them
…And what if she went crazy? Her mother had gone crazy, screaming her hopeless, mad scream, weeping for hours, for days, lying in her soiled bed, crying that her head was splitting in two. Loretta had seen other crazy people, had seen how fast they changed into being crazy. No one could tell how fast that change might come. That bastard with his gun had made all this happen, set everything going, and none of it could be stopped, not even if Brock himself were to run back up the stairs and stumble back past the door again and lean into her room—that was it, Loretta thought in horror, that was it, what made it so terrible, that it couldn’t be stopped, nobody could stop what was happening. She looked around. To get out of this room she had to pass by the end of the bed, right by Bernie’s feet. In the dim light he looked as if he might still be sleeping; if she hadn’t heard the gunshot maybe she wouldn’t have guessed…but the blood kept soaking into the pillow, yes, that couldn’t be stopped. He was dead now and could not move. How could she move so heavy a body?
She was sixteen years old. She wondered if she would ever live past that age. Time seemed to have stopped. She needed something to help her, something to grab hold of, she didn’t know what. An object fell off her bureau, a bottle of fingernail polish; she let it go, forgetting it. Inside the top drawer of the bureau was a tangle of clothes. They were hers. She stared at them and a choked scream rose in her throat, a cry for her father. She actually said “Pa!” out loud, as if the word had come from her by its own strength. She pulled at a bureau drawer, and it made a rasping, protesting sound of wood against wood. This released her; she ran around the end of the bed and out into the kitchen, bumping into a chair and sending it halfway across the room. “Oh, Jesus! Look what he did in there!” she cried. She pushed the door of her father’s room open. Though she could see the room was empty she said softly, timidly, “Pa?” The bed was unmade, just as it had been the day before. Her father hadn’t come home. For a moment she couldn’t remember whether he had been home at all that week or in the hospital again. No, he was home, he was just out somewhere sleeping it off, better for him to be out of this mess anyway. He couldn’t take it. It would drive him crazy. For the first time since the shot she felt a sense of satisfaction—better for her father to be free of this mess.
The clock on the icebox said five-thirty. This was Sunday morning. Everyone was sleeping except Loretta and Brock, who was running somewhere down an alley. People asleep nearby would maybe hear the thud of his footsteps outside their windows but nobody could care enough to lean out and shout after him, “Hey, why are you running? What are you running away from?” Police in all-night diners would be drinking coffee and reading newspapers, and if they bothered to glance out to see Brock they wouldn’t bother catching him—let him go, who gives a damn about a murderer? Too much trouble to run after him. Out loose like that, Brock had all the world to roam in, but she, Loretta, was stuck in this apartment: the kitchen, which was very still except for the clock ticking, with its bare-topped table and its slightly uneven sink with two gawky faucets and a soap dish in which a thin piece of pink soap remained, and its pile of dishes, dishes nobody would ever wash except Loretta herself!—this trivial fact angered her—and above the sink a small window, not very clean, and on either side, looming up to the ceiling, cupboards without doors, in which plates and glasses were piled in a dreary way, so very familiar, and the window at her right hand—the window Bernie was going to climb out of if there was trouble and someone came home early. He had been going to climb out that window, that had been their plan. It had been thought up in another dimension, one that hadn’t come off. And to one side there was that room she would never go in again, never. She would never walk through that doorway again, never go near that blood-soaked bed and that dead boy who had brought her so much evil. On the other side of the kitchen was her father’s room, where things lay scattered around on the floor and on the bed, a smelly mess that she wouldn’t straighten up because he didn’t like anyone touching his private things—his “secret” things, clippings in a cigar box and other papers, old receipts, which no one cared about anyway; his room was narrow as a box, just the same size as hers. The two rooms framed the kitchen between them, and until now Loretta had never thought about this. The space in which she and her father and Brock lived was the space of a few boxes, ruled out and walled in, and all the unconscious living that had gone on in it!—all those years, unconscious! It was strange that it should end like this. Just past the kitchen was Brock’s room, really a kind of parlor, where he slept on a daybed and kept his things hidden in a trunk, everything pushed back against the wall, out of sight, so that it never looked as if anyone really lived there: an anonymous room, the way he wanted it. Loretta looked into his room. The door to the hall was partly open—as he had left it in his haste. She went to this door and touched it; it was a surprise to her that the apartment was open like this, anyone could have strolled in, even a kid could have walked in. She did not seem to know what to do. Around the shabby edges of the drawn shade a faint light shone, and this light would get stronger as the day opened and expose everything, but do no harm to Brock’s half-vacant room—no one would be coming back to this room, it would never expose or accuse him, it was an innocent room, and even the worn brown carpet on the floor had the innocence of something forgotten.
She ran out of the apartment and down the hall. It was early; no one was awake to help her. The shabby, familiar look of the hall brought back to her all the times she had walked out here without knowing who she was or how dangerous her life was. A dead boy lay in her bed, still bleeding. She would have screamed except it was morning and too quiet. No one, nothing, was in the hall; she was alone and breathing very hard. Her eyes were like stone in her face, hard and tight, and on the top step of the stairs her toes twitched to get her out of here. She went down the stairs cautiously. Down one flight, around on the landing past someone’s garbage can, down another flight, and then she was in the vestibule. Someone had dropped a penny there, right in the middle of the floor, and her eye seized upon it out of habit, and she picked it up and thought, That’s good luck! Outside, the morning was hazy. She felt her toes and muscles itch with the desire to run like hell.
She did not run. She turned into a side alley, hurrying. She was barefoot, in her house dress, drenched with sweat; probably wild-eyed and wild-haired. She touched her hair like a blind girl, patting it, smoothing it down. If anyone saw her, what would they guess? Barefoot out on the street like a hillbilly or a nigger! A cruising police car would pull right over to the curb and a policeman—maybe even someone she knew—would grab her wrist and that would be that. There was a dead boy in her room, in her bed. She began to sob, hurrying up the alley. “God, you have got to help me out. This one time,” she said. Her strong legs carried her on, and her breath came in strong jags. At the end of the alley she paused, her eyes darting around but settling on nothing. It seemed to her that God would probably help her out. Maybe He would give her some kind of answer. If someone raised a shade in the building nearby, let it shoot up, that would be a sign. Or if a horn blew somewhere. But nothing. Loretta turned and ran down the alley behind her building and came out to a narrow street, a lane. Everywhere there were boxes and piles of junk, a clutter she half knew by heart but had never really looked at until now, but now she was afraid of rats—with her bare feet—and if Bernie’s people were out already looking for him, she could maybe hide in that junk somehow. She could hide there until dark. Bernie’s brother would be out looking for him, and everyone would tell him about her, and so he would show up at her place, looking for her. Bernie’s brother was no taller than Bernie had been, but dark and swarthy and ugly, mean-faced, kind of crazy, not much interested in girls. He played with knives. He had a gun.
What she had to do, Loretta thought, was get a gun herself. Get a gun first. Then she could figure out what to do next. First she needed a gun, but to get the gun she needed money. Back in her room she had three dollars saved, which
was nothing, and anyway she wasn’t going back up to that room. She would get a gun, she thought, and then she would be safe. It came to her that girls had their faces slashed for all kinds of small mistakes—she’d seen a woman running down the street once with the side of her face streaming blood, all that blood erupting from the slash of a man’s razor; and she already felt the slash like lightning from her jaw to her temple. And she thought of a girl beaten half to death, found out in this alley one morning. She thought, I have to get a gun, and every part of her body strained forward at this certainty, focused on it. She could understand now why her brother had a gun. Everyone needed a gun; it was crazy not to have one. Now she had to run half-naked out into the street looking for one. She felt grit under her feet and looked down just in time to miss stepping on a chunk of heavy glass, but she didn’t slow down. The hazy warm air was filled with the urgency of getting a gun. She could almost hear the words…a gun, a gun…in the air about her. Once she had a gun, then, then she could take care of herself.
In her yellow-flowered cotton dress she ran past a cigar store that was closed and dark. She ventured out onto a wide street—a car was some distance away, no danger—and started across it, running across the cool cobblestones in her bare feet, panting like a cow. First she had to get some money from somewhere and then she had to buy a gun—she strained her mind on this problem. And it seemed to her that her entire life had risen up to this moment, like a road rising ignorantly along a slow incline; all her good intentions and hopes and her pretty face would come to flower this Sunday morning and save her, or lead her to mutilation and death. One or the other, no way out.
She was in someone’s back yard. Panting, a sharp pain in her side, she paused to lean against a fence and tried to think…tried to think about a gun, about Bernie and Brock, Brock’s gun…about Bernie’s brother, whom she had seen only a few times but about whom she’d heard so much…yes, he was crazy, he was a killer and only needed someone to kill. Brock had been a killer and had needed someone to kill, but she hadn’t known that. She had understood it too late. He had killed for no reason but because he had been ready to kill, the time had come. And Bernie’s brother, rested after a few hours’ sleep, would gather himself together and start out after her, grim and satisfied with his duty. Or maybe he would let her go, he’d only frighten her? Maybe he would let her go?
She went to Rita Moreines’s place. The screen door clattered under her pounding. She opened the screen door and pounded on the inside door. She was bathed in sweat. She called out, “Rita! Rita, let me in!” Let all the neighbors hear, she didn’t give a damn but wanted only to get inside. Her skull seemed to be getting tighter and wilder. What dripped down her face was either tears or sweat, she didn’t know which, and she yelled “Rita!” and tore at the door with her fingernails. Just now it came to her, mysteriously, lightly, that this was the second time Bernie had been shot! When he’d been fourteen, an old man had shot him with his rifle. The old man had been hiding in his store after dark, all set to blow out the brains of the kids who kept breaking into his place at night, he hadn’t blown Bernie’s brains out but only shot him in the shoulder. Bernie had been in the hospital for a while but didn’t die, and later everyone kidded him about it. But no one was going to kid him about anything now. He had been a boy of maybe seventeen, wiry and quick, but now his brains were ruined and nothing was left of him, nothing except that body up in Loretta’s room.
“My God,” Rita said, opening the door. She was fastening a green robe around her. “Loretta, what the hell’s wrong?”
Loretta pushed past her and got inside; she closed the door.
Rita said, “Is somebody after you? Is your father out there?”
“No. It’s all right,” Loretta said. She leaned against the kitchen table, pressing her wet palms flat against the top and leaning forward, her head drooping. She felt very dizzy.
Two of Rita’s kids came into the room. “Go back to bed,” Rita said. “Get out of here.”
Rita sat in a chair at the table and waited for Loretta to get hold of herself. She said in a deliberate, level voice, not showing much surprise, “If it’s your old man gone nuts again, you can stay here. Relax. You know, you’re running around half naked? Look, kid, you better do something about your old man. There are four or five guys just like him—I mean, that I know personally; they got something not working right in their heads and drinking sets them loose. They all been out of work too long. Is it your father or what?”
Loretta shook her head. “Can I borrow some shoes?” she said.
“Sure. Where are you going?”
“I want…I need to…” She tried to straighten up. When she brushed hair back from her forehead she was startled to feel how wet her face was. She said, “I need some money. I’m in bad trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“In trouble. Awful bad trouble.”
Rita was staring at her. Her black hair, dyed, was as mussed and wild as Loretta’s, but her expression was very still; she was trying to figure out what Loretta meant. Finally she said, “With the police, honey?”
“No.”
“Not your father?”
“No. But my father will be home in a while. Maybe he might be on his way home.” Loretta looked around in a daze. “What time is it?”
“Take a look.”
The clock was on the icebox, just like her clock at home. It said six. “It’s so early, that’s why I can’t think right,” Loretta said. “My father isn’t home yet but he might come home…or maybe he won’t, I don’t know. Sometimes they bring him or somebody calls the cops. They found him lying outside the Ticonderoga Bar that time. It was awful cold and he might have frozen to death. But I don’t know when he’s coming home.”
“Why is it so important when he comes home? What happened?”
Loretta waved her off. “Can I borrow some shoes? A dress?”
“Where are you going?”
“Maybe out of town. But first I have to see somebody.”
“Who?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“What do you mean, you can’t tell me? Why not?”
“Well, I need some money for a gun.”
“A gun?”
“I’m in trouble, I need a gun,” Loretta said.
“You better stay away from a gun if you’re in trouble or not.”
Loretta wiped her face again. Rita was lighting a cigarette. She seemed to be staring around the room, leaving Loretta to herself. This kitchen was cluttered and dirty; a pile of old newspapers lay on one of the chairs. That pile had been there for weeks. Loretta could see a comic-strip page on the top of the pile, and in spite of the hazy, dazzling air about her she read through “Gasoline Alley” and part of “Dick Tracy,” wondering if she’d read them before; she probably had, they seemed familiar.
She made herself look up at Rita again. “So can I borrow some clothes?” she said.
“Sure,” Rita said.
There was so much maternal heaviness in her, so much strictness and half-begrudged affection, that Loretta was pained to think of how much less a mother her own mother had been, less suited for dealing with the surprises of life. Rita was in her mid-twenties but already she had two husbands behind her and many men, in various cities. She wore a green silkish robe, not silk, and the healthy pink skin of her throat and chest made Loretta know that here was a woman like herself, made of the same kind of flesh and predictable in the same way.
“I got some stuff in here you can have,” Rita said. “But are you going to tell me about this? When it’s all over?”
“When it’s all over, yes,” Loretta said.
They walked past Rita’s children. Rita brushed them aside, muttering, “You little pests! Get out of the way, get lost!” They closed the door to a back bedroom. “Here, here’s a dress. Take that thing off and put it on before you get arrested,” Rita said. She pulle
d something out of a pile of clothes. “There’s some shoes over there. I only got fourteen dollars. But you can get something with that if you really need it.”
“I don’t want to take all your money.”
“Go ahead.”
“Then what about you?”
“I can get something from Harry Kaiserkof, you know…”
Loretta pulled the dress over her head fast, embarrassed to have Rita see her. A flush of shame descended from her face to her chest and belly. Was she crazy, doing this? What was she doing in Rita’s place at six o’clock on a Sunday morning? She thought, Anyway, this can’t last long. She got her head free of the dress, breathing in panicked snatches of air. The first thing that caught her eye was a framed picture on the wall of the little Dionne quintuplets, hardly more than babies. She said, strangely, pointing toward the picture, “I don’t think I want to have a baby…”
“What?”
Rita was looking at her as if she were crazy. She said, “Oh nothing, no, forget it. I’m sort of nervous.”
“You want some coffee or something?”
“No, thanks.”
“If you want to stay here you can.”
“No.”
“Is all this something to do with Brock?”
“Well, yes. With Brock,” Loretta said. She buttoned the dress. She looked down at her trembling hands. “Yes, Brock. It was Brock. Brock did it,” she said.
Rita walked with her to the door. Loretta looked out into the street, saw nothing, got ready to step outside. She wondered if her body would keep working long enough to get her through this morning.