CHAPTER NINETEEN
I fell asleep with my head on Nick’s shoulder, and I dreamed of strange things. I was a little girl standing on the deck of a ship as it pulled away from the mainland. It was not a memory, for I was younger when Eliza Baker took me from Tonkin, but there was something rather more than less real about the plumes of gunpowder smoke in the distance and the rush of people on the quay, some carrying their most precious things and others carrying guns.
The air was full of paper scraps, falling down from the tropical sky like snow, and I stretched out my hand, curious when they didn’t melt like snowflakes.
“Against all the old laws, we made soldiers out of paper,” I said wisely to myself, “but look what became of them.”
A bomb went off on the quay, shaking the world and setting off the siren, I opened my eyes and found a world fractured by chaos. I sat up just as we passed beyond the sightless, spectacled eyes of T. J. Eckleburg, and I saw that rather than being wide and wise, they were now closed and refused to look any further. We pulled to a complete stop in Willets Point, and Tom was craning his neck up and around to see what was the matter.
“Some kind of trouble?” asked Nick, who had been sleeping as well, and Tom nodded excitedly.
“Accident of some kind,” he said. “Good for Wilson, I guess.”
“How very vulturish,” I said, sitting up and rubbing my eyes, but no one paid me any mind.
“Let’s keep driving,” Nick said, but Tom wasn’t paying any attention to him either, swinging the coupe off the road to where a cluster of cars were nosed into the ash yard. There was a tired police officer taking names, and an ambulance as well, but there was urgency to the scene. After a moment, we realized that the long low wail was not the siren, but the sound of someone’s pain trying to squeeze out their mouth.
“Oh G—o—o—d, oh God,” came the wail, and I jumped because I hadn’t heard that kind of religious suffering since I left the South.
“Tom, let’s go,” I said sharply, but he was already stumbling forward. His face looked pale, pale enough that Nick and I fell into line without further questions, and then we stood in the garage’s open door, taking in the scene in front of us like solemn children told to learn a lesson.
Stretched on the workbench was a woman wrapped in blankets, only her red hair visible at one end and her small bare white feet at the other. Someone had tied her big toes together with string, a tradition in the East to keep a corpse from walking. The man who stood at her head was the garage station owner who had spoken with Tom earlier that day, and in the shadows behind us were his neighbors, come to see the carnage.
“She landed in the ditch left of the road, she must have flown like a bird.”
“Struck her so hard her shoes came right off, flew who knows where.”
“Which ones?” asked another voice, and still another answered, “The copper ones with the silk bows. Crying shame, they were expensive too.”
Tom made a gruff and startled sound at that, taking a step forward towards the workbench. His face was pale, his eyes were too dark, and a thick sweat had broken out on his brow.
“What in the world is happening?” I asked, bewildered, and it was Nick, of all people, who answered me.
“What happens when a man’s girlfriend is struck dead in the road,” Nick said. “She might have had the courtesy to wait until we had passed by, don’t you think?”
Despite his surprisingly cruel words, Nick was as pale as Tom, staring at the woman on the workbench as if at any moment she might stand up and try something against his virtue. You saw her wild, red, and wholly artificial hair first, as I think she meant you to, but her face was as round, soft, and white as a powder puff, the mouth small and dainty. Her face was still in good shape （open casket is possible, if desired, I could hear sensible Aunt Justine say in my head）， and that meant that the rest of her must be pulverized.