She shook her head. “I don’t expect you’d understand, Mr. Trout. ”
“I’d like to. ” He intended it as a lie, but he surprised himself by meaning it.
She smoked her cigarette and stared at the line of gray clouds that had begun to creep over the far tree line.
“I’ve got cancer,” she said.
Her comment startled Trout. “What? I mean … God, I’m sorry. Is it very … advanced?”
“I’m a corpse,” she said. “I’ll be dead by Christmas. ” She waggled the cigarette between her fingers. “Three packs a day for forty years. ”
“I’m … sorry. ”
“Fuck it. The warnings are right there on the side of every pack. I knew what I was getting myself into. Slow suicide. Knowing that these coffin nails would kill me one day made them taste a little better. ”
Trout said nothing.
Selma cocked her head and looked up at him. “I won’t pretend that I’m anything but what I am, Mr. Trout, and being a whore and a madam is far from the worst things I’ve done. I’ve lived down in the gutter since the day I was born. Shoved into the life but chose to stay there. My choice. I make no apologies and I’d spit on anyone who said they felt sorry for me. This is my life, and I had some good times, too. ” A tear glittered in the corner of one eye and she wiped it away irritably. “I can’t fix anything I ever done. Most of the people I wronged are long dead, so there’s no way to make any kind of amends, even if I wanted to. I don’t regret most of it, but there’s one thing … one single thing that I wish I hadn’t done. Or, maybe it’s a thing that I wish I had done. ”
“What’s that, Selma?” Trout asked softly.
“When my sister Clarice got knocked up, she came to me and asked if I’d take the baby. She was really far gone, even then. Her hurt went so deep that she lost herself in her own darkness and she knew—like anyone else knew—that she was never going to find her way out. ”
“Who was the father? Where was he in all of this?”
Selma gave a bitter laugh. “He was any one of a hundred ten-dollar tricks. Even if she knew his name there was no way he’d ever do the right thing because nobody ever does the right fucking thing. ”
“So she asked you to take the baby?”
Another tear formed and this fell down her cheek, rolling and stuttering over the thousands of seams in her skin. “I had a place and I had a little bit of money. I was running ten whores, and I could have made them take care of the kid in shifts. I could have done that and it wouldn’t have been no skin off my nose. It would have been nothing to me. ” Two lines of tears fell together. “But it might have been everything to Homer. Nobody would have laid a hand on him. None of those foster parent fucks would have stuck their dicks in him. No one would have whipped him with electrical cords or burned him with cigarettes or made him kneel on pebbles. ” Selma suddenly grabbed Trout’s sleeve. “Homer might have had a chance, you see?”
“Yeah,” he said thickly. “I see. ”
“And all the hurt he did to other people. All those killings. The bad things he did to women and little kids. He might not have done any of that…”
“You don’t know that, Selma. He might have had this in him from birth. ”
She pulled her hand away from his sleeve and gave a derisive shake of her head. “A bad seed? Bullshit. I don’t believe in that. Babies don’t carry sin. ”
“I’m talking a chemical imbalance or—”
She shook her head again. “No. It was the system that made him into a monster. It’s their fault. Theirs and mine. ”
They stood in the cold wind, watching the sunny day grow gradually darker.
“So,” Trout began slow
ly, “bringing him back here…?”
“Homer never had a home,” she repeated. “I didn’t give him anything before. Now … at least I could do that much. A home … and maybe some peace. ”
Trout had a hundred other questions he wanted to ask, but he left them all unsaid. They tumbled into the dirt like broken birds as he looked into those lambent green eyes. Windows of the soul, and hers looked in on an interior landscape that was ravaged by storms and blighted beyond reclamation.
He said, “I’m sorry. ”
She nodded. Tears streamed down her face, but she set her jaw. Trout watched as she stubbed out her second cigarette and lit the third.
Without another word he turned and walked slowly back along the road to the Explorer. This story was solid gold, no question about it, but he knew with absolute certainty that it was going to break his heart to write it.