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 often dancing a foot 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, 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. Vampirish, 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 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 like,” 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 nipples of one of her tits.

I was standing at the door by 12:45. She didn’t come out until around 1:30. At first, I didn’t recognize here. Standing before me was a woman without make-up, without her costume, looking remarkably ordinary. Her dark hair was pulled back in a bun, and her glasses suggested that she read a great deal. She wore a gray sweater that read “University of Idaho”, baggy, khaki trousers and sandals.

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 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.”

On the drive through the dark empty desert towards Beatty, which is approximately one hundred miles north of Las Vegas, things got weird. At first we talked. She told me what she’d done before becoming a stripper. She emphasized that she’d never used drugs, and I then told her a little about me.

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, her voice cold.

“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’s life, and things are forever changed,” she began. “One morning, 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. We’d 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, 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.

As I drove back to the city, I wondered what life with Rachel would have been like. I found myself wondering if she was face to face with God, hoped that she was with her mother and father and brother. Gazing through my windshield into the darkness of the night sky, hoping for a winter meteor shower, I knew better.

I couldn’t wait to get home, take out a novel by Dickens or Conrad or Pynchon, and read until I fell asleep.

- By Rich Logsdon 2001