Little Easter

And She Did

“You look like shit,” Kate Barnum noted before I had both of my legs through the door of the scavenged old whaling ship.

“The best part is, I get to feel worse than I look,” I winked, easing myself into her age-shredded sofa. “Got a beer to wash down my pain killers with?”

“Sure.” She ambled barefoot into the kitchen and reappeared holding a glass mug smeared with fingerprints on the outside and full of unnamed beer within. “How’d it happen? And don’t tell me you fell into an uncovered washing machine.”

“Nah. If that happened, I’d be dead. Can’t swim a stroke.” I got guilty quiet thinking about a little girl floating face down in Ponsichatchi Creek. Sometimes it’s not funny. What you think about, I mean.

Barnum mistook my change of expression for bad beer. “The beer sour?”

“No. Just everything else.”

She lit a butt and nuzzled up next to me, her free hand falling carelessly onto my chest. I nearly passed out when it landed.

“Ribs,” I coughed out.

“Sorry. Christ, you really are in bad shape. I thought the black eyes were just a fashion statement!” the reporter snickered nervously. “You must be getting close. Someone warn you off?”

“Yeah.”

“Who?”

“Next question.” I sat up again, breathing as normally as a man could with a hundred yards of tape around his middle.

“MacClough, huh.” Barnum lit up the room with her self-satisfaction.

“You are good.”

“I didn’t get to where I was by being dull-witted, Klein.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “but how’d ya get to where you are now?”

“Next question.” It was her turn to look like a swallow of bad beer. We were even.

“Do you still have access to the Times morgue?” I wondered.

“Not officially. Why?”

“You’re not Jewish, Barnum, so stop answering my questions with questions. Yes or no?”

“Yes,” she acquiesced.

“Go back twenty-five years and work-”

“Twenty-five years!”

“And work forward,” I continued. “You’re lookin’ for a mob trial in which a woman turns state’s evidence and then goes underground.”

Kate pulled a bottle of house brand bourbon out from under the kidney-shaped coffee table and took a warm-up swallow. When she was warmed up, she took another.

“You want to give me any details or am I going to have to stay in the morgue for twenty years just looking?” she queried with as much enthusiasm as a pig for a ham sandwich.

“Don’t get so excited. One thing is you won’t have to look that far forward. The envelope is twenty-five to twenty years ago. It’s the only time frame that fits. Secondly, I’m pretty sure the woman’s name was Azrael.” I wasn’t certain at all, but I was getting pretty comfortable with lying. “Might’ve been a nickname. I don’t know.”

“Azrael?”

I spelled it for her.

“Not much to go on,” she yawned and took another swig. The cheap stuff was tasting like Wild Turkey by now.

“It’s enough.” I tamped out her cigarette to underline by two words.

“Let’s fuck, Klein,” she changed gears and subjects and removed her sweatshirt.

“Christ,” I laughed uncomfortably, “I wish you’d just get to the point.” I don’t know what it is exactly. Maybe men are unnerved by women who not only think like they do, but who give voice to their thoughts. “Sorry,” I ran a fingernail along the tape ridges about my ribs. “Besides, you play too rough.”

“Just come with me, baby,” she helped me out of my seat, her left nipple brushing my cheek. “I’ll do all the work.”

And she did. Most of it, anyway.

Now we were just lying there, sleepless and lonely on her smoky sheets in the dark; the absence of love robbing the room of breathable air. Even before she could finish taking what I had to give, I could feel the emptiness creep in the window like poison gas. In the absence of love, consummation is the cruelest part of desire. Barely able to make out her shape in the blackness and gas, I wondered if she’d simply gotten used to it. I never have.

“Do you know what question couples forever wonder about but never ask until it’s too late?” Barnum spoke into the night.

“No,” I answered, somehow relieved that she felt the absence, too.

“Where did it go? That’s what they ask. Where did it go?”

And I did not respond. What was there to say, anyway? In any case, I was in no shape to look any harder at myself than I was already. She got up to find the bathroom and the bottle and a pack of cigarettes. I also think she went to take a look.