by John Farris
"Birka!"
"I'm over here," she said. Aloud this time, because they were so close; some compassion in her voice but not as much as Marjory might have wished to hear from her old, dear friend.
15
The voices.
They clamored on the radio like some ghostly call-in show, such a babble that few words were intelligible to Duane and Puff, although the emotions were clear: suffering and desperation. Puff held her hands over her ears, grimacing.
"Turn it off!"
"I can't turn it off," Duane said. "I don't even know where it is. And I don't want to go look for it."
"I want my radio, and I want to get out of here!"
"You go find it."
"No! It's them. I told you I heard my mother before!" She took her hands from her ears and circled him around the waist with one arm, her other hand pushing against his ribs as she tried to move him backward, out of the cavern. Duane, more fascinated than frightened, held his ground easily. Puff looked at him, chin bunched, her mouth pushed into a tight bow. "Wha-what is this, Duane? Is it hell? All those bodies, is that wha-what we'll look like whuh-when we're—"
"Hey, Puff, it's just the damn radio."
"MAKE IT STOP! Please, Duane!"
"Okay—okay, stay here, I'll find the radio. Let go?" With a little prying on Duane's part, she loosened her grip on him. Her lips also loosened and quivered, her chin relaxed, and while she continued to stare at him, all expression drained from her face like water squeezed from a sponge. She looked very childlike, except for her peachy breasts and large nipples, dark as bruises and pebbled. He put a hand between her breasts and felt her heart trying to jump into his palm. She swallowed, Adam's apple bobbing. Duane felt a corresponding emotional bobbing. Half the time she was like a sister he had to put up with, and half the time he wanted to fuck her. Down here he wanted to. Outside, well, he just wouldn't be interested. He couldn't explain that to himself. Her eye with the cast looked glum, a little dusty, like the eyes of all the trophy heads in his father's den. His father had even stuffed a raccoon, as if it were as rare and dangerous as a white tiger. It was a weird time to be hating his father, but being in Puffs company for so long had finally started to unstring him. Then she closed both eyes, head tilting back almost blissfully, and he felt the slackness in her body as her breathing slowed. But she was steady on her feet.
"You okay?" Duane asked. The din from the radio was fading, only two or three voices now, down to whispers. But even without the voices acting as a beacon he wouldn't have much trouble locating the radio, out there in the middle of this big cocoon. The beam of the nearby flashlight reflected from veins of quartz in the roof. "Be right back," Duane said, reluctantly taking his hand from her heart. Puff swayed almost imperceptibly, breathing through her mouth, and didn't answer him. She had rebounded from hysteria into a trancelike state. Maybe that was normal. . . if anything about Puff could be called normal. Or maybe it was something to worry about, a deferred acid trip she was just now catching up to, but Duane liked her this way. Once he recovered the radio, then he'd simply take docile Puff by the hand and walk her out of the cavern. With luck he wouldn't run into Marjory, leading a naked Puff around. Duane grinned, picturing that encounter. I don't know what happened to her clothes, Marjory, she just kept taking them off and leaving them places.
This had turned out to be quite a day. There wasn't half as much buzz in stealing cars.
Puff sighed deeply and seemed to ease still farther into stoned privacy.
Duane stepped around her in the soft tangle of silk.
"Mom?" Puff said, as if she were talking in her sleep. A muscle fired beneath the bad eye, crinkling the skin. Both hands were clenched at the level of the shadowed dent of belly button, tendons standing out in the slender wrists. Her head was still tilted back as if she might be gawking at something overhead. Eyes closed but the tiny muscle twitching like code. Puff frowned. The tip of her tongue appeared between parched lips, withdrew. Duane hesitated, watching her, uneasy now. Wanting to say something to snap her out of it, but concerned about the consequences.
Better to leave her alone, retrieve the radio, get the hell out of there.
He heard only one voice on the radio now. A child, in tears.
Don't you whine, Ethan!
Shit, Duane thought, who said that? The rebuke wasn't on the radio, the voice seemed to come from inside his head. Duane felt a cold streak down his breastbone, a freezing knifepoint deep in his bowels. Thinking now about what Marjory had said earlier, concerning the unknown fate of the population of Dante's Mill. They all left one day. Seventy-four people. Just picked up and vanished.
Why?
There were no more voices on the radio, he heard only a mild humming as he waded deeper into the cocoon to find it.
He stepped on a hidden head the size of a croquet ball and jerked away with a cry, almost lost his balance to go sprawling deep into the nesting of mummies. Now they seemed to be everywhere underfoot as he picked his way cautiously toward the beam of the flashlight pointing up at the roof, thick as casualties on a battlefield. Looking down, he couldn't see much. But kept stepping on them no matter how he danced around trying not to. Dessicated limbs tough as beef jerky, not yielding underfoot. Not breaking off, either. His throat locked but too late, an instant later he threw up.
When he could breathe again he continued to wade grimly through the nearly waist-high drift of the cocoon to the place where the flashlight had struck Puffs radio—there it was, resting atop something dark, another mummy but small. God, a kid, Duane thought, reaching down to get the radio, his nerves half shot from the vomiting, heart accelerating.
Something shriekingly painful went through his head, ear to ear; his eyes closed involuntarily and he gritted his teeth, hands hovering above the radio: it was worse than a high-gain blast of static. A scream, maybe, but inhuman in range and intensity: human in the relief, the joy expressed. He looked down at a closed tarry face, the face of a mummified child. Long dead and with a twist of dried vine deep in the wasted throat. But he could swear, in those moments of contact, of unexpected empathy, something stirred beneath the surface of that satiny shrunken face like a burrowing worm, that the eyelids of the mummy were about to open.
Duane seized the radio and groped for the flashlight, lying deeper, thrust aside a stiffened hand, the shrieking in his head causing him to cry out, an outpouring to relieve the pressure of the unrelenting interior sound. He picked up the flashlight and straightened, throwing the beam in Puffs direction.
But she wasn't there any more. Puff had vanished. And as the radio in his hand vibrated again with the babble of exultant voices, Duane had the dreadful feeling that Puff, wherever she was, had just done something irredeemably wrong.
16
Ted Lufford finished cutting the grass in the rain and came into the kitchen dripping after he put the Toro away. He was wearing only a pair of grease-stained denim cutoffs and ratty sneakers; Enid could count eight of his toes through the holes in those sneakers. Grass cuttings clung to Ted's slightly bowed legs almost to his knees, which were a little smoky from the exhaust of the old lawn mower. Enid smiled as she slid a Pyrex dish filled with breaded pork chops into the oven.
"You're a mess," she said.
"Let's take us a shower."
"I don't need a shower," Enid said, wrinkling her nose at him.
Ted went to the sink and leaned over to drink from the faucet.
"That is a habit of yours I'm never going to get used to," Enid said mildly.
Ted straightened and wiped his mouth. "Saves dirtying up a glass. What else are we having for supper?"
"Marjory's warmed-over scrapple."
Ted nodded approvingly. "It don't get to tasting just right anyhow until it's warmed over two or three times." Enid closed the oven door and adjusted the temperature. "Better cook those real slow," he suggested.
Enid took off her apron and glanced at the wall clock. "You ought to be half-starved a
fter cutting all that grass." Thunder rumbled. Rain poured onto the back steps, overflow from a clogged gutter.
"I need to do something about that gutter the next time I'm over."
"I know you do," Enid said, smiling, her eyes on him melting like honey on a hot biscuit.
"What time's Marjory coming home?"
"I don't have any idea. I would've thought with the rain they'd be here by now. Or maybe she's over to Rita Sue's."
"Think we'll have the house to ourselves?"
"No telling for how long," Enid said. She folded the apron across the •top of a ladder-back chair and glanced over one shoulder at Ted.
"I know what that look in your eye means," he said with a tough well-satisfied grin.
"Maybe you just think you do," Enid said.
"Reckon I'll get rid of these shorts."
"The shoes too while you're at it."
Ted went as far as the doorway and unbuttoned his shorts and pulled them down and kicked them over the sill, then kicked off his sneakers and turned back to Enid in a flash of lightning, a little potbellied and bronzy naked and still shining from rainwater and sweat and plastered-on grass. Enid took off the gold bracelet that had belonged to her mother, and the sleeveless top she was wearing, and her bra.
Enid said, "I caught mamma and daddy doing this once, right here in this very kitchen when they thought I was minding Marjory somewhere else. I guess I was about six years old."
"What did you think, Nuggins?"
"Well, I remember thinking, 'I wonder what he does with all that.'"
"Did you find out?"
"Oh, no. Not then. I didn't keep on looking or anything. I respected their privacy."
"Well, when did you find out?" Ted asked teasingly.
"Oh, I expect you know the answer to that, you were there at the time."
"Were you that innocent?"
"Not enough to matter." Enid pulled her green Bermuda shorts down, wriggling a little, then treated him to an impudent pelvic twist and thrust as soon as the shorts dropped to her ankles.
"Boy, I just never suspected about you," Ted said admiringly.
"Never suspected what?" Enid said, hipshot and naked too except for a slim ankle chain and sandals. She rubbed across a breast with her knuckles. "I know I don't have anything to be bashful about, or do I?"
"What I meant was, how you don't like to wear underpants."
"I do when it's cold. I don't when it's hot. And Lordy it's been hot."
"Baby baby," Ted said fervently, coming toward her, a hand on his joystick.
Enid playfully put a thumb in her mouth, forefinger curled against her nose. Ted cosied up to her, plucked the thumb from her mouth and licked it, all the way to the inside of her wrist, watching her nipples pucker.
"Daddy, what do you do with all that?" Enid said dreamily.
When Ted picked her up in his arms she put her thumb back in her mouth and closed her eyes.
Fifteen minutes later Enid dropped off to sleep. She always did, even in the car, although they'd stopped doing it in Ted's car six weeks ago. Ted lay there in Enid's bed for a while, a little drowsy himself, watching the rain on the bedroom windows. Then he got up, brushed some of the grass off the sheets, and went down the hall to the bathroom. Marjory wasn't home yet. But he'd taken a few showers in their house and he was fairly certain that Marjory, who was a chore to be around sometimes but sharp as a tack, knew what was going on anyway. He'd left his change of clothes in the spare room. After he was dressed he took a washcloth soaked in warm water and half wrung out and a towel back to Enid's bedroom.
She woke up while he was giving her a sponge bath and put her arms around him.
"Umm. What's that good smell you're wearing?"
"It's just some new stuff I bought at Sears. Like it?"
"I like all of your smells. Your after-shave and shampoo. I like your sweat. I like the way your fingers smell when you've been playing with our things." Her eyes wide-awake and staring solemnly at him. He didn't know what to think when Enid talked like that. It was the last thing he'd ever expected from her. He liked sex talk during sex, oh yes. But sometimes when they weren't doing it, when they were out on a date or just chatting on the phone, she would come out with a remark that, although she never used vulgarities, would jolt him, then giggle at his reaction. She had said, for instance, one night while they were having dinner at the DQ, "Which part of my meat do you like best, the brown or the pink?" He'd nearly strangled on a bacon cheeseburger when she came out with that. And then she'd said, "Gravy or plain?" Or, over to his folks' house for an evening of porch sitting and Fourth of July fireworks, leaning over to whisper in his ear, "I was thinking about you today shopping at K-Mart, and I just had to get out my hanky." Well, actually, it was Ted's handkerchief, which he had loaned to her after that first time in the car when neither of them was prepared for what took place, and she had kept it, and not washed it through subsequent usings. Enid claimed she took the handkerchief everywhere with her, though she stoutly refused to produce it on demand. She didn't need to carry his picture, Enid said, but she liked to be close to his smells. Plural. Maybe she was just teasing; still, the notion gave Ted a definite kick, but made him uneasy, too. Enid was a little strange. Fiercer than he'd ever thought a woman could be in bed, the rest of the time as demure as if she'd never been kissed. Not exactly down-to-earth. As his mother said, not approvingly, "You just never know what's on that child's mind." Maybe that was the creative artist in her. Most girls he'd been at least half-serious about, once you knew them for a couple of weeks there were no surprises. They were as predictable as migrating ducks. Ted thought of the way his mother used to wrap Christmas presents before her arthritis got too far along, you could look at one of her packages and be convinced you knew what was in it, then on Christmas morning a toy truck would turn out to be a Hopalong Cassidy holster and gun. Enid wrapped herself new for him every day and dared him to guess, and that was a part of what kept him engrossed. Oh, and he liked her smells just fine, too.
"Guess I'd better change these sheets," Enid said, giving him a kiss and getting off the bed. Ted watched her bending over stripping the bedcovers and was a little sorry he'd been so fast to get dressed.
Enid straightened slowly, the linen-changing half done, and walked away with a forearm crossed under her breasts, as if something mean and gloomy had come over her. She went to the windows where the rain was pelting hard and stared at the drowning tree outside, the unseen road.
"What's the matter, hon?" Ted asked. "Looks like you've got a stomach gripe."
"I do," she said almost inaudibly.
Ted felt both a thrill and flash of anxiety. Her cute belly was rounding out just a little more than he'd ever noticed before. "Don't imagine you're—"
"No," she said, matter-of-factly, "I surely would know if I were going to have a baby. Anyway I can't while I'm—"
"Well, I thought you might've—"
"No, I'm real good about taking them. You know I don't want a baby anytime soon. Not while Marjory's still the baby of the family." Enid tensed, then nearly doubled over. "Oh, God," she said, looking up and out at the dark with fearful eyes Ted saw reflected in the streaming glass.
"Nuggins, what is it?"
"Just this hollow feeling. Like, at mama and daddy's funeral when I realized for certain I was never going to see either of them again." She turned. "That was the first time. Up until then I just thought it was all a mistake. Like it was not actually happening."
"But what's the matter now?"
"We're never going to see Mr. Horsfall again," Enid said, with a woeful sideways fall of her head and a sniffle and then tears.
"Oh." Ted relaxed his grip on a bedpost. He had expected it was something really bad going on in her mind. He put an arm around Enid while she gasped and shed tears, then sat them both on the edge of the mattress. "Nuggins, I know you feel responsible that he ran off, but you shouldn't be carrying on like this because somebody took advantage. How
were you supposed to know?"
"What I know now," Enid said bleakly, "is that he's lying dead somewhere." She looked at the wall by the door where she'd tacked up a portrait Mr. Horsfall had done, for the most part smearing the heavy paper with white liquid shoe polish. Ted thought the portrait was ugly. A woman, sort of, with big screechy looking blue eyes but no hair. Holding out a clawlike hand that had only a thumb and three fingers. There was a black smudge where the little finger belonged.
Ted said something meant to be comforting like, Time will tell, and cuddled Enid, and presently she dried her eyes and smiled forlornly at him.
He changed the sheets for her while she got dressed, blue walk shorts but still no underpants, and they went downstairs to supper.
Once the dishes were cleared Ted continued with his efforts to teach Enid the strategies of blackjack, and they listened to the radio. By nine o'clock Enid was demonstrating her version of the fidgets: staring eerily into space, fingers of her right hand clenched as she cocked and uncocked her thumb. She still couldn't seem to remember which pairs to split, although she tried to get interested in the card game.
They took a break. Enid called Rita Sue's house. Then she poured another cup of coffee and came back to the kitchen table.
"I don't know where they can be. Isn't that boy supposed to be on probation or something? I've never known Marjory to act like this over any boy."
"Well, she's getting to be the right age. I told you I ran his sheet. He was a first-time offender. They all were. His probation officer says he's got a stable home life, a good academic record, and regular church attendance. No trouble since he hot-wired that Cadillac. Hell, I was in a little trouble myself that age, but nothing ever got on the books."
"This just isn't like Marjory, to be late and not give me a call. It's almost quit raining. Do you feel like taking a drive?"