“I’m the one who’s showing her the guest register.”
Ray groaned.
I stepped out into the hall and shut the door. “I should have explained something, Henry. It is important that we not be seen together except at the front desk. Someone could get the wrong idea about our relationship, or rather the right idea, if you follow me.”
“I have a new poem to read you tonight.”
“I’ll be there. I look forward to hearing this poem.”
“All right. McJones looks kind of crazy.”
“Because he is.”
Henry gave me a long, wondering look before moving away carefully down the dirty stairs. He held tightly to the banister.
I went in all ready to congratulate Ray on his crazy act but found him stretched out on the sofa, hugging his stomach. “Something bad, bad, bad was in that chicken,” he said.
I rinsed out a handkerchief to wipe his face. Within an hour things were much worse. He paced, hunched almost double, then stretched out on his back twisting, and then began to mutter about birds and turtles. I gave him some aspirin. He chewed the tablets, then spit them on the floor and lunged into the bathroom.
He began to shiver awfully. His jaw clamped, and the muscles churned on the sides of his face. He pulled his pants and shirt off and wrapped himself in sheets. Soon the sheets were soaked with sweat.
I felt okay. The chicken hadn’t affected my stomach in any bad way.
Of course. It wasn’t the chicken at all.
24
In the liquor store across St. Paul, the old man with a bandage on his ear refused to sell to me.
“It’s for my boss,” I explained.
He shook his head.
Down the sidewalk, I spotted Henry at the dollar table outside a secondhand book shop. He wasn’t reading the books but smelling them, one after another.
“I need a favor,” I said.
He blinked at me, gathering his wits. He hadn’t seen me coming, and his wits were widely scattered. “You said we’re not supposed to meet away from the desk.”
“This is urgent!” I gave him some cash and instructions. “I would do it myself, but I’ve misplaced my driver’s license.”
Henry scuttled off down the sidewalk. He didn’t buy my story, but he didn’t need to anymore. He was docile and compliant now. I had him “under discipline,” as it is called in the trade. He was back to me in no time with a pint of something called Old Overholt. I left him with his fragrant dollar books.
At the room I had some trouble locating Ray. I heard snapping and at last found him in a space between the bed and the wall. He was down there wrapped in his wet sheets, snapping his fingers first by one ear, then the other.
He wanted me to look inside both his ears with the flashlight. He thought there was a “bug” stuck in one of them. I don’t know what kind of bug he meant, the electronic kind or the kind with six legs. I dreaded whatever I might see, but I looked, because he wanted me to. I could not see far in for all of the iron-colored hair that was growing in his ears.
I poured some bourbon into a paper coffee cup with a little water. I told him to drink it.
He sipped it, and you’d have thought I had given him poison. He threw the cup against the wall.
“What are you trying to do to me?” he said.
“This has happened to you before,” I said. “It happened at the Farm. I know about it.”
“Somebody left that chicken sitting out!” He said it in language that was spotted with profanities. I’ve omitted those.
“Ray,” I said. “Settle down, okay? Settle.” I moved closer to him. He was still wedged down there in between the bed and the wall, all of him from the chest down.
He covered his face with the sheet.
“I know what’s happening, Ray.” I tried to make my voice very flat, because a girl can sound simpering or overly plaintive when she is emotional. “It happened at the Farm when you stopped drinking. They kept you in the infirmary for two weeks. Do you remember?”
He didn’t move.
“I know I’m not supposed to know about it. It happened over Christmas break, when the school was closed. I stayed with the Gandys that week, and Mrs. Gandy explained it to me. If a person is used to having several drinks every day, sometimes he’ll need a doctor’s care if he suddenly stops. You can get very sick from just stopping.”
Still Ray didn’t respond or move.
“I want you to know that I didn’t mind spending that week with the Gandys,” I said. “Christmas is a stupid holiday. I only mention it because I’m concerned that this project of giving up drinking is not a good project for us to be taking on right now. We need to save that for a time when you have access to plenty of fresh air and vitamins. You are missing your long daily walks, too. Your whole routine has been wrecked. Let’s do this right. I sent Henry to buy this bourbon, Ray. He’ll do anything I tell him to now. I’ve got him well under control. It’s not your regular brand, but I’m sure it’ll do. Are you hearing me, Ray? Please, uncover your head.”
He brought the sheet down from his face. His face was pale as milk, and his eyes were messy and wet. I recovered the paper cup he had thrown and dusted off the rim. I poured a couple swallows of bourbon in and diluted it with water from the sink. I gave him the cup and he drank it down obediently.
We both waited in place to see what would happen. No evil ghosts came writhing out. He blinked a few times, and then he sighed and raised his eyebrows. He started to cough, and I lit him a Raleigh, which he climbed out from behind the bed and sat up to smoke. Then he had a few more swallows of the Old Overholt, and then he drank some water, ate a Captain’s Wafer, and was quiet. I felt like we were out of the woods for a while.
25
Late that night, when I had Ray laid out on the couch and sleeping, I went downstairs to let Henry read me his new poem. It concerned a bodiless male personage who was in love with a fetching librarian, only he couldn’t kiss, caress, or even say good morning to her because he was a bodiless personage. All he could do was hover in the stacks, a dusty spirit, and get a load of her shelving books all day long.
“It’s poignant,” I said.
Henry gave me a long, big-eyed look. He was on his high stool inside his cage, and I stood at the opening in the grate. It was two in the morning.
“Did Mr. McJones enjoy his cocktail?”
“Why do you ask?”
“You said it was urgent.” He blinked at me slowly.
Out on St. Paul there were tire squeals and shouting. A man ran into the lobby, looked around him, and ran back out.
Then quiet.
“I had better go back up and check on Roy McJones,” I said.
“All right.” Henry pushed the guest register through and I copied the few new names into my notebook.
“See you tomorrow night,” I said.
“Good night, Roberta,” he said sadly.
I started toward the stairs. But I wasn’t really done for the night and I knew it, because I recalled Ray’s admonition on managing an asset: you want him to be happy as well. I went back to the cage.
“What’s got you down, Henry?”
“I can’t really talk about it,” Henry said.
“Isn’t there something I can do to help?”
“Yes.”
“What, then?”
“I can’t tell you!”
“I’m no good with puzzles,” I said.
He asked me whether the librarian in his poem reminded me of anyone. “Dark eyebrows and yellow hair? ‘Small and cruelly efficacious hands’?”
“She sounds like a pill. I don’t know why the bodiless personage is in love with her like that.”
His eyes looked past me into several thousand miles of space. “I was wrong, you have no ear for poetry,” he said.
Well, I had tried. I went on upstairs.
26
Things were different with Ray now. He stayed in bed for four days, eating nothing but crac
kers and tangerines that I peeled for him. He slept a lot. Sometimes we talked.
“You’re a good kid,” he said.
I wouldn’t have minded hearing that sort of thing, except that there was something sad in the way he said it.
“You’ve seen my less attractive side,” he added.
His tone was confidential and beaten. I couldn’t seem to convince him that we might wind up better off for having left D.C. “I’ve never told you this, but I don’t have a very high opinion of the D.C. public schools,” I said.
“Is that right?”
“I think we can do much better. We’ve got to keep it together here until we have our new identities, and then we’ll start fresh out West.”
“I haven’t seen my home state in a dog’s age,” he said.
“There you go.” He meant Oklahoma, which I had never seen.
“I’d like to show you the Continental Divide, and the Corn Palace, too. This country has the grandest system of paved roads in the world. Grand is really the only word for it.”
Yet he spoke like an invalid, with nostalgia. I told him I wanted him to see a doctor.
“That’s impossible,” he said.
It wouldn’t have been impossible, but it seemed like a very great risk. HORSEFLY’S name was in the papers every day. They said that the FBI was looking for him in all fifty states plus Mexico and France. Perhaps he was dead with a hole shot in his body, left somewhere to rot just as he’d fallen. I was scared of that, and we never did see a doctor.
Each day after lunch I offered Ray some bourbon. He would take a few sips. Not much. Enough to keep him calm. Or was it killing him? I didn’t know. I asked him, “Ray, what do you think? Should you have a little bit, or not?”
He’d shake his head no, then drink it.
He seemed most like himself when he sat up to smoke a cigarette. He grimaced while taking the first draw, and then he would shake the match out. He squinted through the smoke.
He talked about Stanleyville, which was something he’d never done since we left that place. He mentioned the names of men who had driven trucks for the Sheffield Beer Distributing Company. “The network went all over the east,” he said. He’d had the use of a small plane as well, and a Cuban pilot who’d been assigned to him by the Agency. He mentioned many other names as though I would know them, though I didn’t. Then he described some large birds which he said were shaped like human heads, and they walked up and down the road by the warehouse unmolested. “Their bodies were sort of tan-colored with a purple mark on the breast,” he said. “Celeste was afraid of these birds, and so was the girl, and so was the dog.”
I did not remember any such birds. Nor the dog, nor anyone named Celeste. And who was the girl?
I felt the gravity of hearing these things. A box had been pulled down from the shelf and some old items brought out and unwrapped, but not all of them. Others stayed tight in their wrappings. An idea crossed my mind which I imagine many others have thought before: These things were so neatly packed away. If we take them out, we’ll never get them all back in.
Therefore, when Ray alluded to some person I didn’t know, I didn’t ask him to say more, and when his mind seemed to wander and he said something that didn’t make sense, like that these head-shaped birds could talk, and that he had conversed with them, I let it go. Sometimes he went half to sleep, and he would talk in this state. If his dreams got very agitated I would shake him and give him a small drink.
You can see I was improvising, but it seemed to work. Soon he slept the full night through, and in the morning he sat up and said he would enjoy having some buttermilk. I went out to find some on St. Paul.
I took the back stairs out of the Fletcher. The reason was this. Henry was on day shift that day, and I was in a rush to get the buttermilk. Were I to use the front stairs, those sad, wide-set eyes would be pulling at me. I wedged a paper match in the door lock so I could get back into the building from the alley.
If only I had not done that. Had I gone out the front, Henry would have known I was not in the room, and therefore he would not have gone up by himself when Ray started flinging things into the walls. A recluse who resided in Room 39 under the name “Sam Smith” called the desk. I had not seen his face once. He called down to Henry complaining of the disturbance from 33, and Henry, who would ordinarily have ignored such a complaint or else called the Baltimore police, came upstairs himself because he thought that Roy McJones was hurting Nurse Roberta Dewey. Had that been the case, what could the unsteady Henry have done? He was heavy and soft, and his legs were different lengths. He was no match for Ray. But he went up anyway. He knocked, and Ray got up and let him in.
It took me the better part of an hour to locate a quart of buttermilk on St. Paul. Back at Room 33, I found Ray pacing the floor in his shorts and his yellowed undershirt, kicking his bare feet through some gray fluff that was scattered over the linoleum.
I was slow to absorb the scene. The cushions from the sofa had been slashed open and emptied: that was what the gray stuff was. The folding chair was pushed over, and the hot plate was on the floor, broken open.
“What has happened?” I said.
“We’re burned,” Ray said.
He stepped close to me and took the paper bag from my hand. He handed me his yellow-handled sodbuster pocketknife. The single blade was opened. His arms shook as he unfolded the mouth of the buttermilk carton.
“Cover him with the knife,” Ray said. He took his buttermilk into the bedroom.
I was confused. The card table was on its side in the corner, and I heard a wet cough from behind it. It was Henry. I saw his black shoe with its built-up sole. I asked Henry what he was doing behind that table.
“McJones said he would kill me,” Henry said.
“What did you do to make him want to kill you?”
“Nothing!” Henry told me about the noise and Sam Smith’s call.
“I need to have a word in private with Mr. McJones,” I said. I backed up into the bedroom. “The desk clerk is working for us,” I hissed over my shoulder to Ray.
Henry threw the flimsy card table over and rose to his knees. It was difficult to watch. He was bulky and awkward, and he was afraid.
“Mr. McJones is very sick,” I said. “I’m sorry for this misunderstanding.”
“Why are you lying about him?” Henry said. “Are you his daughter?”
“No! I’m not! The truth is, he’s someone important—you’d understand if I told you. He needs to rest.”
“He needs a drink,” Henry said. “He’s no different from ten other sponges in this building. They come here to die.”
The brown amphibian eyes seemed to leap at me. Henry put his fist on the doorknob and rattled it, unable to make it do what he wanted. Then for some reason it opened, and he left.
Ray came out of the bedroom carrying his shoes from two fingers. The front of his shirt was wet with buttermilk. “We are burned,” he said.
“That was the desk clerk!” I said.
He put a finger to my mouth to silence me. Then he came close. “You should have been more careful. He’s an obvious Bureau informant. He’s planted some listening device in here, and he saw you leave and came up to change the batteries. We’re burned, and this phase of the thing is over.” Ray dropped onto the ruined sofa and got his feet in his shoes, but he pulled one of the shoestrings into a knot. He cursed and stood up. “Idaho,” he said.
“What?”
He shook his head. The ring with the Scamp keys on it hit me in the chest.
“You’re sick, Ray,” I said. I took his arm.
He wrenched the arm loose. Somehow I tripped on my own feet and found myself on the floor. He bent down close to me.
“Yes, I am sick. Come through for me, Jumbo. Code word Idaho.”
He left. I heard his shoes clatter down the stairs, and then from the window I saw him come out from under the front awning onto the sidewalk. He caught himself on the hood of a parked green sta
tion wagon. He crossed St. Paul, and then he went away up Madison Street, gone.
27
I wanted to climb out the window and down the side of the building after him.
But I couldn’t. He was sick, but Idaho meant something. I knew what it meant. Spacious, queasy-making thoughts expanded in my brain, but I pushed them down. Close, practical thoughts must be my only thoughts. I ran to get the buttermilk carton with Ray’s fingerprints smeared across it. I don’t know why—our fingerprints were everywhere. I dumped a hill of his cigarette butts into a paper grocery bag and pushed all my clothes into my knapsack.
There wasn’t much to pack. While scanning the room, I noted a set of gouges high on the wall. It seemed that Ray had swung the hot plate into the wall by its cord, or maybe thrown it. He must have had some reason to suspect that a listening device was inside. It was a perfect hiding place—that hot plate was so filthy, we had touched it as little as possible.
I left with my arms full. At a bend in the stairs, I stopped to look for Henry. There he was in his cage, head in his hands. I climbed back up a flight and slipped out the back stairs. No paper match was needed this time, because I wouldn’t be back.
Some children were wrestling at the curb near the Scamp. “Hey, chickie,” one of them said to me. I got in the Scamp and cranked it, and when it lurched forward those children hopped aside.
I drove for some time, an hour or more. I don’t know how. Later, when I stopped, I had no recollection of any streets I had driven through. All I seemed to be able to think of was Ray in his soaked shirt telling me to come through for him.
I had stopped alongside a parking lot. The sun was low, and the glare was such that all of the dozens of cars appeared the same steely white. I thought of something that I had seen earlier, but which hadn’t registered at the time. I got my red radio out of the knapsack. The leather case had been pulled off of it and the corner of the radio crushed as though it had been stomped on. The radio could have been opened simply enough with a small screwdriver, but we didn’t have one of those.
Angela Sloan Page 6