A Beauty (19 page)

O
nly the cat could rouse Merv Badger from his easy chair in the office, and even then he paused a moment to sigh before he hoisted himself to vertical. But it had to be. The creature was in the hotel on impermanent sufferance, and anything it might leave in its wake, such as hairballs, piss, shit, vomit, dead mice, and dead birds, had better not be trod on by Pansy. When it started squawking, Merv moved. He scooped it up by the belly, intending to toss it out the front door, but its ribs contracted under his hand, and then its body started convulsing. It jerked and jerked and then, more frighteningly, stiffened. The gagging stopped. Merv moved faster. It wasn’t making a sound, it wasn’t moving, and flecks of white foam dropped from its mouth. Out on the steps, Merv held it up level with his eyes, and made himself look. The darn thing had a toad stuck in its throat; you could see the ropy back legs twitching. Merv had to reach in past the sharp little fangs and grab hold of the struggling toad; he had to do it before he thought twice. It was almost as bad as the time he’d had to deliver a baby. They hadn’t let pregnant women stay in the hotel after that
experience. She’d been alone, and they’d agreed afterwards they should have turned her away when they saw the size of her stomach. The doctor came two days late. Pansy had fainted.

He didn’t see whether or not the toad came out whole, but enough of it did scrape free to let the cat breathe again. The cat gasped and shuddered and went slack in his hands. He dropped it, shuddering himself, and it ran off under the steps. He could hear it retching, could feel the gorge in his own throat as he bent and wiped off his hand in the long grass by the sidewalk. But at least he could tell himself later it was because of the cat he was able to head off the posse.

He was getting to his feet when he saw them coming, the reeve and two councillors. They were wearing hats, all three of them, and right away that gave them an advantage, since he was hatless, having just involuntarily stepped outside. But at least he was outside. At least. Whole slabs of his life could be listed under that heading, he thought, watching the men stride towards him.
At least
was his life, his foundation – or at least his propulsion. It got him up in the morning (at least the night is over), made the coffee (at least the coffee will wake me up), et cetera, et cetera. A constant round of consolation, if not compensation, was his lot. He tried to pretend he didn’t know the men were on their way to see him. He began to whistle, with a look in his eyes that tried to say he hadn’t a thought in his head, and in particular he had no thoughts at all about a certain sheet that was still hanging from a certain bedroom window. No, he was out here in the dirt beside the hotel for a quick trill or two, and wasn’t it a nice day? It was a usual day for that summer, nothing more; a hot, cloudless sky backed the three advancing fedoras. He’d never been able to carry a tune and his whistle petered out before they reached him.

“Hello, Merv,” the reeve said and the councillors nodded. The reeve put one foot up on the lowest hotel step and leaned forward in a way that could be friendly or could be threatening and was meant to look as if it could be either. The cat scooted out under his leg and streaked across the road. Merv backed up. His mouth had gone dry and he barely managed to croak out the reeve’s name.

“Merv, Merv, Merv,” the reeve said. The three men chuckled. The reeve knocked his hat back as if he needed more light to get a good look at the miserable creature cowering in front of him.

Merv knew better than to try to chuckle with them, or to attempt any hint of bravado. He didn’t ask what he could do for them today. He could feel his shoulders getting narrower, his chest hollowing. His fingers felt sticky and he shuddered inside, thinking of the toad slime he hadn’t quite wiped off still clinging between them.

“When’s that sheet coming down, eh?” the reeve asked. “Or should we appeal to the little woman?”

“Today,” Merv said. He cleared his throat and repeated the traitorous word so it was audible.

The reeve clapped him hard on the back. “Good man.”

“I’d ask you in for coffee,” Merv whispered, his throat even drier, now. “But the wife’s not too well.”

“Not up to it, eh?” The reeve said and the councillors nodded sagely, as if confirming Merv’s untutored opinion. The reeve clapped his back again in a manner that suggested he’d just passed a death sentence on him, and Merv should be glad it wasn’t worse, and the councillors, in unison, uttered a sound that was so sympathetic it was almost a moan. Then they left Merv to gird his loins and sigh his feckless sighs and go sneaking up the stairs to do his dirty work.

The cat, fully recovered and as unrepentant as any animal that doesn’t learn from its mistakes, bounded across the floor and batted a grasshopper a good one. The hopper landed in Pansy’s lap, where it sat on a slightly vibrating fold of her skirt, unblinking while she observed its presence. If looks could kill, it would be dead, but nothing, not even the evil eye from Pansy Badger, could kill a hopper, nothing but a big foot coming down hard from whatever constituted grasshopper heaven.

“They’re actually locusts, eh?” Merv was asking the solemn man from the Trevna area, who had volunteered that information and not much else.

“They’re a Christly plague, whatever you call them,” Pansy said. She hated it when Merv lowered himself to someone he figured had more education, or more status, whatever it was this Scandinavian guy had. “Merv’s on the district committee,” she told the man. “The reeve put him on.”

“It’s got Pansy worried,” Merv told him. “Access to arsenic, eh?”

Merv’s jokes weren’t all lame, but when he sounded nervous starting to tell one, she got nervous, herself. And when they fell flat, nobody ever knew what to say afterwards. They all looked at the hopper, still sitting on Pansy’s skirt, its feelers quivering.

“Heard the word,” Merv said.

Pansy swatted it away. Its hard-cased body smacked against the wall. It sat on the floor after it fell, staring back at all three of them at once from the gleaming obsidian eyes on the sides of its alien head.

“They come up from the States,” Merv said. “We’re seventy per cent infested this year, around here. Cripes, they’ll eat the armpits out of your shirt out there in the fields.”

Pansy wanted to swat
him
. Going on and on like that. As if the man hadn’t said he farmed north of here. He’d know as much if not more as Merv about hoppers or anything else.

The man looked down at the open hotel register one more time. It lay splayed across the desk, a book of such optimistic size it was able to go back the twenty years of the hotel’s existence and still leave ample room for future guests. The man hadn’t liked the look of the last new signature, enrolling Mr. and Mrs. Smith forever in the annals of Addison Hotel history. Wasn’t the first thing he’d encountered in his life he hadn’t liked. He had disappointment written all over his face; even when he was only talking about locusts, that face of his was just waiting to fall into those hardship lines again. Well, he’d asked if he could see it, and he’d got what he asked for. As for Pansy, it was the book’s last, blank pages she didn’t appreciate.

They sat on in the hot office after he left, and Merv started paging through the register. She knew what he was looking for and what he’d be pretending to find.

“Mr. and Mrs. Shaw,” he murmured.

Grudgingly, she said, “And their son, Rick.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Wire.”

“And their daughter, Barb.” She felt in her skirt pocket for the tube of lipstick she’d found under the dresser in those kids’ room after they’d left. “He was the girl’s father, obviously. She must of run away and he come after her,” she said. After a minute, she said, “He must of done something or she wouldn’t of run away.”

Merv didn’t know why Pansy was always so hard on men, why she always thought women needed defending against them. She frightened herself into believing it. He said, “I wondered if she wasn’t looking to you for help. Remember, I said so that morning. She was watching you that morning, I told you so.”

“Oh I know, with that limp look,” she said, tossing it off. “Christ, if I’d had sex all night I’d be limp, too. And you’d be dead.”

“That’s right, my sweet one. I’d be in paradise.”

“God, you’re awful,” she said, but she laughed.

“Mr. and Mrs. Coddle,” he said.

“Molly?”

“Right you are.”

She slipped her hand into her pocket and fingered the metal lipstick tube again.

“Ride,” he said.

“Joy.”

“Ruff.”

“Ruff? Come on.”

“Dan.” He hid his grin. “Dan-ruff?”

She took the lipstick out, pulled the lid off and twisted the tube so the ruby red spiralled upward. She sniffed it. The smell was really nice, flowery. As if she was talking to the lipstick, she said, “Maybe I shouldn’t of told her father which way they turned at the highway. But all the time he was here, I kept thinking about that sheet, flapping out the window. Hell, he must of seen it when he come to the door, the poor bugger.”

Merv twitched. He could not tell her she needn’t fear the man had seen the sheet.

Pansy sniffed the lipstick again. This time she held it too close to her nose. “Access to arsenic. Hah, hah, hah,” she said. “Makes you wonder why there aren’t more murders, when every farmer in the province can get his hands on it. Maybe there are more; maybe there’s been a whole rash of murders, wives dropping dead at the kitchen sink. Husbands, too, eh? And the authorities are hushing it up.”

Merv tried not to look at the red daub over her right nostril. “They mix the arsenic with sawdust,” he said. “You couldn’t eat enough sawdust. If you did, it alone would kill you.”

“Maybe you could pick the arsenic out, like Vi Lunt, eh? Picking the mouse turds out of the tea.” She put the lipstick back
into her pocket and stretched her legs out and crossed them at the ankles.

“She didn’t really?”

“She did. I asked her. Bert Thorpe paid her to do it, so he could sell the tea. Old Mrs. Wainwright said she’d buy it from him if he got the turds out.”

“You couldn’t pay me.”

“That goes without saying.”

“I seen Wilf Stone died,” he said, leaping through an association of acquaintances and feeling almost nimble at this conversation, which was keeping well clear of the sheet, now a sheet no more, now ashes in the burning barrel.

“By his own hand,” Pansy said, sounding satisfied.

“Took a while.”

“Wasn’t the best shot in the world, was he? Maybe we should try picking the arsenic out. The way things are going. Can you see it in the sawdust?”

“I don’t know. I never handled it,” he said. “I just do the paperwork. Anyway, I’ve got a better plan.”

“Well?”

“No. It’s my plan.” He didn’t actually have anything figured out that they could turn to if the situation got more dire, but he was happy to keep her on a topic that interested her.

“Jesus Christ, you better tell me about it,” she said. “Any plan of yours. There’s likely to be something drastically wrong with it you haven’t thought of. And what if I want to go with you?”

He pretended to consider it, as if he really had a strategy all thought out and she really could have a part in it. “Waste of a human being,” he said magnanimously.

“I’d be a waste and you wouldn’t?” The cat, she noticed, was writhing immodestly on the linoleum.

“The hotel can support one.”

“Are you kidding? One person do all this work? How would you like to be the one left? The laundry alone would have you weeping. We’d better go together or not at all. Let that cat out, will you? It looks like it’s going to be sick.”

He got to his feet and scooped the cat up and tossed it out the front door, thinking its days were numbered if it was going to pull him to his feet twice in twenty-four hours.

“What is it?” she asked when he came back.

“What is what?” He thought she must have seen him looking at her nose.

“Your way to do it.”

“I’ll tell you when the time comes.”

“It’s probably something dumb like jumping off the Pool elevator. Hah! That was it, wasn’t it? You couldn’t be sure of dying, you know. You could linger on for weeks, like Wilf Stone, in agony. You can put that out of your mind.”

“If it was ever in it.”

“I know that’s what you were thinking.”

“We could hitchhike to the coast.”

That comment led Pansy to take the Lord’s name in vain and to wish she had a dollar for every time Merv tried to end a conversation by saying they could hitch a ride to the coast. “I can see us here in this same room in thirty years, having this same goddamn conversation,” she said.

“At least we have each other,” Merv said.

“And Old Caldwell and Old Jock.”

“We’ll outlive them.”

“And the cat.”

“We’ll outlive it, too.”

“There’s a happy thought,” she said. “I seen you.”

He knew it. He knew all along she’d seen him or heard him or somehow divined what he’d done with her sheet. At least the suspense was over. Now he just had to wait for the sentence to be passed, justice to be meted out, whatever Pansy decided it was to be.