Billy Bathgate by E L Doctorow

Author:E L Doctorow [Doctorow, E L]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307767387
Amazon: B000SFMZXC
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2006-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

When I was through she didn’t say anything. She handed me the wine bottle. I tilted my head up to drink from it and when I looked again she was no longer sitting beside me but had slid over the mossy bank and was by means of crevasses in the rocks and the small pine saplings growing from them lowering herself down the side of the gorge. I lay on my belly and watched. When she was two-thirds of the way down the mist enveloped her.

I wondered if she was going to do something really stupid. If I had told my story too well. I had not included everything, that for instance when Irving and the pilot were talking in the wheelhouse Bo Weinberg begged me to go below and see what was happening to her. I had done that and heard a little, not much, because the boat’s engines were so loud down there. I listened for a few minutes outside the door of the cabin where Mr. Schultz had taken her and then I had gone back up to the deck and told Bo she was all right, that Mr. Schultz was pacing back and forth and explaining his point of view. But I had just wanted to make it easy for him.

“You wanted life?” I had heard Mr. Schultz shout. “Here, Miss Debutante, this is it, this is what it looks like!”

And then I couldn’t hear anything for a while. I hunkered down in the passageway and just before I was about to give up I put my ear to the door and I heard his voice again: “You don’t care for what’s dead, do you? I’m telling you aside from the actual details he’s dead. Can you understand that? You can forget the dead, can’t you? I think you’ve forgotten already, haven’t you? Well, I’m waiting, it’s either a yes or a no. What? I can’t hear you!”

“Yes,” she said, or must have. Because then Mr. Schultz said: “Ahh, that’s too bad. That’s too too bad for Bo,” and then he laughed. “Because if I thought you loved him I might have changed my mind.”

I grabbed her skirt and shook it out and tossed it over the side and watched it float into the mist and disappear. What was I expecting? That she would find it, put it on, and climb back up? I was not acting sensibly. I dropped over the side and turned my back to the gorge and went after her. It was harder than it looked, I found that out almost immediately with my head barely below the edge when the root I put my foot on broke away and I almost fell. I didn’t like staring at rock face three inches from my nose. The rocks were scratching the shit out of my elbows and knees. I was in a panic of descent, I don’t know what I feared, that she would just leave me there forever, that someone would find her, take her, do something bad to her.

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