“Delilah? The dead mother gave you that?”
She knows how to absorb a punch.
“That’s what my father told me, sir. She had it planned out for a girl.”
Strickland bites into his candy. He does this like a lion, too, jaws wide. Zelda knows cheap candy when she sees it, she practically grew up on it, but this is a new level of cheap. It cleaves badly; she sees splinters sliver into the man’s cheek and gums. She sees blood, diluted by saliva, and can almost taste it, cold and edgeless, as opposite to hard candy as the color red is to green.
“Interesting lady, this dead mother,” Strickland says. “You know what Delilah did, don’t you?”
Zelda enters Fleming’s scolding sessions prepared to deflect claims that janitors stole something that absentminded scientists only misplaced. Never before has she had to bone up on biblical characters.
“I… at church, they—”
“My wife’s a churchgoer, so I’m up on most of the stories. What I recall is God gave Samson a bunch of strength. Slew a whole army with a donkey’s jawbone, that kind of thing. Now Delilah, she was a temptress. Got old Samson to tell her his secret. So Delilah gets her servant to cut off Samson’s hair and calls in her friends the Philistines, who poke out Samson’s eyes and mutilate him till he’s hardly a man anymore. He’s just some thing they torture. That’s Delilah. Real credit to females. Odd name, is all I’m saying.”
The conversation shouldn’t go like this; it isn’t fair. Zelda knows the same Bible stories, but her body betrays her, turns her into the stooge Strickland expects—she can feel her eyes widen and her lips tremble. Strickland scans the file, and Zelda can hear his silent tsk, tsk. Zelda is ashamed to feel relief when Strickland shifts his gaze to Elisa. Zelda can still hear his thoughts, though. Laziness isn’t strictly a Negro problem, no sir. The lower class is the lower class because they can’t find their bootstraps. Take this white woman. All right face, nice enough figure. If she had an ounce of gumption, she’d be puttering about a tidy house taking care of kids, not working the graveyard shift like some sort of nocturnal beast.
Strickland crunches candy, picks up the second file.
“Elisa Esposito,” Strickland says. “Es-po-si-to. You part Mexican or something?”
Zelda glances at Elisa. Her friend’s face is taut with the particular anxiety she suffers when someone doesn’t yet know she’s mute. Zelda clears her throat and intercedes.
“It’s Italian, sir. It’s a name they give to orphans. She was found on the riverbank when she was a baby, and they gave her the name.”
Strickland frowns at Zelda. She knows the look. He’s getting sick of hearing her talk. Creating self-aggrandizing myths, he must believe, is yet another flaw of the common class. This girl here was found by the river. This boy here was birthed with a caul. Pathetic origin stories chanted as if proof of divinity.
“How long you two known each other?” he grunts.
“Whole time Elisa’s been here, sir. Fourteen years?”
“That’s good. Means both of you know how things run here. How things need to stay. I guess you’re the two who found my fingers?” He rubs his head. He’s sweating. He looks like he’s in agony. “That’s a question. You can reply.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m going to go ahead and thank you for that,” he says. “We thought they ended up—it doesn’t matter what we thought. Now I’m not real thrilled about the paper bag. Seems like there should have been something better than a bag. The doc says a wet rag would have been just as good as ice. He said they wasted a lot of time sterilizing the fingers before they could label the nerves and whatnot. I’m not trying to blame you here. But still. Right now, we don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s like what Delilah here said about having children. The fingers will take or they won’t. Well, there you have it. That’s what I have to say about that.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Zelda says. “We did our best.”
An earnest apology delivered quick before you can feel bad about it—that’s Zelda’s method. Strickland nods, but then there’s trouble. He looks to Elisa, expecting the same, and impatience darkens his tired, pained face. Elisa’s silence comes off as rudeness. There’s no hope in dodging this. Zelda sends a prayer up and steps into the lion cage once more.
“Elisa doesn’t talk, sir.”
22
MILITARY WORK INGRAINS certain assumptions into a fellow. A person who won’t talk is suspect. They’re choosing belligerence. They’re hiding something. These two women don’t seem sharp enough for subterfuge, but you never know. The lower classes, after all, are where you find your Communists, unionists, folks with nothing to lose.
“She can’t talk?” Strickland asks. “Or chooses not to?”
“Can’t, sir,” Zelda says.
The throb in his arm fades to the background. This is interesting. It explains why this Elisa Esposito has kept this shit-hole job. Not obstinacy but limitation. Probably all explained on page two. He closes the folder, though, and gives her a long look. She can hear just fine, that’s for sure. There’s a raptness to her that is startling. Her eyes are locked onto his lips in a way most females would consider indelicate. He looks harder, wishing for buchité vision, and sees raised scar tissue in the shadow of her shirt collars.
“Some kind of operation?”
“They don’t know,” Zelda replies. “Either her parents did it to her, or someone at the orphanage.”
“Now why would someone do that to a baby?”
“Babies cry,” Zelda says. “Maybe that was enough.”
Strickland thinks back to Timmy’s and Tammy’s infancies. How each time he’d returned from DC to Florida, he’d been stunned by the Lainie he found. Exhausted, floppy-limbed, fingers puckered from baths and diapers. Now suppose you worked at an orphanage. Suppose there wasn’t one baby, or two, but dozens. He’s read military studies on sleep deprivation. He knows the kind of dangerous ideas that begin to seem sane.
He wants to tell Elisa to stretch out her neck so he can watch the gray light of the monitors slide across the satiny extrusion of scars. The ferocity of Elisa’s eyes make her wild; the wounds indicate that she’s tamed. It’s an appealing combination. She fidgets under his stare and crosses her legs. Well, there you go. Just a regular girl after all. Except here’s something else he wasn’t expecting. She isn’t sporting the rubber-soled shoes of every other janitor he’s seen. These are coral pink. He saw shoes like this all the time in Japan. Painted on the sides of Air Force bombers. Worn by pinup models. In real life, though, hardly ever.
Elisa Esposito stares at her clasped hands, just like they all do, then appears to recall something. She digs into the pocket of her smock, withdraws a tiny, bright object, and holds it out. She looks somber, which makes the monkey motion of her other hand so strange. She’s rotating a thumbs-up fist over her tits. She’s a certifiable fruitcake, he thinks, until the Negro pipes up to remind him of sign language.
“That means she’s sorry,” Zelda says.
Elisa is holding his wedding ring. This, too, he’d assumed had tumbled down the asset’s gullet. Lainie will be glad to see it. He, however, feels no emotion about it. He searches Elisa’s face but can’t find anything dishonest about the offer. She didn’t steal the ring, nothing like that. Her expression is sincere. The circular pattern of her hand over her breast seems less simian, more sensual. He has a sudden, strange realization. His new aversion to light and loud noises—here’s a woman built as if to those specifications. A woman who works in the dark of night. A woman who can’t make a peep.