Chapter Twenty-Five

Donovan approached the doorway to the darkened room and peered inside. It was a tiny place, perhaps an office in better times, hazy with sweet-smelling smoke and lit by a dirty oil lamp. The room seemed populated by shadows, all of them engaged in smoking, snorting or injecting things. Before he could get his bearings, a tall man in the shiny, green-tinged remnants of a tuxedo came up to him. "We take silver or gold," he said in a pleasant tone that managed to convey the idea that silver and gold were not only the patron's best choice of payment but the only choice. "What would you like?"

Donovan was crafting a response when he saw her. Pale and ethereal, she sat on the floor on the opposite side of the room, staring at nothing with such an expression of vulnerability on her face that he was moved like he had been when he first saw her. "I came to get her,” Donovan said.

"Good. She just takes up space and never spends more than a dollar on her damn cheap huffers."

Donovan passed into the room and lowered himself onto the floor beside the redhead, who pouted and looked away with a poorly disguised lack of curiosity. "Hey," he said, "What's your name?"

"Valerie."

Donovan tried to scoot a little closer, the pallor of her skin seeming to beg for the warmth of his own brown and healthy body. "That's a pretty name. Is it your real name, or just the one you go by?"

"What's it to you?" She turned away, as if hoping this would discourage him, and picked up a paper bag. She held it to her face and inhaled deeply.

Donovan put a hand on her shoulder. "Honey...Valerie, please don't do that."

"Why should you give a damn? You want to fuck me? It'll be twenty dollars. In silver."

"That's pretty steep," Donovan said.

She nodded in satisfaction and took another hit off her bag.

"I didn't search all over this place to buy you for an hour. I want to talk to you."

"Yeah, right. What are you, a Fed?"

"No, I just think you're interesting."

"You don't even know me."

"I know you don't belong here." They sat in silence a few minutes before Donovan spoke again. "What's in the bag?"

Valerie raised her eyebrows as if it were a foolish question. "Around here they call it a roadrunner. A little paint, a little coal diesel." She held the bag toward him in a ghostly parody of good manners.

"I don't do that sort of thing. I do plenty of other things I shouldn't, so there need to be a few I don't. That way I'll have a chance of squaring things later with the Lord."

"I don't want to hear anything about the Lord," Valerie said. "It's because of him I'm in this place."

"I don't know that I'd go blaming God for my troubles."

"Well, I blame him for mine. I used to be a good girl. A good Christian girl." She held Donovan's gaze to make sure he understood this point. "My family had a small place in the mountains and it was a hard life, but we managed okay. But then my father died and it was just my sick mother and us four girls. We sold our stock and seed for medicine and were left with nothing."

Donovan took one of her slender hands. "I'm sorry."

"There was nothing to do but look for work. My oldest sister left saying she was going to join the Guard and send us money, but we never heard from her again." Valerie started to raise the bag to her face again, but Donovan's hand on her wrist stopped her. "So that left three of us to figure out some other way of making money. We had no skills and lived so far from everything. None of us could find work we could do that earned any real money except. . .” she waved a hand. "This. So we drew lots. I lost." She wrenched her hand from Donovan's grasp and inhaled again from the bag.

"Earning your bread, no matter how you have to do it, isn't going to kill you, but that stuff will.”

"I don't care. I'm as good as dead anyway. My mother and sisters take my money, but they don't talk to me. Not like I'm one of them. I'm just the disgusting whore who gives them money so they can keep living on their mountain being good Christians."

Seeing that the man in the tuxedo was glaring at them, Donovan stood up. "Come on." He helped Valerie to her feet. He put an arm around her waist and guided her back into the noisy dance hall. "Is there someplace we can go? Somewhere a little quieter?"

Valerie looked at him a long moment, swaying from inhalants, moonshine and high heeled shoes that pinched her toes. Then she took his hand and led him around the perimeter of the dance floor to a door he hadn't noticed earlier. Beyond was a dim tunnel of doors. Valerie led him to a room at the end of the hallway. "This one's mine," she said, as she opened the door onto a tiny closet of a room, bare except for a bed, a dirty mirror, and a few crumpled dresses wadded on the floor in a corner.

"This wasn't what I meant."

"Hey, you said you just wanted to talk, right?" She shut the door behind them, stepped out of her shoes and flung herself on the bed. "If you meant what you said, it shouldn't matter where we are." She closed her eyes. "So talk."

Donovan did. Since there was no other furniture, he sat on the edge of the bed and told her of his adventures as a street kid in the city. He played with the tattered hem of her skirt while she told him of life on her mountain. He lay down next to her and wrapped a lock of her strange orange hair around his hand as he told her about farm life with Amalia and Carina. He said little about his days in the Guard, but she seemed to understand the need to keep a secret and didn't press him about the gaps in his story any more than he pressed her about the missing parts of hers. When finally it seemed there was no more to say, he leaned over and kissed her.

"It's not really twenty dollars," she said.

"I know."

"I just say that when I'm tired and I want to make a man go away."

"I kind of figured that."

"You don't have to pay me anything. I like you."

"Maybe I want to give you something, because I like you, too."

When Donovan left an hour later, Valerie was asleep and he had left under her pillow a ration book he had lifted earlier in the night, and a small gold piece worth considerably more than twenty dollars.

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