“I remember walking down the stairs to the platform, and after that—”
“Someone pushed you.” It sounded stupid, but what was wrong with that? It was stupid.
“Pushed me in front of the train?”
“Yes.”
“Have I lost my legs?”
George tried to swallow and couldn’t. There seemed to be nothing in his throat to grease the machinery.
“Not all of them,” he said inanely, and her eyes closed.
Let it be a faint, he thought then, please let it be a f—
They opened, blazing. One hand came up and slashed five slits through the air within an inch of his face—any closer and he would have been in the E.R. getting his cheek stitched up instead of smoking Chesties with Julio Estavez.
“YOU AIN’T NUTHIN BUT A BUNCHA HONKY SONSA BITCHES!” she screamed. Her face was monstrous, her eyes full of hell’s own light. It wasn’t even the face of a human being. “GOAN KILL EVERY MAHFAHIN HONKY I SEE! GOAN GELD EM FUST! GOAN CUT OFF THEIR BALLS AND SPIT EM IN THEY FACES! GOAN—”
It was crazy. She talked like a cartoon black woman, Butterfly McQueen gone Loony Tunes. She—or it—also seemed superhuman. This screaming, writhing thing could not have just undergone impromptu surgery by subway train half an hour ago. She bit. She clawed out at him again and again. Snot spat from her nose. Spit flew from her lips. Filth poured from her mouth.
“Shoot her up, doc!” one of the paras yelled. His face was pale. “Fa crissakes shoot her up!” The para reached toward the supply case. George shoved his hand aside.
“Fuck off, chickenshit.”
George looked back at his patient and saw the calm, cultured eyes of the other one looking at him.
“Will I live?” she asked in a conversational tea-room voice. He thought, She is unaware of her lapses. Totally unaware. And, after a moment: So is the other one, for that matter.
“I—” He gulped, rubbed at his galloping heart through his tunic, and then ordered himself to get control of this. He had saved her life. Her mental problems were not his concern.
“Are you all right?” she asked him, and the genuine concern in her voice made him smile a little—her asking him.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“To which question are you responding?”
For a moment he didn’t understand, then did. “Both,” he said, and took her hand. She squeezed it, and he looked into her shining lucent eyes and thought A man could fall in love, and that was when her hand turned into a claw and she was telling him he was a honky mahfah, and she wadn’t just goan take his balls, she was goan chew on those mahfahs.
He pulled away, looking to see if his hand was bleeding, thinking incoherently that if it was he would have to do something about it, because she was poison, the woman was poison, and being bitten by her would be about the same as being bitten by a copperhead or rattler. There was no blood. And when he looked again, it was the other woman—the first woman.
“Please,” she said. “I don’t want to die. Pl—” Then she went out for good, and that was good. For all of them.
4
“So whatchoo think?” Julio asked.
“About who’s gonna be in the Series?” George squashed the butt under the heel of his loafer. “White Sox. I got ’em in the pool.”
“Whatchoo think about that lady?”
“I think she might be schizophrenic,” George said slowly.
“Yeah, I know that. I mean, what’s gonna happen to her?”