Ness stood up and took a pistol from a shit-brown pocket. It was a small revolver made to look even smaller by his big hand. He pulled back the hammer as I had done with him a few mornings before.
I smiled and then grinned.
“You know what I’m gonna do, right?” he said.
I fluttered my eyelashes at him. It was the pretense of innocence that I’d used in a dozen films where I was some chaste child about to be indoctrinated into a brutal carnal world.
Dick raised his arm, leveled the pistol.
He fired. It sounded like a cap gun. Shards of shattered tile pelted my left shoulder from behind.
“You missed,” I told him.
He fired again, this time to my right.
“Maybe you should get a little closer, Dick.”
I fully expected to die in that same bathtub where my husband expired, in the place where Jolie Wins had electrocuted them both. I could have saved myself. I could have begged. I had the money for Ness in the trunk of my car. I didn’t need it. But I wasn’t going to give in. He would have to kill me and I didn’t give a damn.
Dick’s face, already crushed from a lifetime of angry blows, fell in on itself. He lowered the pistol and shook his head.
I wondered if he was looking inside himself for the strength to murder me. I had given him enough reason, enough disrespect. But he just turned around and walked out of the bathroom. I had no idea of the content of the chain reaction of emotions set off inside him.
It was late in the afternoon before I was ready to go out again. I drove my Jaguar down to Threadley Brothers Mortuary. Talia Dean was sitting at the stone desk.
Talia was young and waiflike. Her loose tie-dyed hippie dress and white sandals made her an anomaly in the house of the dead. But there was something perfect about that odd juxtaposition of intense life moving among the shadows of death.
“Hello, Mrs. Pinkney,” the young woman said.
She rose and came around the marble slab to shake my hand. After this friendly and oddly perfunctory welcome she leaned forward and hugged me.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered in my ear.
Then she leaned back and stared into my eyes.
I tried to smile at her. Maybe I succeeded.
“Lewis is downstairs with your husband,” brown-haired Talia said. “I can call him and ask if he’s ready for you to come down.”
I nodded. We both went to sit at the Fred Flintstone desk. While she pressed the right buttons to get to Lewis, my red phone rang.
“Hello,” I said.
“Lewis?” Talia said on her line.
“Sandra?” Marcia Pinkney said over the red phone.
“Can Mrs. Pinkney come down to view her husband?” Talia asked.
“I decided to take you up on your offer,” Marcia said.
“She’s right here,” Talia said.
“... to come and see Theon,” Marcia concluded.
I gave Marcia the address of the mortuary while Talia hung up and waited.
After I disconnected the call the displaced hippie said, “I can take you down to see your husband now, Mrs. Pinkney.”
He was wearing a tan suit with his favorite Stetson in the coffin. I realized that Lana must have helped them get the clothes. I came into the cool, dark chamber alone. Talia had left me at the door.
Lewis was standing over the earthly remains of my poor lost husband. Theon was smiling. It was his natural smile. I had never before seen a corpse made to look as the person had in life.
Dardanelle had done a brilliant job.
“He looks just like Theon,” I said.
“It was as if he did the work himself,” Lewis told me. “The muscles of his face found that smile with the smallest urging. He was a man who enjoyed life.”
“Every minute,” I said, “like he was going to die the next day.”
“In my business you learn to take advantage of the span you’re allotted,” the undertaker told me. “We see so many who fall before their time.”
It was a simple pine coffin, unfinished as I had wanted it to be. Seeing him there I felt the emptiness created by his absence. It wasn’t so much that I missed him but that he had been there in ways that no one else ever could. Now, for the next two days at least, I would be alone.
“Could you bring a cot in here?” I asked the lanky mortician. “I’d like to spend the last night at his side.”
“That’s against policy.”
“Does that mean no?”
It was a simple canvas cot with X-crossed wooden legs at either end. The blanket was army surplus and very scratchy but that wouldn’t interrupt my sleep. I sat there next to my dead husband, thinking that he would have been happy that I didn’t have a book. The light in the small interment room was no more than forty watts — I wouldn’t have been able to read anyway.
It would have also made Theon happy if I decided to have sex with him one more time before he went into the grave. At some younger, wilder time I might have given him that last good-bye.
But that night I just sat there feeling so at ease and comfortable.
I was considering taking off my dress and lying down when a knock came on the door.
I thought it was an overly formal Dardanelle, but when I pulled the door open Marcia Pinkney stood there. I had forgotten her completely.
That night she was wearing a black dress and a dark gray hat with a gray, loose-net veil. Her eyes were still shocking in their intensity but the wan smile she had from days before had been put away.
“Is he here?” she asked.
I stepped to the side, ushering her in with the movement. Her gait was stiff-legged; so much so that I stayed close to her side in case she stumbled.
The pine coffin reminded me of Queequeg’s coffin in Moby Dick — the passage of death that also made room for life.
“Oh my God,” Marcia said, standing over her son.
I put my arm around her shoulder.
She reached out and wept silently. I imagined that her tears would have felt hot.
“I treated him like a dog,” she muttered.
“He acted like a dog, Marcia. That’s why I loved him.”
“You did?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Even after all he did to you?”
“Of all the doors I could have run through, his was the kindest. He never hit me and he always listened — even when he didn’t understand.”
“I could have helped you buy a better coffin,” she said.
“Come sit on the cot, Marcia.”
The coffin was set on the floor and so when we sat on the makeshift bed we could look down upon Marcia’s dead son’s smiling countenance.
“He looks very natural,” Marcia said. “I guess that sounds clichéd but it’s true.”
“You couldn’t have stopped this from happening,” I said. “I was his wife and I couldn’t do it. Theon was after something that he could never have and he was gonna push it to the limit until he went off the side.”
“But it was my fault.”
“You can’t look at it like that, Marcia. Theon was a man. You have to respect a man to live his own life, and if you do that then you have to let him be responsible.”
“But I’m his mother.”
“So let it hurt you that he’s gone. Feel the pain of his death but don’t climb in there with him.”
The old woman took me in a feeble embrace. She cried on my arm and shook in gratitude and despair. She patted my hand and whispered my name, my real name.
After all that, she leaned away and said, “Thank you. I didn’t do anything to deserve your kindness.”
She left soon after. I didn’t accompany her because I knew that Lewis would see her to her car. I was relieved to be alone again. Marcia’s emotions were too intense for death.
In the cool light, on the stiff cot next to my dead husband, life slowed down to a reasonable pace. The death chamber was cool and sedate. There were no sounds from anywhere.