Bury Me Deep (13 page)

He rolled them up in the carpet like Cleopatra.

Then Mr. Worth came with the Worth Brothers Meat Market truck. When he walked in, his face turned gray. He said some things to Joe and then he looked over at Marion, who sat in the corner still, holding her hand to her chest, looking up and watching them.

“Is she all right?” he asked Joe, and Joe said it didn’t matter, and they carried the carpet out like moving day.

“Where are you taking the girls,” Marion said suddenly, head jerking up, body rising stiffly. “Where are you taking my girls.”

“Marion, look out the window. See if the street is clear,” Joe said.

Twitching, her body feeling as if on strings, she made it to the window and floated a finger through the curtains, peering out to a great black nothing.

“When I come back,” Joe said, “this place must be cleaned, Marion. It must be cleaned top to bottom.”

And she looked up at him in his blood-edged shirtsleeves and one browning strand stretched across the starched shirt.

“It will be clean,” she said, and it was her voice, but it was as if someone else were using it, cranking it from her chest like a windup doll. “It will be clean, Mr. Lanigan. It will be virgin pure.”

L
ATER,
she would remember nothing of it, but the cleaning went on for hours. Carbolic acid and white vitriol. That house had never been so spotless, Marion’s arms red and raw, her wound festering under its wrapping. She could feel the bullet there, small and tight, and her skin puffing around it, cradling it.

Sometime, Joe returned, now in a pearl gray suit and hat, clean-shaven as if on his way to morning church service.

He had found Marion on one of the girls’ beds, hand wrapped in the dish towel.

She didn’t move when he entered the room, he seemed so funny standing there, almost as if he were picking her up for a date.

He was saying some things.

“Worth and I, we took them away. And Mr. Worth, well, he fixed everything, Marion.”

“Mr. Worth,” Marion said, and she didn’t remember him at all, not even the leg of lamb he once brought or his trilling hand organ. “Did Mr. Worth fix the girls? Did he really?” She felt her body shake and jerk. She wondered if she’d dreamt some or all of the night before. How could Mr. Worth put Ginny’s face back together? Mr. Worth, who spent days dressing young beef for the silk stockings in town who could dole out for more than brisket and soupbones. “Are they fine now, Joe? Are they mended? Where are my girls?”

Joe took his hat off, shaking his head. “Marion, Marion,” he said, and he walked toward her and rested a hand on her leg. “You know what you did to the girls. The girls are gone. And now he’s fixed it so we can take them away.”

“Take them away?”

“I had planned that we would take them to the desert and bury them. But after some conversations with Mr. Worth, who is very familiar with those roadways for his businesses, well, he said it was foolhardy. The highway patrol are a constant presence on those roads. The more distance, the better. So we need to get them far away, Marion. Do you see? This is where we need your sweet face.”

He sat down on the bed beside her, taking care not to brush against her hand, nor let the bloody dish towel touch his suit. “I am sorry for my coldness before, Marion, you must see. You are mine and I will protect you. You will see what I have done for you. For us both.”

He helped her to her feet and guided her to the living room, air heavy with bleach, making her stomach spiral.

A
LL SHE COULD THINK
of was Louise buried six feet deep in the desert, body weighted with rocks. Ginny’s candied mouth open, caught, midcry, and filled brimful with glittering sand.

How could she reckon with this?

In the middle of the room, next to the teetery coffee table, sat two black, silver-latched packing trunks, one very large and one more compact.

“You see, Marion,” he said, arm around her, holding her up. “It’s all taken care of.”

“I don’t see,” she said, clutching fingers to his lapel. “Are we going on a steamer? Are we running to far-flung lands?” And her head twisted loose, and she began giggling and Joe did not like that one bit.

“Marion,” he said, reaching round and grabbing her face in hand. “Marion, you must see what we have done here. You must
know what we have done with the girls. Do you see?” Turning her face with one hand, turning it hard, he pointed to the trunks with the other. He pointed to the trunks and Marion would always remember this. His right arm around her neck, hand grooved under her chin like a vise, and left arm pointing, like God himself, down to Earth, down to Adam, down to the black trunks on the unimpeachable floor.

Her girls, her girls. Her girls in those trunks like so much packing. A flash in her head, Louise’s long limbs curled at funny angles, crumpled like a magician’s assistant inside a magic box. And Ginny like some stretched-thin rag doll twisting round itself.

“Oh, Joe,” she said, and she felt her shoulders convulse, but there was nothing in her stomach but gin. “Oh, Joe.”

“Listen, Marion,” he said, voice stern but gentle. “You must pull yourself together here. I need you to help. You can’t fall to pieces on me.”

“No, Joe,” she said, “I won’t.”

“Here,” he said, taking a packet from his pocket. “Take these.”

They were pills and she raised a palm of them to her mouth until he swatted her arm down. “Not all of them, Marion. Not now. One.”

She did as she was told, eyes never leaving the trunks. “Joe,” she said, tongue dusty with the powdery pill. “Joe, how did you get them in there? How did they fit?”

“Worth took care of everything, Marion. Don’t you worry about that. He has,” he said, and there was the sparest of pauses, “operated on Louise and made it all work.”

Marion felt her knees turn to soft dough and she began to drop to the floor.

“What did I say to you, Marion?” Joe said, pulling her back, raising her shoulders high, turning her to face him and then slap
ping her twice hard across either cheek. Her head rang. “I have done everything, Marion. And now it is your turn.”

H
E TOLD HER
how it would be. He told her to go home and pack a bag. He told her to telephone the Lightning Delivery Service and have them pick up the trunks and take them to the station and load them on the train and then they would be waiting for her twelve hours later when she arrived in the Southern Pacific Station in downtown Los Angeles. See how he’d rigged it, so she would never even have to touch them? See how he had arranged everything? And she would never have to lay hands on those trunks. Never even have to touch those awful boxes sitting there. Those awful boxes.

“But won’t Mr. Worth…Won’t he…”

“He won’t say a goddamned word, Marion,” Joe said, and it was the first time he had ever cursed before her. “They’re
his
trunks. He knows I have enough on him to hang him. Horse meat to hospitals. That’s just the start.”

She didn’t know what that might mean and didn’t want to guess. Everything seemed so different with Joe now and yet somehow the same, just with her eyes struck wide, lashed open, there was no hiding. Joe was Joe. And it was a dark thing.

Was this the one who had held her curls between fingers and pressed lips to, tickling stomach, lips on faint down and eyes bewitched?

It was a dark thing.

So she packed her bag and it was all like a dream, fuzzy, ill defined. Later, she recalled running her good hand along the front of her good dress, smoothing its worn cotton.

“W
HAT YOU GOT IN HERE, BARBELLS?”

The Lightning Delivery Service men looked at the trunks. One had started raising it onto his dolly and then stopped.

“You joining the circus, angel? Gonna be the Strong Man, or Strong Gal?”

Marion smiled. She surely did. The pills, they were helping. She could feel herself move as if marionette lifted and she recited over and over again Joe’s instructions in her head. He told it to her three times and three times he made her repeat it back to him.

“You sure there’s not hooch in those trunks?” The other man winked. “’Cause we
would
have to report you for that.”

Marion kept her gentle smile and shook her head, filling out the baggage slips. “Oh no, I’m a Christian, gentlemen.” She did not know where that line had come from, but she was glad for it. It sounded so sincerely meant. Inside, somewhere under the gauze of the pills, there was a whirring terror, but she could barely hear it, a vague purling somewhere far away. And so she returned to Joe’s instructions and recited them with care: “A fellow worker and her friend, well, they packed all their worldly goods in there. They asked me to ship them. They’ve moved west.”

“And left you behind? Damn fools, I’d say.”

“They met some men,” she enunciated, “and went off with them to Los Angeles.”

“Sound like some girls. I’d like to meet those girls.”

“That’s the kind of girls they are,” she said.

“I’ll say. Say, this is going to cost a pretty penny.”

“I have the funds. They left me the funds.” As Joe directed, she showed the men a roll of bills.

“Well, how ’bout that? Those are some girls.”

T
HINGS BEGAN HAPPENING
very fast and all the time was collapsing in on itself, softly falling to the center. It had something to do with her head and something to do with the pills and something to do with everything that mattered being gone.

She did not remember taking the streetcar home, but back at Mrs. Gower’s, she telephoned the clinic and told the weekend receptionist that she was quite sick and expected she would not be at work on Monday.

“Oh, I am sorry, Marion. You do sound rotten. Not yourself at all,” the girl said. “Take care. Hot-water bottle and hot toddy, you know?”

Suddenly, she felt terribly anxious. “I hope Dr. Milroy will not be mad at me for missing work.” As the words came from her mouth they sounded so silly to her, so frivolous she nearly laughed.

“Don’t worry. Everyone likes you, Marion,” the girl said. And Marion replied that she was so glad.

T
HE PLAN WAS FOR
J
OE
to come to the rooming house at eight o’clock to drive her to the station. She had her head covered with the old cloche hat, as he told her, and she tucked every platinum bit of her hair underneath.

Waiting by the window, she watched her wounded hand and she could smell it and it smelled unclean despite all her ministrations. She took another of Joe’s pills and finally saw his Packard pull up at 8:20, leaving them only ten minutes to get to the station.

“You’re drunk, Joe,” she said as they pulled away from the curb, she with her satchel so heavy and he didn’t help not one bit. He was drunk and she couldn’t believe it.

But he just laughed and steered the wheel. He began instruct
ing her on what to do. What had made sense earlier made no sense now. She said, again, “But, Joe, why don’t we just take the trunks into the desert and bury them? Why don’t we just do that? Why must we send them all the way to California? And why must I go too?”

He waved his hand at her, Masonic ring flashing, and she thought he might strike her again, but he was somehow gay. “I told you, baby doll, I told you. The highway patrol’ll find the trunks before we can blink and it will all come back to you. This way, it’s two girls, two girls
notorious
for their reckless, aberrant ways, out on a tear to Hollywood for a new life of casual debauch. Who wouldn’t believe that of them?”

She looked down at the ticket in her hand.
MRS. H. MACGREW
,
it said.

“But why must I go too? Why can’t the trunks go without me?”

“You must go to be sure that the trunks are safely in the hands of my associate, Mr. Wilson. He will take care of everything there. What’s more, he will bring you to a physician to tend to your wound. It works perfectly, you see, as Los Angeles is a place I have associates and it is a place you have been before. It will swallow this up. Los Angeles is a place that swallows things like this up whole.”

He pulled an envelope from his pocket and slid it across the seat to her. “Take this,” he said, and she smelled the booze coming off him, from his mouth, his suit, his whole body. There was something in his face too. Something closed and done. “Now, what did I tell you, Marion? What are your instructions?”

“Get off the train at Southern Pacific Station and wait for Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson will find me,” she said, “by the pansies on my lapel.” She fingered the cloth pin on her dress. “Look for a thin man with yellow hair and spectacles and a green gabardine
suit. It’s just like a motion picture. Like
Mata Hari.
That’s what you said. You said I was to be Mata Hari.”

“That’s right, darling, Mata Hari. That’s you,” he said, laughing, eyes gaudy with liquor. It was awful, and the look on his face made Marion, even behind the numb the pills cast across her, feel herself die. She died right there. It was all over. It was all over and she knew that once she got on the train, it would be as if all the lights had gone out all over the world.

For twelve hours she sat in her seat on the Golden State Limited and barely lifted her head. The man seated next to her had a large shiny face and big teeth and a pomaded head of hair that shone across the car like a searchlight, and he told her he was going to work in motion pictures and she should too, or did she already, because she looked the spitting image of Constance Talmadge and had anyone ever told her that.

The man talked for a while, and Marion looked out the window, her hand hidden behind her purse, which contained the envelope Joe had given her, and she knew the hand was aching but she couldn’t feel it aching. She looked into the black pane.

“Honey, there ain’t nothing to see,” the man said, and she could feel the wink in his voice. She wondered, suddenly, seeing his grinning reflection in the glass, if this was how Joe Lanigan was, really was at bottom. Was this him?