The Genocides

While the men and Blossom rested, Maryann rigged a sort of harness and even succeeded, over loud protests, in cinching it about Greta. Maryann fetched another heaping portion of swill using the laundry basket that had been rescued from the commonroom fire. If this wasn’t done for Greta at hourly intervals, she would begin to take up handfuls of the surrounding filth and stuff her gullet full of it. She no longer seemed to be aware of the difference, but Maryann was, and it was largely for her own sake that she kept the basket replenished. After Greta had downed suflicient of the fruit pulp, she was usually good, as now, for a few moments of conversation, and Maryann had been grateful for this during the long, dark hours of waiting. As Greta had often observed during these sober interludes: “The worst part is the boredom. That’s what got me into my condition.”

Now, however, she was pursuing a less weighty subject: “There was another movie, I can’t remember the name now, where she was poor and had this funny accent, and Laurence Harvey was a medical student who fell in love with her. Or else it was Rock Hudson. She had him right in the palm of her hand, she did. He’d have done anything she said. I can’t remember how that one ended, but there was another one I liked better, with James Stewart—remember him?— where she lived in this beautiful mansion in San Francisco. Oh, you should have seen the dresses she had. And such lovely hair! She must have been the most beautiful woman in the world. And she fell down from a tower at the end. I think that’s how it ended.”

“You must have seen just about every movie Kim Novak ever made,” Maryann said placidly while the baby nursed at her breast.

“Well, if there was any I missed, I never heard about them. I wish you’d loosen these ropes.” But Maryann never replied to her complaints. “There was one where she was a witch, but not, you know, old-fashioned. She had an apartment right on Park Avenue or someplace like that. And the most beautiful Siamese cat.”

“Yes, I think you’ve told me about that one already.”

“Well, why don’t you ever contribute to the conversation? I must have told you about every movie I’ve ever seen by now.”

“I never saw many movies.”

“Do you suppose she’s still alive?”

“Who—Kim Novak? No, I don’t suppose so. We may be the very last ones. That’s what Orville says.”

“I’m hungry again.”

“You just ate. Can’t you wait till Buddy is finished nursing?”

“I’m hungry, I tell you! Do you think I like this?”

“Oh, all right.” Maryann took up the basket by its one remaining handle and went off to a more wholesome section of the tuber. Filled, the basket weighed twenty pounds or more.

When she could no longer hear Maryann nearby, Greta burst out into tears. “Oh God, I hate this! I hate her! Oh, I’m so hungry!” Her tongue ached to be covered with the beloved, licorice-flavored slop, as a three-pack smoker’s tongue craves nicotine on a morning when he has no cigarettes.

She was not able to wait for Maryann’s return. When she had driven away the worst of her hunger. she stopped cramming the stuff in her mouth and moaned aloud in the darkness. “Oh Ga, how I hay myself! Myself, thas who I hay!”

They had hauled Greta a long way, only stopping to rest when they had reached the uppermost tuber in which they had spent the first night of their subterranean winter. The relative coolness at this height was a welcome relief from the steamy heat blow. Greta’s silence was an even more welcome contrast. All during the ascent she had complained that the harness was strangling her, that she was caught in the vines and they were pulling her apart, that she was hungry. As they passed through each successive tuber, Greta would stuff the pulp into her mouth at a prodigious rate.

Orville estimated that she weighed four hundred pounds. “Oh, more than that,” Buddy said. “You’re being kind.”

They would never have been able to get her as far as they had, if the sap coating the hollow of the roots had not been such an effective lubricant. The problem now was how to hoist her up the last thirty, vertical feet of the primary root. Buddy suggested a system of pulleys, but Orville feared that the ropes at their disposal might not be able to support Greta’s full weight. “And even if they can how will we get her out through that hole? In December, Maryann was barely able to squeeze in through it.”

“One of us will have to go back for the axe.”

“Now? Not this one of us—not when we’re this close to the sunlight. I say let’s leave her here where there’s food ready at hand for her and go up the rest of the way ourselves. Later is time enough to be Good Samaritans.”

“Buddy, what’s that sound?” Maryann asked. It was not like Maryann to interrupt.