Chapter 15
Nicky moved into the apartment with them. Steve said nothing and did not seem to know the boy was there. He sat over his books, reading steadily, taking notes, and then, when he could read no more, he got out the silver pipe and the sticky ball wrapped in foil.
Lorna wondered why he did not shoot up on heroin, which was easy to get in New Orleans and did not require the elaborate equipment of opium, nor leave the telltale sickly sweet odor. She sensed that he liked the ceremony of opium-smoking better than the actual high he obtained from the poppy. The heavily carved silver pipes, the way he squatted, Chinese-style, over the paraphernalia, fed some colorful and imaginative need in him that the coldly scientific hypodermic syringe could not match. It was his way of escaping into the past whose secret he longed to unlock. This way, he could pretend that he was in ancient China.
One day he sprang up from his desk and started putting his books into their packing boxes. Lorna and Nicky stared at him.
"What's the matter, Steve?" she cried.
"Let's go . . . to San Francisco . . . out west somewhere. I'm sick of this place. Come on, hurry! The cops'll be here in a minute, hurry!"
She turned, stunned and helpless, and looked at Nicky but the boy gave her a high sign and winked quickly.
"We'd better split somewhere fast. I heard there was a crackdown coming in this neighborhood, and this is the first place they'll be because you can smell that hash of his as soon as you turn the frigging corner."
She put her head in her hands.
"Running . . . always running. Will it never end?" Her voice scaled up to a note that bordered on hysteria. Nicky looked quickly at her, his eyes narrowed. With his thin face and red hair he looked like a fox.
"Let's us split, just the two of us," he whispered. "He's bombed out of his mind! Who needs him?"
She looked at Steve's furious activity as he packed. She had not seen him move so fast since he began to smoke opium. He had grown thin and drawn, his appetite down to something less than subsistence level. As she listened to Nicky's pleas to leave him she slowly shook her head.
"Are you nuts? Hell get us both busted if we tie up with him. What do you want him for? He's not cooling your ass for you anymore, I am!" he hissed.
She continued to shake her head.
"No . . . I can't leave him, not yet."
She knew, in some instinctual part of her being, that all was not finished between her and Steve yet. When it was, she would know it. Nicky argued but she was adamant. The thing that had drawn them together was not yet resolved, the wheel of Fate had a few more turns to go.
Once he had packed his books and papers, Steve became passive and silent once more. He neither seemed to know or care that Nicky was coming with them; he sat in the back of the car, his handsome dark face taut and secretive, as they put the suitcases in beside him and got in the front seat together.
He was like a child or a dog-and a very obedient one-on the entire trip. They took turns driving. When they stopped for food he took nothing but coffee. When they bought gas or checked into a motel, it was Nicky who took the man's part and stood outside talking to the attendant, or signed the registration cards. They took a double room and put Steve into a single. He made no objection; all he wanted was his suitcase full of books and notes, which he took everywhere, afraid to leave it in the car. The few times Lorna got him into a restaurant he dragged it in, oblivious of the stares. After the first few times, she left him in the car entirely. She brought food to him but he only nibbled at it, then pushed it aside.
When they got to San Francisco they stayed at a housekeeping motel. This time there was no question of getting an apartment. Lorna knew that they would not be permanent anywhere, ever again. A hazy dream world state settled over her, as opaque and mysterious as the bluish smoke from Steve's silver pipes.
The suspension of reality and her subsequent entrance into the limbo of imagination began when the motel owners presumed that Nicky was her son. His habit of calling her Mom undoubtedly started it, and now that she looked older and strained it was natural for people to assume that she was his mother when they saw their identical coloring.
Life became a movie, and movies were unreal. Therefore, life was unreal. After that, she ceased to worry about anything. When she received Nicky's bulging cock each night she reversed their roles and once again became an adolescent girl, while the real adolescent became, in her mind, her handsome father. Steve, lost in his own realm of ether, became hazy and ghostlike to her. She turned him into Dan. He was like a dead man, the way he sat for hours doing nothing, hardly moving, staring with glazed eyes into space. It was not hard to think of him as Dan's ghost.
If Dan were there in the apartment with them in the guise of Steve, then Dan was not really dead, and Lorna was free from guilt. She started to call him Dan but he took no notice of it, just as he took no notice of anything at all.
Throughout it all, the thick fog of San Francisco did its part to blur the edges of reality and help her to see everything through a misty netherworld screen. The soupy nights belonged to a realm of the imagination in which she came increasingly to dwell.
Nicky went out to Golden Gate park one night and made a contact and bought some pot. He and Lorna turned on while Steve smoked his silver pipes. That too added to her dream world and she worried about nothing, absolutely nothing. Sometimes when she was high she remembered the night in the painting studio with the man named Tom, and how she had experienced that intense flash of familiarity as she leaned over the palette and heard him tell her his name.
Tom . . . Tom . . . why are you so familiar, Tom?
Sometimes she relived the day she had gone walking in the woods and met Steve in his blue-gray convict pants. Her mind exploded into visions of giant buttons; they swelled up and rushed at her like flying saucers, and the holes in them turned into mouths that shouted: "Men in the woods without women! I'll keep you in me, you big-cocked stud! I'll hold you in my cunt with two fingers just as I did that tube of cream!"
They stayed a month in San Francisco. Their departure came on a night when Nicky rushed into the room and told her that the motel owners knew that they were using drugs and had thrown them out.
"Hurry, they said they'd call the cops if we didn't leave in fifteen minutes!"
Fortunately Lorna was down at the time. They hustled Steve up and threw the half-packed luggage in the car. Nicky hunched over the wheel, stiffening every time he saw a cop on a corner.
"Where are we going?" she asked him.
"Seattle. I can't think of any place else to go from here, can you?"
She couldn't, nor could she be bothered to try. Nicky was in charge now, she realized, and with her realization came an odd, satisfied pleasure. Of course Daddy should be in charge; every good girl did what her Daddy told her to do. If he wanted to move to Seattle, why, all well and good. And if he wanted to fuck her-still better!
She giggled suddenly. Nicky looked at her curiously but said nothing. She felt completely secure in his sixteen-year-old hands, knowing that his sixteen-year-old prick was always at her disposal. She had to have her Daddy's prick. If she had had it all along, none of this would have happened to her. If Daddy hadn't died she would have lived on with him after killing her mother. Poor Daddy didn't have the nerve to commit murder, but she did. She would have done it for him, and then they would have lived together as man and wife-daughter, happily ever after. Naturally, she would not have married Dan, which meant that she would not have gotten sick of him and decided to run off with Steve. So if she had her Daddy back, all the bad things would go away, never to return.
By the time they got to Seattle, Nicky was Daddy to both. He controlled the money, all the cash, which rested on his slender hip. It was Nicky who decided where they should live; it was Nicky who decided that the mother-son bit was as good a disguise as anything, especially since people were ready to buy it without even being told. Neither he nor Lorna really thought about why they needed a disguise at all; technically they had not done anything illegal, and certainly they hadn't done anything in Seattle, at least not yet, since they had only just arrived in town. But the stamp of flight and nameless fear was on them, and disguise seemed a natural thing. Though neither of them knew it consciously, the mother-son game was a strong comfort and aphrodisiac to both of them.
Lorna did not really notice Seattle except to see that it was a city of wooden houses built on hills. The magnificence of Mt. Ranier, like a strawberry ice cream sundae in the horizon, the blue waters of Puget Sound, the impressive harbor, the craggy Olympic mountains, all passed without notice. She was not going to live here, after all, really live here. She would never live anywhere, ever again. Soon they would go somewhere else. Where? Perhaps Canada . . . it wasn't very far away.
Nicky rented an apartment down near the waterfront. When they had settled Steve into it, they went out together. He was the pimp now, the trafficker in women that Steve had once been. He wanted to know what they were going to do about making some real money. He wanted to do some more movies. They walked past the skin flicks in the downtown area and he looked at the marquees with a hungry, lupine expression on his face.
"I'll bet the girls in those have pimples on their ass," he said contemptuously. "You've got it all over them. How about me rounding up some guys and really making a flick to end 'em all?"
"Sure," she said tonelessly.
They went into a waterfront bar and had a drink. Nicky started to outline his plans but they were interrupted by an old drunk who insisted upon talking to them. Nothing would make him go away.
"Haven't seen you folks in here before," he slobbered. "New to Seattle?"
Nicky stiffened with automatic guilt, but Lorna quickly answered yes. He glared at her but she was getting drunk and paid no attention.
The old-timer was delighted and launched into a Chamber of Commerce spiel. He talked about the old days, telling them every building that had been torn down in his memory, and even before.
"My Dad remembered the fire of '89," he chortled, and Nicky put his head in his hands and muttered "Oh, Jesus."
"Yessir, he remembered it well, and my granddad could tell even better stories. He remembered his granddad tell about the Sawdust Women, he-he. They was Seattle's first whores, you know? Beg pardon, ma'am," he said to Lorna, but she urged him to go on. He needed little encouragement. He seldom had a listener with such rapt eyes as he saw on this luscious redhead.
"Yep, the Sawdust Women were the Indian gals in the first days of settlement here. They called 'em that because the first whorehouses were built down on the tide flats, where Yesler's sawmill dumped its dust and filled in the wet land until there was a solid foundation to build on. And guess what they built? Yep, whorehouses. They stocked 'em with Indian women 'cause that's all they had here then. There was one gal called Two
Fingers Lou because she had such a big box that she had to hold her customers in with her two fingers. She come to a bad end, though. A lumberjack named Tall Tommy shot her dead one night 'cause he said she was so dang flappy down there that he couldn't feel a dern thing."
Lorna sprang up from the stool with a loud cry. The old timer sputtered drunken apologies but she did not stay to hear them. She ran out the door and flagged a cab and got in. She gave the man her address and he drove off just as Nicky reached for the door. He missed it and Lorna turned to see him wave frantically at another taxi.
Her mind spun wildly. The wheel of Fate had taken its last turn for her and Steve now. She saw herself on the bathroom floor in Dan's house, holding the cream in her slot. I'll keep you in me, you big-cocked bastard! Men in the woods without women . . . Steve had been a man in the woods without women that afternoon she met him, but it wasn't the first time. He was Tall Tommy the lumberjack, who had killed her down on the tide flats in a brawling pioneer whorehouse.
Two-Fingers Lou will get even with you!
She chanted the doggerel in her mind until it drove out all else.
"What's that, ma'am?" said the driver, turning.
She had not realized she had spoken out loud.
"Nothing."
Now she knew what their running had been all about. The gypsies had arrived home at last. The inexorable pull of Fate had drawn them West like a magnet. They thought it was planned, but it wasn't. Each thing that had happened to them happened for a reason and a purpose, and that was to get them closer and closer to this city of big wooden houses on hills, a city that had started out as a collection of whorehouses and a sawmill on the waterfront.
The driver pulled up before the apartment house and she tossed him the fare and got out. She looked around but there was no sign of Nicky in another cab. She had time! It wouldn't take long, and she knew where the gun was.
She ran up the stairs and opened the door. Steve turned around and surveyed her dully. He said something in a slurred voice but she rushed past him into the bedroom. She returned with the .38 he used to wear in the shoulder holster.
She pointed it straight at his face.
"Now we're even!" she. screamed.
His head exploded as she pulled the trigger. Blood and gluey pinkish-gray pieces of brain spattered on the papers on the desk. Screams broke out in the hallway and someone screamed "Call the police!"
She stood there with the gun in her hand until her white-faced adolescent Daddy opened the door. The police crowded in behind him.