Ginny Gall полностью

In a minute he and the Ghost were climbing the back stairs. The stairs smelled of old washings, of liniment and spicy perfume and several combos of urine and rotten vegetables and pepper sauce. Neither spoke. They crossed the third-floor landing and entered a narrow hallway. The walls were covered in an old-fashioned rose paper down to a muddy brown wainscoting; dim electric bulbs burned in wall sconces stained with verdigris. A narrow strip of featureless dark green carpeting covered the floor. He’d not been in this part of the house before. Doors, liverish repaints crusted into whorls and random patterning, lined the hallway, a few of them open partway. Halfway down a woman’s quavery voice sang, “If you can catch me you can keep me,” from a song he remembered hearing playing on the checkout deputy’s radio as he was being loaded onto the truck for the ride to Acheron penitentiary.

Just beyond a partially opened door and an oblong of drowsy yellow on the floor was his mother’s door, as indicated by the Ghost. He didn’t have any need to come see the room beyond his suddenly wanting to. You take a step, he thought, and the one step leads to another. He felt like he was moving deeper into the dark. But maybe that wasn’t it, maybe he was moving toward the light — or to nothing special.

The Ghost held up one hand for him to stop, took a big ring off his belt, deftly located the key, unlocked the door and held it open.

“You the first bellhop I ever met,” Delvin said.

“You the first on-the-loose jailbird I ever met.” He smiled and stuck out his hand. It was slightly greasy but he held on to Delvin as if he didn’t want to let go. “How you doin, really, Del?” he said. “I am sure sorry about Mr. Oliver. I couldn’t talk much about anything out at Miz Cutler’s.”

“I know. I spect I’m doing pretty well, now that I can walk around unfenced.” He surprised himself how tightly he gripped the Ghost’s hand.

“I’m sorry about your mama.” He still looked nervous.

The room was small, only a bed with a coarse gray wool blanket and uncased square pillow and a little white table beside it with an unlit tin kerosene lamp on the table. A narrow wooden clothespress. A small dormer window looked out on the backyard. He could hear laughter down there.

“I’ll step out here a minute,” the Ghost said and closed the door behind him, leaving Delvin in the dark but for a washed-out light coming in the window. Delvin started to call him back but then he didn’t. He stood in the kerosene-smelling room and then he sat down on the bed and then he lay down on it full length. He curled up on his left side and put his head on the pillow. You’d think time could twist in such a way that the old dried-out moment might come back to life in the present one. What others — what girls, what men passing through, maybe dark horses like the Ghost — had lain on this bed since his mother had slept those few nights here and died? Maybe no one had. Maybe her old festive being still traced itself here. He squeezed his eyes shut. No. It didn’t matter.

He was tired, a graininess in his mind, sand in his eyes; he drifted off to sleep.

How long it was later he wasn’t sure, and in the darkness he wasn’t sure where he was, or if he was somewhere else beside his sling bed at Acheron — or was it Columbia? Strange — he had almost stopped waking in those places. The Ghost’s hand was lightly shaking him as no hand would in prison. He did not come up panicked or fighting. He came up dizzy, as if he was drugged and swimming through layers of drizzle.

“It’s you right on,” he said, swung his legs out and sat up. “I mean it’s me.”

The Ghost stood near enough to grab him. “You need to get a move on,” he said.

Delvin was almost alert. “Somebody call the police?”

“They will soon.”

“Damn. Those old women figure me out?”

“Somebody will if somebody hadn’t awready.”

“What you being mysterious about?”

“You just better come on. Time to move yo hocks.”

Again he could hear singing, a low rough female voice, singing the same song; he must have been asleep only a minute.

“No way I could spend the night here, hunh?”

“You wouldn’t want to do that.”

“Lord, I’m swackered.”

“You on the run already, aint you?”

“I’m on furlough.”

“Like one of them army boys.”

“How come you aint hitched up?”

“Weak heart. How come they didn’t put you in?”

Was he crazy? “They gave me a pass on the whole shebang.”

“Well, come on. It’s time for the civilians to air out.”

On their way, moving slowly, Delvin half alert and memorizing as he went, walls and floor, the hall doors like a cascade in his mind, the faint lights like a lost measure of something grim and unforgivable, half a dozen steps down the passage the Ghost reached to close a door that stood open. “I thought I told you to keep this door shut,” he said into the room.

“You don’t run me,” a woman’s voice said. It was the singer’s voice and a voice he had heard before.