“When do you want to die?”
“The sooner the better. Tomorrow night, if possible.”
“What if they don’t go to Foresman about the teeth?”
“They will. He’s my dentist, and the teeth will be all they’ll have to identify me with. That’s your job, Peter. You’ve got to be sure there’s nothing else left.”
“I’ll make sure.”
“Who will you use?”
He shrugged. “Who knows: Someone.”
Someone. Nobody. An indefinite pronoun waking at this moment, perhaps, in some drab room to the gray light of another drab day, remembering with sickness or indifference, but certainly not pleasure, the traffic of the spent night. He wondered for the first time who she was and where she had come from and whether, in the end, she would mind so much dying for a reason she would never know. Dying violently, a small and essential technicality, because she happened to be available and had a set of teeth.
Then he was struck by a wild thought. What if she had plates? What if they were to find in the charred wreckage of the car at the foot of the bluff beside the river a set of dentures? It would be a wonderful example of the biter bit, the kind of ending you found in the little one page stories. The thought adhered to his mind, swelling with enormous significance and grim comedy, and he began to laugh softly on the verge of hysteria, his body shaking with the effort to contain the laughter.
Etta drew away and looked at him sharply. “What’s the matter, Peter?”
“Nothing. I just thought of something.”
“Of what?”
“I was wondering what would happen if she had false teeth.”
“For God’s sake, Peter, cut it out! You’re not breaking up on me are you?”
“I thought it was very funny.”
“I don’t like it when you think and talk crazy.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“All right. Just take it easy. And you’d better let up on the bourbon, too. You’ll never make it through this in a fog.”
“Don’t worry about it, I said. I’ll be all right.”
“Sure, darling. You’ll be all right. You’ll be fine.”
She relaxed against him again, and he drove on into the city in silence. The highway fed them through suburban and urban residential districts into the congestion of the downtown area, and at last she said. “Let me off at the bus station. Peter.”
“Where are you going from there?”
“I don’t know. I’ll find a room.”
“How shall I contact you?”
“I’ll rent a box at the post office. I’ll let you know the number as soon as I get it. I’ll tell you what name to use, too.” Reaching into her purse, she handed him a piece of cardboard stamped with black and red numbers. “Here’s the claim check for my Olds. It’s parked in the garage across from the Envoy Hotel. You can pick it up there when you’re ready. The Senator’s at the Capitol and will be there for at least another week. I left home yesterday and told the servants I’d probably be returning tomorrow night. Do it then if you can. They’ll think it happened when I was coming back.”
“All right.”
He pulled into the unloading zone in front of the bus station, and she got out quickly and removed her suitcase from the rear. Leaning through the open window, she said, “You take it from here, darling. You know what to do so do it well, and do it fast. Later, when you think it’s right for the finish, send me the word and I’ll come back.”
“I’ll let you know.”
He leaned toward her across the seat, and their lips met in brief, hot adherence, and then she turned and walked swiftly away, her hips swaying in the exaggerated rhythm of her new character, the cheap yellow case swinging at her side. He watched her until she turned the corner and disappeared.
CHAPTER 6.
It was a mean and narrow street on the lower side of the city where the earth declined from its suburban heights to the level of the river. The black water lapped in the night at its low embankment. Along the street at wide intervals, street lamps cast light like yellow grease in stagnate puddles on old brick, exposing here and there the ugly debris of the life that passed and shed its odds and ends in passing—paper and cans, the shards of broken bottles.
At the curb near the corner, Peter parked Etta’s Olds, a gleaming incongruity of bright chrome and enamel. Walking down the sidewalk along the faces of crumbling buildings to a dim and solitary rectangle of weak light in the mass of surrounding darkness, he turned and stepped up into a short hall. From beyond a closed door at the end of the hall came the pulsing, wanton rhythms that marijuana makes. On a straight chair beside the door, tilted back against the wall with heels hooked over the chair rungs, was a fat man with bleary, colorless eyes and a slack mouth half open in an expression of witless decadence. The bleary eyes moved over Peter indifferently as he went past and through the door.
The torrid music was like a blast of hot wind. Smoke drifted horizontally in wavering strata. The small dance area was congested with writhing anatomy. At tables and in booths, inhibitions had largely ceased to function. Peter found an empty stool at the bar and crawled on. No one paid any attention to him, and he sat waiting, watching in the mirror behind the bar the action on the dance floor. After a while, as he had anticipated, there was a voice at his shoulder.
“Drinking alone, honey?”
He shifted his eyes in the mirror to the reflection of a thin and gutted face that achieved by device and the kindness of shadows a suggestion of the prettiness it had once had. The skin was dry and sallow, sunken between sharp bones. It was, he thought, a face that might have been ravished and dehydrated by a high fever.
“I’m not drinking at all,” he said. “How
