Free Battleborn: Stories by Claire Vaye Watkins Page B

light attached to the weather vane, rotating in the dawn. Here, it is what it is. Manny makes his way out back to the peacock coop.
    Manny was hired to manage the Cherry Patch Ranch one day when he drove out from Las Vegas, where he grew up. He was eighteen, had been hustling for three years and always knew he was destined for something bigger, though it took a tranny john whipping him across the face with a stiletto for him to act on that instinct. Jim Hart—fifty then, with the girth and slope of an aging athlete and a full head of black hair just starting to gray—happened to be working the door that day, a stroke of luck, because Jim never worked his own door. Bad for business. Jim took one look at Manny and waved the girls off, saying, “Sorry, guy. We don’t have men in here.”
    And Manny, prepared for this, said, “Why not? You’re losing money, honey. You want to know what I get for a hand job with Rentboys? Three fifty. A hand job. And that’s off
-
Strip, okay?”
    Jim took him straight back to his office with Gladys, Jim’s assistant. After an hour Jim said, “Look, guy, bottom line: Every other Tuesday I load the girls into the van and we go down to Nye County Health and get them all looked at. Every other Tuesday. And no legal hooker, not in the entire state of Nevada, has
ever
tested positive for an STD. Not even crabs. It’s safe, clean sex. That’s the brand. I bring men in here . . . I’m not messing with a good thing. That’s all.” He tipped back in his chair and put his pen into his mouth. “But a fag madam. That’s unique.”
    That was fifteen years ago. Manny walks past the girls’ fifth wheels lined in two rows behind the main house like eggs in a carton, with the courtyard and swimming pool between them. Beyond the fifth wheels are the single-wide trailers they call suites. The Oriental Room, the Hot Tub Room, British Campaign. The thick black wires of the intercom system droop between the buildings. The pool is ringed with knobby salt cedars and adolescent pomegranate trees. Manny drags Darla’s picnic table back to the courtyard where it belongs, in the rocky dirt peppered with screwbean mesquites and young cottonwoods. He plucks a cigarette butt rimmed with lipstick from a struggling patch of sod, puts it in his breast pocket; then he slips out to the coop.
    On paper, Jim Hart raised Indian blue peacocks until 1970, when he got his operating license. Prior to that, as far as the government was concerned, Hart Ranches made its modest living selling the birds to zoos and private collectors. In reality, Jim hated selling the birds and found reason to do so as seldom as possible. When the cost of the food and upkeep was considered, the peacock business barely broke even.
    The girls always brought in more money than the birds, but it was a long time before the Cherry Patch Ranch was much more than two single-wide trailers on either side of the wide, airy coop. Then, in 1970, as Jim and his friends in Carson City had suspected it might, the state legislature outlawed prostitution in Clark County. Jim remodeled, making the ranch straddle the county line, with the trailers and main house in rural Nye County, and the peacocks technically residents of Clark. By the time Manny arrived, the Cherry Patch was the closest a brothel could get to Vegas.
    His second week, a courier came out and picked up three sedated chicks destined to roam some movie producer’s estate in the Pacific Palisades. Manny found Jim sitting on an overturned feed bucket by the coop, bawling into his hands. When he noticed Manny standing there watching, Jim leaned back against the chicken wire. “Goddamn it,” he said, and pressed the heels of his hands against his eye sockets as though he could stop his tears that way.
    Manny squatted in front of the older man. “It’s all right.”
    “I know that, kid,” Jim managed to say, before he crumpled forward again, crying and hiccuping like a child. Manny held him,