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The Cottonmouth Club was a low, ramshackle building on the corner of a dead crossroad. It had corrugated panels for walls, and more of the same for its roof. In places, slapdash paint suggested an effort to keep the structure standing. A single light, swimming with moths, illuminated the gravel lot, and a pole with an empty frame suggested signage that had decayed or been taken down or been stolen. Better days, Jem thought. The name of the bar was written on the side of the building, though some of the letters were missing. They’d discolored the panels where they’d hung, so when the VW’s headlights splashed across the galvanized steel, Jem could spell out the words for himself.
At the door, he showed a fake ID—one of the ones Tean didn’t know about—to the cue-ball bouncer by the door. Probably not necessary. Jem wasn’t sure the guy would have carded him, but it didn’t hurt to be proactive. Jake Benning from Wyoming was visiting a cousin, Jem decided. To buy stock. That made sense; they had to run horses around here somewhere. The bouncer didn’t care about any of that, of course. He waved Jem in, and that was that.
Inside, the club was almost as dark as the night outside, with only a few pendant lights oozing brownish light that did nothing to push back the gloom. A long bar dominated one wall, with bottles filling the shelves behind it. Tables held the usual suspects—a man in a stained undershirt; a four-top of glassy-eyed college bros; a chinless pair of men Jem thought might be father and son. Booths lined the wall opposite the bar, with sagging curtains that could be drawn to provide the illusion of privacy. Def Leppard pounded over the speakers. A few blocky TVs above the bar showed grainy images of what Jem took to be soft-core porn, but the real show was the stage at the far end of the room.
A spotlight picked out the pole at center stage, where a skinny girl in a bikini bottom hung upside down. Jem took her for young, but after a moment, he thought maybe she was just thin—drugs, or an eating disorder, or both. She slowly slid down the pole, her tiny breasts defying gravity and her eyes empty, until her head bumped the stage. A poochy guy was humped right up against the stage, with a spray-on tan and rockabilly hair. When he reached out to fondle her, a gold cross the size of a remote control swung out on its chain.
Movement at the periphery of Jem’s vision made him turn, and he spotted DeVoy peering out of one of the booths. Jem nodded and moved over, and no sooner had he sat down on the sticky vinyl banquette than a waitress appeared. She gave him a tired, marionette smile that Jem realized, after a moment, was supposed to be suggestive—to go along with the skirt that barely covered her ass and with hair chemically cooked until it was blond.
“We’re fine,” DeVoy told her over the music, and she nodded and shuffled away. Then his gaze swung back to Jem. “Took you long enough.”
“Sorry.” Jem didn’t have to pretend to be curious; he poked his head out of the booth’s enclosure, caught a whiff of puke clinging to the velvet curtain, and gave the club another look. As he watched, a heavyset guy in a biker’s cut passed a bag of what Jem thought might be meth to a white man with hair like a cotton swab. “Hey, this place is a little rough. Are you sure—”
“Do you have the money or don’t you?”
“Well, yeah, but—”
As Jem reached for his wallet, DeVoy lunged across the table to grab his arm. “Not here, dumbass!”
“Hey!”
DeVoy released him and sank back onto the banquette, holding up both hands—truce, not quite an apology.
“This feels messed up,” Jem said, sliding an inch toward the edge of the booth. “Forget it.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” DeVoy patted the air. “Now come on. You can’t go running off now. We got a deal.”
“What deal? You drag me out here to the middle of nowhere—”
“Look, man. You’re here, right? You want the bird, right? So, chill.” DeVoy waited, and when Jem didn’t move, he relaxed. “I’m gonna grab the bird. The one I showed you, right? Pretty little thing. And you sit here. Have a drink if you want. In ten minutes, you meet me out back. I’ll have the bird, and you’ll have the money, and we’ll both be happy. All right?”
Jem knew the right look: wanting to be tough, but uncertain, the veneer of aggression without anything to back it up. The way a scared guy would try to look if he found himself in a place like the Cottonmouth Club, if he didn’t know how to back out, or if his pride wouldn’t let him.
DeVoy grinned. “All right then.”
Then he slid out of the booth, crossed the bar, and disappeared through a door to the side of the stage.
When he was gone, some of the knots in Jem’s back loosened. He took a deep breath, pulled at his tee where sweat had bunched it under his arms, and tried to think.
The waitress passed again, and Jem ordered a Keystone Light. He thought maybe that was called irony, but he also thought if Tean had been there, he would have scrunched up his forehead and explained—or tried not to explain—that it wasn’t technically irony. The woman came back faster than Jem expected, and he gave her cash and shook his head when she asked if he wanted anything else. Peeling himself from the vinyl, he shifted to the edge of the booth for a clear view of the bar. The curtains blocked him partially from sight, which gave him an ideal way to observe the rest of the room. He sipped at the Keystone Light. The beer was mild, with a hint of the mineral-metallic flavor Jem associated with some other light beers. It was smooth, you could say that. Of course, tap water was plenty smooth too.
The too-thin girl on stage had been replaced by a taller, full-figured woman who, when she turned in profile to twerk, Jem realized was pregnant. The college bros, minus one, seemed to have lost interest, but lots of men in the crowd had perked up. Jem noted a few women mixed in among the faces; he’d been in strip clubs before, and he knew women were more common than lots of people believed, but these didn’t look like bachelorette parties or cougars on the prowl. These were hard-faced women in worn clothes, most of whom stared at their drinks and seemed oblivious to the music and catcalls and the representatives of the male gender who were making jackasses of themselves.
One woman drew Jem’s eye because she was laughing, glancing at the stage with no apparent self-consciousness before returning to the group of men and women she was sitting with. She was sharp jawed, and although it was hard to tell in the ugly yellow light of the club, Jem thought she was pale. Her blond bob was gelled back, and she wore a mechanic’s jumpsuit. Where a name should have been, the patch sewn onto the chest read FUCK OFF. She seemed to sense Jem’s gaze, sitting up straighter, scanning the room, and Jem drew back into the privacy of the booth.
What to do about DeVoy? Jem touched the pocket of his jeans, where he kept the telescoping antenna and the barrette. He didn’t have to check the paracord with the hex nut; it was a weight around his neck, the metal flat against his chest. Go out there? Have some fun? The thought caught Jem by surprise, and his first reaction was to remind himself that this was about someone trying to sell exotic animals, about someone doing something illegal, something Tean would have found abhorrent. But now, with Nelly singing over the club’s speakers, with Jem’s blood pumping faster as his mind played out scenarios, he couldn’t pretend this was about Tean. Not completely. In part, at least, it was because of the boredom. And in part, if Jem were totally honest with himself, because he missed this. Missed the shadiness. Missed the chaos. Missed being good at it. Missed, in a way he hadn’t fully formulated to himself until now, a world he understood.
A man broke up laughing at a table beyond the curtain of Jem’s booth, and another man shouted over him in a hillbilly twang, “Swear to Christ, man: sixteen and tits like a hog.”
Jem peeked out at the club again. The dancer had come down from the stage and was now grinding in the lap of a green-faced kid. The boy couldn’t have been much older than twenty-one, and if his coloring were any indication, his buddies had been plying him with drinks—and probably more than drinks—all night. A birthday, maybe. Or maybe he just couldn’t hold his liquor. As Jem watched, the boy leaned forward and puked all over the dancer. She screamed and slid off him to land heavily on the floor.
It was all over in a matter of minutes: the cue-ball bouncer tossed the kid out of the club, a fiftysomething woman in jeans and a polo came out to clean up the puke, and the screaming dancer was escorted backstage by a guy with zero neck. Another girl came out—Black, with a weave that hit her at the small of the back, and white tassel pasties she was already using to good effect.
For one last moment, Jem debated: leave, or go around back and find DeVoy. The rational part of him said leave. The part of him that sounded like Tean told him to leave. The smart, sensible, responsible thing to do was to leave.
But a question nagged at Jem: why exotic animals? Why a bird? Because of the conference? Because the town was full of people like Tean, people who loved animals? But that only raised other questions. How had DeVoy known to target them? How had he known enough about exotic birds to trap a potential buyer?
The responsible thing was to go home.
