Tell Them Katy Did (3 page)

“I couldn’t leave without saying goodbye, could I?” Claire said, only the slightest edge to her voice.

“No, I guess not,” Lisa said, her tone, her manner, a bit uncertain. Lisa was rarely uncertain. They stood, regarding each other, the silence growing awkward. A turntable whirred and clicked, and Sinatra, too, went quiet, waiting.

“You weren’t at Jason’s funeral,” Claire said.

Lisa took a cigarette from a china dish, lit it with a silver lighter, made a show of exhaling slowly. “Actually, I hardly knew Jason,” she said, not looking at Claire.

“You know me. I thought we were friends. You said often enough that we were.” Lisa’s shrug was pointed, deliberate. “If not friends, then what were we?” Claire insisted.

“Can I get you a drink? Don’t you want to take off your coat?”

“No. I want you to tell me what we were, Lisa. You and I. If not friends.”

Lisa sighed, stubbed the barely smoked cigarette out in a crystal ashtray. “Christ, I hate scenes,” she said. She flicked a phantom bit of tobacco from a crimson lip. “If you really must know, darling, you were a challenge. You were so, oh, I don’t know, so married, so virtuous. I find innocence tempting. It’s a trait of mine. I never said I was a nice person.”

“Is that all I was?” Claire asked. “A score?”

The corners of Lisa’s mouth turned up a little and she cocked an eyebrow. “Well, of course, one doesn’t get a score for a fumble. Or were you planning to…?” She left the question unfinished, staring instead at the gun Claire had taken from the deep pocket of her coat. She looked from the gun into Claire’s face, saw there the answer to the question she’d been about to ask.

“Ah,” she said, long and drawn out. Claire said nothing. “You can’t get away with it, you know. People get caught for murder. They never get away with it.”

“Well, but, we wouldn’t hear about the successful ones, would we? If someone got away with it, I mean.”

Lisa said nothing. Under the expert makeup, her face paled, making her lips redder still, as if they were berry-stained.

“You have a reputation, Lisa,” Claire said. “All those married men, all those jealous wives. Who on earth would ever suspect me? And everyone thinks I left town earlier today, you’d heard that yourself. I’m on my way to California already. That’s what everyone believes.”

“The gun,” Lisa started to say, but Claire interrupted her.

“The gun’s not registered. Anyway, I’ll toss it somewhere along the road, far enough away from here that even if it’s ever found, no one will connect it to you. Or me.”

Lisa squared her shoulders, summoned up a trace of the old Lisa, brash, confident, almost arrogant. It was, Claire thought, an admirable performance, under the circumstances.

“Surely you don’t really mean to kill me,” she said. She gave Claire a disbelieving smile, her head tilted in that way she had, and took a step in Claire’s direction. “Over one lousy little kiss?”

Claire smiled too. “It was lousy, wasn’t it?” she said.

The log cracked again in the fireplace. Claire started, and pulled the trigger. The bang was louder than she expected. She winced and jerked her hand, but as close as she was there was no possibility of her missing.

She stood, looking down at the dead woman on the floor, the pale yellow silk splashed now with scarlet. She thought she ought to feel remorse, but to her surprise, she didn’t. An eye for an eye. Lisa had killed Jason, as surely as if she’d shot him. Fair was fair, wasn’t it?

There was a clatter of footsteps on the stairs and Will, Lisa’s ten-year old boy, charged into the room. “Mom, I heard…” he said, and stopped short, staring. His eyes, his expression, reminded her of Jason’s, that other time. When he’d barged in unexpectedly.

“Will,” she said, astonished. “I thought you were spending the weekend with your father.”

“My dad’s got the flu,” he said. He looked from her to his mother, and back to her. His face was ghost white. “Are you going to shoot me?” he asked after a long moment. His voice cracked a little but he stood his ground, arms at his sides, at attention.

She had turned toward the door when he dashed in, had forgotten the gun in her hand. She realized now she was pointing it at him.

“No,” she said. She lowered her hand, took a step backward, and dropped into the chair by the window. “No, I’m not.”

Outside, it had started to snow again, a furious wind whipping the big flakes against the pane in waves. She thought of the waves in California, the way they seemed to pause for a second or two—translucent in the afternoon sunlight, like they were carved from jade—just before they rolled up onto the beach.

“You’d better call the cops, Will,” she said.

Midnight Special

A Note from the Author

It is a bit of a departure from form to write an introduction to a short story. In this case, however, I thought it might interest the reader to have some idea how I came to write a story that is so fundamentally different from my usual work.

It is not that the story is heterosexually oriented, nor that the protagonist is a female, that makes it so different, nor even the fact that she is a black woman. I have said in the past that a white author could not write specifically about the black experience, but assuming this woman to be a part of my contemporary culture, there are surely enough similarities in our day-to-day experience to make the transition, if not easy, certainly not undoable. After all, we all share certain tendencies, likes, needs, fears, wants, and from them a competent author should be able to construct a story that crosses both the gender and the racial barriers.

But it is exactly there that
The Midnight Special
becomes such a radical departure for me, because I do address the black experience and not in a contemporary setting, either. The story is set in 1949, and my Marilou is a madam in a black whorehouse in Hot Springs, Arkansas, the Las Vegas of its time. In short, a world entirely foreign to my experience.

You might well ask yourself why on earth I would choose to make things so difficult for myself; but any author can tell you, there are stories the author chooses, and stories that choose the author. This was one of the latter, and when it first presented itself to me, I resisted it mightily, not thinking I could possibly do it justice. Be written, however, it would, and in time I sat down dutifully to write.

Even more challenging, I did something I’ve never done before, and which I always advised other writers against doing—I think I can safely say that most, if not all, writing instructors would advise writers against dialect.

Why then did I choose to write this story in dialect? For the same reasons as given above—the story demanded it.

I wrote it first “straight.” I could see immediately that it didn’t work. I tried writing the dialogue in dialect, and the narrative without it. I tried…well, suffice to say, I have never done as many rewrites on anything as I did of this story. Instead of the usual days that it takes me to write a short story—after all, this one is only about 3,000 words—I spent months on it, all the while convinced that I would never get it published. That it appears here in ebook format is a tribute to the courage and the artistic integrity of the publisher of Untreed Reads.

Was it worth the time and effort? Realistically, that’s not for me to say. The value of a story is not in how and why the author wrote it, nor the publisher issued it. The merit of a story is in itself, in its telling, and in what it brings to the reader.

Deciding is your role in the endeavor. It is my sincere hope that some of you who read it will think that
The Midnight Special
is worth the telling, worth the reading.

In which case, I will have done all that I, as an author, can reasonably expect to do.

Victor J. Banis

Midnight Special

Hot Springs, Arkansas, 1949

“He here. He at the back door,” Sukie say.

It was early. They wasn’ open for business yet, most the girls just layin’ ‘round by the windows, fannin’ themselves, sometimes callin’ out to men on the street below, but more friendly like than serious. Rufus busy cleanin’ the bar. Marilou be in her office, checkin’ yesterday’s money when Sukie come in without knockin’, slid inside all quiet like and push the door shut behind her.

“He at the back door,” she say, lookin’ as scared as maybe she seen a ghost. Added, like it make everything clear, “He been shot.”

Marilou stare at her like she musta made it up. Knew who she meant, ’course. They be talkin’ about him jes a little bit ago, nobody hardly talkin’ ’bout nobody else. Wasn’t expectin’ him to turn up here, though.

“They lookin’ for him all over the place. How he get here an’ nobody see him?” she say, and, “he gonna get us all kilt, an’ he ain’t careful.”

“You want me to send Rufus? Tell him to git?”

Marilou thought on that for a minute, rollin’ her eyes up at the cut-glass chandelier like she thought she find some message wrote up there, tellin’ her what to do. After a bit, she give a great sigh and heave her big ole self out of the chair. “Ought to shoot him mysef,” she say in an exasperated voice. “Mens. Always tryin’ to git that ole rib back, isn’ they? You hasta help me.”

Sukie shook her head, eyes wide in her coal-colored face. If she had the nerve, she say no, but one dark look from Marilou an’ she jes shut right up. She know better than to sass Marilou when she say like that. She follow Marilou meekly through the bar, where Rufus hardly give them a glance—women’s business, was what he figured, too early to be customer trouble—and down the hall.

“Huh?” Marilou say, openin’ the back door and seein’ nobody there.

“In the bushes,” Sukie say. “I tole him to hide hisself, lessen somebody come along and see him.”

“Where you at?” Marilou demanded in a sibilant whisper. The azalea bush next the door groaned. She stepped off the stoop and looked into the bush. A pair of eyes, wide and bloodshot, blinked back at her.

“Mighty glad to see you, old gal,” he say.

And she say, “It ain’ mutual, tha’s for sure. You wantin’ to get me kilt, tha’s what you comin’ round here for?”

“Didn’ have no place else to go,” he say, breathin’ heavy, the words comin’ out slow, like they been penned up too long. “They after me like a dog.”

“Tha’s the truth,” she say. “They lookin’ all over the place for you, every policemans in two counties.”

“They ain’t found me yet. You gonna help me, or what?”

She took her time over that, didn’ answer him direct, either, but she say to Sukie, “We best take him up the back stairs.”

It was two flights up, supportin’ him between them and him not able to do much more than shuffle his feet. He stank, too, of sweat and blood and dirty water from some place he been hidin’.
Prolly down by the crick
, she figured, it was a crick kind of smell. And fear, you could smell the fear on him worst of all, hung about him like a fart round a hound dog.

In Marilou’s room, the biggest bedroom in the place, which suited her position just fine, she propped him by the door, Sukie helpin’ him to stand. Marilou went to a big ole wardrobe against one wall and, puttin’ her broad shoulder again it, rolled it out the way. Behind it, another set of stairs, narrow and steep, went up to the attic.

“I never knowed this was here,” Sukie said, surprised out of being afraid.

“Wasn’t supposed to know. Never tole nobody about it. Rufus, he probably ’member this attic. Or maybe not. I fix it for mysef when we had that trouble couple years back, figure I might need me someplace to hide. Git him on the cot, there.”

Except for the cot and a pillow on it, there wasn’ much else in the room but a bucket for a toilet, flies makin’ a racket around it, and another bucket full of dirty water. The blind was pulled down tight over the one window. Across the way, at the Gypsy Casino, the neon lights flashed on and off, on and off, green and red splashes leakin’ through the window blind, dust thick everywhere. The room like an oven. Not a breath of air stirrin’.

They wrestle him onto the bed. He give a weary smile.
Look like a death head grinnin’ up at me,
was how she saw it. Behind her, Sukie slip out the door and disappear down the stairs. Jes as well, Marilou thought, she be too excitable.

“Much obliged,” he say in a weary voice. “’Preciate it greatly, I surely do.”

“Don’t be gettin’ too grateful, an’ don’t you be thinkin’ you stayin here either,” Marilou say. “I leaves you rest till morning, tha’s all. Be way quieter then, ’bout four, five o’clock, jes ’fore the sun come up. Can’t keep you here past that. Daylight come, it too dangerous.”

“I unerstan’.”

“Jes so you do. Don’ mean to be hateful, but I got my own skin to think of, me an’ the girls. Them girls all depends on me to look out for ’em.”

“Everybody know you good to your girls. You always good to me, too, honey. I know that. I’s a mean bastard sometimes, wasn’ I?’

“They’s worse ones, I ’spect. Men, they all mean, you ast me. Somepin about that sap you all got down there. Don’ matter much. Runnin’ a place like this, you see some bad ones, is all.”

“You always my favorite, though, I swear it. Never mean to treat you bad. Jes the way things happen. You right, I reckon, it’s the sap.” He paused and say, like the idea just popped into his head, “You wanna take a ride while I be here? For ole time sake?”

She snorted. “Listen at the fool. Can’ hardly crawl up the stairs, two women hepin’ him, and he layin’ there thinkin’ ’bout poontang, if that ain’ jes like a man.”

“I ain’ dead yet, girl. If we was careful, I could…”

“’Sides,” her eyes narrow, “I ain’ got what you like down there nowadays. Not what I be hearin’, anyways.”

“Ah, that shit.” He coughed. “People talkin’ queer shit, tha’s all it is. You oughts to know that. Do women all the time, since I’s knee high, always like it jes fine an’ I ’spect the ladies do too, most of ’em acted plenty grateful, seem like. That other stuff, tha’s just prison business, it all you got to do when you in there. But I always thinkin’ ’bout women when I doin’ it, and tha’s no lie. I swear it, most the time, I thinkin’ ’bout you, honey, an’ you wantin’ to know the truth.”