A streetcar clambered by, heavy with grillwork, and Loretta carefully did not look up to see who might be watching her—this gloomy thunder took the hill ahead of her and drew her up slowly behind it, Loretta now beginning to wonder if maybe her five minutes were running out without anyone knowing about it or caring. Buildings of gray-green, buildings with store fronts soaped and abandoned, and above them in a raucous confusion of radios people leaning out windows on their elbows, the expanse of their arms like the white expanse of curtains on either side of them, framing them. Someone called “Loretta!” It was a girl from school. Loretta waved but hurried on past.
When they’d first moved to this city—her father piling up all their junk in the back of a truck and driving the truck himself, coming to the city with a slow, dreary crowd of other country people (but people from farms, not “business” people like themselves), all of them making the rounds of apartment buildings, asking timidly for rooms, for help, for directions to the nearest government buildings—she had first thought the city was terrifying. Now she loved it. When they had moved here she had been a child, and in that world of childhood each day had been a skirmish. Sometimes she had done well, sometimes she had failed, sometimes it had been pretty bad and she’d run with a bleeding face through alleys, prowling with horror amid the debris of vacant lots she could not recognize, afraid of angry mothers as well as strange kids—that hadn’t been so nice, better to forget it. Brock, so dreamy and slow for years, had been bloodied up more than once and called a hillbilly, which he wasn’t, when all he had to do was open his mouth to let them hear that he hadn’t a Kentucky accent—and Loretta, a curly-haired little girl with confused impulses of tenderness and viciousness, had made her way painfully by courting the important kids in her class, knowing by instinct which girls were important, which girls had older brothers to protect them and were therefore valuable. But all that was past and indeed she rarely thought about it. She rose up out of childhood, and the terrors of its valleys and mountains sank to a monotonous landscape beneath her eyes, forgiving or indifferent or both, and though she knew the very same kids now who had tormented her as a child she did not really recognize them as those kids, and they did not recognize her, as each year drew them farther into adulthood.
On her way to Sissy’s she ran into Bernie Malin, who was with some friends of his, and in that slow, clumsy ballet of boys they edged away while he came to walk with her, smoking a cigarette and talking eagerly. “What do you mean,” he said, “going to make a dress! Sew a dress! Spend all that time sewing a dress? Don’t tell me nobody sewed that one you’re wearing, that’s a real store-bought dress, that’s got style!”
“Oh, what do you know?”
He was in front of her, blocking her way, and so she had to stop, and behind them at the corner his friends stood around, probably watching—she was upset when she should have been pleased, and she didn’t understand this, but Bernie was the cause of it all and so she said coldly to him, “Sissy and I made this date last week.” The word “date” was a strange word to use to him.
Bernie shrugged his shoulders and grinned at her. He was a smallish, slender boy, hardly taller than Loretta, but handsome in a doll-like way. Mechanical too were his mannerisms, which were centered mainly on his cigarette—bringing it to his pursed lips, taking it thoughtfully away—and Loretta felt a little dazed by this, unprepared, wondering what there was about him that so upset her.
She said, “Why don’t you go fool around with your boy friends,” and he said, “Those dopes don’t exist for me.” The very expulsion of his breath excited her.
They walked up the hill side by side. This was the better part of downtown, a single, long block of stores. Bernie’s arm occasionally brushed against hers but neither seemed to notice it. He asked her about Brock. He asked her about certain friends of hers, boys they knew in common. He asked her about her father. His father had once worked with her father, and that connection seemed important to them both.
They wandered over toward the canal, and at a break in the line of buildings they stood and leaned against the railing. It was getting dark. Down by the locks there was a building in which certain lock officials worked. Bernie said that he’d once sneaked down there, past the No Trespassing signs, and looked in the windows of their little building. Loretta said sarcastically that that must have taken some courage. Bernie asked her how she’d like to go swimming in the canal, right with all her clothes on. Loretta asked if he thought he could do that all by himself. Bernie said that a friend of his brother’s was having some people over to his house for a party, and it would be nice if she could come. Loretta remembered and forgot Sissy in the same instant, frowning down at the lights bobbing on the water. Her attention was focused on finding out who this friend was. They explored their mutual acquaintances and the relationships among them, trying to find a link, some way of breaking through. He knew her brother and was a little afraid of him. She knew his brother and was a little afraid of him. Bernie leaned against the railing, as if it were a familiar place for him, facing her, and the way he laughed with his mouth hardly showing a smile and the way he brought his eyes up to her in a certain commanding movement made her give in. Loretta lived in a sweet confine of flesh: she exulted in her being, the joy of young, strong muscles, the leap of excitement in the blood when sometimes she simply drew a full breath. Her down-covered arms, her legs that were thicker than she wished, her round little belly and fleshy hips, the rosy radiance of her skin—these were all she had, but these were everything. Her eager blood yearned for the boy’s eager blood; each was leaning toward the other, unaware, like twin shoots drawn by the heat of the sun.
Bernie smiled. “Look, please, come with me, okay?”
“Huh! Why should I?”
“C’mon. You want to.”
“Could have asked me before just-this-minute.”
Mysteriously Bernie shook his head. The gesture, so manly, adult-secretive, stabbed at Loretta’s groin.
“Yeah, you know my name,” Loretta said, pouting. “You know where I live.”
“Hell, I was working past six.”
“Where?”
“With my father.”
He was boyish and sweetly nervous, leaning toward her. She began to smile. Between them there rose a heady excitement that was punctuated by honking horns in the Saturday-night parade of restless cars. He seemed to her prematurely wise, this boy small in his bones and small in the handsome, cocky slant of his eyes, and he put her in mind—she didn’t know why—of the feature-paper heroes of only the other day, Baby Face Nelson and Dillinger, who were dead now but still very important. An aunt of one of her friends, come to visit, told them about Dillinger in Chicago and how she had seen with her own eyes the hem of a dress of a friend of a friend, stained with Dillinger’s blood from where she’d squatted down to soak it up in an alley—Jesus Christ, someone had said, why would anyone do that? But Loretta understood and wished violently that she had been there too, to kneel in the blood and bring it back home in triumph, because there wasn’t much else to remember a man by except something raw and ugly, and that blood had been real enough in him, warm and coursing through his veins until some policeman’s bullet let it loose.
“Will you come with me?” Bernie said earnestly, a real seriousness pushing against the movieland style of his voice, and Loretta knew that she had to give in.
She walked with him back across the bridge, the cobblestone surface hard beneath her feet, and the few lights down on the canal painful to her eyes, while Bernie talked about something he and his brother were planning, revenge on a store that had cheated them or hadn’t given them jobs, and Loretta felt only a mild tingle of alarm as he spoke of setting fire to all the straw and crap in its basement, tossing some gasoline around and getting the hell out, and letting it all go up in a big ten-alarm blaze—that would show those bastards!
She and Bernie went to a house not far from Loretta?
??s own apartment building. She let herself be cajoled by Bernie and by others into joining a party in the front room, these were older kids mostly, and some were fully adults, drinking, dancing energetically to music from a radio, laughing riotously. Loretta smiled, couldn’t help it. Like her Pa, whom drinking made sick, yes he knew it but couldn’t help taking the first drink of the day, that first rush of happiness. I deserve this. Within minutes Loretta was caught up in the excitement, her hair frizzed, in her face. She and Bernie danced, or tried to; the room was so crowded! Loretta stumbled breathlessly against Bernie and felt a sudden deep gratitude to him, he liked her. She was a girl who was liked.
Bernie was shouting something in her ear. What? She must have agreed, now he was walking with her outside into a weedy back yard and then into an old garage so piled with junk you couldn’t have driven a car into it, which was funny, Loretta giggled, and the two of them finished their beers and pressed together eagerly, like children colliding. It was time: Loretta slid her arms around the boy’s neck. There was a point at which you did this, when it was right. Too soon, it wasn’t right. But now it was right. A swift, keen sensation of helplessness rose in her; she thought of being lifted into the air in a balloon, carried crazily and helplessly up into the sky, and she thought of grabbing onto the last car of a train and being snatched away along the gleaming rails, never to be seen again…
Back at the house someone was yelling. A police car pulled up in front. So the two of them escaped, climbing over a fence, weak with laughter and very affectionate, quick to fall into each other’s arms. Up at her door, in the dingy hallway, she stood with him for half an hour, for forty-five minutes, until finally she said, “You can come in with me if you want to.”
Bernie, shaken and excited, drew back from her and said, “You mean it? Do you mean it?”
She said, “If my pa is home he’ll be passed out, don’t worry, he just falls in bed and that’s that, and my brother won’t be back till morning. Anyway, nobody comes in my room, it’s my room and my business, my own life, nobody dares to come in there!”
He kissed her and wrapped her in his eager arms. She gave herself up to him but thought of one thing: her mother’s old dresses in a closet, the arms stiff as if bent permanently into the shape of the arms that had gone inside them.
2
Sick and exhausted, so exhausted that even the ache had gone out of her, she slept…and seemed to be stumbling around in rooms she’d never seen before, taking hold of the helpful arms of people, staring into their eyes but finding no center to them, no iris to the eye. But it was not a dream of terror: she felt only exhausted and wet with sweat, overcome. A heavy, leaden warmth lay upon her, like clouds of dusty smoke, stroking her body. Then there was a loud sharp noise. She woke.
She woke at once, already screaming, the scream mangled and inaudible. It was stuck back in her sleep, deep in her mind. She woke at once. Through the door of her room, in the faint light, someone ran and stumbled against a chair in the kitchen—she knew just which chair it was, on that chair were dish towels drying from last night—and so, suddenly, she was awake for good.
In her bed, beside her, was a boy. She knew him but for a moment could not remember his name or why he was here. With the sheet twisted around her she began to draw slowly away from him. A thought came to her as suddenly and as sharply as that cracking noise: He’s dead. Her mind seemed to pause after this. She stared down at him. Then, slowly, a painful sweat broke upon her, breaking over the stale film of sweat that had been so soothing and so sweet. She was able to think clearly enough, He’s dead, that bastard killed him, and these words passed through her mind as if they were someone else’s words, someone looking in the window. The boy lay very still. The sheet had been yanked partly off him. She wanted to grab hold of him, wake him up. Bernie Malin! Why didn’t he wake up? What did he want from her, lying there so heavily, unmoving? Her terror made no impression on him; he seemed to sleep a man’s stubborn sleep, oblivious of her. One of his arms lay curled upon his bare chest and the other hung down over the edge of the bed. He had dark silky hair. Loretta got out of bed very quietly. She backed up, staring at him, until she felt the wall against her back, and so she stopped, very still. She stared at the boy to see if he was or was not breathing. Minutes passed. She would try again; she would stare very hard at him to see if he was or was not breathing.
It must have been very early, before dawn. Why hadn’t the shot awakened everyone, got them going, running up the stairs, ringing alarms, peering in her window? She felt the wall hard against her back and wondered why it had not collapsed, fallen, to let everyone look in at her? She believed she could already feel the vibrations and thuds of footsteps out in the street, an army of gawkers and accusers, and what wouldn’t they think up to yell in her face! What are you going to do now, you little whore, how are you going to get rid of him? Minutes passed. She stood crouched and sweating in the dim light, staring at the bed.
Gradually she began to see the blood on him. It was moving. Across the side of his head, shyly turned from her, a stream of blood was moving and soaking into the pillow. That pillow was twisted in two; he must have liked to sleep with a pillow bunched up like that. She did not move. She could smell his blood. Words came to her again, like an incantation, My brother is to blame, him, that bastard…If she could throw it all in his lap, take all this trouble and toss it like garbage at him, if she could get rid of it somehow, then she would be free—this choking pressure inside her chest and throat, this crazy sensation of terror that she wasn’t sure could be her own, it was so strong, she’d be free of it and her brother loaded down with it, they would run up to him and grab him and yell into his face, his ugly face, You murderer! You bastard!
But nothing happened. She waited, sniffing at the odor of blood and bodies, the odor of damp sheets, her brain reeling and her body very still, waiting, but nothing happened. Was nothing going to happen? Maybe a gunshot in the middle of the night wasn’t much of a surprise after all. Maybe no one heard it, no one would raise a shade angrily, no one would jump out onto a fire escape to see what was what. This was not the movies. Nothing followed fast upon anything else; nothing was connected with anything else.
She groped around for something to cover herself with. She could not see very well. Her fingers closed upon something, a cotton dress she wore around the house. Bending, she did not lower her eyes but kept them sharp upon the boy’s head, fearful of a change if she looked away. Blood was moving, blossoming on the side of his head. It was not going to stop. She was afraid that a sudden movement of hers would knock something over and disturb that flow of blood, get it going faster, so that it would gush out of his head and onto the floor and soak through the floor onto the ceiling beneath, running warm and sticky over everything. She moved very slowly. What she saw was real enough, but part of her mind kept pushing it away, nudging it aside, it wasn’t hers; if only she could get hold of Brock and scream for everyone to come see what he had done: just look at this! How she would run up the street, accusing that bastard! She slipped into the dress and saw that her hands were trembling; she couldn’t control them, and yet they somehow obeyed her, sliding buttons through buttonholes as always, going through the same routine as always. A person has to get dressed, she thought wildly. The boy did not look at her getting dressed. She waited again for him to stir, to wake up with an embarrassed little joke and make everything right again…
Terrible, how still Bernie lay, how stubborn that lithe little body had become! One shot had done it, like magic. Suddenly Loretta hated him; her hatred burst upon her, and it was enough practically to set her screaming in rage, for men always disappointed you, there was no hope to them, nothing. There was no center to men: their eyes, smiling or serious, had no center to them, nothing. Loretta stood in a hazy, vivid hatred, watching the boy. It was the heaviness of his body she hated too. All his flesh had turned to poison. What had been so hot and sweet earlier that night was now
heavy with death, and the fact that death had come so fast and without any struggle showed how little you could trust the body, even the body of a man, arms and legs and chest and belly, all of it useless. She put her knuckles against her mouth and began to whimper as the realization of what had happened came into her mind, and came into it again, fast and fierce as Bernie’s love had been, pounding against her. “My God,” she said in a whisper, “did it really happen? Did he really do it?” Brock had run out and left her, and what was she going to do? What could she do with that body? Where was she going to hide? The gun had gone off right beside her, a few inches away from her head. An explosion in her ear. Her brother must have leaned right over the bed and put the barrel of the gun against Bernie’s skull and pulled the trigger, that bastard, and the noise had yanked her right out of sleep and she would never sleep again. Somewhere in Bernie’s brain was the bullet that had done everything. So much power packed into a little bit of metal, a power greater than the man behind it, far greater. So it had been fired. So Bernie was dead. Loretta forced herself to look carefully around the room, her room. She had to figure out exactly where she was. This room was a puzzle.