by Ed Kurtz
Beautiful?
“It’s okay. Wait for me.”
“I don’t like it. It’s not right.”
“We’re not in charge right now,” he said, shrugging. “It’s this or nothing.”
She hung her head and sighed. “I’ll wait right here.”
“Good.”
“Come back.”
“I will.”
Jojo blinked and turned back to the nurse and the stairs. She went up, lugging him along like a Pekinese on a leash. For the second time in her life, Theodora watched as a frighteningly evil person dragged the Dog-Faced Boy away.
“I always knew you were a sweet boy,” the nurse cooed as they went down the hall together. It was dimmer than ever and one of the lights in the ceiling flickered incessantly. “He did a hell of a job getting all the rubes to think you were wild, but I knew better.”
“Who are you?”
“Come, now. You’ll hurt my feelings.”
“I know the face, but I can’t remember. I don’t remember much from that time.”
“I expect you don’t. I had an uncle like that. Fought the Mexicans and saw some pretty awful things, I guess. Couldn’t recall one damn thing from that war. Half the time he didn’t even believe he’d been there.”
“All right, but I was in the circus, not a war.”
“Hmn,” she said. “Maybe worse, then.” She stopped in front of the last door on the left and carefully, gingerly touched the doorknob. “Here we are, champ.”
She turned the knob and Jojo said, “Why don’t you tell me who you are, huh? Short of a thump on the noodle I’m not planning on just magically remembering.”
“Maybe a thump’s the answer.”
She pushed the door open and he saw the girl on the bed.
“Goddamnit, who are you?” he snarled.
“Knock it off, Jojo,” complained the girl on the bed.
He stiffened at the realization that she wasn’t Margie Shannon. He melted at the fact that she was Sarah, his long-dead mistress from the wrong side of the tracks.
“And take them damn shoes off before you track dirt all over this house. I spent all day cleaning up white folks’ dirt; I ain’t about to have to do it in my own house, too.”
“Sarah,” he whispered raggedly.
“And don’t you dare argue with me, Jojo Walker,” she went on with a knowing wink. “You can boss your own wife around, you want to lord over a woman, but I’m the head of this house and don’t you forget it.”
Her stern, pinched expression couldn’t last—it never could. Her forehead smoothed and the full smile, the most genuine, guileless smile he’d ever seen told the truth about how she felt.
“My God,” he said.
“Good grief, Jojo,” she laughed, “why in the world do you look so shocked? I was only joking. You know me.”
If her absence had made his memory of her richer, more beautiful, then Jojo decided that was what he was looking at: a memory. But people didn’t interact with their memories. Memories were for when connections were dead and gone, contact forever done with. He sniffled and rubbed his chin, suddenly shocked back to the reality of the circumstances.
“Shit,” he grouched. “My face.”
“You do need a shave, wolf-boy.”
Anyone else and he’d have been offended, but he accepted the pet name from Sarah early on. He accepted anything from Sarah.
She stood from the bed, smoothed out the wrinkles in her nightie, patted at her raven black hair with the palms of her hands. She was meticulous about straightening it with her pressing comb, despite Jojo’s constant comments that she’d look pert near perfect if she was as bald as a cue ball.
“Come on,” she instructed, hooking a finger at him as she crossed the room to a door that hadn’t been there a moment before. “Let’s get my boy all lathered up.”
He took a step forward and froze. Sarah tilted her head playfully and snorted a laugh, shutting her eyes momentarily and fluttering her eyelashes. Jojo turned to look at the nurse, who remained standing behind him like a bodyguard.
“Why?” he asked.
“Go to her, you fool,” the nurse said, suddenly bereft of all her menace. “She’s the love of your life. Don’t miss it.”
“It’s . . .”
“It’s what? Not real?”
“It isn’t.”
“Does it matter?”
“I loved her.”
“I know you did. You still do. Go. Love her now.”
Sarah opened the door and dramatically planted a hand on her round hip.
“Are you coming or do I have to drag you?”
The nurse went back to the door, stepped out to the hall.
“Go,” she said again, and then vanished from the room.
Jojo said, “I’m coming.”
On his way to her, to the love of his life, he remembered the nurse’s name like it was burned into his brain with a branding iron. Minerva, he thought.
“You get the water hot and I’ll get your shaving kit together,” Sarah said.
He followed her into the washroom feeling vaguely guilty for watching the way her buttocks moved beneath the sheer fabric of the nightie. He watched all the same.
“Sometimes I think we’re the two biggest frauds in Litchfield, you and me,” she said lightly, rummaging through the medicine cabinet.
Jojo twisted the knob above the faucet in the clawfoot bathtub. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m a coloured woman who wants a white woman’s hair, and you’re a wolf-boy who wants to be hairless like everyone else.”
She laughed again; a lilting, soulful laugh.
He said, “Everybody wants to fit in, not get stared at or treated like last week’s garbage. That’s not asking too much, is it?”
“I don’t reckon so, but why’s it all got to do with hair? Mine’s too curly and yours is too damn much. Some’s too red, or too grey, or too thin or not enough. Jumpin’ Jesus, I expect if we all stayed bald the way we were born the world would be a lot better off.”
“I suppose you’d blame the war on Hitler’s moustache.”
“Why not? His silly little moustache and Churchill’s big, bald head.”
Jojo erupted into peals of laughter, and Sarah joined him.
“By God, woman,” he said, gasping, “you’re in rare form today.”
He touched the stream of water rushing from the faucet and it stung him with its heat.
“Well, I ought to be, by God,” she answered.
She was unzipping the leather shaving kit and extracting the brush and straight razor. The soap and scissors she’d already taken out and set beside the bathtub. She sat down beside him on the tub’s edge and started to unbutton his shirt. Thick brown hair puffed out along the way.
“Yeah?” he asked. “And why’s that?”
“Because it’s been so long, you big, hairy dummy.”
Furrowing his brow, Jojo let his arms go limp as she pulled the shirt off. He was puzzled by what she meant. He wondered how long it could possibly have been, given the fact that they were never apart long, not between the first time he stole a kiss and the day she died. . . .
Sarah gently took his chin with one hand and snipped at the hair on his face with the scissors in the other. Brown clumps rained down on his lap. The faucet roared behind him, sounding for all the world like Niagara Falls.
“How . . . how long has it been?”
“Bless me, but you really are a dummy, Jojo Walker.”
“I’m sorry.”
Snip, snip.
“Don’t be sorry—just be still, for crying out loud!”
Snip, snip, snip.
She leaned in close, taking extra care along his nose and around his eyes.
“How long,
Sarah?” he whispered.
“It’s been a long, long time, lover.”
“You mean since . . .”
“That’s right, baby. That’s right.” She cut faster now, making horizontal rows on his brow. “Since your wife killed me.”
A shot rang out and with a dull, sickening thud a deep red-black hole appeared an inch above Sarah’s left eye. Jojo jerked, startled, and the pointed tips of the scissors stabbed the skin at the hairline she was shaping for him.
“Now look what you made me do!” she complained, sitting back and giving him a disappointed mother look. Blood trickled out of the hole in her head, gathered in the fine hair of her eyebrow.
She pursed her lips and went for a wad of toilet paper to dab at the two dark beads welling up on his brow.
“You got to stay still,” he scolded him, the blood oozing from the wound and falling in fat droplets above her eye. “This is why you got scars all over your face, you know.”
“I know,” he muttered, staring.
She patted with the tissue paper until the bleeding stopped, entirely oblivious to her own. She held the bristles of the shaving brush beneath the running water for a moment, then applied it to the cake of soap in the bottom of an old coffee mug. Working up a foamy lather, she smiled and started to hum softly. Her big brown eyes half-lidded, she did not seem to notice the red drops falling into the lather.
“Gonna get you all cleaned up,” she said, half to herself. “Then maybe we’ll get you all dirty again, what do you think about that?”
Sarah winked like she always did, the cheek below her winking eyes dimpling in a way that made Jojo’s chest feel tight. She gathered a heady foam on the brush and set to soaping his face, twisting the soft bristles in circular motions until he was nothing but suds. Through the thin honeycomb haze of the soap bubbles, he watched as she unfolded the razor and red blood vessels burst in her eyes. The dark brown skin of her face was taking on a blue hue and her breathing was becoming laboured and heavy. She held up the razor until it glinted in the light and brought it down to scrape across Jojo’s cheek. Her left eye clouded, rolled up into the socket until the iris disappeared.
“Steamy in here,” she said.
She swiped at him with the razor and Jojo ducked back. Her depth perception was shot with the one eye out of commission.
“Oh,” she said, touching her mouth. “I’m sorry.”
Jojo frowned and reached for the razor. “Maybe I should—”
“I—I don’t . . . feel . . .” Sarah moaned and dropped to the floor in a heap. Jojo smelled fresh excrement; her bowels had voided. He cried her name and threw himself at her, seizing her shoulders and shaking her madly. He was helpless in the face of the oozing, dime-sized hole in her brow, open-mouthed and eyes welling up.
“Sarah,” he muttered. “Oh, Sarah.”
White foam fell in sudsy blobs from his face and burst when they splashed against her body. The water continued to roar out of the faucet, but he was oblivious to it. His eyes burned from the soap and teared up, washing it all out. He fell into a squat beside the dead woman and whimpered, reached quivering fingers out to touch her cold, blue face. The skin retracted at his touch, tightened and broke apart, fragile as an egg yolk. Jojo gasped as he watched her face shrink against her skull and split wherever the angles of her face pressed through, turning her once smooth and perfect skin into melting mush. In moments, she came to look like what she truly was: a woman who had been dead over a year, left to the damp earth and its countless parasites and the ravages of time. A sheer blue nightie filled with bones and rot and useless, agonizing memories.
“I killed you, didn’t I?” he asked of the decomposed remains. “Beth pulled the trigger, but I’m the one who killed you. Jesus Christ, I’m the one who killed you.”
Sunken in the wretched puddle of rot that encompassed the bones of Sarah’s right hand was the straight razor, still wet with soap and a thousand tiny brown hairs. The blade accused him, beckoned to him. Jojo heaved a laugh and the laugh became a sob. A year of self-pity and bitter regret had done the trick—he thought only of himself and his own pain, drank to dull it and managed to bury the sting of love. Love that rotted away to the putrescence he saw before him. It stung him now, and it hurt like hell.
“What a fucking world,” he said as he plucked the razor from the fetid pap on the washroom tiles. He ran the razor under the steaming water in the tub, washing away the yellow-black gunk of dead flesh.
“I shoulda let you alone, darling.”
He flicked his wrist and knocked water from the gleaming steel.
“Either that or Beth ought to’ve killed me, too.”
Love, he knew now, was something for the pictures: another damn good reason he never went anymore. William Powell and Myrna Loy, or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers—fantasy couples who shared fantasy loves. In real life it was compromise and disappointment, wrong choices and deep societal limitations that reined a man in and lashed him into submission. You did what you were damn well supposed to do or you paid for it in blood and hate. And for a sub-human freak like Jojo Walker, you sure as shit took what you could get and didn’t complain when you got it. He’d been lucky and he spit in luck’s face. Then the spit turned into bullets and both his distant wife and impossible lover were spared the anguish he spent every hour kicking and screaming against, to no avail.
Jojo stood up and stepped over the liquid remains of Sarah to the small mirror on the opposite wall. He ran the heel of his hand up one side and down the other, wiping the condensation away to see the strange face that stared back at him: a monster’s face, dripping with froth, two wavering red eyes embedded in the stubbly prickles of unwanted hair. He thought about what the reverend had told him, the implication that his incantations to the Morning Star were what brought upon the myriad miseries that afflicted the people of Litchfield, that he’d extended a foolish invitation that ignited a firestorm of despair as a forerunner to the coming of Barker Davis. He scowled at the werewolf in the mirror, whose personal responsibility he could not absolve no matter how many ancient words twisted the sleepy quietude of an unremarkable Southern town.
No sorcerer had forced his hand, made him fall for a girl he wasn’t allowed to have. He clenched a fist and wrenched it back, ready to smash the monster’s face in front of him, but the rage expired in heavy sigh.
“What a fucking world,” he said.
He felt the spiny contours of his throat with one hand while he brought up the razor with the other.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“This ain’t no good,” Charles said, pacing the lobby. “We can’t just leave him up there, not with her.”
“He knows what he’s doing,” Theodora offered lamely.
Charles snorted. “Then I don’t reckon you know too good. Now I love that man, he’s my friend, but making good decisions ain’t one of his best skills.”
“I know a bit about that.”
“You know the white side of it. Me, I know both sides. I’m telling you that man’s lucky he didn’t get strung up once on this side of town and then again on the other. And him a policeman at the time.”
“Nice words for a good friend.”
“It’s the truth. As things went, he was lucky as all get-out; he didn’t really break no laws and all he got for his trouble was fired by the sheriff.”
“I’d say he got a lot more than that.”
“That’s true. But being an outcast is a sight better than swinging from a tree.”
“You sure about that, Charles?”
Charles puckered his eyebrows and glanced away.
“From what I know,” she continued, “that man has been a pariah all his life, since the day he was born. Now, I don’t much cotton to an unfaithful man, but I expect love is love and when it hits you there isn’t a whole hell of a lot anybody can do about it. You take your chanc
es and place your bets, and maybe more often than not the bet’s no good and the horse comes in last, but that’s life, ain’t it? Unless you have a crystal ball tells you how everything’s going to work out, you just got to jump in feet first and hope for the best. Most of the time, anyway.
“I don’t suppose I would have ever stepped out on my husband, God rest his wicked soul, but being married to him certainly didn’t turn out the way I thought it would, and my guess is the same went for Jojo Walker. Maybe it ain’t pretty to look at life that way, but I don’t see it being any other way. He bet on the wrong horse the same as me.”
“Then maybe he shoulda took his licks and gone on home like everybody else.”
Theodora pressed her lips together until her mouth looked like a cut. Behind them something pounded from the cashier’s cage. Charles frowned and looked that way.
Mr. Thomas threw himself against the mesh, snarling and clawing at the criss-crossing wires like a rabid animal in its cage. The mesh rattled and Thomas growled, then backed up and hurled himself at it again. Theodora caught a convulsive breath. Charles muttered, “The hell?”
“You’re not supposed to be here,” Thomas rasped, his voice like broken bones grinding together. “Get out, nigger! Get out, whore!”
“Oh, Jesus,” Theodora groaned. “Here we go again.”
Thomas collided with the mesh, his face scraping along the exposed wire ends which cut his skin and dragged it into open, jagged wounds. He pawed at the cage like a mad dog and screamed, though from pain or frenzy no one could tell.
“That bitch nurse took my shotgun,” Charles said. “It’s all you, lady.”
“All me? But—I can’t . . . I can’t just . . .”
“Then give it here.”
His eyes half-hooded and mouth turned down to a determined grimace, Charles reached for the rifle in her hands. She wrenched away, wide-eyed and afraid.
“It’s not his fault. It’s none of their fault, Charles! It’s that, that man—the magician. Please . . .”
The front doors boomed open, slamming against the inside walls and sending a deafening echo across the lobby. Thomas screeched furiously and found the latch to the cage’s door. Ernie Rich jerked in, revolver at the ready and looking very much like a man who had been to hell and back.