The hair fell around her shoulders, changing her into a stranger, a picture in a magazine. She wasn't inside her eyes. She'd gotten away someplace where he didn't exist. The eyes in the mirror were burning him like white-hot brands. He felt as if all his will had been sucked down into his penis and was pushing out now, strained against his pants. He had to take the clothes away and make her see it. "Look at me!" he snarled. The man in the mirror started to spin like a clock hand, and both his hands were pulling on the penis; the head of the penis was an eye. He wanted sperm to spurt out of the iris of the eye and then the whole mirror began to spin. "Look at me!
Look at my eyes!" But her eyes squeezed shut. He slapped her across the cheek so that she lurched sideways, falling against the ottoman.
"Don't think you can make me go away! Do you hear me?" Then he unzipped and opened his pants. It had happened, and now he couldn't stop. "Okay. There! Now, you look, you look now!"
He could see the print of his hand reddening her cheek. There were tears spilling out of her eyes, but she wasn't crying aloud. The only noise she made was a harsh breathing. Barnum had his hand on the gun in his pocket, squeezing it as he watched her; and when she still would not look, he pulled it out, pressed the muzzle next to her neck, and flipped her hair outward. He kept gulping so that he could breathe. "You listen to Lime," he said, himself listening to many years of books and magazines. "I'm not kidding. I don't want to have to kill you, so you look up here and see what ole Lime's got for you."
He stuck the gun under her chin and tilted it.
"That's right, that's right," he whispered. Pulling up his shirt, he thrust the purplish flesh out at her. "How do you like that, huh? All of a sudden, you can see me good. All these years you wouldn't look.
Now it's too late."
She twisted her back to him when he reached out, but he wriggled his hand inside her summer dress, sliding it under her slip and bra. He pulled hard on her nipple, watching her eyes as she grabbed at his arm. "Look. You better not. Because you can get hurt really bad. Now, you're going to have to take off all your clothes for me. It doesn't have to be bad; you could make it nice. Otherwise, you're going to make me hurt you. Come on, you knew all along, isn't that true? You've just been waiting, you could feel it, you knew this was coming; it goes way back, you and I, isn't that true? Say it!" He swung the gun.
"Please," she whispered.
The hand with the gun slammed against Judith's cheek. Pain rose in her like the fright of a sudden fall, but its cause seemed to be something happening far away, or she was far away, safe somewhere, waiting until this was over. She could see the arm shake and the gun tremble, she heard the voice tell her again to take off all her clothes or she would be hurt badly. She understood the voice, she was aware that her hands had begun to remove her clothes because her fingers could feel buttons and hooks, but she was thinking that if she could just keep from coming back, she would be all right. She knew she could not make her legs run for the door or the phone or make her voice try to talk to him. Her mind kept sorting through, shifting contingencies, gathering information should she need it. No knight would come to her rescue if she screamed.
From across the hall the television kept laughing as the flat, hollow voices pretended to be real. Cooled air blew against her body, and shame splotched her skin. She filled her head with the need to breathe carefully, to breathe away the panic that might attack her heart.
With a long, slow shudder, Judith unfastened her bra and let her arms fall. Her body stood motionless in front of him, limp and slightly shivering. Then the gun's coldness and the sticky heat of his hands started to move all over her, his fingers pulled at her breasts.
She felt herself coming back and she fought against it, panting faster and making herself listen to the sound of her breath, not his. Fingers kneaded her skin, one pushed inside her, twisting. She was sweating, even in the mechanically cold air. Then she could feel his organ jerking between her legs. Nausea uncontrollable swelled up in her, and, bent double, she started to gag in quick, dry heaves. Already thrusting, he was shoving her down onto the flat expanse of ottoman and sofa. The stubbly velveteen prickled her back and buttocks. Her senses, despite her effort to escape them, were alive; her body had betrayed her. It had pulled her back inside it. She started frantically to will herself to disappear while he wriggled on top, but she could feel his fingers down there. Then the pressure started, widening, pushing. Suddenly lunging, he jabbed up through her and the pain was hot up her spine, with fragments bursting at the back of her head.
It was going on too long. Judith kept promising herself in a hypnotic litany, "This will end, this will end, this will end." She could not pull her mind away from what was happening there inside her.
Her mind had not dulled sensation, but horribly focused and sharpened it; her senses so concentrated that time ballooned out of proportion, filling each inescapable instant. All his sad, false smells assailed her—the medicinal mintiness of his mouth, the raw, spicy odor of aftershave on his cheeks, and worst, the smell in the stiff sprayed hair, like plastic flowers too sweetly odorized. His face was too big, like the face in a magnified mirror that makes a moon surface of the skin. Only around the part of his body that flailed against her could she feel the heat and slipperiness of flesh. He still wore even his sports jacket, and his shirt, sweated through, stuck hideously wet against her breasts and stomach. She tasted the blood in her mouth from where she was biting her lip against the burn of his stabbing himself into her. He pulled her legs up, stretching them apart so that they hurt, as he kept slapping against her. Suddenly, he jerked out, but grabbed back at her to keep her down. He tore off his jacket and shirt.
From far off a loud crack of noise trembled through the house, but he paid no attention to it, and since the noise did not stop him, it was insignificant to Judith as well. All she could think was that it was unfair, that everything required of her had been erased by his failure to finish, so that it had to begin again. Then the pain started over again, on and on. Now she could feel the wet mats of chest hair and stomach hair that was alien to her, repulsive to her skin. She fought with careful breaths to climb up back safe into her mind. She thought about John, how his chest was smooth, how that first time on her wedding night the pain had surprised her but had still been less than she had expected and been led to expect; how she dreaded to feel that stiffened flesh poke at her in bed before she could sleep, so she would have to know that John wanted her to let him do it.
But how long had this been, a quarter-hour, an hour? With John it had always been only minutes, sometimes seconds, and she had taught herself even while he did it to disappear. Was this man different from other men, or was John? Judith could still hear the television; earnest voices made promises, feverish voices raved and sang about clean bodies, mouths, hair, sinks, toilets, windows, clothes, and on and on, spliced between the dirty news of the world. It must be, then, eleven o'clock. Why couldn't she faint? What held her here and wouldn't let her heart burst and kill her so that she could escape?
Her hand, flung out, knocked against the cold metal of the gun. Why couldn't she make her fingers close around it? Why couldn't she pick up the gun and kill him, or her? She tried to remember what she had been taught in those tales the nuns had told to pose perilous dilemmas of faith. In them young girls were lashed, burned, raped by atheist Orientals and Russians, and she recalled that it had been all right to deface yourself, ruining your beauty, to escape their lust, and it had been all right to be killed for your faith. For your faith. But for yourself? Or to kill? Or to kill yourself?
Sensation rushed back down to where the pain was. She could not stay away. And it kept on, labor until she whooped too for breath, her mouth gaping. And his huge face filled her vision, purplish and frenzied. Sweat drops and tears splashed onto her, then ran down her face, mixing with her own. His head banged into her shoulder, over and over, numbing at least that small part of her. She felt that they had dropped out of time, that this
act would never end, but go on forever in tortuous incompletion, like the acts in hell.
Now, now, she begged, now let me go mad; now that it's happened, now that it's true. For everything that waited behind the glass had laid itself bare and proved itself as vile and scared and savage, as unjust and unjustifiable, as unloved and unlovable, as her heart had always known. Now that she had witnessed, now that she lay stained and bleeding in the shattered glass, why wouldn't God let her go?
But the man thrust frantic against her, sobbing now, his mouth sliding over her face and neck and breasts, sucking everywhere. And she wanted to plead, Just suck and be at peace. And she wanted to gloat, laughing, I'm barren so there is nothing you can do that can touch me finally. She was caught there now. His sweat, like vinegar, stung her eyes closed. His hands were desperate on her flesh, clasping and unclasping, pulling her legs and hips against him. With panic she felt that he could never finish. She looked up into his eyes.
But the eyes were glassy and emptied. "Move," he croaked at her, and she was trying to move. Words gurgled through saliva in his throat like a man choking on blood. His hand slipping in the sweat of her hand shoved hers down to where they joined and he squeezed her hand around his testicles. She could feel heat and the sharp prickle of hairs as he squirmed their hands down between them. A choked grunt at each thrust, he strained against her, his face puffed up and purplish red. When she lost hold of him, his hands clutched at her throat, and she felt quickly to find him again just as it swelled upward, and he shuddered, moaning enough like John for her to know that he had reached it, that they were finishing it.
Now, she thought, I'm going to die now, because his hands clamped, pushing on her throat as he jerked in spasms above her. There was a swelling pressure inside her head until blackness pushed at her eyes. But then suddenly the hands twitched and fell away. His weight fell away, and as it was lifted away from her, Judith began to vomit.
Compelled beyond the agony of having to move in her nakedness, she ran, stumbling, already heaving into her hands, got open the bathroom door already leaning over, and retched into the toilet.
But he had followed her. He stood behind her while uncontrollably the last convulsions rose up through her as she tried to make the toilet flush again and again. He said nothing, but stood there rubbing the gun against his thigh, only watched her as she pulled a towel around herself. She reached, shivering with pain now, for the pills above the sink, pills prescribed to keep her heart in order. She noticed with a dulled astonishment that she could stand there with him beside her and not go mad, or die, or let her heart be killed; that between the death of self and the vilest life, her body was choosing life for her.
She could even turn to him, seeing his eyes, and say, "Please. Just go now. Just leave." His eyes were glassy. She saw that hate and hurt were frozen on his face like the faces of the damned in a picture. But then slowly he began to grin, and the grin widened as his hand shoved inside his pants. Refusal like electric shocks vitalized her, so that she could push past him, running, out into the hall and toward the front door. And when he caught her, she was already kicking out at him.
And when he touched her, she screamed, "No! You can't!" She hadn't known how hard the sound of the scream would tear up her throat.
They fought as he hauled her through the entry of the family room, where from the television news of the world still babbled.
He caught at her hands. The nails were bloody. "It's gone too far now," he gasped with hoarse solemnity. "I can do anything. It doesn't matter what happens now." Shoving her back, he pushed his pants down. And rage at this violation of their contract, rage stronger than pain or pity or fear bellowed up and out of her in a growl that made him step back when she leaped at him, and bit his hand, and the gun flew to the floor.
She was still growling when, knocking her down, he grabbed at her foot and flipped her onto her stomach. Still growling after her one shriek of pain so that she could not hear while he heaved out of his heart in senseless words the poisoned blood of his life. Still growling, spittle running from her mouth, when the crashing glass of the picture window flew splintering into the room and the German shepherd, Night, leaped through the hole.
chapter 54
A soldier seeking revenge had been on his way to save Judith Haig.
He was an unlikely cavalier, in quest of his own wife.
That sharp crack of noise, unnoticed by Barnum, had slapped at Maynard Henry, a half-mile back, with the impact of an explosion.
He was coming west down over the top of the ridge when noise leaped into the sky with the old nauseating loudness he thought he'd have forgotten. With a volley of curses he flung himself over his German shepherd, pulling it, rolling with it over the slope of the highway shoulder. "Uncool." He chuckled softly. "Can't hack it, Night, you know, getting old. Fucking blisters. Right, should have waited to get the truck. Still the dumbest fuck around, just the way Arn always said."
From where the sound had come, some miles to the north, a pulsing spurt of fire jumped into the dark haze. Off beyond the marshland it spread over the sky like the bright orange, bright black of firefight, those school-made Halloween colors of Vietnam. The Halloween trick in Vietnam of that whoosh, that deep black smoke of napalm ballooning up in the jungle sun. Guys freaked under its spell. Too much power to get your hands on, it swept you up in it. But then guys went wild on gun-door fire too, coming down into an LZ to unload grunts or pick them up; a lot, dumb assholes, going back in zipper bags. Guys went wild with the noise and terror, spasming on the guns so much you couldn't tell if they were shooting or getting shot. The birds flying the copters couldn't stand to touch the ground, the ground could scarf you up so fast. It was no place to be. And yet earth had saved Maynard Henry once, easing him down in the orange monsoon ooze when he had crawled, squirming, under sprawled bodies to hide himself. Over him the bodies, wet and warm like another layer of earth, had kept him alive when death had passed over, its black muzzle rooting for any who might have escaped, but missing him, pressed into the mud. Lucky, he said, remembering.
Yeah, guys freaked on the ground. He could see the face of one, a fat braggart child's face, the eyes crazy with uppers and downers, telling him about a slope female corpse, how "I propped her up and I spread her gook legs and I got my whole clip off right up her gook cunt. Pow pow pow pow. Pow pow pow. " And he had pantomimed the shooting like a movie gangster. And Henry'd seen guys taking pictures of each other standing beside the corpses of women sawn in half. Boys standing there with dead eyes and innocent smiles. What purpose served by stopping one? Still, he had; grabbing a skinny kid's camera once, slamming it to pieces against a jeep fender. The kid had backed off fast.
Dusky red rolled up over the sky. The woods behind Wild Oat Ridge were now on fire. Without analyzing the fire's cause, Henry automatically mapped its location as he loped down the steep graded road while Night bolted ahead, then circled back, scout and flank.
Around a corner, lights shone like steady fallen stars near the side of the highway ahead. The ex-soldier walked methodically on, limping now, noted peripherally the motorcycle shoved onto the purple flowering branches, recalled peripherally the dipshit on a cycle who had kicked at Night outside Fred's Fries.
Then as he came up the flagstone path to the large ranch house, a woman's scream cried out at him, savage. Henry rammed his shoulder at the front door, already jumping from the step when it didn't open, already running around the side of the house, with Night barking next to him, kicking Night down and pulling with both hands on the back sliding door. Then to the front again, to the large picture window, between the curtains a crack of light. On the floor somebody was on a woman. He had her on her stomach, her head crushed into the carpet; her legs were kicking and he was hurting her. From the highway Henry could hear sirens bleat, the noise still far away, coming toward him. He hauled a big, jagged flagstone out of the dirt and hurled it through the glass. Beside him, Night, wild, jumping.
W
ith his wadded jacket, the gun in its pocket giving weight, he beat away the broken glass. Night leaped into the room. As Henry lifted his leg over the ledge, he saw the man, his face and torso clawed bloody, scrabble off the woman, his penis bobbing, coated and slimy, his pants bunched around his ankles, as he crawled for something on the rug. The woman wasn't Chin, but a blonde woman older than Chin. Blood on the woman's mouth, blood on the insides of her thighs, blood on a nipple. Her cheek and throat, arms, thighs, discolored with bruises. He couldn't see Chin anywhere in the room.
Then Night was growling; the man spun and had a revolver. The muzzle splatted a quick noise, and Night, already in the air, squealed, spun to the rug, twitching and yelping.
The man crouched there, his eyes dead and crazy, the gun pointed up at Maynard Henry.
"You scumbag," Henry said tersely. "Stand up!"
Convulsive, moaning in high yelps, the man scurried to his feet waving the gun. "Get away, I'll kill you! I'm going to shoot! Get away! Get away! Goddamn you!"
But Henry simply shook his head as he walked forward and then grabbed Barnum's wrist and shook the gun to the floor. When Barnum lunged for it again, Henry kicked his hand away and, swooping quickly down, raised the gun himself. Without pause as Barnum kept grabbing for it, he pointed the gun at Barnum's naked crotch and fired, and without pause raised it to Barnum's naked chest and fired again, while astonishment, incisive, punctured the crazed blur of Barnum's eyes.
The body jumped backwards, falling. Blood, so red the man's auburn hair looked brown, pulsed out onto the stomach and thighs.
Henry could hear Night's squeals and the groans of the woman who rocked on her knees beside the dog. A siren whooped, its loudness coming closer and closer until it was just outside the house. Finally it subsided in an abrupt whining halt. A light spun, flashing red through the window. Ignoring it, Maynard Henry bent down to Night, but the dog growled and bit at him; its whole side was torn open, soaked red.
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