Black Alice

by Thomas M. ; Sladek Disch; Sladek Disch

  Catching herself chewing on a hangnail, she slapped her own hand so that it stung. It was a ritual she'd almost forgot ten, from years and years ago, when her father had cured her of thumb-sucking the same way.

  She regarded the pale flesh of her arms regretfully. Good heavens, at this rate she'd be all summer getting a tan, for her kidnappers probably would keep her indoors all the time. She wondered how long it would take and how much money they were asking for her. It didn't seem the right moment yet to ask.

  She worked loose a page of Just-So Stories and stuffed it behind the seat cushions. It would be, she hoped, a valuable clue. And good enough for stinky old Reverend Scott if he were caught with it!

  The Buick pulled down a narrow, garbage-strewn alley and stopped by the doorway of a wornout-looking brick building. A crudely-lettered sign above the door said: Royalton Hotel Service Entrance.

  The kidnapper glared down at Alice with his green eyes and whispered (though there was nobody nearby to have overheard) : 'Now are you going to come along without a peep—or will I have to use this?' He showed her the pistol.

  She shrank back into the corner of the seat and promised, this time, really to behave. All four nail-bitten fingers were in her mouth up to the second knuckle.

  He nodded and touched a button on his door. 'Get out,' he commanded.

  Reaching for the handle without seeing it, Alice opened the door and slid out of the car. She stood statue-still until he'd come around and taken her hand. 'If anyone inside sees us, you call me Daddy, understand?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'Yes, what?'

  'Yes, Daddy.'

  But the lobby of the Royalton, once they were inside, was as empty as a St. Adnobian classroom at five o'clock. He smiled, and flicked the butt of his filtertip into a metal ashtray, where it disappeared through a hole in the top. Alice bit her lip fretfully. She had hoped to get the cigarette butt for herself, as a clue.

  'Just like I hoped.' he said. 'Saturday morning. Ain't it beautiful?'

  'Yes, Daddy.'

  Hand in hand, kidnapper and kidnapped climbed the narrow service stairs. Patches of paint of some indecipherable colour clung to the grey wood along the untrodden edges. Then, down the third-floor corridor, tiptoe on the faded carpet, beneath which the floorboards rose and fell, creaking, so that Alice got the disquieting impression that the Royalton was put together as haphazardly as the tree house she had climbed up into last summer, right over Gwynn River Falls. How had she ever dared to do that!

  They stopped outside Room 323. He knocked and said, 'It's me—Harry.'

  Therefore, she reasoned, Roland Scott was an alias. Or, at least, Roland was.

  Heavy footsteps padded to the door, making the wooden floor groan. A key grated in the lock. The door opened.

  'Here. Good-bye. Nobody saw us.' Harry pushed Alice into the room. The door slammed behind her and was locked. Turning around, she found herself before simply the biggest woman she had ever seen (with the possible exception of Mrs. Buckler) who, with a rather flirtatious gesture, dropped the room key into the hollow between her monumental breasts.

  'Hello there, honey,' she said. 'I'm Bessy.'

  'Really?' Alice asked. 'Or is that your alias?'

  'Now ain't that a silly question? Because if I say it's my name, you'll just have to believe it is. But as a matter of fact, honey, it is my name, and no foolin'.'

  Bessy smiled, almost bashfully, and went to rummage in the canvas carryall on the chair beside the dismal double bed. Alice had a chance to look around the room. The dim overhead bulb revealed nothing but greyness overlaid with dirt: grey walls, grey floors, grey curtains over grey windows that looked across an airshaft at grey bricks. Aside from the bed, the only furniture was ricketty sticks and slabs of pine, which formed, in

  different combinations, chairs, a table, and a dresser, all painted grey. Above a sagging sink in one corner a mirror reflected greyness. Everything looked too dirty to touch, so Alice stayed where she was, in the middle of the room.

  Bessy returned and thrust her hand, pink palm up, under Alice's nose. 'Here honey, you swallow these.' Two pills, the smaller white and innocent-seeming, the larger, an ominous red lump of what looked to be solid plastic. Poison?

  'If you please, I'm forbidden to eat things that strangers give me,' Alice said in a flat voice.

  The woman laughed, and her golden incisor flashed. 'If I please! O sweet Jesus—if I please!' She sat back on the bed, holding her left hand over her jiggly breast.

  'All right now, you listen to me, honey, and listen close— you're going to be staying with me three days, maybe longer. If your ever-lovin' daddy don't come up with the ransom money right away, we may be stuck with each other I don't know how long. Now you're a bright little girl. You tell me how you're going to eat and drink if I don't give it to you. Huh?'

  Alice saw the logic of it. She was utterly, helplessly, hopelessly in the black woman's power. If they meant to kill her—if it were poison, Alice could do very little to prevent it. And if it weren't, why then there was no need to make a fuss.

  She swallowed the two ghastly pills. She would have liked a glass of water, but she mistrusted the murky glass on the ledge by the sink.

  And Harry had told her that kidnapping didn't have to be bad! Bad? It was worse than being vaccinated, almost.

  'Were they poison?' she asked. She could feel the larger pill still stuck halfway down her throat.

  'Just medicine, honey. To calm the nerves. Now, you just lay down there on that bed, while I get about my work.' She began emptying out her carryall. Alice's head hurt. She wished the hotel didn't exist. She wished that nothing was real but her and Dinah. Not the dirty grey room. Not the big black woman. Not anything. But that wasn't healthy, wishing things not to be real. She had to remember to live with her environment, the way Miss Godwin said.

  The black woman was still taking things out of her satchel. A steel thing. Shoes. A red thing. Clues...

  Then the greyness swallowed her whole.

  Waking, her stomach hurt awfully, as though it were a kettle full of boiling water, and she had an incredible headache. Was I his what migraine was like? No wonder her mother hated it!

  'Feel bad, Dinah honey?' a voice asked, not unfeelingly.

  She remembered the greyness, the room, the woman. But was she Dinah now? Dinah, who didn't exist?

  A great black hand, surprisingly firm, took hold of her arm and pulled her into a sitting position. The bed was all covered with newspapers. How queer! 'Come on, honey, sit up. That's it. We gonna do your hair.'

  The woman was holding scissors. Alice watched her groggily. The scissors snipped, and curls fell to the newspapers on the bed, and snipped ...

  'No!' Alice shrieked, pulling away. Her hands felt at the back of her head for the ponytail, now irreparably lost. Bessy clapped one hand over Alice's mouth and pulled her back to the bed with the other.

  Snip, and another lovely long lock fell to the newspapers. It would take months, years, to grow it back.

  The hand eased away from her mouth. 'You gonna keep quiet?'

  'Yes. I hate you though.' A tear trickled down her cheek. Snick. A wad of hair fell and stuck to the wetness.

  'Now we're gonna curl your hair a little bit, won't that be nice?'

  'I'm not going to talk to you,' Alice announced. She watched Bessy plug the cord of a peculiar appliance into the wall socket beside the bed. It was little more than a steel rod with a plastic handle. It smoked! Was Bessy going to torture her? 'What is it?' she asked in a whisper.

  'This?' Bessy spit on her forefinger and touched the smoking rod gingerly. The wet sizzled. 'This is just a li'l ol' curling iron, Dinah honey. It won't hurt. All I'm gonna do is give you curly hair, so you'll be pretty. All right?'

  Knowing that Bessy was doing this to prevent the police detectives from being able to identify her, Alice nodded. It was all part of being kidnapped, apparently.

  'My name is Alice, you know,' she said.r />
  Bessy paid her no heed. The curling iron touched her hair, and there was a sound like Rice Krispies, only louder. Alice flinched. 'It smells awful,' she protested.

  'It do, don't it, but it's gonna look real sweet.' Bessy chuckled. 'You wait and see if it don't.'

  When her hair was nothing but stiff, wiry curls, Bessy pulled Alice to the sink and told her to close her eyes real tight. A cold, thick liquid was brushed into the resisting curls, and a new and worse stench was added to the old. It seemed to go on for hours, first the cold squish, then hot water, then more cold squish.

  At last there was the welcome hum of a hand hair dryer and the balmy rush of hot air across her itching, burning scalp. Bessy gave her a towel for her face. When she was all dry, she peeped open her eyes fearfully to see what her hair would look like in the speckled mirror. She stared, dull-eyed, frozen with shock.

  The face in the mirror was not the face of Alice Raleigh. The tight black curls of Bessy's handiwork framed a face of deep, gingerbread brown, from which two pale blue eyes, the sole remnant of the real Alice Raleigh, stared out desolately. The mouth in the mirror opened wide to scream, but Bessy was ready for that. Alice bit at the hand covering her mouth, she clawed and kicked and writhed, all to no purpose. She was so little, and Bessy was so big.

  The huge hand that covered her mouth covered her nose as well, so that she couldn't breathe, the other hand held two more pills, a white and a red, in readiness. When the hand came away Alice had to gasp for air. The pills popped into her opened mouth, and the hand came down again so that she could not spit them out. In defeat, Alice swallowed.

  In a few minutes all her resistance was gone. She wanted nothing but sleep, but Bessy would not let her lie down.

  'Come on, Dinah, we got to get you changed out of that dress.'

  'I'm not Dinah.'

  Bessy, heedless, handed her a short red dress with piping on it, a dress that was not only fearfully shoddy and faded, but years too young for Alice. Or for Dinah?

  If only she could think, but her head was reeling so that she had all she could do to keep balanced while Bessy changed her out of the turquoise dress and into the red check.

  To think: why, for instance, was she black? Had Bessy painted her while she was asleep? Was that possible? She dawdled, pondered, dozed.

  'Upsy-daisy, Dinah darlin'. We going to leave this fair city now.*

  The sunlight coming in through the window was the last muddy dregs of the summer afternoon. Alice could barely make out the individual bricks on the other side of the airshaft.

  Bessy plopped her on to the bed and pulled off her shoes and long white stockings and gave her, instead, a pair of scuffed-up saddle shoes, with no socks at all.

  While Bessy busied herself carrying the newspapers and shorn hair into the toilet across the hall, Alice regarded herself sleepily in the mirror. Was it herself, that figure in red, its kinky hair awry, chewing a brown thumb, blinking improbable, drowsy blue eyes?

  'What's this?' Bessy asked, holding up Just-So Stories.

  'It's my book! Don't throw that away!'

  Bessy carefully pushed the nondescript book into the bottom of the carryall.

  As in a dream, Alice was led out of the door, down a different staircase, out into the dusky streets. They walked forever till they came to the Greyhound Bus Station, where, at the candy and souvenirs counter Bessy bought a twenty-nine-cent pair of sunglasses. Alice was glad to have them, for the terminal was painfully bright. You could sleep while you waited on the orange plastic benches, and in the bus you could sleep even better in the soft snuggly seat next to the window, with Bessy's overlapping middle serving almost as a sort of blanket.

  With something like surprise, Alice realised that the whining noise she'd been hearing ever since they'd left the hotel was her own voice. She hadn't meant to whine, but rather to scream, to tell the people about her who she was.

  The light in the bus went on. A man came down the aisle, crying, for some reason, the single word 'Pillows!'

  It was enough. She wakened and struggled to her feet, pushing away the imprisoning fat of her abductress. 'I'm white!' she screamed. 'Look at me! I'm white! I'm white!'

  Bessy pushed her back into the soft seat. The lights went off. Alice tried to say more, but her voice was only a pathetic squeak.

  'Look at my eyes,' she whispered. 'My eyes are blue.'

  'I'm sorry,' Bessy announced to the bus at large. 'I'm awful sorry, folks. My little Dinah here ain't never been away from her home before, has you, Dinah honey? And this trip up north has got her all upset. You've got to excuse her, folks.'

  But no one appeared to be listening to the apology. No one appeared to have heard Alice's outburst. None of the whole embarrassing incident had, as far as they were concerned, even happened.

  Chapter 6

  Frank Yerby was Delphinia's favourite author, and of all his novels the one that Delphinia liked best was The Foxes of Harrow, a tale that was, according to its cover, 'charged with all the passion and violence of the Old South', Delphinia could never get enough of the Old South, but this novel had something that none of the others did. Delphinia discerned in the unhappy life of Odalie, the mistress of Harrow, a remarkable parallel to her own, and she could never read about Odalie without wanting to cry. Like that unfortunate woman, Delphinia was descended of a fine old French family proud of its heritage; she was of a passionate yet sensitive nature, and beautiful and frail as a spring flower. Like Delphinia, Odalie was of so refined a nature and so delicate a constitution that it was, if not impossible, then very, very difficult, for her to fulfil her conjugal duties.

  Of course there were differences too, but they were superficial. Delphinia, for instance, was not, due to a cruel jest of Fate, the mistress of Harrow or of anything like Harrow. As for Rodipoo, it was hard to say exactly how much he resembled the master of Harrow, Stephen Fox. He was still handsome (though, it is true, his hair did not glow like foxfires); he was, most times, a gentleman and considerate of his wife's finer feelings. She decided that, despite everything, she loved Rodipoo every bit as much as Odalie had loved Stephen Fox.

  As though to put this decision to the test, Rodipoo came into the bedroom and, after a perfunctory greeting, took a seat by the window. They sat in silent communion as the room grew dusky, Delphinia loving Rodipoo, and Rodipoo, presumably, loving Delphinia.

  At last, growing bored, she handed him the book. 'Would you read a bit of this aloud for me, darling? The light is going, and I feel one of my migraines coming on. I left off where Odalie said, "I've come to be your wife ... if you still want me."'

  Indulgently, Roderick read aloud to his wife. Even blurred by whiskey his voice could send shivers through her. So refined, so gentlemanly! A pity that he would never be able to go before the bar! What jury could resist such a voice? She had never understood what had happened exactly, why that career had been denied him. There was, for those who would believe it, that ugly story that her father had tried to make her listen to, after she'd come back from the elopement and he was trying to persuade her to seek an annulment. Roderick had assured her it was a tissue of lies. Donald Bogan had been the guilty party, Donald Bogan, whose father was a judge on the State Supreme Court; Jealous of Roderick and Delphinia's love, he had shifted the blame for his terrible act to his unsuspecting fraternity brother. Roderick's family, though genteel, could do nothing to save him; Delphinia's father, who might have helped, simply refused! Yes, it was a terrible injustice; it reminded her strongly of what happened to Mack Lefevre, the hero of Trammermill (another novel of the Old South). Mack Lefevre had been sole heir to Trammermill, a fine old Southern plantation, but then one day he had a duel with ...

  A slight worry-frown creased Delphinia's pale brow, as the sound of running footsteps distracted her from the train of her thoughts. The footsteps were too heavy to have been her daughter's, and surely all the servants would know better than to stampede up the stairs. All of them except...

 
As Delphinia suspected, it was the governess, Miss Uppity Godwin, who came stumbling into the room—without knocking!—looking quite as though she'd been through a tornado. Roderick leaped to his feet, and Delphinia had to bite her lip to keep from reprimanding him then and there. Standing up for a coloured servant, indeed! But it wouldn't do to mention it now, in front of Nell Godwin. Not, it seemed, that she would have noticed, for she was running off at the mouth a mile a minute, in a manner quite impossible for Delphinia to understand. Alice was learning to talk the same way, like some damn Yankee Northerner. It was really a disgraceful exhibition, and all of this on top of the agony that her migraine was causing her!

  'Oh my God!' said Roderick, running his hands through his toupee. 'Oh, Jesus!' Such language!

  'Yes,' continued Miss Godwin, 'and then I was locked in the car with him all the rest of the day. It was to give them time to take her wherever they had to. Didn't you wonder where we were?'

  'I asked Emmie this afternoon, and she said you were taking her to the beach.'

  Miss Godwin wrung her hands. 'I tried to find out something. I tried to talk with him, but he wouldn't say anything, not a word. It's my fault for having believed him and gone into the car, but when he said that Mr. Duquesne was ill, I didn't think ... Oh, it was so awful, I'm so sorry!'

  'Kidnapped,' said Roderick. 'Kidnapped!'

  Delphinia was beginning to understand what had happened.

  Miss Godwin began crying into a soiled yellow handkerchief and sank into the imitation Louis Quatorze chair. Really, that was going too far! Without so much as a by-your-leave!

  'Kidnapped?' asked Delphinia, in a sceptical tone. 'Who is kidnapped?' She leaned forward in her sickbed, unmindful of the arthritis that would ordinarily have made this movement impossible. She clawed the silk comforter off her legs and demanded imperiously: 'What the hell are you talking about, Nell?'

  The canaries, always responsive to the moods of their mistress, began to screech and flutter, while the governess, scorning to answer, sat there in the Louis Quatorze chair and snuffled into her handkerchief.