Free The Best American Short Stories 2015 by T.C. Boyle Page B

was going to go out of his mind. He hated to think like this. He was not a crude man, not naturally. But this was the simple fact of the matter. McHenry was not an old man, not yet, and whatever had switched off when Marnie got sick had gotten switched back on again somehow. He remembered one of his crew—an extra guy, a friend of somebody’s, not one of the regulars—talking about his day off, going to a massage place in Billings. He shut up about it when he saw McHenry was listening. But it stuck in his mind. You could just pay for it. And nobody was watching.
    McHenry lived with these thoughts for two or three months and then decided he needed to go to Billings to see what the truth of the matter was. It took him another few weeks to gather his nerve. It was April before he made it.
    Spring has a good reputation, he thought, driving south through spitting snow, but it maybe shouldn’t. Not Montana spring, anyway. Just a hard season. Easter Sunday with Marnie in her flowery dresses and the freezing rain just pounding down.
    He found the Bangkok Sunshine out by the Interstate, alone and kind of forlorn-looking in a giant gravel parking lot behind the truck wash. His pickup was the only car in the lot. A pink building with the word MASSAGE in red neon, a white door. Momentum carried him inside where a young, not-quite-pretty Asian girl in a swimsuit top and a piece of flowery cloth for a skirt sat reading a magazine in a language McHenry didn’t recognize.
    â€œThirty or sixty minutes?” she asked.
    â€œI don’t know,” said McHenry. “Sixty, I guess.”
    â€œThat’s a hundred,” she said, and McHenry was shocked. He didn’t know what he was expecting but this was somehow a substantial amount of money. But it seemed too late to back out now, and it was just this once. He could afford it.
    â€œI don’t see you much,” said the girl.
    â€œThis is my first time.”
    â€œAre you a cop?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œOkay. Room two. And people usually tip.”
    It was a room with a bed and a poster of a beach. The door he had come in and another door and a third he guessed was a closet. No windows. Linoleum floors, everything easy to clean, like a veterinarian’s exam room. McHenry sat on the bed and waited. It was taller and narrower than a regular bed and he could feel plastic under the sheet. It was a room without any music, he thought, too many people passing through and nobody staying long. The sadness came back to him. PHUKET
, said the poster. He didn’t know where that was. It looked beautiful, in a faceless way. Palm trees and blue skies.
    Then the far door opened and another Asian girl walked in, smiling—a little shorter and rounder than the girl at the desk but dressed the same, her breasts spilling out of the swimsuit top. Her hair was long and bound at the back with a red ribbon. She was barefoot.
    â€œYou have to take your clothes off!” she said, laughing. “Otherwise it doesn’t work.”
    McHenry had allowed himself to forget this part. He had not had his clothes off in front of anybody for a long while, anybody but doctors and Marnie. An urge to flee arose, was suppressed by an act of will. She opened the closet. He took his shoes off, then his pants. Then he hesitated.
    â€œCome on,” she said. But lightly, playfully. She was alive if the room was not. He went the rest of the way naked and then lay facedown on the bed. Cold plastic under a thin sheet. She covered his ass with a towel and bent to look him sideways in the face.
    â€œWhat’s your name?” she asked.
    â€œBill,” he lied.
    â€œI’m Tracy,” she said. “Relax.”
    McHenry tried to make himself relax. But the body doesn’t lie, and he tensed at the touch of her hand on his shoulder.
    â€œOK, OK,” she said. “It’s going to be OK.” She turned the lights down quite low, and music seeped in