“What for?” she asked, glowering.
“All I want to do is talk about Sam Taggart.”
She sat motionless for perhaps two seconds, then came at my face with such a blinding, savage speed that she nearly took both my eyes with those hooked talons, actually brushing the eyelashes of my right eye as I yanked my head back. She followed it up, groaning with her desire to destroy me with her hands. I have never tried to handle a more powerful woman, and the heat in the room made her sweaty and hard to hold. I twisted in time to take a hard smash of round knee against my thigh instead of in the groin. I got her wrists, but she wrenched one free and tore a line across my throat with her nails.
She butted me solidly in the jaw with the top of her head, and then sank her teeth into the meat of my forearm, grinding away like a bulldog. That destroyed any vestige of chivalry. I chopped the side of her throat to loosen her bite, shoved her erect and hit her squarely on the chin with a short, chopping, overhand right. She fell into my arms and I heaved her back onto the bed.
I found a pile of nylon stockings on the lower shelf of the sash stand. I knotted her wrists together with one, her ankles with another, then bent her slack knees and tied the wrists to the ankles with a third, leaving about ten inches of play. Then I looked at the lacerated arms which had made the whole procedure slightly messy. I wondered if girl bite was as dangerous as dog bite. There was a half-bottle of local gin on the floor by the comic books. Oso Negro it was called. Black bear. I poured it over the tooth holes, and clenched my teeth and said a few fervent words. I looked at my throat in her mirror, and rubbed some gin into that too. I tore away a piece of white sheeting and bound my arm and poured a little more gin on the bandage. Then I tried the gin. Battery acid, flavored with juniper. I picked my fifty dollars off the floor and put it in my shirt pocket with the pesos.
She began to moan and stir. She was on her right side. I sat on the bed near her, keeping a pillow handy. Her eyes fluttered and opened, and remained dazed for about one second. Then they narrowed to an anthracite glitter, and her lips lifted away from her teeth. She had good leverage to use against the nylon, all the power of her legs thrusting down, all the power of arms and back pulling. She tried it. I do not know the breaking strength of a nylon stocking. Perhaps it is a thousand pounds.
She closed her eyes, her face contorted with effort. Muscles and tendons bulged the smooth toffee hide. Her face bulged and darkened, and sweat made her body shine. She subsided, breathing hard, and then without warning, snapped at my hand like a dog. I yanked it away, and the white teeth clacked uncomfortably close to it.
I saw her gather herself, and I picked the pillow up, and at the first note of the scream, I plopped it across her face and lay on it. She bucked and writhed and made muffled bleating noises. Slowly she quieted down. The instant I lifted the pillow, the scream started and I mashed it back down again, and held it until she was really still. When I lifted it she was unconscious, but I could see that she was breathing. In about three minutes her eyes opened again.
“What the hell is the matter with you, Felicia?”
“Sohn of a beech!”
“Just listen to me for God’s sake! I wasn’t trying to insult you.”
“You wanna find Sam, uh?”
“No! I’m his friend, damn it. When I said my name you had a look as though you heard it before. Travis McGee. From Florida. Maybe he said my name to you.”
“His friend?” she said uncertainly.
“Yes.”
“I remember he say the name one time,” she said in a forlorn voice. Surprisingly the dark eyes filled, tears rolled. “I remember. So sorry Trrav. Please tie me loose. Okay now.”
“No tricks?”
“I swear by Jesus.”
She had pulled the knots fantastically tight. I had to slice them with my pocket knife. She worked feeling back into her hands. As I started to get up, she caught my arm and pointed to her foot. She turned it so that the lamps shone more squarely on the broad brown instep. “See?” she said.
There were about a dozen little pale puckered scars on the top of her foot, roughly circular, smaller than dimes.
“What’s that?”
“From the other ones who say questions about Sam.” She pronounced it Sahm. “Where is he? Where he go? Where he hide. Sohns a beech!” She looked at me and firmed her jaw and thumped her chest with her knuckles. “Pain like hell, Trav. Not a cry from me. Nunca palabra. Fainting, yes. You know… proud.”
“Who were they?”
She peered at my throat and made a hissing sound of concern. She slid off the bed and tugged me over to sit on the stool. She wiped my throat with something that stung, though not as badly as the gin, and put a Band-Aid on the worst part of the gouge. When she unwrapped my arm, she said, “Ai, como perra, verdad. Que feo!” She had iodine. That too was less than the gin. She wrapped it neatly, taped the bandage in place.
“So sorry.” she said.
“Put something on, Felicia.”
“Eh?”
“I want to talk. Put on a robe or something.”
“Some love maybe? Then talk? No pesos.”
“No love, Felicia. But thank you.”
“The skinny woman, eh? But who can know?” She stared at me, then shrugged and went to one of the cardboard wardrobes and pulled out a very sheer pale blue hip-length wrap. Before she slipped into it, she dried her body with a towel, and slapped powder liberally on herself, using a big powder mitten, white streaks and patches against bronze-brown hide. She knotted the waist string, flung her long hair back with a toss of her head and sat in the upholstered chair.
“So?”
“Who were the men who hurt you?”
“Two of them, burning, burning with cigarette, Trrav. Cubanos I think. One with the good English. Then they want love. Hah!” She slapped her bare knee. “With this I finish love forever for one of them I think. Screaming, screaming. He say to other one, cut the bitch throat. But the one, the one with the English, say no. Help his friend into car. Go away. Leave me there, seven kilometros from here. I walk on this bad foot back to here.”
“When did this happen, Felicia?”
“Perhaps five-six weeks. Sam gone then. Gone… three days I think. One night in this room. My friend is Rodriguez, with the fish truck going to Los Mochis. Sam walked before the day was light. Rodriguez, stop for him at a place on the road. I fix that. Every man thinks he is gone by boat. He…” She stopped and frowned. “Sam said come here?”
“In a way”
“How is that-in a way?”
I sat on the tin stool, arms propped on my knees, and debated telling her. It is so damn strange about the dead. Life is like a big ship, all lights and action and turmoil, chugging across a dark sea. You have to drop the dead ones over the side. An insignificant little splash, and the ship goes on. For them the ship stops at that instant. For me Sam was back there somewhere, further behind the ship every day.
I could look back and think of all the others I knew, dropped all the way back to the horizon and beyond, and so much had changed since they were gone they wouldn’t know the people aboard, know the new rules of the deck games. The voyage saddens as you lose them. You wish they could see how things are. You know that inevitably they’ll drop you over the side, you and everyone you have loved and known, little consecutive splashes in the silent sea, while the ship maintains its unknown course. Dropping Sam over had been just a little more memorable for Nora than for me. It would stay with her a little longer, perhaps. But I did not know how it would react on this one. He would be dropped over the side in this next instant. It would be brand new for her.
“Sam is dead,” I told her.