“Slide over onto my bed, with me.”
“Well…”
“Not for that. I need…held. You won’t try anything. You don’t have that sort of face. I can trust you. Can’t I?”
“You can trust me, Louise.” Taking into consideration I was pretending to be somebody I wasn’t, I figured she could do worse than trust me, among this company.
“I’m going to turn on my side,” she said.
She did.
“Now could you cuddle up to me? Maybe slip your arm around my waist?”
I did.
“That’s…that’s how Candy and me slept. Like spoons.”
“I got a girl back in Chicago,” I said. “We sleep like this sometimes.”
“It’s nice, isn’t it? Kinda…comforting.”
“It is nice.”
I was right up against her; she was soft and smelled like perfume. Dime-store perfume maybe, but I liked it anyway. I felt a stirring in me and had to pull back away from her rounded little rump; but she pushed back against me and said, ingenuously, “Candy was so sweet.”
Soon she began sobbing quietly; into my hanky. My erection receded. I kept my arm around her waist and hugged her to me.
“What am I going to do without him? What am going to do?”
I stroked her head, said, “There, there.”
And pretty soon she fell asleep.
So did I, and then I heard an unearthly sound, a screech out of a nightmare, and bolted upright in bed.
“What the hell was that?” I said.
Louise was sitting over at the child’s desk, combing her bobbed blond hair out with a brush; she was wearing that same pink dress I’d seen her in yesterday—like me, she’d slept in her clothes. She smiled over at me. She had no makeup on and looked about thirteen years old. The kind of thirteen-year-old that makes boys reconsider how they feel about girls, however.
She made a crinkly smile. “A rooster, silly. Haven’t you ever been on a farm before?”
I rubbed my face with a hand; I needed a shave. Sun was beginning to find its way in the open window next to her, but it still seemed pretty dark out to me.
“No,” I said. “This is a first for me.”
Still brushing her hair, she said, “I was raised on a farm. My daddy’s a farmer.”
“Do you miss your daddy?”
She looked sad, kept brushing. “Sometimes. I don’t imagine he misses me, though.”
“Why’s that?”
“He thinks I’m a bad girl. A sinner.”
“He’s a religious man, your daddy?”
“Too religious. He used to beat me with a belt because I wasn’t devout enough.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “At least when he beat me I knew he cared.”
“Pardon?”
She put the brush down and came and sat on the side of the bed next to me. “Sometimes that’s how people show you they care about you.”
“Hitting you?”
She nodded. “I don’t say it’s the best way. I wouldn’t ever hit anybody myself. And Candy—he hardly ever hit me. I guess that’s why I loved him so much.”
She seemed better this morning, seemed already to have accepted the finality of Candy’s death. Maybe in this fast crowd she ran with, fast death was commonplace. I asked her.
“You ever see anybody die before?” I said.
“Sure. Two times.”
“Guys working with Candy, you mean?”
She nodded. “They got shot on jobs.”
“I see.”
“And Candy killed some people. I never went on any jobs with him, so I never saw it. And I don’t like to think of it. But it’s true.”
