Billy Bathgate (23 page)

TWELVE

W
hen I was through she didn’t say anything. She handed me the wine bottle. I tilted my head up to drink from it and when I looked again she was no longer sitting beside me but had slid over the mossy bank and was by means of crevasses in the rocks and the small pine saplings growing from them lowering herself down the side of the gorge. I lay on my belly and watched. When she was two-thirds of the way down the mist enveloped her.

I wondered if she was going to do something really stupid. If I had told my story too well. I had not included everything, that for instance when Irving and the pilot were talking in the wheelhouse Bo Weinberg begged me to go below and see what was happening to her. I had done that and heard a little, not much, because the boat’s engines were so loud down there. I listened for a few minutes outside the door of the cabin where Mr. Schultz had taken her and then I had gone back up to the deck and told Bo she was all right, that Mr. Schultz was pacing back and forth and explaining his point of view. But I had just wanted to make it easy for him.

“You wanted life?” I had heard Mr. Schultz shout. “Here, Miss Debutante, this is it, this is what it looks like!”

And then I couldn’t hear anything for a while. I hunkered
down in the passageway and just before I was about to give up I put my ear to the door and I heard his voice again: “You don’t care for what’s dead, do you? I’m telling you aside from the actual details he’s dead. Can you understand that? You can forget the dead, can’t you? I think you’ve forgotten already, haven’t you? Well, I’m waiting, it’s either a yes or a no. What? I can’t hear you!”

“Yes,” she said, or must have. Because then Mr. Schultz said: “Ahh, that’s too bad. That’s too too bad for Bo,” and then he laughed. “Because if I thought you loved him I might have changed my mind.”

I grabbed her skirt and shook it out and tossed it over the side and watched it float into the mist and disappear. What was I expecting? That she would find it, put it on, and climb back up? I was not acting sensibly. I dropped over the side and turned my back to the gorge and went after her. It was harder than it looked, I found that out almost immediately with my head barely below the edge when the root I put my foot on broke away and I almost fell. I didn’t like staring at rock face three inches from my nose. The rocks were scratching the shit out of my elbows and knees. I was in a panic of descent, I don’t know what I feared, that she would just leave me there forever, that someone would find her, take her, do something bad to her. Some woods maniac just waiting for the opportunity. But it was more than that, that she would find him, that oblivious to the uses that could be made of her she would somehow hone in on him wherever he was skulking, in whatever foul den. Some of the pine saplings had stickum on them which glued up my hands and helped me to hold on. I felt the heat on my back, the farther I descended the hotter it was becoming. In one place there was a ledge and I stopped to rest: the sound of the water was mountainous, like coal pouring down a chute. Getting off the ledge was harder than getting on. Below it there were fewer and smaller saplings to hold on to. Soon there were none and I held on by sticking my sneakers in cracks and clutching outcroppings with my fingers. Then all at once it clouded up, it was chilly, and I realized there were boulders to stand on, and so, bit by bit I
climbed down these piled boulders to the bottom and stood in a white mist with the sun high above me diffuse and pale.

The waterfall was to my right about twenty or thirty yards, it was the last and longest fall of the water and had not been visible from the top. It came home to me that falling water is what makes gorges, I mean this could not have been news to anyone but it was practically the first bit of nature I had ever seen in operation. I have read about dinosaurs too but that would not be the same as finding the bones of one. The water coursed swiftly past where I stood on a steeply tilted bank of sand and rock, the channel couldn’t have been more than six or eight feet wide but it was the widest here of any place that I could see right or left. Her skirt lay on the ground where I had flung it. I rolled it up under my arm and I headed to the left away from the waterfall, and soon I was on boulders again, jumping from one to another with the water boiling beneath and around them, this was all in a generally downhill direction, I felt as if I was descending into a pore of the planet, and then I came around a bend and was looking down at a cantilevered ledge shaped like an enormous arrowhead, and piled on it were her clothes and shoes and socks. I leapt down and ran to the edge, I saw below me a clear black pool of water entirely still except for a silver rim of spill off at the far side.

It seemed to me I looked at this water until anybody under it would have to surface or drown. I was terrified, I pulled off my sneakers and shirt and prepared to jump in, I don’t swim very well but I felt I could dive down in the water if I had to and at this moment the water shook and she broke into the air, her head and shoulders rising, and shouted or drew a great gasping breath that was like a cry of pain as the water poured off her shoulders, and then she threw her arms behind her and settled and floated on her back with her arms outstretched and lay there in the water with her chest heaving and her legs seeming to attenuate and wither as they floated downward in the black water.

After a while she was upright, shaking her head and smoothing her hair. She swam sidestroke out of my sight and appeared
a minute later where I was not looking, climbing up onto the ledge with her body pale and wet and her teeth chattering and her lips blue. She looked at me without recognition. I rolled my shirt into a wad and rubbed her as she stood with her knees pressed together and her arms across her breasts, I rubbed her shoulders and back, the backs of her legs and after a moment’s hesitation her backside and then the front of her legs while she stood and held her hands at her mouth and shivered herself warm. Then, for the second time in my life, I watched Mrs. Preston get dressed.

She said little on the walk back. We followed the gorge to where it went dry, and then widened on smaller rocks, and finally flattened out with the land. I was overwhelmed and could not speak on my own initiative and waited for her, and waited upon her, I felt we had an alliance of sorts, but it was conditional, as if I still had to grow up, I felt ignorant, I felt chastened and foolish and like a child. We walked again through the brown pine-needle forest and found the logging trail and came out into the meadows. She said, “Did he really ask you to protect me?”

“Yes.”

“How very strange,” she said.

I didn’t answer.

“I mean that he would think I couldn’t take care of myself,” she said by way of clarification. She stooped where the sun shone through the trees to pick a small blue flower drooping over like a bell. “And you promised him you would?”

“Yes.”

She came up to me and hung the flower over my ear and I found myself holding my breath till I no longer felt her touch. She sent out a very secret and indiscriminate beaming attraction, Mrs. Preston, as if it was always there whether you were or not.

“Oh don’t move it,” she said. “You’re such a pretty little devil, do you know that?”

“That’s what they tell me,” I said and a few minutes afterward we scooted down a wooded embankment on our heels and came
out to the dirt road and so eventually to the paved road leading down the hill to Onondaga. I walked backward to look at her in the sun. Her hair had lost its wave and was dried sleek and off the forehead with the tracks of her fingers showing her careless attention to it. She had not a bit of makeup on her face but those full lips were their natural color now and her skin had regained the blush of her life. She was still not smiling though, and she had reddened, swimmer’s eyes. Before we got back to the hotel she asked me if I had a girlfriend and I said I did, and she said whoever that girl was was lucky, but the truth was when she asked I felt guilty because I was no longer thinking of little Becky, who seemed to me now no more interesting than a child, but only of her. I was frightened by her, this woods guide, oh what she had shown me, like some counselor with a whistle on a lanyard, for the first time I understood what a match she made with Mr. Schultz, she took her clothes off to gunmen, to water, to the sun, life disrobed her, I understood why she went with him, this was not like mothers and fathers of ordinary existence, there was no consideration of love, it was not a universe of love they livedin, fuckingand killing as they did, it was a large, empty resounding adulthood booming with terror.

I thought about her from the moment we went to our separate rooms and I lay on my bed in the late afternoon as dull-witted as the weather which hung hot and heavy in the Onondaga Hotel with the gauzy white curtains motionless in the open windows. The curtains grew gray, darkened, and were lit by a broad flashing and after an interval there was a muffled distant thunder. I now liked her far more than I had and knew in fact I might even be sweet on her, as how could a poor boy not after what she had put me through. Of course I had not entirely lost my wits and knew that whatever feelings I had I would suffer them in silence if I wanted to live on Earth a little while longer. I closed my eyes and watched her again climbing out of the pool at the bottom of the gorge with her nipples all crimped and blue and her pale pubic hair stringy with dripping water. I thought this time I was seeing someone who had tried to die, though of course I couldn’t be sure because she lived an enlarged existence, it was
not her nature to be contained by judgments. I wondered what would happen if her intimacy with Mr. Schultz prevailed over my confidences and she told him the things I’d reported. But I had the feeling she would not, that she had the character of independence, that she lived alone in some sort of mystery of her own making and that it was her integrity to be self-driven and self-communicating only, however alluringly close she might drift toward anyone at any given moment. I told myself that she had finally expressed some appropriate human grief and thought maybe that was a large part of my new liking for her, or tried to persuade myself of that anyway, even though it didn’t quite jibe with the heavy tool I found in my hand with its own made-up mind existing, as she did, in the demonstrated inadequacy of my thought. I was resolved by the time I had had a cold shower in the big white bathroom all my own and had dressed for the evening in my suit and tie and glasses that no matter what my feelings they would not deter me from the justice my life demanded. I really had promised Bo Weinberg I would look after her and protect her, and now that I had told her, I would have to, but I hoped for my sake as well as hers that it wouldn’t ever come to that.

THIRTEEN

B
y now in our stay at the Onondaga Hotel, as in any billet occupied for any length of time, the troops had been provided with a supplemental bill of fare that was more like home. Mr. Schultz had established a supply line from New York and once a week a truck came up with steaks and chops, racks of lamb, fish on ice, delicatessen, good booze and beer, and every couple of days someone went down to Albany, where an airplane landed with fresh New York rolls and bagels and cakes and pies and all the newspapers. The hotel kitchen was kept hopping, but nobody in there seemed to mind, as I thought they would, the implied judgment in all of this seeming to have escaped them. Everyone was without undue pride or umbrage or sensitivity, only too willing to cook and serve Mr. Schultz everything he provided them with, and in fact seemed to pick up in their own qualifications just being proximate to the big time.

Dinner became a ritual occasion as if we were all a family gathering at the same hour, though at different tables, at the end of the day. The dinners tended to go on awhile and were often the occasion for extended reminiscences on Mr. Schultz’s part. He seemed relaxed at these times unless he drank too much, in which case he became surly or depressed and glared at one or another of us if we seemed to be having too good a time despite
him, or eating too happily the food on our plates, which he liked to ask us to pass over to him for spite so that he could spear this or that morsel for himself before giving the plate back, he did this to me several times, which never failed to enrage me or cause me to lose my appetite, once he went over to the other table and took a steak from their platter, it was as if he couldn’t be generous and hospitable without feeling at the same time that people were getting the best of him, and on these nights dinner was most unpleasant with Miss Drew excusing herself when she didn’t like what was going on, it really took the heart out of you to think he begrudged the very food going into your mouth, it was demeaning to have your portion violated, and these evenings were not good evenings at all.