by Jack Ketchum
After what he’d told her.
How long had she known him? A couple of weeks?
His interest in her was way, way over the top.
Deke with his usual sensitivity said she was crazy as her mother was if she didn’t dump the guy like he was wired to a keg of dynamite. It was not the best way to put it at the time but she had to agree. You didn’t fool with guys like this. Though she’d never met a guy like this exactly she wasn’t stupid. You didn’t have to shoot yourself in the foot to know that guns can hurt you.
The problem was what to say and how to say it. To let him down fast or easy. If at this point easy was even possible.
The way he was sounding she wasn’t sure it was.
Just phone him and let the call decide, she thought. See where it goes. Otherwise you’ll be sitting here the rest of the goddamn night.
She found his number in her book and dialed.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Ray.”
“Kath! Great! How you doin’? How’s your dad?”
“He’s okay. Better. He did some work, I made some dinner, we watched television. Fairly normal evening.”
“Yeah, he’ll be okay. It just takes time.”
“I know.”
“What about you?”
“I’m fine. Tired. Exhausted. The flight, the drive and all.”
“So I guess you wouldn’t want to be going out or anything.”
“Tonight?”
He had to be kidding.
“Sure. I got kind of a present for you. You’re gonna like it. I know you are. A surprise. Right up your alley. I thought maybe we could . . .”
“Ray, listen, we have to talk. There’s no way I can go out tonight. I’ve got to get some sleep. I figure I’ve got maybe another half hour in me and that’s it. But we can’t do this anymore, anyhow.”
“Huh?”
“This just isn’t working out for me, Ray. I’m sorry. I mean, I’ve been thinking. I like you and we’ve had a good time together but I’ve got to be honest with you. I really don’t think we should keep on seeing each other.”
He started to interrupt but she wanted to keep this rolling.
“I think you’re getting too involved with me, you know? And I don’t want to get involved right now. I don’t mean just with you. Not with anybody. I mean, you say things like . . . you tell me you’re falling in love with me . . .”
“Jesus, Kath. I do love you.”
“See? That’s what I’m saying. You can’t love me, Ray, not after a couple of weeks and a couple of dates and even if you could, you’ve got to understand, I don’t want to be loved. Liked is fine, loved’s a whole other thing.”
“Everybody wants to be loved, Kath.”
“Sometime, sure. Sure they do. But I don’t want somebody loving me right now. You see what I’m saying? Not now. I don’t want the responsibility. Look at it my way. I’m new in town. I hardly know anybody here. I’m heading into my senior year in a brand-new school in a brand-new town.”
“So?”
“So I don’t want to get into some serious thing with somebody. I’m gonna be meeting a lot of new people, I want to be able to . . .”
“Fuck other guys.”
“Excuse me?”
“You want to be able to fuck other guys, that’s all the fuck you’re saying.”
“No, that’s not all the fuck I’m saying. You keep hearing what you want to hear, Ray, you know that?”
“So then it’s college, right? Your daddy’s got this great job and all this money and you’re going off to college in another year like that bitch Sally Richmond and Ray isn’t. Ray’s some kinda loser, Ray’s staying right the fuck where he is. So to hell with Ray, right? Jesus Christ, Kath.”
Sally Richmond? Who in god’s name was Sally Richmond?
“Ray, it’s none of those things. It’s just what I said it is. I don’t want to get involved, that’s all. No more, no less.”
There was a silence on the other end. The room felt oppressively warm though she’d opened the windows first thing and tonight was on the cool side. But there wasn’t much breeze. Maybe that was it. Or maybe it was the brandy she’d snuck after dinner. But what she really wanted to do now was strip off her clothes and take a shower and he down naked on the bed and try to relax but she had to talk to him and get this over with and until that was done the jeans and shirt seemed weirdly necessary. Protective, like second skins.
“So you want to tell me who he is?” he said quietly. “The other guy?”
“There isn’t any other guy.”
“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Kath. I’ll find out anyway.”
“I’m telling you there isn’t. There’s nobody.”
“I don’t know why you’d want to he to me. I mean, I’ve been straight with you.”
“Ray, there isn’t any other guy. This is me we’re talking about, what I want and don’t want. Stop trying to make more of it than it is. There’s no other guy.”
“What you want. It always comes down to that doesn’t it, Kath?”
“It comes down to that for everybody, Ray. You included. Isn’t that why we’re having this discussion right now? Because I’m not telling you what you want to hear? I’m sorry. I’m really sorry it didn’t work out the way you wanted it to. I really am. But you’re not going to change my mind arguing about it. You can’t talk a person into having a relationship with you.”
He laughed. It wasn’t a nice laugh. It seemed to say she didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.
And maybe in his case she didn’t.
“No other guy, huh.”
“No.”
“I figure you owe me the truth. I figure you owe me that much. You fucked somebody else out there, didn’t you.”
“For chrissakes, Ray!”
“One of your old biker buddies, right?”
You should hang up right now, she thought. Don’t get into this.
“Come on. You did. Didn’t you.”
“What business is it of yours what I did or didn’t do? What do you care?”
There was a pause and then his voice went soft again.
“Oh, I care, Kath. Believe me. I care.”
She didn’t like this tone of voice of his any more than she liked the nasty one. It frightened her. Like the guy was capable of innumerable instant changes. It also was making her mad and she needed to control that.
“Listen. This is getting us nowhere, Ray. I’m sorry if you feel hurt. I didn’t mean to . . .”
“What do you know about hurt, Kath? You get every goddamn fucking thing you ask for. You always do, don’t you? You ever get something you didn’t ask for?”
Screw this, she thought. You don’t need it.
“That’s it. Discussion over. I’m going to bed now, Ray. I’m much too tired for this.”
“You’re saying you’re gonna hang up on me now? In the middle of all of this?”
And now he was sounding like a hurt little boy. The guy had more faces than Carter had pills.
“We’re not in the middle of anything, Ray. I’ve said everything I have to say. I’m sorry but . . .”
“Dammit, Kath! Will you fucking listen to me!”
“. . . but that’s the way it is. I’ve got to get some sleep. Good night, Ray. Good-bye.”
She placed the receiver down. Then took it off its cradle and placed it on the nightstand.
He wasn’t through. He’d try to call her. She knew he would.
She wondered how scared of him she should be.
She was shaking with tension. Exhausted or not she was not at all sure about getting to sleep tonight. She thought about her father’s brandy and single malt whiskey in the downstairs cabinet. A glass of something would calm her.
No, she thought. Ray Pye was not going to turn her into some goddamn alky. A good hot shower instead. But thinking about a shower immediately brought to mind Janet Leigh in Psycho. She remembered Ray appearing in her bedroom. Sca
ling the roof. Climbing in through her window.
Surprise me.
Jesus. Tonight a good hot shower was not going to make it.
Maybe I should give Deke a call, she thought. See what he thinks. It’s still pretty early in California. The guy tells me he’s killed two people and now he’s practically threatening me over the telephone. Maybe I should phone the police.
It was not her habit to have anything to do with the police. Nor was it Deke’s. But maybe.
One drink does not an alky make, she thought. Not even two or three.
She shut and locked the window and then she went downstairs.
Chapter Thirty-two
Ray
Ray couldn’t sleep. Though he was already halfway wasted on the last of his hash and the better part of a six-pack by the time he got her call. He wondered if she could tell he was high. If that contributed to her dumping him. He didn’t think so. He’d sounded fine.
The bitch, she’d made up her mind already. Didn’t even give him a chance.
He didn’t even get to mention the coke.
And now her phone was off the hook. He tried her over and over again.
What the fuck was going on here?
He drank another beer and then he switched to scotch. He sat in front of the TV set without hardly seeing it. All he saw were images of her. Kath stripping off her clothes by a moonlit pool, walking through the parking lot at Bertrand’s Island trying out locked car doors, showing tit to the guy behind the counter in the liquor store, Kath sitting gazing at him beneath a tree lit with red Chinese lanterns in New York City, in her bedroom wrapped in a towel, in an oversized white shirt and jeans and then naked beneath him and he remembered the feel of her, the taste of her mouth and scent of her hair and alongside all these eddying images and impressions an anger flowed and a will and a yearning that almost hurt him to consider.
More scotch and the images blurred and softened, springing into focus like slow strobic light, like a knife tearing up through paper glinting and disappearing. Finally he slept.
In his dream he was in Turner’s Pool.
Night in deep water.
He was swimming for his life.
Pulled down at the hands of strange maidens.
Chapter Thirty-three
Sunday, August 17
Jennifer/Katherine/The Cat
Jennifer woke around eleven with a dull throbbing headache that testified to the warm six-pack of Colt .45 from the night before, to drinking herself to sleep once she left the dock, drinking well into the morning and to a not-so-dull fury. In the shower the headache began to subside but not the anger. She dressed and had a cup of coffee and borrowed the Griffiths’ car. The day was gray, a slow drizzle of rain falling, misting the windshield. The houses along Poplar and Ridge Road looked sullen and empty. People were at church. People were at home reading their Sunday papers. People were still in bed.
And all these people had lives. Boring or not.
All these people were doing something.
Mrs. Pye was manning the front desk as she usually did on Sundays. She drove past it and back to Ray’s apartment and opened the car door and stepped out onto the macadam and leaned on the horn. She did not want to go inside. She wanted him to come outside and she didn’t give a good goddamn who else she managed to disturb to get him out there. The horn blared its steady note through the open motel courtyard and after a moment his door opened, Ray looking pissed and only now climbing into his shirt, his hair not even combed yet. So she’d woke him. Fine.
She wondered who was inside. Who he was fucking this time. His precious Katherine? She waited until he started walking toward the car and then released the horn.
“Jennifer? What the fuck?”
He looked terrible. Red-eyed and puffy.
“What the fuck. That’s exactly right. What the fuck makes you think you can use me whatever way you want, Ray? Whenever you want. What the fuck makes you think you can just go on and on with this bullshit? I came here to tell you, I quit. No more bullshit, Ray. You hear me? No more!”
She was shouting. She loved it. She felt practically weightless all of a sudden. It was pouring right out of her. All the poison, his poison—she even imagined its color, green, green and yellow—spilling right out of her across the macadam between them like some kind of nasty bile.
“You crazy? You want to tell me what the fuck’s going on?”
“You’ve fucked with my head for the last time, Ray, that’s what’s going on. I’m gone. You got it? History. You played me for a sucker for the last time. You know what? I don’t need you anymore, Ray. I don’t know if I ever needed you. I think you were just a real bad habit. Guess what? Habit’s broken. I’m Tim’s girl now, you asshole! And he’s better in bed than you’ll ever be. And he doesn’t have to stuff his shoes with beer cans to make people think he’s got a great big cock. So screw you, Ray! And screw your goddamn phony ring!”
She dug it out of her pocket and threw it at him hard, heard it thunk off his forehead just over his eye and tinkle like a bell on the ground and saw him flinch, saw the big man, the big stud flinch from a blow from a tiny little broken ring and it felt so good she laughed. She laughed right at him, right into his face and at that moment he was nothing, Ray was absolutely nothing to her for practically the first time she could remember and she knew this with a certainty she’d never known about anything in her life.
“You fucking bitch!”
He lunged at her, grabbed her by the arms. His breath sour with old alcohol. And then he was shaking her. The fingers hurt but she didn’t care. He could slap her, punch her, throw her to the ground and she wouldn’t care about that either. There wasn’t a thing he could do to her, there wasn’t any way he could hurt her anymore. Not in that soul-deep way he’d hurt her all these years. She’d made it past that in one big leap. She was done with him now and and not the other way around and as he raised a fist she looked him in the eye and saw the hesitation there, the moment of cowardice and doubt, almost laughed in his face again and then she heard a voice behind her.
“Raymond. “
She saw him glance beyond her down the drive and turned and saw his mother standing there behind her.
“Let her go, Raymond. Right now.”
There was a moment when she thought he still might hit her despite the cold command in the voice and she steeled herself for that. She could take a punch. She could take whatever the hell he was dishing out. Whatever it was it had been worth it. Then the fist dropped. The fingers on her arms relaxed and then released her. She turned back to him and looked into a face so explosively red, at an expression so strained and twisted, she thought he might just have a stroke right then and there.
Go ahead, she thought. Die.
You damn well deserve to die.
And it was the first time she’d thought that too. Though she more than anyway knew he did.
“Get back inside, Raymond. We’ll talk about this later. Jennifer, I think you should get into your car.”
She took a deep breath and nodded and then climbed into the driver’s seat. She didn’t close the door. Through the windshield she saw him glaring at her, then turn and spit down to the macadam and as he walked back to his apartment trying to look so tough, the long strides, the fists clenched, the open shirt flapping in the misty breeze, slamming the door behind him, she thought that it really was a damn funny walk he had. Really, it was ridiculous.
Mrs. Pye leaned in through the open door.
“You better stay away for a while,” she said.
She nodded. “Like forever.”
She realized suddenly that she’d never really seen Ray’s mother up close before. Not this close. His mother was always just passing by or sitting behind a desk. She was a handsome woman. Her eyes were narrow, dark. Her lips were almost nonexistent, her good skin barely lined, the nose attractive and slightly beaked, the long graying hair pulled back tight into a severe bun.
“I can’t stand
the temper on that boy. I’m damned if I know where he gets it from.”
The eyes glittered, moved back and forth, studying her.
“I don’t know either,” she said. She started the car. “Thanks, Mrs. Pye.”
“Jane, honey. Call me Jane.”
“Thanks . . . Jane.”
The eyes studied her again.
“You go on home now,” she said and stood there watching until the car pulled away.
It was two o’clock in the afternoon before Katherine reached him on the phone. Ten in the morning California time. It sounded like she’d woken him.
“Where were you last night, mister?” she said.
“Don’t ask and I won’t say.”
“Okay. You sound like shit though.”
“Thanks, Kath. I really appreciate that, y’know?” He yawned. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
As best she could Katherine told him about the conversation of the night before.
“What do you think? Should I call the cops?”
“Jesus, Kath. I don’t know. You really want to get involved with the Man? What are they gonna do for you?”
“Arrest him?”
“For what? It’s not like he showed you the goddamn rifle or something. It’s your word against his. They talk to him, release him, and then he’s really pissed at you.”
“Harrassment?”
“He’s not harrassing you. He’s phoning you. You had a shouting match over the phone. So what? You really scared, babe? You really scared of the guy?”
“I don’t know.”
“You want me to drive on out there?”
“Here?”
“Sure. Big fella on a Harley. Have a little talk with the asshole?”
“You’d do that?”
“For you I would. I wouldn’t drive that far to see the Pope piss on Lyndon B. Johnson’s leg but for you I would. Sure.”