During the afternoon Gilly cried, sometimes for B. J., sometimes for herself. Mrs. Morrison gave her two pills and Violet Smith brought her the kind of drink Violet Smith had often made for her own consumption before she’d taken the pledge.
When she finally ran out of tears she used eye drops to clear her eyes, and witch hazel pads to reduce the swelling, and make-up to obscure the lines of grief around her mouth. Then she walked across the hall to her husband’s room.
She said, without looking at him, “I went to see Ethel Lockwood this morning. She showed me the letter she got from B. J. in prison.”
He moved his head. He didn’t want to hear about it. Everything was far away and long ago. Who was Ethel?
“The letter had a number of interesting things in it, personal things about me. The consensus of opinion is that I have no class. Imagine that. I always thought I was such a classy dame. Didn’t you?”
He knew what was coming.
“Also, I’m dirty. I don’t stand around in the shower all day, so I’m dirty.”
He could hear the note in her voice that meant she was going to throw a fit and nothing and nobody could stop her. Not even Mrs. Morrison, who thrust her head inside the door and asked if there was anything she could do.
“Yes,” Gilly said. “You can drop dead.”
“I told you to lie down and rest after taking those pills. I naturally assumed—”
“You can assume right up your ass to your armpits.”
“Your knowledge of anatomy is rather meager.” Mrs. Morrison turned her attention to the wheelchair. “I’ll be out in the hall if you need me, Mr. Decker. Press the buzzer and I’ll hear it. I’ll probably hear a great many other things as well, but it is my duty to stick with my patient in fair weather or foul. Press your buzzer. Have you got that, Mr. Decker? Signify that you understand me by raising two fingers of your right hand for yes. Or did we agree on one finger for yes and two for no? I’m not sure. No matter. Buzz.”
“You buzz,” Gilly said. “Buzz off.”
“I shall be in the hall, Mr. Decker. Listening.”
He lay silent and motionless, wishing all the women would go away and never come back, Mrs. Morrison and Violet Smith and Gilly, and now this other one, Ethel. Who was Ethel?
Gilly described her briefly. Ethel was a vicious-tongued, sanctimonious snotty old bitch.
“Where’d she get the right to criticize me? I have as much class as she has. Goddamn it, I’m a classy dame. Are you listening? Do you hear that, you nosy parker out in the hall? I’m a classy dame!”
She began to cry again.
“You know what it said in the letter? It said, ‘I don’t understand how it all happened between Gilly and me. She was a lot of fun and we had some laughs, but then suddenly she was expecting me to marry her. She asked me to.’ That’s what it said in the letter, making it sound like I begged, like I was lower than low.”
Tears and more tears.
He wished he could offer her some comfort or explanation, anything to stop the deluge that threatened to wash them both out to sea. We are drowning, Gilly and I, we are drowning together.
Twenty-one
Aragon spent Sunday driving the rutted roads and walking the dusty streets of Rio Seco. He began near the shoemaker’s shop where Jenkins had lived and worked his way past the tinsmiths and weavers and potters and wood-carvers into the red-light district of sleazy bars and sin shows and cubicles where the prostitutes lived and worked and died. He talked to peddlers, cabbies, hookers, mariachis. None of them had heard of Tula Lopez.
At eight o’clock he returned to his hotel to have dinner. The clerk on duty at the desk when he stopped to pick up his room key was the same elderly man who’d given him the insecticide on the first night of his stay. He looked nervous. “You like it here at our hotel, sir?”
“It’s fine.”
“No more mosquitoes?”
“Nothing I can’t handle.” I drink beer and the mosquitoes siphon it off before it can damage my liver. It’s a pretty fair system.
“I was telling Superintendent Playa what a quiet and polite young man you were for an American.”
“And why did you tell the superintendent that?”
“Because he asked.”
“That seems like a good reason.”
“I thought so.” Some crazy insect was hurling itself at the light above the desk, and the clerk watched it for a while with a kind of detached interest. “Why the superintendent asked, I don’t know. But you will certainly find out.”
“Certainly?”
“Oh yes. He’s waiting for you in the dining room. Since seven o’clock. Already he’s eaten one dinner and may have finished a second by this time. Naturally, we cannot present him with a check. It would be unwise. Yet it hardly seems fair that the hotel should pay, since the reason he’s here is you. Once in a while a policeman comes to the hotel, but never so important a one and never one with such a huge appetite.”
“Put his dinners on my bill.”
“What if you are not available later to pay the bill? Possibly you would like to settle your account tonight.”
“No, I wouldn’t like that.”
“What if I insist?”
“I wouldn’t like that, either.”
“Perhaps you are not so polite an American as I thought,” the clerk said and grabbed at the insect that was attacking the light over the desk. He missed. Aragon left the two of them battling it out.
Superintendent Playa, wearing civilian clothes, sat in a corner of the dining room behind a potted palm as though he were in hiding. But there was too much of him to hide, and it seemed inevitable that more of him was on its way. He was eating flan with whipped cream, and drinking something thick and yellowish out of a glass mug.
“Oh, Mr. Aragon. Good evening.”
“Good evening, Superintendent.”
“I’ve been waiting for you, passing the time with a bite to eat. Please sit down.”
“All right.”
“Join me in a rompope. It’s an eggnog flavored with rum. Quite delicious.”
“No thanks.”
“Very well, we’ll get down to business.” The superintendent unbuckled the belt of his trousers, and his stomach ballooned out between him and the table like an air safety bag inflating on impact. “The word is that you’ve been searching for the girl Tula Lopez all over town.”
“Yes.”
“You still want to see her?”
“Very much.”
“Perhaps I can arrange it. Yes, I think it would be quite possible.”
“You know where she is?”
“I know. Come along, we’ll pay her a call.”
“I haven’t had any dinner.”
“I ate for both of us to save time.”
“That’s very good of you.”
“You might really believe that, a little later on. If one is going to feel squeamish, it is better to do so on an empty stomach.” He rose with some difficulty and pushed his own stomach back into the captivity of its belt. Then he called for his check.
Aragon said, “I told the clerk to add it to my bill.”
“Why would you do such a thing? Have you a guilty conscience?”
“No.”
“Are you attempting to influence my judgment?”
“No.”
“Then why should you pay for my dinner as if I’d been your invited guest?”
“I—”
“Unless, of course, you invited me and the invitation failed to reach me in time. Could that be true?”
“It could.”
“Then I accept your hospitality. Many of my invitations arrive late or never. Our local system of communications is poor, though I believe you and I are communicating quite nicely, are we not?”