Page 89 of If Looks Could Kill
Pearl—Small Hours on the Third Avenue El(Early Morning, Monday, December 3, 1888)
The second- and third-floor windows of Bowery shops flash by the train. Some dark, others lit, many with pasteboard messages. Liquor and soap flakes, canned peaches and tinned tobacco, ladies’ hats, salvation, and passbook savings accounts. They whir by in a snowflake haze.
Other messages aren’t written in words, but in women’s flesh, in nearly nude young women dancing in the windows, their pimps shilling them even at this forsaken hour.
May those girls be mercifully numbed. May they be allowed to forget that these trains transport prying eyes. May their spirits soar high above their trapped bodies to a happier place.
Pearl closes her own eyes and rests her throbbing forehead against the icy window.
And what of her spirit, imprisoned in her trapped body?
Time loses its grip. In the small of night, no church bells ring, no factory whistles blow. Train wheels squeal atop wet tracks. The trestle shudders and sways.
What a fool she’d been to think she could make a dent in this ocean of vice.
You can’t dent an ocean. An ocean swallows you. Pearl’s not sure she’d mind that.
But who needs an ocean? She has a train.
Just open a side door. Just lean out. A second’s terror, but it can’t be worse than this. Then all would be over. She could not become Stella. Nor Pearl the Killer.
Pearl the Killer. Some moniker that is. Tabitha could no doubt coin something better. It has none of the zip of that “Jack the Ripper” the papers go on about.
And what if—she lets her roving mind imagine—what if she did decide to become her own kind of killer celebrity? Launch her own reign of terror right here on the Bowery?
Feared. Unseen. Like the Whitechapel fiend, hidden in plain sight. Moving with impunity by day. Hunting and petrifying by night. Filling a vicious New York with statues of cruel men.
She could be an ingenue at parties. A coquette at balls. Courted and coveted by men of wealth and fashion. She knows her looks and Stella’s money can make Pearl Davenport irresistible. She can shed her religious persona—like a snake sheds its skin, very funny—and become a society princess. Be the belle of them all.
She can go back to Lafayette Place and become Stella’s fashionable daughter. Host parties. Dance. Drink fine wine. Wear jewels. And kill any man who deserves to die.
And, oh, how full this city is with such men, who beat their wives and abuse these poor prostitutes and drink away their paychecks before they buy their children bread.
She’d come to the city to help such families by calling those men to Christ. Now she’s ready to exterminate them like cockroaches.
Thou shalt not kill.If ever the voice of God had thundered a plainer commandment, she doesn’t know when. Better to die than become a killer.
By God, this double-mindedness will drive her mad.
If she dies tonight, it will shatter her mother, who has lost so much. She groans to think of her mother’s pain. But isn’t burying her last child better than learning what she’s become?
Dead and mourned versus alive and monstrous.
Will anyone else miss her? Those who knew her back home will be surprised, but soon forget her. Her childhood friends hadn’t remained close. Her Army comrades will be shocked. Tabitha will feel it was her fault. For all her cleverness, Tabitha can be so oblivious.
It grieves Pearl to think of harming Tabitha or her mother or anyone. But far better this than to draw them into the hell of her disgusting, diabolical existence.
She is alone in the train car, until a stop where two men board the train. Young. White. Laborers. Drunk. Their laughter is too loud, their words too large, too jocular. Their steps, not quite steady. One is reedy and red-faced. The other has a raw handsomeness about him. A rugged stance and striking, if unwashed, features. He seems to have long known it.
They notice Pearl.
“Nick, look what I found,” announces the red one. “Little Bo Peep, on the train, asleep!”
This burst of genius deserves much mutual back-slapping.
“Little Bo Peep, where’d you put your sheep!” adds the handsome one, not to be outdone.
They approach, swaying with the train, swinging from stanchion pole to stanchion pole to keep upright. They’re coming for her.
