The Night Inspector (19 page)

She finally said, “Oh, my. Oh, well.”

I reached for the floor beside the bed, then forced my hand from the mask. I returned the hand to my side and felt the chill of the heavy sheets. “It’s the second time I’ve failed,” I said.

“No, you mustn’t regard it as failing.” She rolled toward me and kissed my arm, while her long, naked leg lay hard against my own leg, hip to hip and knee to knee. “Could this, in fact, be the third?” she asked.

“Are you counting, you mercantile woman? And the word is
failed
. If I’m here to enter you and haven’t and can’t, then the transaction is a failure.”

“No, dear. You aren’t here to enter me. You have a tongue and fingers.
You have toes. There are candles on the stand, as long as you’re careful. You could enter and set up housekeeping, for all that. Which, I would wager, is precisely why. You are not here to fuck like a stoat. You are here for me. There are emotions in the room.”

It would have been an apt moment to inquire as to hers. Our relationship was predicated, no matter our intimacies, on asking little—asking less, asking least.

“Shall I tell you an exciting story, Billy?”

“Something splendid in its filth? To whip me along?”

“I have a whip, if that’s what you’d like.”

I turned and rubbed her buttocks and the dip in her spine. It reminded me of a topography I had known but could not recall. And it was smooth, golden and smooth, as exciting to touch as her breasts. I lay my forehead against her shoulder and said, “I could not wound such perfect skin. I could not do you harm.”

“Do me good, then,” she said. “I’ll tell you again about the Irishman who loves to bugger.”

“Please, no,” I said. “Please do not. Tomorrow—”

“Ah,” she said. “I am paid for a dinner party tomorrow. Three others and I. A gentleman wishes his gentleman friends entertained. We dine in private rooms at Broadway at half past eight and for all of the night we are together. He is said, the host and my dinner companion, to have been known by President Lincoln. He is a manufacturer of boilers for the steam trains.”

She nipped my shoulder, then licked where she had bitten. Then she gently chewed at the place, as if I were to be her meal.

“What has he in mind?” I asked with what I hoped was a tone of idle curiosity.

“He wants, I would suppose, what most of these gentlemen want.” She scraped her teeth against the flesh above the shoulder bone. “To tear our clothing away after they have made a decorous dinner of roasted beef and excellent Champagne. To rape us on the table among the gold and
silver flatware and the platters from Limoges. To have us on the floor, or bent over chairs. To piss in our mouths. To spurt their mettle on our faces and our throats. The usual.” She bit me harder, for she knew—did she not?—that I was growing hard and that what I hated to hear from her was also an incitement. I turned sideways now, and so did she. She lay her leg around me and pulled us with it closer together, she moving up and then down and upon me while seizing me with her left leg and arm. She was like the concubine of the Arabian prince, telling her stories, charming my flesh with her words, but hardly to save her life. She spoke for the sake of mine, I could not help but think. She charmed me into blinded action, away from my mind, and therefore safe for a while, and—so far as the sensations were concerned—entire again.

The woman I dreamed I must kill was not the woman I killed. She was a Rebel whore or, anyway, a whore who served the Rebel soldiers. Let me avoid all judgments and only say that she was a woman of business. It was a farm, and of course in a dip of the farmland that was flanked by low hills and then a long, gradual incline: Jessie’s naked back. There were two large sheds or little houses instead of a single large building, and the men’s horses were left in a rude corral made of rope affixed to saplings and some stakes impaled in the hard, dusty ground. No trees grew near the house, and I would have to crawl down from the hills. I would therefore have to wait for darkness, and thus rely upon lights at windows, unless I could take them as they departed the women. Since there were few windows, I chose the latter course.

It seemed to me that four women worked the two buildings, and I wondered how they would manage the traffic when seven men approached down the long, gentle incline in which a muddy stream hardly trickled. It made the line of Jessie’s spine beneath my hands. Three of them waited outside after being greeted by two women, and the four men divided up and two went with each of those who had stood outside, one in what seemed to be a white slip—I wondered at the prediction by my dream—and the other, whose hair was boldly red, wore what seemed
to be a very long man’s shirt that covered her from shoulder to just above the knee, but which she wore unbuttoned. I could hear the deeper tones of the men and the laughter of the women, but discerned no words. I lay curled among large stones that someone, plowing, had dragged from the furrows at the end of what once was a crop field. I would be shooting slightly upward, so would have to correct by firing high to let the bullet drop. My hands would know the height.

I chewed a piece of jerky, as much to keep myself alert as to assuage any hunger. A vulture soared, and I worried lest he mistake me for a corpse and draw the eyes of the three Rebels to me. They sat and squatted near the corral, passing a bottle and smoking. I needed a little more time, I calculated, for the men inside to get busy—their carelessness would assure me of more cooperative targets when they rushed outside.

The vulture dropped lower, and through the telescope I saw one of the men look up to watch its flight. It was necessary to rush, I decided, and, leaning against the roundness of a rock that must have weighed four hundred or five hundred pounds, I lay the rifle at the junction of left hand and boulder, and I took them, one and two and three. I caught the third as he was reaching the door of the rightmost shed.

They were quick. One came out, naked except for stockings, and I caught him in the chest. I had aimed for the neck or head, but he was moving jerkily, waving a pistol and calling to his companions. No one came from the shed to the left. Out of the right-hand building, on his knees, wearing no shirt and no shoes, his trousers unbuttoned, came a curiously tall and bony fellow aiming at this, at that, at nothing at all, and I fired up and along the barrel of his gun and saw his face explode. I heard another door and, reloading, moved to the left side of the boulder and sighted on the other structure, out of which walked the woman, now naked, who had worn the man’s shirt—I could tell it was she from the frizzy red hair that waved up and out. Shots issued from the single small window behind her. They gave the percussion of handguns, and they
were unaimed, simply fired off in fear or hope. Through my sight, I watched her shout. Her face was contorted, violent, and brave. She held a shotgun and would not have reached me. She fired it, and I watched it slam her naked shoulder back. Her breasts jumped.

She went to the men I had taken down, and she called to one, the fellow I had caught in the chest and who was bleeding to death, I was certain. She moved as though he had spoken in reply, and then she took up the rifle that lay near him. She knew to check its charge—it was an old flintlock, I thought—and from the ground near the wounded man she took up powder and balls.

The men in the house who hid behind her continued to fire randomly, while she knelt and, scowling ferociously, did a more than acceptable job of loading up.

She looked at me. I saw that in the sight. I had grown careless and had exposed myself to her while regarding her nakedness and her courage. She pointed at me with a short arm and a stubby finger. A rage danced across her unpretty face. Her nipples were extended, like tiny fingers. And she stood to point again, and then to start across the dusty field toward the rocks among which I waited.

I put a shot a yard or so before her. She stopped. The men behind her fired punily at nothing from the shelter of her shed. I checked its window and doorway and saw the other whore, wrapped in a coarse gray blanket, peering at my rocks. She held a telescope, and she called to the one with the rifle. I moved the sight to her again and watched her come toward me.

“Please,” I said. She could not have heard me. “I beg you,” I said.

She strode forward, and then she stopped to look down, as if for the first time aware that she was naked in the dust of her field.

She called to me—in the direction, at any rate, in which I lay from her—and I tried to read her lips. She called the same words again.
This is my house
, I thought she said, or
This is my home—get out
. I could not tell, but I knew that she was challenging me. And I did feel challenged.
She was a gallant, redheaded, absolutely naked whore who was armed with a heavy weapon that she hefted with authority.

I said, once more, “Oh, please.”

I was watching as she called again, and watching still as she came closer, and because I had not fired again, the men at the house—I could tell from the sound of their shooting—had at last emerged. I put another shot into the earth near her and decided that it was time, at last, to go. I had stayed there far too long, enchanted by this wonderful woman I would have given much to greet, and to shake by the hand. I did not consider her as a partner in bed, I think, because she was more of a man than any of us men on her farm.

She walked closer and at last I could hear what she said: “All you can do is kill me, serpent. This is my
home.”

She was not a silent soldier, I thought, but she was as gallant a foe as a man could have. I stood, in violation of my central tactic, as if we fought in a duel. She knew to react at once, lifting the rifle to her small shoulder and taking aim. I cut her down and loaded behind the rock, then stood to watch her through the sight. A number of shots from the house went no place near me. She was missing most of her throat and all of her chest: I had not wanted to damage her face. I kept the sight there, and I looked at her cheeks and nose and lips, but they were part now of a corpse; she was only meat now and her heroism would be kept, from here on, inside the man who had killed her.

I covered the house. One of them scuttled back, but the other paused, and I shot him on the spot. There were only a Rebel and a whore left to contend with, and I decided to risk open movement. I walked at a good marching pace up the low hill the way I had come. Every now and again, I stopped and turned to face the sheds and scrutinized the land with my telescope. If they were lucky, they’d be fucking each other, I thought, because there was nothing left to do in the face of so much slaughter except, of course, wail at the skies—where the vulture, I remembered, was poised.

“I love when you do that,” Jessie said.

“You must tell no one.”

“We are our secret,” she said, wiping the tears at my eyes. “We are our good secret. No one knows about us except that you prefer me and will pay most dearly, and that I am pleased to be preferred.” She lay against me now, her head on my chest. I could feel her breath against my breast as she spoke. “And within that secret,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“The other one. About the poor children,” she said.

“Of course. I have our man, and I am laying the ground.”

“While
doing
a lay. A double lay, then, and one of them not for profit.”

“But he has latterly had a death in the family, and I must be tentative. But I have not forgotten the children. And I wonder if the recent death will not be powerful motive for him to lend us a hand.”

She moved her own hand and cradled me in it, cock and balls at rest. It was as if she held the whole of me.

Uncle Sidney Cowper, I came to realize, had admirably demonstrated the kind of discipline and restraint about which he had preached. This came to me of a wet, cold afternoon in my fourteenth year when I was out and at my chores—weather was no obstacle to the performance of duty, Uncle Sidney preached, and besides, we did need the wood to warm the house. I was splitting some limbs of birch to use as kindling in our kitchen stove and was concentrating on the blade of the axe in the greasy, chilly rain. I brought in an armful and was about to go out for another, pausing to filch a carrot from the simmering kettle of soup on the stove, when I heard a kind of snuffling from the pantry. It occurred to me that something large, say a raccoon, had got into our stores. At the door, just slightly ajar, I paused, for the snuffling had been joined by a lighter sound, as of panting, and it sounded more like a person, and less like a
raccoon. I went to one knee at the door and listened, pressing my ear to the space between the door and the jamb.

The lighter sound became “He … will … hear,” whispered in my mother’s voice.

The deeper snuffling was, of course, the energetic gasping for breath as he grasped for my mother of Uncle Sidney Cowper.

I do not know what caused me to stand and kick the door shut, but I did, still dripping in my soaked canvas coat, before I went outside and set to splitting thick, heavy sections of birch. It was pleasing that no thoughts came into my head or, if they did, were instantly banished by my care with the heavy axe and my concentration on meeting the top of each section with the wet, sharp blade. When I heard the door from the mudroom off the kitchen slam to, I knew to stand and catch my breath. I held the axe across my body with both hands, and I was uncertain about my intentions with it.

This thought seemed to catch Uncle Sidney, for he stopped in his progress toward me and studied his nephew, but then, to his credit, he came up within inches of me and looked into my eyes. He wrapped the skirts of his long coat beneath his legs, and he sat on the chopping block. I stepped back a pace, whether for the easier placement of a blow or for safety’s sake, I do not know.

Water poured off the shakes of the roof and into a couple of barrels, while the wind blew rain upon us and the spruces about the house nodded under the onslaught. My uncle said, “So what do you say, Billy? Was the slamming necessary? A gentleman doesn’t slam doors. Nor does he invade the privacy of others. Don’t pout, son.”