Strange Sisters

Chapter 8

“... coffee,” said the bald It.

The aroma of the black brew drifted into her nostrils. Raising her head, she slanted a look upward through her hair.

“What?” she said. “What did you say?”

“I said, here’s your coffee, lady. Drink it, you’ll feel better.”

“I feel all right. Just a little strange, that’s all. Whimsical, I mean. I feel very whimsical.”

“Sure, lady. Coffee’s good for that, too.”

“Really? Coffee’s good for whimsy? With all respect for coffee, I find that hard to believe. I’ve found in my own experience that nothing is good for whimsy. Have you checked your facts?”

“What say we just try it? Just drink some while it’s hot.”

“Oh, yes. While it’s hot. It is necessary to strike while the coffee is hot. That means you must act at the psychological moment. At the right time. I did something because I thought it was the right time, but it didn’t turn out to be the right time at all, and now I can see that no time would have been the right time.”

She caught herself up and stared at him slyly through her hair. Although she couldn’t remember at the moment precisely what it was she had done, she knew that she must be careful not to tell this agreeable It too much. She had great faith in him, but it didn’t pay to place too much faith in faith. She had had personally some very unfortunate experiences in that respect. If you had too much faith, someone was quite likely to get whimsical with you.

“Tell me, It,” she said. “Did you ever pray for something?”

“Will you please drink your coffee, lady?”

“Of course. Naturally. By all means. If you answer my question, that is. I’m willing to make that bargain with you. You answer the question, I drink the coffee.”

“All right. So I’ve prayed.”

“You’re begging the question. I asked if you’d ever prayed for something. I distinctly remember asking that.”

“So I’ve prayed for something.”

“Recently?”

“No. A long time ago. When I was a kid.”

“Did you get it? What you prayed for, I mean.”

“I don’t remember ever getting anything.”

She shook the hair out of her eyes and looked at him with a return of triumph in her expression. “You see? I told you God loved you. Maybe you thought it wasn’t considerate of God not to give you what you wanted. Is that true? Well, I assure you it was very considerate of God, because not getting anything is better than getting too much. Once I asked for something, and I got it, but I got something else, too, and all together it was too much. Can you understand that?”

“Sure. I understand everything. Now be good and drink the coffee like you promised.”

Yes. A promise is a promise is a promise is a rose, and the roses are blooming in the night, and the night is June. She could smell the roses below the window, and they smelled like coffee. She lifted her cup and swallowed some of the roses, and they were hot. They burned a path to her stomach.

“That’s the way,” said the bartender. “Just drink it slow and pretty soon you’ll be as good as new.”

She began to giggle then, because the thought crossed her mind, prompted by his assurance, that being as good as new might be no improvement. Why was it that people always made the bland assumption that something was necessarily better when it was new than when it was older? That was not true of cheese or beer or blessed rye whisky, and it might not be true of people. If one could start over, be new again, could one be different? Before Stella and Vera and Jacqueline? Before Renowski and Brunn and murder? Could one do differently and think differently and go a different way? Or was the potential not only determined but also directed — nothing to do but what must clearly be done and one way only open? It was a complex problem, rather like metaphysics, and it mixed her all up. It made the world whirl around.

She lifted the cup and scalded her throat. The bartender nodded approvingly. She had great faith in him. Should she tell him the truth right out? I’m a strange one, It. I have the wrong color hair. Because of it, I killed a man with an ice-pick. He had a desk set in his apartment, and my hair was the wrong color. Again she giggled, visualizing the bald It’s expression. But she would be unable to see his expression because of the thick mist that was settling. As a matter of fact, it had already swallowed him up.

Quite suddenly, pricked by a desire to move, she got up herself and pushed her way into the mist It was a soft tangible impediment to progress, and she leaned her body against it, feeling it cleave before her and flow together soundlessly behind her. She had an idea that the mist existed only in the lounge, that it would be clear outside, but she discovered on the street that this was not so. The mist was still around her, thick and swirling. It shifted and drifted and rifted, and there was a yellow blur of electric lights, and through the rifts an occasional person or object. It made walking very difficult. Walking becomes very awkward when the ground — or the sidewalk, to be precise — turns out to be higher than one had judged. One then makes a new estimate of the distance to the sidewalk, and the perverse sidewalk immediately assumes a level lower than the estimate. When walking thus becomes a precarious undertaking, the best thing is to move closely to available buildings for support. The buildings may shift and sway with the mist, but they won’t collapse. They are essentially stable.

Walking along the buildings, she arrived in time at an open newsstand on the corner. Here the yellow light was brighter, thinning the mist and she saw with reasonable clarity die colorful covers of many magazines in racks, a stack of newspapers on the counter. Newspapers! There was something she had expected to read in the newspapers. Something she had looked for earlier and had not found. Something of peculiar importance to herself that she kept forgetting and remembering and forgetting. She stood looking at the newspapers, thinking very hard, and slowly Angus Brunn took shape again in the mist that was solely the emanation of her brain.

Moving down the counter, she removed the top paper from the stack and folded it and slipped it quickly under her arm. Then, turning to the attendant on the other side of the counter, she was aware for the first time since leaving the lounge that she didn’t have her purse. Where had she left it? In the booth? At the bar? Certainly she had had it at the bar, because she had paid for her drinks, and all her money had been in her purse. Perhaps she had carried it back to the booth with her, but it was certainly one place or the other, and clearly she must return for it or give up the newspaper. The lounge seemed suddenly very remote, a far-away, mist-shrouded place to which she was intensely reluctant to return, even if she could find her way. On the other hand, she could not give up the newspaper. It was a terrible dilemma on which she threatened to break, tension mounting at once to the maximum of her capacity to endure it, and she was saved only by the chance contact of her fingers with some odd coins in the pocket of her jacket. Dropping a nickel on the counter, she left with an exorbitant feeling of relief.

At the intersection, the curb tricked her by being in a place it had no business being. The treacherous descent of her foot beyond the expected point of contact caused her to stagger forward into the street. There was a shrill scream of rubber, a confused rise of voices, and she was conscious of a soft blow on her thigh that apparently completed the destruction of her balance because afterwards she was sitting on the curb with her feet in the gutter, and it wasn’t likely that she would have sat there deliberately. A frightened face under a cap with a hard bill was swimming around in front of her eyes, and there was a voice that apparently issued from the face, and the voice was frightened, too.

She comprehended the words with difficulty. “Jesus Christ, lady, you jumped right in front of me. Against the light, it was. You jumped right out in front of me against the light.”

“Did I?” she said. And then because she was sorry to have frightened him, she said so. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Are you hurt, lady?”

“Hurt? Why should I be hurt?”

“Can you stand up all right?”

“Of course I can stand up.”

“Try it once. Here, let me help you.”

She felt the gentle upward pressure of his hand on her elbow, and she rose with it easily.

“There,” she said, as if she were proving decisively and with great satisfaction a disputed fact. “There.”

“That’s fine. Jesus, I’m glad you ain’t hurt,”

“Thank you,” she said primly.

He could smell the rye now, or rather became conscious of what he had smelled all along, and he said, “Look, lady, excuse me for saying it, but you ain’t in no condition to be walking in traffic. You tell me where you’re going, I’ll be glad to take you there. In my cab, I mean. I’m a cabbie.”

“Oh.” She tried to think where she’d been going, and so far as she could remember, she hadn’t been going anyplace. There was always home to go to, however, if there was no place else, and so she said, “I was going home.”

“Good. Just climb in, I’ll take you there. Here you are. This way. This is my bus.”

She got into the back seat and leaned back while he went around the car and got under the wheel in front. At that moment before the cab moved, she thought of the newspaper. Leaning forward, she said with desperate urgency, “The newspaper! I’ve lost the newspaper!”

He turned, looking over his shoulder. “What? Oh, your newspaper. Must’ve dropped it in the street. Just a second, lady.”

He got out of the cab again and walked up in front of the lights. He bent over and came back with the paper. “This it lady?”

She relaxed, clutching the paper. “Yes. Thanks very much.”

“All right, lady. Now, what’s the address?” She told him, and the taxi moved, threading traffic. The mist returned, seeping into the interior of the car and acquiring a density that quickly obscured the back of the driver’s head. Leaning sideways, she rolled down a window, and the night air struck sharply across her face. The mist boiled and thinned. It made her sad to be riding in a taxi, because once, a long time ago, she had ridden to Jacqueline’s in a taxi after killing a man. It was a sad, disturbing time in her life and it was especially disturbing because there was a conspiracy of silence about it, and nothing was ever said about the man who died. That was why she kept buying newspapers, to see if anything was ever printed about the man, and that was why, come to think of it, she had bought the one she now held.

She spread it on her knees and tried to read the big print of the headlines, but there was not enough light in the taxi, and besides the mist kept floating in thin strands across her line of vision. Folding the paper, she sat clutching it in her lap. She sat quietly with her eyes closed, swaying with the motion of the car, the night air fanning her face. After a while, the motion ceased, and the cabbie was out on the sidewalk holding the door open.

“This is it, lady. You want me to help you to your door?”

“No. No, thank you.”

She got out onto the sidewalk, holding firmly to the open door until the concrete under her feet quit rocking, and then she crossed over to the entrance to the building. Inside in the small and rather shabby lobby, really no more than a hallway with a worn carpet and a scattering of decrepit chairs, she stood looking at the stairs. Her apartment was on the third floor, and it was such a long way up through the mist that was everywhere over a perilous route of antic steps that wavered and faded and fell away before her. Moreover, her thigh was now paining her. It was a dull, throbbing pain concentrated near the hip. Each time she lifted the leg to feel for the next elusive step up, the throbbing was sharpened by the tension of muscles.

Three flights up, she felt her way along the wall to her door. There, she stood staring at the knob and the keyhole below the knob, and she felt that the stuff of her body had lost all quality of adhesion and that she was about to fly into innumerable tiny fragments. Because, having come so far, she could go no farther. Because, having lost her purse, she had no key. Oh, it was a grand joke. Oh, she had been the butt recently of an abundance of grand, hilarious jokes. They were so funny, really, that she was compelled to laugh at herself. She leaned against the door and did so, the laughter rising at first from her belly in soft waves that shook her body with only the faintest aspirate sound but acquiring as it grew, as the joke became bigger and better, an ascending shrillness.

Down the corridor, a man separated himself from the wall and approached her. Taking hold of her by an arm and pulling her away from the door gently, he reached down and turned the knob and pushed the door inward.

“You must’ve forgotten to lock it,” he said. “I took the liberty of trying it.”

This made the joke still better, and she kept right on laughing. Forgetting to lock the door, which was something she couldn’t remember ever having done before. A perfectly strange man coming along to try the knob and hanging around to tell her about it. It all fitted into the pattern of hilarity, and the whole world, which had reached a nadir of evil, was now abandoned to the most delicious idiocy. She laughed and laughed, tears pouring down her cheeks, and the man smacked her sharply across the mouth with the hand that had turned the knob. Her head struck the frame of the door, and the rising welter of laughter died in her throat in a series of diminishing gasps.

She stared at him with wide, incredulous eyes. “You hit me,” she said dully.

“Sorry. Best treatment for hysterics, sister. You better go in and sit down.”

This struck her as being a reasonable explanation and a wise suggestion. She accepted the one and acted upon the other. She went inside and sat in a chair with her legs stretched in front of her, and her feet were such a great distance away that she had difficulty seeing them. Vision improved shortly, however, and she could see not only her own feet quite clearly but also another pair of feet beyond them. They must belong to the man who opened the door, she decided. He must have followed her into the room. He must have turned on a light, too. She hadn’t, she was certain, and if he hadn’t done it, the room would be dark. She resented this. She wanted him to go away. She was grateful to him for his service, of course, but he had no right to presume on her gratitude. Had she thanked him? Maybe he was waiting for that. She thought that she had, but it could have been the cabbie she was remembering.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll be quite all right now.”

“Will you?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to talk with you. Do you feel capable of talking?”

“I could talk with you if I wanted to, but I don’t believe I want to. You’ll have to excuse me.”

“Can you see this?”

He was holding a hand toward her palm up, and the light gathered and glittered on something in the palm, but she couldn’t tell what the thing was. She squinted, peering at it, shaking her head.

“What is it?” she said.

“A badge. My identification. My name’s Sergeant Tromp. I’m a policeman.”

His words were a glacial wind, and the mist condensed and fell inside her skull like icy rain, leaving exposed for a terrible moment the ugly, distorted shape of terror waiting patiently beyond the frail defenses of delusion and fantasy and alcohol. Then the mist rose again from the surface of her feverish brain, blurring the vision and delaying the certain issue.

“A policeman?” she said. “What do you want?”

“Like I said, to talk with you. Not me, to be exact, but Lieutenant Ridley. Down at police headquarters. He sent me to bring you.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know any Lieutenant Ridley. I don’t know any lieutenants at all.”

“That’s all right. He doesn’t know you, either. He’d like to get acquainted.”

“Policemen are to arrest people. Does he want to arrest me?”

“You done anything to be arrested for?”

She shook her head, looking at him craftily from under lowered lids. “You’re trying to trick me, Sergeant. You’re trying to make me incriminate myself. I don’t have to answer that.”

“Sure, sister. That’s right. You don’t have to answer anything.”

“I don’t mind, though. I don’t mind answering. It’s not what I’ve done, you see. It’s what I have.”

“What’s that?”

“Look at me. Can you see anything wrong?”

“You’ve had too much to drink, that’s all I can see.”

“No, no. It’s my hair. Can you see anything wrong with my hair?”

“It needs brushing. Otherwise, it looks okay.”

“I mean the color. The color is wrong. Is this lieutenant going to arrest me because of my hair?”

“Look, sister. Save the jokes for Ridley. He’s a very literate guy with a sense of humor. He likes a good joke.”

“Joke? I guess it is a kind of joke. On me. Someone always keeps playing jokes on me, Sergeant. Like giving me hair of a nameless and abominable color. Don’t you think that’s funny? They’re taking me to prison for the color of my hair. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? You’ve come to take me to prison for the color of my hair, haven’t you?”

He said wearily. “Not prison. Not yet. Just down to Headquarters. Listen to me, sister. Putting it bluntly, you’re drunk, and it’s getting late. The lieutenant will be getting tired of waiting. What you need is a cold shower. Suppose you go get one, like a good girl, and I’ll wait for you here.”

“A shower?”

“That’s what I said. Go along, now. You wouldn’t want me to help you, would you?”

She shuddered and stood up. Placing her feet very carefully, she walked past him and into the bedroom. Terror waited in the mist, but the mist was warm and shielding and would not rise. The mist was thrice blessed. The mist was her last friend on earth. She walked through it across the room until her knees struck the edge of the bed. Gently, with a long sigh, she lay down on her face, and the mist closed in upon her and darkened and was perfectly still.

In the other room, Sergeant Tromp waited a reasonable length of time for the sound of the shower, and then he went into the bedroom. Standing beside the bed, he looked down at the recumbent figure. His emotional state was a bitter mixture — tiredness and cynicism and vestigial pity. He was tired because a man just naturally gets tired after so long a time on a road that isn’t going anyplace to speak of, and he was cynical because cynicism is something that can’t be helped after a while, life in general being what it is. Why did he feel pity? Well, she wasn’t much more than a kid, and she was in a hell of a mess, and once he might have felt a hell of a lot more than he was now capable of feeling. Rolling her over onto her back, he lifted an eyelid, felt her pulse, turned away with a whispered curse.

“God damn it,” he said. “God damn it to hell.”

Methodically, with slow professional assurance, he searched the room. Closet, drawers, two pieces of luggage. He was looking for nothing in particular, and he found nothing. In the bathroom, he looked into the medicine cabinet and found the unlabeled box. He opened it and looked at the shiny green tablets and put it back. Moving back through the bedroom into the living room, he found the telephone and dialed Headquarters.

“Lieutenant Ridley in Homicide,” he said.

He waited, looking at the wall with milky blue eyes that had the curious shallow look of blindness. After a few seconds, he said, “Lieutenant? Sergeant Tromp. She’s here. Came in just a few minutes ago. Now she’s gone out again, like a light, I mean. What? Yeah, plastered. I sent her to take a shower, and she passed out on the bed.”

At the other end of the line, Lieutenant Ridley said, “Can you bring her out of it?”

“I doubt it. She’s really been tying one on.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter much. Let her sleep it off. I’ll send a man around to keep an eye on the place. We can bring her down in the morning.”

“That’s what I thought. She’s a crazy dame, Lieutenant. Talks crazy.”

“All drunks talk crazy.”

“I got an idea this was different. Something behind the liquor.”

“What did she say?”

“Crazy stuff. Stuff about the color of her hair. About going to prison for it.”

There was a long silence. The wire hummed. Sergeant Tromp waited with the patience he had learned on the road going no place much, and Ridley came back in his own good time. His voice possessed a sudden hushed quality, as if he were looking at the truth written in cobwebs and was afraid to breathe on it.

“Housman,” he said.

“What?”

“The hair. The stuff she was talking. It’s from a poem by a guy named Housman. You wait for relief, Sergeant. Put him in the hall.”

“Right.”

Sergeant Tromp hung up and cursed again. Imagine the guy pinning it down like that. You say something about hair and right away he says Housman. A real fancy college boy. It didn’t make it any different because he tried to cover up by calling people guys and dames, either, the poetry-reading bastard.