The Big Sister

by Jake Hinkson

I was shaking my tits at the Friday night crowd when I saw my little sister walk through the back door of The Stiff Cougar. Cinque, the bouncer, asked her for her ID, and then they talked for a second. Janie must have told him she was looking for me because Cin said something, and Janie looked up at the stage where I was straddling a chair in nothing but high heels and sweat. I spun off the chair, scooped up some moist clumps of cash laying on the stage, and then with one last jiggle for the boys in the front row, I danced off through the tinsel backdrop.

They cut the song I'd been dancing to, and an awkward silence filled the bar before the crowd started muttering. As I hurried to the dressing room, I heard Ralph fumbling over the loudspeaker, “Uh…that was Miss Dixie Delight, ladies and gentlemen. She'll be back…later, later on in the evening. Up next…let's see…”

A new redhead named Nancy rushed past me, stubbing out the cigarette she'd just lit up. “You owe me one,” she grumbled as she slipped through the tinsel.

I heard Ralph boom, “Vanessa Domination, ladies and gentlemen!” as the crowd started to clap and cheer.

I thought about running out to the floor to find Janie, but I didn't want to be mobbed by a bunch of drunk assholes on the way. I kicked off my heels and pulled on some jeans. I was digging through my gym bag for a bra when Janie came through the backdoor.

My sister was seventeen years old, and she didn't look a thing like me. She looked like our mother, short and as shapely as a French fry. Somehow I wound up with all the tits and ass in our family. I loved Janie, of course, but we'd never been close because I'd always felt weird that I was so much better looking than her. That sounds like an arrogant way to think about it, but it's the simple truth. Janie looked like a math nerd, which is what she was—or at least what she had always been. She had a plain face with a small nose, small lips and tiny little ears. She never met a frumpy sweatshirt she didn't like. When she came through the backstage door and caught me topless, I felt weird about being naked for the first time in a very long time.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” I asked, rummaging through my bag. I couldn't find my stuff, so I picked up a dirty sweatshirt someone had left lying around and slipped it on. Now, we looked more like sisters.

“ Elizabeth ,” she said.

“What?” I said walking over the mirror. I picked up a towel and wiped off the top layer of my makeup.

When she didn't say anything, I turned around. She was crying.

I walked over to her. “What?” I said, more softly this time. “What's wrong, Janie?” I braced myself for bad news about Mom, maybe Grandma.

“I need your help,” she said. “You have to…you have to come with me.”

“What's wrong?”

The door popped open and Ralph came in. He was a young guy, maybe twenty-five, and he'd started The Stiff Cougar Gentleman's Club his first week out of college. He lived and breathed business, and he had all kinds of big plans to expand The Stiff Cougar into an adult entertainment empire. Recently, he'd been floating the idea of shooting DVDs starring some of us dancers. I knew where he was going with that idea, but I wasn't looking to become a porn star.

“ Dixie ,” he snapped “what's the deal with leaving the stage early?”

“This is my sister,” I said.

Ralph nodded at her, but he didn't see her. Ralph didn't have much use for anyone who wasn't a paying customer. “What's the deal?” he asked me again.

“I have to go,” I said.

“What? Where? I got a hundred horny drunks out there.”

“And you have enough girls to cover me for an hour,” I said. “I gotta go.”

“God damn it.”

“Janie,” I said. “Wait outside.” I jerked my head at the door, and my wide-eyed sister slinked toward it.

When she'd closed the door, I told Ralph, “I have to go. It's my father.”

“You told me you don't even know your father.”

“I don't, but he contacted us because he's dying of testicular cancer,” I said. “If I want to see him, I have to go now.”

It was a horrible lie, but since I didn't know the old man, I didn't mind telling it. Besides, I knew it would work. Ralph's weak spot—and it was a bad one to have if you were managing strippers—was that he basically thought the human body was gross. He hated to hear about someone's head cold or menstrual cycle, much less anything as terrible as a disease. His employees were always telling him they had diarrhea. He'd send you home just to get you out of his face.

“Go,” he told me. “Just go.”

***

“This better be good,” I told Janie as we climbed into my car. Turning on the heater, I said, “I'm losing money while we're sitting here.”

“I'm in trouble,” she said. She was shivering.

“What kind of trouble?”

She shook her head.

I stared at her and waited. Our frosty breaths puffed out between us like we were smoking cigarettes.

She said, “I think I killed some…somebody.”

“You think you killed somebody.”

“Yes.”

I leaned closer to her as her breath streamed out through her mouth. She bit her lip.

“Have you been drinking?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“What?”

“I don't know. Liquor of some kind.”

“Where?”

“At Wendy's apartment.”

“Wendy.”

Wendy was a twenty-two year old high school dropout who Mom and I didn't like. She was an obnoxious deadbeat pothead, but for some reason my little sister thought she was cool.

I put the car in drive. “Where am going?” I asked. “Wendy's apartment?”

“Yes.”

I pulled out of the parking lot. “Tell me what happened.”

“Me and Wendy met this guy at the liquor store—”

“That's fucking great,” I said. “You met a guy at the liquor store.”

“And we went back to Wendy's apartment.”

I felt the skin on my neck and back tighten up.

Janie looked down at her hands. “We were hanging out and drinking, and he started getting loud. He and Wendy started having a fight, but then they made up and went back to her room. I was watching TV. They were in her room having sex.”

I hurried through a yellow light, and adjusted my rearview mirror to see if there were any cops around.

“I feel asleep on the couch,” Janie said “and then I woke up, and he was there.”

“Who is this guy?”

“I don't know. He said his name was Gene.”

Wendy's apartment complex was a big place that stretched out over a city block. I'd dropped off Janie there a couple of times, so I knew where I was going, but I pulled into the Wal-Mart parking lot across from the complex and parked at the far end, away from Wendy's apartment.

“Her apartment's down there,” Janie told me.

“We'll walk it,” I said. “First, you tell me what happened. This asshole woke you up. Then what?”

She looked down at her small, thin hands. I looked at them too, and I don't know why, but I remembered teaching her how to snap her fingers when she was little.

“He wanted me to, uh, give him a blow job,” Janie said. She was embarrassed to even say the words, and then her face went flush and one by one, some tears fell from her eyes.

“You fought him,” I said.

She shook her head. “No.”

I stared at her.

“Oh.”

“Then Wendy came out and found us, and she was really mad and drunk and she started yelling at him. He started yelling at her. I said that maybe I should leave, but they both ignored me. Then he hit her and things got really scary. Wendy lost her mind. She started yelling, and he hit her again, so I ran over and hit him, too.”

She stopped and looked out the window. The sky was black and clouded over. There was no moon and no stars.

“What happened then?” I said.

She shook her head. “It just got crazy. He had this gun in his coat, a little gun in his pocket, and when he pulled it out I just…ran. He grabbed me and threw me in the kitchen. Some steak knives fell over.” Her tears hit her jeans, and she wiped them away. “And I guess I picked up one and stabbed him.”

“You ‘guess' or you did?”

She nodded as if to answer. Then she said, “Wendy sent me to get you.”

We got out of the car and walked over to Wendy's apartment. It was quiet as we walked down an alley between two rows of townhouses. Wendy's apartment was in a cluster of single-bedroom apartments. Her place was on the bottom, at the end facing the dumpsters, so we came at it from the back alley. We didn't see anyone except a scrawny tomcat digging into a crumpled up Arby's bag.

I tapped lightly on Wendy's door.

After a while, a tiny voice said, “Yeah.” I looked at the peephole and saw it go dark as Wendy leaned in to look at us.

The door opened, and Wendy hid behind it in the darkened hallway. The only light in the apartment came from the kitchenette. When Janie and I walked in, Wendy shut the door. She was a tubby girl with a big gut and flabby tits squeezed into a tight shirt. At twenty-five, she still had acne. Right now, though, except for a swelling black eye, she was as white as a toilet seat.

“ Elizabeth ,” she sighed.

“Where is he?” I asked.

She stared crying.

“Christ,” I muttered. The apartment wasn't big, so I moved in the direction of the light. Around the edge of the refrigerator, I saw a cowboy boot peeking out. Then I heard a wheeze of breath, and the boot moved.

I spun around and looked at the two frightened girls behind me. They huddled against the front door.

I stepped into the kitchenette and found the man lying in a sticky mass of piss and blood. It smelled foul. His face was covered in blood, and I couldn't tell exactly how old he was. One of his eyes was plastered shut with drying blood, but his other eye was open and staring at the kitchen light like it was the face of God.

“Why haven't you called an ambulance?” I asked.

The girls started crying again, and I told them to shut up. I rubbed my face and squatted down beside the dying man, trying not to step in the blood and urine. His small black revolver had skittered into the corner and lay there against the trashcan. Looking down at his face, I didn't feel a goddamn thing. I wasn't terrified, horrified, or anything at all.

I tried to think it through as calmly as I could. We could get rid of the body, dump it somewhere, and then hope he didn't get traced back here, but the more I turned that idea over in my head the less sense it made. The cops would trace him back here. It stood to reason. The girls met him at a liquor store. The manger would remember them. They were probably on security cameras.

“You should call the cops,” I said.

“No!” Wendy cried. She rushed to the edge of the carpet, not touching the tile in the kitchenette. “They'll…we'll be in trouble.”

I stood up. “You got a dying man here,” I said. “What do you want to do, bury him in the woods? You think they won't look for him? You think they won't find him? He's not dead yet. If we save him, this won't be as bad. It'll still be bad, but, god, it won't be murder. It was self-defense.”

Wendy glanced at the kitchenette counter beside me, and I looked down and saw what she was looking at. Next to a folded green Army jacket was a man's wallet. I stared at it for a long time.

Then I looked back up at the girls. Behind Wendy, my sister slid down to the carpet as if her legs were useless. She hugged her knees to her chest and stared at the floor. She nodded.

“We tried to steal it,” she said.

Wendy swung her head toward Janie, but she didn't say anything. When she looked back at me, I saw all of it there on her stupid face. They'd tried to get this guy drunk and rip him off.

I closed my eyes. I could hear the guy's breathing. I could hear Janie, too, as she rocked back and forth against the front door.

I told Wendy to call 911. “Tell them he attacked you,” I said. “Cry. Cry a lot.”

Without another word, Wendy dialed 911 and went to pieces talking to the operator. She even flubbed her own address a couple of times before she got it right. She rubbed her pimply chin, and Janie stared at the floor and rocked back and forth. I watched both of them and waited, knowing that we had to call the cops, but also feeling a sick rumble in my stomach tell me that we couldn't let this guy report his side of the story. When Wendy got done talking to the operator, I told her to wait by the door with Janie.

Then I walked back into the kitchenette, made sure the girls couldn't see me, and looked down at the man. He wore a flannel shirt and blue jeans, both of which were soaked through with blood. Red bubbles popped out of his left nostril every few seconds. I reached down and pinched his nose. He jerked a bit, but he was so near death he couldn't even lift his arms. In thirty seconds or so, he was dead.

I checked my shoes, arms, legs. The only blood on me was on my thumb and forefinger. I hurried to the bathroom and rinsed them off in the toilet and flushed the dead man's blood. I washed my hands with a sliver of soap from the shower, and when I was done, I flushed the soap.

I went back out to the girls. They were both standing and staring at me like befuddled old women. Careful to touch it at the edges, I picked up the dead man's wallet and put it in his coat.

“I'm leaving,” I said. Janie opened her mouth, but I raised my hand. “We don't have any time to waste. Shut up and listen. If they know I was here then they'll know you came and got me. That just makes you look bad. That's second-degree murder. At least. You guys have to tell the story. You were hanging out with this older guy. He got rough and brought out a gun. You fought back, and he ended up stabbed. You were in shock. You didn't know what to do. Finally, you called 911. He died before they got here. That's it. I wasn't here. And you didn't leave.”

Wendy said, “What if—”

“There's a thousand what if's,” I told her. “Stick to that story no matter what. Be as nonspecific on the time as you can be, but don't specifically lie.”

Janie nodded.

Wendy said, “Okay.”

I stepped to the door, and Janie reached out and took my arm. I looked at her and patted her hand. “Just stick to the story,” I said.

I slipped out, crept back down the alley and went to my car. I was back at The Stiff Cougar in a few minutes.

“How's your dad?” Ralph asked sarcastically when I walked backstage.

“He's okay,” I said taking off my sweatshirt.

“You're full of shit, you know.”

“I know.”

“Who was that girl, really?”

“My coke connection,” I said, shimmying out of my jeans.

“Get out of here. It was not.”

I shrugged and walked over to the mirror to put on some makeup. He walked up behind me. I stopped what I was doing and looked at him over my shoulder in the mirror. He was staring at me, thinking hard about something. I hated this sleazy little motherfucker.

“Where'd you go?” he asked.

“Nowhere,” I said. “I've been here all night. Out in the parking lot doing blow.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

He stared at me, his little blue eyes like pieces of ice. Maybe I didn't come across as nonchalant as I thought.

“Okay, Dixie Delight,” he said “but you owe me.”

“What do I owe you?”

“I don't know yet. Depends on where you really were for the last hour. You might owe me a lot.”

“I told you where I was.”

He nodded. “Sure. Let's just call it a rain check, okay?”

“What do you want, Ralph? Private dance? Is that it? Sloppy blowjob back in your office?”

He smiled an ugly smile. “You ain't my type, Dixie . I like decent girls. I'll tell you what though, when I start that direct-to-DVD sideline next month…you might think about what you owe me.”

He patted my shoulder and walked away. For a while, I sat there in the empty backroom, staring at the door. Then I looked at myself in the mirror. I don't know what I saw. Not a murderer. Not a stripper. Not even an older sister. I just saw a girl who looked worried. I stared at her for a second, and then I caked some makeup on her face.