that been the end of it. The uppity bitch had found that kike ... that little baldheaded kike ...
But the world was full of uppity, troublemaking bitches. His wife, for instance. But she was one uppity bitch he could do something about ... always supposing, that was, he could get a little sleep.
Norman rolled over onto his other side, and 1985 at last began to fade away. “When you least expect it, Rose, ” he murmured. “That’s when I’ll come for you. ”
Five minutes later he was asleep.
10
That slutty gal, he called her, Rosie thought in her own bed. She was close to sleep herself now, but not there quite yet; she could still hear the crickets in the park. That slutty high-yellow gal. How he hated her!
Yes, of course he had. There had been a mess with the Internal Affairs investigators, for one thing. Norman and Harley Bissington had escaped from that with their skins intact—barely-only to discover that the slutty high-yellow gal had found herself a lawyer (a baldheaded kike ambulance-chaser, in Normanspeak) who had filed a huge civil suit on her behalf. It named Norman, Harley, the entire police department. Then, not long before Rosie’s miscarriage, Wendy Yarrow had been murdered. She was found behind one of the grain elevators on the west side of the lake. She had been stabbed over a hundred times, and her breasts had been hacked off.
Some sicko, Norman had told Rosie, and although he had not been smiling after he put the telephone down—someone at the cop-shop must have been really excited, to have called him at home—there had been undeniable satisfaction in his voice. She sat in at the game once too often and a wildcard came out of the deck. Hazard of the job. He had touched her hair then, very gently, stroking it, and had smiled at her. Not his biting smile, the one that made her feel like screaming, but she’d felt like screaming anyway, because she had known, just like that, what had happened to Wendy Yarrow, the slutty high-yellow gal.
See how lucky you are? he’d asked her, now stroking the back of her neck with his big hard hands, now her shoulders, now the swells of her breasts. See how lucky you are not to be out on the street, Rose?
Then—maybe it had been a month later, maybe six weeks—he had come in from the garage, found Rosie reading a romance novel, and decided he needed to talk to her about her entertainment tastes. Needed to talk to her about them right up close, in fact.
1985, a hell of a year.
Rosie lay in bed with her hands under her pillow, slipping toward sleep and listening to the sound of the crickets coming in through the window, so close they sounded as if her room had been magically transported onto the bandstand in the park, and she thought of a woman who had sat in the comer with her hair plastered against her sweaty cheeks and her belly as hard as a stone and her eyes rolling in their shock-darkened sockets as the sinister kisses began to tickle at her thighs, that woman who was still years from seeing the drop of blood on the sheet, that woman who had not known places like Daughters and Sisters or men like Bill Steiner existed, that woman who had crossed her arms and gripped the points of her shoulders and prayed to a God she no longer believed in that it not be a miscarriage, that it not be the end of her small sweet dream, and then thinking, as she felt it happening, that maybe it was better. She knew how Norman fulfilled his responsibilities as a husband; how might he fulfill them as a father?
The soft hum of crickets, lulling her to sleep. And she could even smell grass—a husky-sweet aroma that seemed out of place in May. This was a smell she associated with August hayfields.
I never smelled grass from the park before, she thought sleepily. Is this what love-infatuation, at least-does to you? Does it sharpen your senses at the same time it’s making you crazy?
Very distantly, she heard a rumble that could have been thunder. That was strange, too, because the sky had been clear when Bill brought her home—she had looked up and marvelled at how many stars she could see, even with all the orange hi-intensity streetlights.
She drifted, sliding away, sliding into the last dreamless sleep she would have for some