Where There's Smoke полностью

“At a party downtown. I was the token spade, she was the obligatory kook. We hit it off right away. This was right after her brother died, I guess she was looking for somebody she could talk to. My own brother died when I was just a kid, so I knew how it felt. Also, she’s a terrific-looking girl, I guess you know that. Or at least she was till she started coming on like Cleopatra, dyeing her hair black and starting to wear that shit around her eyes. Jesus!”

“When was that?”

“A little while after we began living together. Must’ve been the end of April, the beginning of May. I figured it was just some more of her kookiness coming out, you know? I mean, to tell the truth, it was the kookiness that attracted me to her in the first place. I’d had white ass before, even chicks who were better-looking than Nat, but none of them had that kookiness about them, you know? I never knew what to expect from her. It was like every day was some kind of surprise.” He grinned suddenly. “When you’re trying to make it straight, there ain’t much excitement around, you know? You’ve got to be careful you don’t spit on the sidewalk, otherwise you’re back in­side. Well, living with Nat made things exciting.”

“Then why’d you kick her out?”

“Because there’s a difference between a kook and a crazy. The minute I realized Nat was a crazy, I asked her to leave.”

“Crazy how?”

“The brother thing.”

“What about it?”

“Well. . . her mother gave Nat all this junk when her brother died. His personal stuff, you know? All kinds of shit—his birth certificate, some of his toys from when he was a kid, his Army discharge papers, his report cards from elementary school, his driver’s license, his social security card, compositions he’d written in high school, his class ring from when he graduated college... a whole pile of worthless shit. But Nat used to take it out and go through it again and again, as if it was some kind of national treasure. And you know this pendant she wears all the time? This little jade thing with the carving of Cleopatra on it?”

“Yes, what about it?”

“It was a gift from her brother, I guess you know that.”

“Yes.”

“Okay. He gave it to her, I don’t know when, her twenty-first birthday, I don’t know, he found the pendant in an antique shop and gave it to her as a present. Had it engraved with her name. A nice gift.”

“Go on.”

“Okay. Right after we began living together, she tells me the gift was from Ptolemy the Twelfth, who her brother Harry has suddenly become in her mind, right? And she takes it to a jeweler and has him engrave it with the date Cleopatra was born—69 B.C. And she starts re­membering things about Harry—who’s now Ptolemy, right?—and telling me they got married when she was seventeen, and telling me how much she loved him, and then…Ah, shit, she just got crazy, that’s all.”

“How?”

“She started calling me Ptolemy. She started saying I was her brother. And in a little while I realized she wasn’t fucking Charlie Carruthers on that bed in there, she was really fucking Ptolemy the Twelfth, who was Harry Fletcher her goddamn dead brother. Mister, I don’t like being a phantom fuck. I told her to get out.”

“And she left.”

“She made a fuss. But she left. This was on the eighth of June. She came back on the fourteenth to get her stuff, told me she’d found an apartment on Oberlin Crescent.”

“Have you seen her since?”

“Once. She came up to Hammerlock last month to show off her new boy friend. Must’ve been looking for me all night, driving around from bar to bar. Finally caught up with me outside Dimmy’s on a Hun’-third. I was just coming out of the place, I see her sitting in this VW bus. She waves me over and introduces me to the guy behind the wheel. He’s white, naturally, and blond. Very blond. Big head of blond hair, blond mustache, blond eyebrows. Leave it to Nat. A spade kicks her out, so she latches on to the blondest stud I ever saw in my life.”

“What color was the bus?”

“Red. With a white top.”

“What was the man’s name?”

“Arthur Wylie.”

“What does he do for a living?”

“I don’t know. I know only one thing, and that’s he isn’t gonna last too long, not with that hang-up she’s got about her dead brother. There were times I thought she’d commit suicide or something, just so she could get to good old Harry. It was spooky. I had enough of that voodoo shit when I was a kid and my grandmother used to tell me stories. Seven years old, and she used to sit me on her lap and scare me out of my wits. I’m glad my grandmother’s dead, and I’m glad I got rid of Natalie, too. I began to breathe again the day I kicked her out. I hope I never see her again as long as I live. One fling with Cleopatra was more than enough, believe me.”

“Was that the last time you saw her? When she came up here with Wylie?”

“Yeah. But I got a call one night, I guess it was from her. I answered the phone, and a woman said, ‘I put a curse on you,’ and hung up. It didn’t sound like Nat, but who else could it have been?”

“Susanna Martin?”

“Maybe,” Carruthers said, and shrugged.