Downtown (49 page)

We walked a little way into Tight Squeeze. It was practically deserted. The litter of the street people eddied in the wind; homemade cigarette butts, faded banners hawking the Maharishi Yogi and
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
, Peter Max posters for myriad rock concerts; posters proclaim-ing “Make Love, Not War,” “Do Your Own Thing,” “If It Moves, Fondle It.” But except for a few bundled figures scurrying along the sidewalks, there were no street people.

“I walked here the first day I was in Atlanta, just about one year ago,” I told Luke, “and the street was wall-to-wall freaks, and you had to jump over used condoms. Not a freak or a condom in sight tonight, though. ‘The times, they are a’changin.’”

“More likely it’s the weather,” Luke said. He aimed his camera at a torn banner whipping across the deserted, lunar street; “Power to the People,” it read. He put the camera away and we walked on.

“Nothing worse than a fair-weather freak,” Luke said.

“Where did you think you’d be this Thanksgiving, when you were here that first day?”

“I didn’t have any idea. Probably still at the Church’s Home, trying to sneak in late past the sisters. Still wondering what it was like to lose your virginity.”

“You’ve come a longer way than I think you know,” Luke said.

Back in the carriage house we built a fire and made coffee.

Luke sprawled on the sofa and I was in the ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 396

kitchen slicing the half pecan pie Teddy’s mother had sent home with us when I heard the doorbell. I stopped, listening.

No one ever rang this late unless we were expecting them.

I heard Luke’s voice, and another one, frail and child-like, and then Luke called, “Come in here, Smoky,” and I went, still holding the pie. Alicia Crowley sat on the sofa, her head down on her chest, looking up at us through strands of honey hair. It was so matted and limp that I almost did not recognize her. Nothing else about her was familiar, either, except the beautiful blue maxi coat she had gotten for Christmas last year. I remembered that we had all speculated that Matt had given it to her, but Alicia never said. The coat was spotted, and one of its military brass buttons was gone. Alicia was shivering so hard that the sofa shook with it. At first I thought it was because she was cold, for she wore no gloves and only shower clogs on her narrow blue-white feet. But the shivering was worse than mere cold; it was profound, seemed to rack her entire body. Her face was dead white, but two hectic circles of red burned on her cheeks. She wore no makeup, and her lips were chafed and bitten raw. She looked ghastly.

Luke dropped a quilt around her shoulders and said, “She came in a taxi. I’m going out and pay him. Get her some brandy or something and see if you can warm her up. I don’t think she can talk. Something’s bad wrong.”

He went quickly out the door and I dropped down on the sofa beside Alicia and put my arm around her. She looked at me with eyes that were glittering and opaque, hot-looking eyes. They filled with tears, and she dropped her head again.

“Tell me what’s the matter,” I said. “We’ll help you, but you have to tell us. Did something happen with Buzzy? Did he hurt you?”

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She shook her head and tried to speak, but could not. I filled a glass half full of bourbon and held it to her lips, and she got some down. The rest went down the front of the coat.

“I’m sick,” she whispered finally, the words chattering past her teeth. “I’m real sick, and I can’t go to a doctor, and I’m scared to death.”

Luke came back in and knelt in front of her, and took her hands.

“Tell us,” he said. “There isn’t anything so bad that we can’t fix it. Tell us, babe.”

She leaned against the sofa back and closed her eyes.

“I got pregnant,” she whispered after a long time. “I thought everybody would have guessed. When I told Buzzy he had a fit. He said it wasn’t his, but of course it was, and he knew it. Finally he gave me some money, this huge wad of bills, and told me to be on a street corner in Tight Squeeze at five-thirty a few mornings ago, that it would be taken care of. He said…he said not to come back to his place, not to try to get in touch with him. And he said if I told anybody where the…the doctor was, or what had happened…something would happen to me. It’s illegal, you know. Having an abortion is illegal. Can you imagine Buzzy worrying about that?”

She laughed, and it turned into a sob, and I tightened my arm around her and looked at Luke. His eyes were slits, and the skin around his nose and mouth was white.

“So I waited in the dark on the street corner, and this humongous limousine pulled up and the driver said my name, and I got in, and we drove and drove…. I think we drove to Tennessee somewhere. I didn’t pay any attention to the road signs. I was scared to death. The limousine had shades over all the windows and a panel behind the driver I couldn’t see through. He never said another word to me until we were back in Atlanta.

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“He dropped me off at this place, it was awful, down in the Negro part of town, although the doctor and nurse were white, and they…did the abortion. It hurt like nothing I could have imagined. They didn’t give me anything. When I left, the doctor gave me some antibiotics and pain pills and told me that if I had any symptoms, I should get to a doctor here real fast, but that if I told where I had been I would be awfully sorry. And I knew he was telling the truth.

Buzzy…Buzzy could do that. When we got back here the limousine dropped me off at the TraveLodge Motel over on Spring Street. Buzzy had paid two weeks on a room. I knew I was going to have to do something about getting my job back, or getting another one, and finding somewhere to stay, but somehow I just couldn’t go to Matt right then. I looked so bad, and I felt awful, and I didn’t know what Buzzy might have told him. And then I got really sick, with fever, and chills, and bleeding, and I knew that I had an infection, but I was just too scared to go to a doctor. I don’t know any doctors. I’ve never been sick…”

Her voice faded out as if she were simply too exhausted to go on. She lay against the back of the sofa, eyes shut, and I thought for a moment she had dropped off to sleep. Then she made a great effort and whispered, “Please help me. I think I might be dying.”

Luke sprang to his feet and put his arm around her.

“Help me get her into the bedroom,” he said. I supported her on the other side, and we raised her to her feet. There was a dark blot of blood on the sofa where she had been sitting. The enormity and reality of it hit me then. I began to tremble, too, a fine, silvery fluttering in my arms and legs.

I could scarcely support Alicia’s long, knobbly length. And yet, she weighed practically nothing. It was like carrying a bundle of dried twigs.

We got her down on the bed and Luke propped her feet up with pillows and packed blankets around her.

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“Give her some more whiskey,” he said, “and put a towel under her. I’ll be right back.”

“Where are you going?”

“To make a phone call.”

“Luke, no! You heard what she said, Buzzy will…do something to her if she tells people, and if she sees a doctor she’ll have to tell; they’ll know. Jesus, you can’t be going to call Matt!”

“No. I know what to do. Get the whiskey, Smokes.”

I got the glass and went back to Alicia, straining to make out what he was saying on the telephone, but I could only hear the sound of his voice, low and urgent, not his words.

The whiskey dribbled out of Alicia’s mouth and she lay with her head turned into the pillow and her eyes closed. I thought she looked as if she were dead, and kept putting the back of my hand to her mouth to see if I could feel breath on it. I could, light, stringy breathing. I was terribly, terribly afraid.

Under the fear anger rode, cold and mature.

Luke came back and sat on the other side of the waterbed and took her wrist in his. He looked at me a couple of times, but mostly he stared at a point beyond me, at the wall. I could not read his face. I started once to ask him who he had called, but he simply shook his head, and I did not ask again.

After what seemed a very long time, there was another ring at the door, and he rose and went into the living room and came back, followed by John Howard. John looked remote and elegant in a blue three-piece suit and a white shirt, and I wondered what Thanksgiving celebration Luke had called him from. He nodded to me, but did not speak. He and Luke lifted Alicia off the bed and walked her, stumbling and muttering, into the living room. Luke picked up her coat, but her knees buckled and she slumped toward the floor.

John Howard picked

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her up in his arms and Luke covered her with a blanket and they started for the door.

“We’re taking her to John’s doctor friend,” Luke said over his shoulder. “He’s waiting for us at his clinic. You remember, he came when we called him about your friend that night at the motel. He can help her; he’s a good doctor. And he sure isn’t going to talk. Be back when we can.”

“Wait, I’m coming with you,” I said, but he shook his head.

“The fewer white faces the better, babe,” he said. “You’d only be a hindrance tonight. Wait here and I’ll call you and tell you what we need to do. That’ll help more than anything.”

And they were gone out the door.

I meant to straighten the apartment, wash some dishes, clean the blood off the sofa, put away the food we had brought home with us, maybe make some soup or something Alicia might be able to eat, but in the end I did nothing. I sat on the sofa and stared into the fire and drank the rest of the whiskey in the glass I had filled for her, and thought of nothing at all that I can remember. I knew that the great wind of anger waiting deep inside me would come out soon, and with it grief and outrage at the sheer, awful wrongness of this thing, but it could not get through the white stillness in me yet. Eventually I fell asleep on the sofa. It was very late, near morning, really, when the phone rang again and I heard Luke’s voice.

Alicia had a bad sepsis. The doctor had had to do a D&C, and did not know yet if more surgery would be necessary.

He did not think so. He had pumped Alicia full of intravenous antibiotics and fluids, and she would rest there in the clinic until midday, when he could tell whether the antibiotics were working. The doctor and his nurse would stay with her. So would John Howard. They were sending Luke home.

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He was so white and exhausted when he got there that I simply drew him into bed and held him. I said only, “You’re sure the doctor isn’t going to tell?”

“No. He’s done a lot of this, cleaned up after bad abor-tions. You can imagine he’d get a lot of it in the projects. He does some, too; good surgery, careful stuff, for women who need it. He’s illegal, so of course he’s not going to report it.

Not all his patients are black, by a long shot.”

“He’s a good man,” I murmured into Luke’s neck.

“He’s a goddamned saint,” Luke murmured back, and was asleep almost before the words were out of his mouth.

Alicia did well on the antibiotics, and could be discharged a day later provided she had somewhere to go and nursing care for a week. She did not; she had no more days left at the motel, and so Luke and John brought her back to the carriage house and we put her to bed, taking turns sleeping on the sofa and in Luke’s filthy old sleeping bag before the fire. She drank the soup and juice we brought her, and took the pills, and let me give her a sponge bath and comb her hair, but she did not talk much. She slept, and slept, and slept.

I went back to work the following Monday morning, and left Luke in charge of her. I did not know quite why, but I was so angry with Matt that I simply could not talk to him.

I hid in my office for two days with the doors shut, feigning backed-up work. Hank and Sister and Teddy looked at me in puzzlement, but I don’t think Matt noticed. He had come back from the holiday weekend taciturn and remote once more. His door was as firmly closed as mine was.

By the end of the week Alicia was much better. Thin to bone, pale as a cave fish, but with a faint wash of color along her elegant cheekbones, and the sheen restored to her hair.

She washed the clothes Luke had

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bundled hastily into her bags at the motel, after paying her last night’s rent, and pressed them, and said that the next weekend she was going to get another motel room until she could find a job.

“I can’t impose on you all anymore,” she said. “I owe you everything. I’ll never forget it. But I can’t stay here.”

Luke and I together only had enough money, after our own expenses, to pay for a few days’ lodging for her.

“What are you going to do for money until you find a job?” Luke said. “Can your family help?”

She merely laughed. It was not a mirthful sound.

“What I’m going to do is go talk to Matt,” she said. “He said I could have my job back if I wanted it. If he wasn’t just talking, it’ll solve a lot of problems.”

“You really want to do that?” Luke said.

She lifted her shoulders and let them fall in a slight, elo-quent shrug, and smiled faintly. The old, enigmatic Alicia was back; she seemed untouched by the past awful week.

But I knew she wasn’t, could not be.

“I’d rather do anything else in the world,” she said. “But I can’t think of anything.”

She came into the office that afternoon, looking other-worldly and altogether stunning in her new thinness and the strange luminosity that illness gave her skin. She wore a black miniskirt I had not seen, and black heels. Her legs looked a yard long in fine black mesh stockings. She smiled and nodded at everyone like a duchess reviewing her staff, and went into Matt’s office and closed the door.

She came out half an hour later with her head high and two circles of pure red on her face, saying nothing to anyone, sailing out of the office as if borne on water. That night she moved her things from Luke’s apartment. We had gone to a movie; when we got back, she was gone.

She left no note. We did not know where she went.