Free The Night Inspector by Frederick Busch

tattoos, never feeling the necessity to make clear to the studentbody or his faithful trustees how it was that he had come to see them in the first place, banding her lower breasts and torso as they did. Jessie said, sweetly, “Bumfodder, Billy. A couple of nights ago, you rose like the moon. You don’t lose the ink in your pen that quickly.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Are you acquainted with anyone else who knows the subject better than I?”
    “I don’t like to think of it like that.”
    “Yes, you do.”
    “Well. Sometimes, perhaps.”
    “Do you think of me sucking away at some big Irishman? Slurping my mouth all over him? As if he were a piece of ice, and myself in heat, if you know.”
    “I know, Jessie.” She put her hand on me and I flinched.
    “Yes,” she said, “but a little firmness there already, I’d say. Let’s go one better. He’s turned me over and pressed my face down into the pillow. We know what he wants, don’t we? There goes his big, blunt finger, pressing in, and I say something about the cold cream, and so he must say something about his
hot
cream, and he presses his suit, let’s say. Let’s say he presses on. I’m facedown into the pillow, and he’s immense in me. Christ! He—”
    I turned over and I pressed the mask upon her. She tensed and went still.
    “Sometimes,” I said, “I would surrender an arm if I could kiss you.”
    “Take off the mask,” she said.
    “I’m—”
    “Oh, no? What’s this I’m feeling? Remove it, please. The mask, not your— That’s right. Not your— No, you know what to do now, don’t you?”
    It was the night I asked her again to tell me what the tattoos represented.
    “Well, I’ve just now told you,” she said.
    I left off asking, and I lay in my pride and in my childish resentment.
    “You tell
me
something,” she whispered.
    I said, “Yes.”
    “What were you remembering? What were you thinking about? When you couldn’t. When you thought you couldn’t.”
    “Hue and cry,” I said, “crimes, misdeeds, and misbehavior.”
    “You evade me.” She turned and kissed the crushed, crimped bony flesh beneath the scars at the side of what was left of my face. She kissed my ear. She nipped it, and I felt it down through my spine. “Tell,” she said.
    “My work in the War.”
    “The rifle work.”
    “Assassinations, yes.”
    “The dead are burdening your body,” she said.
    “The dead bed me that I might not bed you?”
    Jessie said, “Perhaps.” Then: “This one,” she said, taking my hand and moving my finger along her ribs to the swell of her breast, “this is my mother’s time on Pukapuka. She was taken from there as a girl.” She moved my hand along her to the other side; I cupped her breast lightly because the flesh was beautiful and perfectly smooth, and because she permitted and even wished me to. “This is the story of my father in the Indian encampments.” I read the story with my hand, and with its fingers. My nerves read. I remained there, eyes closed, in the tale of the man escaped from captivity to whites, now captive again to redskinned people. I listened with the outer flesh of my body for the moment he met Jessie’s mother, and how she came to be there in the Seminole place, and how they coupled, and how they parted. Then she moved my hand to her belly, my fingers lower and, as she moved her legs apart, in. I understood little but felt much, and I therefore was grateful and burdened at once.
    I sighed and my breath went up the craters of my face.
    Jessie said, in her dry, low, undramatic voice, “This is about Billy Bartholomew entering my life. Now you may take the mask off, Billy.”
    “But I have,” I whispered.
    “Not that one, dear,” she said, as if I would understand.
    I made my way, on the arranged evening, to the foot of the Hudson River, at West Street, where, on a barge moored fast to the pier, some dozen feet, down wooden steps, below the level of the street, the Customs man on duty sat