asked Captain Sledge.

“I’m savin that package,” she said. “The man that opens that one is gonna pay well for the privilege.”

It made Minnie uneasy to hear them discussing her as though she couldn’t hear them, or as though she wasn’t even in the room. It annoyed her. She slammed a glass a little too heavily into its place and it broke. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, her head down, as she raked the broken glass into a waste can.

“Don’t cut your hand, dear,” Miss Hooten said.

“I’ll pay for it,” Minnie said, “you can take it out of my wages.”

“Don’t be silly,” Miss Hooten said, “forget about it.”

“Here, let me pay for it,” Captain Sledge said. He slid some coins across the bar toward Minnie. Minnie looked up at him and their eyes met. “Hey,” he said, “this girl’s got a green eye and a blue eye! I’ll be damned.”

“That’s not all that’s unusual about her,” Miss Hooten said.

“Whattaya mean?”

“Think about it for six months and I might let you see,” Miss Hooten said.

“Six months! Shit.”

“Anything worth havin is worth waitin for,” Miss Hooten said.

“Hell, in six months I might be in Tim-buc-too.”

“She’ll be here when you get back.” Miss Hooten lit one of her wrinkled cigarettes and blew the smoke at the ceiling. She took another drag and inhaled deeply.

Captain Sledge was looking Minnie up and down. He smiled at her. She was wearing a thin white cotton blouse and khaki slacks. She knew her breasts looked good in the shirt. “I liked the way you looked when you bent over to pick up that broken glass,” he said. “Bend over like that again.” She looked at Miss Hooten. Miss Hooten smiled and nodded. Minnie bent over, her rump toward Captain Sledge. A sudden rush of warmth washed through her. It aroused her to have him looking at her like that. “That is fine,” he said, “really fine.”

“Isn’t it?” Miss Hooten said.

“She’ll fetch a pretty penny, that one,” the captain said.

“Indeed,” Miss Hooten replied.

A girl named Paula, who was from Orlando, a little town in the middle of the state, offered to let Minnie hide in the closet in her room and watch. Minnie thought that would help her not be self-conscious and nervous when she started turning tricks, which Miss Hooten had told her would be very soon. She was anxious to get started.

As she sat in the dark in the closet, she thought about her family. She wondered where they were and what they were doing. Whether her father had found work, and whether they were hungry. She missed them, but the truth was she did not think she could have had better mothers than Ruby Frost had been or Miss Ida Hooten was. Ruby Frost was gentle and kind, and life there had been unhurried and pleasant; Silas puttered in his truck garden, Ruby (with Minnie’s help) cooked their food, and they spent a good deal of their leisure time sitting on their front porch and rocking. It was the first time in her life that Minnie had known there was such a thing as leisure time. She had thought that everyone lived and worked and traveled at the hectic pace kept up by her family and the rest of the migrants. They were Gypsies, yes, but Minnie didn’t really know what that meant, other than the times her mother or her father lapsed into a language she didn’t understand, or used strange words to refer to something she knew was called something else, like “diklo” for scarf or “glata” for the younger kids. They were no different from the other migrant families, and Minnie, in retrospect, supposed that they were all Gypsies, too. Her mother and her father had told them their family were Gypsies, so there was no reason to question it or to wonder. They had been told that their ancestors had come to America from Romania, in the old country of Europe. She supposed that it was simply like Ruby and Silas being colored, and their ancestors coming from Africa. But Minnie’s people were not colored people, were they? She could see, in the mirror, that she was dark-complexioned, that her hair was black and thick. And she remembered the old man, Alexander Mossback Frill (she forced the image of him burning up in the fire from her mind), had asked her, “You ain’t a colored girl, are you?” She had asked Miss Hooten, right after she had first arrived on the key, if she was colored.

“Lord no, child,” Miss Hooten had said, “you are . . . exotic.”

“I’m a Gypsy,” she had said, and Miss Hooten’s eyebrows had shot up her forehead. She pursed her lips in surprise, regarding Minnie as if she had just that very second appeared out of thin air, had materialized without warning right there in front of her. And Miss Hooten had said,

“Why yes . . . yes you are!” The revelation, which if she had just paid the girl a little more attention she would have known, made her eyes glisten.

Minnie heard Paula and her man (“Do not call them ‘johns,’” Miss Ida Hooten said. “They register in this hotel under their own names or they do not register at all.”) enter the room, Paula giggling, probably at some lame joke her man had made. Minnie put her eye to the crack of the not-quite shut door. She watched Paula remove her dressing gown and drape it across a chair. Then she pulled her nightgown over her head and stood naked in front of the man. Minnie inspected the man: he was short and plump, with graying hair. She could see the front of his britches poking out with his erection. “Get undressed, honey,” Paula said. She sat on the bed. Then she lay back and stretched out. The man fumbled with the buttons on his shirt and yanked it off. He undid his belt and let his britches drop, pulling down his underwear. His thing popped out (she still thought of them as “things,” though she had learned numerous other names for them) and waved in the air, as stiff and straight as a metal pipe. “Nice,” Paula murmured, “you got a nice one, honey.” The man approached the bed and Minnie expected him to climb up and assume the position in which she saw the Mexican boy with her sister, but to her surprise he didn’t. He sort of crawled up between her legs and put his mouth on her down there and started licking and kissing and munching on her, right in amongst her tangled black hairs. “Oh, oh, baby,” Paula said. She moved her hips and moaned. After a few minutes of this, she pulled at his shoulders. “Come on, honey, you’re drivin me crazy, come on up and fuck me good.” Then the man slid up and Paula opened her legs wide and then locked her heels over his back. Minnie could see his thing go into Paula, sliding in easy and quick, and they began to buck against each other, both of them groaning now. They went on like that for a while, until Minnie saw the man’s back stiffen, and he let out a long moan and then collapsed on top of Paula. He looked like he would be heavy. They were very still, except that Paula was running her hands up and down his back. Then the man sat up on the edge of the bed and Minnie could see his thing, not so stiff now but dangling down and gleaming wetly in the light from the lamp. The man sat there for a while, then stood up and began to put his clothes back on. “Come back, honey, okay?” Paula said. She was still reclining naked on the bed. The man did not answer her. When he got his clothes back on he left, without a word, pushing the door to behind him.

“Come on out, Minnie,” Paula said. Minnie pushed the closet door open and stepped into the room; Paula made no attempt to cover herself. “Well, what’d ya think?”

“That’s it?” Minnie asked.

“That’s it,” Paula answered.

The day was fast approaching, and Miss Ida Hooten put blue and green crepe paper streamers all around the lounge. She devised a raffle, with the winner getting to deflower Minnie. Tickets were ten bucks apiece, and most of the men on the Key at the time bought one. For the winner, the visit to Minnie’s room would be an extra cost, of course, the standard twenty-five-dollar fee, which, as was her custom, Miss Ida Hooten would collect and deposit in the drawer of her cash register in the lounge before the lucky man could mount the stairs. The raffle was so unusual and provocative that word of it spread over all that part of Florida, and men were driving in from Gainesville and Tampa and other cities to get in on the fun. Many charter boats with home ports elsewhere along the Gulf coast put in temporarily at Cedar Key.

And of course there was no way that Silas and Ruby Frost could not hear of it in nearby Rosewood. They had heard rumors of where Minnie was, ever since she had climbed out the window that night and struck off walking somewhere.

“Where she goin, you suppose?” Silas had asked.

“I don’t reckon it makes any difference to her, long as she’s goin,” Ruby answered.

Ruby had known that it was only a matter of time before the girl moved on, but she was with them long enough for them to grow attached to her. She was a sweet girl, but she had itchy feet, and itchy other parts of her body, too, if Ruby’s intuition was correct, and she would have bet that it was, and I suppose that the truth of my intuition is borne out now, proved, Ruby thought. The image in Ruby’s mind of the girl sitting in the ditch beside the road, just sitting there minding her own business like it was the most normal thing in the world for an eleven-year-old girl to be out there all by herself not knowing where she was nor where she was going, that image seemed to Ruby to define Minnie: that maybe that was her place, her home, alongside the road, and any other place she lit for more than a few days would soon start to get old to her. She had that Gypsy blood in her, all right, and she had told them right off that’s what she was, a Gypsy. So it was no real surprise to Ruby and maybe not even to Silas when one morning they found her room vacant, the window propped open with a stick of stove wood, and her gone, like she’d just turned to vapor and blown away. Like she just appeared out of nowhere, lingered, and then vanished, so that their little cabin was no more to her than the sandy ditch Silas had found her in.

Ruby and Silas had both known that it was dangerous to grow as fond of someone as they had the girl, someone you don’t have any firm ties to, either legal or blood or even race. Still, she had seemed close to kin almost from the start, moving into the little lean-to room off the kitchen, wearing one of Ruby’s house dresses that had been cut down for her, them watching her grow from a half-starved, skeletal child into a healthy young woman, Ruby herself the mother instructress when the girl’s first blood came, the nurturer when the girl was sick, putting cold rags on her forehead when she was feverish. Answering her questions, and some of her questions about what men and women did together were very specific, indicating to Ruby that she already knew the answers. She was extremely curious about all that. Only four years, but I knew you, Ruby thought, maybe even better than I knew my own child if that is possible, since he was a boy and then a man, with that core of mystery that is always there in someone of a different gender, even between mother and son. And I knew, could have predicted, that you would wind up right where you are now, before you have even lived out your fifteenth year. I’m just glad you didn’t mess with Silas, as some would have, and him an old man with a dilly that ain’t good for anything anymore except running water through it.

In the end there were forty-one chances sold, which gave Miss Hooten a quick profit of $410 before any merchandise had changed hands, so to speak. She promised to split it with Minnie, right down the middle, half and half, though her usual split was forty-sixty, so that every time one of her girls turned a trick she pocketed fifteen dollars and Miss Hooten kept ten, out of which came Miss Hooten’s profit, all the expenses of the hotel, and a bribe for the local police department. It was an arrangement that was fine with the girls, since in other houses they had worked they made less than half, and those 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.