Have Spacecat, Will Travel: And Other Tails by John Hartness (best color ebook reader .txt) 📗

you know what this town’s been saying about me for longer than you’ve been alive. If you think you’ve seen something can’t be believed, I promise you I’m the one person in this county that’s likely to believe it,” I added.

She looked me in the eye and nodded. “I reckon you probably are, Ms. Carter. Well, it kinda makes sense you’d be here.”

“Why’s that, Tina?” I asked, gently prodding.

“Because I’m pretty sure my bar is haunted, and the ghost is killing my business. Literally.”

You couldn’t have heard a pin drop in the room, but only because the floor was carpeted. Neither Willis nor I spoke for a long moment, then he broke the growing silence by asking, “Why do you think you’re being haunted, Miss McNaughton?”

Tina took a deep breath, another sip of her whiskey, then started talking. “Well, like I said, I don’t expect you to believe me, but all this started happening a few months after Chastity died.”

“Was Chastity one of the girls who danced here?” I asked. “Her stage name?”

The woman across the bar from me let out a little bark of a laugh, harsh and grating in the silence. “Nah. That’s the funniest part, you see. Chastity was her real name. Chastity Adler. I always thought it was friggin’ hilarious, a woman named Chastity working in a joint like this, but most of the other people here don’t appreciate irony the way I do. Anyhow, Chastity danced here for about a year, maybe eighteen months. She was saving up to move away and go to school. She’d just turned eighteen and graduated from high school in Spartanburg. I think she mighta went to Byrnes, I don’t know. Said she came down here to dance because all the clubs up there were too big for her and she was scared somebody she went to school with might see her. Or worse, one of her teachers.”

“I can see how that might be an issue,” Willis said.

“I don’t,” Teenie shot back. “Hell, my preacher comes in here every Wednesday night after choir practice for a couple shots and a lap dance. I ain’t embarrassed about what I do for a living. It’s honest work, and the money beats the hell out of most of what a woman with nothing but a high school diploma and C-cups can get in this part of the world. But that was Chastity’s hang-up. She didn’t want nobody she grew up with seeing her boobs. I didn’t care why she was here; I just like having her. She was young, she was pretty, and she’d had more than one ballet class when she was six, which is all most of us here ever got. She made good money for a while, until everything went to shit.”

“What happened?” I asked. I have to admit, I was drawn into the story of the small-town girl stripping to earn money to make her life better. It was like redneck Flashdance, only without the welding mask.

“She was in the middle of a set on the stage when… Do you know how strip clubs work?”

“No,” I said, at the exact same moment Willis said, “Yes.”

“Our girls dance two or three-song sets, depending on how many girls we’ve got working that night. They come out in a skimpy outfit, and they get down to a bikini by the end of the first song. They dance around the stage, flirt with the guys, work the pole if they can do that. Not too much, because the floor ain’t what it used to be, so they can’t swing out too far or the whole damn roof might fall in again. Anyway, the second song is where the boobs and the dollar bills both come out. They’re topless and down to a g-string by the end of the second song. If there’s a third song, they dance around some more, grind on some of the guys near the stage, then they collect their money and spend the time until their name comes up in rotation again walking around the room giving lap dances. That’s where they make their real money.”

“Can girls really make money doing that here? Seems like there wouldn’t be enough people to keep y’all in business,” I said.

“Honey, even with free porn all over the internet, you can never underestimate a man’s desire to have somebody’s titties bouncing off his nose.” Teenie looked at the whiskey bottle, shook her head, and reached into a red and white Igloo cooler on the floor behind the bar, pulling out a dripping wet plastic Coke bottle. She opened the soda and took a long drink.

“Anyhow,” she continued. “It was a Sunday night during football season, so the place was pretty full. Big Baby had the smoker going out back with a pig on it, and the Redskins were kicking the shit out of the Browns, so everybody was having a good time. Chas was dancing, I figure her third or fourth set of the night when all of a sudden she looks down at a dude by the stage and freezes. Now Chas was pretty nearsighted, so she must not have recognized the guy when he first sat down. She had both arms wrapped around his neck and was giving herself a good wiggle when she got a good look at his face, let out a little scream, and ran off stage into the back room.

“I grabbed my baseball bat out from under the bar and went after her, fully intending to beat the shit out of the guy if he touched her wrong or said something nasty or made her feel bad in any way. And I knew I had enough of my regulars in the place that they’d hold his arms while I played Whack-A-Mole with his nuts if I needed to. When I got back to the bedroom we use for a dressing room, Chas had a sweatshirt and jeans on already and was throwing clothes in a backpack, tears