His stints at the typewriter grew gradually longer as the pain slowly receded and some of his endurance returned... but ultimately he wasn't able to write fast enough to satisfy her demands.
The gotta which had kept them both alive - and it had, for without it she surely would have murdered both him and herself long since - was also what had caused the loss of his thumb. It was horrible, but also sort of funny. Have a little irony, Paul - it's good for your blood.
And think how much worse it could have been.
It could have been his penis, for instance.
"And I only have one of those," he said, and began to laugh wildly in the empty room in front of the hateful Royal with its gap-toothed grin. He laughed until his gut and stump both ached. Laughed until his mind ached. At some point the laughter turned to horrible dry sobs that awoke pain even in what remained of his left thumb, and when that happened he was finally able to stop. He wondered in a dull sort of way how close he was to going insane.
Not that it really mattered, he supposed.
Chapter 2
9
One day not long before the thumbectomy - perhaps even less than a week - Annie had come in with two giant dishes of vanilla ice-cream, a can of Hershey's chocolate syrup, a pressure can of Reddi-Whip, and a jar in which maraschino cherries red as heart's blood floated like biology specimens.
"I thought I'd make us sundaes, Paul," Annie said. Her tone was spuriously jolly. Paul didn't like it. Not her tone of voice, nor the uneasy look in her eyes. I'm being a naughty girl, that look said. It made him wary, put his wind up. It was too easy for him to imagine her looking exactly the same way when she put a heap of clothes on one set of stairs, a dead cat on another.
"Why, thank you, Annie." he said, and watched as she poured the syrup and puffed two cumulus clouds of whipped cream out of the pressure can. She performed these chores with the practiced, heavy hand of the long-time sugar junkie.
"No need for thanks. You deserve it. You've been working so hard." She gave him his sundae. The sweetness became cloying after the third bite, but he kept on. It was wiser. One of the key rules to survival here on the scenic Western Slope was, to wit, When Annie's treatin, you best be eatin. There was silence for awhile, and then Annie put her spoon down, wiped a mixture of chocolate syrup and melting ice-cream off her chin with the back of her hand, and said pleasantly: "Tell me the rest." Paul put his own spoon down. "I beg your pardon?"
"Tell me the rest of the story. I can't wait. I just can't." And hadn't he known this was coming? Yes. If someone had delivered all twenty reels of the new Rocket Man chapter-play to Annie's house, would she have waited, parcelling out only one a week, or even one a day?
He looked at the half-demolished avalanche of her sundae, one cherry almost buried in whipped cream, another floating in chocolate syrup. He remembered the way the living room had looked, with sugar-glazed dishes everywhere.
No. Annie was not the waiting type. Annie would have watched all twenty episodes in one night, even if they gave her eyestrain and a splitting headache.
Because Annie loved sweet things.
"I can't do that," he said.
Her face had darkened at once, but hadn't there been a shadowy relief there, as well? "Oh? Why not?" Because you wouldn't respect me in the morning, he thought of saying, and clamped down on that. Clamped down hard.
"Because I'm a rotten story-teller," he answered instead.
She slurped up the remainder of her sundae in five huge spoonfuls that would have left Paul's throat gray with frostbite. Then she set her dish down and looked at him angrily, not as if he were the great Paul Sheldon but as if he were someone who had presumed to criticize the great Paul Sheldon.
"If you're such a rotten story-teller, how come you have best-sellers and millions of people love the books you write?"
"I didn't say I was a rotten story-writer. I actually happen to think I'm pretty good at that. But as a story-teller, I'm the pits."
"You're just making up a big cockadoodie excuse." Her face was darkening. Her hands were clenched into shiny fists on the heavy material of her skirt. Hurricane Annie was back in the room. Everything that went around came around. Except things no longer had been quite the same, had they? He was as scared of her as ever, but her hold over him had nonetheless diminished. His life no longer seemed like such a big deal, gotta or no gotta. He was only afraid she would hurt him.
"It's not an excuse," he had replied. "The two things are like apples and oranges, Annie. People who tell stories usually can't write stories. If you really think people who can write stories can talk worth a damn, you never watched some poor slob of a novelist fumbling his way through an interview on the Today show."
"Well, I don't want to wait," she sulked. "I made you that nice sundae and the least you could do is tell me a few things. It doesn't have to exactly be the whole story, I guess, but... did the Baron kill Calthorpe?" Her eyes sparkled. "That's one thing I really want to know. And what did he do with the body if he did? Is it all cut up in that trunk his wife won't let out of her sight? That's what I think." Paul shook his head - not to indicate she had it wrong but to indicate he would not tell.
She became even blacker. Yet her voice was soft. "You're making me very angry - you know that, don't you, Paul?"
"Of course I know it. But I can't help it."
"I could make you. I could make you help it. I could make you tell." But she looked frustrated, as if knowing that she could not. She could make him say some things, but she could not make him tell.