However, if someone had asked Jasper Cone, he would have said that business was booming for the pimp. Ever since Blackie and the girls had set up shop in Virgil’s shed, he had been watching them at night from the weedy perimeter of the lot. At times he wondered why he tortured himself so. In addition to walking around half-numb from lack of sleep, the insects nearly ate him alive, and he sometimes witnessed things that sickened his stomach, not an easy feat when you consider that this was a man who spent hours every day mucking about in shithouses without the slightest qualms. Too, wasn’t it useless to pine over something you could never have? Because of his size, Jasper hadn’t had an erection since before he quit growing around the age of seventeen, not a full-blown one anyway. “Not enough blood in your body,” Doc Hamm had told him a couple of years ago. “Even if it was to happen, you’d probably pass out before you could do anything with it.” But though he knew the doctor was right—he had grappled with his cock enough times to know it would never stand at attention—he still had desires; he could feel them coursing through his body whenever he came upon a woman, whether it be on the street, or in an outhouse during a surprise inspection, or looking through some neighbor’s carelessly curtained window late at night. He was to a great extent like a man without a stomach who nonetheless can’t resist spending all of his free time hanging around a chophouse buffet.
Along with unrequited lust, another part of Jasper’s fascination with the Whore Barn was just being able to see how the women operated. There had always been a prostitute or two in Meade—old Midge Daniels with her varicose veins and flabby honkers, and a colored girl named Jellybean who lived over on White Heaven—but they did their dealings behind closed doors. Here, everything was out in the open. The number of men who went in and out of the tents astounded him. The weekdays were sometimes slow, but on Friday and Saturday nights he often counted seventy or eighty. Young bucks, too, determined to get their money’s worth. Jasper had heard that you couldn’t wear one of those woman things out, but, Lord, that was a lot of pounding when you added it all up. And there were other things to be had, too, besides just what the pimp called a “straight fuck,” which, even to the virginal Jasper, began to sound a little boring after a while. For an additional dollar, the blonde would speak strange words in a foreign accent, and the skinny one would dress up like a schoolgirl, while the ugly one, if properly aroused, would swallow a man’s spunk just for the hell of it. No wonder she was so fat, Jasper thought. Just the other night when that wagonload of boys from Monkey Town tore into her, she must have slurped down a quart of the stuff. Oh, yes, it was such a clamoring, festive, noisy place, with the lighted lanterns hanging between the posts, and the pimp serving drinks at the little plank bar, and the bodyguard taking the money and keeping the lines moving in an orderly fashion. They even had a jug band playing on the weekends, a trio from Kingston that called themselves the Ginseng Gang. True, there was sometimes trouble, like the other evening when they had to pistol-whip the big-boned country boy from Clarksburg off the one called Matilda. For one reason or another, he’d decided that he was going to make her moo like a cow, and when she refused, he went a little crazy. You could still see his handprints around her throat the next night in the campfire light. But the way Jasper figured it, at an average of three dollars a shot, the Whore Barn was making more than enough money, no matter how much he heard Blackie bitch to Henry on slow nights about the clap doctor out at the army base cutting into their profits with his rubber hammer trick.
25
SERGEANT MALONE WAS sitting on a stool in front of the camp post office, his nose stuck in the Scioto Gazette, when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Bovard approaching. Jesus Christ, he moaned to himself, not a minute’s peace. It wasn’t so much that he disliked the lieutenant; hell, he was nicer than most of the college boys he had come across. At least he didn’t walk around like he had a broomstick shoved up his ass and his nose stuck high in the air like the Yale brats, Benchley and Smothers. And he had gotten Malone drunker than Katy’s cunt again two nights ago, so there was that, too. No, it was something else. He reminded the sergeant of those Englishmen he had watched with a telescope from a distant field hospital kicking a football out into No Man’s Land just as they began an attack, their heads swollen with glory and honor and all that other bullshit they were taught in their public schools. By the time the sortie was over, the only thing left of the entire regiment was that damn ball, bobbing around in a shell hole filled with bloody water and body parts. You might have gotten by with that sort of bravado in the past, but not anymore. Now there were machine guns that fired three hundred rounds a minute and mustard gas that turned the lungs to pink froth and generals who thought that if they only lost a few thousand men gaining an extra yard or two, why, they had achieved some great victory. Maybe it really would be, as some people predicted, the last war that would ever be fought.
“Anything interesting in the paper?” Bovard asked as he stepped up onto the porch.