فصل 20

CHAPTER 20

A big bathroom, all white tile and skylights and sleek Italian fixtures standing against exposed old brick. An elaborate vanity flanked by tall plants and loaded with cosmetics, the mirror beaded by the steam the shower made. From the shower came humming in a key too high for the unearthly voice. The song was Fats Waller’s “Cash for Your Trash,” from the musical Ain’t Misbehavin’. Sometimes the voice broke into the words: “Save up all your old newsPA-PERS,

Save and pile ‘em like a high skySCRAPER

DAH DAHDAHDAH DAH DAH DAHDAH DAH

DAH…”

Whenever there were words, a small dog scratched at the bathroom door.

In the shower was Jame Gumb, white male, thirty-four, six feet one inch, 205 pounds, brown and blue, no distinguishing marks. He pronounces his first name like James without the s. Jame. He insists on it.

After his first rinse, Gumb applied Friction des Bains, rubbing it over his chest and buttocks with his hands and using a dish-mop on the parts he did not like to touch. His legs and feet were a little stubbly, but he decided they would do.

Gumb toweled himself pink and applied a good skin emollient. His full-length mirror had a shower curtain on a bar in front of it.

Gumb used the dishmop to tuck his penis and testicles back between his legs. He whipped the shower curtain aside and stood before the mirror, hitting a hipshot pose despite the grinding it caused in his private parts.

“Do something for me, honey. Do something for me SOON.” He used the upper range of his naturally deep voice, and he believed he was getting better at it. The hormones he’d taken—Premarin for a while and then diethylstilbestrol, orally—couldn’t do anything for his voice, but they had thinned the hair a little across his slightly budding breasts. A lot of electrolysis had removed Gumb’s beard and shaped his hairline into a widow’s peak, but he did not look like a woman. He looked like a man inclined to fight with his nails as well as his fists and feet.

Whether his behavior was an earnest, inept attempt to swish or a hateful mocking would be hard to say on short acquaintance, and short acquaintances were the only kind he had.

“Whatcha gonna do for meeee?”

The dog scratched on the door at the sound of his voice. Gumb put on his robe and let the dog in. He picked up the little champagne-colored poodle and kissed her plump back.

“Ye-e-e-e-s. Are you famished, Precious? I am too.”

He switched the little dog from one arm to the other to open the bedroom door. She squirmed to get down.

“Just a mo’, sweetheart.” With his free hand he picked up a Mini-14 carbine from the floor beside the bed and laid it across the pillows. “Now. Now, then. We’ll have our supper in a minute.” He put the little dog on the floor while he found his nightclothes. She trailed him eagerly downstairs to the kitchen.

Jame Gumb took three TV dinners from his microwave oven. There were two Hungry Man dinners for himself and one Lean Cuisine for the poodle.

The poodle greedily ate her entrée and the dessert, leaving the vegetable. Jame Gumb left only the bones on his two trays.

He let the little dog out the back door and, clutching his robe closed against the chill, he watched her squat in the narrow strip of light from the doorway.

“You haven’t done Number Two-ooo. All right, I won’t watch.” But he took a sly peek between his fingers. “Oh, super, you little baggage, aren’t you a perfect lady? Come on, let’s go to bed.” Mr. Gumb liked to go to bed. He did it several times a night. He liked to get up too, and sit in one or another of his many rooms without turning on the light, or work for a little while in the night, when he was hot with something creative.

He started to turn out the kitchen light, but paused, his lips in a judicious spout as he considered the litter of supper. He gathered up the three TV trays and wiped off the table.

A switch at the head of the stairs turned on the lights in the basement. Jame Gumb started down, carrying the trays. The little dog cried in the kitchen and nosed open the door behind him.

“All right, Silly Billy.” He scooped up the poodle and carried her down. She wriggled and nosed at the trays in his other hand. “No you don’t, you’ve had enough.” He put her down and she followed close beside him through the rambling, multilevel basement.

In a basement room directly beneath the kitchen was a well, long dry. Its stone rim, reinforced with modern well rings and cement, rose two feet above the sandy floor. The original wooden safety cover, too heavy for a child to lift, was still in place. There was a trap in the lid big enough to lower a bucket through. The trap was open and Jame Gumb scraped his trays and the dog’s tray into it.

The bones and bits of vegetable winked out of sight into the absolute blackness of the well. The little dog sat up and begged.

“No, no, all gone,” Gumb said. “You’re too fat as it is.”

He climbed the basement stairs, whispering “Fatty Bread, Fatty Bread” to his little dog. He gave no sign if he heard the cry, still fairly strong and sane, that echoed up from the black hole: “PLEEASE.”