Odd Hours

“What’s your last name, Valonia?”
    “Fontenelle. Remember it.”
    “That’s no problem.”
    “I’ll be famous one day.”
    “I’ve no doubt you will be.”
    “What’s your last name, Harry?”
    “Lime.”
    “Tart,” she said.
    “Actually, I’m pretty much monogamous.”
    Her laugh was nicer than I had expected, girlish yet robust, and genuine.
    I didn’t want to like her laugh. I dreaded hearing in it this trace of merriment that suggested a once-innocent child.
    Now I could see that she was even younger than I first thought, no older than twenty or twenty-one.
    Valonia’s long hair had been tucked under the fox-fur collar. With one hand behind her neck, she pulled it free. She shook her head, and a wealth of spun gold cascaded around her face.
    “Are you ready for the world to change, Harry?”
    “I guess I better be.”
    “It’s all so old and tired.”
    “Not all of it,” I said, openly admiring her.
    She liked to be admired.
    “They’re going to love him so much,” she said.
    “Who?”
    “The people.”
    “Oh, yeah. Them.”
    “They’ll love the way he’ll take charge. Bring order. His compassion and his strength.”
    “And his magnificent dental work.”
    She laughed, but then chastised me. “The senator’s a great man, Harry. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t think so.”
    Cautious about being seduced to respond outside the character that I had created—or, rather, borrowed from a Graham Greene novel—I said, “For me, it’s mostly about the money.”
    Gazing into the fog, Valonia blew out a poof of breath through puckered lips. “The old, tired world—just gone.”
    “Do that again,” I requested.
    Staring at me, she puckered and blew.
    I said, “Maybe, after all, it’s not entirely about the money.”
    Her blue eyes dazzled. “The perpetual arguing, the tiresome debate that never settles anything. No one will miss that.”
    “No one,” I agreed, but was overcome by sorrow that she could be so young yet hate so much.
    “He’ll shut them up, Harry.”
    “It’s time somebody did.”
    “And in the end, they’ll like it.”
    She inhaled as if trying to clear nasal congestion.
    “The endless quarreling,” she said, “when we know the issues were really settled long ago.”
    “Ages ago,” I agreed.
    She tried to clear her nose again. “The people are going to be so grateful for the New Civility.”
    I could hear the uppercase N and C in the way that she said it.
    “Do you believe, Harry?”
    “Deeply. Plus there’s the money.”
    “It’s so wonderful to believe.”
    “You come so alive when you say the word.”
    “Believe,” she said with childlike yearning. “Believe.”
    She inhaled noisily, and again.
    “Damn these allergies,” she complained, and reached into a coat pocket for a handkerchief.
    From under my sweatshirt, from the small of my back, I drew the gun that held two more rounds.
    Her compact pistol, a lady’s gun but deadly, hung up on the lining of her coat pocket as she tried to draw it.
    “Valonia, don’t.”
    The snagged lining tore.
    “Please,” I said.
    The gun came free, and in her passion to defend the faith, she fired wildly.
    In every direction from the bullet hole, the laminated window beside my head instantly webbed to the limits of its frame.
    I shot her once, not just to wound, because it never could have been that way.
    Golden hair swirled, shimmered, as she spasmed from the impact. She dropped the little gun, and dropped herself, collapsing toward a needed rest, faceup on the stained and soiled deck, an orchid in the mud.
    Snaring her pistol, I knelt beside her.
    Her eyes were open, but not yet vacant. She stared at something, perhaps a memory, and then at me.
    She said, “I’ll never get to see…”
    I took one of her hands in both of mine, and I was not assaulted by the vision of a red tide. That future had been thwarted.
    “I’ll never get to see…the new world,” she finished.
    “No,” I said. “I spared you that.”
    Her limp hand tightened on mine.
    She closed her eyes. And at once opened them in alarm.
    “Don’t let go,” she pleaded, her voice younger now, without sophistication or artifice.
    I promised her, “I won’t.”
    The strength in her grip increased, became fierce, and then she had no strength at all.
    Although she was gone, I still held her hand and prayed silently that she would not add to her suffering by lingering here in spirit.
    I wondered who had turned her free