I don’t know why, but both of my hands itched, as though I had a rash or had been weeding a garden without gloves and had raked my skin with thorns. I could feel Benbow’s eyes on me. “What are you not telling me?” he said.
I glanced up the grade at the Lowry house and the rosebushes in Mrs. Lowry’s flower beds. “Nothing,” I replied. “Let me get my coat.”
* * *
MOON CHILD’S HEAD and most of her face were encased in bandages. Her arms were striped with bruises where she had been held by someone who had vise grips for hands. Her teeth and ribs were broken, her lips split. She was on a catheter, and a needle was taped to a vein in her forearm. Her face twitched each time she inhaled.
I sat in a chair two feet from her pillow. “I’m sorry this happened to you, Moon Child,” I said.
Dried mucus clung to the corners and lashes of her eyes; I could hardly see them inside the depth of the bandages. “Did Marvin do this to you?” I said.
No answer.
“I met Jimmy Doyle, Moon Child. Maybe he’s an okay fellow. Or maybe not. What do you think?”
I saw the fingers of her right hand move on the sheet. I picked them up as I would a handful of broken Popsicle sticks. “Want to tell me something?”
Her lips moved, but no sound came out. The sutures in them were black and as stiff as wire. I lowered my ear to her mouth. “Say that again?”
Her breath was like a tiny feather on my skin. I raised my head and eased my hand from under her fingers, then stood up. Benbow looked at me, his face a question mark. I pointed toward the door.
Outside the room, his right foot was tapping with expectation. “What’d she say?”
“She said, ‘Where did Daddy go?’?”
His face was drawn, his eyes empty. He reached unconsciously in his shirt pocket for a package of cigarettes that wasn’t there. “I’d appreciate you coming down to the jail.”
“What for?”
“I can’t understand what the beatniks are saying.”
* * *
THE HOLDING TANKS for women and men were at opposite ends of the same corridor. Our first stop was at the women’s unit. Because it was a weekend, the room had a high occupancy. Most of them were DWIs and working girls and street drunks and women who were passed out for undetermined reasons and looked like they had been poured on the concrete floor. Orchid and Lindsey Lou were standing in a back corner, leaning into each other as though escaping a cold wind, their heads bowed.
I asked Benbow if we could talk to the girls in private.
“They won’t come out,” he said.
“Hey, Orchid!” I said.
No response.
“How about you, Lindsey Lou? Can you talk to me?”
They crouched together as though trying to burrow inside each other.
“Moon Child talked to me,” I said. “Can’t y’all do the same?”
They looked at me, then at each other.
“That’s right,” I said. “It took all her strength to do it. Give me two minutes.”
They hooked hands and walked to the bars. The other prisoners pulled away from them. Orchid had tied her green-and-purple-streaked hair on top of her head. Her drooping left eye had a raw scratch under it. Lindsey Lou curled her fingers around the bars and pressed her narrow face, even her pigtails, between them, as though she wanted to squeeze herself onto the other side of the earth.
Orchid spoke first, her words hardly audible.
“You’ll have to speak louder,” I said.