Free Sarah by J.T. LeRoy Page A

wears it,’ Petunia tells him. ‘It’s gotta be one of them folk-made carved crosses, so sweet … I always see it through her clothes.’
    I nod and try to cover the penis bone outline with my hand.
    ‘It’s too big,’ Le Loup says while counting out stacks of money. ‘I’ll buy you a proper dainty one from the Pay Mart.’
    I reluctantly take off and toss my raccoon bone out the window and under one of the huge bright yellow skunk cabbage leaves.
     
     
    I envy Pooh, in her tight leather miniskirts, sequined silver halters, and precarious heels, handing fatter and fatter wads of money to Le Loup that he, without acknowledging her, stuffs into his boots.
    ‘I hope your innards don’t give up on us anytime soon,’ Le Loup says through his half grin, after having to install velvet ropes for keeping all my worshippers queued to avoid the fistfights and sporadic gunshot taken to line jumpers.
    ‘Even desperate lizards on line to see the Jackalope don’t need no goddarned gates to keep them in order,’ Stella laughs.
    ‘I guess the truckers are more desperate to get the inspectors off their backs than you lizards are to get on yours for a trucker,’ Lymon says as he turns over his whole paycheck so he can fondle my feet.
     
     
    Sometimes, when my palm is resting above one of Pooh’s johns’ hearts, I can feel my second sight beginning to unfurl. It comes to me in a hazy sensation, like trying to recall a particular scent from childhood. I sense what position they favor, whether they like to be spanked and chastised for being naughty, or what nasty words they are partial to having moaned into their ear.
    Pooh stopped bringing in her tricks to testify to Le Loup after a particular trucker she had brought in who hauled an eighteen-wheeler filled with Kingsford charcoal briquettes ended up contributing to have a visit with me. As I pressed my palm to his beaded forehead, I suddenly saw flashes of lustings from the trucker that were so black and deviant I could only shudder and shake. Everyone took my tremors as a sign of divine sanction, and Le Loup later whispered in my ear how I must incorporate that more often. Since I’d never done anything except lie there and occasionally fall asleep, my outburst caused deeper levels of allegiance and adoration toward me. But Pooh knew what had caused my trembling. She saw me staring at the thick finger marks around her neck and the blue pallor her face still carried. Pooh had anticipated what he would do to her. She had used her second sight to know that it was the lack of surprise in her eyes, the lack of struggle on her part that would cause him to lose interest and to loosen his grip. She was the first not to end up face-down in a ditch at the side of the road. His inability to strangle her left him in a sobbing heap and Pooh was able to convince him to tell Le Loup, without mentioning any dead bodies of course. She was truly a psychic lot lizard, and deserving of media attention if anyone was.
    I knew Pooh had believed the Kingsford trucker was too dark to be swayed by any God-fearing fervency, but the trucker was so unsteadied by Pooh’s lack of terror and his own resulting impotence that, as they approached Le Loup’s and he heard other truckers discussing how they were all going to visit the patron saint of truckers, he thought now might be a chance to petition for a return to his old murderously crafty self.
    After I had removed my hand from the trucker’s head, Pooh and I just stared at each other in silence. Something passed between us, like walking in on someone masturbating in a toilet stall. I had become a part of something private. My body had experienced the fear she had deadened herself to. Likewise, I could feel she now knew something about me. Something secret. Pooh nodded her head solemnly at me as if conceding defeat, but gave an insinuating smile and wink of her eyes, indicating that next time she would be the one leaving me in