All the Dead Lie Down

by Mary Willis Walker

  The young woman actually smiles up at Sarah Jane. She must be new. “Can I help you, ma’am?”

  The air conditioning has hit Sarah Jane’s wet skin with a vengeance. “Cold in here,” she says to explain the new onslaught of shaking.

  “Sure is,” the girl says. “Can I help you?”

  “Yes.” Sarah Jane tries to keep her voice low so she won’t attract attention. “I want to find out about a poison. It’s called soman, I think, something like that. Can you look it up and see if you got anything about that?”

  “S-o-m-i-n?” the girl asks.

  “I’m not sure how it’s spelled. Maybe that’s it.”

  The young woman types on her keyboard and watches the computer screen. “Nothing under that spelling.” She hits a few keys. “Or e-n or a-n. What kind of poison is it?”

  “What kind?”

  “Yes. Like is it an insecticide or what?”

  “Well …” Sarah Jane tries to remember back to the discussion on the deck. “It’s this poison Hitler had but didn’t use in the war, even though he could have. It kills people. They breathe it. Real deadly.”

  “A poison gas?” the girl says, brightening up. “Like mustard gas maybe. Let’s try gases.” She types and watches the screen again. Sarah Jane thinks it must be wonderful to have that power in your fingertips, to find out things just by typing. She loves to type and was always good at it. She was one of the fastest typists in her class at Comstock Business College—seventy words per minute—before she met old slack-jawed Harold, and got married and had the children and was trapped in the house with them all the time and got to drinking and all and things went to hell in a handcart.

  “Ah, this looks promising—” the girl says, “Gases, asphyxiating and poisonous, war use. Here’s a book on the subject. We’ve got it at this location if you want to take a look. It might discuss the poison you’re interested in. Here, I’ll write down the call number for you.” She copies from the screen and hands the little square of paper to Sarah Jane.

  Sarah Jane stands there looking at the paper—a title and a number. She has no idea how to use it. She hasn’t hunted for a library book since she was in high school and she’s forgotten how.

  The girl cocks her head to one side. “Ma’am, that number should be up on the third level. Toward the back.”

  “Uh, thanks.”

  “And when you find the book, you can look in the index in the back to see if the poison you’re interested in is included. That’s a quick way to see if the book’s going to be useful.”

  “Oh, okay.” Sarah Jane looks toward the big central staircase and then she notices for the first time that a thin man wearing a bow tie is staring at her from behind the circulation desk. She looks away quickly and heads for the elevators to get out of his line of vision. She takes the elevator to the third level and hurries through the stacks, figuring out the way the numbers work. It reminds her of the Galveston library, where Gramma used to take her when she had a school paper to do. She’s always loved being in a library—so quiet and cozy and orderly, the wooden drawers with the cards inside, the tables with green-shaded lamps, the people sitting quiet, but busy.

  Studying the numbers on the tall shelves, she finally locates the shelf where her book should be. When she actually finds the right book, she feels a rush of pleasure. She pulls it out and looks at the cover, which has a picture of a man in a gas mask on the front. It is called A Higher Form of Killing and now she remembers Billy Goat Gruff saying those exact words. When he was explaining how it took just the tiniest bit to kill a person, he’d said, “It’s a higher form of killing.” This is what she’s looking for. She tingles with the certainty that fate is about to show her what’s what. She carries the book to a table where she hopes she won’t be noticed. It’s in a deserted corner at the end of a row of shelves.

  She is shocked to see how tiny the print of the index is. Since she last looked at a book, the print has gotten smaller, she thinks. But if she gets way back from the print she can just make it out. She pages through, looking for entries that begin s-o-m. It takes awhile, but she finds an entry for “soman (GD)” with three page numbers after it. She looks at the first page listed and is excited to see it has to do with Hitler and something they call “secret nerve agents.” This must be right. At the bottom of the page she reads:

  IN ADDITION TO THE TWO FACTORIES WHERE THE NAZIS WERE PRODUCING TABUN AND SARIN, THE RUSSIANS ALSO DISCOVERED THE SECRETS OF AN EVEN MORE POISONOUS NERVE AGENT WHICH THE GERMAN SCIENTISTS HAD REFINED BUT NOT MANUFACTURED IN QUANTITY. THE CHEMISTS HAD FIRST PRODUCED THE SUBSTANCE THEY CALLED SOMAN, LATER KNOWN AS GD, IN THE SPRING OF 1944. TESTS HAD SHOWN THE NEW NERVE AGENT TO BE EVEN MORE TOXIC THAN THE TWO SUBSTANCES THE GERMANS HAD ALREADY ADOPTED FOR USE AS WEAPONS.

  Wow. Sarah Jane feels a little thrill at finding what she was looking for. She also feels a growing dread. She goes back to the index for the next page listed and turns to it. She reads:

  SOMAN IS THOUGHT TO BE THE FAVORED SOVIET NERVE AGENT, FAR AND AWAY THE MOST POWERFUL OF THE G-AGENTS, AND ABLE TO BREAK THROUGH THE BLOOD/BRAIN BARRIER WITH EASE.

  Lordy—the blood/brain barrier. She doesn’t know what that is, but she’s certain it has to do with what Billy Goat Gruff was saying about how it kills people. She flips to the middle where there are some photographs. They are awful: battlefields and corpses and people with grotesquely swollen blackened and blistered limbs from poison gas. This is what Toe-tapper and Billy Goat plan to do to the people up there in the Senate—the senators and the schoolchildren and the tourists and the people who work there and the people like her who just need a cool place to sit. She believes it now.

  She closes the book. There really is a poison like Billy Goat Gruff was talking about. He wasn’t bullshitting about that. And now she is convinced of what she has suspected since this morning—he killed Tin Can. It is crazy, but it must be true.

  She lets herself remember now. The manager at the Grill, the one with the suck-up voice, told Billy Goat and Toe-tapper about the bag lady in the spotted coat. So they came looking and they found a bag lady in a spotted coat, down by the creek. They killed Tin Can because they thought she was the one who heard them talking and saw them up on the deck. They killed her because she was wearing the cow coat. If Sarah Jane had been wearing it, they would have killed her instead. Poor Tin Can, the simple little twit, just got herself scooped up by that old claw of fate. She probably thought Billy Goat was real nice right up to the end.

  Sarah Jane’s shivering has started up again; this place is like a refrigerator. They killed Tin Can. They killed her and stuffed her in a garbage bag. And they really are going to kill everyone in the Senate. Even the children. They think they can do anything they want and get away with it, like kings of the world. She feels that familiar old hot blue flame licking up, scorching her cheeks.

  Lufkin was right.

  She has to do something. But what? She can’t just go and tell the police what she heard under the deck. If she does that, they’ll make her give her real name and then they’ll find out about Houston. And she’ll have to tell them about Tin Can and take them to her body and maybe they’ll think she killed her and that she is some crazy serial killer of homeless women and is making all this up, and she’ll be in some real trouble then and she’ll be sorry she ever got involved.

  Anyway, they probably won’t believe the poison gas thing because it sounds, even to her, like something a crazy woman would rave about. Just the DTs, they’ll say, an old bum having hallucinations.

  She needs some sort of proof. The book might help. She glances around to see if anyone is watching. There’s no one in sight, so she drops the book into her bag quickly. She’ll bring it back when she doesn’t need it anymore.

  Then she freezes. Someone is watching her. He’s standing at the end of the high shelves and he could have seen her drop the book in her bag. Oh, no. She lowers her head, watching him from the corner of her eye. He is walking down the a
isle, slowly, studying the books. Maybe he wasn’t looking at her.

  He is a large, gray-haired man in a blue-jean jacket—not one of the library workers, thank God. She’s been worried about the bow-tie man who stared at her downstairs. But this man doesn’t seem interested; he is just looking for a book.

  She sits quite still, waiting for him to finish and move on. As he reaches the end of the shelf, he slows his pace even more. Then he comes to a standstill uncomfortably close to her table, and suddenly is leaning down, as if he’s going to ask her something. Instead, he reaches into her bag and lifts the book out. He did see her take it. She turns to explain that she is not stealing it, but then she sees that he’s holding something in his other hand—a straight razor. It’s open and it’s heading toward her neck.

  Her brain explodes in panic. She throws herself backward with such force that the chair tips and she crashes to the floor. The man grunts and leans down over her. The razor is right in front of her eyes, coming at her. Jesus Christ, he’s gonna kill her, right here in the library.

  She scrambles backward, desperate. But he is fast for such a large man. He takes a swipe at her throat.

  She screams and jerks away from the blade. But it catches her this time, nicks her collarbone as she backs up.

  Terrified, Sarah Jane flings her arms in front of her face to ward it off. She squirms backward. He climbs on top of her to pin her down. She screams again.

  He grunts and takes another swipe with the razor. It cuts into her forearm, right through her heavy black sweatshirt.

  “Ow,” she yells. “Help! Someone help me!” The words sound ripped out of her.

  As if on command, a man appears from the shelves. “Stop this!” he shouts in a voice you would use for unruly children. Sarah Jane glances up. It is the skinny man in the bow tie. She’s so glad to see him.

  A woman in a red dress appears at his shoulder. “Call the police,” he says to her.

  The big man scrambles off her to his feet. He is wearing black boots, jeans. His gray hair is crewcut. He is huge. She realizes with a flash of heat that this must be Billy Goat Gruff from the deck. How the devil has he found her?

  “What’s going on?” the man in the bow tie asks.

  Billy Goat backs away. “This crazy woman attacked me,” he says, “this old bum.” It’s the low voice, the accent. Now she’s sure: it is Billy Goat. He raises his hands and there is no razor to be seen. “She was stealing a book and I told her to put it back.” He points at Sarah Jane. “Look in her bag.” He turns and heads toward the stairs, walking very fast.

  “Hold on!” says the bow-tie man, but Billy Goat is already running down the stairs.

  Sarah Jane tries to talk but it comes out as sputtering. It takes a few tries before she can get the words out: “He had a razor. He was trying to kill me.”

  The bow-tie man points at her. “You stay right there.”

  He takes a few steps toward the table and looks down into her bag. He reaches in for the book. “Were you planning to steal this?” Then, looking more closely at her face, he says, “Say, don’t I know you?”

  Sarah Jane scrambles to her feet. She grabs her bag and heads for the stairs.

  “Stop right there!” the man calls out.

  Sarah Jane needs to get out, quick. The cops have already been called, and she can’t let herself get trapped in here. Without looking back she limps to the stairs and hurries down them, running toward the exit. When she passes through the arch in front of the door an alarm goes off in her ear.

  Outside, she looks up and down the street—no cop car insight, and no Billy Goat, thank God. But she’d better hustle.

  She turns the corner onto Eighth Street to get off the main road. Before she gets a block away, she hears sirens. She’s a sitting duck; they’ll spot her right away. She feels an animal instinct telling her to go to ground. She looks around desperately for a place to hide, a safe place just to sit for a while. Across the street stands a huge stone building with a sign saying AUSTIN WOMEN’S CLUB. Fate again. She’s a woman, after all. She runs across the street. Behind the building a sunken parking lot is surrounded by high stone walls with patches of overgrown bushes at the edges. Perfect. She hurries downhill and turns on Nueces to get to the entrance. The whole lot is empty. The sirens are louder now; they must be in front of the library, just two blocks away. She hobbles across the lot to a shady corner where a pile of old stones and high weeds provide a hiding place. She clambers over the stones. She drops her bag and sits with her back braced against the old darkened stone wall.

  She is burning hot and panting like a steam engine. Her left leg hurts worse than ever from the running and there’s blood all over her hands. She knows she’s been cut, but she can’t feel any pain yet. Carefully, she pulls the arms of her sweatshirt up to see how bad it is. On her right forearm is a long cut, but it doesn’t look very deep and has already stopped bleeding. She pulls the sleeves back down. Nothing to worry about—just a few more drops in that endless flow of lost blood.

  She tries to look down at her collarbone, but she can’t see it and she has no mirror. It doesn’t matter anyway.

  She rests her head back against the wall. The stones are cool and damp. She closes her eyes. She’s tired. She’s so tired.

  Now she’ll never be able to go back to the library. After all that mess today, they’ll never let her back in. Just one more place she can’t go back to. That’s pretty much the story of her life—a steady drying up of places to be. One by one. So there’s not a single place on the face of the earth for her to go to. She can’t go back to her spot under the deck. She can’t go back to Ellie’s house in Brenham. She certainly can’t go back to the shelter in Houston, or the one-room apartment, or to Donner’s boardinghouse. She can’t go back to the house in Baytown where she lived with old slack-jawed Harold. She can’t go back to Gramma’s in Galveston. There is no place for her. She is truly homeless now.

  She doesn’t know what in the world to do.

  It’s surprising, but the person she’d most like to have here with her now is Tin Can. Even though she was a retard, Tin Can was good for talking things over with. She had horse sense and she’d listen to whatever you wanted to say, for however long it took you to say it. Sarah Jane wants to talk to her right now, needs to. But she’s dead, and they’ll never talk again.

  Then it occurs to her that, besides her and Lufkin, and Billy Goat who killed her, maybe no one else knows Tin Can is dead. Maybe no one has found her body. She feels the loneliness of that body lying there in that empty place. It’s just not right.

  She thinks about the writer woman, Bopeep, the one in the bathroom—what was her name? She’d want to know about Tin Can because she’s writing about her and she said she liked her. And Tin Can liked her and thought she was a good listener.

  Sarah Jane sure needs a good listener. She remembers the card the woman gave her, but she doesn’t know if she still has it. Eyes still closed, she reaches into her bag. The first thing her bloody fingers touch is a smooth surface, a small rectangle. She takes hold, pulls it out, and opens her eyes. “Molly Cates,” it says, “Associate Editor, Lone Star Monthly.” At the bottom is a phone number.

  That’s it. Fate.

  She’ll call her.

  She’ll tell her about Tin Can, and about what she heard under the deck, and about the book and what it says about soman, and about Billy Goat attacking her in the library. She’ll tell Bopeep everything and make her believe it. Then she’ll ask her to tell it to the police. That’s a good idea. She’s respectable. They’ll believe her.

  After she rests awhile, calling Bopeep still seems like a good idea, and there have been no more sirens and no police cars that she can see, so Sarah Jane gets up and hoists her bag to her shoulder. She starts walking west, looking for a pay phone. After many blocks she spots one right inside the door of a convenience store. She enters, ignoring the hostile glares from the two men behind the counter.

  She rummages
around her bag, first for the card, then for her coin purse. She unzips the little purse. Inside is one quarter. That’s all—just one quarter. Fate again. She is meant to make this call.

  She dials the number on the card. The phone rings three times, then a voice says, “Hi, this is Molly Cates. Leave me a message at the beep and I will return your call.” Then there is a long beep, and silence.

  Sarah Jane is flustered. She doesn’t know what to do, so she says, “Uh, hello. This is …” She pauses, recalling that she never told the woman her real name. “This is the friend of Tin Can, the one in the bathroom the other day. Remember? I’m Cow Lady and you gave me a card and said to call if I wanted to talk sometime. Well, I … want to talk. It’s important. But I got no number for you to call me back at. And this is my only quarter, so I’m not sure what to do.” She pauses. “I know! They take messages at HOBO. Maybe you could call there. I don’t know the—” A quick beep cuts her off, then a dial tone. The fucking machine has hung up on her! She stands there holding the phone to her ear, feeling abandoned.

  Slowly she puts the receiver back and watches the coin return, hoping her quarter will slide down. It doesn’t, of course, but she sticks her finger in just to make sure.

  “You need something, lady?”

  One of the men has come out from behind the counter. He is staring at her, his hands on his hips.

  One more person who thinks he owns the world—they’re everywhere. But Sarah Jane is too tired and shaky to give him a hard time. She shakes her head.

  On her way out she glances over at the cooler against the wall where they probably have some Thunder Chicken, but the only money she has is Ellie’s hundred-dollar bill pinned in her shirt and, of course, she can’t spend that. Anyway, the drinking is killing her. Maybe it’s time to stop.

  She steps outside, out of the air conditioning into the heavy afternoon heat, and wonders where Lufkin is hanging. She thinks she’ll look for him. Then she’ll check HOBO for a message. If there is a message, she’ll scrounge a quarter to call Bopeep back, and she’ll tell her everything.