She had opened the door to them after Bannerman had rapped steadily for nearly five minutes. Johnny stood beside him on his aching legs, thinking that this night would never end. It would just go on and on until the snow bad piled up enough to avalanche down and bury them all.
‘What do you want in the middle of the night, George Bannerman?’ she asked
suspiciously. Like many fat women, her voice was a high, buzzy reed instrument – it sounded a bit like a fly or a bee caught in a bottle.
‘Have to talk to Frank, Henrietta.’
‘Then talk to him in the morning,’ Henrietta Dodd said, and started to close the door in their faces.
Bannerman stopped the door’s swing with a gloved hand. ‘I’m sorry, Henrietta. Has to be now.’
‘Well, I’m not going to wake him up!’ she cried, not moving from the doorway. ‘He sleeps like the dead anyway! Some nights I ring my bell for him, the palpitations are terrible sometimes, and does he come? No, he sleeps right through it and he could wake up some morning to find me dead of a heart attack in my bed instead of getting him his goddam runny poached egg! Because you work him too hard!’
She grinned in a sour kind of triumph; the dirty secret exposed and hats over the windmill.
‘All day, all night, swing shift, chasing after drunks in the middle of the night and any one of them could have a – gun under the seat, going out to the ginmills and honky-tonks, oh, they’re a rough trade out there but a lot you mind! I guess I know what goes on in those places, those cheap slutty women that’d be happy to give a nice boy like my Frank an incurable disease for the price of a quarter beer!’
Her voice, that reed instrument, swooped and buzzed. Johnny’s head pumped and throbbed in counterpoint. He wished she would shut up. It was a hallucination, he knew, just the tiredness and stress of this awful night catching up, but it began to seem more and more to him that this was his mother standing here, that at any moment she would turn from Bannerman to him and begin to huckster him about the wonderful talent God had given him.
‘Mrs. Dodd … Henrietta …’ Bannerman began patiently.
Then she did turn to Johnny, and regarded him with her smart-stupid little pig’s eyes.
‘Who’s this?’
‘Special deputy,’ Bannerman said promptly. ‘Henrietta, I’ll take the responsibility for waking Frank up.’
‘Oooh, the responsibility!’ she cooed with monstrous, buzzing sarcasm, and Johnny finally realized she was afraid. The fear was coming off her in pulsing, noisome waves –
that was what was making his headache worse. Couldn’t Bannerman feel it? ‘The ree-spon-si-bil-i-tee! Isn’t that big of you, my God yes! Well, I won’t have my boy waked up in the middle of the night, George Bannerman, so you and your special deputy can just go peddle your goddam papers!’
She tried to shut the door again and this time Banner-man shoved it all the way open. His voice showed tight anger and beneath that a terrible tension. ‘Open up, Henrietta, I mean it, now.’
‘You can’t do this!’ she cried. ‘This isn’t no police state! I’ll have your job! Let’s see your warrant!’
‘No, that’s right, but I’m going to talk to Frank,’ Bannerman said, and pushed past her.
Johnny, barely aware of what he was doing, followed. Henrietta Dodd made a grab for him. Johnny caught her Wrist – and a terrible pain flared in his head, dwarfing the sullen thud of the headache. And the woman felt it, too. The two of them stared at each other for a moment that seemed to last forever, an awful, perfect understanding. For that moment they seemed welded together. Then she fell back, clutching at her ogre’s bosom.
‘My heart . .. my heart .. .’ She scrabbled at her robe pocket and pulled out a phial of pills.
Her face had gone to the color of raw dough. She got the cap off the phial and spilled tiny pills all over the floor getting one into her palm. She slipped it under her tongue. Johnny stood staring at her in mute horror. His head felt like a swelling bladder full of hot blood.