'D-Don't, R-Richie,' Bill said, 'duh-duh –duh –h-h — ' Then he burst into tears himself and they only hugged each other on their knees in the street beside Bill's spilled bike, and their tears made clean streaks down their cheeks, which were sooted with coaldust.

CHAPTER 9

Cleaning Up

1

Somewhere high over New York State on the afternoon of May 29th, 1985, Beverly Rogan begins to laugh again. She stifles it in both hands, afraid someone will think she is crazy, but can't quite stop.

We laughed a lot back then, she thinks. It is something else, another light on in the dark. We were afraid all the time, but we couldn't stop laughing, any more than I can stop now.

The guy sitting next to her in the aisle seat is young, long-haired, good-looking. He has given her several appreciative glances since the plane took off in Milwaukee at half past two (almost two and a half hours ago now, with a stop in Cleveland and another one in Philly), but has respected her clear desire not to talk; after a couple of conversational gambits to which she has responded with politeness but no more, he opens his tote-bag and takes out a Robert Ludlum novel.

Now he closes it, holding his place with his finger, and says with some concern: 'Everything cool with you?'

She nods, trying to make her face serious, and then snorts more laughter. He smiles a little, puzzled, questioning.

'It's nothing,' she says, once again trying to be serious, but it's no good; the more she tries to be serious the more her face wants to crack up. Just like the old days. 'It's just that all at once I realized I didn't know what airline I was on. Only that there was a great big d-d-duck on the s-s-side — ' But the thought is too much. She goes off into gales of merry laughter. People look around at her, some frowning.

'Republic,' he says.

'Pardon?'

'You are whizzing through the air at four hundred and seventy miles an hour courtesy of Republic Airlines. It's on the KYAG folder in the seat pocket.'

'KYAG?'

He pulls the folder (which does indeed have the Republic logo on the front) out of the pocket. It shows where the emergency exits are, where the flotation devices are, how to use the oxygen masks, how to assume the crash-landing position. 'The kiss-your-ass-goodbye folder,' he says, and this time they both burst out laughing,

He really is good-looking, she thinks suddenly — it is a fresh thought, somehow clear-eyed, the sort of thought you might expect to have upon waking, when your mind isn't all junked up. He's wearing a pullover sweater and faded jeans. His darkish blond hair is tied back with a piece of rawhide, and this makes her think of the ponytail she always wore her hair in when she was a kid. She thinks: I bet he's got a nice polite college –boy's cock. Long enough to jazz with, not thick enough to be really arrogant.

She starts to laugh again, totally unable to help it. She realizes she doesn't even have a handkerchief with which to wipe her streaming eyes, and this makes her laugh harder.

'You better get yourself under control or the stewardess will throw you off the plane,' he says solemnly, and she only shakes her head, laughing; her sides and her stomach hurt now.

He hands her a clean white handkerchief, and she uses it. Somehow this helps her to get it under control finally. She doesn't stop all at once, though. It just sort of tapers off into little

hitchings and gaspings. Every now and then she thinks of the big duck on the side of the plane and belches out another little stream of giggles.

She passes his handkerchief back after a bit. 'Thank you.'

'Jesus, ma'am, what happened to your hand?' He holds it for a moment, concerned.

She looks down at it and sees the torn fingernails, the ones she ripped down to the quick tipping the vanity over on Tom. The memory of doing that hurts more than the fingernails themselves, and that stops the laughter for good. She takes her hand away from him, but gently.

'I slammed it in the car door at the airport,' she says, thinking of all the times she has lied about things Tom has done to her, and all the times she lied about the bruises her father put on her. Is this the last time, the last lie? How wonderful that would be . . . almost too wonderful to be believed. She thinks of a doctor coming in to see a terminal cancer patient and saying The X-rays show the tumor is shrinking. We don't have any idea why, but it's happening.

'It must hurt like hell,' he says.

'I took some aspirin.' She opens the in-flight magazine again, although he probably knows she's been through it twice already.

'Where are you headed?'

She closes the magazine, looks at him, smiles. 'You're very nice,' she says, 'but I don't want to talk. All right?'

'All right,' he says, smiling back. 'But if you want to drink to the big duck on the side of the plane when we get to Boston, I'm buying.'

'Thank you, but I have another plane to catch.'

'Boy, was my horoscope ever wrong this morning,' he says, and reopens his novel. 'But you sound great when you laugh. A guy could fall in love.'

She opens the magazine again, but finds herself looking at her jagged nails instead of the article on the pleasures of New Orleans. There are purple blood-blisters under too of them. In her mind she hears Tom screaming down the stairwell: 'I'll kill you, you bitch! You fucking bitch!' She shivers, cold. A bitch to Tom, a bitch to the seamstresses who goofed up before important shows and took a Beverly Rogan reaming for it, a bitch to her father long before either Tom or the hapless seamstresses became part of their lives.

A bitch.

You bitch.

You fucking bitch.

She closes her eyes momentarily.

Her foot, cut on a shard of perfume bottle as she fled their bedroom, throbs more than her fingers. Kay gave her a Band-Aid, a pair of shoes, and a check for a thousand dollars which Beverly cashed promptly at nine o'clock at the First Bank of Chicago in Water tower Square.

Over Kay's protests, Beverly wrote her own check for a thousand dollars on a plain sheet of typing paper. I read once that they have to take a check no matter what it's written on,' she told Kay. Her voice seemed to be coming from somewhere else. A radio in another room, maybe. 'Someone cashed a check once that was written on an artillery shell. I read that in The Book of Lists, I think.' She paused, then laughed uneasily. Kay looked at her soberly, even solemnly. 'But I'd cash it fast, before Tom thinks to freeze the accounts.'

Although she doesn't feel tired (she is aware, however, that by now she must be going purely on nerves and Kay's black coffee), the previous night seems like something she must have dreamed.

She can remember being followed by three teenaged boys who called and whistled but didn't quite dare come right up to her. She remembers the relief that washed over her when she saw the white fluorescent glow of a Seven-Eleven store spilling out onto the sidewalks at

an intersection. She went in and let the pimply-faced counterman look down the front of her old blouse and talked him into loaning her forty cents for the pay phone. It wasn't hard, the view being what it was.

She called Kay McCall first, dialing from memory. The phone rang a dozen times and she began to fear that Kay was in New York. Kay's sleepy voice mumbled, 'It better be good, whoever you are' just as Beverly was about to hang up.

'It's Bev, Kay,' she said, hesitated, and then plunged. 'I need help.'