Redway Boulevard

by Rachel Maizes

At night the kittens lay pressed against one another in the cavity of Melissa's night stand, which she had lined with old pillowcases and shredded towels. During the day Melissa let them out to chase leaves and climb the craggy apple tree in the front yard, the same tree that she used to climb before she began standing on Redway Boulevard in her miniskirt and high heels waiting for a man to pull over. At sunset she gathered the kittens-they never strayed too far from her mother's house-and closed herself in her bedroom, lying face down on her twin bed, next to a wall covered with dark paneling. If her mother happened to knock on the door she yelled "Leave me alone!" without waiting to find out what her mother wanted. Sometimes a man came by the house at night and Melissa left with him, this time her mother being the one to yell "Come back here," or "Don't bother coming back," depending on her mother's mood.

During the day, while her mother slouched behind the counter at the drycleaner's sorting other people's dirty clothes, Melissa led men back to the house and to her room, where worn out stuffed animals perched forgotten on the windowsills and glittery lipsticks rolled around on the night stand. Melissa would have preferred to use her mother's room because it had an air conditioner. It was only a tiny air conditioner that dripped water on the stained carpet, but it was better than nothing when you were stuck in the middle of a sweltering east coast summer. Sweltering or not, there was only one room Melissa could fill with the chalky stains and musty smells of sex and that was her own.

Nights when it was too hot for Melissa to sleep, she slipped into her mother's room and lay on the floor next to her mother's bed. The air conditioner would come on as loud as an airliner and Melissa would silently rail against the noise, until the machine finally shut off revealing the sound of her mother's breathing. If Melissa was lucky, she fell asleep before another cycle began. She would wake up long after her mother had left for work to discover that her mother had covered her with a light summer blanket.


The sound of the doorbell chiming woke Melissa. She had overslept. She pulled on an oversized t-shirt and went to let Sam in.

"I don't have all day, and what the hell are you wearing?"

"Nothing," she said, and she pulled off the t-shirt and led Sam to her room, conscious of the perfect firmness of her naked adolescent body and the power it gave her.

"I told my wife I was going to the gym," he said as he yanked his oxfords off without bothering to unlace them and dropped his pants and his drawers in a heap at his feet.

No sooner had she lay back on the bed than he was on top of her, pressing a fat erection into her. She grabbed the extra-large tub of lubricant that she kept under the bed and worked some into her dry crack all the while repeating, "That's right, give it to me," a phrase she'd heard in a triple-X video that she'd seen at a friend's sweet sixteen party.

Sam had been the first man to pay Melissa for something she was in the habit of giving away for free. It had been a few days after high school let out for the summer, some six weeks before, and Melissa had been dragging herself along Redway Boulevard, her cut-off shorts riding up her butt and her mother's instruction to "get a job, you're not hanging around doing nothing all summer like you did last year," clattering around her brain. She was half-heartedly glancing in shop windows for Help Wanted signs knowing that she had waited too long and all of the jobs had been filled by high school students who were far more eager than she was to stand behind a counter all day and smile. She had just reached behind and adjusted her shorts when Sam pulled over in his red Mercedes and lowered the window. "Hey, gorgeous," he called out, but Melissa ignored him. He slowly followed her down the street, taking in the steady upward creep of her shorts and creating a minor traffic jam. "You need a ride?" he persisted. But she didn't. When Melissa turned off onto a side street, Sam followed. "How about lunch?" he called out to her, nearly colliding with the hot dog vendor who was crossing the intersection.

Melissa was very hungry. She had skipped breakfast and she didn't have money to buy lunch. She considered going home but all that was in the refrigerator was an unopened jar of peppermint jelly, a tower of baloney wrapped in wax paper, and some gradually hardening white bread. Melissa was convinced that baloney was responsible for the smattering of pimples across her chin and that pure spite caused her mother to buy it. "How about it?" Sam shouted, oblivious to the stares of passersby. Melissa was used to the attention of high school boys (short term as that was) but she was not used to the attention of men, not even homely ones like Sam, and just glimpsing him through the car window, Melissa could tell Sam was homely. Oil-slicked waves of graying hair rolled across his scalp, purplish red acne scars spread scattershot across his face. Rather than repelling her, it made Melissa feel safe. She got in the car.

He took off for a steak house and after lunch they went back to her house and she spread her legs while thinking nostalgically about the way blood ran across her plate each time she cut into the steak. Fucking Sam wasn't that different from fucking boys from school. He entered her when she was still dry, but it was quickly over. Despite the pain, a part of her liked it, liked the feeling of being filled up, temporarily taken over, it didn't matter by whom. When a man was moving inside her, she was no longer Melissa, she was Melissa-Sam or Melissa-Jack or Melissa-the-kid-with-the-red-baseball-cap.

When it was over, Sam had put fifty dollars on the dresser. Including her meal-which had cost a staggering twenty-five dollars-Melissa calculated that she had made seventy-five dollars for two hours of work.

With the money Sam left on the dresser, Melissa bought the kinds of clothes she thought hookers wore-leopard print mini skirts and elastic blouses, four-and-a-half-inch heels-and she began going out on the Boulevard every day. When pimps approached she lied and said she needed their help, that her father was a cop who was abusing her. They left her alone after that. Working the Boulevard wasn't what her mother had meant by a summer job, but it beat flipping burgers at McDonald's.


After Sam left Melissa smoked a joint and sat on the stoop of her house teasing the kittens with a piece of ribbon, dragging the blue strip along the broken bricks until the kittens pounced, or dangling it above their heads to see them jump and clap their paws together, all in slow motion, because that's how kittens move, gracefully and always a soft landing. When she tired of that she grabbed the littlest one by the scruff and laid it on its back in her lap and scratched its belly, but it still wanted to play and snatched at her hand like a ribbon and hung on with all four paws, nails digging into her flesh. She shook it off angrily and it bounced down the steps but charged back up a minute later, stalking her hand. She grabbed it again and flung it some ten feet into the yard. It landed on its side and rolled over and took off into the hedges.

Melissa wondered what to do with the rest of the afternoon. She didn't feel like working, standing under the merciless sun, tears of sweat rolling down her inner thighs. She thought about calling one of her friends but they all had summer jobs at fast food restaurants or the supermarket or had escaped altogether, working in resort towns like Fire Island and Montauk. The truth was they weren't her friends anymore. Not since she had told them she was screwing men their fathers' age. Maybe they were afraid she was screwing their fathers.

She considered going to the beach but she didn't drive and the vinyl seats on the bus scalded her ass. Last summer she rode her bike to the beach every day, where she watched the seagulls and pigeons score a free lunch off the discarded chips and half-eaten sandwiches sunbathers left behind. That was what Melissa wanted, a free lunch. Not like her mother who shed five pounds a day feeding the laundry and dry cleaning machines in hundred-and-ten degree heat for a paycheck that never made it to the end of the week. Or even like her father who had worked night security at the Oceanside Mall until he was shot trying to stop a robbery.

Melissa made more in two afternoons than her mother made in a whole week. And some guys were easy. Like the purple-haired kid who came just as soon as his dick touched her thigh, before it was even in. He left in such a hurry he forgot his wallet. A plastic thing, ripping at the seams. Going through it Melissa found a picture of his infant son, a gas card, and a library card. Funny, she wouldn't have pegged him for a reader. Melissa held on to the wallet for awhile but he never came back.

Of course when you came right down to it, tricking was no free lunch. She ended up at the clinic twice with rashes; the antibiotics gave her the runs. Then there was the guy who wanted to tie her up. He stood at the foot of her bed in his black jeans and black cowboy shirt, a stiff gas station cap square on his head, holding out a roll of laundry line that he had taken out of his backpack. "What do you say, babe?" He reminded her of a cousin she had grown up with so she let him, but only after making him pay double.

She had been hit once. A vicious blow beneath her left eye. She had covered the bruise with thick makeup for two weeks to keep her mother from asking questions. The thing was, the man hadn't looked dangerous. He was old and going soft, skin hanging under his eyes, his cheeks sliding off his jaw. He waited until he was inside her, pumping. Then he lifted himself with one arm and reared back with the other. By the time she figured out what was going to happen it was too late. He came right after he hit her, then pushed himself off and dressed as if nothing had happened. She lay in bed too stunned to move, spikes of pain hammering the side of her face. She hadn't even protested when he picked up the fifty dollars he had put on the nightstand and put it back in his wallet.

She almost stopped after that. What kept her going was the feeling that for the first time in her life she was good at something. Men came for one thing and they left satisfied. Even the guy who hit her had been satisfied. Maybe especially him. It wasn't like school where year after year Melissa overheard the same complaints directed at her mother, "If she would only pay attention, try a little harder, do her homework." And her mother would be forced to try to explain, "Well you know she lost her father when she was nine," or to apologize, which was worse. The terrible truth was that Melissa did pay attention, did try her hardest. Homework assignments might as well have been written in that funny script the women in headscarves read on the number 2 bus. In desperation, Melissa sometimes held the textbook upside down or read passages aloud but it never made any difference. While other students busied themselves finding the square root of a number, Melissa sat in class drawing pictures in her notebook of a mortarboard, knowing the picture was as close as she would ever come. But the worst part was waiting to be found out, to be asked a question she couldn't answer, hands of a dozen students waving madly, while the teacher waited, unwilling to believe that even she, even Melissa, couldn't answer such a simple question. When it seemed like the blood in her head must finally come pouring out her ears in rivers of shame, Melissa would guess, and the guess was always wrong, and judging by the laughter of the other students it was worse than wrong, it was downright silly.

Even at home Melissa failed to please. Her mother said what a beautiful girl she would be if. If she sat up straight. If she didn't bite her nails. If she smiled. But there was no if when she was with a guy. They were grateful for her young body and it didn't matter that someone else might have a better body, boobs that were bigger than six-for-a-dollar oranges, feet that didn't point back at each other like the head of an arrow. They didn't care if she slouched or cursed or showed a bad attitude. An eruption of pimples on her chin or forehead didn't put them off. They couldn't wait to drop their wrinkled slacks, to run their chapped hands over her breasts, to stick it in.


The pot had made her too lazy for a bike ride, too lazy for anything really except for letting men do what they liked to her or playing with the kittens or laying on her bed examining the dark lines in the wood paneling or the way the light radiated from the one working bulb in the exposed ceiling fixture.

She went back out on the Boulevard and waited. Waiting was another thing Melissa was good at. Lost in disjointed thoughts that rose in her mind like steamy breath and just as quickly disappeared, she never became impatient. She wasn't like the older women who approached passing cars, or called out to drivers, or flashed their stuff. She just leaned against the back of a newsstand and waited. When a guy pulled over she climbed in the front seat and directed him to her mother's house. Or if all he wanted was a blow job she had him park behind the supermarket or in an empty church parking lot. Twenty five bucks to suck some guy's sweaty prick. It was the going rate, but if she had her way it would be twice that. Melissa couldn't stand the view from a man's lap, every purple popping vein, each goose-pimpled hairy ball. It was a relief to make it all disappear in the cavity of her mouth. But her mouth was a small container for so much demanding flesh. The worst part was being an eyelash away from the guy's asshole. Half the guys had no personal hygiene whatsoever. It made her gag. Still, she liked the feel of her growing bankroll. She kept a small bottle of mouthwash in her purse and used it when she was done.

For the first time in her life Melissa could buy a slice of pizza or half an ounce of pot without having to steal the money from her mother's purse, which was empty most of the time anyway. Her pockets bulging, Melissa would visit the stores on Forest Avenue, cheap stores with merchandise piled high in wooden bins, underwear, pairs of sneakers, the left attached to the right with plastic, nesting bowls, plastic Madonnas. The Chinese shopkeepers had always trailed her through the store, waiting for her to steal something. (They never caught her.) Now that she had money, they nodded politely when she entered, wrapped an extra piece of tissue paper around her purchases. She imagined that's what it felt like to be Paris Hilton.

A week after she started standing out on the Boulevard, Melissa bought her mother one of the Madonnas. She thought her mother-who hung rosary beads from the corners of mirrors and attached a button to her purse that said "JC is my American Idol"-would like it, and that she might even put it on the fireplace mantle next to the picture of Melissa's father in his Navy uniform.

"You don't think I know how you got this?" her mother shouted, a sour odor filling the space between her and Melissa as her mother waved the Madonna and air circulated through the stained underarms of her blouse. She made a production of shoving the Madonna head first into the garbage, into the trimmed fat and entrails of the chicken she had baked for dinner.


Melissa watched the cars pass slowly by, drivers taking in the women with morbid fascination like the scene of an accident: A Cadillac SUV, quadraphonic bass throbbing through the body; a Jaguar convertible, top down even in the unbearable heat, the middle aged man at the wheel wiping his scalp with a handkerchief; a vintage Mustang, windows tinted black. Melissa's mother didn't own a car. Her father had driven an ancient Chevy truck that belched black smoke and wouldn't start half the time.

The Mustang slid up to the curb and the passenger door swung open. Inside, the driver shifted back behind the wheel. He couldn't have been older than eighteen. Thick coils of black hair covered his head. His feet barely reached the pedals. Melissa got in.

"It's twenty five for a blow job, fifty if you want to fuck me."

"What if I want both?" his voice was nasal and whiny.

"I'll do both for seventy. You gotta pay before we go anywhere."

He took five hundred-dollar bills out of a bank envelope. Melissa's hands began to shake. He held the money between stubby fingers. "What'll this buy?"

"What do you want?" The words caught in her throat.

"Let's go to my house," he said.

They left gas stations and pawn shops behind and drove to a neighborhood without sidewalks where homes were hidden behind elaborate landscaping. A gate slid open as he drove toward it and closed automatically behind them. The driveway was longer than Melissa's street. Though it was barely three o'clock in the afternoon, broad sycamore maples and towering pin oaks shrouded the property in dark coolness. Even the wildlife heeded the private property signs. No squirrels chased one another across the manicured lawn, no house finches or starlings called to one another.

Once in the house, he led her through a maze of hallways to a thickly carpeted room with oversized leather furniture and a video screen that took up nearly a whole wall, blocking the windows. He arranged himself on a leather armchair and from a hidden pocket produced a game console. Ignoring Melissa, he began to play a video game, controlling a race car that occasionally exploded in bright flashes of red and purple flames and then sprang back to life. Melissa sat on a couch, waiting. But he didn't seem in a hurry.

"Listen, you want to do it now?" she said after some time passed. Between games, he had showed her where the bar was and she'd poured herself a Pepsi and was eating fancy nuts from a can. They weren't as good as Planters.

"Right after I finish this game," he said. But when the game ended he started another and another after that. It was cold in the room. Unseen, silent air conditioning was creating a deep freeze. Melissa's skin felt tight where the sweat had dried and she was covered with goose pimples. She hugged herself to keep warm. After a while she curled up in a tight ball on the couch and went to sleep.

When she woke up, the room was dark. She had no idea what time it was.

"Hey-" she shouted, realizing all at once that she didn't know his name. "Hello?"

She wandered into the hall, which was even darker than the video room. The light switches, if there were any, were hidden.

She wandered down numerous long hallways until she found herself in an cavernous kitchen. He was at the table, eating a sandwich.

"Have a nice nap?" he asked. His feet dangled half an inch from the floor.

"That looks good," she said.

"Want one?"

She nodded and sat down while he went to the counter and fixed her a sandwich of mayonnaise, turkey, and bacon. He cut it in half with a meat cleaver and licked his fingers. When she finished, she wiped her mouth across her arm. "What's your name, anyway?"

"People call me Snake. My real name is Sheldon. You can call me whatever you like."

"Well, Sheldon, I don't mean to be rude, but are you afraid or something? It's no big deal you know. If you want you can just lie back and let me do all the work. That's what you're paying for."

Red blotches appeared in the center of his cheeks. Red blotches surrounded by pale white. "How do you know what I'm paying for?" He was shouting.

"Okay, I was just saying. I can't stay all night, you know. At some point you have to make up your mind."

"What's your hurry, you got a date?" He laughed, a bitter, nasty laugh, deep in this throat. Then he bit his thumbnail.

"Look, maybe you should call me a cab."

"Don't be so sensitive. Just give me a little time to digest my food is all. You want to see something interesting?"

"What is it? You have a dead body hidden somewhere?" She was still mad.

"Nah. Nothing like that. Follow me."

As she shadowed him down the hall, she realized she was several inches taller than him. He took a key out of his pocket, opened a heavy wooden door. The room was filled with glass cages and inside the cages, enormous snakes. Black cross bands covered their tan and pink skin. "They're boas," he said.

The room was hot. Much hotter than the rest of the house. It smelled like dust and wood shavings and an earthy smell she couldn't identify.

"How many are there?"

"Fifteen." He said it like it was an accomplishment.

Melissa noticed a cage in the corner of the room filled with mice.

He took a wire scooper and caught one of the mice. In the moment before he caught it, Melissa took in its delicate pink tail, its tiny pink forepaws holding a food pellet. He interrupted it in the middle of its last meal. As he lifted it out of the cage a tiny pellet of shit escaped it, falling like rain back into to the cage. The mouse scrabbled around the scooper frantically trying to escape. But it couldn't get a grip on the finely woven mesh. He opened the top of a snake's cage and dropped the mouse. The snake slowly turned its head and observed the mouse, but the snake was in no hurry.

"You want to hold one?" He indicated another cage, with an even larger snake.

"No thanks."

He lifted the cover on the cage and hoisted the snake which immediately wound itself twice around his shoulders and neck. "They smother their prey."

She didn't know what to say to that.

"Why do you keep the door locked?"

"One time a large male got out and ate one of my sister's guinea pigs."

"You're joking."

"It's nature."

"That's horrible."

"My sister made a big deal about it and now I'm not allowed to take them out of this room, which really stinks. What's the point of having them if you can't show them off?" He set the snake on a table top and took his shirt off.

"In here?"

"Yeah, won't that be crazy?"

He peeled off his jeans. Everything about him was small.

"Aren't you going to put the snake away?"

"Nah, it won't hurt us. It'll just watch."

It didn't take long for her to undress. She lay on the carpet and he lay on top of her, his compact body pressing hard against her abdomen and chest, flicking his tongue into her mouth, up and down her body, washing her face. He barely sweated and his breath smelled like the bacon they had eaten for lunch and also like sour milk. Her eyes were fixed on the snake which lay watchful and unmoving on the table.

He wrapped his arms around her chest and squeezed, hard, forcing the breath out of her lungs, bruising her ribs. She pushed him off and lay on her side.

"What's the problem? For five hundred bucks thought I could do whatever I wanted," he complained.

"If you hurt me again, I'm leaving."

"Okay, okay, you're pretty bossy for a whore."

He spat the word whore at her and it met its mark, covering her with a dark stain. She was like a bird trapped in an oil spill. Melissa had never actually thought of herself as a whore. She had never considered herself like the other women who stood out on Redway Boulevard. In her own mind she was still a kid. What she did with men was temporary, a summer thing, not who she was. It was a way to make some money. All of sudden she felt queasy. Her lunch rose in her throat and she was nearly sick on the carpet. "My name is Melissa," she said quietly.

"Whatever."

He was still hard. She could tell he was impatient to get back inside her.

She lay back on the floor, hiked her legs up. He lay on top of her pressing all his weight into her chest. She dug her nails into his arms. "Hey, that hurts!" he complained, but he eased off her chest. Currents moved through his body, waves that began at the top of his head, rippled through his back, cascaded down his short legs. Each thrust of his abdomen touched off another wave. It seemed to Melissa he was showing off for an audience and looking around she saw that they had one. The snakes and even the mouse were watching.

They went at it for a long time. Usually Melissa's mind drifted off during the sex, but this time she paid attention. She was alert to his penchant for squeezing, and when he went so far as to wrap his hands around her neck she bit his fingers and he didn't try it again. At times the sex was like a competition, at times it was more like a brawl. When Sheldon finally came, Melissa considered herself the winner. But when she looked up and saw the lump in the snake's belly she felt like crying. The other snake had slipped off the table and disappeared.

Melissa took a cab home. When she got there, she changed into a pair of jeans and shoved all of the clothing she had bought that summer into a large plastic garbage bag. She threw away too the lubricants and the jellies, the condoms and the spike-heeled sandals. She dragged the bag out to the curb for the morning's pickup.

Later that night, makeup scraped off her face, and traces of Sam and Sheldon showered off her body, kittens asleep in the nightstand and Melissa lying naked on her bed next to them, Melissa realized that five hundred dollar bills were at the bottom of the garbage bag in the pocket of the skirt she had worn that day. She hated to reopen the bag and briefly considered leaving the money there. If it had been only twenty five or even fifty dollars she might have. But five hundred dollars was a lot of money. Enough to buy new clothes for school so for once she wouldn't look like an orphan; enough to buy cigarettes and pot and a cell phone and maybe even an iPod. Enough to replace her torn book bag that smelled like rotten fruit and was stained and sticky from spilled Coke. Besides, she had earned the money. There was no reason to have it end up alongside empty cereal boxes and corroding batteries at the city dump. She threw on the t-shirt she had worn that morning and went back out to the curb.

She had sealed the bag with a stubborn knot which resisted her prying fingers. When she grew tired of wrestling with it, she tore at the side of the overstuffed bag, spilling clothes and shoes and jars onto the sidewalk. Reaching deep inside the bag she tried to find the skirt but it was too dark to see inside the bag and she had no luck randomly pulling things out. She dragged the bag back up the front stoop, leaving a trail of clothing and creams behind, and propped open the front door, allowing light from the hallway to shine in the bag. She had just placed her hand on the skirt when she realized the kittens had woken up and were chasing each other down the hall. Before she could close the front door they had bolted.

She searched for hours, shining a flashlight into the crowns of trees and under bushes, calling them by their names and making the hissing sound that had always worked to bring them back in the past, but without success. When she returned home, the contents of the bag were strewn about the sidewalk just as she had left them. She didn't have the heart to clean them up. Instead, she went to her room and propping her pillow by the open window lay awake all night, listening for the sound of soft paws.

© 2009 by Rachel Maizes.


Rachel Maizes writes and practices law in Boulder, CO. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The MacGuffin, The Barcelona Review, Eclectica and Offcourse Literary Journal. Her short story, “Retardo”, was named a Notable Story of 2008 by storySouth's Million Writers Award.