Conner turned and beseeched the next couple who hurried past, two men with dive tanks on their backs who made a concerted effort not to look his way, not to even glance at him for fear of the guilt they might suffer. Rob looked like he was on the verge of tears. The cap of water disappeared into the girl’s mouth, but she didn’t swallow. Conner tried to feel for a pulse, but he didn’t really know how. Maybe that was his own pulse in his thumb he was sensing.
“What the hell?” he asked. He studied his hands, which were raw from the haul. His legs ached from the long hike with the weight of the girl and the tent. There were doctors deeper into Springston he couldn’t afford, but he could tell them what the girl promised. What she might mean. Or he could go door to door in Shantytown and beg for help. Hope someone might know more to do than give her water and clean the sand out of her wounds.
“What about Mother?” Rob asked.
Conner’s hands shook as he twisted the cap back onto the canteen. He peered up at his brother, who had tears streaking down both cheeks. It was the worst idea either of them could possibly have. But it was also likely that their mother was the only person who would take the girl in, who might know what to do for her.
“Goddamn you,” Conner told his brother. He cursed him for being right.
39 ? A Rose on the Pillow
Rose
The leak in the pipes had not been fixed like the plumber said. Rose could see that the brown stain had spread across the white painted ceiling, had grown. It was a stain within a stain within a stain, three concentric brown patches of varying hue, one patch each for the three times the plumber had ripped her off, one patch each for the three times the plumbing to the upstairs basins had leaked precious water. Drip, drip, drip goes the coin.
The crack up there was getting worse as well. Widening. A zig at the end that used to be a zag, moving its way back and forth across that warped surface. The sands were shifting, the walls twisting, a house out of shape.
And the springs. The springs of the bed needed oiling. They sounded like the mad call of some crazed bird, some animal that chirped over and over, waiting for a response, for some hint of life, for awareness from some other, but only getting a rhythmic silence. A pause for every squeak. Week, week, week, week. Years piling up.
Her husband had brought her the bed triumphantly, had raised it from nearly four hundred meters, or so he’d bragged. And it was heavy. She could attest to that. Rose had moved it with a friend when the palace had fallen. It was all she had left in the world: the bed, that dresser, this brothel. It was fitting how her husband had left her prepared for her new life. Other men concerned themselves with getting their family up on their feet. Rose had fallen for a man who had left her on her back.
“How was that for you?” the man asked. He had evidently finished. Was now looking down at her expectantly, sweat dripping from his nose to splash between her breasts. His arms—muscled but layered with fat—trembled. There was more hair on his shoulders than his head, and his beard was full of sand.
“Oh, you’re the best,” Rose told him.
“Ah, you’re just saying that.” He grunted and fell to the side, a flock of startled springs chirping.
“I’m not,” Rose said. “You know you’re my favorite.” She prayed to the gods he wouldn’t ask her what his name was. Please, please, please don’t ask. They always wanted to hear it, to make it personal, to own more than just her time. But he didn’t ask. Worse: he started snoring.
Rose groaned and moved gingerly to the washbasin. She pulled the sewn intestine out from between her legs and washed it in the shallow puddle of water. The milky swimmers swirled on the surface with the others before slowly settling to the bottom. Rose draped the intestine over the lip of the basin with two others to dry. With a towel, she wiped off what had leaked out and had dribbled down her inner thigh to her knee. She dressed while the man snored. She would charge him rent for the bed if he stayed more than an hour. Serve him right.
Leaving the room, she stood on the narrow balcony walkway that circled the inside of the Honey Hole. It was dead quiet below, early in the morning, but the remnants of a noisy evening were scattered everywhere. Drunks sleeping on the floor, curled around barstool legs like lovers. Spent as much time on them as on any woman, Rose thought. A card game had been abandoned, the pot and players missing but the empty jars and cans and glasses standing in a crowd around the discard pile and folded hands. There were two puddles in the middle of the floor to clean up—piss or spilled beer. Idiots wasting their coin on fluids they couldn’t get in them, or on fluids that would pass right through.
Another of the doors opened down the catwalk—or the Esplanade of Pussy, as one of her regulars called it. Doria stood in her doorway and suffered a deep kiss goodbye, and then her client waddled down the stairs toward the bar, fumbling with the laces on his fly as he went.