“Sherrill, please, honey. I said I was sorry …”
“Starr Bright” spoke rapidly, and clearly, to be heard over the noises of the fan and the TV. “A man is a mask of Satan, Deputy, and maybe can’t help himself. Like a scorpion. Born in sin and travail and lust and wickedness and a love of inflicting hurt on weaker creatures. Jesus saw, and didn’t judge. He said, ‘Forgive, and love thy enemies as thyself But God says, ‘I am a God of wrath, and none shall hide from my vengeance.’”
Now she was wrapping a towel carefully around the pistol, and around her hand that held the pistol. Until the tip of the barrel was only just visible.
Fenke said, in a quavering voice, “Why are you doing that, Sherrill? Baby, please—”
“‘This is the Father’s will which hath sent me.’”
“Sherrill—”
“One thing about Vegas, people mind their own business. You might hear women screaming—you might hear firecrackers—might even hear guns sometimes. But people respect each other’s privacy.” She was advancing upon the kneeling man dancerlike, knowing how, in his terror, she grew ever taller, more radiant. The light from her face alone was enough to blind him! He tried to shield the naked part of himself with his arms, and by cringing, hunching over; bringing his thighs closer together. As if ashamed of the fleshy thing between his legs, shrunken now, of the hue and texture of a slug. “My first boyfriend, the first boy I loved, I told you his name was Michael but that was not his name. He raped me, took my love for him and defiled it. And shared me with his buddies. I was fifteen; never told a soul. Too ashamed. You count on us being shamed.” She paused, breathing quickly. “A cop raped me once—more than once. In Miami, and in Houston. Cops prey on the weak because they have the power. All this fallen world is, Deputy, is those with power preying on those without. You made a mistake, Deputy. You stole ‘Starr Blight’s’ thousand-dollar jackpot.”
A sickly jaundice-light shone in the man’s eyes. He was begging, shivering. “Please, don’t. Don’t shoot me …”
“Look, I’m a sinner, too. I am ‘Starr Bright’ and I am a fallen angel. My daddy warned me as a headstrong child and I failed to heed. My daddy was a man of God, a shining man of God and he spoke to his flock who adored him of the dark heart of mankind. He spoke of Jesus as his brother, and of Satan the fallen angel as his brother. The one walking at his right hand and the other walking at his left hand. I broke his heart, I betrayed my daddy’s love. All the days of my life I am accursed. I have not seen that man in fifteen years. Wishing to drown my own baby girl in sickness and despair and lashing out at those who would forgive me, and love me.” She wiped her tearful stinging eyes on her forearm. Her vision wavered as if about to be extinguished, then came into sharp, painful focus again. She saw the kneeling man cringe before her, yet saw his eyes ratlike and alert, waiting for an advantage. She said, slyly, “Well, Deputy—all I need is your credit card.”
“Sherrill, no. I’m begging you …”
“For what?”
“My life …”
“Then down. Down.” She was moving, dancerlike, closer to him. The high-humming air conditioner and the noise of the TV made the air jangle. If she stumbled, if she weakened—he would know. By instinct he would know. He was cringing, craven and terrified yet ratlike he would know. The fact excited her, like sex. Like sex as it had once been. In her ecstasy, in her exultation, she was drawing dangerously near to him. Whispering, “Pray for forgiveness from the Lord, and ‘Starr Bright’ will forgive you, too.”
Fenke clasped his hands together clumsily, in an eager display of piety. His chest gleamed with sweat and his face was a mask of sweat, the creases in his forehead shining like metal.
In a stammering voice, a tremulously sincere-sounding voice, he began to pray, “Our F-Father who art in heaven—” then seemed to lose his breath, and needed encouragement, so “Starr Bright” said, “—hallowed be thy name—” and quickly he continued, “—h-hallowed be thy thy name—Thy k-kingdom—” and again he paused as if his throat had closed, and “Starr Bright” was obliged to lead him, as, as small children, years ago in Shaheen, New York, she and her sister Lily had been led tenderly and firmly in prayer by their parents, “—thy kingdom come, thy will—” and the man eagerly repeated, “—thy w-will be done—on earth as it is in—in—”
Suddenly then making his move. Lunging at her, trying to grab the gun. But “Starr Bright” was prepared for this. Oh yes: “Starr Bright” was prepared for this. As if she’d been watching the kneeling man from a far corner of the room, or from a distant prospect of time. Noting how, his head bowed, chin creased against his chest, he’d been watching her covertly, desperately, in an attempt to deceive. “Starr Bright” gracefully sidestepped him, and pulled the trigger, sending a bullet into her enemy’s face.
Point-blank.
“Didn’t I warn you, Deputy! Deputy-pig!”
A single deadly shot aimed at the bridge of her enemy’s nose. A bullet piercing the man’s flesh, his bone, plowing into his brain in an instant. He had no time to cry out, to turn away or duck. He deserved no time to prepare himself. The towel wrapped around the gun had only partly muffled the sharp, cracking sound, but “Starr Bright” believed she was in no danger, no one would hear; God would protect her as He’d protected her all along. She stood over her fallen enemy, panting in triumph, “Didn’t I warn you, Pig-Deputy! Mask of Satan! All of you!”
But Deputy Fenke had collapsed, was dying, or dead. So swiftly, it had to be a miracle. His eyes were opened in astonishment and his lustrous-glassy gaze was fixed to hers—then fading, failing like a dimming light. “Starr Bright” bent to peer closely. Where was the man’s soul?—had it departed his body? Was it already gone? Gone—where?
Soft now and spineless as a creature pried out of its shell to die on dry land the man lay at her feet. Her bare feet. She stepped back, out of the flow of blood. Blood flowing darkly from the single wound to his broken face and soaking into the cheap nylon carpet of what unknown room he’d brought her to, to rape her; what unknown cheap hotel in this Sodom and Gomorrah of the desert that God might strike with lightning to annihilate should He wish at any time. “Starr Bright” was trembling, panting. Her thoughts blasted clean. For these are the days of vengeance, that all things which are written may be fulfilled.
3
Days of Vengeance
In Joshua Tree, California. In Tempe, Arizona. In a Malibu beach house at Thanksgiving. Things got complicated.
I don’t want to kill. Not a one of them. I am not one who kills. I am Rose of Sharon, I am not one who kills.
Knowing not to travel by plane. Passing through any metal detector, sending her new suitcase through any X ray. For she could not leave her protection behind.
Angry words in blood on bloodied walls. Dancing in blood. POLICE OF FOUR STATES SEEK VENGEFUL FEMALE KILLER. “STAR” KILLER SOUGHT IN SLAYINGS. A lie, most of it. Trash to sell cheap newspapers. Dancing in blood, barefoot!
Never.
Sticky warm pig’s blood, infected blood: never!
In Tempe, Arizona, purchasing at a discount mall a $6.99 Holy Bible. She was a brunette with soft-doe eyes. She was Sylvia, she was Durelle. But things got complicated. Once you toss the dice you have to play the game out.
“Starr Bright” yearned to dance again! “Starr Bright” was too young to retire! Audiences loved her, roused to cheers, whistles, applause, lust. “Exotic interpretive dance.” Oh she was lonely, she grew resentful. Things got complicated.
One night swallowing painkiller capsules a man (youthful middle-aged, good-looking, TV producer separated from his family) gave her to quiet her but she vomited up, sick as a dog, the chalky clotted mess.
And laughed in bitterness, resignation. God has His plans for “Starr Bright.” No sinner can intercede.
Their names were newsprint. Their names were syllables pronounced on TV news broadcasts. Their photo-faces which were not faces she recognized.
Ma
sks of Satan. Not true faces.
How can you tell?—the pig-eyes.
From X in Joshua Tree, $588 which probably wasn’t worth it. And the Land Rover she’d driven in a trance from Bishop, California, to Salt Lake City. A vision in the salt flats, God had drawn her. From Y, $1800. He’d given her not knowing how his life was spared. But Z, in San Diego, New Year’s Eve. Things got complicated.
Eastward then by Greyhound. Not daring to board any airplane.
In the papers and TV they maligned her. “PIG DEATH” KILLER SOUGHT.
In the papers and TV they celebrated her. “STAR” KILLER SOUGHT.
Threw away her clothes, the bloodstained gold lamé dress scissored into pieces, burnt. The Gucci bag, stained shoes and lovely red human-hair wig. Designer sunglasses. Purchased Kmart clothes, a foam rubber pillow for her belly. Eight months’ pregnancy. Dark circles beneath her eyes, graying-brown hair the hue of dishwater. Flat shoes, nylon stretch slacks, no rings except a cheap wedding band on her third finger, left hand. And her nails needing a manicure.
Oldish to be pregnant, maybe in her forties. A blotched face, pale pulpy mouth. Favoring her right leg, a limp.
Men’s eyes drifted past her, through her. Even cops’.
Always you can rely on pig-eyes not-seeing what doesn’t turn them on.
In a diner near Denver, Colorado. Seeing the TV news, a flash of the “STAR” KILLER’S heavily made-up glamorous face. Sitting round-shouldered in shapeless clothes, slack face, belly and dishwater hair. In a row of Greyhound passengers that would have looked to a neutral observer companionable. Though no one knew anyone else. More coffee ma’am? the bored teenaged waitress asked and the oldish pregnant woman lifted her cup daring a small almost-shy smile Hey I’ve been a pouty pretty kid like you, not so long ago, yes she said, thanks, but the bored waitress didn’t catch the smile, why bother. On the TV now the cruel likeness of beautiful “Starr Bright” had vanished, a grinning man in a checked suit held a pointer to a U.S. weather map across which eerie tendrils of vapor-smoke swirled.
On the Greyhound things were smooth and clear and dull and not complicated. But you can’t ride a Greyhound bus forever.
I am not one who kills, I am Rose of Sharon who sings in the choir.
I am “Starr Bright.” I am an exotic interpretive dancer. I am gifted, beautiful, glamorous, singled out for a special destiny.
How can you tell?—the pig eyes.
At the shadowy rear of a tavern parking lot in Council Bluffs, Iowa. In the guy’s new-model Caddy, in the plush backseat. Things got complicated. You end up fighting for your life, defending your life. Struck, stabbed, pierced the enemy pig-flesh to defend your life. Things got complicated and went their own way not like on TV.
She took pig-money to protect herself. It was too complicated to explain and no one to whom she might explain, for God required no explanation, God guided her hand. As He had directed her not to destroy her baby rock-hard and swelling like a bulb in the earth in her belly For through this baby you will be reborn. And not to destroy her baby after its birth as her hands had urged, seeking to hold its small head under water For through this baby you will be reborn.
In Council Bluffs, Iowa. She’d wanted to see the “bluffs.”
Things got complicated. Can’t ride a fucking Greyhound forever.
A purchase of a second Bible. A smaller one, with tissue-paper pages. Why?—“Starr Bright” hadn’t yet said.
Thirty-five knife wounds to the chest, belly, “genital area” as the newscasters fastidiously reported.
Wild! How in Malibu she’d tossed the disgusting flesh-clumps into the ocean after using them to smear, stain, spell out “Starr Bright’s” curse DIE PIG on the bedroom wall. Wearing rubber kitchen-gloves of course. Learning afterward from a tabloid how the “genital parts” had washed up on a private beach close by owned by a Hollywood celebrity.
An innocent memento: platinum gold cuff links inset with pearls. No initial.
Enter into the rock, and hide thee in the dust. For fear of the Lord.
II
1
The Nightmare
You have to do what I say! You have to! You’re my slave!
Lily Merrick shook herself awake, terrified, from a nightmare. She was dry-mouthed as if she’d been running, panting; for a confused moment she couldn’t comprehend where she was.
Pleading, “No. No. No.”
Heart pounding erratically. Her body, tense, tight as a fist and covered in sweat, in that state of suspension in which the muscles seem paralyzed as if under a spell. The childish demanding voice rang in her ears: an old nightmare, at one time a familiar nightmare but one she’d believed she had outgrown since marrying the man who was her husband, and moving to a house of her own. Lily opened her eyes in the dark of a room that should have consoled her with its comforting dimensions and whispered aloud, “I—am Lily Merrick. My husband is Wesley Merrick. We have a daughter Deirdre—Deedee. I am not—”
But what was it Lily Merrick was not?
She couldn’t think. Didn’t want to think.
She was a woman so upset by violence and the mere reportage of violence that she could not bear to watch much of the evening television news, nor could she force herself to read of atrocities in Bosnia, Nigeria, Iraq; the vicious racial beating of a young black college student by a gang of whites on Long Island last week; a rape-murder case currently being tried in Westchester County. Virtually any details of the Holocaust. Torture and mass murder in the killing fields of Cambodia. The terrifying devastation after the bombing in Oklahoma City at which all of America had watched appalled—Lily had turned away, crying. To see that heartrending photograph of a dying baby held in a fireman’s arms—she was wounded, sickened. As a citizen of the world, as a responsible adult and the mother of a fifteen-year-old daughter she understood that she had an obligation to know; to know the worst; she was married to a man who didn’t flinch from the worst, or so she believed of Wes; yet evidence of man’s—and woman’s—cruelty filled her with dismay and horror. Exhausted her, she might have said, spiritually. If I can’t intervene, it seems wrong to know.
Of course she wasn’t that unusual, she had numerous women friends and acquaintances who felt as she did; who stayed away from violent movies, never watched offensive television programs. Lily’s was just a more extreme reaction, visceral, immediate as if her own being, her very nerves, were abraded. She’d been brought up to feel sympathy for others, not detachment; she’d been brought up to abhor destructive gossip; she had no natural prurient interest in celebrities’ heartbreak or scandal, of which there was, in America, an inexhaustible supply marketed by the media; she had no interest in “gory details” of any kind; never watched TV tabloid programs; a kind of glaze came over her eyes, a willful yet genuine blindness, if she happened to see, by accident, atrocity photographs in the paper: yet another bloodied body lying on a dusty road somewhere in Middle Europe; in Africa, bodies heaped like kindling; the aftermath of an IRA bombing in London. She most shrank from reports of violence against children, of which there seemed, in recent years, so much. And she was particularly sickened by individual acts of systematic, apparently purposeful violence: serial killings, serial killers. This most recent serial killer, a woman, who’d murdered as many as eight—or was it nine, ten?—men in the Southwest and California; leaving behind mutilated corpses, bloodied walls and satanic symbols. What Lily knew, she’d picked up from Deedee; she hadn’t cared to watch a TV news segment on the case, or read about it in the paper; she’d happened to pass by the recreation room where she’d overheard her daughter and girlfriend talking, one of them saying, “Wow. About time there’s a woman … Always some damn man …” and the other murmuring agreement, and both girls giggling. Lily passed by calling out, “H’lo, girls!” cheery and unobtrusive as always. Never meddled in her daughter’s business, tried not to impose her sensibility on others, yes and frankly she was grateful that Deedee had a few girlfriends to invite
to the house.
Waking from the nightmare, yet lying, still, in that state of muscular paralysis. She was thinking of Deedee, and of the guilt she felt about Deedee; that Deedee could not know … certain facts of her parentage. One day, but not yet.
You promised. Remember! Always.
It was a gusty sleet-driven February night, somewhere past midnight. Wes hadn’t yet come upstairs; wasn’t in bed beside her; must have been working in his office. The man was naturally restless, insomniac; even before going into the Marines, he said, and enduring boot camp, he’d never required more than four or five hours sleep a night.
“Wes! Where are you!”
So Lily would give the nightmare, the experience of the nightmare, a wifely-playful tone. That was best. As she did with most problems, hurts, disappointments, household and professional matters of a trivial nature. Make them into entertaining anecdotes, or jokes. She was Lily Merrick of 183 Washington Street, Yewville, New York, an attractive small city of thirty-five thousand people twenty miles south of Lake Ontario; resident of an old, handsomely restored colonial-style house in Yewville’s oldest residential neighborhood. She was an amateur potter, she taught an evening class at the local community college once a week, she was the wife of … the mother of … She knew who she was!
You have to do what I say! You have to! You’re my slave!
Well, it was Wes’s fault. Not coming to bed at a reasonable time. His side of the bed empty. His warm weight beside her missing. The sound of his breathing, his snoring. The sagging of the mattress in his direction.
She would go downstairs to get Wes. She’d kiss him, and chide him. “Honey, come to bed! Please.” No, better for her simply to go back to sleep, stop making such a fuss. It wasn’t like Lily to make a fuss.
Lying in an odd position on her side, cramped, uncomfortable. Her forearm was pressed awkwardly against her breastbone and she could feel her heart still beating hard. You have to. My slave! These dreams she’d been having sporadically since—when?—sometime last fall. Remnants of old childhood nightmares. Like picking through the cluttered attic and cellar of her parents’ old house in Shaheen after her father’s death. Never know what you might find.
Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon Page 7