«Just what kind of pills have they been feeding you here? Can’t you realize, you’re
under a criminal indictment. If they catch you jumping bail, they’ll throw away the
key. Even if you get away with it, you’ll never be able to come home.»
«Well, so, tough titty. Anyway, home is where you feel at home. I’m still looking.»
«No, Holly, it’s stupid. You’re innocent. You’ve got to stick it out.»
She said, «Rah, team, rah,» and blew smoke in my face. She was impressed,
however; her eyes were dilated by unhappy visions, as were mine: iron rooms, steel
corridors of gradually closing doors. «Oh, screw it,» she said, and stabbed out her
cigarette. «I have a fair chance they won’t catch me. Provided you keep your bouche
fermez. Look. Don’t despise me, darling.» She put her hand over mine and pressed it
with sudden immense sincerity. «I haven’t much choice. I talked it over with the
lawyer: oh, I didn’t tell him anything regarding Rio — he’d tip the badgers himself,
rather than lose his fee, to say nothing of the nickels O.J. put up for bail. Bless O.J.’s
heart; but once on the coast I helped him win more than ten thou in a single poker
hand: we’re square. No, here’s the real shake: all the badgers want from me is a
couple of free grabs and my services as a state’s witness against Sally — nobody has
any intention of prosecuting me, they haven’t a ghost of a case. Well, I may be
rotten to the core, Maude, but: testify against a friend I will not. Not if they can
prove he doped Sister Kenny. My yardstick is how somebody treats me, and old
Sally, all right he wasn’t absolutely white with me, say he took a slight advantage,
just the same Sally’s an okay shooter, and I’d let the fat woman snatch me sooner
than help the law-boys pin him down.» Tilting her compact mirror above her face,
smoothing her lipstick with a crooked pinkie, she said: «And to be honest, that isn’t
all. Certain shades of limelight wreck a girl’s complexion. Even if a jury gave me the
Purple Heart, this neighborhood holds no future: they’d still have up every rope from
LaRue to Perona’s Bar and Grill — take my word, I’d be about as welcome as Mr.
Frank E. Campbell. And if you lived off my particular talents, Cookie, you’d
understand the kind of bankruptcy I’m describing. Uh, uh, I don’t just fancy a fadeout that finds me belly-bumping around Roseland with a pack of West Side hillbillies.
While the excellent Madame Trawler sashayes her twat in and out of Tiffany’s. I
couldn’t take it. Give me the fat woman any day.»
A nurse, soft-shoeing into the room, advised that visiting hours were over. Holly
started to complain, and was curtailed by having a thermometer popped in her
mouth. But as I took leave, she unstoppered herself to say: «Do me a favor, darling.
Call up the Times, or whatever you call, and get a list of the fifty richest men in
Brazil. I’m not kidding. The fifty richest: regardless of race or color. Another favor -poke around my apartment till you find that medal you gave me. The St.
Christopher. I’ll need it for the trip.»
The sky was red Friday night, it thundered, and Saturday, departing day, the city
swayed in a squall-like downpour. Sharks might have swum through the air, though
it seemed improbable a plane could penetrate it.
But Holly, ignoring my cheerful conviction that her flight would not go, continued
her preparations — placing, I must say, the chief burden of them on me. For she had
decided it would be unwise of her to come near the brownstone. Quite rightly, too: it
was under surveillance, whether by police or reporters or other interested parties
one couldn’t tell — simply a man, sometimes men, who hung around the stoop. So
she’d gone from the hospital to a bank and straight then to Joe Bell’s Bar. «She don’t
figure she was followed,» Joe Bell told me when he came with a message that Holly
wanted me to meet her there as soon as possible, a half-hour at most, bringing:
«Her jewelry. Her guitar. Toothbrushes and stuff. And a bottle of hundred-year-old
brandy: she says you’ll find it hid down in the bottom of the dirty-clothes basket.
Yeah, oh, and the cat. She wants the cat. But hell,» he said, «I don’t know we should
help her at all. She ought to be protected against herself. Me, I feel like telling the
cops. Maybe if I go back and build her some drinks, maybe I can get her drunk
enough to call it off.»
Stumbling, skidding up and down the fire escape between Holly’s apartment and
mine, wind-blown and winded and wet to the bone (clawed to the bone as well, for
the cat had not looked favorably upon evacuation, especially in such inclement
weather) I managed a fast, first-rate job of assembling her going-away belongings. I
even found the St. Christopher’s medal. Everything was piled on the floor of my
room, a poignant pyramid of brassières and dancing slippers and pretty things I
packed in Holly’s only suitcase. There was a mass left over that I had to put in paper
grocery bags. I couldn’t think how to carry the cat; until I thought of stuffing him in
a pillowcase.
Never mind why, but once I walked from New Orleans to Nancy’s Landing,
Mississippi, just under five hundred miles. It was a light-hearted lark compared to
the journey to Joe Bell’s bar. The guitar filled with rain, rain softened the paper
sacks, the sacks spilt and perfume spilled on the pavement, pearls rolled in the
gutter: while the wind pushed and the cat scratched, the cat screamed — but worse,
I was frightened, a coward to equal José: those storming streets seemed aswarm
with unseen presences waiting to trap, imprison me for aiding an outlaw.
The outlaw said: «You’re late, Buster. Did you bring the brandy?»
And the cat, released, leaped and perched on her shoulder: his tail swung like a
baton conducting rhapsodic music. Holly, too, seemed inhabited by melody, some
bouncy bon voyage oompahpah. Uncorking the brandy, she said: «This was meant to
be part of my hope chest. The idea was, every anniversary we’d have a swig. Thank
Jesus I never bought the chest. Mr. Bell, sir, three glasses.»
«You’ll only need two,» he told her. «I won’t drink to your foolishness.»
The more she cajoled him («Ah, Mr. Bell. The lady doesn’t vanish every day. Won’t
you toast her?»), the gruffer he was: «I’ll have no part of it. If you’re going to hell,
you’ll go on your own. With no further help from me.» An inaccurate statement:
because seconds after he’d made it a chauffeured limousine drew up outside the bar,
and Holly, the first to notice it, put down her brandy, arched her eyebrows, as
though she expected to see the District Attorney himself alight. So did I. And when I
saw Joe Bell blush, I had to think: by God, he did call the police. But then, with
burning ears, he announced: «It’s nothing. One of them Carey Cadillacs. I hired it. To
take you to the airport.»
He turned his back on us to fiddle with one of his flower arrangements. Holly said:
«Kind, dear Mr. Bell. Look at me, sir.»
He wouldn’t. He wrenched the flowers from the vase and thrust them at her; they
missed their mark, scattered on the floor. «Good-bye,» he said; and, as though he
were going to vomit, scurried to the men’s room. We heard the door lock.
The Carey chauffeur was a worldy specimen who accepted our slapdash luggage
most civilly and remained rock-faced when, as the limousine swished uptown
through a lessening rain, Holly stripped off her clothes, the riding costume she’d
never had a chance to substitute, and struggled into a slim black dress. We didn’t
talk: talk could have only led to argument; and also, Holly seemed too preoccupied
for conversation. She hummed to herself, swigged brandy, she leaned constantly
forward to peer out the windows, as if she were hunting an address — or, I decided,
taking a last impression of a scene she wanted to remember. It was neither of these.
But this: «Stop here,» she ordered the driver, and we pulled to the curb of a street in
Spanish Harlem. A savage, a garish, a moody neighborhood garlanded with posterportraits of movie stars and Madonnas. Sidewalk litterings of fruit-rind and rotted
newspaper were hurled about by the wind, for the wind still boomed, though the rain
had hushed and there were bursts of blue in the sky.
Holly stepped out of the car; she took the cat with her. Cradling him, she
scratched his head and asked. «What do you think? This ought to be the right kind of
place for a tough guy like you. Garbage cans. Rats galore. Plenty of cat-bums to
gang around with. So scram,» she said, dropping him; and when he did not move
away, instead raised his thug-face and questioned her with yellowish pirate-eyes,
she stamped her foot: «I said beat it!» He rubbed against her leg. «I said fuck off!»
she shouted, then jumped back in the car, slammed the door, and: «Go,» she told
the driver. «Go. Go.»
I was stunned. «Well, you are. You are a bitch.»
We’d traveled a block before she replied. «I told you. We just met by the river one
day: that’s all. Independents, both of us. We never made each other any promises.
We never — » she said, and her voice collapsed, a tic, an invalid whiteness seized her
face. The car had paused for a traffic light. Then she had the door open, she was
running down the street; and I ran after her.
But the cat was not at the corner where he’d been left. There was no one, nothing
on the street except a urinating drunk and two Negro nuns herding a file of sweetsinging children. Other children emerged from doorways and ladies leaned over their
window sills to watch as Holly darted up and down the block,
