Astronomers say that even galaxies eat each other; so why not let’s eat this sweet bitch?

Anyway, she tries to kill Ernest: that’s all the story really. No one knows why, and Catherine won’t tell. The rest of us can only list the attempts: Once she tried to dump a steel bookcase on him, another time she lunged at him with a red-hot poker; once she grabbed the rusty spoke of a bicycle wheel when we were passing by a salvage dump in Detroit.

We were walking down this deserted backstreet one Sunday, before noon. When Catherine spotted the salvage dump, she ran a bit ahead of us, to the wire-mesh fence. When we got to her, she had her hands entwined in the fence. We stood behind her, watching. She looked almost like a little girl in her yellow cotton dress, her hair in tiny braids and tied with a ribbon, her bowlegs peeking out of the dress and looking as if she were perpetually getting ready to climb onto a saddle—with ride-’em-cowgirl bowlegs. She was even wearing socks with her high-heeled shoes—that was the latest style. Standing pigeon-toed, she looked like a canary peeking into its cage.

“Come along, Catherine,” Ernest said, after we had stood there a moment.

“I’m looking to see if they’ve got anything I can use. They’ve got a lot of rubber things. I’m thinking of maybe doing a series of pieces in rubber. Bouncing the idea around, you know.”

She seemed in delightful good humor for a change.

I stopped watching her and watched the pale building that was the central office for the salvage company. It had high windows, so you’d have to climb a ladder to peek inside. The door was tall and narrow; only one person could enter at a time. I imagined one of those slender carnival giants—a man who lived on stilts—the sort you see in carnival parades, wearing a tuxedo and an oversized stove-pipe hat.

“We’ll come back tomorrow and you can look around.”

I turned; Catherine turned, one foot darted forward, she stretched her arm like a fencer, looking as determined as an expert. But Ernest had done something she hadn’t counted on; he had already taken off his leather jacket and had draped it over his arm—luck or premonition I don’t know—so that he had a readymade shield against her. She stabbed the leather. I grabbed her from behind around the waist and held. She still stood with one leg jutted forward; the other foot had fallen out of its shoe, so she was off-balance, easy for me to hold. Ernest got the bicycle spoke out of her hand and just stood looking. She gave a sudden yell like a samurai, then settled into my arms. A weird, curious look on Ernest. Like that time I went with an aunt to the police department to file a complaint. There was another woman there sitting at a gray, metal table, examining photographs. She kept turning pages till she got to the page where she saw the familiar face. “This is him,” she said, then, “I think this is him. This could quite possibly be him.” The detective standing behind her said, “We don’t go by possibly in here.” When my aunt and I got outside, she said, “That’s not exactly true that they don’t go by possibly. I have known them to go by possibly.” Anyway, the look of that woman spotting the “possibly” photograph was the look that Ernest had watching Catherine: “This is her. I think this is her. This could quite possibly be her.” But, standing behind Catherine’s shoulder, it was as if he were looking at both her and me at the same time.