Rose Madder

“How are you making out on pillowcases today?” the tub of guts walking on the inside asked the other two.

“For once, they’re all there,” the older woman walking on the outside said.

“How about you, Pam?”

“I haven’t counted yet, it’s too depressing,” Blondie replied, and they all laughed-those high, giggly sounds that always made Norman feel as if his fillings were cracking in his mouth. He stopped at once, looking in a window at a bunch of sporting goods, letting the maids pull ahead. It was her, all right-no question about it. Blondie was the one who had said the magic words Ettinger’s Pier. Maybe it changed everything, maybe it changed nothing. Right now he was too excited to figure it out. It was certainly an amazing stroke of luck, though-the kind of miraculous, coincidental break you always hoped for when you were working a longshot case, the break that happened more often than anyone would ever believe. For now he would file this in the back of his mind and proceed with Plan A. He wouldn’t even ask about Blondie back at the hotel, at least not yet. He knew her name was Pam, and that was plenty to start with. Norman walked to the bus stop, waited fifteen minutes for the airport shuttle, and then hopped on board. It was a long ride; the terminal was on the edge of the city. When he finally disembarked in front of Terminal A, he slipped on his dark glasses, crossed the street, and made his way to the longterm parking area. The first car he tried jumping had been there so long the battery was dead. The second one, a nondescript Ford Tempo, started all right. He told the man in the collection booth that he’d been in Dallas for three weeks and had lost the ticket. He was always losing them, he said. He lost laundry tickets, too, and he was always having to show his driver’s license at Photomat when he stopped in to pick up his snapshots. The man in the collection booth nodded and nodded, the way you do at a boring story you’ve already heard about ten thousand times. When Norman humbly offered him an extra ten dollars in lieu of the ticket, the man in the collection booth perked up a little. The money disappeared. Norman Daniels drove out of longterm parking at almost exactly the same moment that Robbie Lefferts was offering his fugitive wife what he termed “a more solid business arrangement.” Two miles down the road, Norman parked behind a beat-to-shit Le Sabre and swapped license plates. Another two miles on, he stopped at a Robo-Wash. He had a bet with himself that the Tempo would turn out to be dark blue, but he lost. It was green. He didn’t think it mattered-the man in the collection booth had only taken his eyes off his little black-and-white TV when the tenspot had appeared under his nose-but it was best to play safe. It increased the comfort level. Norman turned on the radio and found an oldies station. Shirley Ellis was on, and he sang along as Shirley instructed, “If the first two letters are ever the same / Drop them both and say the name / Like Barry-Barry, drop the B, oh-Arry / That’s the only rule that is contrary.” Norman realized he knew every word of that stupid old song. What kind of world was it where you couldn’t remember the fucking quadratic equation or the various forms of the French verb avoir two years after you got out of high school, but when you were getting on for forty years old you could still remember Nick-Nick-bo-bick, banana-fa

“Hey Jude” crap today. He was still a couple of miles from where the real city began when he saw a place called The Base Camp ARMY SURPLUS LIKE YOU NEVER FIND! the sign out front read, and for some reason that made him burst out laughing. He thought it was in some ways the single most peculiar motto he’d seen in his whole life; it seemed to mean something, but it was impossible to say just what. Anyway, the sign didn’t matter. The store probably had one of the things he was looking for, and that did. There was a big ba

“You wah niy-vole baddery widdat?” the clerk asked. He was a bullet-headed young man with a harelip. He wore a teeshirt which said BETTER TO HAVE A GUN AND NOT NEED ONE THAN NEED ONE AND NOT HAVE ONE. To Norman he looked like the sort of fellow whose parents might have been blood relatives. “dass waddit runs on-a niy-vole.” Norman realized what the young man with the harelip was trying to say and nodded.

“Give me two,” he said.

“Let’s live a little.” The young man laughed as if this was the fu

“Whatchoo want?” the black barber asked. He spoke perhaps more brusquely than he would have to a black man, but not discourteously, either. You weren’t discourteous to a man like this without a damned good reason, especially when you were alone in your shop. He was six-two at least, with broad shoulders and big, thick legs. Also, he smelled like a cop. Above the mirror were photographs of Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, andjalen Rose. Jordan was wearing a Birmingham Barons baseball uniform. Above his picture was a slip of paper with THE ONCE amp; FUTURE BULL typed on it. Norman pointed. “do me like that,” he said. The black barber looked at Norman carefully, first making sure he wasn’t drunk or stoned, then trying to make sure he wasn’t joking. The second was harder than the first.

“Whatchoo saying, brother? Are you saying you want a cleanhead?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.” Norman ran a hand through his hair, which was a thick black just starting to show flecks of gray at the temples. It was neither exceptionally short nor exceptionally long. He had worn it at this same length for almost twenty years. He looked at himself in the mirror, trying to imagine what he was going to look like, as bald as Michael Jordan, only white. He couldn’t do it. With luck, Rose and her new friends wouldn’t be able to, either.