Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  My eyes acclimate to the dark. A glow in the vicinity of the stairs where The Citadel’s North and South wings meet. Poised at the landing, eerie in the downstairs light, a form in a shapeless dress that sweeps the floor, long hair down her back.

  Bronwyn! I call out quietly, not wanting to startle her.

  She disappears into the rooms of the South Wing.

  I follow, quickly and quietly. On the way I pass doors left ajar, scattered possessions, evidence of residence. Has the place been rented? Have squatters moved in?

  Who could it be? I try to think. In a flash of understanding, I surmise that Victoria Woodhull and her sister have somehow contrived to lease the place, have installed Bronwyn there and have been working all along to seduce her into their nefarious lives.

  Well, no.

  A thin layer of dust on the floor of the hall, patterned over with footprints. I venture into Bronwyn’s old room. Cobwebs, more dust. But more footprints, too.

  In the armoire against the far wall, its doors flung open, I see one of my immense five-gallon glass anatomical specimen jars. Stolen from me somewhere along the way. I cannot quite discern what’s inside.

  Then I realize.

  Male members, swimming in a sea of foul-smelling formaldehyde. A half dozen at least. In a multiplicity of sizes and shapes.

  Her trophy case.

  Who could witness such a ghoulish collection without physically reacting? I don’t faint. But I do feel my scrotum retract protectively into my abdomen.

  At the sound of her footsteps, my whole body convulses with fear. Whirling around, I follow the sound through the deserted, dusty house. A ruined, abandoned Citadel. Room after empty room. Finally, at the end of the hallway, I see her pass quickly to the landing at the top of the stairs and descend.

  As I follow Bronwyn down the steps to the stairhall, I notice several things at once.

  The front door to Fifth Avenue is flung open.

  A lamp in the stairhall is lit. It throws a gleam over a figure sitting in a straight-backed chair, knitting.

  The Sage Hen wears a startled look on her face as I pass, heading out the front door on the trail of Savage Girl.

  No doubt my own face exhibits a matching look of surprise. I force myself to revise my understanding once again. Not the Woodhulls at all. I have underestimated the depth of Bronwyn’s relationship with the Sage Hen. She might be the one she considers her true mother—not Mallt, not Anna Maria, not the Comanche woman Nautda.

  Obviously the Sage Hen and Bronwyn have colluded all along, ever since Virginia City. I have always felt a nagging sense of someone watching, lurking, skirting at the edges of our lives. It was no doubt the Sage Hen, monitoring her prize pupil.

  I poke my head outside. The newsmen collect themselves around a carriage half a block to the north, parked at the curb across the avenue from Swoony’s. Freddy, back already? I can’t stop to find out. Bronwyn is already across the street.

  I follow her. I am still somewhat hobbled by my wounded foot, sore if I use it too much.

  As soon as we enter the park, we leave behind gas jets, light, civilization. A half-moon dances behind the clouds, peeks out, dances back, but we are in Dante’s selva oscura, the dark, dark forest. Black-headed trees stare down at me.

  Midway through our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.

  How I know for sure it is her: Instead of skirting the Zoo, as any sane pedestrian might do at night, the figure ahead of me plunges directly in among its cages and walkways. A flash of her dress, disappearing next to the pen where the elephant sleeps standing up.

  When I emerge onto the gentle southern slopes of the Dene, she is nowhere in sight.

  Bronwyn? I call out. Softly, since I don’t want the reporters out on the avenue to hear.

  For a second, as the moon clears, I see her, twenty yards away, framed against the Willowdell Arch.

  Yes, indeed it is Bronwyn, her that I love.

  At the end of her right hand gleams the triple-bladed razor claw.

  Yes, beauty and terror often bump up against each other. I have dwelled upon that before, in theory anyway. At the moment I have not a moment to dwell.

  I turn and hobble away.

  She knows the lay of the land better than I do, I think, desperately trying to figure an escape.

  I limp west, across the loop drive, out onto the flat pan of the Sheep Meadow. White smudges in the darkness, spring lambs crying out for their mothers. The whole flock is there, settled for the night. My arrival disturbs them to their feet. I back away as though I have violated some peaceful scene.

  As I do so, a figure rushes quickly out of the darkness and crashes into me.

  I fall, hard.

  Through wincing pain I look up to see looming over me not the Bronwyn I know, not a human being even, but some strange raging creature.

  Savage Girl transformed. Not she but it.

  Straddling me in Bronwyn’s loose artist’s gown, the beast pummels my face. I try to block the blows, but with astonishing strength it restrains me.

  She is mine forever, it sneers. We are going to marry.

  In a high-pitched voice, parroting my exact words, from the interview I gave to Wick Zinder.

  So it worked, my strategy. The Herald story I had planted lured out the beast to attack me. I try and fail to reach into my pocket for my own blade.

  Now we will have some fun, Mr. Anatomist. The same sneering tone. What leg do you prefer? Right or left?

  My ability to speak has wholly deserted me.

  No answer? Then I’ll choose.

  A wealth of black hair drapes over its face. It fixes the claw more snugly onto its hand and draws a deep slicing incision through the fabric of my trousers, deep into the groin-side flesh of my right leg.

  Stop, I plead, childish and unconvincing.

  I fall silent because it has made the mortal cut and all I can do is press my hands over the wound to stanch the blood. Woozily, I am aware that I have only a few minutes until my six quarts of red flow out of my body.

  The creature rears upright, gloating over me.

  I drag myself into a sitting position, reach my forefinger and thumb into the wound and with a strangled shout pull the artery from my leg, stretching it out like a night crawler.

  The beast watches me, fascinated in spite of itself. Idiot, it hisses.

  I scrabble inside the wound again, feeling myself fading into shock, desperate as the seconds tick away. Again I wrap the other end of the severed femoral around my finger and pull. Spurting like a fountain, it slips from my grip. I grab it again.

  Pulling at the two ends of the artery, I attempt to pinch them shut. My hands fumble. My fingers are thumbs.

  The beast laughs harshly. The surgeon! it cries.

  But I manage, I manage. I tie the two ends off. The arterial gush stops for the moment.

  Now the creature raises the claw hand, ready to drive the blades into my chest. I wave it feebly away.

  A deep-thunder roar sounds in the darkness. Screaming meadow sheep scatter in all directions.

  This beast, this apparition, bloody claw in hand, about to end my life, halts, peering off into the black.

  The moon clears again. Across the greensward of the meadow walks a figure from my dream, Bronwyn as Savage Girl, not bare-breasted, all right, but Amazonian, striding purposefully directly toward us. Carrying the diamond-encrusted bow that Nicky had given her.

  Beside her walks the black-striped tigon Charlemagne, muscles rippling with a lazy, stretched gait, tail erect and twitching.

  Meaning the cat is on the kill.

  The Central Park Zoo tigon, uncaged, unleashed by Savage Girl. She commands it as though it were a circus lion.

  But if she is there with the animal, then who is my mysterious assailant? Who stands above me with raised claws?

  I am petrified, watching the big cat come loping across the lawn.

  Will it be drawn by the sce
nt of my blood?

  Faster and faster, then blazingly quick, finally leaping through the air, the tigon slams my attacker athwart the chest. I feel the heat of the big mutant cat as it flies past me. I smell its thick musk.

  Knocked five feet away by the force of the blow, my attacker sprawls, its cheap wig goes askew, its artist’s gown rides up, and I get a good look at its face. A strange twisted creature with slits for eyes and a lipless mouth.

  The Toad.

  R. T. Flenniken. Bronwyn’s keeper in Scott’s barn. Clutching his black wig, scrabbling backward to get away, his face a mask of panic.

  Ignoring me entirely, the tigon delicately picks up the shrieking little man and carries him off in its jaws, bounding into the woods at the north end of the meadow.

  Did he get you? Bronwyn says, running up to me. Meaning the Toad.

  It’s all right, I say. I tied it off.

  She extracts a length of bowstring from her quiver and tourniquets my leg expertly, tightening it until I yell. And faint. I am always fainting.

  I wake after what feels like only seconds later. But something is wrong. It is not Bronwyn standing over me but the Sage Hen. She attempts to untie the tourniquet around my leg. Pain overwhelms my whole body.

  Stop it, I say. Although the words never make it out of my mouth, dying weakly in my throat.

  Where is he? the Sage Hen shouts into my face. Where is my son?

  Her son. That would be . . . R. T. Flenniken.

  My mind isn’t working right. I attempt to address her politely as Mrs. Flenniken, to ask her to please stop jerking my wounded leg around.

  Where’s that witch of a wild girl? she says.

  She has gone off and left me, I don’t have strength to say. She’s running with the tigon. Helping it punish your son.

  You little shit, the Sage Hen says. We knew you were trouble the first time we laid eyes on you.

  Please, Mrs. Flenniken, Mrs. Flenniken, please. Again no words actually see the light of day, or the dark of night, or whatever it is right now.

  Far off, the roar of the tigon. The Sage Hen looks up just as her son did, fearful and paralyzed.

  An arrow wings in through the night (it is night, yes, I remember now), barely grazing the Sage Hen’s scalp. Another, whistling inches past her face, thuds solidly into a tree trunk at the edge of the meadow.

  The Sage Hen staggers back and begins to run, to the south, away from the roaring sound, away from the flick of arrows.

  The last thing I see is Savage Girl, jogging off lazily in pursuit, wielding her bow like Diana, diamonds sparkling in the moonlight, inflicting cut after near-miss cut on the Sage Hen’s tublike body, surgical in her Comanche precision. The two of them disappear into the green meadow dark, pursuer and pursued, getting farther and farther away as my sight dims.

  I am left alone. I sure as hell hope Charlie doesn’t return.

  A cloud obscures the moon.

  I faint.

  Epilogue

  What happens a month later, at the end of June, finally pushes the Wild Child of the Washoe off the front pages of the newspapers. Three hundred U.S. Cavalry soldiers riding under George Armstrong Custer fail in their attempt to fight off a force of eighteen hundred Lakota, Arapahoe and Cheyenne led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.

  The hungry public can’t get enough details from the Battle of the Little Big Horn. They are tired of Bronwyn Delegate. We are, finally, yesterday’s news.

  Which is just how we like it.

  Mrs. Hugo Delegate sits astride my lap, facing me, wielding a straight razor, giving me a good, close shave.

  We are at Sandobar. The house, not the train.

  Nothing is more beautiful than summer on Long Island. Blue ocean, white-yellow beach, air so fresh it’s like God’s own breath on the first day of creation.

  Swoony has died, and her death shook a lot of things out. Grandmother left me Sandobar House in her will.

  Scritch, scritch, scritch. The razor hugs my jawline.

  I like a man with a clean face, Bronwyn says.

  When I think about it, I say, Comanche men don’t grow beards, do they?

  Who am I, Hugo? she asks me, a fierce expression on her face. This is our own private catechism.

  I laugh nervously, aware of the blade. Not my sister, I say.

  Who?

  A Comanche girl.

  Yes.

  During our honeymoon sojourn on Long Island, she has certainly taken on the look of an Indian girl more than ever. She goes barefoot. Her black braids fall over her shoulders. I have never before seen a woman above the age of sixteen wear braids unless she has them pinned up elaborately in back.

  Duende, most definitely duende.

  Then again, Bronwyn the Comanche also resembles a bright, fresh young woman in the new style, wearing a flouncy, blue-and-white-striped seaside dress. And bloomers. Yes, I have accepted bloomers into my life. No more crinolines, no more bustle.

  As she shaves me, we talk, not for the first time, of the fateful night in the Central Park. We speak of things that matter, as Tahktoo might say.

  I ask her, How about the mother? The Sage Hen? The coroner’s report didn’t mention death by a thousand cuts, via bow and arrow.

  She stumbled and fell, Bronwyn says. She ran to the top of the biggest rock outcropping in the park. It was a long drop, but she died fast.

  Uh-huh, I say. You didn’t give her a little push?

  Hold still, she says, wielding the razor, don’t talk, this is sharp. Applying the blade to my Adam’s apple.

  I say, How’d you know Charlie wouldn’t go for the sheep in the Sheep Meadow, you know, instead of the Toad?

  Man-killer, prefers human meat, she says. Ripped apart some farmers in India.

  Then how did you know Charlie wouldn’t go for me?

  She sits back to appraise her work. Well, that I didn’t know, she says. But I figured at least one of you two would survive, Delegate or Flenniken, so either way I’d have a husband.

  Missed some, she adds, putting the razor to my throat again.

  I’m surprised, I say.

  I’m not surprised that you’re surprised, she says.

  When you went down to Bev’s that night, you knew what would happen, didn’t you? Flenniken would come and kill Bev.

  Flenniken didn’t like any competing suitors. Insanely jealous, in fact.

  And when, dear Bronwyn, did you realize that?

  She turned, picked up a hot towel soaking in the sink behind her and slapped it on my face. He deserved it, didn’t he?

  Bev, I say, my words muffled.

  Yes, Bev, she says. He deserved it if anyone did.

  Well, I think, we both have Bev’s blood on our hands, don’t we? Literally and figuratively.

  The events of that dreadful night at the dead man’s town house play themselves over in my mind. Greeted at the door by a bland, oblivious Margolis, climbing the stairs in a sort of suspended dream state, knowing where I was going and suspecting what I would find when I got there, entering the blood-soaked study. The killer gone.

  I had smeared the red stain on myself, to convince detectives that I was the murderer. Bronwyn got spattered with it, grappling with Flenniken—not in an attempt to stop him from killing Bev but because she knew I was coming and that the Toad would try to kill me.

  And the others? I say, taking the hot towel away from my face to look at her.

  The others, she says. I didn’t even know about some of them. Poor Graham, the groom at The Ditches. I was never sure what was happening until the very end. Until Percy. Everyone I smiled at died.

  I used to feel hurt that you never seemed to smile at me.

  That was me saving your life. Just like you telling that crazy story about killing people without remembering doing it. What was that?

  Preposterous, I know. But it was the only way I could think of to save you.

  Silly boy.

  So you used Flenniken to kill Bev.

 
And used Bev to catch Flenniken, she says.

  Part of the issue with R. T. Flenniken, it turns out, is that he and his mother, the Sage Hen (real name, Arthuretta Flenniken), were both convinced that Bronwyn had married the son.

  It was a bit of stage business that Cal Scott tried out, Bronwyn explains to me. A wedding ceremony. We were going to put it in the show. Ever afterward the Sage Hen and R.T. seriously believed it to be real.

  Madness, I say.

  Well, yes, Bronwyn says. They were both unwell in the mind. I believe it ran in the family. Like mother, like son. He used to enjoy wearing my dresses.

  Did he ever . . . ? I say, letting the thought trail off.

  Did he consummate? she says, laughing gaily. What do you think? There was none of that. He couldn’t do it. That is why he collected them from those who could.

  Good Lord, I say. Lord, Lord.

  • • •

  Bronwyn loves Sandobar House, a cedar-shake beach mansion with generous porches, the whole estate half torn apart by the recurrent hurricanes that hit Long Island. The evening of the first day she spends there, she says, I think this is my favorite place in all the world. You grew up with this?

  By a surprising bit of good fortune, we can live anywhere we want. A scrawled codicil to Swoony’s will left the contents of her personal safe to one “Virginia Delegate,” which was crossed out and rewritten as “Bronwyn Delegate,” which was crossed out and rewritten as “Bronwyn Bowen.”

  Freddy and Anna Maria hired Howe and Hummel to break the will, to no avail. Judge Harkington, who became very fond of Bronwyn during her time inside Blackwell’s prison, found for us.

  The problem was, though, there was no safe to be found. Grandmother’s bank, Guaranty Trust, knew nothing about it. Neither did Mike the butler. No one did. Swoony’s house, which Freddy had mortgaged out from under her, was taken away. We looked and looked but couldn’t discover a safe anywhere.

  During our last week in residence at Swoony’s, the furniture largely sold off, the empty shell of a town house nearly barren, Nicky managed to save the day.

  Well, I’ll miss her, the old bird, I said.