She rested her forehead on her arm and cried for a few seconds. Then she pressed her nose and stood up, stacking the dishes. "Come on, you big jock. You'll be late."
He pushed away from the table and crossed the kitchen in three steps. He took his wife in his arms and held her close for a long minute, while the electric clock hummed high and white on the wall.
She rocked back and forth with his body. Finally she began to laugh.
"Get out of here," she said, trying hard.
"Meet me at work," he said. "I'll take you to Fernando's for dinner."
The tears settled diamond-bright in her eyes. She kissed him noisily and pushed him out the door.
She watched him through the window.
He came back in.
"Forgot something," he said. He walked briskly to the breakfast nook, picked up the morning paper and dropped it in the waste can. "Give my love to the ice cream man," he said before he shut the door again.
"Hey, I don't even know the…"
He was gone and she stopped laughing. She went to the can and picked out the paper. She spread it on the table and stared down at it.
"Shit," she said very seriously. ''Oh shit, Joe…."
The latest headline read:
Security Doubled
ANOTHER BRUTAL COED SLAYING
Lissa, now in tank top and embroidered Levi's, toed into her sandals and slipped down the stairs, her thin fingers playing lightly over the handrail.
"Sharon?" On the wall at the foot of the stairs she noticed the poster Sharon had brought with her from New York. It was one of those old You Don't Have To Be Jewish To Love Levy's advertisements, showing an Indian biting into a slice of rye bread; Sharon had replaced the Indian with the horribly burned face of an Asian child, and now she saw that someone had written across the face with a red marking pen the words You Don't Have To Be A Unicorn To Enjoy The Tapestry in an unmistakably feminine hand. She wondered what that meant. "Has anybody seen Sharon?" she called, tapping her nails on the railing. Then, "Is anybody here?"
She thought she heard voices and stepped off the stairs. But she saw only the bright, still day outside the open front door, and the two familiar Security guards at the edge of the dry lawn. They stood with their hands behind their backs and, Lissa thought, peculiar smiles on their faces; as they rocked on their heels their billy clubs swung tautly from wide, black belts.
Something about them gave her the creeps.
Her eyes listlessly scanned the living room, finding nothing to settle on.
She stepped away from the open front door. Sharon must have left it open. On the way out, probably to see Eliot.
She could call Eliot and find out, couldn't she?
She took two steps toward the phone. She stopped. The thought of the newly-installed tap put her off again. Damn it, she thought. It irks me, just the idea of it. It really does.
She sighed. She stood in the middle of the rug, her left hand resting on the back of the sofa and her right hand fingering her left elbow. She took a breath, held it, let it out. Then she went over to the big front door and nudged it shut. With her back. She didn't particularly want to look outside.
Officer William W. Williams was doing push-ups on the grass.
"How many I got, John?"
"Uh, forty-seven by my count, Bill."
"You lyin'!"
"You're not going to break no record today, Williams," said Officer Hall around a lumpy chili dog from the food service machines.
"You shut up, Hal." Williams spat to one side and pumped three more times. The muscles on his shining arms inflated with each stroke.
"Fifty," said Joe matter-of-factly, "and still counting."
Williams quivered high on his corded arms for a beat, then dipped again.
"Mother," he breathed.
The sun, setting some kind of record for April, beat down in shimmering waves, now mercifully on the tin roof of the pergola so that the officers were able to remove their spongy hats, at least for half an hour. Joe felt not quite a breeze but at least a shift in the hovering air layers here in the shade; the sweat in his short black hair was beginning to evaporate, cooling and contracting his scalp. It was, he thought without knowing why, a day for ice cream. Williams, however, chose to remain under the sun, bridging again and again over the blanched grass.
"What did the Chief have to say this morning?" asked Joe. "Sorry I missed the briefing."
The men did not answer.
As far as Joe could see the campus was deserted, the gray buildings flat and silent, the sparsely-sown trees moving not at all in the noonday heat. Though he knew better, Joe wondered idly if anyone other than Security was on the grounds today.
Old John, white-haired and better suited to a Santa Claus costume than a black uniform, folded his hands unsteadily.
"It was another one of his pep talks, Joe. You know Withers." Joe didn't very well, but it didn't matter. "I guess you didn't miss anything."
Hall resumed chewing.
Joe realized that Williams had suspended over the lawn. Finally he moved. Down.
"Well, I hope we get him," offered Joe, "and soon. A guy like that has got to be sick, and needs help."
Up. Williams stopped.
Hall stopped eating.
Joe felt odd. He repeated to himself what he had said, trying to figure why they were uptight. Something about Withers, maybe. Except for Old John, they didn't seem to like the Chief. That must be it.
"Hell," said Hall, "this is the easiest job in the world. We don't have to do anything. A person commits a violation, he does himself in." He spoke carefully, as if laying out a scientific fact. "Because if he's human, he's ashamed of the act. That's all the lever we need." Barely changing his tone he said, "Look at that one, will you?"
They looked. A young girl, slender and poised, was crossing the parking lot in old Levi's, very tight, and a form-fitting top.
Down. "Hoo. That one is sweet and tough," said Williams. Up.
"You take girls like that," Hall went on. "They don't have any sense of shame. Man, somebody's got to teach her a lesson."
"I'm not sure I follow you," said Joe.
Down. Williams rolled over onto his back. "Gimme some of that Dr. Pepper."
Hall cackled and took the bottle over to Williams. He knelt and whispered something. Williams nodded, then drained the bottle and lay back, gazing dreamily through the low trees by the pergola. "Somebody gimme my shirt an' gun." He sang a few notes to himself. "You know what we need around here?" he asked. "Bows an' arrows. That's what we had in 'Nam. Pick a sentry out of a tree at a hundred yards. Whoosh. Simple as that. Don't make no noise."
The girl was disappearing from sight.
"What time's it getting to be?" asked Joe. He reached for his walkie-talkie. "We'd better check in with the command post."
"No reason to hurry," said Hall.
Williams rolled over onto his belly. Up. He started counting again. Down.
Up.
Down.
"Hey, you can knock it off," Hall said to him. "She's gone."
They all had a good laugh over that.
Lissa walking across the grass: What were they laughing about?
Beyond the glimmering parking lot she glanced over her shoulder at the pergola, blurry without her glasses, bouncing behind her with each step. She shrugged and went on.
She looked down. She slipped her shoes off and felt the warm grass, following her feet past the Library and the new Student Union, staying on the shade. At the far side of the campus she climbed the cool steps to the lab.
"Knock-knock?"
She slid around the open door.
The stink from the tiered cages was overpowering; she knew at once that it would be too much for her.
She heard someone clear his throat. She held her breath, tucked in her top, and walked forward between the skittering enclosures.
"Oh!"
An electric buzz rattled the cages.
The rats sc
rambled over one another, hundreds and hundreds of rats. She almost screamed. The buzzing stopped. The rats subsided.
A hand, cold and clammy as sweating brass, touched her neck. She stiffened. It seemed to be trying to press her straight down into the floor.
"Ah, but you're not Sherrie, are you." It was a statement. "Apologies."
She was released. She turned. She saw a moist left hand recently relieved of its rubber glove; as she faced it, an acrid fume sliced up her nostrils. Formaldehyde.
She stumbled back. "W'll, hi, Eliot. I was looking for Sharon." She rubbed at her watering eyes. "I was on my way to your apartment, but I thought I'd stop by here first." She looked up into his pallid, implacable face. And shuddered. "You haven't seen her?"
"Afraid not, Lissa."
He simply observed her, waiting.
She wanted out, but she said, "Well, what are you up to in here, anyway? I never saw all these—these mice the last time I was here."
He snapped off his right glove and moved to the sink, applied talc. He pocketed his pale hands in his white coat and leaned against a supply cabinet.
"A low voltage is discharged through the bottom of each cage," said Eliot, "every two minutes, twenty-four hours a day. At various stages I remove typical specimens and dissect the adrenal cortex, the thymus, the spleen, the lymph nodes and so forth, and of course the stomach. There is a definite syndrome, you know."
Are you for real? she wondered, drifting to the window. Below, a fat, greasy-looking mama's boy with horn-rimmed glasses gazed up at the window. She had seen him hanging around a number of times lately. Too many times. She stepped away from the window.
"The adrenal cortex," continued Eliot conversationally, "is always enlarged. All the lymphatic structures are shrunken. And there are deep ulcers, usually in the stomach and upper gut."
He's not kidding, she thought. She looked outside again. The young man was gone. She felt relieved. "What do you call it?" she said, almost reflexively.
"A stress rig," said Eliot. Cheerfully, she thought. Then, "Sherrie's probably back at the House by now. Be careful going home, will you? I know I don't need to remind you." When she did not say anything, "About what happened to the others. It was a combination, a choke hold from behind, forearm across the throat, under the chin, one arm in a hammerlock. Fractures of the larynx, internal hemorrhaging. And this vertebra, this one right here, at the base of the neck. That's what finished them. He had to lift them off their feet. Here." He reached out to show her.
Suddenly, jarringly, the cages buzzed.
Let me out of here! She felt sick.
"Well, I'll see you later, Eliot." She did not wait for an answer.
Outside and down the stairs, a breeze was coming in with the dusk. It's really summer, she thought. She wanted desperately to be at the beach. She could almost smell the Sea & Ski basting her skin. A bird sang high on a telephone wire. O let there always be summers, she thought. A hundred, a thousand of them. That was what she wanted. She wanted there to be a thousand summers.
Joe trod blankly along University Drive. Off duty at last, he was on his way back to the campus, where his wife would be waiting.
"How long has this been happening?" he asked, a little dazed.
"Ed Withers's been paying off Hall to keep him quiet ever since, Lord, seven-eight months," said Old John, strolling with his hands behind his back, his voice low as a moribund bulldog's. "Anyway, Joey"—he had never called him that before—"I figured you ought to know. What I mean to get across is, try to keep to yourself as much as you can while you're here. They're a kind of—oh, they're a bunch of what you would call motivated young officers. Highly motivated."
"What I can't understand," Joe persisted, "is why everyone is keeping his mouth shut."
Old John averted his eyes and took an unexpected number of steps to answer. He fingered his handcuffs nervously; they glinted in the day's dying rays of sunlight. "Job's a job, you know what I mean," muttered Old John.
Joe turned those words over and over as they came to Portola Place.
What in the world did that have to do with it? He stopped at the curb. "What does that have to do with it?" he asked.
But Old John was trekking on down Portola Place. He continued to keep an eye on Joe, however. Joe saw him put a hand behind his ear.
"Nothing," Joe shouted. Nothing at all. "See you Friday."
He shook his head. Even here, he thought. He took a too-deep breath of the lukewarm air, squinting as the setting sun peeped its staring red eye from between the buildings. He started walking again. He lowered his head and watched his feet move, crossing the street at a fast clip.
So Hall's wife was getting pumped by the Chief of Security. And Chief Withers was being—was there a less melodramatic word for it?—blackmailed by Hall. With a promotion thrown in. Joe throttled a bitter laugh. He wondered whether Hall's wife knew that end of it. And whether she was smugly enjoying the benefits with her husband. What the hell, what the hell, what the hell, Joe thought aimlessly. And heard a rustling in the bushes.
"Where's the cook?"
"She's not coming in again till after vacation."
"Well, where's the House Mother?" said Kathy. "I know, I know, there's no House Mother here. Ooh, I wish I was still at PT!"
"Better not let Madam President hear you bitching," said Sharon. "She'll kick you out on your lily-white ass."
Kathy groaned and went upstairs.
Lissa laughed. She had seen the House Mother for the Pi Taus; her face had more lines in it than War and Peace, which she had been reading for English 260. Trying to read. Part I had been on The Six O'Clock Movie Monday. Dutifully she had watched it, but for some reason she missed Part II. Part III had been on for a few minutes now.
"Henry Fonda's the only one who acts like he read the book," said Sharon, giving up on the color controls and laying her legs over the arms of the couch again. The set, which rendered everything the color of bile, did look, as Sharon had once remarked, "like somebody took a whiz on it." Lissa tried to follow the plot, but by now it made no sense at all to her.
"Who's been leeching my Marlboros, anyway?" said Sharon, digging under the cushions.
Lissa flipped over to Channel 11. "Hey, Chiller's on."
"Right arm," said Sharon.
"Is that Frankenstein?"
"Fuck yes," said Sharon. "I've seen this flick so many—"
"You know, I've never seen it all the way through," said Lissa. "My folks would never let me."
"Ha!"
"No, really."
"Well, go ahead, knock yourself out."
Fascinated, Lissa watched the scene in which little Maria so innocently shared her flowers with the Monster on the riverbank. One by delicate one they cast daisies on the water. Then, very slowly, the Monster's expression began to change, as the child ran out of flowers, as the scene began to fade out.
"That's the part they always cut," said Sharon. "You should see his face right after this, before they find her with her neck broken. You know what I think? I don't believe he ever meant to kill her at all. I think he just sort of, you know, crushed her to him. You know what I mean? I don't think there was anything evil about it. They were both innocents. Neither one of them knew anything about it."
A bald-headed used-car salesman appeared on the screen, his face a sneer of chartreuse.
Joe stood stock-still and waited for the next sound.
It did not come.
He stepped onto the blue-shadowed lawn. His hand steadied on his flashlight.
He heard footfalls on the other side of the hedge, close to a house.
He let himself into the foliage, deciding to follow it up. Leaves, small and shiny, tracked past him on either side, hard branches skidding off his head, almost knocking his hat to the ground.
Close to the other side, he saw a man's back moving quickly away from him along the side of the house, toward the front sidewalk. The house was dark, probably empty; he hoped so. He felt di
soriented for a fraction of a second, almost as if he were not really here but somewhere else entirely. Then he saw the figure stand straight and slow to a normal gait, crossing under the street lamp. Then the figure returned to a crouch and headed into the trees on the other side. Peeping Tom? Or the one he had been hired to catch? Well, if this is the one, he must be one poor scared son of a bitch right now, even if he doesn't know he's being watched. In fact, Joe realized, his own heart hammering at the back of his badge, that part wouldn't really have anything to do with the feeling, not anything at all.
Joe pulled free of the hedge and backed up. He moved down behind the next four houses in line and then continued forward to the street and crossed at the end of the block. He cut into the alley just past the houses.
He stayed close to the wooden fence, navigating around trash barrels—empty, they would drum an alarm down the whole of Sorority Row.
He heard tennis shoes grinding into the gravel.
A young man crossed the alley not fifty feet in front of him.
They heard Kathy put a record on the turntable upstairs.
The TV screen receded into the deepening shadows of the living room. A cricket started up, sounding so close that Lissa glanced nervously about to see if it was in the house with them. Outside, an elderly officer paced past the hedge, hands behind his back.
"Look at that old codger." Sharon's ash flared and hissed before her face, then arced down. "I'll bet they still don't give them real bullets to use. Yeah, I saw his gun one time. The barrel was plugged up with wood or bubble gum or something. I wonder if they're going to do any good now that we need them? Somebody needs them. The only thing they've been good for so far is to remind us all. D'you see what I mean?" She sat forward. "God, I've got to get away from here for a while. I'm starting to vegetate. When's Eliot coming over?"
"He didn't say."
"He always takes his time. I don't know what he does on his way over here, wandering around jacking his brain off with some new pet theory."
"Sharon!"
"Well, it's the truth."
They sat with the sound turned down. The cricket synched with the record for a few bars, then continued on its own again.
Red Dreams Page 10