#8: I Do Not Want This

[00:00:05] Speaker A: Well, tell me. Well, I just couldn't. I couldn't possibly tell you. It's here. Can't you feel it? This whole room, everything is in color and I can feel the air. I can see it. I can see all the molecules. I. I'm part of it. I. I'm. Can't you. [00:01:00] Speaker B: To understand where I am now, I have to go back a few months. A few short weeks after turning 18, with a half tank of gas, chipped glitter nail polish, and a head full of crooked dreams, I took a trip to a neighboring county. About a half hour's drive from Hickory Bend. Faro Creek, Just a cracked stretch of highway before the interstate swallows you whole. The kind of place where folks pass through without stopping unless they have a reason. My reason was the Velvet Mule. The Mule sat just outside the town limits like it didn't want to be part of anything. A low slung building with blacked out windows and a busted neon sign that that flickered so slowly it felt like the place was trying to blink itself out of existence. It wasn't glamorous. It smelled like smoke, sweat, and Lysol that couldn't quite kill the sins soaked into the woodwork, the carpet stuck to your shoes. The music was always a few seconds behind itself, like even it didn't want to be there. But they paid in cash and they didn't ask questions. I liked that part. I started as a cocktail waitress, weaving through the swampy heat of beer breath and broken promises with a tray of watered down drinks and a fake smile. Some nights I wore less than the girls on stage. Some nights I made more tips than they did. I knew how to look at men just long enough to make them feel important, but not long enough for them to think I owed them anything. It's a tightrope, but I've always had good balance. A month in, Jimmy Coulter, the owner, called me into his office. He was the kind of man who sweated even in air conditioning. All gold chains and cologne. Strong enough to choke a horse. He. His desk was cluttered with old receipts, empty bottles and a half used bottle of Brut. He didn't look up when he spoke, just kept scribbling something into a ledger like he was pretending he could still do math. You got the look, he said. You could make five times what you're making out front. 10 easy, if you play it right. I asked him what that meant, but I already knew. Private entertainment, he said, like it was a college degree. Good money, good clientele. I told him I'd think about it. That was a lie, because something about that place had already started to hollow me out. Every time I went back, I left another piece of myself behind. I knew what I was getting into. Maybe that's what I wanted to get into, something I couldn't crawl out of, to be consumed. Famous, maybe, or just unrecognizable. I was already halfway gone. The rest of me didn't put up much of a fight. The night I said yes, they handed me a red silk robe and a bottle of peppermint schnapps, and Jimmy told me my first client was already waiting. He sat in the corner like a stain that wouldn't come out, hunched over, eyes glassy, tapping his fingers against his knee like he was playing some invisible piano. He looked older than he should have, bloated, soft around the edges, like something preserved in bourbon and regret. I recognized him immediately. Hank Phelps, Jesse's daddy. Jesse was a year younger than me in school, always wore her hair in braids and carried pencils behind her ear like she was born to be someone's assistant. She was the type of girl who cried when the teacher read where the Red Fern Grows. I remember thinking that was sweet. I also remember the day Hank Phelps left Hickory Bend. Some said he left his wife for a far younger woman. Others whispered darker things. It was seven years ago. Folks just stopped talking about it, like if you don't say a name, it stops existing. But I said it to myself the moment I saw him. Hank Phelps, and he didn't recognize me. Or maybe he did and didn't want to. His eyes were rimmed, red, watery, like he'd been crying for days or maybe just never stopped. He didn't touch me that night, not really. Just talked ramblin things. Kept saying he saw things he wasn't supposed to, that the trees whisper at night that there's something under Hickory Bend, something old that should have stayed buried. Then he'd snap out of it and flag the attention of the cocktail waitress for another drink. Bourbon straight up, I think it was. Then he would shift his attention to me and only me, as if I were the only person in the room, maybe even his entire world. He told me how beautiful I was and how he'd love to get me away from here, far away from here. He'd keep repeating that over and over again as he watched me dance across his lap, just him and I. But then out of nowhere he'd slip back into some bizarre monologue about missing hours, days, and weeks of his life. Said he wakes up places he doesn't remember walking to that night haunted me. Still does. It's the same creeping feeling I have this morning with the day rising slow and sickly over the treetops like it's warning me to turn back, like the sun's in on something and doesn't want to be. And that thing, that body still laying out there by the bend in Foxfire river, half in the mud, half in the water, like it couldn't decide which world to belong to. I wish I hadn't insisted on shooting the video with Beau out here. We could have done it at his house, in his busted up bedroom with that sad beanbag chair and his silly Bob Seger poster staring down at us. Hell, we could have done it anywhere. But I had a vision. I said I wanted nature. I said I wanted something cinematic, something. Something beautiful, something with trees and water and morning light, like it knew how to hold a secret. I didn't want a lonely room with a plastic fern and peeling wallpaper. I wanted grandeur. And I got it. More than what I bargained for. The body was fresh, face down, one bare foot, pale and slick, pointing toward the sky like it had been trying to rise but got caught halfway. The flies hadn't even found it yet. The water moved slow, respectful. I don't know how long I stood there before my brain caught up to my eyes. Long enough to feel like I was floating, like maybe I'd left myself behind and was just watching this play out from somewhere else. And now here I am, trying to forget about the body and instead remembering Hank Phelps, the feeling of him, that sour static in your bones feeling I got the night he looked at me and smiled, like he knew something I didn't. It started creeping in as I sat here in the truck, trying to keep my hands from shaking, trying to remind myself that I'm real, that this is real, that I didn't imagine that body or the river or the sound it made when I stepped in too close. It was the way he looked at me. Not just drunk or pathetic, though he was both. But knowing. You've got the look, he'd said, his voice gravel soft and wet with booze. Too good for a place like this. The same damn thing Jimmy Coulter said to me in his office, sweating through his silk shirt like a hog at a funeral. You've got the look. You could go far. You don't belong in a roadside dive like this. And that was months ago. I hadn't thought of it since, until this morning. Until that body. I should have taken his advice then ran, vanished into the night like a whispered name, just like he did seven years ago. There was something about the way he said it, like it wasn't a compliment but a warning. Dressed up in flattery. Too good for a place like this. That line clung to me, sticky and cold, long after the room emptied and the music died. When he slid the hundred dollar bill down the strap of my G string, his hand barely brushed my hip. Gentle, almost apologetic, and I saw more where that came from. Crumpled bills tucked into his wallet like they were hiding, stacks of them. He wasn't showing off, he was trying to give it away, like it weighed too much. Maybe I should have ran away with him that night. I remember there was a flicker in my mind that night. It lasted a split second of me climbing into the passenger seat of his dented, dust covered sedan, of heading west or south or just away, towards some place that didn't smell like despair, where nobody knew my name or my body or my dreams. But then he looked at me again and I saw something buried deep in his eyes. Not lust, not longing, dread. He was afraid. Not of me, not even of dying, but of something else, something that followed him, clung to his skin, it hid behind his teeth when he talked too long. And even with that wallet full of cash and with the road yawning like a promise, I stayed. I smiled, I did the rest of my shift, I got in my car, I drove home, and I never saw him again. And much later that night, in the split second before I fell asleep, I remember thinking Hank Phelps. He was like a ghost making his last.