There he was ahead, crossing the street called Speedway, a buzzard with a brown-bagged bottle of wine. He grinned and licked his chops. He was drunk, and some German tourists watched him paw her tits.
“Ahm hun-nuh-gree, you slappy cow bitch,” he said, mimicking her impediment. “An’ horrr-neee. Wanna puts muh whole haid in there! Thinks you kin fits a whole haid? How ’bout a whole fist? How ’bout two fists? Two-fisted love!” The crapulent fiend pulled from the bottle and cackled.
She took his hand and said, “Want. Too. Fuck.”
She nearly dragged him down the sidewalk, and he got such a kick out of her ardor that now and then he broke free, girlishly collapsing in laughter, hacking and wheezing and pointing. “The bitch in love! The bitch love me! Now howda ya like that!” Like an underworld Music Man, he almost burst into song.
She led him through the cyclone fence surrounding the depredated rooms of the Tropicana. The structure had been gutted and prep’d for rebuilding, but there were no guards or workers. Jane took Please-Help.-Bless upstairs — still bent over gleefully, he pulled from his wine — to the very same room she had shared with her William on their first night together. The mattress was gone and the space looked altogether different than it had before, and of that she was grateful.
This was the first time in a room for Jane and Please-Help.-Bless too. When he fucked her, it was usually behind the scratchy freeway brush near Lincoln and Olympic, a block or so from SeaShelter. He liked it when the people in cars could see them going at it.
“You looks thin — did I ball that kid outta you? Shit! How ’bout that! I fuck him right outta you, huh? You likes that. Don’ need no abortion now. Here it is, slappy-cow: the lean, mean ’bortion machine!” He unbuckled his pants and she lay down while hiking up her skirt. “You love me, don’ chew? You love me now, now ain’t that a bitch? She love me! She wanta fuck me! She love to fuck her daddy!”
She would tell her William everything now, every terrible thing she’d done, and risk him leaving her. She would risk it all, because that was the only way they could begin anew. She would tell William everything, and if he said it was too terrible and that they could never see each other again, she would just walk away and kill herself without him ever knowing. (She would never want him to think he had anything to do with such an act.) And if he told her to go to the police and confess what she had done, she would. They would arrest her for her crimes and she would be able to sleep again. She would at least be able to see her William — there were probably jails that held men and women under the same roof, like at SeaShelter. Maybe they could serve their time then leave jail together and come back to Santa Monica to start over. They could stay on the beach-bluffs awhile before checking in to the shelter, like that night they left the hotel after the raid.
She wet herself down there with spit, and Please-Help.-Bless spat wine on her too and opened her up with dirty fingers. “You look good,” he said, turning her over and forcing his way in. “Ooh but you stank! Shit, you stank. Somethin’ like to crawl up there and die. Maybe the baby did! Heh heh. Naw — I think you dropped that baby. It good you dropped that baby ’cause you thin now. You a thin cow. What’d that little peesuhshit have, cock or pussy? ’Cause if it had a pussy, you shoulda saved it for me.”
He grew quiet while he worked, and let go of the bottle.
“Pweeze,” said Jane, trying her best to enunciate. “Why yoo seh they killum.”
“Shut up, bitch. Shut up whileye fuck.”
“Yooo seh dey killum in pwih-sun. They killum—”
“Oh yeah!” He picked up the bottle and swigged while jimmying himself in. “Thas right they gun killum! That turn you on? They prolly killim right now while I fucks you! Man a menace! Das why I pull him off thuh streets! I do that. I have the pow-uh! Gold Shield lissen to me. Them boys in the joint, they find out he fuck kiddies, they killum good and slow! They gun rape rape rape jus’ like I rape yoh ass. He gun bleed like you bleed ’cept he ain’ gonna drop no baby.”
“Buh you canh stop them—”
“Now, why would I, bitch? Now shut tha fuck up. Ain’ gonna stop nuthin’. They killum! Killum! Killum!”—the word capping each painful thrust. “Killum! Killum! Killum! Killum! Killum! Kil—”
In the midst of his transport, Please-Help.-Bless stopped dead — or nearly so, for Jane Scull had plunged a knife deep into his bowels. The smell of perforated belly erupted in her sensitive nostrils, pelting like a weapon itself. She used the knife William had bought her for protection; the same that had cut the umbilicus in the bathroom at McDonald’s.
Please-Help.-Bless stared into her eyes, lips clamped, shaking like a zealot. It was then, with him seizing beneath her, that she uttered the fruit of weeks of diligent elocutionary practice: “You — are — dy — ing.” His body retracted, crab-like. The bottle was still in his hand and shattered against the wall. He slashed at her throat, which opened like a well of water everlasting. She was gone before him, though not by long.
Her weight acted as a full-body tourniquet, so that when he wriggled out from beneath, impaled on her dagger, a bucket of blood and insides poured forth. He slipped and slid as he stood on the killing floor. It is said we revert to infancy at the time of our death; the vagrant reverted only to the name by which he first was known.
“Someone help me!” he cried from the door frame.
And that was the end of him.
Amaryllis’s farewell lay on the floor in the middle of the cousin’s apartments, and they paced around it — even Edward hobbled about — like lost hikers awakened to a final campfire extinguished by careless neglect. Toulouse accused Edward of being cavalier and Machiavellian; Edward accused Toulouse of being lovesick, needy and vain; Lucy accused both of being hypocrites and was in turn lambasted for having the gall to be secretly relieved that the girl was gone, to which the outraged mystery writer responded by sobbing hysterically while hurling various items against the walls of Boar’s Head Inn proper. To make matters worse, an oblivious Boulder showed up on a film break and spoke blithely of her crush on Joaquin Phoenix and how she had gone to Diane Keaton’s house for dinner and held the Annie Hall Oscar in her hand.
Toulouse left in a huff and walked up the hill to Saint-Cloud. The Dane’s gait seemed wobbly, and he thought: That’s all I need. For Pullman to up and die on me … He had failed her; he had failed everyone. He remembered the girl’s misery on meandering up this very slope — that was the day he pushed her away, the day he wasn’t man enough to do the thing his mother and father had done in that very room. A day that would live in infamy.