At the back of the store, they stepped out another hole onto a cement loading dock with cement stairs down to the alley, went past the exhaust fan of Viagra’s kitchen spewing french-fry odors, up a wooden staircase to a balcony, and into Kenny’s home. It was mostly one enormous room with shoulder-high bookcases—well, shoulder-high on Kenny—dividing it into sections for sleeping, office, workout equipment, an entertainment center and lounge along one wall, kitchen and eating space between and along windows overlooking Myrtle and Main Street. The enclosing wall space was decorated with old grainy photos of the pool hall, the railroad station, and more guys lounging around ancient autos or playing baseball. The bathroom and a closet were closed off at the rear.
“Very nice,” Charlie, who should have been fussing over poor Marlys, said.
“My whole family used to live up here with my grandparents.” Kenny laid Marlys on a couch and wrapped her in a blanket. “I sort of like it better this way.”
Marshal Brunsvold was on his cellular to Gentle Oaks. “Yeah, we got Marlys—tried to do herself in again. I don’t think she’s hurt much. I’ll be bringing her up.”
“Why wouldn’t you let her kill herself if she wants to? Can’t be much fun being alive at the Oaks.”
“Against the law,” the marshal said without hesitation. “I’ll drive the car around to the alley side so we don’t have to depress the revelers in your fine establishment, Ken. If you’ll just carry her down for me.”
“That law must be on those books he was talking about. First time I’ve heard of them.” That smile, slow and easy and knowing, reminded Charlie of a cat stretching. Oh, boy.
Marlys decided to get feisty about the time Marshal Sweetie’s Cherokee came to a stop in the alley, so Charlie drove it while he hung on to the ancient woman with Charlie’s eyes.
“This is insane,” Charlie said as she pulled into the semicircle in front of Gentle Oaks, where the leaves were falling big-time now in an icy wind and the moon loomed large and bright and orangey. Marlys growled low in her throat and the law growled back.
“Del.”
“Sorry, I get carried away when the moon’s full, too. Specially the harvest moon because it means football and snowmobiling and pheasant hunting and Halloween. Right, Marlys?” He chuckled low and evil, and Marlys copied that sound with a little too much gravel but even more evil. “Besides, watching you and Kenny look at each other could steam up all North Iowa.”
“How long has he been back from the outside world?”
“About eight, nine months now. He likes Myrtle a lot better than your mom.”
They both literally wrestled a frail, little old Marlys Dittberner into the nursing home’s outer doors, losing the blanket on the way—Charlie was briefly reminded of the famous photograph of a fleeing girl, mouth gaping in a scream, napalmed in Vietnam—when the inner doors opened at them in an horrendous roar of rage. Not the doors—the two guys in wheelchairs.
CHAPTER 11
IF CHARLIE WAS getting a little spooked by the moonlight leaking through a ruined grocery store that once delivered by horse-drawn wagon, it was nothing compared to Gentle Oaks at the full of a harvest moon.
“What do you people do around here for Halloween?” she asked the marshal as they wrestled a naked-again Marlys through careening wheelchair lunatics, but that awful alarm system drowned out her voice.
Fatty Staudt and Fatty Truex were trying to arm-wrestle each other out of their wheelchairs. Their hospital gowns opened in the back and swung free among flailing arms. Even bare-gummed, they could voice vile expletives over the alarm, but their snarls were slurred and hissy. Wouldn’t you think the testosterone would have worn out by now, even if they hadn’t?
Charlie was looking for the doohickey to turn off the alarm when a bare, hairy arm came down in front of her face and did it for her. The doohickey was a cream-colored box beside the door, and the hand at the end of the arm curled its fingers under it to turn it off. The hairy arm belonged to Richard Burton in his younger days when he was alive—the moody, broody, smoldering Richard Burton. Just one problem, his eyes were almost black, like Charlie’s.
“Just what do you think you’re doing?” he thundered in a stage voice with accents suggesting the British, but trained for Broadway. “And who the hell are you, anyway?”
“Jane Erye?” Please tell me you’re not Harvey Rochester or I’ll pee my pants right here and now. “You talk funny.”
“You notice that, too?” Marlys Dittberner stopped struggling to look up into Charlie’s face. “Ain’t normal, huh?”
Marlys had had a double mastectomy with no attempt at a rebuild. That’s why she didn’t wear a bra. Made sense. This woman made sense in a lot of ways Charlie really didn’t want to deal with.
“Help me, help me, please help me,” a woman’s voice pleaded from somewhere close and then screamed. At least the TVs were off.
“What are you doing here, Harvey?” Del wanted to know.
Marlys groaned and peed on the floor. Charlie groaned and crossed her legs.
An enormous fat Siamese with long hair waddled down the hall, sniffed the wet spot on the carpet and then hissed at Harvey.
“Dolores, get thee hence,” Mr. Rochester intoned and pointed behind him, where Charlie spied the saving grace of the universal sign for ladies’ room.
She left Marlys with the marshal—“Don’t lose her this time, dammit”—and made it in time but barely because of an all-consuming hysterical bout of laughter. Whoever said the nice old Midwest was boring and predictable hadn’t visited Myrtle, Iowa.
Charlie was still giggling when she and the marshal and the Jeep Cherokee circled the drive and roared out to the main road. Del explained Harvey’s presence there was due to the weekend staff and the full moon. “Residents get really violent sometimes and they’re always understaffed on weekends—temporary help. Can’t sedate or restrain the residents anymore. Most you can do is antidepressants or anxiety drugs, and then only on doctors’ orders. Temporaries get hit around a few times, they just walk off the job. Sometimes even Harvey Rochester has to step in and help out. And he’s the boss.”
“Why does he act like an actor?”
“He is an actor. Or he was. Spent years in New York. Never saw him on TV or anything, but we all figured he must be acting.”
“Actors, artists of any kind, tend not to be good businessmen. They use different sides of the brain or something.”
“I don’t know, old Harvey’s a pretty good businessman. Must mean he’s a bad actor, huh?” Delwood laughed at his own double entendre—when it hit him.
“What kind of a cat is Dolores?”
“Tomcat.”
It was raining by the time they reached Viagra’s. The Lumina was gone.
“Edwina must have left without me.”
“What kind of daughter goes off and leaves her mother in a pool hall, anyway?”
“An adult daughter. And I was driving this heap so you could restrain Marlys Dittberner, remember? So you can take me out to the home place, Marshal Sweetie.”
“Marshal.” Ben whoever ran up to the Jeep, “Kenny wants you should take a case of Bud out to Elmo when you take Miss Greene home. Her mother left with their car. I’ll run get him.”
“What is he, the town crier?”
“Watchman.”
“Myrtle has a watchman?”
“It’s on the books.”
“What’s he do—never mind.”
“Gets paid for it, too.”
“Now stop that.”
Kenny came out of Viagra’s carrying a big box like it was a feather, slid it onto the backseat, and looked at Charlie closely.
Clutch.
“That the warmest coat you brought? Wait a minute,” he said and went back into the pool hall.
“I was going to take Uncle Elmo a six-pack but—”
“Kenny keeps him in beer. If he runs out, he’ll drive his pickup into town. Family keeps him in food and cigars. We ta
ke care of our own.”
“Why shouldn’t he drive into town?”
“No license, him or the pickup. Macular degeneration in his eyes. Legally blind.”
“This is the most depressing place I’ve ever been in. How come I do so much laughing here?”
“I think maybe your answer came before your question,” Kenny said, crawling in beside the Budweiser and handing his knee-length jacket over the seatback to Charlie. “What do you think?”
“Who invited you, Cowper? You have a business to run, you know.”
Charlie noticed the Cherokee was the only vehicle, parked or otherwise, on Main Street, or what she could see of it. There were no streetlights in Myrtle.
“Weather report emptied the pool hall half-hour ago. Front moving in. Myrtle rolls up the sidewalks by nine anyway. But it was a fast exodus tonight.”
“Snow?” Charlie asked.
“Ice,” both men answered at once. Kenny added, “And I felt it my duty to protect the only law-enforcement individual for many miles—his virtue, you know.”
“Well, I’m glad I’ve got a ticket out of here at eight o’clock Tuesday morning.”
Both men chuckled.
“Death duties rarely lasted a year back then, two was almost unheard of,” Uncle Elmo explained over weak tea and brownies at the kitchen table that night. “There wasn’t nursing homes. Poor farms maybe—but you didn’t want to send anybody you knew there. They was mostly nursing homes and loony bins. Women took on the chore for love and as a duty and out of guilt and often in hopes of money to support themselves and their children. Weren’t many jobs for them outside the home. Might be unspoken, but there was always a daughter discouraged from romance and marriage. That was the one meant to see to the parents so the others could go on with their lives. When women started working and earning their own way, the system broke down. Ain’t no fixing it now. Can’t blame desperate people for trying, though.”
“I couldn’t come back here to live. I hated it here. I still do.” Edwina was all sad again.
“You was always such a pliable young thing. Husband gone and you getting toward retirement age, we figured maybe coming home would sound good. Didn’t realize you’d changed so much. Abigail’s lived here all her life—couldn’t send her off to Boulder.”
“Why? Nobody here can stand her anyway,” Charlie said. “She gets righteous with people out there, they’ll just shun her. Sounds like justice for all.”
Elmo Staudt had a big nose with a heavily veined bulb at the end and a rather endearing rascally gleam in those blue eyes that didn’t see well enough to get a driver’s license. “More like vengeance. Vengeance ain’t right. What do you plan to do when you retire, Edwina?”
“I’ve been kind of thinking about Prescott, Arizona, for part of the year.”
“I didn’t know that, but it seems perfect,” Charlie said—anywhere but Long Beach. “I have a writer there who flies out of the little local airport to the Phoenix airport and then anywhere. He really likes it.”
“What could you do there you can’t do here?”
“Almost everything I like and want to do.”
“You could walk the desert to your heart’s content.” Charlie was beginning to see why they were marooned out here at the home place with Uncle Elmo and not in Helen and Buz’s nicer house in town. These two had a relationship from Edwina’s childhood nobody else in the family did.
“And I’d like to do some traveling, and there’s a book I want to write—I probably won’t have time to get to until then—on the function of intestinal diseases among the Dipodomys ordii.”
“You won’t be writing no highfalutin books around Abigail Staudt, I tell you. Schoolteaching either. And what would you do with her anyway when you went to this Prescott place?”
“Mom’s not a schoolteacher. She’s a university professor, for godsake.”
“I wasn’t going to have her living with me, Uncle Elmo. I’d put her in the Towers. It has independent-living apartments for the elderly and it’s not far from campus.”
“She wouldn’t know anybody. What if she got sick? And that would cost money.”
“There’s a nursing home attached. And she’d have to get to know people, and yes, it would cost money. With both sisters gone, she can’t be destitute. If she is, we’ll all just have to pitch in and help, won’t we? Since we’re all family.”
The Greenes trudged upstairs to their icy bedroom, leaving Uncle Elmo Staudt staring after them, flabbergasted.
“Do pack rats really have intestinal diseases?” Charlie asked her mother, pulling up all three comforters and putting Kenny Cowper’s big coat on top of the pile.
“Everybody does.”
“After tonight, I’m not spending another night in this house, Edwina, and that’s that.” All she slept in was a man’s T-shirt, and she could see her breath on the air up here. “And I’m not letting them put the screws to you. You don’t owe these people anything for making you feel like a toad when you were growing up.”
“It’s not that simple, Charlie.”
“Your parents are dead, right? You had no brothers or sisters. Let the cousins take care of their own.”
“My parents are buried not far from Great-aunt Gertie. I’ll show you tomorrow. But you saw Fatty Staudt at Gentle Oaks today. Well, he’s my grandfather. He was Edward Staudt the First, my father was Edward Staudt the Second, and I was supposed to be Edward Staudt the Third. Thus Edwina. The long-awaited brother never arrived—a great disappointment to the family.”
“Edwina, that is so dumb. It’s not like there was a throne to inherit.”
“And the final blow was that I married Howard Greene, a lapsed Jew, and eventually adopted you.”
CHAPTER 12
THE SUN WAS so hot on her bare skin Charlie had trouble breathing. It beat through the rounded corner window of Harvey Rochester’s living room. She and Kenny Cowper rolled on Harvey’s lush carpet next to a black grand piano. It was probably the most painfully erotic moment in her life, but she wasn’t exactly fighting him off. Leaf shadows played on the window and across the carpet and on Kenny Cowper.
“Told you it was her,” Great-aunt Abigail hissed above them, and the piano bench was full of Harvey Rochester, pounding out something broody and moody and violent. There were two women with Abigail, all three in period dress—like the Civil War era or something. All three pointed down at her, and Kenny disappeared and Charlie was suddenly cold. By this time, she’d figured out it was a dream but damn near came anyway. Can women do that?
“Can women do what?” Her mother stood over her. She’d pulled the covers off Charlie and had a towel wrapped around her head. “You were having a bad dream. Hurry up, I’ve got a tub running for you.”
“What’d I say, did I say anything?” Oh, jeesh.
“You were just moaning and groaning and wondering if women could do something. Now get down there before the tub runs over—real hot water, Charlie. You can wash your hair in the tub. There’s a saucepan you can dip it up with, pour it over to rinse. Hurry.”
“Wash my hair in the bathwater? Gross.”
But after Charlie’s “nightmare,” she really needed a bath and her head was a total itch, so she did as she was told. The water was hot and the deep tub spilled over a little when she displaced some of that water. She got shampoo in her eyes from rinsing with a saucepan and the towels were thin to nothing and the room a refrigerator once she was out of the water, but she did feel much refreshed.
Edwina had a little travel hairdryer. Charlie didn’t carry one anymore because she always stayed in upscale hotels where they were attached to the bathroom wall.
Uncle Elmo had decided to take them out to breakfast at the Schoolhouse Café in town. He found an ankle-length coat that made Edwina look like a fireplug, and escorted them out onto the back stoop.
“I think I better drive, Uncle Elmo,” Charlie said, blinked, and looked again, squinting in the sunlight glinting off ice. Ever
ything was as before but coated with shiny ice. Every dead blade of grass or weed or fence post or wire shimmered with beauty. And the skeleton barn most of all because of its mass and incompleteness, strange and saggy shadow angles and holes. This was not thin ice either. Weed blades and harvest stubble were three times their size and clacking against each other in the wind. Fence wires drooped with the weight, and a wire to the house from a pole along the driveway was barely a foot off the ground.
“Where’s the car?” Charlie stepped off the stoop and landed on her ass in seconds.
“Put it in the barn—” Uncle Elmo helped her up “—because of the storm. It’s still some shelter if not a lot. Your mother and I’ll meet you at the gate. Careful how you step now.”
Charlie pretended she was ice-skating, which she was, but on boot bottoms. Her hair hadn’t quite dried at the roots and she imagined it was freezing upon her scalp, sending icy tendrils down to her nerve endings.
Jesus, Greene, will you pay attention? This is not your average slippery.
Where have you been? Charlie asked her inner voice. Is that what’s been missing here?
Not as fascinated with the marshal and the barkeep as you, babe. Besides, Myrtle, Iowa, has been dominating the guilt scene. Not much I could add.
The rest of the world spoke in zillions of tiny cracking and clacking sounds. Was this what it sounded like inside a deep freeze or an ice-cube tray? She fell only twice more before reaching the barn, hoping all the way that the Lumina would start. She’d never driven a Chevy before. It was parked next to an ancient pickup of indeterminate color, and started after a couple of turnovers.
Charlie would forever be grateful for whatever instinct or fantasy or hovering protective angel told her to back the black rental out of the barn right away instead of sitting there a while to let it warm up. Because she’d no sooner cleared the barn door than the barn collapsed in shivering stages of shimmering ice-coated pieces of wood, finally too old to hold up under the weight. Charlie sat there staring at the dazzling explosion—many of the ice shards striking the windshield, some painting rainbow hues in the sunlight—thinking of Marlys Dittberner.
The Rampant Reaper Page 7