Bury Me Deep Read Online Free PDF Page A

each month, requiring massages, low lights and a steady supply of something called Cardui Treatment, which came in a green bottle and which she’d spoon into her favorite highball glass. “Blessed thistle, black haw and goldenseal,” Ginny would lisp, finger pressed on the bottle label. “Stops flooding spells, heaviness in the abdomen. Giddiness.” Am I less giddy, Marion, am I? She was not.
    Here was Louise slipping her fingers under her ruffling bloomers and pulling out loose pills, one after another, into her other palm still sticky from squeezing lemons for the drinks.
    “Can you take these for me, Marion? I don’t want Ginny to find them,” Louise said. “She thinks whatever I get is all for her.But I have to pay the rent with something other than my fine bottom.”
    “Where did they come from, Louise?” Marion asked. Her husband’s face flashed before her eyes. He was the first person to show her such pills, without meaning to, tucked in his trouser cuffs, on their honeymoon trip from Grand Rapids to St. Louis. When she lifted his suit from the trunk, pressing her hand into the knife pleats, the pills scattered all over the floor of the train car and his gasp was loud and pained.
    “Mr. Lanigan, of course,” Louise said. “Isn’t he kind?”
    “Louise, what are you doing with…with narcotics?”
    “Oh, Marion, don’t pull a face with me. They’re just medicine. You know how the other fellows, Mr. Gergen and Mr. Scott and Mr. Worth, all bring us notions? Even Sheriff Healy once brought us a marble bust with a bullet in it from that big raid at the Dempsey Hotel. I sold it for four dollars. Why, Mr. Worth brought us the baby lamb just last Sunday. They all bring us the things they sell. Well, Mr. Lanigan, he sells medicines. And he knows Ginny’s in such terrible, terrible pain and so he brings me little treasures. And I dole them out one by one. But, Marion, Ginny loves pills of any kind, she’s not particular, she just loves them such a darn lot and I’ve tried to hide them but don’t you know she finds them, the little minx.”
    Marion looked at her in the tiny bathroom, Louise all legs and hot breath atop the sink, her damp hands dotted with pills, eyes on her so anxiously.
    “But you said something about paying your rent.”
    “If I were to buy her medicine, all of it, my darling, I couldn’t rub together two dimes for rent. I couldn’t, Marion. Don’t you know it? Sure, I could pawn the radio. Do you want me to pawn Mr. Loomis’s lovely radio, Marion? Mr. Loomis was so happy to give us that radio.”
    Mr. Loomis had been awfully pleased to give them the Silvertone cathedral radio. Marion had heard the story many times, including from Mr. Loomis himself, who spoke breathlessly about how he’d had it wheeled in on a dolly while the girls were at Sunday services (that’s what he said, though she had never heard of either Louise or Ginny attending church), and when they came home, there it was in the living room, trilling Eddie Cantor singing, “Potatoes are Cheaper, Tomatoes Are Cheaper, Now’s the Time to Fall in Love.”
    So Marion slipped the pills into the pocket of her dress, but Louise said that was not near good enough and she wrapped the pills in a handkerchief for Marion and told her to tuck them in her step-ins. Marion felt her face go red and she would not do it and Louise laughed and laughed and laughed. They strode back to the party arm in arm and Louise was still laughing and so beautiful.
    Opening the door to the room—the door was vibrating with music, with music so frenetic, that “Tiger Rag” song they’d played five times before, and when the door opened it was like a blast of moist heat in the face, all the energy of so many in such small spaces and the men with collars sprung loose and the women with no shoes.
    Mrs. Loomis was waving around the girls’ tiny Colt pistol and shouting she’d blow everyone to pieces at midnight and one of the other women