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By Root 512 0

’s last gunslinger had been just more of the man’s endless prattling. But on top of everything else it was just a bit too much and it came out anyway, what she had no business saying. Her voice sounded as calm and as resolute as ever, she supposed, but she was not fooled: she knew a blurt when she heard one. “The bail bondsman came very promptly, of course; he had been notified in advance. They held onto us as long as they could nevertheless, and I held on as long as I could, but I guess they won that one, because I ended up wetting myself.” She saw Andrew’s eyes wince away again and she wanted to stop and couldn’t stop. “It’s what they want to teach you, you see. Partly because it frightens you, I suppose, and a frightened person may not come down to their precious Southland and bother them again. But I think most of them—even the dumb ones and they are by all means not all dumb—know the change will come in the end no matter what they do, and so they take the chance to degrade you while they still can. To teach you you can be degraded. You can swear before God, Christ, and the whole company of Saints that you will not, will not, will not soil yourself, but if they hold onto you long enough of course you do. The lesson is that you’re just an animal in a cage, no more than that, no better than that. Just an animal in a cage. So I wet myself. I can still smell dried urine and that damned holding cell. They think we are descended from the monkeys, you know. And that’s exactly what I smell like to myself right now.

“A monkey.”

She saw Andrew’s eyes in the rear-view mirror and was sorry for the way his eyes looked. Sometimes your urine wasn’t the only thing you couldn’t hold.

“I’m sorry, Miz Holmes.”

“No,” she said, rubbing at her temples again. “I am the one who is sorry. It’s been a trying three days, Andrew.”

“I should think so,” he said in a shocked old-maidish voice that made her laugh in spite of herself. But most of her wasn’t laughing. She thought she had known what she was getting into, that she had fully anticipated how bad it could get. She had been wrong.

A trying three days. Well, that was one way to put it. Another might be that her three days in Oxford, Mississippi had been a short season in hell. But there were some things you couldn’t say. Some things you would die before saying . . . unless you were called upon to testify to them before the Throne of God the Father Almighty, where, she supposed, even the truths that caused the hellish thunderstorms in that strange gray jelly between your ears (the scientists said that gray jelly was nerveless, and if that wasn’t a hoot and a half she didn’t know what was) must be admitted.

“I just want to get home and bathe, bathe, bathe, and sleep, sleep, sleep. Then I reckon I will be as right as rain.”

“Why, sure! That’s just what you’re going to be!” Andrew wanted to apologize for something, and this was as close as he could come. And beyond this he didn’t want to risk further conversation. So the two of them rode in unaccustomed silence to the gray Victorian block of apartments on the corner of Fifth and Central Park South, a very exclusive gray Victorian block of apartments, and she supposed that made her a blockbuster, and she knew there were people in those poshy-poshy flats who would not speak to her unless they absolutely had to, and she didn’t really care. Besides, she was above them, and they knew she was above them. It had occurred to her on more than one occasion that it must have galled some of them mightily, knowing there was a nigger living in the penthouse apartment of this fine staid old building where once the only black hands allowed had been clad in white gloves or perhaps the thin black leather ones of a chauffeur. She hoped it did gall them mightily, and scolded herself for being mean, for being unchristian, but she did wish it, she hadn’t been able to stop the piss pouring into the crotch of her fine silk imported underwear and she didn’t seem to be able to stop this other flood of piss, either. It was mean, it was unchristian, and almost as bad