“Johnny home?”
“He’ll be back around six or so,” Vi says. “Can I take a message?”
“So where is he?”
“Can I take your number and have him call you back?”
“Do you even know?”
“Know what?” Vi asks. “Who’s calling?”
“An acquaintance.”
“You called yesterday and the day before.”
Joe hangs up.
The Bluebird is doing fifty down the cracked alleys, and when a bag lady steps from between two garbage cans, she has to drop her bag to get out of the way. Joe rolls over her shopping bag, bulging from a day’s foraging, and in the rearview mirror sees her throwing hex signs in his wake. He pulls up behind Sovereign’s, and there’s that smell of trash, oil, and pigeons, compounded by a summer breeze. Joe can sense someone eyeing him from inside the empty garage, and he eases his right hand into the pocket of his sport coat and flicks the safety off the.22, uncomfortably aware of how useless the small-caliber pistol is at anything but point-blank range. A gray cat emerges from Sovereign’s garage, carrying in its mouth a pigeon still waving a wing. The cat looks furtively at Joe, then slinks into the morning glories, and from the spot where the cat disappeared, Grace steps out. Morning glories are clipped to her tangled black curls. She’s wearing a morning-glory-vine necklace, vine bracelets, and what looks like a bedraggled bridesmaid’s gown, if bridesmaids wore black. Her bare feet are bloody, probably from walking on glass. “Long time, no see, Joey,” she says. “I been with the Carmelites.”
Joe recalls Sal asking if he was going to her closed-casket wake. “You had a thing with her, didn’t you?” Sal had asked.
“No way!” Joe told him. “A little kissyface after a party once. I don’t know why she made up all those stories.”
“That whole Fandetti family is bonkers,” Sal said.
Nelo, her father, a Sicilian from Taylor Street, operates an escort service, massage parlors, and a strip bar on South Wabash, but he brought his four daughters up in convent school. The official story was that Grace wasted away with leukemia, but rumor had it that it was a botched abortion. Now, Joe realizes old man Fandetti is even crazier than he thought, faking his daughter’s death in order to avoid the humiliation of an illegitimate pregnancy. No surprise she’s a nutcase. He wonders if they collected insurance on her while they were at it.
“If you stick your finger inside, you can feel the electric,” Grace says and demonstrates by poking her finger into a flower. “That hum isn’t bees. Electric’s what gives them their blue. You should feel it. Come here and put your finger in.”
“Where’s your shoes, Grace?”
“Under the bed, so they think I’m still there.”
“Still where? What are you doing here?”
“Come here, Joey, and put your finger in. You’ll feel what the bee’s born for. They’re so drunk on flower juice!” She walks to the car and leans in through the window on the passenger side, and the straps of her black gown slip off her shoulders, and from its décolletage breasts dangle fuller than he remembers from that one night after a birthday party at Fabio’s when he danced with her and they sneaked out to the parking lot and necked in his car. She’d looked pretty that night, made up like a doll, pearls in her hair, and wearing a silky dress with spaghetti straps. That was what she called them when he slipped them down and kissed her breasts. She wanted to go further, pleaded with him to take her virginity, but he didn’t have a rubber and it wasn’t worth messing with her connected old man.
“Know what was on the radio?”
“When?” Joe asks. He’s aware that he’s staring, but apparently still stoned on that hash oil, he can’t take his eyes off her breasts. His reactions feel sluggish; he has to will them. He realizes he’s been in a fog … he’s not sure how long, but it’s getting worse.
She opens the door and sinks into the leather seat and humming tunelessly flicks on the car radio. “I Only Have Eyes for You” is playing. “Our song, Joey!”
“Grace, we don’t have a song.”
“The night we became lovers.”
“Why’d you tell people that?”
“You got me in trouble, Joey, and in the Carmelites I had to confess it to the bishop. We weren’t supposed to talk, but he made me show and tell.”
Joe flicks off the radio. It’s like turning on the afternoon: birdsong, pigeons cooing, flies buzzing trash, the bass of bees from a thousand blue gramophones.
“All the sisters were jealous. They called me Walkie-Talkie behind my back. They thought I didn’t understand the sacredness of silence, but that’s not true. They think silence is golden, but real silence is terrifying. We’re not made for it. I could tell you things, Joey, but they’re secrets.”
“Like what, Grace? Things somebody told you not to tell me?”
“Things God whispers to me. Joey, you smell like a girl.”
“I think you can’t tell ’cause you don’t know. Tell me one secret God said just so I see if either of you knows anything.”
“I know words to an accordion. If you turn on your radio you’ll hear stars singing the song of a thousand crackles. I know about you and girls. I know what’s in your gym bag.”
“Yeah, what?”
“They’re your way of being totally alone.”
“What’s in the gym bag, Grace?”
“I know you can’t stop staring at my tits. I don’t mind, you can see. Oh, God! Windshields glorify the sun! Feel.”
“Not here, Grace.”
“Okay, at your place.”
“That’s not a good idea,” Joe says, but he can’t stay here with her either, so he eases the car into gear and drives slowly up the alley. The top of her dress is down, and against his better judgment — almost against his will — he turns onto Twenty-fifth, crosses Rockwell, the boundary between two-flats and truck docks. He drives carefully, his eyes on a street potholed by semis, but aware of her beside him with her dirty feet bloody and her bare breasts in plain view. Rockwell is empty, not unusual for this time of day. They’re approaching a railroad viaduct that floods during rainstorms. A block beyond the viaduct is Western Avenue, a busy street that in grade school he learned is the longest street in the world, just like the Amazon is the longest river, so they called it Amazon Avenue. Western won’t be deserted, and across Western is the little Franciscan church of St. Michael’s and the old Italian parish where he lives.
“I’m a Sister of Silence, so you need to be nice to me like I always was to you.”
“I’ve always been nice to you, too, Grace.”
“I could have had men hurt you, Joey, but I didn’t.”
They’re halfway through the streaky tunnel of the railroad viaduct and he hits the brakes and juts his arm out to brace her from smacking the windshield. “I don’t like when people threaten me, Grace. It really makes me crazy.”
“Let’s go to your place, Joey. Please drive. I hate when the trains go over. All those tons of steel on top of you, and the echoes don’t stop in your head even after the train is gone.”
“There’s no train.”
“It’s coming. I can feel it in my heart. My heart is crying.” She squeezes a nipple and catches a milky tear on a fingertip and offers it to him, reaching up to brush it across his lips, but Joe turns his face away. When he does, she slaps him. He catches her arm before she can slap him again, and under the viaduct, minus the glare of sun in his eyes, he sees her morning-glory-vine bracelets are scars welted across her wrists. Whistle wailing, a freight hurtles over, vibrating the car. He releases her arm, and she clamps her hands over her ears. Her bare feet stamp a tantrum of bloody imprints on the floor mat.