She closed her eyes and let the sorrow come over her. Sorrow for her brother and herself; sorrow for their lives.
She saw him again at his typewriter; heard keys striking the eternal silence.
“I wish you would have told me, brother. I wish you would have. It would have been easier for you. We could have comforted each other.”
She raised the hand carrying the gun, brought the gun to her temple once again.
The hammer was still back.
“Can’t you go any faster?”
“Maybe you think this is an Indy race car or somethin’, huh, lady?”
“God, please; please just go as fast as you can.”
“Jes-uz,” the cab driver said. “Jes-uz.”
She said a prayer, nothing formal, just words that said she hoped there was a God and that he or she or it or whatever form it took would understand why she was doing this and how much she longed to be with her brother again and that both God and her brother would receive her with open arms.
She tightened her finger on the trigger and then—
— the knock came.
“Hon?”
Oh, my Lord.
“Hon, you awake in there?”
Finding her voice. Clearing her throat. “Yes?”
“Brought you some Kool-Aid. That’s what I drink all summer. Raspberry Kool-Aid. Quenches my thirst a lot better than regular pop, you know? Anyway, I brought you a glass. You wanna come get it?”
Did she have any choice?
Linnette lay the gun down on the bed and pulled the purse over the gun.
She got up and straightened her skirt and went to the door.
A long angle of dirty yellow light fell across her from the hallway.
The woman was a lot heavier than she’d looked downstairs. Linnette liked her.
The woman bore a large glass of Kool-Aid in her right hand and a cigarette in her left. She kept flicking her ashes on the hallway floor.
“You like raspberry?”
“Thank you very much.”
“Sometimes I like cherry but tonight I’m just in a kind of raspberry mood. You know?”
“I really appreciate this.”
The woman nodded to the stairs. “You get lonely, you can always come down and keep me company.”
“I think I’ll try and get some sleep first but if I don’t doze off, I’ll probably be down.”
The woman looked past Linnette into the room. “You got everything you need?”
“I’m fine.”
“If your brother’s room starts to bother you, just let me know. You can always change rooms for no extra cost.”
“Thanks.”
The woman smiled. “Enjoy the Kool-Aid.” She checked the man’s wristwatch she wore on her thick wrist. “Hey, time for Blackie.”
“Blackie?”
“Boston Blackie. You ever watch him?”
“I guess not.”
“Great show; really, great show.”
“Well, thank you.”
“You’re welcome. And remember about keeping me company.”
“Oh, I will. I promise.”
“Well, good night.”
“Good night,” Linnette said, and then quietly closed the door.
Ten minutes later, the cabbie pulled up in front of the hotel.
As always, the street reminded Aimee of a painting by Thomas Hart Benton she’d once seen in a Chicago gallery, a street where even the street lamps looked twisted and grotesque.
Aimee flung a five-dollar bill in the front seat and said, “I appreciate you speeding.”
The cabbie picked up the five, examined it as if he suspected it might be counterfeit, and then said, “Good luck with whatever your problem is, lady.”
Aimee was out of the cab, hurrying into the lobby.
She went right to the desk and to the heavyset clerk who was leaning on her elbows and watching Kent Taylor as “Boston Blackie.”
The woman sighed bitterly, as if she’d just been forced to give up her firstborn, and said, “Help you?”
“I’m looking for a woman who just came in here.”
“What kind of woman?”
“A dwarf.”
The desk clerk looked Aimee over more carefully. “What about her?”
“It’s important that I talk to her right away.”
“Why?”
“Because... because she’s a friend of mine and I think she’s going to do something very foolish.”
“Like what?”
“For God’s sake,” Aimee said. “I know she’s here. Tell me what room’s she in before it’s too late.”
The desk clerk was just about to respond when the gunshot sounded on the floor above.
Aimee had never heard anything so loud in her life.
The echo seemed to go on for hours.
“What room is she in?” Aimee screamed.
“208!” the woman said.
Aimee reached the staircase in moments, and started running up the steps two at a time.
An old man in boxer shorts and a sunken, hairy chest stood in the hallway in front of 208 looking sleepy and scared.
“What the Sam hell’s going on?”
Aimee said nothing, just pushed past him to the door. She turned the knob. Locked.
Aimee heard the desk clerk lumbering up the stairs behind her.
Aimee turned and ran toward the steps again. She pushed out her hand and laid the palm up and open.
“The key. Hurry.”
The desk clerk, her entire body heaving from her exertion, dropped the key in Aimee’s hand. The desk clerk tried to say something but she had no wind.
Aimee ran back to 208, inserted the key. Pushed the door open.
The first thing was the darkness; the second, the acrid odor of gunpowder. The third was the hellish neon red that shone through the dirty sheer curtains.
Aimee was afraid of what she was going to see.
Could she really handle seeing somebody who’d shot herself at point-blank range?
Aimee took two steps over the threshold.
And then heard the noise.
At first, she wasn’t sure what it was. Only after she took a few more steps into the dark tiny room did she recognize what she was hearing.
A woman lying face down in the bed, the sound of her sobbing muffled into the mattress.
Just now the desk clerk came panting into the yellow frame of the door and said, “She dead?”
“No,” Aimee said quietly to the woman. “No, she’s not dead.”
And then Aimee silently closed the door behind her and went to sit with Linnette on the bed.
Aimee had been with carnivals since she was fourteen years old, when she’d run off from a Kentucky farm and from a pa who saw nothing wrong with doing with her what he’d done with her other two sisters. She was now twenty-eight. In the intervening years she’d wondered many times what it would be like to have a child of her own and tonight she thought she was finding out, at least in a curious sort of way.
It was not respectful, she was sure, to think of Linnette as a child just because Linnette was so little, but as Aimee sat there for three and a half hours in the dark, breathless from holding Linnette in her lap and rocking her as she would an infant, the thought was inevitable. And then the wind from midnight came, and things cooled off at least a little bit.
Aimee didn’t say much, really — what could she say? — she just hugged Linnette and let her cry and let her talk and let her cry some more and it was so sad that Aimee herself started crying sometimes, thinking of how cruel people could be to anybody who was different in any way, and thinking of that sonofabitch Ralph Banghart spying on the little guy in the house of mirrors, and thinking of how terrified the little guy had been when he fell prey to Ralph’s practical joke. Life was just so sad sometimes when you saw what happened to people, and usually to innocent people at that, people that life had been cruel enough to already.