Irina, suddenly her friend, waved her over. “They sent the wrong person from Billings,” she said. “The wrong iced coffin. It was a fat man, not this girl. Now they wait again.”
Dulcy headed out for Margaret’s house, where she was the second Sacajawea on the gossip circuit: Vinca Macalester had talked about a body arriving, and a mix-up, and mentioned X-rays with her husband’s new machine. She’d also passed on the news that Mrs. Fenoways had died the night before in horrible suffering, riddled and wracked by cancer while Gerry and Hubie howled at her bedside. The sons had been drinking since the morning; now they were waiting for the girl’s body at Hruza’s Cold Storage.
Dulcy said she had errands in that direction; would Margaret go with her? Margaret would not; Margaret had an aversion to the Fenoways brothers.
Which was only sane, but Dulcy had a compulsion to know the worst. She felt like her own body was arriving on the train. She bought two blouses at Thompson’s, a pair of spring shoes at A. W. Miles, a magazine at Sax and McCue’s, where a five-year-old boy flirted with her; every little thing helped. She stopped at Wong’s for the laundry she knew wasn’t ready yet, and she played tiddledywinks with another small boy propped on the counter between bales of linen while Joe Wong’s wife counted items. Through the laundry’s window she watched Durr and Falk march back and forth between the hotel and the studio two more times while Lewis sat on a bench in front of the studio, just one door down from the laundry, and read a magazine. When Samuel emerged from the newspaper office and waved to him, she followed.
The Fenoways brothers were holding court at Hruza’s Cold Storage, moving in and out of the tavern next door while a boy ran back and forth between the telegraph office and this temporary police station to check on the status of the girl’s body. Dulcy, pretending to admire dresses through the window two doors down, smelled cold and woodchips from the open door. The crowd of men in Hruza’s anteroom stood in a fog of tobacco smoke, talking loudly about dead mothers. When she saw Durr come around the corner, Dulcy hurried into Winslow’s Grocery across the street, and Gerry Fenoways’ voice followed her like a wall. My mother’s fucking dead, and it’s Saturday; let’s get this thing into the beyond, send this little lassie back to her own home hell. You know this isn’t some effing maiden we’re discussing here—so young, but the bits seem quite used. And meanwhile none of you cunts give a shit about my poor bleeding mom.
In Winslow’s, a nervous clerk followed her while Gerry howled on: at Durr to take his portrait and hurry the train, at Bixby to find that Swedish fuck. Dulcy fluttered in a circle, then said she needed to pick out things for her house, to be delivered later. Ten pounds of flour, ten pounds of sugar, coffee that had flavor... she nattered away while a boy took dictation and politely ignored repetitions.
I could run faster than this fucking train. This girl fucked faster than this fucking train. Go ask again. “Doesn’t he know how to use the station telephone?” said Winslow, a twitchy man growing twitchier. He had a gray mustache that seemed wider than his bony face. Dulcy, ordering food she wouldn’t be able to taste for weeks, was beginning to be hungry, and she eyed casks of smoked and salted fish, Karkalay and Norway bloaters, Holland and kippered herring, anchovies and mackerel. She bought some smoked eel and was at the cash register when a new sound echoed across the street, someone singing. Everyone in the store walked to the front to see whatever this new noise meant.
Che gelida manina,
se la lasci riscaldar.
Cercar che giova?
Al buio non si trova.
What a frozen little hand. Let me warm it for you. Such sensitivity: Hubie Fenoways, wiry and agitated, was bellowing out La bohème as he paced in the street. She’d heard that he styled himself an opera singer, and he really wasn’t that bad. Someone jeered, and called him a bagpipe, but he finished, and bowed, then rolled up his sleeves and started for the man. Bixby, who needed to find a saner line of work, held him back, but the mood changed: a delivery wagon with the coffin appeared, escorted by Lennart Falk. Hubie walked up to Falk and poked him—hard—in the chest.A voice whispered in her ear, Lewis: “Avoid those men, at all cost.”
Samuel was next to him, gleeful. “The Fenoways are quite something, aren’t they?” he said. “They are their own opera.”
Lewis took a second look at Dulcy. “Did this just happen?” he asked, pointing to her glasses. “Are you blind?”
“I often use glasses,” she said. “And I’ve had headaches.”
“You’re vain,” said Lewis. It made him happy, and she guessed they’d been drinking. “They make you seem very severe,” he said.
“I am severe,” said Dulcy, who’d put effort into looking more like a widow that day.
“You are lovely,” said Lewis. He nodded toward her purchase; the clerk was just tying the string. “With strange tastes. Eel, Mrs. Nash?”
“Are you watching?” asked Samuel. “Mr. Falk would like to hit the younger Fenoways. He’s already had a hard day. He wasn’t looking forward to the girl, and the brothers Fenoways were making the most of the moment—”
“Nasty little shits,” said Lewis. “Their mother should be relieved to be free.”
Dulcy blinked, but Samuel rolled on: the body had been due to arrive from Billings early that morning, but the Billings morgue had loaded the wrong coffin. When they’d accompanied Lennart Falk to the back of the store at ten, they’d peered down at the body of a middle-aged suicide, an accountant who’d swallowed cyanide.
“Worse than a hanging,” said Samuel, rubbing his eyes. “Worse than the girl when we saw her in Missoula a month ago, and I vomited on Lewis’s boots.”
The Fenoways disappeared inside Hruza’s, and Lewis headed out. “Here we go again,” said Samuel.
Dulcy fled.
???
At six o’ clock, when Lennart Falk’s Elite door slammed, Dulcy listened to him talk to a presumably empty room. This was yet another thing that was her fault: if only he’d think it was the end of the story. But that poor dead girl without the right broken bone would still be dead, and Lennart Falk would begin looking for another brunette. Dulcy had almost managed to feel sympathy for everyone but herself when she heard a soft firm step in the hall. She braced herself for Irina’s questions, but the girl knocked softly on the door to the north. Dulcy vaulted off her bed to put an ear to the wall. She heard the click of Falk’s door, soft conversation, a salvo of giggles and soothing sounds, and within another sixty seconds the unmistakable wail and thump of a bed subjected to a full-blown rut.