Clara Rinker. Of the three unluckiest days in Barbara Allen's life, the first was the day Clara Rinker was raped behind a St. Louis nudie bar called Zanadu, which was located west of the city in a dusty checkerboard of truck terminals, warehouses and light assembly plants. Zanadu, as its chrome-yellow billboard proclaimed, was E-Z On, E-Z Off. The same was not true of Clara

Rinker, despite what Zanadu's customers thought.

Rinker was sixteen when she was raped, a small athletic girl, a dancer, an

Ozarks runaway. She had bottle-blonde hair that showed darker roots, and a body that looked wonderful in v-necked, red-polka-dotted, thin-cotton dresses from K Mart. A body that drew the attention of cowboys, truckers, and other men who dreamt of Nashville.

Rinker had taken up nude dancing because she could. It was that, fuck for money, or go hungry. The rape took place at two o'clock in the morning on an otherwise delightful April night, the kind of night when Midwestern kids are allowed to stay out late and play war, when cicadas hum down from their elm-bark hideaways. Rinker had closed the bar that night; she was the last dancer up.

Four men were still drinking when she finished. Three were hound-faced long distance truckers who had nowhere to go but the short beds in their various

Kenworths, Freightliners and Peterbilts; and a Norwegian exotic-animal dealer drowning the sorrows of a recent mishap involving a box of boa constrictors and thirty-six thousand dollars' worth of illegal tropical birds.

A fifth man, a slope-shouldered gorilla named Dale-Something, had walked out of the bar halfway through Rinker's last grind. He left behind twelve dollars in crumpled ones and two small sweat rings where his forearms had been propped on the bar. Rinker had worked down the bar-top, stopping for ten seconds in front of each man, for what the girls called a crack shot. Dale-Something had gotten the first shot, and he had stood up and walked out as soon as she moved to the next guy. When she was done, Rinker hopped off the end of the bar and headed for the back to get into her street clothes.