Little Miss Mute
Page 5
ever even heard of, but the present landlord and I had come to an understanding long ago on another matter. I had done a major favor for him in the past, and in lieu of paying me, he’d let me shack up in this place for as long as I wanted. I couldn’t complain about the conditions when the shelter was free. And hey, I had my own shower and toilet. Still, the location meant having to use my coat from an umbrella for Miss Mute again as we made our way north and then east to the door of my place. I poked my key in, jiggled it around until it finally caught, and gave the door a shove with my shoulder until it popped open. The door frame always seemed to swell up around the wetter times of the year, so getting in and out always meant fighting that flimsy damned door.
My room was cold and had a musty, moldy sort of underlying smell to it from the occasional water leaks, but it was dry and safer than standing out in the storm. I clicked on the lights, took back my coat from Miss Mute, and hung it and my hat on the half-broken cheap coat rack by the door. The coat rack, like almost everything else in my place, had been furnished by the owner from old leftovers before he’d had the downstairs lobby remodeled. The ripped and worn leather sofa, chair, and ottoman, the coat rack with two out of its four hooks missing, the scarred and tarnished brass luggage carrier that I used for a closet of sorts, and the beat-up desk and swivel chair that I used more for reading the paper and sipping whiskey than doing any sort of paperwork, were all hand-me-downs from the owner. The only things I’d invested in, myself, were the small but functional icebox, a second-hand radio, and the worn-out bed that was only marginally better than sleeping on the floor. I honestly expected a gal like Bettie to turn around and walk right back out into the rain, rather than face up to the prospect of spending any time in a dump like this.
Seeing that she wasn’t making a run for it, I shrugged, spread my arms, and said, “It ain’t no castle, but it’s what I got.”
She followed right on my heels as I went over to the bathroom and fetched some necessities from the medicine cabinet. Taking out a bottle of alcohol – surgical stuff, nothing good for drinking – and a box of gauze, I laid out a few things on the table next to the sink and turned to face her in the glaring light of the bare bulb overhead. She squinted against the glare of the light and shielded her eyes with one delicate, pale hand, regarding its brightness as though it were the sun.
“Okay, now, where’s the worst of it?” I asked as I uncorked the bottle of alcohol. Little Miss Mute just looked at me sort of naively, blinking. “C’mon, I saw how bad you were bleeding. Where’d you get cut up?”
She just shook her head, smiling slightly. I looked her over as best I could.
“Doesn’t look like he split your lip,” I said, eyeing her over as she stood perfectly still. “Did you bite your tongue?” Again, she shook her head. “Well, then what? You cut the inside of your cheek?”
I gently tried to pull her lower lip down, hoping she would take the hint and open her mouth for me to take a look. I was no doctor, but I knew enough to help patch a person up after they’d been knocked around a bit.
I didn’t even see her move. One moment, she was still holding her hand up to keep away the brightness of the light; the next instant, she had me by the wrist again with that unreal grip of hers. Her cute smirk was gone and her narrowed eyes were a bit wider with what looked like some form of panic. She relaxed after a second or two, shaking her head as she let go of my wrist.
“Relax, okay? Just trying to help,” I told her, laying a hand upon her shoulder. She nodded her head in understanding, but quickly spun away, suddenly out of my reach. “You’re not making this easy, Bettie.”
“I am fine,” she murmured with her back to me. “I was not hurt.”
“Then whose blood was all of that, earlier?”
“Not my blood,” she replied after a moment’s hesitation.
I’m a little slow about these things, sometimes. “You’re saying it was his blood?”
Bettie nodded, turning her head to look back at me through her damp, stringy veil of black hair.
“So, what’d you do? Bite him?” I chuckled under my breath as I unbuttoned my left cuff and began to roll up my sleeve.
She didn’t move. She didn’t even blink. The girl just stared at me like that, looking at me through her hair, those impossibly green eyes that were still so bright through such darkness. Pieces were falling together in the back of my mind, but the picture I was getting out of it all was just superstitious, crazy-talking nonsense. The first supposedly rational conclusion that I came to was so nutty, I didn’t even want to justify it with a conscious consideration. What was I going to do, ask her straight out if she … oh, come on! Had I really read that many stupid fairy-tale books as a kid?
“So, you’re not hurt at all, then,” I said more than asked.
“No. I was not hurt.” I couldn’t even see her lips move as she said that.
I shrugged it off and turned to the sink with my sleeve rolled up to my elbow, turning on the cold tap. There wasn’t a real cut across my palm, really. It was sort of like a really thin line of rug burn, more than anything. It wasn’t bleeding, not really, but there was a hint of pinkish color to the water that swirled down that rust-stained ceramic basin as I rinsed it off. I grit my teeth and did my best not to curse aloud as I quickly scrubbed by hands clean, trying not to irritate the wound any more than it already was. By the time that I’d finished washing it, the line was bleeding bright red again, and I stained the hand towel in a few places with it as I tried to dab it dry.
I hated cleaning up cuts and scrapes, but I’d seen folks get in sorry shape for ignoring smaller stuff before. I held the bottle of alcohol tightly in my right hand and held my left over the sink basin, pausing to draw a few steady breaths. I glanced over to Bettie and saw that she had turned to face me, again shielding her eyes from the brightness of the lamp.
“I always hate this part,” I sighed, shaking my head an instant before I started to pour the medical-grade hooch over my hand. It felt cold for a second, and then the burn sank in quick and hard, like someone had just shoved a red-hot spike through my palm. I tried my best to remain gentlemanly, but I had to either cuss or scream. An old habit I’d picked up in my childhood, one that I needed to lose before it got me into trouble someday, I started hissing a few random German obscenities through my clenched teeth – things I’d overheard Pops muttering a long time ago.
My astonishment overruled my pain in an instant as I glanced over to find Bettie suddenly standing very close to me, looking just as surprised as I felt. Either she was bothered by what I was doing to myself, or…
“Sprechen sie Deutsch?” I asked. She nodded. “Wait, you’re German? I thought you said you were … something else…?”
She didn’t have an actual reply for that, only shrugging and shaking her head.
“So, now you’re German?” She shook her head. “No? But you speak German?” She nodded to that. “How many different languages do you know?”
Bettie contemplated that for a few moments as I corked and put away the bottle of alcohol, still hissing with discomfort. If the light hadn’t been on, I wouldn’t have been very surprised to see blue flames coming off my left hand, it burned so much. After a few moments, as I began to wind the gauze around my hand, she held up eight of her fingers.
“You’re full of…” I blurted. She shook her head. “There’s no way you know eight different languages.” She nodded emphatically, combing her hair back with her fingers. “Now, this I’ve gotta hear.”
She stared at me for a few moments, then blinked slowly, rolling her eyes almost exasperatedly as she turned and began to walk away. She stopped in the doorway, thought for a moment, and then held up one finger as she rattled off something in German that was too quick and too fluent for me to catch. She held up another finger, and then said a sentence of something else in another language that sounded distinctly like something one of the Italian girls across town might have yammered. She went on like that, counting off one
language after another with her fingers as she repeated what I presumed was the same sentence in several different languages – German, Italian, Spanish, something else, another something, so on, and so forth.
Okay, so her list of oddities included the fact that she was an expert linguist, if not a genius. I had finished wrapping my hand by the time she finished her demonstration, although she kept her back to me and her face turned away the entire time. I approached her from behind as she recited her seventh language, and her words stopped abruptly when I placed my hands upon her hips. Through the damp material of her mud-smeared black dress, I felt the ribs and laces of her corset under my thumbs as clearly as I could now see them. It was just another strange thing about her, a woman as skinny as her thinking that she needed to wear a corset, but it did give her already attractive shape just a little bit more of an hourglass curve in the middle. Standing this close to her, I drew in a full breath of her scent. She smelled like damp earth, mint leaves, and warmth.
“I love it when a woman talks dirty to me,” I growled as I nuzzled my face into the crook of her neck, “no matter what language she uses.”
She hummed approvingly and caressed my scarred cheek as I laid a few kisses against her collarbone. I pressed myself