13
When she got back to her room that night, Rosie dropped to her knees and peered beneath her unmade bed. The gold armlet lay all the way in the back, standing on edge in the dark and gleaming softly. To Rosie it looked like the wedding ring of a giantess. Something else lay beside it: a small folded square of blue cloth. She’d found a piece of her missing nightgown after all, it seemed. There were reddish-purple spatters on it. These looked like blood, but Rosie knew they weren’t; they were the spill of fruits better not tasted. She had scrubbed similar stains off her fingers this morning in the shower.
The armlet was extremely heavy — a pound at least, perhaps even two. If it was made of
the stuff it looked like it was made of, how much might it be worth? Twelve thousand dollars? Fifteen? Not bad, considering it had somehow come out of a painting she’d gotten by trading away a nearly worthless engagement ring. Still, she didn’t like to touch it, and she put it on the nighttable beside the lamp.
She held the little packet of blue cotton in her hand for a moment, sitting there like a teenager with her back propped against the bed and her feet crossed, and then she unfolded one side. She saw three seeds, three little seeds, and as Rosie looked at them with hopeless and unreasoning horror, those merciless words recurred, clanging in her head like iron bells: I repay.
VII
Picknickers
1
Norman had been trolling for her.
He lay awake late in his hotel room on Thursday night and across midnight’s dark knife-edge into Friday morning. He turned off all the lights except for the fluorescent bar over the bathroom sink; it threw a diffuse glow across the room that he liked. It made him think of the way streetlights looked when you saw them through a heavy mist. He lay almost exactly as Rosie had lain before falling asleep on that same Thursday night, only with just one hand under his pillow instead of both. He needed the other to smoke with, and to convey the bottle of Glenlivet standing on the floor to his lips.
Where are you, Rosie? he asked the wife who was no longer there. Where are you and where did you ever find the nerve to cut and run, a scared little creepmouse like you?
It was this second question he cared about the most — how she had dared. The first one didn’t matter all that much, not in any practical sense, because he knew where she was going to be on Saturday. A lion doesn’t have to bother himself about where the zebra feeds; all he has to do is wait by the waterhole where it drinks. So far, so good, but still . . . how had she ever dared leave him in the first place? Even if there was no life for him beyond their final conversation, he wanted to know that. Had it been planned? An accident? An aberration born of a single impulse? Had anyone helped her (besides, that was, the late Peter Slowik and the Cavalcade of Cunts on Durham Avenue)? What had she been doing since she’d hit the bricks of this charming little city by the lake? Waitressing? Shaking farts out of sheets in some fleabag like this? He didn’t think so. She was too lazy to do menial work, you only had to look at the way she kept house to see that, and she had no skills to do anything else. If you wore tits, that left just one other choice. She was out there someplace right now, selling it on some streetcorner. Of course she was; what else? God knew she was a lousy lay, screwing her had been about as exciting as fucking mud, but pussy was something men would pay for even if it didn’t do anything but lie there and drool a little after the rodeo was over. So yes, sure, she was probably out there selling it.
He’d ask her about it, though. He would ask her everything. And when he had all the answers he needed, all the answers he ever wanted from the likes of her, he would wrap his belt around her neck so she couldn’t scream, and then he would bite . . . and bite . . . and bite.
His mouth and jaws still ached from what he had done to Thumper the Amazing Urban Jewboy, but he wouldn’t let that stop him, or even slow him down. He had three Percodans at the bottom of his traveling bag, and he would take them before he went to work on his lost lamb, his sweet little rambling Rose. As for afterward, after it was over, after the Percs wore off. . .
But he couldn’t see that, and he didn’t want to see that. He had an idea that there was going to be no after, only darkness. And that was all right. In fact, a long dose of darkness might be just what the doctor ordered.
He lay in bed and drank the best Scotch in the world and burned one cigarette after another, watching the smoke drift up to the ceiling in silky reefs that turned blue when they passed through the soft white radiance from the bathroom, and he trolled for her. He trolled for her, and his hook slipped through nothing but water. There was nothing there and it was driving him crazy. It was as if she had been abducted by aliens, or something. At one point, quite drunk by then, he had dropped a live cigarette into his hand and clenched his fist around it, imagining it was her hand instead of his, that he was holding his hands over hers, clamping hers tight on the heat. And as the pain bit in and wisps of smoke curled out around his knuckles, he whispered, ‘Where are you, Rose? Where are you hiding, you thief?’
Not long after that he drifted off. He woke up around ten on Friday morning, unrested and
hungover and vaguely frightened. He had dreamed peculiar dreams all night long. In them he was still awake and still lying in his bed here on the ninth fioor of the Whitestone, and the light from the bathroom was still cutting softly through the darkness of his room, and the cigarette smoke was still rising through it in shifting blue membranes. Only in his dreams, he could see pictures like movies in the smoke. He could see Rose in the smoke.
There you are, he thought as he watched her walk through a dead garden in a pelting rainstorm. Rose was naked for some reason, and he felt an unexpected bite of lust. He hadn’t felt anything at the sight of her nakedness but weary revulsion for eight years or more, but now she looked different. Pretty good, in fact.
It isn’t that she’s lost weight, he thought in the dream, although it looks like she has . . . a little, anyway. Mostly it’s something about the way she’s moving what she’s got. What is it?
Then it came to him. She had the look of a woman who’s fucking someone and hasn’t had anywhere near enough just yet. If it had even crossed his mind to doubt this assessment — to say What, Rosie? You got to be kidding, cousin — one look at her hair would have been enough to settle the question once and for all. She’d dyed it slut-blonde, as if she thought she was Sharon Stone, or maybe Madonna.
He watched the smoke-Rose leave the weird dead garden and approach a stream so dark it looked more like ink than water. She crossed it on a path of stepping-stones, holding her arms out for balance, and he saw that she had some sort of wet, crumpled rag in one hand. It looked like a nightgown to Norman and he thought: Why don’t you put it on, you brazen bitch? Or are you expecting your boyfriend to come by and give your ticket a punch? I’d like to see that. I really would. Tell you one thing — if I so much as catch you holding hands with a guy when I finally track you down, the cops are going to find his goddam trouser-rat sticking out of his asshole like a birthday candle.
No one came by, though — not in the dream, anyway. The Rose over his bed, the smoke-Rose, walked down a path through a grove of trees that looked as dead as . . . well, as dead as Peter Slowik. At last she came into a clearing where there was one tree which still looked alive. She knelt down, picked up a bunch of seeds, and wrapped them in what looked like another piece of her nightgown. With that done she got up, went to a set of stairs near the tree (in dreams you never knew what fucked-up thing was going to happen next), and disappeared down them. He was waiting around for her to come back up when he began to feel a presence behind him, something as cold and chill as a draft from an open meat-locker.