I got off the bed, stood. “I’ll leave.”
Louise looked at me; she was a small thing, but she had eyes you could dive into and swim around in for a lifetime or two.
Paula said, “Why don’t you let him keep you company? You don’t want to be alone tonight.”
Louise thought about that for a moment, shook her head no, meaning she didn’t want to be alone, and Paula smiled and said, “That’s a good girl,” and shut the door on us.
I stood there looking down at the girl, in the blue-ivory semi-light. She looked up at me. She looked pretty pitiful.
I said, “Is it all right if I lay back down, there?”
She swallowed. Nodded. Then quickly added, “But keep your pants on.”
I smiled at her. “I don’t do anything in a hurry.”
Despite herself, despite her situation, she found a tiny smile for me. Said, “Well, keep ’em on, anyway.”
“I can pull these beds apart a ways, if you like.”
“No. No, that’s okay.”
I lay back down.
She turned her back to me.
A few minutes ticked by, and then I heard her sobbing. I thought about touching her shoulder, but let it go.
Then she turned to me and, a hanky clenched in her fist, face slick with tears, said, “This is all wet.” She meant the hanky. “You wouldn’t happen to...?”
“Sure,” I said, and dug out a handkerchief for her.
She patted her face dry; no new tears seemed on the way, at least not immediately. She said, “I must look a mess.”
“You look fine. But you got a right to feel that way.”
She shook her head despairingly. “He was alive one minute, and the next...” Her chin crinkled in anger; she looked like a little girl about to throw a tantrum. “I’d like to kill that damn doctor!”
“It’s been taken care of.”
That shocked her. The angry look turned blank and she said, rather hollowly, “They... killed him?”
I nodded.
“Good,” she said. But I didn’t quite buy it.
“You don’t have to pretend for me,” I said.
“What?”
“That you like it. The cheap way life and death is traded in around here.”
She swallowed again. “I didn’t really mean I wanted Doc Moran dead. He’s a... he was a lush and always crowing about himself. But...”
“But he didn’t deserve to die for it. That what you’re saying?”
She shrugged a little; leaned on her elbow and looked at me. Those eyes. Those goddamn eyes.
“He didn’t mean to kill Candy,” she said. “I hate him for not being a better doctor. But I’m not glad they killed him.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Just don’t expect me to cry for him,” she said, with an edge of bitterness. “I don’t have any tears left for that damn old drunk.”
I nodded.
“You’re nice to stay in here with me, Mr. Lawrence.”
“Call me Jimmy. Should I call you Lulu?”
“If you like... Jimmy.”
“What’s Lulu short for?”
“Louise. Nobody around here calls me that.”
“Would it be okay if I call you that?”
That surprised her; but she nodded, three little nods.
“Why don’t you get some sleep, Louise.”
“All right,” she said.
She turned on her stomach, facing away from me.
I lay looking up at the stars in the ceiling-paper sky.
After a while she said, “Jimmy?”
“Yes, Louise?”
“Would you do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“Slide over onto my bed, with me.”
“Well...”
“Not for that. I need... held. You won’t try anything. You don’t have that sort of face. I can trust you. Can’t I?”
“You can trust me, Louise.” Taking into consideration I was pretending to be somebody I wasn’t, I figured she could do worse than trust me, among this company.
“I’m going to turn on my side,” she said.
She did.
“Now could you cuddle up to me? Maybe slip your arm around my waist?”
I did.
“That’s... that’s how Candy and me slept. Like spoons.”
“I got a girl back in Chicago,” I said. “We sleep like this sometimes.”
“It’s nice, isn’t it? Kinda... comforting.”
“It is nice.”
I was right up against her; she was soft and smelled like perfume. Dime-store perfume maybe, but I liked it anyway. I felt a stirring in me and had to pull back away from her rounded little rump; but she pushed back against me and said, ingenuously, “Candy was so sweet.”
Soon she began sobbing quietly; into my hanky. My erection receded. I kept my arm around her waist and hugged her to me.
“What am I going to do without him? What am going to do?”
I stroked her head, said, “There, there.”
And pretty soon she fell asleep.
So did I, and then I heard an unearthly sound, a screech out of a nightmare, and bolted upright in bed.
“What the hell was that?” I said.
Louise was sitting over at the child’s desk, combing her bobbed blond hair out with a brush; she was wearing that same pink dress I’d seen her in yesterday — like me, she’d slept in her clothes. She smiled over at me. She had no makeup on and looked about thirteen years old. The kind of thirteen-year-old that makes boys reconsider how they feel about girls, however.
She made a crinkly smile. “A rooster, silly. Haven’t you ever been on a farm before?”
I rubbed my face with a hand; I needed a shave. Sun was beginning to find its way in the open window next to her, but it still seemed pretty dark out to me.
“No,” I said. “This is a first for me.”
Still brushing her hair, she said, “I was raised on a farm. My daddy’s a farmer.”
“Do you miss your daddy?”
She looked sad, kept brushing. “Sometimes. I don’t imagine he misses me, though.”
“Why’s that?”
“He thinks I’m a bad girl. A sinner.”
“He’s a religious man, your daddy?”
“Too religious. He used to beat me with a belt because I wasn’t devout enough.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “At least when he beat me I knew he cared.”
“Pardon?”
She put the brush down and came and sat on the side of the bed next to me. “Sometimes that’s how people show you they care about you.”
“Hitting you?”
She nodded. “I don’t say it’s the best way. I wouldn’t ever hit anybody myself. And Candy — he hardly ever hit me. I guess that’s why I loved him so much.”
She seemed better this morning, seemed already to have accepted the finality of Candy’s death. Maybe in this fast crowd she ran with, fast death was commonplace. I asked her.
“You ever see anybody die before?” I said.
“Sure. Two times.”
“Guys working with Candy, you mean?”
She nodded. “They got shot on jobs.”
“I see.”
“And Candy killed some people. I never went on any jobs with him, so I never saw it. And I don’t like to think of it. But it’s true.”
“What kind of people?”
“Did he kill? A bank guard and a sheriff’s deputy. It bothered Candy.”
“It did?”
“Yes — he was afraid of the electric chair.”
I said nothing.
“He doesn’t have to be afraid anymore,” she said, and then tears gushed forth, and she was burying her face in my chest.
I held her for a while; by the time she came up for air, the sun was pouring through the windows like fresh buttermilk.
I wiped her tears with the bedspread. She smiled at me bravely. I got lost in her eyes, brown, brown eyes.
She said, “You didn’t take advantage of me last night.”