“It has nothing to do with the Indians.” She wouldn’t give him this, though he was right, of course — or partially anyway. “It’s Brinsley-Schneider, who you seem to think is so great. Brinsley-Schneider and eugenics and euthanasia and all the rest of the deadly u’s.”
He was smiling the smile of the literary theorist in a room full of them, the smile that made him look like a toad with an oversized insect clamped in its jaws. “The deadly u’s?” he repeated. And then, softening, he said, “All right, if it’ll make you feel any better I’ll check the doors and windows, okay?”
Her eyes were on the book. Way off in the night she could hear the dying rattle of the last car at the end of the train. Her life was changing, and why couldn’t she feel good about it — why shouldn’t she?
He was in the doorway still, his face settling into the lines and grooves he’d dug for it over the past two and a half years of high seriousness. He looked exactly like himself. “Okay?” he said.
—
She didn’t have to be in at work till twelve the next day — she was an assistant to the reference librarian at the university library, and her schedule was so flexible it was all but bent over double — and after Sean left for class she sat in front of the TV with the sound off and read the account of Lavina Eastlick, who was twenty-nine and the mother of five when the Sioux went on a rampage near Acton, Minnesota, in the long-forgotten year of 1862. There was a moment’s warning, no more than that. A frightened neighbor shouting in the yard, first light, and suddenly Lavina Eastlick — a housewife, a hopeful young woman her own age rudely jolted from sleep — was running barefooted through the wet grass, in her nightgown, herding her children before her. The Indians soon overtook them and cut down her husband, her children, her neighbors and her neighbors’ children, taking the women captive. She’d been shot twice and could barely stand, let alone walk. When she stumbled and fell, a Sioux brave beat her about the head and shoulders with the stock of his rifle and left her for dead. Later, when they’d gone, she was able to crawl off and hide herself in the brush through the long afternoon and interminable night that followed. The wounded children — hers and her neighbors’—lay sprawled in the grass behind her, crying out for water, but she couldn’t move to help them. On the second afternoon the Indians returned to dig at the children’s wounds with sharpened sticks till the terrible gargling cries choked off and the locusts in the trees filled the void with their mindless chant.
And what would Dr. Toni Brinsley-Schneider have thought of that? She’d probably applaud the Indians for eliminating the useless and weak, who would only have grown up crippled around their shattered limbs in any case. That was what Melanie was thinking as she closed the book and glanced up at the casual violence scrolling across the TV screen, but once she was on her feet she realized she was hungry and headed off in the direction of the kitchen, thinking tuna fish on rye with roasted sunflower seeds and red bell pepper. She supposed she’d be putting on weight now, eating for two, and wouldn’t that be the way to announce the baby to Sean six months down the road, like the prom mom who hid it till the last fatal minute: And you thought I was just going to fat, didn’t you, honey?
Outside, beyond the windows, the sun washed over the flowers in the garden, all trace of the night’s mist burned off. There were juncos and finches at the feeder she shared with the upstairs neighbor, a dog asleep at the curb across the street, pure white fortresses of cloud building over the mountains. It was still, peaceful, an ordinary day, no Indians in sight, no bioethicists, no railroad killers hopping off freight trains and selecting victims at random, and she chopped onions and diced celery with a steady hand while something inexpressibly sad came over the radio, a cello playing in minor key, all alone, until it was joined by a single violin that sounded as if a dead man were playing it, playing his own dirge — and maybe he was dead, maybe the recording was fifty years old, she was thinking, and she had a sudden image of a man with a long nose and a Gypsy face, serenading the prisoners at Auschwitz.
Stop it, she told herself, just stop it. She should be filled with light, shouldn’t she? She should be knitting, baking, watching the children at the playground with the greedy intensity of a connoisseur.
The sunflower seeds were in the pan, the one with the loose handle and the black non-stick surface, heat turned up high, when the doorbell rang. The violin died at that moment — literally — and the unctuous, breathless voice of the announcer she hated (the one who always sounded as if he were straining over a bowel movement) filled the apartment as she crossed the front room and stepped into the hall. She was about to pull open the door — it would be the mailman at this hour, offering up a clutch of bills and junk mail and one of Sean’s articles on literary theory (or Theory, as he called it, “Just Theory, with a capital T, like Philosophy or Physics”), returned from an obscure journal with postage due — but something stopped her. “Who is it?” she called from behind the door, and she could smell the sunflower seeds roasting in the pan.
There was no answer, so she moved to the window beside the door and parted the curtains. A man stood on the concrete doorstep, staring at the flat plane of the door as if he could see through it. He was small and thin, no more than five-five or — six, tanned to the color of the copper teakettle on the stove and dressed in the oily jeans and all-purpose long-sleeved shirt of the bums who lined Cabrillo Boulevard with their Styrofoam cups and pint bottles — or should she call them panhandlers or the homeless or the apartmentally challenged? Sean called them bums, and she guessed she’d fallen into the habit herself. They said crude things to you when you walked down the street, gesturing with fingers that were as black as the stubs of cigars. They were bums, that was all, and who needed them?
But then the man turned to her, saw her there at the window and turned to her, and she had a shock: he was Hispanic, a Latino just like the man on TV, the killer, with the same dead cinders for eyes. He put three fingers together and pushed them at his open mouth, and she saw then that he had no mustache — no, no mustache, but what did that mean? Anybody could shave, even a bum. “What do you want?” she called, feeling trapped in her own apartment, caught behind the wall of glass like a fish in an aquarium.
He looked surprised by the question. What did he want? He wanted food, money, sex, booze, drugs, her car, her baby, her life, her apartment. “Hungry,” he said. And then, when she didn’t respond: “You got work?”
She just shook her head — No, she didn’t have any work — and all the time she had to give this man, this stranger, this bum, had already been used up, because there was smoke in the kitchen and the seeds were burning in the pan.
—
It was past eight when she drove home from work, feeling exhausted, as if she were in her eighth month instead of the second. The day was softening into night, birds dive-bombing the palms along the boulevard, joggers and in-line skaters reduced to shadows on the periphery of her vision. All through the afternoon the mist had been rolled up like a carpet on the horizon, but it was moving closer now and she could smell it on the air — it was going to be another dense, compacted night. She parked and came up the walk and saw that the upstairs neighbor — Jessica, Jessica-something, who’d been there only a month and was so pathologically shy she cupped both hands to her face when she talked to you as if a real live moving mouth were somehow offensive — had been doing something in the flower garden. The earth was raw in several spots, as if it had been turned over, and there was a spade leaning against the side of the house. Not that it mattered to Melanie — she’d never had a green thumb and plants were just plants to her. If Jessica wanted to plant flowers, that was fine; if she wanted to dig them up, that was fine too.