Easy Prey

feet to the right, that way.” Jimmy moved it, and Plain looked around. “Everybody ready? Alie’e, remember the line. Clark, are you ready?”
    The welder said, “Yeah, I’m ready. Was that enough sparks?”
    “Sparks were fine, sparks were good,” Plain said. “You’re the only fucking professional working here this morning.” He looked back at Alie’e. “Now, don’t fucking pout—blow right through the line. . . .”
    ALIE’E WAITED PATIENTLY until her mouth was fixed, staring blankly past the makeup artist’s ear as a bit of color was patched into the left corner of her lower lip; Jax said into her ear, “Love you. You’re doing great, you look great.” Alie’e barely heard him. She was seeing herself walking the plank, the vision of herself that came from Plain’s mind.
    When her mouth was done, she stepped back to her starting mark. Jax got out of the way, and when Plain said, “Go,” Alie’e got her expression right, started down the plank with a lanky, hip-swinging stride, and blew past the exposure line, the green dress swirling about her hips, the orange-yellow welder’s sparks flashing in the background. The stink and smoke of the burning metal curled around her as Plain, standing behind the camera, fired the bank of strobes.
    “Better,” Plain said, stepping toward her. “A little fuckin’ better.”
     
 
THEY’D BEEN WORKING for two hours in the belly of the grain barge. The barge was a gift: a pilot on the Greek-owned Mississippi towboat Treponema had driven it into a protective abutment around a bridge piling. The damaged barge had been floated to the Anshiser repair yard in St. Paul, where welders cut away the buckled hull plates and prepared to burn on new ones. Plain spotted the disemboweled hulk while scouting for photo locations. He made a deal with Archer Daniels Midland, the barge owner: Delay repairs for a week, and ADM would make Vogue. The people who ran ADM couldn’t think of a good reason why the company would worry about Vogue , but their publicity ladies were wetting their pants, so they said okay and the deal was made.
     
 
THEY WERE STILL working with the green dress when a team from TV3 showed up, and they all took a break. Alie’e goofed around, for the camera, with Jax, showing a little skin, doing a long, slow, rolling tongue-kiss, which the camera crew asked them to redo twice, once as a silhouette. The interviewer for TV3, a square-jawed ex-jock with bleached teeth and a smile he’d perfected in his bathroom mirror, said, after the cameras shut down, “It’s a slow day. I think we’ll lead the news with this.”
    Nobody asked why it was news: they all lived with cameras, and assumed that it was.
     
 
TWO HOURS FOR four different shots, with and without fans, two rolls of high-saturation Fujichrome film for each of the shots. The Fuji would make the colors pop. Plain pronounced himself satisfied with the green dress, and they moved on.
    The next pose involved a torn T-shirt and a pair of male-look women’s briefs, complete with the vented front. Alie’e and Jax moved against the far hull and a little shadow, and Alie’e turned her back to the photo crowd and peeled off the green dress. She’d been nude beneath the dress; anything else would ruin the line.
    She was aware of her nudity but not self-conscious about it, as she had been at first. Her first jobs had been as one model in a group, and they usually changed all at once; she was simply one naked woman among several. By the time she started up the ladder to stardom, to individual attention, she’d become as conditioned to public nudity as a striptease dancer.
    Even more than that. She’d worked in Europe, with the Germans, and total nudity wasn’t uncommon in fashion work. She remembered the first time she’d had her pubic hair brushed out, fluffed up. The brusher had been a thirty-something guy who’d squatted in front of her, smoking a cigarette while he brushed her, and then did a quick trim with a pair of barber scissors, all with the emotional neutrality of a postman sorting letters. Then the photographer came over to take a look, suggested a couple of extra snips. Her body might as well have been an apple. . . .
    You want privacy? You turn your back. . . .
     
 
ALIE’E MAISON—“AH - LEE-AY May-Sone”—had been born Sharon Olson in Burnt River, Minnesota. Until she was seventeen, she’d lived with her parents and her brother, Tom, in a robin’s-egg-blue rambler