The Devil's Own Rag Doll (30 page)

You can be drawn to trouble like to a flame, and I didn't have any explanation for myself. Maybe I was just more likely to fall that way than most men. Or maybe troublesome ways suited me best—maybe it was all I was good for. Just sitting and thinking, fuming in my hot car, I knew it was making me meaner. For some things, you
need
to be mean, but up to this point in my life, I hadn't ever considered the cost of making myself and keeping myself so hard and mean. I wondered if I was even human any longer, if I could really ever fit in with regular folks. In some way, I had to admit that I was
choosing
to aim for trouble; I had to accept the guilt for that, too. It was my decision to go after Sherrill and the rest, though I knew it might mean the end of me. I owed something to all those who had been put down by the working of whatever hateful scheme was afoot. But just like any other man, I didn't want to die while I still had even a faint hope for a better life.

Finally I fired up the car and headed out.

CHAPTER 17

Although I remember not a single thing about the drive over, I was not surprised to find myself on Eileen's porch. It was another hot day, and the inner door was open. I could see that Eileen was in the middle of a day of cleaning. All the rugs had been rolled up and taken outside, and all the windows had been opened and the drapes and curtains taken down. I peered through the screen into the house and saw how much brighter it seemed inside than usual. Like a dope, I stood there admiring how nice the place seemed when it was all opened up. I knocked and knocked again, but Eileen did not come to the door. Gradually I realized that the sound of someone whacking the dust from a rug had been falling on my deaf ears for some time, and I stepped down from the porch and followed the little walk to the backyard.

She wore a white scarf and an apron and stood insensibly downwind from the rug she was beating hell out of. She didn't see me at first or hear me trip the latch on the gate, and so I stood there admiring her for a time. The neighbor's friendly dog pushed his snout through the fence and snuffed at me, then stood up with his front paws on the top rail. I patted him absently and scratched at the scruff of his neck.

When she finally turned to look at me, she gave a little start and then settled quickly when she realized I wasn't Alex. It rattled me to see the emotion move so quickly over her face. Then she smiled and put up her hands, embarrassed. I stopped scratching the dog long enough to put up a little wave. She hung the wire beater next to the rug on the clothesline that ran from the house to the garage and clapped her hands together to knock off some of the dust. Then she walked brightly over to me, brushing dust from herself all the way.

“Cleaning day,” she said. “I must look a fright.”

“You look okay,” I said. “Better than me.”

I bent down to lay a kiss on her, and I could see in her eyes that she wanted to ask if I'd found anything about her boy.

“He'll turn up,” I told her. “He can't stay gone forever.”

“Pete.” She seemed to want to laugh. “It's good to hear you talk that way. If I could believe it—just look at you,” she said. “You're falling to pieces.”

Somebody in the neighborhood was frying chicken. “Listen,” I said. “Have you got any food in there?”

It was as if I'd struck her. Her face fell; her eyes showed something of the emotion that boiled in her. “You should have called, Pete. I can always make you something, you know that. I'm glad to do it.”

“I don't want you to feel bad. I'm just so hungry.”

“Come on, then,” she said. She motioned toward the door and crowded me to get me moving.

I pulled my hand from the dog and stepped inside. While she washed her hands and put out bread and cold cuts for me, I sat down at the kitchen table and wondered if my stomach would be able to handle solid food anymore. It seemed that I could go without eating; it would be like giving up, which should have been easy.

“I'll have to talk to the milkman,” she said. She stood considering the buildup of milk bottles in her icebox. “Alex drinks two or three quarts a day. I can't use all this.”

“I'll drink it,” I croaked.

She brought a fresh bottle to me. I pulled off the lid and began to suck it down. Though I never used milk except when there was no cream for the coffee, I had no trouble choking down most of the bottle. Eileen watched me with some concern as I ate at the bread and meat and mustard without taking the trouble to make a sandwich. My hand smelled strongly of the neighbor's dog, but that didn't concern me overly much. It would have been better to eat slowly and more lightly, but I just put it all away without thinking. When I was done, I fell back in my chair. My stomach was so full that it pained my chest; I feared that my ticker might give way.
If anyone ever really dropped dead from a bad heart at so young an age, it would be me,
I thought with a trace of panic. I was dizzy, I knew that my face must have gone red, and the veins on my head throbbed and seemed ready to burst. There was no way to escape, no way to avoid the trouble that was inside my own skin.

“Pete, what's happening? Can you tell me?”

“No,” I said. “It's a holy mess.” I wanted to belch but couldn't. “And talking won't fix anything.”

“You have to talk to somebody,” she said.

“I don't mind talking,” I said, “but it won't do any good now.”

She considered this for a time, leaning against the counter by the sink. Then she pulled the scarf from her head and dropped it to the table. I could not have said what day of the week it was, or what time of day or night, or whether I would still be living tomorrow. I thought that a bit of water might ease everything through my innards, but I couldn't bring myself to ask for it.

“I'll make you a bath,” she said.

The suggestion seemed as good as any other, so I did not resist. While Eileen set the water going into the big tub in the next room, I kicked off my shoes. I thought that standing might ease the pressure on my chest, so I lifted myself from the chair and paced about the kitchen.

“I can wash those clothes for you.”

I looked down at my hobo's rags. “I smell bad, ah?”

She had moved very close to me. “You need to take better care of yourself,” she said. “Will I lose you, too?”

I couldn't find an answer. She took my hand in both of hers and squeezed and worried over it.

“Eileen, I appreciate all of this. But I can't stay too long,” I said. “I'm supposed to be working.”

“Maybe something of Tommy's would fit you,” she said.

“I doubt it. Maybe.”

With her next to me, so close to me, I felt almost regular. She looked up at me like she might look up at any other man—just for a moment—and then she let go of my hand and went to check on the bathwater. I took off my jacket and settled it over my chair in the kitchen. Modesty or plain common sense might have suggested that I should wait until she could clear out before I began to remove the rest of my clothes. But it wasn't that kind of day. I emptied the change and the scraps of paper from my pockets, kicked off my shoes, stripped down to my shorts, and placed all the clothes in a pile. Though I couldn't see her from where I stood, I could hear her soft hand splashing through the water, the squeak of the old handles on the faucet as she adjusted the temperature, and her sighs. She didn't fall back with embarrassment when she saw me. It was more like pity; and I reckoned that the sight of my battered body, dressed only in a black eye patch and threadbare white shorts, had only added to the burden of her womanly care.

The water was too hot, certainly too hot. My skin tensed with alarm even after I had sunk my whole self into the deep tub, but I kept lowering myself down, thinking that a good soak might loosen up the crusted blood at the back of my neck and clean out the holes in my legs. I heard music playing, but I could not be sure where it came from. Maybe it was only the rhythm of Eileen's washing machine in the basement. It seemed to me that I should be feeling something more, considering what I knew and what I had seen in the last few days. I should have been afraid of losing what I had, even my life. As the water slowly cooled and my skin began to pucker, I contemplated the tufts of hair that sprouted on my two biggest toes. I wafted my bad hand through the water to feel how oddly the scarred skin picked up feeling from everything, tingling and cool, like the fingers were not gone but only gone to sleep.

Eileen had crept into the bathroom. She carried a bundle of folded clothes in her arms. I could see a couple of white shirts and some trousers and at least one pair of stockings. Her expression was gentle, but I sat up as quickly as I might have if I had fallen asleep in church. I guess she saw the swelling at the back of my neck. She put down the clothes and knelt at the side of the tub. Then she found a cloth and worked a lather into it with a bar of Ivory soap. She seemed shocked at the damage that had been done; the blows I had suffered had opened up the skin, and I had not been able to get a look at it or clean it myself. Well, I sat through the pain and discomfort she brought to it, thinking that it might do some good. She kept hissing, as if to bring some voice to my silent suffering.

“This needs stitches,” she said.

I shrugged. “Just some gauze.”

She shook her head and eased me backward to rinse the soap away. I let myself fall back until I was comfortable again in the tepid water. It seemed to pain her to look at me, but she did. She rested her forearms along the edge of the tub and put her cheek down and stared deeply at me for a time. Then she sat up a bit and leaned over to pull the patch off my eye. My hands came up but I didn't stop her. She let out another sigh and found the rag again, lathered it up, and swabbed around my whole face and under my jaw. Her hair was spilling down and her big breasts were hanging over the edge of the tub. When she had finished, she used her cupped hand to let water fall and rinse the soap away. She left the sudsy rag on my chest.

“Look at that,” I said. My prick, which had been sort of bobbing in the deep water, had stiffened up.

“Pete,” she said. She flipped the cloth to try to cover the rude portion, but it was not effective. When she turned back to look at me, I could see at least that the shock had made her smile. I put my hands under her arms and hoisted her into the tub.

She shrieked and muffled herself immediately, writhed a bit, and then settled herself on top of me, hiding her face. Before too long I began to work at the buttons of her dress, and eventually we were able to slop the whole of her attire onto the bathroom floor. By the time we had finished washing up properly, the water had grown too cold to bear, even though the surrounding air was warm and muggy. Anyone looking through the bare windows of the house from the sidewalk would have seen two naked people walking through the dining room to the bedroom, two white and shivering bodies.

It didn't take long to warm up in the bed. We fooled around for a time under the sheet. I can't honestly say that I was so caught up that I forgot about the ugly hole on my face or what she might think of it. Her eyes were closed mostly. Maybe a dark thought about what I had done with Anna crept into the room with us, or maybe the ghost of the black boy I had killed or the specter of what I would have to do later on in the night—it wasn't something magical that could erase everything bad that had happened in the world. I thought, too, of all the soldiers who were fighting in the mud or in the jungle, and I supposed that many of them had found a way to accept such simple comfort, however far from home they strayed. But all of these thoughts didn't sway me much; Eileen was plush and soft and warm, and I mostly threw myself into the regular bout of lovemaking.

Before long we were both warm all over—except for her feet, which somehow didn't share the pumping blood—and I got up on top and moved into her. It was a pleasure, and I wasn't in any hurry. We didn't talk. Eileen was made for loving, for comfort, and in some way this gave me a bit of sentimental pride that my brother had done so well for himself. Gradually things worked themselves up to a more heated pace. Eileen lay with her eyes tightly shut. She huffed and tipped her hips upward, kept them still for me, and lifted her legs so that I could feel her cold heels on my backside. I must have closed my eye as well, because I was surprised to see her staring calmly at me during the time when my stones began to clench up and my movement was most ferocious.

In a soft, breathy voice she said, “I love you.”

The effect of it was like a crash, like that train wreck I had been expecting all along. I was in the middle car and I was being crushed from in front and behind. The thing of it was, it wasn't entirely bad. It was like I had found the trouble I had been spoiling for, and at least it
seemed
that I had made a right move.

“Jesus Christ” was all I could manage to croak.

I collapsed in a great spasm atop her. She wrapped her arms and legs around me and squeezed hard for a long time, and we lay like that until things began to cool off and settle down. With my face in the pillow, I could not see if she was crying or if she had been disappointed. She kept her hand to the back of my head for a time, then lifted it and looked at it.

“You're still bleeding,” she said.

I rolled off her and felt at the back of my head and neck. Blood mixed with sweat covered my fingers, a fair amount. “We'll have to cover it up with something.”

“You should see a doctor,” she said. Her face was calm and sleepy.

“I can't,” I said. “There's no time for all of that. And those doctors, once they get their hooks on you—”

“I do love you, Pete,” she said. “I care about what happens to you.”

“You know me well enough,” I said. “How do I know if I can get the hang of all this?”