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“You haven’t guessed?”
“I’m not that smart.”
“Andre, come in here,” she said.
The chauffeur appeared in the doorway, holding a tin plate with a ham-and-onion sandwich on it. His eyes looked like they had been transplanted from a zombie. “Oui, mademoiselle?”
“Andre is from Haiti,” she said. “He used to be a voodoo priest. He was defrocked for killing a man. I think he actually killed several men. Now he works for me. Why does Arnold Beckman want the cup, Andre?”
“Because he drank from it.”
“Who is ‘he,’ Andre?”
“Our Lord, mademoiselle.”
“See? Simple,” she said.
LATER THAT NIGHT he wrote in his journal, I have the feeling a burden has come out of nowhere and been set squarely upon my shoulders. I am not sure what the burden is. I know I do not want it.
As he reread his words, he felt a level of fear in his stomach that made sweat break on his forehead. He slowly tore the page from the binding and continued tearing it into tiny pieces until it no longer existed.
MAGGIE BASSETT WAS a believer in extreme measures. In every situation there was a winner and a loser. Those who pretended otherwise not only invited their fate but deserved it. Ask the animals whose heads ended up stuffed and stupid-looking on a den wall, while down below their killers shook the ice in their drinks and adjusted their scrotums and talked about the gas wells they were drilling in a pristine lake. Ask the Mexican girls who delivered on their knees behind a saloon for pocket change. The peons who had their land stolen for five cents an acre. The poor Negro wiping out a cuspidor with his bare hand, grateful for his job.
At Fannie Porter’s place, she got to meet all the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales, stringing in one door and out the other, each more hungry and base and self-deluded than the next. The setting of the sun didn’t hide iniquity; it revealed it, as with kicking over a rotted log. City councilmen brought their mistresses to the cock- and dogfights down the street. People with syphilis of the brain had arguments with the moon to the delight of the spectators on the sidewalks. She serviced prison administrators who worked convicts to death and fed them weevil-infested food while they did it.
The sexual menu was wide open. Politicians showed up with gift certificates that had a six and a nine printed on them. There were private arrangements for clergy and men who wore hundred-dollar suits and freshly laundered white shirts as soft and smooth as ice cream, gold tie pins the size of an elk’s tooth. No girl was too young, no man too old. When the men smiled, their faces turned into Halloween masks.
This was the milk of human kindness she read about?
In the American South, you fucked down and married up. Her bed smelled like a seagull’s nest.
Twenty million dead in the war, and in the final weeks they were still killing so they could go back home and resume cleaning chimneys
and breathing coal dust and textile lint and licking the boots of the swells. Maggie wondered what the girls leaping like balls of flame from the roof of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory would have to say.
There was no way to reach Ishmael’s room without traversing the entire length of the open ward. She tried not to look into the eyes buried inside the swaths of bandages or see the tubes running from the catheters into drip jars, the stumps crisscrossed with stitches like trussed hams, a man with a cotton pad and a strip of tape across his face where his nose used to be, the sputum buckets by the bedsides of those who had been gassed. The astringency of the mops and pails used to scrub the ward barely hid the stench of the unemptied bedpans and the yellow-streaked bed linen piled in the corners.
She collided with a skeletal man on crutches whose pajama bottoms exposed his pubic hair. When he apologized, his face inches from hers, his mouth a ragged hole, she drowned in his breath.
She went into Ishmael’s room and shut the door. Safe, she thought, then wondered why she’d chosen to think that particular word.
He was propped up on the pillows, his smile as big as a slice of watermelon.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
“For what?”
“For our train trip.”
“I’m a little fuzzy on that.”
“We’re going to San Antonio. I’ve reserved a compartment on the Pullman car. You’re being discharged from the hospital. Like we talked about.”
He frowned. “I’m confused.”
“Everything is taken care of. What a nice day for a train ride.”
“I thought my mother was coming here this week. Or maybe next. I know she was here.”
