A week ago the rains began in Los Angeles, slicking the streets into road accidents, crumbling the mud from the hillsides and toppling houses into canyons, washing the world into the gutters and storm drains, drowning the bums and the homeless camped down in the concrete channel of the river. When the rains come in Los Angeles they always take people by surprise.
Bilquis has spent the last week inside. Unable to stand on the sidewalk, she has curled up in her bed in the room the color of raw liver, listening to the rain pattering om the metal box of the window air conditioner and placing personals on the Internet. She has left her invitations on adult-friendfinder.com, LA-escorts.com, Classyhollywoodbabes. com, has given herself an anonymous e-mail address. She was proud of herself for negotiating the new territories, but remains nervous—she has spent a long time avoiding anything that might resemble a paper trail. She has never even taken a small ad in the back pages of the LA. Weekly, preferring to pick out her own customers, to find by eye and smell and touch the ones who will worship her as she needs to be worshiped, the ones who will let her take them all the way ...
And it occurs to her now, standing and shivering on the street comer (for the late February rains have left off, but the chill they brought with them remains) that she has a habit as bad as that of the smack whores and the crack whores, and this distresses her, and her lips begin to move again. If you were close enough to her ruby-red lips you would hear her say,
“/ will rise now and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek the one 1 love.” She is whispering that, and she whispers, “By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. My beloved is mine and I am his.”
Bilquis hopes that the break in the rains will bring the Johns back. Most of the year she walks the same two or three blocks on Sunset, enjoying the cool L.A. nights. Once a month she pays off an officer in the LAPD, who replaced the last guy she used to pay off, who had vanished. His name had been Jerry LeBec, and his disappearance had been a mystery to the LAPD. He had become obsessed with Bilquis, had taken to following her on foot. One afternoon she woke, startled by a noise, and opened the door to her apartment, and found Jerry LeBec in civilian clothes kneeling and swaying on the worn carpet, his head bowed, waiting for her to come out. The noise she had heard was the noise of his head, thumping against her door as he rocked back and forth on his knees.
She stroked his hair and told him to come inside, and later she put his clothes into a black plastic garbage bag and tossed them into a Dumpster behind a hotel several blocks away. His gun and his wallet she put into a grocery store bag. She poured used coffee grounds and food waste on top of them, folded the top of the bag, and dropped it into a trash can at a bus stop.
She kept no souvenirs.
The orange night sky glimmers to the west with distant lightning, somewhere out to sea, and Bilquis knows that the rain will be starting soon. She sighs. She does not want to be caught in the rain. She will return to her apartment, she decides, and take a bath, and shave her legs—it seems to her she is always shaving her legs—and sleep.
She begins to walk up a side street, walking up the hillside to where her car is parked.
Headlights come up behind her, slowing as they approach her, and she turns her face to the street and smiles. The smile freezes when she sees the car is a white stretch limo. Men in stretch limos want to fuck in stretch limos, not in the privacy of Bilquis’s shrine. Still, it might be an investment. Something for the future.
A tinted window hums down and Bilquis walks over to the limo, smiling. “Hey, honey,” she says. “You looking for something?”
“Sweet loving,” says a voice from the back of the stretch. She peers inside, as much as she can through the open window: she knows a girl who got into a stretch with five drunk football players and got hurt real bad, but there’s only one John in there that she can see, and he looks kind of on the young side. He doesn’t feel like a worshiper, but money, good money that’s passed from his hand to hers, that’s an energy in its own right—baraka, they called it, once on a time—which she can use and frankly these days, every little helps.
“How much?” he asks.
“Depends on what you want and how long you want it for,” she says. “And whether you can afford it.” She can smell something smoky drifting out of the limo window. It smells like burning wires and overheating circuit boards. The door is pushed open from inside.
“I can pay for anything I want,” says the John. She leans into the car and looks around. There’s nobody else in there, just the John, a puffy-faced kid who doesn’t even look old enough to drink. Nobody else, so she gets in.
“Rich kid, huh?” she says.
“Richer than rich,” he tells her, edging along the leather seat toward her. He moves awkwardly. She smiles at him.
“Mm. Makes me hot, honey,” she tells him. “You must be one of them dot corns I read about?”
He preens then, puffs like a bullfrog. “Yeah. Among other things. I’m a technical boy.” The car moves off.