Skin Deep by Timothy Hallinan

smile that missed me by a yard. Her teeth were stained and broken. "Shanksh," she said to the chair next to me.
    "Ahmed," Pepper said to her, and I saw that the Middle Easterner had dropped a couple of ones on the counter in front of him. Amber trudged in his direction and then leaned over and swung her long, lifeless brown hair back and forth in a gesture that had probably been sexy ten years and a million dances earlier. Trying to straighten up, she lost her balance and fell on her tail. She didn't seem surprised, and Ahmed laughed. Nana looked over from the other stage.
    "Wasted in excess," Pepper said. "She'll never make it until closing time."
    "Wasted on what?"
    "Name it, sweetie," Pepper said. "Don't give her any of Toby's coke, okay? Ambulances are bad for business."
    I put the coke away and turned to watch Nana.
    She was standing upright and toying with the top button of her hot pants, looking down at a hugely bearded customer who had put down a small mountain of money. With a smile that made me want to put on sunglasses, she undid the button and then swung her leg in a high arc over his head. He dropped a few more bills on the mountain and licked his lips, exaggerating the gesture to cartoon proportions. Nana gave him the classic "shame on you" signal, rubbing one forefinger over the other, and moved on to the next customer.
    The music came to a merciful halt, and Nana left her stage quickly. She threw me an appraising glance, helped Amber climb down the stairs, and then put a protective arm around her waist. They disappeared together behind the red curtain. Amber kept getting her feet mixed up.
    I took a long gulp of the vodka and, feeling its glow inside me, surveyed the room. In addition to Pepper, there were four women working as waitresses, all of them dressed for the first two pages of a Penthouse centerfold. Lingerie was conspicuously in evidence. Most of the girls seemed to be on the shy side, if that's the proper figure of speech, of twenty. Bellies were flat, buttocks were firm. Gravity was still lurking offstage, preening its villain's mustache. Cellulite and stretch marks were as absent as an intellectual at a Ku Klux Klan meeting. Despair was a decade away. At the same time, I felt as though I were watching balloons of bright hope passing through a sewing machine. On the other side of the needle was Amber.
    During the long pause between songs, nobody said a word.
    Then a cash register clanged to introduce Pink Floyd's "Money." The crimson curtain parted, and Amber's skeletal figure wobbled toward the stage with Nana's hand poised supportively in the middle of her back. Amber had taken off the camisole but retained the leopard-skin panties and the elbow-length gloves. Nana wore nothing but a slender gold chain that swaggered its way around her hips, about halfway between her navel and real trouble. She got Amber onto the stage and then, after a moment of concerned surveillance, went to her own. Her black hair, rippling and knotting as though it had a life of its own, cascaded down her back and brushed the dimpled cleft of her buttocks. Nana presented a new standard of nudity, like a third and, as yet, undiscovered sex. If all women looked like that, I thought, there would be no fashion industry.
    Amber teetered precariously in front of me and then, more to keep her balance than for any other reason, abruptly turned her back. I was staring at the backs of her knees, and their delicate tangle of wrinkles and blue veins reminded me of the sturdy, inviolate legs of my first love, who had helped me through the demanding mathematics of third grade. I thought of her name for the first time in twenty years, and for a moment Amber was a child named Lynn Russell.
    And then she turned back to face me, keeping her balance in defiance of all the laws of physics. Perspiration trickled down her face, taking vertical lines of mascara with it. Her elegant gloves had slipped down her arms, and I could see the tracks, red