The last part was my own passivity. I could not fill up the hole in my life. Not the hole left by the girl when she said good-bye — I don’t want to lay this at her door — but the hole that had always been there, the dark, confused swirling that never stopped down in the middle of me.
Nona filled that hole. She made me move and act.
She made me noble.
Now maybe you understand a little of it. Why I dream of her. Why the fascination
remains in spite of the remorse and the revulsion. Why I hate her. Why I fear her. And why even now I still love her.
It was eight miles from the Augusta ramp to Gardiner and we did it in a few short
minutes. I grasped the nail file woodenly at my side and watched the green reflectorized sign —
KEEP RIGHT FOR EXIT I4 — twinkle up out of the night. The moon was gone and it had begun to spit snow.
“Wish I were going farther,” Blanchette said.
“That’s all right,” Nona said warmly, and I could feel her fury buzzing and burrowing into the meat under my skull like a drill bit. “Just drop us at the top of the ramp.”
He drove up, observing the ramp speed of thirty miles an hour. I knew what I was going to do. It felt as if my legs had turned to warm lead.
The top of the ramp was lit by one overhead light. To the left I could see the lights of Gardiner against the thickening cloud cover. To the right, nothing but blackness. There was no traffic coming either way along the access road.
I got out. Nona slid across the seat, giving Norman Blanchette a final smile. I wasn’t
worried. She was quarterbacking the play.
Blanchette was smiling an infuriating porky smile, relieved at being rid of us. “Well, good ni — ”
“Oh my purse! Don’t drive off with my purse!”
“I’ll get it,” I told her. I leaned back into the car. Blanchette saw what I had in my hand, and the porky smile on his face froze solid.
Now lights showed on the hill, but it was too late to stop. Nothing could have stopped me. I picked up Nona’s purse with my left hand. With my right I plunged the steel nail file into Blanchette’s throat. He bleated once.
I got out of the car. Nona was waving the oncoming vehicle down. I couldn’t see what it was in the dark and snow; all I could make out were the two bright circles of its headlamps. I crouched behind Blanchette’s car, peeking through the back windows.
The voices were almost lost in the filling throat of the wind.
“…trouble, lady?”
“…father… wind… had a heart attack! Will you…”
I scurried around the trunk of Norman Blanchette’s Impala, bent over. I could see them now. Nona’s slender silhouette and a taller form. They appeared to be standing by a pickup truck.
They turned and approached the driver’s-side windowof the Chevy, where Norman Blanchette was slumped over the wheel with Nona’s file in his throat. The driver of the pickup was a young kid in what looked like an Air Force parka. He leaned inside. I came up behind him.
“Jesus, lady!” he said. “There’s blood on this guy! What — ”
I hooked my right elbow around his throat and grabbed my right wrist with my left hand.
I pulled him up hard. His head connected with the top of the door and made a hollow thock! He went limp in my arms.
I could have stopped then. He hadn’t gotten a good look at Nona, hadn’t seen me at all. I could have stopped. But he was a busybody, a meddler, somebody else in our way, trying to hurt us. I was tired of being hurt. I strangled him.
When it was done I looked up and saw Nona spotlighted in the conflicting lights of the car and the truck, her face a grotesque rictus of hate, love, triumph, and joy. She held her arms out to me and I went into them. We kissed. Her mouth was cold but her tongue was warm. I plunged both hands into the secret hollows of her hair, and the wind screamed around us.