Bury Me Deep (14 page)

But it couldn’t be. It couldn’t be, and she would make him love her once more.

W
HEN SHE FINALLY FELL ASLEEP,
that was when she could shut out Louise and Ginny no longer. They were there, they were in the seats across from her, lounging nudely like lovely harem girls with jeweled fingers and toes, and they were chattering away at her, and Marion could feel herself wanting to laugh with them
and it was lovely and they were back. They were putting arms around each other and Ginny was singing “Cheerful Little Earful” and Marion wanted to reach over and squeeze her little thrush cheek and as she started to, as her fingertips nearly touched that flushed face, before, before…
before the face blew to pieces, to shimmery black powder, to nothing. To nothing.

To pause and think, to think about what had occurred—the savage thing she had, with fumbling hands, wrought—would ruin her. To pause and think of those black boxes jostling in the freight car behind her, to picture the bodies curled round inside—well, one could not allow thoughts to scamper in that direction and yet go on. No. No. She knew in some way it was God’s wrath fallen upon her for her sinful ways and worse still her rapture over the sin, her openmouthed hunger for it.

And yet thoughts of Joe Lanigan still came. They wouldn’t stop, even now. She couldn’t break it. Nothing could break it. She so wanted it broken for good.

I
T WAS LIKELY TWELVE HOURS LATER,
the spidery hands of the Southern Pacific Station clock told it, but it felt like a minute or a year and she took another pill, noting sadly only eight left and how would she go on without them?

She found a seat under the arrivals-and-departures board, fluffed her crushed pansy pin and awaited the arrival of Mr. Wilson, who would wave a hand and fix everything, Joe Lanigan’s gleaming West Coast proxy and her savior.

A
N HOUR AND TWENTY-SEVEN MINUTES
had passed when she felt the nerve pulsing in her face. Eyes weary from scanning the crowd, wave after wave of blond men in gabardine, nearly all
of whom smiled back at her but none of whom answered to Mr. Wilson, though one said he could be President Hoover if she were so inclined.

Oh, he was not coming. She wondered if Joe Lanigan had deceived her and Mr. Wilson would never arrive—if in fact this Mr. Wilson existed at all. She wondered this, but she could not let herself believe it, not now. She couldn’t slip down into that murky place. It would swallow her whole.

L
OOKING IN THE LADIES’ ROOM MIRROR,
she felt herself tingling all over. There was a monumentality to the moment. It was so big she was made breathless by it.

Outside, in the bank of telephone booths, she had telephoned Joe Lanigan’s house. “I’m sorry, miss, but he is out on business,” the nurse said. “We don’t expect him until this evening.” Marion could picture her, tray in hand, in that silent house, that dark mahogany corridor, that lonely telephone in that lonely house, the metallic smell of illness choking the air.

She knew of no other way to reach Joe.

Joe had made himself impossible to reach.

For one long minute she was sure that the best, the only, the correct thing to do was to walk back to the tracks and throw herself under the next train like some white-necked heroine from a melodrama. She was certain this was the thing she must do. She was certain of it.

Placing a hand to her face, to her quivering chin and jaw, she asked,
Marion, is this the end? Is this the dark pitch at cliff ’s edge?

But it was not. It was not. She would not let it be so. She had found herself in dark corners before, not so dark as this, but dark in other ways—
Nights spent lonely as if alone, Dr. Seeley, hollow-eyed and lost, crying to her and skin-popping, and what to prepare her
for this, minister’s daughter Dutch Reformed pure and Sunday school in her eyes; this was not for her but it was hers and she had to
—she had found her way out before. She would find her way out now. In some ways, she was surprised how fast her blood still ran, how hard her heart still galloped. She was not such a wilting thing. It turned out she was not that thing at all.

Forty dollars remained in the envelope Joe had given her. She had forty dollars with which to save herself.

Her first thought was to abandon the trunks and use her return ticket for the next train home. But the station officials would, of course, find what was inside them and then where would she be, where would she be? It was all too close, it was all right upon her. Those trunks. Those trunks. They were leering, black-hearted things, weren’t they? They were so big, she was sure she could see them through the station walls, through the walls of the claims office and right through into their messy centers.

She felt her throat catch, her eyes turn dun in the mirror. She shook her head, shook her thoughts away, juggled them out of chaos into focus.

Oh, God, one can’t think like this, one cannot, she determined. She just needed time, she needed distance. She needed to figure things out. To slow down her thoughts, to think things through. She tried to concentrate. If only she had time, time to reach Joe, who would have to account for himself, who would have to make things right.

A picture came to her of the Hotel Munn, a shaggy place on Olive Street where she and Dr. Seeley spent six weeks the previous year, awaiting yet another licensing hearing. But the staff might recognize her.

Then she remembered the place on East Fifth Street, above the Blue Bell sandwich stand. The St. Curtis Hotel. She had gone
there once, summoned by the manager to retrieve her husband, who had spent four days lounging in the lobby, ascending the stairs on occasion to take his pleasures with bug-eyed hah-peeners in various rooms whenever, as he said, the poppy fleet came in. The St. Curtis, she would go there. It was not a place where anyone was remembered. No one bothered you there. Not even the manager, who’d only wanted his two bits.

“I
HAVE COME
for those two trunks.”

“Aren’t I the happy fella,” the baggage claims man said, “because don’t they ever weigh a mother-in-law-sized ton and I thought I might have to move ’em to Unclaimed. What you got in them anyway? They sure are stirring up a stink.”

Marion smiled brightly. “Oh, I am sorry.”

“You know,” the man said, eyeing the trunks, “last year, fella up in Montreal, Canada, killed his wife with a claw hammer and shipped her here in a steamer. Ten days en route and stalled in the Plains on account of bad weather. By the time she got here, there wasn’t much left inside but some bones and slime. Only figured her out from her teeth. Her skin had slipped off like a moldy peach peel. Baby, did she stink. I’d’ve taken another shot of the ole mustard they gave me in the Marne over that any day,” the man said, handing her the slips to sign. Looking at her face, he added, quickly, “Aw, I’m sorry. I got a big yap. Are you okay, miss? I made you all green, didn’t I?”

“I’m all right,” she said, fingers delicately to lips. “Just a little travel sick. Will these fit in a taxicab?”

“Between you and me, I think you’re better off hiring a truck. I know a fella runs a hand laundry truck between here and Good Samaritan.”

“Will you phone him for me?” She showed him all her teeth,
had not smiled so broadly since playing Little Eva at her grammar school drama pageant.

“Consider him on his way. He ain’t gonna like that smell any more than me, but slap him some extra green and he can hold his nose the whole way.” He paused and looked at the trunks again, and then at Marion. “I
am
supposed to ask, that wouldn’t be meat in there, would it? ’Cause it sure stenches like meat.”

Marion bit her lip. “I know it’s against the rules, but I promised Mama.” She had no idea where the lie came from, or how she was spinning it with such bright conviction. “It’s just two white-tailed bucks my brother shot up in the mountains. For Mama’s Easter dinner.” Where did such lies come from and from what place did such reserve glide, smooth as churned butter? Was it the pills? Was it Joe Lanigan’s mesmeric speech in her ear? It was as if she had been born to it, and it was so much easier, so much easier to declaim than anything real or true.

“Ham always worked for me,” he said, shaking his head.
Mrs. Wilson,
she scrawled on the form he handed her. “You’re lucky you remind me of my sister Irene,” he said, stamping the form. “Gee, I miss her. She got the lungs bad.”

T
HE
K
EEP
K
LEEN
L
AUNDRY DRIVER,
chest wide as a squeeze-box, rubbed his chin and tilted his head.

“I know they’re quite heavy,” Marion said, twisting her handkerchief between her fingers. “But I’m not going far.”

“Hell, Fritzie, I’ll help you stack ’em on the hand truck,” the baggage claims man offered.

Sucking on his teeth, the driver nodded. “Could do it for five bones. You got five bones?”

Marion said she did.

“Y
OU SURE
this is the place for you?” the driver asked when they turned onto East Fifth Street. A building on the corner promised
INDIVIDUAL LOCKERS FOR 450 MEN, 20 CENTS.

“Yes, I am,” she said, fumbling in her purse for five dollars.

Three doors down she saw the St. Curtis, a sun-beaten awning curling across its narrow façade, iron grills spidering along the windows. Painted just beneath the eaves were the words
NOW FULLY FIREPROOF
. The Iwaki Cafeteria had replaced the Blue Bell sandwich stand, but the same sign covered the window:
GOOD FOOD 5 C
.

T
HE SWEATY MAN
at the front desk was leaning over some pocket toy and didn’t look up until Marion had cleared her throat three times. His sleeves rolled up, Marion could see a blurry tattoo of a flaming dove and the word
FOURSQUARE
.

“A room, please.”

He looked up, squinting. “Sure about that?”

She nodded, dabbing her neck with a handkerchief.

“I’d warn you the cops did a lady bed toss just last night, but you don’t look that sort. Then again, these days, there’s all sorts.”

“I’m just tired,” she said, “and need to rest. You don’t need to worry about me.”

He squinted at her again, then set down his toy and handed her a pen, spinning the heat-rippled register to face her.

She signed
Mrs. Dove.

“The gal they rousted, she was tired too. So tired she had to be flat on her back every fifteen minutes for three days straight.”

Marion handed the man a dollar.

“I tried to give her Jesus,” he said, sliding four dimes toward her, “but she said Jesus broke her heart one too many times. How you like that?”

Marion smiled.

“She rooked us for a dollar and a half, that pinkpants did, but left this behind,” he said, picking up the pocket toy, a small tin compact, and displaying it for Marion. One side was a smudgy mirror, the other had a picture of a man in a porkpie hat blowing three rings of smoke. “The gig is you gotta get the cigarette in his mouth,” he said, tilting it back and forth, with great delicacy. “It’s tougher than it looks.”

T
HE
K
EEP
K
LEEN DRIVER
wheeled the trunks in for her. After a quick survey of the lobby—the man splayed across the spongy wing chair, hat covering his face, the tins of Doctor Bedlam magnetic powder in each corner, the tiny woman in the red hat with the feather, biting her thumbnail and pacing between the front door and the telephone booth in the back—he said he’d take the trunks upstairs, no charge.

“You be careful now, miss,” he said, elbow leaning on the doorjamb, the hotel room nearly too small to hold Marion, the two trunks and him. “This ain’t a place to be for long.”

She thanked him and assured him her friends would arrive shortly for their trunks.

“Kind of a world,” he said, walking away, “leaving women alone in such places.”

T
HE SORROW CAME CRASHING IN,
it overtook her. She thought she might drown in it.

She fought it off. She tried to make it unreal. But the trunks
seemed to grow larger and turn blacker with each passing minute. Standing there, the smell of dirty linens, pest powders, ammonia and something like wet fur stifling, she felt a deep, bone-curling aloneness she’d never known before. It was a sorrowful thing, but it was something else too. For the first time since gazing up, baby-eyed, into her father’s long face, she felt no one at all was looking, no one at all could see. No one could stop her from whatever she might do. And nothing she might do would leave a mark, no one would ever know. She felt drunk with it, braced and grimy and fixing to curl her fists—even as those trunks bloomed larger still.

The trunks, it was true, she could hear them creaking in the hot room, the heat expanding the canvas and pine, stretching the slats. She put her shaking hands on them. That was when the smell first came to her, began to seep into the space. She could feel it climbing up her body, skimming under her clothes, under her fingernails and into her skin. It made her think of the clammy bottom of things, dank and lost and dirt-mouthed. She felt something damp on her ankle. Bending down, she saw the puckering side of one trunk, wet to the touch.

It was all too much. It was so much that it might well have been nothing. She sank to the bed and covered her mouth with the cloth pansy she had unclipped from her dress.

Marion, there are things you are sure you’d never do,
Louise had said to her once.
Until you have.

S
HE TRIED TO FORCE HERSELF TO SLEEP,
but in her head there were some thoughts and the thoughts filled vivid-to-bursting pressures in her head: Joe Lanigan sleeping off his drunk, thinking he had rid himself of her, some sash weight wrapped round his ankle.