What the Dead Men Say (7 page)

    Imagine what Mae would think of him if she ever found out he was involved in the robbery of that bank and the death of that little girl.

    “So long, Kittredge,” Dodds said, then swung back so that he was facing the tavern maid. He ordered himself another schooner. Kittredge left.

    

    

    When James was younger, just after his father’s funeral, his mother’s sister, a shy and unmarried woman named Nella, stayed with the family for three months till, as she put it, Mrs. Hogan “saw that there were things still worth living for.” It was Nella’s habit to bathe in the downstairs bathroom, where the tub with the claws and the wall with the nymphs on it sat in the rear of the house. Nella always waited till everyone had gone to sleep before bathing. The family was too polite to ask why, of course, respecting their aunt as they did, even if she was “eccentric” as their mother had rather shamefully said of her one day.

    One night, when he badly needed a drink, and had found his mother in the upstairs bathroom, James had gone downstairs, thinking he’d get water from the kitchen, which the colored maid had cleaned only that afternoon. He descended the stairs in darkness, liking the way winter moonlight played silver and frosty through the front window. Then he heard the sighing from the back of the house, from the bathroom.

    At first the sound reminded him of pain. But why would Nella inflict pain on herself?

    On tiptoe, sensing he should not do what he was about to do, James went down the hall to the bathroom. The closer he got the more pronounced the moaning and the signing became.

    He was about to raise his hand and let it gently fall against the door when she said, “Oh, Donald; Donald.” And that stopped him. Was there a man in there with her?

    He did not knock. Instead he did what so many comedians in vaudeville did. He fell to one knee and peered through the key hole.

    Aunt Nella was nude. The body she had kept modestly hidden was beautiful and womanly and overwhelming to him. She leaned against the wall with the nymphs so that he could see her clearly, her eyes closed so tightly, her mouth open and gasping, her hand fallen and moving quicksilver fast at the part in her white legs. “Oh, Donald; Donald.” And he saw now that she was alone and only summoning the man as if he were a ghost who could pass through walls and visit her, touch her as she now touched herself.

    He never forgot how Aunt Nella looked that night; she would forever be the woman with whom he compared all other women, and for many years after, in stern midwestern February and in soft mid-western October, he would see her there projected on his ceiling. Oh, Nella; Nella (just as she’d called out for Donald). Nella.

    Just after his third drink, just after Uncle Septemus disappeared down the hall, just after the door closed and the girl came in and dropped her shabby dress to her wide hips, James thought of Nella, thinking the most forbidden thought of all, that he wished it were Nella he was with on this most important of nights, and not some chubby farm girl with bleached hair and the smell of too-sweet perfume.

    The whorehouse shook with the relentless happiness of player pianos (one up, one down) and the even more relentless happiness of girls determined in their somewhat sad way to show the men a good time. He could smell whiskey and cigar smoke and sweat, and could see the flickering shadows cast by the kerosene lamp on the sentimental painting of the innocent but somehow erotic young prairie girl above the brass bed. James supposed that that was how all the girls saw themselves-idealized and vulnerable in that way, not crude and harsh and defeated as they really were.

    She came over and stood by him and said, “My name’s Liz.”

    “Hi, Liz.”

    She smiled. “It’s all right if you look at them. That’s why I took my dress down. So you could see them.”

    He couldn’t stop staring at her breasts. He’d raise his eyes and look into her eyes or he’d glance up at the painting above the bed but always his eyes would drop back down to her breasts.

    She reached out and took his hand. Touched it in such a way that he could tell she was making some character judgment about him. “You’re not a farm boy, are you?”

    “No, ma’m.”

    She giggled. “I ain’t no ’ma’m,’ I bet I’m younger than you. I’m fourteen.”

    He didn’t say anything. Stood straight and still, heart hammering.

    “You want to kiss first?”

    “I guess so,” he said.

    “You don’t know what to do, do you?”

    “I guess not.”

    “You look mighty scared.”

    He said nothing.

    “If you just relax, you’ll enjoy yourself.”

    He said nothing.

    “You kinda remind me of my brother and that’s kinda sweet.” She leaned forward and kissed him gently on the lips. “That feel good?”

    “I guess so.”

    She laughed. “You sure ‘guess’ about a lot of things.”

    He said nothing.

    She took his hand again. She led him over to the bed. They sat on the edge of it, the springs squeaking. She was prettier in profile than straight on. He wanted her to be pretty. On a night like this you wanted your girl to be pretty. He wondered if he’d be so scared now if he were sitting here with Marietta. Or Nella. That was a terrible thought and he tried not to think it, about sitting there with his own aunt, but he couldn’t help it.

    He said, “Do you go to school?”

    She turned and looked at him. “Do I go to school?” She smiled and patted his hand. “Honey, they wouldn’t let girls like me in school.”

    “You got folks?”

    “In South Dakota.”

    “Do they-”

    “Do they know what I do? Was that what you were gonna ask me?”

    “I guess.”

    “No. They don’t know. A year ago I run off. This was as far as I got. I wrote ’em and tole ’em I’m working for this nice woman.” She laughed. “Miss Susan is nice; that part of it ain’t a lie.”

    He sat on the edge of the bed and stared down at his hands. They were trembling. “We don’t have to do anything. I wouldn’t ask for my money back, I mean.”

    “You afraid you can’t do it?”

    He didn’t say anything.

    “A lot of men are like that. Even when they’ve been doin’ it regular all their lives. They just get kinda scared and they get worried if they’re gonna make fools of themselves but, heck, you’ll be fine.”

    “You sure?”

    “Sure. I mean, we’ll take it real slow. We’ll lay back on the bed and just kind of hold each other and take it real slow. I like it better that way anyway.”

    “You do?”

    “Sure. More like we care about each other.”

    “You want to lie back now?”

    “You talk good, don’t you?”

    “Good?”

    “Proper-like.”

    “English is one of my best subjects.”

    “She laughed. “Honey, none of ’em was my best subject. I’m thick as a log.”

    “You ready?”

    “Any time you are.”

    “And I just lie back?”

    “You just lie back.”

    “I don’t take my clothes off yet?”

    “Not yet. I’ll do that for you later.”

    “And then we just… do it?”

    “That’s right. Then we just… do it. But maybe I should teach you a little trick.”

    “A trick?”

    “I ain’t a beautiful girl, honey. I know that. I got a nice set of milk jugs but that’s about it. So Miss Sue tole me about this little trick to pass on to men.”

    “What sort of trick?”

    She giggled. “You’re getting scared again, honey. It’s nothing to be scared about at all.” She leaned over and touched his chest. He liked the weight and warmth of her pressed against him. “You got a sweetheart?”

    James thought about it. Should he even mention Marietta’s name to a girl like this? “I guess.”

    “Well, then, while we’re doin’ it, you close your eyes and pretend I’m her. It’ll be a lot better for you that way.”

    “But isn’t that kind of-” He shook his head.

    “Kind of what?”

    “Won’t that kind of hurt your feelings?”

    She looked up at him in the soft flicking lampglow. How hard she seemed, and yet there was a weariness in her young gaze that made him sad for her. She was fourteen and no fourteen year old he knew looked this weary. “Nope,” she said. “It won’t hurt my feelings at all.”

    But for some reason he didn’t think she was telling him the truth. For some reason he thought she might be happy to hear what he said next.

    “I’m happy to be with you,” he said.

    “You are?”

    “Sure.”

    “Well, that’s nice of you to say.” She pointed to her mouth. “Let me finish chewin’ my gum so my breath gets good and sweet.” She finished chewing her gum, then set it with surprising delicacy on the edge of the bureau and lay back down next to him.

    “Would you like it better if I turned the lamp out?” she said.

    “Yeah, maybe that would be better.”

    So she turned the lamp out.

    He lay there in the darkness listening to both of them breathe.

    After a time she kissed him and it was awkward and he felt nervous and afraid but then she kissed him a second and a third time and it felt very nice and he began stroking her bleached hair and she took one of his hands and set it to her breast and then everything was fine, just fine, and all the whorehouse noise faded and it was just them in the soft shared prairie shadows.

    

    

    Tess was his littlest girl. She was four. Because of the heat she wore a pair of ribbed summer drawers. Her sister Eloise was asleep. Tess was at the doorway, giving Griff a hug he had to bend down to get. Her body was hot and damp and as always she felt almost frighteningly fragile in his arms. He kissed her blue eyes and her pink lips and then he hugged her, feeling the doll cradled in her arm press against him.

    “Will you kiss Betty, too?”

    “Kind of hot for a kiss, isn’t it?” Griff said playfully.

    “You kissed me, Daddy. Can’t you kiss her?”

    Griff looked over at his wife in the rattan rocker and winked. “Oh, I guess I could.”

    So he picked Betty up and kissed her on the forehead and handed her back.

    ‘“Night, punkin’,” he said, bending down and holding Tess to his leg. She was so small, she scarcely touched his thigh.

    “Will you bring me ice cream?”

    “I’m afraid I can’t tonight, hon.”

    “How come?”

    “I have some business to take care of.”

    “What kind of business?”

    He laughed. “Dora, don’t you think it’s time you put your little girl to bed?”

    Dora got up from the rocker and came over. She leaned down and picked up Tess. Tess held tight to Betty.

    Dora said, “How about a kiss for me, too?”

    Griff obliged. He held her longer than he meant to and he closed his eyes as he kissed her. He knew that she knew something was wrong. He’d told her that Kittredge wanted to talk to him about some haying later on in the fall, that the hay man wanted an answer tomorrow morning. But she knew. All during dinner he’d felt her eyes on him. Gray, loving, gentle eyes. Now, holding their youngest, she touched him and the feel of her fingers on his forearm made him feel weak, as if he were caught up in some kind of reverie. He wanted to be younger, back before the holdup and the little girl getting killed. How stupid it all seemed now, being so concerned about not having a job, feeling so afraid that he’d been pushed to such extremes. Hell, he didn’t have nearly as good a job even now but they were making it and making it fine.

    “You don’t have to go, you know,” Dora said. A tall woman, not pretty but handsome in her clean purposeful way, she tugged on his shirtsleeve much as Tess had done earlier. “You could always tell Kittredge you just weren’t interested.”

    “Could be some good money. You never can tell.”

    She said, “Is Carlyle going to be there?”

    “Carlyle? Why would he be there? I haven’t seen Carlyle in a long time.”

    “It just feels funny, tonight.”

    “What’s ‘feel funny,’ Momma?” Tess said.

    He leaned in and kissed them both again. “I won’t be too long,” he said, and then he was gone.

    

    

    Long before there was a brick-and-steel bridge near the dam, Griff used to go there as a boy and throw his fishing line in and spend the day. He’d always bring an apple, a piece of jerky, and enough water to last the long hot day. Other boys would come but

    Griff always managed to stay alone, liking it better that way. But much as he liked it during the day, he liked it even better at night, when the water over the dam fell silver in the moonlight, and when fishermen in boats downriver could be seen standing up against the golden circle of the moon, casting out their lines and waiting, waiting for their smallmouth bass and catfish and sheepshead and northern pike. In the war, where he’d served in the Eleventh Infantry under General Ord during the siege of Corinth and the occupation of Bolivar, he’d lain awake nights thinking of his fishing spot, and the firefly darkness, and the rush and roar of the dam, and rain-clouds passing the moon.

    He was hoping to be a little early tonight so he could appreciate all this before Kittredge and Carlyle got there, but as soon as he left the main path over by the swings he saw two figures outlined against the sky and he knew that tonight there wouldn’t be even that much peace.

    Kittredge said, “Good thing you got here now. Carlyle’s gone crazy.”