The Night Watchman(37)

“That’s what I’m trying to do. It’s said he wants to teach us to stand on our own two feet.”

Both men looked down at their feet.

“I count two,” said Louis.

“Sometimes I wonder,” said Thomas.

“Wonder what?”

“If one of them will ever say, Gee, those damn Indians might have had an idea or two. Shouldn’t have got rid of them all. Maybe we missed out.”

Louis laughed. Thomas laughed. They laughed together at the idea.





Ajax




Thomas and Rose lay side by side in the dim night.

“I went and had a drink,” said Thomas.

All the stoppered emotions of the day came up under Rose’s skin. A prickling, burning pressure.

“Don’t take another one. I’ll kill you.”

He said nothing, but lay there knowing she wouldn’t even strike at him. He wouldn’t strike at her. They were not like that.

He turned to her, sinking. It was so much worse than anybody knew.

The drink had surprised him. He hadn’t thought about it, hadn’t even struggled. Just sat down with Eddyboy Mink and took it. Many years had passed before that drink.

“You’ll kill me how? Poison?”

He watched her face. Her eyes glinted. Tears? No. Heat. Then her mouth twitched.

“You already got poisoned.”

“You sure?”

“Remember those biscuits a few mornings ago?”

“No.”

“That’s because you were eating in your sleep. Wade made them. He was proud. Later on he tells me he couldn’t find baking powder.

“‘So I used this,’ he says.”

“What?” Thomas asked.

“He was holding up a can of my Ajax scrubbing powder.”

“That is poison,” said Thomas, impressed.

“He just used a pinch, or two.” She put her fingers to her mouth. “I told him he could have poisoned you. He’s been watching you close ever since. But looked like it didn’t hurt you, so I didn’t say nothing to you.”

“I am too tired to die,” Thomas said, but fumed. What? Were they just going to wait and see if he keeled over dead? He was feeling sorry for himself, he realized. And it was a relief to know. He could fight self-pity.

“Still,” said Rose, lower, unwilling. “Please. No more.”

To even use the word please seemed to gentle her. She raised her hand and grazed his cheek with her hard, warm palm. Thomas was sinking again, but now into the radiant comfort of which she was the center.

“I promise I won’t.”

“Let’s put the seal on the promise,” she whispered, and held his face between her hands. He put his hands on her hands and it was like they were both holding him together. Then he dropped his hands and went to her.





Iron Tulip




Freckle Face and Dinky lowered her on a rope with a twenty-pound lifting plate at the bottom. Patrice stood on the metal. Just before she went into the water, she took a deep breath and when the plate met the bottom of the tank she glanced at the creamy blobs of faces. They were meaningless. She swung around the rope with one hoof pointed cutely up behind her. She reached back for her tail, but it had floated up over her head and followed her like a blue snake with a head of false hair. She started bobbing up. Remembered there were other weights on the bottom. Props. She reached toward a pink one but at the last moment realized it was a shocking object. Next to it, an iron tulip, which she lifted and pretended to smell, coyly peeking over her shoulder. Suddenly, in joy, she kicked up her hooves and somersaulted backward in an arc. Then she dropped the tulip and surfaced. As she took a breath she heard applause, heard whistles. The noise of appreciation charged the water. She swirled down into a new substance. The moves were in her, easy. Poses out of magazines, but twisted loose from ads for refrigerators, canned peaches, cars, wringer washers. A finger to her lips, a hip switch, a rolling eye, the rope of tail to swing in a slow lasso toward a creamy blob. And by mistake, from the bottom, she plucked a naughty hatchet. Twenty minutes passed easily.

“You are a sensation,” said Jack, as she dripped by a small electric coil of heat. “Don’t get too close to that. You’ll melt a hole.”

She was sitting on a wooden stool. Jack had a little color. The sardonic parentheses around his smile had lifted. He said he’d noticed how she flinched from the “implements of pleasure” and that he would have them removed. “We don’t need to be vulgar. And besides, the city could shut us down.”

“I’d like to stay with using flowers, and maybe I could pretend to chop with that little hatchet, if you’d fix the end of the handle.”

“An object of regrettable taste,” said Jack.

“Oh, and I’d like to be paid the same night.”

“How about in the morning? We could cut you a check.”

“I’d like cash.”

“Cash it is,” said Jack, resigned.

He gave her a cup of hot coffee, but she only took a couple of sips, for warmth. Three more shows. But they passed in a blur of novelty. And then she was removing the suit and laying it out carefully on a sawhorse to dry. In the morning, she would dust the inside with the special powder that Jack said was mixed up to preserve it. Her dinner was brought to her on a tray.