Boys Life

robe was creeping open. It hit me what kind of girl used bad words, and what kind of place this was. I had heard from both Johnny Wilson and Ben Sears that there was a house full of whores somewhere near Zephyr. It was common knowledge at the elementary school. When you told somebody to “go suck a whore,” you were standing right on the razor’s edge of violence. I’d always imagined the whorehouse to be a mansion, though, with drooping willow trees and black servants who fetched the customers mint juleps on the front porch; the reality, however, was that the whorehouse wasn’t much of a step up from a broken-down trailer. Still and all, here it was right in front of me, and the girl with cornsilk hair and a dirty mouth earned her living by the pleasures of the flesh. I felt goose bumps ripple up my back, and I can’t tell you the kind of scenes that moved like a slow, dangerous storm through my head.
    “Take that milk and stuff to the kitchen,” Miss Grace told her.
    The sneer won out over the smile, and those brown eyes turned black. “I ain’t got kitchen duty! It’s Donna Ann’s week!”
    “It’s whose week I say it is, missy, and you know why I ought to put you in the kitchen for a whole month, too! Now, you do what I tell you and keep your smart mouth shut!”
    Lainie’s lips drew up into a puckered, practiced pout. But her eyes did not register the chastisement so falsely; they held cold centers of anger. She took the tray from me, and standing with her back to my dad and Miss Grace, she stuck out her wet pink tongue in my face and curled it up into a funnel. Then the tongue slicked back into her mouth, she turned away from me, and dismissed all of us with a buttstrut that was as wicked as a sword slash. She swayed on into the house, and after Lainie was gone Miss Grace grunted and said, “She’s as rough as a cob.”
    “Aren’t they all?” Dad asked, and Miss Grace blew a smoke ring and answered, “Yeah, but she don’t even pretend she’s got manners.” Her gaze settled on me. “Cory, why don’t you keep the cookies. All right?”
    I looked at Dad. He shrugged. “Yes, ma’am,” I said.
    “Good. It was a real pleasure to meet you.” Miss Grace returned her attention to my father and the cigarette to the corner of her mouth. “Let me know how everything turns out.”
    “I will, and thanks for lettin’ me use the phone.” He slid behind the wheel again. “I’ll pick up the milk tray next trip.”
    “Ya’ll be careful,” Miss Grace said, and she went into the white-painted whorehouse as Dad started the engine and let off the hand brake.
    We drove back to where the car had gone in. Saxon’s Lake was streaked with blue and purple in the morning light. Dad pulled the milk truck off onto a dirt road; the road, both of us realized, was where the car had come from. Then we sat and waited for the sheriff as the sunlight strengthened and the sky turned azure.
    Sitting there, my mind was split: one part was thinking about the car and the figure I thought I’d seen, and the other part was wondering how my dad knew Miss Grace at the whorehouse so well. But Dad knew all of his customers; he talked about them to Mom at the dinner table. I never recalled him mentioning Miss Grace or the whorehouse, however. Well, it wasn’t a proper subject for the dinner table, was it? And anyway, they wouldn’t talk about such things when I was around, even though all my friends and everybody else at school from the fourth grade up knew there was a house full of bad girls somewhere around Zephyr.
    I had been there. I had actually seen a bad girl. I had seen her curled tongue and her butt move in the folds of her robe.
    That, I figured, was going to make me one heck of a celebrity.
    “Cory?” my father said quietly. “Do you know what kind of business Miss Grace runs in that house?”
    “I…” Even a third-grader could’ve figured it out. “Yes sir.”
    “Any other day, I would’ve just left the order by the front door.” He was staring at the lake, as if seeing the car still tumbling slowly down through the depths with a handcuffed corpse at the wheel. “Miss Grace has been on my delivery route for two years. Every Monday and Thursday, like clockwork. In case it’s crossed your mind, your mother does know I come out here.”
    I didn’t answer, but I felt a whole lot lighter.
    “I don’t want you to tell anybody about Miss Grace or that house,” my father went on. “I want you to