Native Son - Richard Wright [61]
“Then she didn’t sleep here last night?”
“Looks like she didn’t.”
“Did that boy say Jan was in the car?”
“Yes. I thought something was strange about the car being left out in the snow all night, and so I asked him. He said she told him to leave the car there and he said Jan was in it.”
“Listen, Peggy….”
“Yes, Mrs. Dalton.”
“Mary was drunk last night. I hope nothing’s happened to her.”
“Oh, what a pity!”
“I went to her room just after she came in…. She was too drunk to talk. She was drunk, I tell you. I never thought she’d come home in that condition.”
“She’ll be all right, Mrs. Dalton. I know she will.”
There was another long silence. Bigger wondered if Mrs. Dalton was on her way to his room. He went back to the bed and lay down, listening. There were no sounds. He lay a long time, hearing nothing; then he heard footsteps in the kitchen again. He hurried into the closet.
“Peggy!”
“Yes, Mrs. Dalton.”
“Listen, I just felt around in Mary’s room. Something’s wrong. She didn’t finish packing her trunk. At least half of her things are still there. She said she was planning to go to some dances in Detroit and she didn’t take the new things she bought.”
“Maybe she didn’t go to Detroit.”
“But where is she?”
Bigger stopped listening, feeling fear for the first time. He had not thought that the trunk was not fully packed. How could he explain that she had told him to take a half-packed trunk to the station? Oh, shucks! The girl was drunk. That was it. Mary was so drunk that she didn’t know what she was doing. He would say that she had told him to take it and he had just taken it; that’s all. If someone asked him why he had taken a half-packed trunk to the station, he would tell them that that was no different from all the other foolish things that Mary had told him to do that night. Had not people seen him eating with her and Jan in Ernie’s Kitchen Shack? He would say that both of them were drunk and that he had done what they told him because it was his job. He listened again to the voices.
“…and after a while send that boy to me. I want to talk to him.”
“Yes, Mrs. Dalton.”
Again he lay on the bed. He would have to go over his story and make it foolproof. Maybe he had done wrong in taking that trunk? Maybe it would have been better to have carried Mary down in his arms and burnt her? But he had put her in the trunk because of the fear of someone’s seeing her in his arms. That was the only way he could have gotten her down out of the room. Oh, hell, what had happened had happened and he would stick to his story. He went over the story again, fastening every detail firmly in his mind. He would say that she had been drunk, sloppy drunk. He lay on the soft bed in the warm room listening to the steam hiss in the radiator and thinking drowsily and lazily of how drunk she had been and of how he had lugged her up the steps and of how he had pushed the pillow over her face and of how he had put her in the trunk and of how he had struggled with the trunk on the dark stairs and of how his fingers had burned while he had stumbled down the stairs with the heavy trunk going bump-bump-bump so loud that surely all the world must have heard it….
He jumped awake, hearing a knock at the door. His heart raced. He sat up and stared sleepily around the room. Had someone knocked? He looked at his watch; it was three o’clock. Gee! He must have slept through the bell that was to ring at two. The knock came again.
“O.K.!” he mumbled.
“This is Mrs. Dalton!”
“Yessum. Just a minute.”
He reached the door in two long steps, then stood a moment trying to collect himself. He blinked his eyes and wet his lips. He opened the door and saw Mrs. Dalton smiling before him, dressed in white, her pale face held as it had been when she was standing in the darkness while he had smothered Mary on the bed.
“Y-y-yes, mam,” he stammered. “I—I was asleep….”
“You didn’t get much sleep last night, did you?”
“No’m,” he drawled, afraid of what she might mean.
“Peggy rang for you three times, and you didn’t answer.”
“I’m sorry, mam….”