Piecework

It was almost midnight. The girl on the beach had a thick, chunky body encased in denim shorts and a dark blue T-shirt. There was a man in front of her, kissing her violently, and another man behind her, running his hands over her body. Above them, the people on the pier at the foot of Main Street were watching, some of them smiling, as the girl struggled. She pushed one of the men back and then darted away among the parked cars on the beach.

“Come back here, girl,” one of the men shouted. He was wearing a pair of dirty white jeans, his hair tied back in a ponytail. The thick little girl looked to her left and saw the signs of Big Daddy’s Lounge, the Saxony Motel and The Seahorse; she saw the lights of the Skylift and the Skyneedle. She dashed between the parked cars to her right, then in front of the slow-moving cars that are allowed to drive on the beach here, then she ran into the surf. The two men were behind her, running hard. The people on the pier just watched.

The two men caught her in the surf. One of them pulled her hair back while the other fondled her. The traffic moved along slowly.

At one end of the pier was a place called The Pit Stop, a dark little saloon, with pinball machines, aging hippies nursing drinks, the Rolling Stones singing “Miss You” on the jukebox. I went down there to find a cop. I saw a fat special standing on the steps to the right of the saloon.

“Hey,” I said, “you got a little girl in trouble down on that beach.”

“There’s lots of little girls in trouble down on that beach,” he said, walking away.

When I got back to the pier, the girl was running under the dance hall that was halfway to the end of the pier. I leaned out over the edge of the Solarcaine sign and saw the two men tumble her into the surf.

The chunky little girl squealed and laughed as one of the men yanked at her T-shirt. Then she got up, soaking, and walked slowly away with them, like a prisoner.

Late the next afternoon, I saw her sitting alone at a yellow table in front of McDonald’s, a block behind the boardwalk. Her dark brown hair was dirty and matted and there were grease stains on her bare feet. She was wearing the same clothes she had on the night before. Her skin looked coarse in the late afternoon sun. She was tearing greedily at a Big Mac, and I went over and sat down across from her. She was about 16.

“How’d you make out last night?” I said.

Her eyes were suddenly jittery and scared and she stopped chewing.

“I’m not a cop,” I said. “I just wondered how you got through the night alive.”

“I’m here, ain’t I?” she said. She had a hoarse, small, girl’s voice.

“How’d you get here?” I said.

Her eyes became icy nuggets. “I don’t know you, Mister. I don’t have to say nuthin’ to you.”

“You’re right,” I said, and went into the main room of the McDonald’s and ordered a milk shake. I paid for it and went outside and sat at another table. Pick-up trucks lumbered down the street, waiting at the light to turn on Main Street and go out to the beach.

Two 4 5-year-old hippies with scoured eyes walked into McDonald’s, shirtless and shoeless, and looked blankly at the chunky girl. She had finished eating, and was sipping a soda. One of them went inside and the other stared at her. She got up and came over to sit across from me.

“You got a dollar?” she said.

“Sure,” I said, and gave her a dollar. The second hippie went inside. “What’s your name?”

“Kathy.”

“Where you from, Kathy?”

“Up North. Albany, N.Y. You’re not a cop?”

“Do I look like a cop?” I said, laughing. She smiled then, and said, “Yeah.”

“Well, I’m not. I’m a reporter.” I showed her a press card. She looked at the picture on the card and then at me, and handed it back. It was starting to get dark now and I asked her how she’d come to Daytona Beach.

“I ran away last May,” she said. “I couldn’t take them no more. I couldn’t take my mother, always naggin’, always on me, you know? So I just took off one night, me and a girlfriend. She quit on me in New York City and went home, but I kept goin’.”

Somewhere in New Jersey, she was picked up by a truck driver. They went all the way to Virginia together.

“I thought he was a nice guy,” she said. “He was doin’ a lot of pills, reds and stuff, and he’d sing the songs right along with the radio, and he knew every word. We come to some place, a truck stop they call it. They had a separate restaurant, just for truck drivers. He gave me some pills and I took them. I didn’t care, and we drank some beer.”

They stayed there all night, and the driver passed her around to five other drivers.

“I didn’t mind,” she said flatly. “It was better than Albany. But when I woke up in the morning in the woods beside that place, they were all gone, every last one of them. I left my shoes in one of the trucks, and I only had $4. So I had to hitchhike. Some old farmer picked me up. He wanted to take me someplace, but he was so old, man. I said no, and he got mad and left me out on the road in the middle of the night.”