Written by guest author Ted Wallenius

This story is part of the project A Writer’s Shindig. Ted Wallenius’s story is the fifth of 6 short stories written for the project. You can read more about our collaboration and read all the stories posted thus far at A Writer’s Shindig.

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“I feel free,” Two-Cents thought.

A moment later he remembered the double white lines of delicious Bolivian marching powder he and Janey Jones had just hoovered up in the bathroom. The bathroom was neither men’s nor women’s; it was just a bathroom, with clean towels, artwork including a small statue of a wild horse, and matching color potpourri.

Two-Cents thought, “That’s usually when they shoot you.”

He took a look around the front room. There wasn’t a gun or a uniform in sight. Just the girls and the bartender, a big kid with a crew cut and a barrel chest who probably hadn’t poured a drink all night. People didn’t go to the Broken Pony to drink, and if they were there under false pretenses they were quickly made to feel they needed to go somewhere else, across Highway 50 to the Corner Bar, for instance. The bartender at the Broken Pony was an expert at making people feel they needed to move on. It was a business, after all; there was competition right across the street, in those pink cottages with their lace curtains and silk sheets on the beds that was on Home Box Office back around the turn of the millennium.

Nevada was the only state in the Union that admitted the world’s oldest profession existed, making it legal in any county with less than 700,000 residents and no contradicting ordinance. Brothels paid an estimated half a million tax dollars per year in Lyon County, where the Broken Pony was located, and where girls as young as eighteen could do it legally. The Covid-19 epidemic and resulting regulations were devastating to the business, but now Lyon County was growing. Elon Musk had come, searching for a new mineral fortune in the form of lithium for his batteries, and bringing with him thousands of workers, many of whom were away from their families and church groups and lonely for the sorts of company the brothels could provide.

There were many requirements for the operation of a brothel. All workers had to be licensed, documented, and were required to pay taxes on their proceeds. The sex workers underwent required weekly checks for gonorrhea and chlamydia with a licensed physician, and once a month for HIV and syphilis. In 2009, Heidi Fleiss applied to start a male brothel, and urethral inspections were added to the list so boys could participate as well. Before any act with a customer began, a physical inspection of the client’s genitalia was conducted. Condoms were required for oral, vaginal, and anal intercourse.

As a result of all the rules there were only nineteen licensed brothels in Nevada. They were regulated and safe. In partnership with state and federal authorities, they defended against human trafficking and child pornography. There were rumors of girls who retired young and lived comfortable second lives on the proceeds of their labors. The nineteen licensed brothels accounted for less than one percent of the prostitution which occurred in Nevada. The rest happened on Las Vegas street corners, in motel rooms in Reno, and everywhere else in between, from Elko to Ely, from Tehachapi to Tonopah.

Tai Botman, the owner of the Broken Pony, tried to keep all this in mind at the holidays, when he dressed his girls up and drove them fifty miles over Spooner Summit to Lake Tahoe, where they enjoyed appetizers at Wolf by Vanderpump, Beef Wellington at Gordon Ramsey’s Hell’s Kitchen, and finally a bottle table at PEEK Nightclub in Harrah’s, dancing and swilling Cristal until the wee hours of the morning.

Now it was the end of August, the dog days, heat, dust and ennui, and one of the girls in the Broken Pony’s parlor began tinkering on the piano. It was the sort of piano that has a folding lid over old ivory keys. The girl began by lifting the lid. She had dark hair that went all the way down to her waist and she wore rose-colored underwear. The girl wasn’t playing any sort of melody but she tinkled the piano keys with two fingers while she stared at Two-Cents. She was so skinny that her teddy sagged on her chest.

Two-Cents dropped his gaze first and turned back to the bar. When he did, the girl in the teddy slammed the lid back down over the keys on the piano with a loud bang, snorted like a truck driver, and walked dismissively over to the other side of the room, where she stood under a large smoky, sepia tinted portrait of William Bonney, adopting the outlaw’s exact same posture except that she didn’t have a rifle under her arm to use as a crutch.

Another of the girls, this one with purple hair, sat on the red velvet barstool next to Two-Cents, showing the bartender professional photos she’d had done. By looking over her shoulder TwoCents could see that she had 1) no hangups about her body, 2) fascinating skills as a contortionist, and 3) the ability to blow fire. This second girl looked slyly back at Two-Cents, making Two-Cents drop his gaze again, pretending he hadn’t been sneaking a look at her photos on the bar top. At that point the purple-haired girl also huffed, dismounted from her stool, and went to stand beside the skinny girl in the rose-colored underwear, both of them imitating the blank stare on Billy the Kid’s face. Two-Cents tried not to take it personally. He wondered how much longer it was going to be before Janey returned from the back of the house to save him.

He was almost ready to wander back there to look for her. That would get the house muscle involved, and not in a good way. The house muscle was the same fellow Two-Cents didn’t want to know about the four 8-balls of cocaine he had in vials in the pockets of his jeans. Drugs were strictly off limits inside the Broken Pony. The discovery of illicit substances in the Broken Pony would cause Tai Botman, the brothel owner, to lose his brothel owners’ license. Brothel owners’ licenses were very expensive, argued over, bribed over, graves dug over, and Tai Botman had absolutely no interest in that sort of trouble.

Two-Cents was a cocaine dealer. Elon Musk’s operation went on twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and when his workers were off shift they wanted to party. In Lyon County, non-violent crime was up thirty percent. The police department and the clerk of courts were both hiring. Two-Cents had a good reputation and good suppliers, and because of the fentanyl danger and the proliferation of meth in northern Nevada those two things were important. Two-Cents did a profitable business that kept him up and away from home at all hours, day and night.

At last Janey came hustling back into the front room of the Broken Pony, heading straight for Two-Cents, her filmy black nightgown billowing businesslike behind her. Breathless, she thanked him for waiting. “Sorry,” she said, “housekeeping’s behind today.” The black nightgown accented her red hair. Two–Cents breathed a sigh of relief and mentally checked the state of his package.

Janey was still thinking how the last guy had insisted she squat overtop his chest and pee on him. He was a good customer and she couldn’t afford to disappoint him. For the housekeeper Rosa, who had to strip the sheets and muttered to herself while she was doing so, louder when Janey was in earshot, he was a catastrophe. If this kept up Rosa was considering purchasing some rubber sheets, although on the face of it she knew lack of absorbency was not going to improve the situation.

• • •

Stacy Worth loved her husband. Or at least she thought she did. She didn’t feel very loving when she caught him going to the Broken Pony. She caught him because of his phone.

“Who’s this message from?” she demanded, showing him the text: Meet up? Half an hour?

Two-Cents shrugged. He wasn’t a man of many words. He held out his hand for the phone but she refused to return it.

She worked on the phone, wanting to throw it at him. A few keystrokes and she pinned the message on Google Maps. “This is from Mound House,” she said. “What were you doing in Mound House?”

“Work friend,” Two-Cents mumbled, wondering how he could’ve forgotten to turn off location services again. He’d needed directions for a delivery was how.

“You don’t know anyone in Mound House,” Stacy chided him. “This is from the Broken Pony.”

“He’s doing some electrical work there,” Two–Cents lied.

Then Stacy did throw the phone at him. She started to cry. “Now I have to get tested for VD.

And now she knew what all those charges were on the credit card.

It wasn’t entirely Two-Cents’ fault. Stacy wasn’t interested in sex. When she was nineteen years old, she went into labor at thirty weeks. Before the doctors could perform a C-section the dead thing inside her came out, sideways, ripping her open from the top of her vagina all the way back to her anus. Stacy needed four blood transfusions and almost died. When it was all over her body had changed. The nerves were all torn up. Stacy was left with no baby, no man, and bladder incontinence.

For a long time Stacy wallowed in self-pity. Then she met Two-Cents, who was the most passive, least judgmental man she’d ever encountered. He accepted her as she was. When he asked her to she married him. And she loved her husband. She loved it when he held her, with his arms around her and her cheek pressed against his chest. Still, she didn’t want him to put that thing inside her. It didn’t feel good, and she couldn’t understand her friends when they said they liked it.

“You need to see some girl’s hatchet wound that bad?” she sobbed to Two-Cents.

Stacy had image problems. She was a bigger girl, shaped more like a weeble-wobble than an hour glass. She had curly blond hair that she hated even though the shining tresses inspired jealousy in all her friends. Because she thought she had to overdo it to make herself attractive she used a color of lipstick that was too pink for her complexion. Somehow it ended up going real well with her hair and the green eyeshadow she used on her eyes.

When Stacy looked at herself in the mirror she often thought of Bette Midler, Barbara Streisand, or, on bad days, Dee Snider.

It didn’t help that she was now forty-two and childless.

It didn’t help that she still worked the check out line at the local grocery store, that she saw the same people over and over again, day after day, and that she made the same small talk. There was Mrs. Merkle on Tuesdays, collecting her butter, milk, and eggs. There was Mr. Dinetta on Fridays, in line with his slipper moccasins, his driving cap, his Burberry scarf, and his frozen lasagna. Stacy wanted to tell Mr. Dinetta to take a cooking class; the lasagna would be better and he might meet someone.

It didn’t help that her husband’s name was Two-Cents, or that he was a good for nothing smalltime cocaine dealer who liked seeing prostitutes more than he liked her.

• • •

Tim Whiting crouched amongst the dead sunflowers at the edge of his property. He’d been meaning to take them out for at least a week. On Oprah’s twenty-year-old advice Tim was reading The Corrections. In summertime the heads were just like Jonathan Franzen described them, “meaty and splendid, heavy as brownies . . . Nature could hardly have devised a more inviting bed”, but now there weren’t any more bright yellow flowers, there weren’t any more goldfinches bouncing the stalks up and down as they pulled out the seeds, making the patch of sunflowers look like it was infested with a convention of partying garden gnomes. It was just grayish-brown sticks and spiky deadheads, sharp enough to draw blood. Not that those deadheads didn’t still conceal life. Tim would find them there in spring, the green shoots coming up one, two, and then in swaths. He didn’t mind. He admired anything that could thrive in that clay, in the heat, wind, and drought of Great Basin summers.

Tim had been a motocross racer. The day it all ended he wore the red and black livery of Ameropump Racing Injectors. He’d taken the hole shot with ease, kneed his nearest competitor off his line and out of balance as he passed, then roared around the track once, gaining the whole way, until he was four lengths out in front. At the end of the second lap, on the second to last jump, the big one, the one they called the Wu-Tang, he decided to really let it loose. He hit the lip hard, flying higher than he ever had, riding the wind, skying so high, engine purring. A photographer at the bottom of the Wu-Tang took a photo at the pinnacle of Tim’s flight, capturing the slogan on his jersey. It read “Big Air by A.R.I.” Tim still had the photo hanging over his bed.

Thirty feet up in mid-air, his throttle cable snapped. Without the revolutions of the motor to stabilize it, the bike nosed over and dove straight at the ground. Tim, surprised, paralyzed, watched in disbelief as the brown dirt, chewed up by a hundred knobby wheels, came closer, closer, drifting up to meet him and the handlebars of his motorcycle. Wham. The impact broke out five of his front teeth and shattered his knuckles, all four on his right hand and three on his left, sparing both his thumbs and left pinky, but that was it. Just like that his racing career was over. ARI took their colors and their sponsorship and their Big Air elsewhere.

Rehabilitation sucked. Tim had dentures and casts on both hands. When the casts came off the physical therapy was endless, painful at first, then so boring he couldn’t stand it. When he was ready the doctor suggested he try something physical to loosen up the joints. Tim, who’d grown up in cowboy boots, settled on roping. He got a bale of hay and put it out in his front yard, in front of the bright yellow sunflowers. He tacked a set of steer horns to the hay bale, and then he sat on his front porch with a cold can of beer and spun a lasso at his makeshift bull, over and over, all day long, right hand, left hand, until he could make and release normal fists again.

Now, twenty years after Oprah and Jonathan Franzen dueled over his selection to her book club, there were crushed cans of beer scattered all around the bale of hay. There was a can of Red Bull balanced between the steer horns, and the sunflowers were all dead and scratchy.

Tim Whiting looked across the street, to the house where Stacy Worth lived. Tim liked Stacy. A lot. He knew she had a husband, but it didn’t keep him from liking her. There was just something about her. She wasn’t beautiful in a skinny flighty vapid made-up influencer super-model cartoon sort of way. She was beautiful because she was real, and because she smiled at Tim and waved at him whenever she saw him from across the street.

Crouching to snip the dead sunflowers, Tim hoped Stacy wouldn’t come outside. As men grow older their bodies change, and that change is most apparent when they’re wearing pants. Pants that used to stay buttoned around slim, youthful waists now insisted on pulling down, down, and down over pear-shaped, beer-reinforced middles. Tim could feel the autumn air directly on his lower back. And in the crack of his ass. If his neighbor Stacy took an innocent glance out her window right now she’d get a full look at what clothes were supposed to hide on people.

To keep his pants in place, Tim drove to Kohl’s and picked himself out a pair of suspenders. They were red suspenders, and when he chose them he had an almost pleasant moment picturing himself chopping firewood and looking like Paul Bunyan, possibly even with his shirt unbuttoned all the way down his chest and the suspenders accentuating his bulging pectorals and six-pack abs and the sweat on his brow in a way that would make Stacy unable to resist a sideways glance.

The problem was, when the time came to raze the sunflowers, Tim didn’t put on the suspenders. Instead he hoped against hope that those push-ups and sit-ups he did, all summer long, some days anyway, would make the jeans work the way they were supposed to, the way they used to.

Now he needed to turn in a direction that would directly expose his butt crack to Stacy, who was no doubt watching from her living room window. Sure, he could stand up and shake his knees out and walk around to the other side and maybe get the bastard from there, but that was so much more work than just turning that way and making the cut.

He turned, feeling the air caress the portion of his anatomy he’d rather not expose. With two squeezes of the lopper he almost got through the sunflower stalk. The damn thing was as big around as his wrist. Just to be sure he was alone in the neighborhood he glanced across the street to the front door of the Worths’. As he did, Stacy walked out on her porch and waved at him.

“Hi, Tim!” Stacy called.

“Good morning, Stacy!” Tim felt blood rush to his face as he straightened and yanked his pants up over his hips.

“That’s quite a view,” she laughed. “Just like when the plumber came last week.”