by Ed Gorman
She went inside. The lobby was small and filled with ancient couches that dust rose from like shabby ghosts. A long-dead potted plant filled one corner while a cigarette vending machine filled the other. In the back somewhere a toilet flushed with the roar of an avalanche. A black-and-white TV screen flickered with images of Milton Berle in a dress.
A big woman in a faded housedress that revealed fleshy arms and some kind of terrible rash on her elbows was behind the desk. The woman had a beauty mark that was huge and hairy, like a little animal clinging to her cheek.
She grinned when she saw Linnette.
"You don't have to tell me, sweetie."
"Tell you?"
"Sure. Who you are."
"You know who I am?"
"Sure. You're the little guy's sister. He talked about you all the time."
She leaned over the counter, coughing a cigarette hack that sounded sickeningly phlegmy, and said, "Linnette, right?"
"Right."
The woman grimaced. "Sorry about the little guy."
"Thank you."
"I was the one who found him. He wasn't pretty, believe me."
"Oh."
"And I was the first one who read the note." She shook her head again and put a cigarette in her mouth. "He was pretty gimped up inside, poor little guy."
"Yes; yes he was."
The woman stared at her, not as if Linnette were a freak, but rather curious about why she might be here.
"I was just traveling through," Linnette said quietly. "I thought I might stay here tonight." She hesitated. "Sleep in my brother's room, perhaps."
Now the woman really stared at her. "You sure, hon?"
"Sure?"
"About wantin' to take his room and all? Frankly, it'd give me the creeps."
Linnette opened her purse, reached in for her bills. "I'd just like to see where he lived and worked is all. I'm sure it will be a nice experience."
The woman shrugged beefy shoulders. "You're the boss, hon. You're the boss."
Kelly was arguing with a drunk who claimed that the shooting gallery was rigged. The drunk had been bragging to his girl about what a marksman he'd become in Korea and wanted to do a little showing off. All he'd managed to do was humiliate himself.
Aimee waited as patiently as she could for a few minutes and then she interrupted the drunk—whose girlfriend was now trying to tug him away from making any more of a scene—and said, "Kelly, I'm looking for a woman who's a dwarf. Bulicek said he saw her here."
The drunk turned and looked at Aimee as if she'd just said she'd seen a Martian.
Aimee's remark unsettled the drunk enough that his girlfriend was now able to draw him away, and get themselves lost on the midway.
"Yeah. She was here. So what?"
"Did you talk to her?"
"Yeah."
"About what?"
"What the hell's your interest, Aimee?"
"Kelly, I don't have time to explain. Just please help me, all right?"
Kelly sighed. "Okay, kid, what do you want?"
"What'd she say to you?"
"She said she wanted to buy a gun."
"A gun? What kind of gun?"
"The gun her brother stole from me."
"My God."
"What's wrong?"
"Don't you see?"
"See what, kid? Calm down."
"If she wanted to buy the gun her brother stole from you then maybe she plans to use it on herself just the way her brother did."
Kelly said, "Shit. You know, I never thought of that."
"So you gave her the gun?"
Kelly seemed a little embarrassed now. "Yeah. Gave it to her for a hundred bucks."
"A hundred? But Kelly that isn't worth more than—"
"That's what she offered me for it. So that's what I took, kid. I never said I was no saint."
"Where did she go?"
"Hell, how would I know?"
"God, Kelly, didn't you notice the direction she was going?"
He shrugged. "Down near the entrance, I guess." He looked chastened that he hadn't paid attention.
"Thanks, Kelly. I appreciate it."
And before he could say another word, she was gone, running fast toward the front of the midway.
There was a card table sitting next to the room's only window. It had the uncertain legs of a young colt. He'd put his portable typewriter on it—the one she'd bought him for his birthday ten years ago—and worked long into the night.
The room had a bureau with somebody's initials knifed into the top, a mirror mottled with age, wallpaper stained with moisture, a double bed with a paint-chipped metal headboard, and linoleum so old it was worn to wood in patches.
She tried not to think of all the sad lives that had been lived out here. Men without women; men without hope.
She made sure the door was locked behind her and then came into the room.
She could feel him here, now. She had always believed in ghosts—were ghosts any more unlikely than men and women who only grew to be three-and-a-half feet tall?—and so she spoke out loud to him for the first time since being told of his suicide.
"I hope you know how much I love you, brother," she said, moving across the small, box-like room to the card table, running her fingers across the small indentations the Smith-Corona had made on the surface.
She decided against turning the overhead light on.
The on-and-off red of the neon was good enough.
"I miss you, brother. I hope you know that, too."
She heard the clack of a ghostly typewriter; saw her brother's sweet round face smiling up at her after he'd finished a particularly good sentence; listened to the soft sad laughter that only she'd been able to elicit from him.
"I wish you would have called me, brother. I wish you would have told me what you had in mind. You know why?"
She said nothing for a time.
Distant ragged traffic sounds from the highway; the even fainter music of the midway further away in the darkness.
"Because I would have joined you, brother. I would have joined you."
She set her purse on the card table. She unclasped the leather halves and then reached in.
The gun waited there.
She brought out the gun with the reverence of a priest bringing forth something that has been consecrated to God.
She brought out the gun and held it for a time, in silhouette, against the window with the flashing red neon.
And then, slowly, inevitably, she brought the gun to her temple.
And eased the hammer back.
At the entrance, Aimee asked fourteen people if they'd seen the woman. None had. But the fifteenth did, and pointed to a rusted beast of a taxi cab just now pulling in.
Aimee ran to the cab and pushed her head in the front window before the driver even stopped completely.
"The dwarf woman. Where did you take her?"
"Who the hell are you?"
"The woman, where did you take her?" Aimee knew she was screaming. She didn't care.
"Goddamn, lady. You're fucking nuts." But despite his tough words, the cab driver saw that she was going to stay here until she had her answer. He said, "I took her to the Ganges Arms. Why the hell're you so interested, anyway?"
"Then take me there, too," Aimee said, flinging open the back door and diving in. "Take me there, too!"
She went over and sat on the bed.
That would make it easier for everybody. The mess would be confined to the mattress. A mattress you could just throw out. She lay back on the bed.
Her shoes fell off, one at a time, making sharp noises as they struck the floor.
Two-inch heels, she thought. How pathetic of me. Wanting so desperately to be like other people.
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, Ibrought 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.
"Two oh eight!" 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.
So that's why she mostly listened, Aimee, because when something was as overwhelming as the little guy's life had been—
Sometimes the desk clerk made the long and taxing trip up the stairs and knocked with a single knuckle and said, "You okay in there, hon?"
And Aimee would say, "We're fine, we're fine," not knowing exactly who "you" meant.
And then the desk clerk would go away and Aimee would start rocking Linnette again and listening to her and wanting to tell Linnette that she felt terrible about the little guy's d
eath.
And then it occurred to Aimee that maybe by sitting here like this and listening to Linnette and rocking her, maybe she was in some way making up for playing a small part in the little guy's suicide.
"Sometimes I just get so scared," Linnette said just as dawn was breaking coral-colored across the sky.
And Aimee knew just what Linnette was talking about because Aimee got scared like that, too, sometimes.
The Greyhound arrived twenty-three minutes late that afternoon.
Aimee and Linnette stood in the depot entrance with a group of other people. There was a farm girl who kept saying how excited she was to be going to Fresno and a marine who kept saying it was going to be good to see Iowa again and an old woman who kept saying she hoped they kept the windows closed because even on a ninety-two-degree day like this one she'd get a chill.
"You ever get up to Sacramento?" Linnette asked.
"Sometimes."
"You could always call me at the library and we could have lunch."
"That sounds like fun, Linnette. It really does."
Linnette took Aimee's hand and gave it a squeeze. "You really helped me last night. I'll never forget it, Aimee. I really won't."
Just then the bus pulled in with a whoosh of air brakes and a puff of black diesel smoke.
In one of the front windows a five-year-old boy was looking out and when he saw Linnette, he started jumping up and down and pointing, and then a couple of moments later another five-year-old face appeared in the same window and now there were two boys looking and pointing and laughing at Linnette.
Maybe the worst part of it all, Aimee thought, was that they didn't even really mean to be cruel.
And then the bus door was flung open and a Greyhound driver looking dapper in a newly starched uniform stepped down and helped several old ladies off the bus.
"I wish he could have known you, Aimee," Linnette said. "He sure would have liked you. He sure would've."
And then, for once, it was Aimee who started the crying and she wasn't even sure why. It just seemed right somehow, she thought, as she helped the little woman take the first big step up into the bus.
