Joan of Arc Finally,
a meteor streaking through the night sky, gorgeous Rachel Fairbanks found a career as a stripper in a
Las Vegas nightclub. Since leaving Idaho seven years before I met her, she had worked in a
liquor store, dealt twenty-one, cleaned cages
at the local zoo, and gone to college.
She’d tried amateur boxing. However, dancing
nude in front of howling men and women gave her a rush, and to make her name in the
underworld of adult erotica she embellished her routine.
Like most of the other dancers, she
began simply, dancing topless during the second song and
taking it all off for the third. Tips
increased, however, as she added something no one else in the club tried: at the beginning
of the third dance, setting a lighter to her nipple rings, she would light her tits on
fire, flames dancing in the air. It was
Wednesday evening, and I had
stopped by Pussy Willows on my way home from teaching a night literature class at the
college. The mid-February arctic winds poured
down from the north into southern Nevada. The
temperature had dropped to fifteen above the night before, packs of wild dogs prowled the
suburbs, and half-eaten corpses of the homeless were
found in the side streets of Las Vegas. Chilled, depressed, I was drinking a Tequila Sunrise in the warm darkness of
the club when I looked at the tall, thin woman dancing on the stage. Her stage name was
Joan of Arc, raven hair cascading down
her back. She had a red and green snake tattooed on her stomach and rings through her
nipples. As I studied her, I saw her look at me, smile, give a nervous wave
as if she recognized me, and blow me a kiss. At that moment, the relentless beat of
the nightclub music, the aroma of beer and cigarettes
faded. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
She couldn’t have been more the twenty-five, had long,
blood-red fingernails, and wore dark red lipstick. Between songs, when she beckoned me
closer, I rose from my well-padded chair,
picked up my drink, and walked to a table next to the stage. When I sat down and the third
song began, she dropped to her knees on the stage, extended her left arm, stroked my hair
with her hand, and said, “Now, please watch this.” She rose, magnificent in semi-darkness.
As the song began, she removed her string,
and I saw a thin line of pubic hair extending toward her belly button from her pussy.
Rush filled the air. After a
couple of spins around the pole, she walked to the front of the stage, two feet from me,
leaned over her pile of clothes, reached down and pulled out a lighter. Flicking the lighter, she brought the flame close
to her body and seemed to set her nipples on fire.
I figured that attached to each ring was something that burned; I just
didn’t know what. Men howled. The effect was dazzling, and as dim lights
darkened, she ran her fingers through her hair, spun slowly
a couple of times, looked my way, winked, and glided towards me. I looked up. “Hi, stud,” she said,
smiling, hands on her hips, her green eyes dancing behind the small flames. “Hey, babe,” I said, heart
pounding feverishly. “I’m Rachel.” “Hi, Rachel,” I answered.
“I’m Jeff.” ‘’What d’ya think,
Jeff?” she said, very carefully
crouching, spreading her legs. Her hands cradled her tits as if she were offering them,
flames and all, to me. “Pretty fuckin’
wonderful,” I blurted, my throat hard. “Ever seen tits burn?” she
asked, coyly. “I have now,” I said. “You like?” she asked. I
watched the fires slowly extinguish. “I guess,” I responded,
smiling. “How d’ya do it?” “Do what?” she asked,
teasing. She never took her eyes from me, and I felt hypnotized. “Set your nipples on fire without
hurting yourself.” The fires were now out. She smiled. “Magical potion. All
witches have a magical potion.” “Maybe,” I said, wanting this
woman more than anything. “But you’re no witch.” “You’re right there,
stud,” she responded, the smile almost disappearing. Instead of resuming her dance, she
continued to squat and fix her eyes on me. “You wanna be with me tonight,
Jeff?” she asked, weakly, almost desperate. She spoke as if out of a dream, and I
answered, quivering with excitement, “Yeah, I certainly do.” The smile returned, and she leaned
over, grabbed the back of my head, pulled me toward her, and put her lips on mine. “Meet me by the door at one,”
she whispered, slowly drawing back, then darting forward and licking my forehead. As she did, I licked the one of her nipples. The woman stood in front of me for at
least a minute as I looked behind her into the club, waiting for the girl who had set her
tits on fire. “Hey. Hey. It’s me, Rachel,” she finally said,
extending her right hand for me to shake. I shook. “And I’m Jeff,” I said,
still puzzled as she stepped forward, put out
her other hand and brushed between my legs. I was amused but didn’t respond. “Let’s try it again,”
she said. “Hi, Jeff! I’m
Rachel!” She was yelling and laughing now. “Remember?
Hello?” She stood at an angle, looked up into my eyes, and waved one hand. Suddenly, the light came on. “Hey,” I stuttered, my moment
of epiphany having arrived. “You’re the dancer who sets her tits on fire,”
I whispered. “The lady with the blazing
tits!” I looked into her dancing green
eyes. “Where ya been, Stud?” she
asked, a little impatient. “I been here for five minutes. Anyone home?” As I studied her, looked into her still
dancing green eyes, her full lips, her smile, glanced at her blood red fingernails, it
finally registered. This was the one. “Joan of Arc!” I exclaimed. “No shit, Jeff. You don’t
miss much.” “We gonna be together
tonight?” “Oh, yes,” she said,
something a little unsettling in her voice. “Very much, I hope.” She pressed her hand between my legs
and squeezed. . “ Now,” she said, “let’s take me home. I didn’t bring
a car, I live in Beatty, so you gotta drive.” My
story took us from the center of Las Vegas to Indian Springs, the home of one of
Nevada’s penitentiaries. I told her that
I had been born and raised in a small town in central Nevada where the only entertainment
was fishing, hunting, fighting, and fucking. When
I was five, Dad had taken off with another woman. Five
year later, when he came back, dying of cancer, Mom took him in and then left for Las
Vegas, where she worked in one of the casinos. Determined to escape central Nevada, I poured myself into literature, went to a
prestigious Eastern university, received my Ph. D, and wound up in Las Vegas. “Things kind of go full circle,
huh, stud?” Rachel asked. She was
amused. I turned off the radio, which had been
playing softly, and asked her, “Now, how about you?” “How about me?” she replied,
coldly mocking. “Well, for starters, where do you
come from?” “I come from Boise. Just north of there.” “Idaho?” “There’s only one
Boise.” I paused and waited. I was glad I had a radio. “All right,” she began.
“My parents come from a long line of farmers,
so I grew up on a farm.” “You like living on the
farm?” I asked. I had the impression that I was walking into a dark pond. She sighed deeply, painfully. “Yeah. It
was heaven. For awhile.” “How long’s awhile?” “Until I was fourteen.” “What happened at fourteen?” Rachel reached into the darkness,
turned the radio back on, fiddled with the buttons, and finally found a station of
throbbing rock. She turned up the station so I had to strain to listen. “At fourteen, all hell breaks
loose in Rachel Fairbanks life, and things are forever changed,” she began. “One
morning, right before Easter, while Momma and I are sitting in the kitchen, eating
pancakes and eggs and laughing about going into town that weekend to see a movie and visit
relatives, we hear the explosion from the barn. Shotgun blast. And I think we both knew what happened, but
Momma dropped her coffee and we both ran from the house to the barn and we knew what we
would find because Daddy had been depressed
for years, following his own mother’s
death, and when we stepped into the barn the air was thick with blood. Thick. Like molasses in the air. Except it was
blood. And I got sick. And there was Daddy,
sitting on the ground, propped against the fence, covered with blood, shotgun still in his hands and pointed at his head. Blood everywhere: in the hay, on the walls, on the
two cows in the pen, shit, on the roof. And I
said, I think, ‘This can’t be Daddy.’ Thought it was some kind of joke.
Maybe a dream because the back part of the head was missing. I mean, this was the man who
carried me outside on a cool spring night when I couldn’t sleep. Jesus. Jesus.” Numbed, I listened. I couldn’t do
anything else. Rachel waited until a new song came on,
then finished her story. “Hell, I
don’t know what happened to Momma. Some
evenings she’d leave the house and go
wandering down the dirt road in front of our house and me and Billy my younger brother
would hop in the pickup and go find her. She’d
be walking in some neighbors field, or sitting by the side of the road, or one time we
found her sitting in a tree. Billy and me
tried to hold things together. We prayed and prayed and prayed after we got Momma in bed
at night. ‘Jesus,’ I would cry,
‘please make Momma better,’ and I’d be holdin’ hands tight with Billy,
who’d say ‘Amen.’ When I was a senior in high school, on Easter weekend,
Momma wandered away again, this time down to
the big highway from Boise and put herself in
the way of a truck. Driver says he never saw
her.” She paused, then said in a gentle
voice, “Mind if I smoke?” “No,” I replied. “But open the window.” Rachel smoked one, two, then three
cigarettes. Finally, she spoke. “You’re
wondering why I set myself on fire.” “Yeah,” I said, “I
guess.” “I think it’s because I can’t feel. Sure, it brings in the tips, and I get invited to
parties where they pay to see me do it. And
I do it. But never for them. I do it so I can feel pain. I can’t feel pain anymore. Especially since Billy died last
year. Murdered in Wyoming. Can’t even enjoy sex.”
I drove into the black empty expanse
of desert, wishing I had stayed back at the club. The desert wind pounded the car, and I
wondered how many miles I had to go before Beatty. Rachel must have smoked a pack when she
asked, “Hey, stud, wanna have a little fun?” Her tone had changed. The question seemed harmless, so I said, “Sure.” “Pull off at the next right. You’ll see a road right up here somewhere.
Take the road. “ Something within me strained against taking the turn into
the desert. But when I saw the road, I slowed
and took the right. “Now where?” I asked,
traveling a dirt road. “Just drive,” she said. “I’ll tell you when.” So I drove for about an hour, until we
reached some desert mountains where the road narrowed,
bordered on both sides by high cliffs. “There’s another road up
here,” she said, excitement in her voice. “There,”
she pointed, “take it.” I
turned left and climbed a winding road several miles to a high flat place where the road
ended. I stopped, waited, then asked,
“What now?” “For the hell of it, Stud,
let’s get naked together and walk in the desert.” “What? It’s freezing
outside.” “C’mon,” she said,
removing her clothes inside my car, “get naked with me. Experience God. C’mon.” Sensing that I was stepping into the
Abyss, I did as I was asked and removed my clothes. I
left the engine idling, and put a Rush CD into the player.
I turned the CD way up. When we stepped from the car, I
didn’t feel the wind. I’m not sure
I felt anything but pure lust for the woman with me. Rachel carried a small black bag. She
had taken off her glasses, and her long black hair blew freely in the wind. “You look great,” I gasped. I wondered what she would look like now with her
tits on fire. “My God, so do you, Stud.”
She examined me, and her expression revealed surprise and delight: I was much bigger than
she had thought I would be. “I want that thing inside of
me,” she said. “God, do I want you inside me.” “I thought you said you
couldn’t feel,” I quipped. “I can feel that monster,”
she assured me. The moon glistened off her nipple rings
as I watched Rachel open her bag, take out a small bottle, squeeze creamy liquid into her
hand, and rub it over her body. When she was finished, she handed the bottle to me. “But, first,
put this on,” she said, her voice low and seductive. She reached
forward and softly held my cock. “Why?” I asked. “What is
this stuff?” “It’s what I put on when I
set fire to myself. I told you about it. Remember?” “So why put it on out here?”
I asked. “Just put it on,” she said,
taking the bottle from me, squeezing some of the liquid into her hand, and rubbing it on.
She started with my back, went to my face and chest, and then worked her way down. I couldn’t feel the wind. “Get every inch of my body. Even
that, ” I said. I was beginning to enjoy this strange girl, and when she finished,
she dropped the bottle to the ground, knelt down in front of me, took my hardening manhood
in one hand, and then with desert wind shrieking about us took me into her mouth and into
her throat. I thought she was going to suffocate, but instead she purred with delight. It
was as good as any fuck I’ve ever had, and after I’d exploded inside of her, she
withdrew me, wiped her mouth, licked her
fingers, and stood. The wind exploded around us, and I
glanced up at the full moon. So far this was heaven. She moved toward me again and draped
her arms around my shoulders. “Rachel, let’s wait for a bit
and then fuck some more. Please.
Please.” I was already starting to get hard again. Usually it takes me twenty minutes
to half an hour. “Yes,” she whispered,
“let’s set each other really on fire and fuck each other’s lights
out.” I waited until my mind replayed what
she had just said. “What?”
I said. “Did you say ‘set each
other on fire’? Is that what you said?” “It’s what I said, Jeff,
“ she answered, reaching down with one arm and gently taking hold of my cock. “You’re speaking
metaphorically, of course, as in the fires of passion,” I said, feeling apprehensive.
Even as I asked, I knew I had misunderstood. “No, I don’t mean quite that,
love Stud,” she purred, massaging me with both hands now, pressing her lips against
mine, her tongue flicking inside my mouth. As she put her arms around my neck again, I
placed my hand between her legs, felt her wetness, and entered her with the tips of my
fingers. “Then what,” I gasped,
“do you mean? Explain for the benefit of your audience.” “OK, stud. I’ll explain.
It’s real fuckin’ simple,” she breathed, low, soft, seductive. I felt in a
trance. “I never set my whole body on
fire before, so that’s what we’re gonna do: set each other on fire and fuck each
other to death.” I paused, allowing the words to drive
into my mind like nails. Then, slowly, I
stepped back from her. “That strikes me as
dangerous,” I commented, the terrifying
image of two lovers consumed by actual fire at the moment of climax. “Sure. It is dangerous,” she
said, stepping toward me. “It’s fuckin’ fatal. So, let’s do it.” “No,” I mumbled, suddenly
realizing that I had entered the world of someone whose darkness was far deeper than my
own. Studying her, her raven hair flying in
the wind, I could see that Rachel was hurt. “Why? Why not?” she demanded,
sounding on the verge of tears. “We’ll catch on fire,
Rachel.” Bathed in moonlight, she paused,
breathed deeply, sniffed and sobbed. “Jeff,”
she began again after several minutes, “does God ever talk to you?” “I don’t think so,” I
said, realizing that my drive to Beatty with a stripper who set her tits on fire had
brought me to the true edge of night. “Not
for a long time. Does He talk to you?” “All the time, Jeff,” she
responded in a sing-song voice. “He’s speaking to me right now. I can hear him in the wind. Can’t you?” The wind banged about us and I thought,
for an instant, that I heard something. I
listened. Nothing. “I hear nothing but the wind and
your voice,” I replied. She was smiling now, blissful I would
say, and I knew now that she was serious. “I know you hear him, Jeff,”
she said. “I hear him.” “And we would burn to a
crisp,” I added, beginning to feel sick inside. “That’s the idea. That’s
it. By that point, we’re gone. Then,”
she assured me, “our souls will leave
our bodies and we meet each other on the other side.” “The other side?” Verging on
panic, I felt darkness encroaching. Eternal night was seconds away. “Yeah. You know what that is,
right, stud?” “The other side to what?” I
know I was shivering now. “To this! This God-forsaken,
fucked-up, drive-you-out-of-your-fuckin’-mind world. That world.” It was the
first time I’d seen her hostile. “Maybe there is no other side.
Maybe,” I speculated, desperately groping for a way out, “this is all there
is.” “Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, you know
better. You know better. Right? You’re the college English professor. You gotta know better.” I glanced up at the night sky, felt the
cold wind pounding against me, then looked at her, as gorgeous as when I had first seen
her on the stage. “Rachel,” I commented,
“this is stupid. Now I’m freezing and wanna go back to the car.” She wouldn’t budge. I should have
just left: walked to the car, climbed in , put on my clothes, and driven away. “Listen, Jeff, ” she stated. “What the hell else is there? Whatever’s
there has gotta be better than here. You know that. I heard your story. You heard mine. We gotta take our so-called
‘leap of faith.’” Maybe it was fear, but I couldn’t
feel a thing at this point. I continued to
look at her, her pale skin glistening from the liquid. For some reason, I felt that I had known Rachel for a life time.
Intuitively, as I looked at her, I could feel her quickly moving away from me. It was as if, standing five feet from me, her mind
were a million light years away. I didn’t know if I should save her. Since leaving home, I had never gone out of my way
to help anyone without getting something in return. “No, Rachel,” I finally said,
sensing what was about to happen. “That’s crazy.
No, no, no. That’s
fuckin’ insane. What are you...?” I
reached out to grab her. I didn’t have a chance to finish
my question or touch her before Rachel ran to the edge of the plateau about
forty feet from us. I figured that the desert floor lay
five hundred to a thousand feet below.
“Then,” she said, laughing,
“I’ll do it. Nothing to it.” In the silence that followed, I could
hear Rush in the background, booming from my car whose driver’s window I had left
down. Frozen to the spot, I did not move. Reaching
into her bag, which she had picked up and carried with her, she produced the lighter,
flicked it once, twice, three times. In the wind, I silently told myself, this will not
work. I was wrong. First, she set her
nipples on fire. Then, she moved to her pubic area and set her hair on fire. I watched. I just watched.
I don’t know why I did nothing. Maybe
I was fascination. Maybe it was morbid
obsession. Maybe I was frozen by the cold. I
think it’s that I wanted to die, too, but was afraid to take the step. I watched as the flame covered her body,
beginning at the line just below her belly button and spreading quickly to all parts of
her body and then to her hair. I could smell, even in the night wind, the rotten stench of
burning flesh, and thought for a moment that I was going to be sick. But I didn’t get sick. I just watched Rachel burn. Maybe I was afraid that I would interrupt
something if I tried to stop Rachel. Holding
her arms out from her body, in the shape of a cross, she burned and burned, flames
shooting into the sky, and I watched and waited, studying her smiling face, hoping the
fire would go out, wondering if she would scream, thinking this is some kind of trick,
that surely the fire would go out. The first scream was hollow, primal,
something unearthly, from deep within the flame engulfing Rachel. My mind spun, and I told
myself to walk forward. My feet wouldn’t
move. The scream came again, a
sound from another dimension, light years away from where I stood, the lonely high desert
plateau, the February wind whipping around me, the full moon overhead. Then,
spectacularly, she turned, stepped to the edge of the plateau, and disappeared. I had no idea. Freed to move, I rushed to the side of
the cliff, and in the darkness could make out what looked like a flaming bird far below
me. I watched the bird, hoping it would
rise before it hit the desert floor. As I
watched, wondering if I should jump, the fire burnt until its glow was extinguished by the
darkness. Rachel Fairbanks was gone. I couldn’t wait to get home, take
out a novel by Dickens or Conrad or Pynchon, and read until I fell asleep. © 2000 Rich Logsdon |