Fade to Blonde

“He can’t get me now,” she said, and wound her legs around mine. “Can you sleep like this?”

“On top of you?”

“It’s safer this way. I’m safe now.” She moved sleepily beneath me, getting comfy. I found I was ready again. “Do you want to do some more?” she said, noticing.

“I don’t think you’re in any shape.”

“You have to take care of me now,” she said, moving beneath me.

Neither of us put on a stitch of clothing until we left the room that night. Of course, she didn’t have any clothing to put on, but she didn’t let me get dressed, either. It was different from the first night. She didn’t make those nice noises now or say any of those picturesque things, or much of anything at all except faster or easy or wait, and the only sound she made was harsh steady breathing, which choked off every now and then as she thought we might be getting somewhere. I tried to be careful of her bruises, but she didn’t want me to be careful. She wanted me to work. She almost didn’t care what I did, but she wanted me doing something to her all the time, and she’d clench her teeth like a small animal caught in a trap each time she thought there was some hope. And then little by little she’d see it was no good again and ease off, her face gray and exhausted and the tips of her breasts just pale flat circles.

In between, she sat naked at my desk like a schoolgirl doing lessons and drew Halliday’s house from memory on typing paper. She knew it pretty well. She scratched in every stick of furniture and put hash marks through the walls to show where the windows were. She told me how many steps there were in the back stoop and the front stoop, and made a guess about how many there were in the hall stairs.

“Where’s the safe?” I said.

She said, “When you’ve got your money, you can find a sweet young girl who doesn’t mind questions questions questions every minute of the goddamned day.”

She made me close my eyes and describe each room from memory as if I were walking through it from the back to the front, and then from the front door to the back, and when she felt I’d gotten it right she took me to bed and rewarded me. But she kept forgetting it was supposed to be my reward and started grinding again.

She was pale everywhere the sun didn’t go, and the bruises made her look paler. She looked fragile. I thought of Scarpa and his men, and what they did for a living, and how people are so damn easy to hurt.

For breakfast I made her a big omelette with tomatoes and cheddar, and for lunch I made a tuna casserole with canned salmon instead of tuna, which worked all right, and that night we had a big spaghetti dinner. I’d never been so proud to have a house full of food. People had done it for me sometimes when I was on the bum, but I’d never done it for anyone else, taken them into my house and fed them. When I was cooking, she’d either lean with her cheek against my back, humming, or sit over her plans, noodling and frowning. After lunch, she helped with the dishes, and then we sat side by side on the bed and watched TV, still in the altogether but not mauling each other particularly, as if we were an old married couple. We watched Friendship Ranch and part of Carter and Sharp on the High Seas. She hooked her leg over mine at one point and took it back when she got pins and needles.

By mid-afternoon the bed was so rotten with sweat that I had Rebecca get up so I could put on fresh sheets. She slumped in my armchair, her knees gangling out, watching me. “You’re really making that bed,” she remarked.

“It doesn’t take any longer to do it right.”

“The Army teach you to make a bed like that? Your mother?”

“She didn’t teach us to make the bed.”

“Why not?”

“She was busy. There. In you go now.”

“That’s right,” she said, her eyes closed. “I forgot you were masterful.”

The radio was playing some slow Nelson Eddy thing.

“Come on,” I said. I came over and took her hands, and she let me pull her to her feet.

“I’m so tired,” she said, and leaned against me. She put her arms around my neck and hung from it like a necklace, rocking a little. We started rocking from foot to foot together to the music.

“You got yourself all snug in here,” she said. “A real little nest.”

“I like having a nice place to stay.”

“Sure. You were on the tramp once. I forgot.”

“That’s okay.”

“Weren’t you afraid? Out there?”

“Of what?”

“I dunno. Getting hurt.”

“A little. Not much. Hurt never lasts. What doesn’t last doesn’t mean anything.”

“Then I guess you think nothing means anything much, because I don’t know anything that lasts. I don’t even think death’ll last. I think when it comes, it’ll be as crappy and slipshod as everything else.”

“Yeah?”

“I think it’ll fall apart in an afternoon like a pair of cheap stockings.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. What are you trying to do, foxtrot?”

“I wouldn’t know how.”

“Why are you even listening to me?”

“Who says I’m listening?”

It was a new song now, and we weren’t even trying to keep time anymore, just shuffling in circles.

“Yeah,” I said, “I was afraid. When I was on the road. That’s why I joined up. I was afraid if I kept rattling around like that, I’d die.”

“Were you that starving?”

“I ate fine,” I said impatiently. “Sometimes I went a day or two without, but that doesn’t kill you. I don’t mean starve, I mean just die. Just go rattling around from town to town for years and years until you’re too sorry to waste a bullet on. Just go on forever. That’s what I mean by dying. I don’t ever want to do that again.”

“All right. Don’t get excited.”

“All right,” I said.

“You’re not dead yet. We’re not dead yet.”

“No.”

“Let’s go to bed,” she said.

“All right.”

We kept circling around.

“It was little different this morning,” I said.

“Uh huh.”

“You were trying to get a little... ”

“I guess,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“I listen to the same songs on the radio as everyone else,” she said. “Sometimes I still want those things, too. You’ve got a lot. I thought maybe you might have something for me.”

“I wish I did.”

“I wish somebody did,” she said.

It was hard to hear that ‘somebody.’

“All right,” I said. “Then I hope somebody does, too.”

She kissed me. She wasn’t kissing me because she thought I might like a kiss, or because she thought it’d be a good idea to kiss me just then, or because she knew a lot about kissing and she’d figured out just how I wanted it, or anything like that. She just kissed me. It went on for quite a while, and then she laid her head against my chest.

“Uh huh,” she said.

“I guess,” I said.

“Ray?”