Getting Even
William Chapin
She was his Baby Doll, his one and only Baby Doll, but he treated her like a rag, like the dirty dishrag he used to wipe the counter after he’d closed up the bar for the night.
Baby Doll -- that was her stage name, her real name was Lu-Ann, but he always called he Baby Doll or just Babe -- had this compulsive little habit, this tic, this ritual of sucking her right thumb when she was in repose,because she didn’t read, not even a newspaper; hardly could read; didn’t watch television; didn’t go to the movies; didn’t cook; didn’t do much of anything except strip, suck her thumb, and lie down with her lover, who was names Sam, and who was brawny as a bull.
It was odd, but few things, indeed nothing, could simultaneously arouse him and enrage him the way the thumb-sucking did.When she did that, when the pink, pudgy thumb got all wet and slippery, it was not unusual for him to take her, quickly and brutally, and then, before he left the bed, to hit her upside the head with the back of his right hand as a kind of post-coital signing-off.
“Why do you do that, Hon?” she asked him early on, wincing in pain, ducking, sheltering her head in her hands. “Why do you hurt me, Hon?”
“Because I like to,” he said. It was an honest answer that, as far as he was concerned, needed no explanation.
Once, a good friend of hers, a stunning hooker who worked in the French section of town even though she was a Jamaican by birth and spoke virtually no French, beyond the word zig-zig, asked Baby Doll why she stated with him. Baby Doll said she didn’t have anywhere else to go. The hooker, who lives alone, had never let a client stay overnight, and was never broke, couldn’t quite believe this, but she let it go, let it go. What was the use? The hooker, well-versed in the ways of the world, thought it not impossible that Baby Doll had this quirky need to be punished for being a stripper. How can you be certain about these things?
**********
Baby Doll and Sam, they worked in the same place, a dingy joint called the Ideal Gardens at the lower end of Decarie Boulevarde. Sam tended bar, served Labatt’s Ale and Seagram’s whiskey to men still in their work clothes, Baby Doll stripped down to a sequined G-string and twirled her generous ass and squatted near the edge of the stage so that the men, holding aloft their bottles of Labatt’s, could stuff dollar bills into what was left of her costume. They were a rude crude bunch, mostly French, and to show their appreciation of Baby Doll’s dubious artistry, they shouted things like “Sacre milles cochons” and “Maudit enfante chienness” and “Donnes mois le zig-zig.”
The music was so loud it hurt your ears, and it came from the band of Bill Shorter, a black pianist who had been hustling his marginal talents for years in the sleazier haunts of nighttime Montreal. When Baby Doll was removing her clothes, pumping and grinding, away, Bill Shorter’s drummer pounded his bass drum so hard you could feel it in the soles of your feet.
For both Baby Doll and Sam, it was a living, but not much more than that. They worked all night, went home to their scrawny flat in Outrement, slept, made their own brand of violent, shallow love, ate food from cans, slept some more, took showers, and went back to work.
It was a living.
**********
At the end of one night, close to 3 a.m., April 8, 1995, Sam said to Baby Doll:
“Hey, Babe, Let’s you and me go up to the mountain this morning.”
“OK by me, Hon,” said Baby Doll.
Sam liked to drive up to the top of Mount Royal, the landmark below which Montreal stretched out in every direction like the spokes of a wheel. He didn’t go up there to look at the stars. He went up there to watch the lights blink out, a dozen here, a single one over there, a brace of them way off in the distance, perhaps in St. Lambert across the river. It was like watching the entire world die out, in miniature. Sam liked that. He wasn’t sure why.
At 3:30, they left the Royal Gardens, got into the Ford pickup, and drove up to the summit of Mount Royal. They parked in a sort of plaza and walked over to a low stone parapet, on the far side of which was a cliff. The cliff was steep, in fact perpendicular, and at its foot was a rock pile. To the left, perhaps 75 yards away, they could make out the dim outline of the city’s municipal ski jump.
They stood there a few minutes, saying nothing. Baby Doll was tired. She began to wonder if Sam would hit her when he got home. If he would do it before, or after. She thought about a disgusting customer who that night, when she was crouched and vulnerable at the edge of the stage, had run his filthy fingers up the inside of her leg. She thought about men. The man next to her, Sam, said:
“Here’s what we do, Babe. I’m gonna stand up on this wall, and I want you to get piggyback on me and tell me what you can see from way up there. OK?”
“OK,” said Baby Doll. Sam hoisted himself up on top of the parapet, and took a position near the outer edge, legs apart. He bent over at the waist, six inches or so, and dropped his arms around his knees, ready to sling his very own Baby Doll up onto his shoulders.
But Baby Doll decided, on the instant, that she didn’t want to be slung onto Sam’s rotten, stinking shoulders. Instead, she put her clenched right fist into the small of his back, just above his rotten, stinking bottom, and gave him a firm push.
Sam toppled right over and, with a frantic flailing of arms and legs, disappeared. It was a free fall. He screamed all the way down the length of the cliff, a high piercing scream, surprisingly high for such a big man, and he struck the rock pile. Then he was very quiet.
Baby Doll listened carefully for a moment or two. Nothing. She thought, that’s one of the most satisfying sounds I have ever heard in my life. That scream. Then she also thought, even more satisfying was the sound of silence that followed it.
