Death of the Black-Haired Girl

16

“SO,” ELLIE SAID. “This kid’s a little genius, eh?”

Brookman saw that she had found the Gazette and read Maud’s article. He had not been hiding it from her, nor had he brought it to her attention. However, he had left it in a downstairs drawer, thinking to keep it from Sophia. He assumed that someone on campus would contrive to mention it in Ellie’s presence.

“Angry in all directions.”

“Is she?” Ellie went to the window and looked at the street. Dusk was coming down. Outside, people had started to walk toward the ice rink where the college was about to play its opener against UConn. Prospects for the home team were not good. “Get over it, I say.”

“It was immoderate. But she had a right.”

“Oh, sure, she had lots of rights. In all directions.” Ellie lowered the blinds against the passersby on the street just below and the strengthening reflection of the room they stood in. “Why did you let her publish it? She was your advisee, I understand.”

“My advisee, yes. I hadn’t read it.”

“You didn’t? Of course that’s none of my business.”

The words chilled him but he had no answer. From an intellectual perspective, even from an emotional one, he would have been interested in her comments.

“Pretty little thing,” his wife said, observing the front page of the Gazette. “Beautiful, actually. Coltish. Sort of an uncontained animal spirit. Ah, youth, eh?”

She rolled up the college paper briskly, omitting to mention what she thought he might do with it. Whereupon she went upstairs. Brookman started to follow but stopped when he heard the bathroom door slam. Sophia was in her room reading Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret before bed. He began to drink. He read several chapters of a book about the decline of the Spanish Habsburgs and then reread some items from the previous day’s Times sports section. One article described a Patriots-Broncos game that Denver lost. A Pats-loving colleague would have won fifty dollars from Brookman had the man not been off winter camping, out of cell phone range.

The liquor brought him no peace, only more anxiety and confusion. Finally he turned the television on and watched a sizable chunk of Red River. He realized that in the numerous times he had seen it, he had never figured out whether John Wayne shot John Ireland to death in their final encounter, nor had he ever remotely believed in the heroine’s cool reaction to taking a Comanche arrow in the shoulder, despite Joanne Dru’s feisty performance beside Montgomery Clift.

From the sidewalk outside he could hear the slightly intoxicated sounds of hockey fans coming from the rink. Amid the stomping, grunting and laughter there came a shout he recognized.

“Hey, Steve! Hey, Professor Brookman!”

He looked out and saw layers of snow gathering on the chestnut tree branches overhanging the curb. The heavy flakes whirled, driven by wind off the river a few miles away. At the foot of the tree stood Maud. She had on a bright plastic anorak that had lowered to her shoulders, and newly fallen snow was in her hair, as he had seen it weeks before. Her eyes reflected the light from his house.

A quarter mile away at the far end of his block, the doors of the hockey rink were open and spectators streamed out, most of them turning left as they exited, making for the main campus. A few dozen, in couples and small groups, were using Brookman’s street as a shortcut. Maud clutched the sky-blue plastic cloth around herself and screamed at him, standing with her face to the weather, toward his house.

“Hey, Prof! Hey, Brookman! Steve!”

Ellie had come downstairs.

“What did you do,” Ellie asked him, “give her a bad grade? Who is she?”

“She’s one of the kids who drinks. Good student. Pain in the ass.”

“Hey, Brookman!” Maud called from the street. “Who you talking to? Is that Mrs. Brookman? Hi, Mrs. Brookman.” They heard what might have been a snowball or a piece of ice against the door. “Hi, Elsa! Congratulations there!”

Ellie turned to her husband.

“I know who she is,” she said quietly.

“She’ll wake up Sophia,” said Brookman. Then, at a loss, he said, “Do you want me to call the police?” As he said it, he knew it had been a lame, stupid thing to ask her.

“The police,” she repeated after him in a monotone. “I think not.”

“Hi, folks,” Maud yelled. “God bless your happy home.”

He opened the front door and went outside, leaving it slightly ajar behind him. “Maud! What are you doing?”

She leaned the length of her arm against the tree trunk, turning to face him in the doorway.

“What am I doing? What am I doing, you son of a bitch?”

“You need to be sober, kid.”

“Oh, Stevie, I am sober. I don’t need anything. I am as sober as you’ve ever seen me, you dirty-hearted son of a bitch. You! Brookman!”

Cars maneuvered their way through the crowded street, sounding their horns, getting razzed and pounded on by the hockey crowd that was slow to yield the right of way. The street was normally closed on game nights. As the fans came abreast of Maud and Brookman, a few paused to look at the two of them, slowing the progress of those behind them.

Someone called Maud by name. A couple of passing boys tried to grab her arm and made as though to carry her off, laughing. “Hey, come with us!”

Violently she shook her arm free.

“Am I making too much noise, Stevie sweetheart?”

Brookman put his hands out toward her, palms open. He thought his house door had opened wider behind him and took in a whiff of the kindly scents from inside. He turned and saw Ellie standing in the doorway.

Maud had caught sight of Ellie. She shouted at the top of her voice: “Are we disturbing the peaceful nest of your loving female duckies in there? Hi, folks! God bless your happy home, you assholes. Hey Miz Brookman, Miz Kiddo Brookman, everybody knocked up in there? You showing yet? I want to see.”

A car passed, slowing down, its tires hushing under its brakes on the slippery asphalt. He looked over Maud’s shoulder and saw the car’s wobbly halt, an old Camry like his own. It took traction and sped on. There were more people on the street now, a few more lights around, passersby attracted or repelled by the melee.

“Stay inside,” Brookman told his wife. When he ventured another look she was still in the doorway.

Maud took a step, a spring toward his door. He moved to intercept her. He had the sense there were more people around, more traffic. Moving hard, he put a low shoulder between his house and Maud, and that was when she started punching. Her first blow was a solid hook that turned his head sideways and came back elbow-first into his molars, which stopped him. Trying to stay up, he saw her charge, head down, almost succeeding in butting him, throwing an uppercut that missed.

More and more people gathered. Maud tried to pass him, feinted on one leg, made her move on the other. He kept his hands out, trying to keep himself between her and his front door. She let the plastic garment fall, wrapped it around her forearm and began to use it as a whip. He backed away and she charged him, punching with the anorak in her hand. Now her punches were heedless and, he thought, harmless, but one caught him on the side of his jaw. He lost his balance on the slippery sidewalk but stayed up.

“Maud! Please, Maud!” He was trying to shout down the violence of her attack.

Then she raised her head and wailed, shaking it from side to side, and she looked so piteous and stricken that out of lost love or mercy Brookman stepped out and took hold of her with both hands. The margins of the surrounding crowd withdrew; no one made a move toward them. Suddenly it seemed he and Maud were alone in the street, and a full rising scream rose from the crowd, getting louder and louder.

“Maud.” He had lost his voice and could not raise it above the cry of the crowd around him. He was holding Maud and she was fighting him, both of them sliding on the sleety crust whitening the surface of the street. He could feel her bracing to run as the noise of the crowd grew louder. For a second he had a good hold on her, but she struggled free as if to run, and he grabbed her again.

People in the screaming crowd were shouting, “Watch out! Watch!” He heard Ellie shouting too. He looked over his shoulder and saw his wife come toward him, screaming too: “Watch out!”

Then Maud broke clean and turned, and as she did, an approaching car, like a black airplane, a thing out of empty space, tossed her in front of it. He would keep what he would always believe had to be a false memory of her falling like a booted Icarus out of a lighted sky in which there was somehow falling snow and her mouth open in a lovely O that had started to shape a word, and her long legs against the electric light, shooting out of the blue plastic square that rose like a kite lifting on a whirlwind and one of her boots flying what seemed the length of the block. She was gone for a moment. There was a hush, almost a moment of silence from the frenzied crowd. Then girls screaming. Boys screaming, and that was a strange sound you never heard on a baseball diamond or a soccer pitch.

His face was angled so that he took in, nearly saw, the blurred fishtailing of a dark automobile driven on, and on and off, the sidewalk at the speed of a night’s winter light in snow. So fast, everyone said. Incredibly fast. One thing he was sure he saw: a very fat young woman in a ski jacket had made a move — maybe thinking to block the car — and then stopped like a cartoon creature arresting itself in midair and effecting a headlong dive away from the car’s path, or what had been the car’s path a fraction of a second before.

Maud landed partly against two brownstone steps and partly against the spear tips of the railing that guarded a house three doors down. The sound had the quality of a shattering and an element like brass resonating, a ring in it, a strange gong and a crack. Brass on bone, and blood, and screaming that echoed in the street. He was holding a mitten. Of all things he would think: A mitten, how utterly un-Maud-like a thing a mitten was.

Someone struck him hard and Ellie ran past him. She was running toward the bloodied child-figure that lay, wrapped tightly in bloody blue plastic, on the sidewalk.