“Stand still, Easy,” Chaim was saying. Then he laughed, “I don’t think you’ll be sorting clothes tomorrow morning.”
I laughed with him. “You be better off wit’ somebody else helpin’ you anyways, man.”
He shook me the way people do when they’re trying to awaken someone. “ You are my friend, Easy.” His somber look saddened me even more. I thought of the victims I had seen. Men wasted to the size of boys, mass graves full of innocence.
“I ain’t no friend’a yours, man. Uh-uh. Th’ew her outta her own place. Th’ew her out an’ now she’s dead. You cain’t trust no niggah like me, Chaim. You do better jus’ t’ shine me on.”
With that I leaned against the wall and slid down to the floor.
“We can’t just leave him here, Poppa,” Shirley said. He said something back, but it sounded like music to me, a song that I forgot the words to. I thought for a moment that he understood my confession, that he intended to kill me in the church basement.
But instead they got me to my feet, and pushed me toward the door. I walked under my own steam for the most part but every now and then I tripped.
There was a loud drumming in my head and lamplights hanging against a completely black sky. I could hear the moths banging against the glass covers in between the thunder of my footsteps.
The light snapped on in the car and I fell into the backseat; Chaim pushed my legs in behind me.
I remember motion and soothing words. But I don’t remember going into the house. Then I fell again, this time into a soft bed. I had been crying for a long time.
21
I heard a door slam somewhere below me. Sometime after that I opened my eyes.
The window had a lace curtain over its lower half. There were big white clouds moving fast across a perfectly blue sky in the upper panes. Watching that sky helped my breathing. I remember how deeply I inhaled, not even wanting to let it out.
“Good morning, Mr. Rawlins.” It was a woman’s voice. “How are you feeling?”
“What time is it?” I asked, sitting up. I wasn’t wearing a shirt and the blankets came down to my stomach. Shirley Wenzler’s eyes were fast to my chest.
“Ten, I guess.”
She wore a no-sleeve one-piece cotton dress that had slanting stripes of blue, green, and gold, all very bright. Squinting at those bright colors let me know that I had a hangover.
“This your house?” I asked.
“Kind of. I rent. Poppa lives all the way in Santa Monica so we thought we’d take you here for the night.”
“How’d I get in bed?”
“You walked.”
“I don’t remember.” It was partially true.
“You were kind of drunk, Mr. Rawlins.” She giggled and covered her mouth. She was a very pretty young woman with extremely pale skin against jet-black hair. Her face was heart-shaped, everything seemed to point at her smile.
“Poppa just shouted at you, and told you where to go, and he kept on shouting until you did it. You…” She hesitated.
“Yeah?”
“You were kind of like crying.”
“Did I say anything?”
“About a dead woman. You said she killed herself because you made her leave. Is that true?”
“No, no it’s not. She got evicted from a place I clean for. That’s all.”
“Oh,” she whispered and then looked at my chest.
I liked the attention, so I left the blankets alone.
“Is Chaim here?” I asked.
“I took him to the church. I just got back. He said that you’d come later if you weren’t too sick.”
“Is this your room?” I asked, looking around.
“Uh-huh. But I stayed in the spare room in the attic. It has a bed and I like to go up there and read sometimes. Especially in the spring or fall when it isn’t too hot or too cold.
“Poppa slept on the couch,” she added. “He does that sometimes.”
“Oh,” I said, partly because I didn’t know what to say, and partly because my head hurt.
I watched her watching me for a few moments until she finally said. “I’ve never seen a man’s chest, I mean, like yours.”
“All it is is brown, honey. Ain’t that different.”
“Not that, I mean the hair, I mean you don’t have much and it’s so curly and…”
“And what?”
Just then the doorbell rang. Three short chimes that sounded like they were in some other world. Shirley, who had turned bright red, made to leave. I guess that she was kind of flustered. I was too.
When she was gone I looked around the room. The furniture was all hand-crafted from a yellowish-brown wood that I couldn’t identify. Not a surface was flat. Everything curved and arced, from the mirrored bureau to the chest of drawers.
There was a thick white carpet and a few upholstered chairs. It was a small, feminine room; just exactly the right size and gender for my hangover.
After a while I heard men’s voices. I went to the window and saw Shirley Wenzler standing outside of a wire fence in front of a well-manicured little yard. She was talking to two men who were wearing dark suits and short- brimmed hats. I remember thinking that the men must have gone shopping together to get clothes that were so similar.
Shirley got angry and shouted something that I couldn’t make out. Finally she walked away from them, turning every now and then to see if they’d gone. But they just stared at her attentively, like sentinels of a wolf pack.
While I watched I hustled on my pants. When I heard the door slam I wanted to go ask her what had happened, but the twins interested me. They walked slowly across the street and got into a dark blue or black Buick sedan. They didn’t start the car and drive away; they just sat there, watching the house.
“So you’re up?” Shirley Wenzler said from the doorway. She was smiling again.
I turned from the window and said, “Nice neighborhood you live in. Hollywood?”
“Almost.” She smiled. “We’re near La Brea and Melrose.”
“That’s a long drive from where you got me.”
She laughed, a little too loudly, and came into the room. She sat in a plush-bottomed chair across from the bed. I sat down on the mattress to keep her company.
“Did some woman really die?” she asked.
“Woman over where I clean couldn’t pay the rent and she killed herself.”
“You saw it?”
“Yeah.” But all I could remember was Poinsettia’s dripping toe.
“My poppa saw things like that.” There was a strange light in her eyes. Not haunted like Chaim’s, but empty.
“Many Jews,” she continued, as if reciting a prayer she’d gone to bed with her whole life. “Mothers and sons.”
“Yeah,” I said, also softly.
At Dachau I’d seen many men and women like Wenzler; small and slight from starvation. Most of them were dead, strewn across the paths between bungalows like those ants, I imagined, stretched out in their hives.
“You think you could have saved her?” she asked. I had the crazy feeling that I was talking to her father, not
