Immediately he heard the familiar ping of butane plunging through the lines, and at the same time the needle on the dial kicked over with a jerk. It continued to climb as he opened the valve all the way until it hit the maximum pressure number on the dial.
He went to the Jeep and backed it around to the track that extended out of the front door of the kiln. He cut the motor and walked back to the kiln, where he turned the large wheel latch on the heavy iron door and swung it open. Then he punched a red button below the light switch, and the heavy iron gurney that ran along the track into the belly of the kiln began groaning. When the gurney had emerged all the way out of the kiln, he released the button and locked the gurney in place almost up against the rear of the Jeep.
He went around to the control panel and studied the instruments. He pushed a few buttons, flicked a toggle switch . . . and waited. Whoosh! The kiln ignited. He tweaked a couple of dials and could hear the burners roaring on the other side of the thick brick wall. He studied the panel a few minutes, and when he was satisfied, he came back around to the front and looked through the tempered-glass window to one side of the door. The flames were blue and steady and powerful, and he could hear them blowing.
Without looking at the Jeep, he turned and started up the path to the house. There wasn’t much light, but he had walked it a million times and didn’t even have to think about it. He crossed the patio and went through the back door into the kitchen, through the kitchen to the dining room, where he opened the liquor cabinet and took out a green bottle of Glenfiddich.
He broke the seal on the bottle of Scotch while he was walking back to the kiln on the dark path, and by the time he got to the Jeep again he was taking his first swig. It was a poor substitute for real courage, and he was ashamed of falling back on liquid fortitude, but at this point in the ordeal it was the least of the things he was ashamed of. He didn’t give a damn. It was the only way he was going to be able to get through the things he had to do next.
Chapter 27
For a while—he had no idea how long—he leaned on the fender of the Jeep, sipping the Scotch. He stared dreamily at the tempered-glass window next to the kiln door through which he could see the blue flame. He waited, watching the evolution of its colors as the heat in the kiln gradually built to the temperatures he wanted.
When he began to feel the Scotch, he screwed the top back on the bottle, put the bottle on the fender of the Jeep, and took a deep breath. After unsnapping the canvas top of the Jeep, he yanked it off the frame and threw it on the ground, then took off the frame and tossed it on top of the canvas. Then he removed his shirt and draped it over the steering wheel.
Standing in the back of the Jeep, he lifted the bundle of bloody linen off Lacan’s body and threw it onto the ground beside the track and gurney. Then he made the revolting discovery that the body had indeed seeped more blood, and an astonishing amount of it glazed the floor of the Jeep. How the hell much blood could the bastard hold? He grabbed the soggy bundle and began wrestling it off the floor, slipping in the sauce of Lacan’s death, breathing its muggy odor as he embraced the body in his struggle to keep his footing and control the grub worm–ish sac.
He was sweating profusely again by the time he got the cocoon onto the gurney and steadied it in place. He jumped down and picked up the bundle of linen and placed it on the front of the gurney, which had been constructed to take a full-size sculpture and so had just enough room for both the body and the bundle.
Again he went to the fender of the Jeep and took several more swigs of Scotch. The kiln was roaring now, a dull rumble that sounded powerful and hellish.
Suddenly he remembered his clothes. He grabbed his shirt from the steering wheel, pulled off his trousers, pulled off his underwear, and slipped out of his socks and shoes. Everything went on top of the bundle, along with the pipe he had also gotten from the floor of the Jeep. He took another drink of Scotch and told himself he could do this. Told himself he was doing the right thing. Told himself he was thinking straight.
He went around the Jeep and into the shed, where he took a long leather apron off a nail and a pair of leather gloves from a shelf and put them on as he walked back to the kiln. He screwed open the wheel latch and pulled back the heavy iron door, backing away and using the door as a shield from the kiln opening. Then he went to the light pole, flipped a toggle switch, and pushed the red button again. The gurney jerked into motion and moved steadily along the track and into the kiln with the bundle of bloody linen and Lacan’s cocoon.
When it was well inside, the gurney bumped to a stop, and he slammed closed the door and spun the wheel latch until it locked in place. He scrambled over the track and looked inside the tempered window to the left side of the kiln door.
The bundle was already aflame with a bright orange flare all around it like a halo, and the shroud around Lacan’s body was gone, heavy ashes dancing up in a rush from his blackened body, which was already crusted over like a marshmallow. He knew what was going to happen next. And it did. Lacan, black as tar, began to move, rising slowly from his waist, until he was sitting up in an equestrian posture, his arms outstretched as if holding the reins of a bridle, his legs drawn up as if they were in the stirrups of a saddle. Sitting like this, his mouth agape, he suddenly burst into a coruscating blaze, riding like a demon into hell, flames shooting up from his head.
Ross spun away from the window and staggered to the edge of the woods, where he vomited . . . and vomited . . . and vomited.
When he finally regained control of his stomach, he realized he was still wearing the heavy leather gloves and apron. He took them off and returned them to the shed. Then he went back and sat on the millstone, which was about knee high and felt cold against his naked buttocks. The furnace was roaring with such exuberance that he could feel its reverberation.
But he didn’t sit long. Again he made his way into the darkness along the path to the house. From the laundry room he took a bottle of bleach and a long-handled scrub brush. He didn’t put on any clothes because they would just be contaminated by the splashing from the cleaning process.
He returned to the kiln, then got into the Jeep and backed it into the woods near the millstone. There was a water hydrant at the millstone and a garden hose with a spray nozzle. He stood inside the Jeep and splashed the bleach all over the floor, front and back, emptying the whole jug. Then he turned on the water full blast and hosed down the Jeep, not bothering to be too neat about it, concerned more about getting rid of all the blood.
Doing the job at the edge of the darkness was frustrating. The weak bulb in front of the kiln shed was of little help to him here, and he had forgotten to get a flashlight from the house. Still, he washed and washed until he couldn’t imagine anything being left.
He got up on the millstone to get out of the mud, removed the sprayer nozzle, held the hose overhead, and washed himself. He would bathe properly later, but right now he wanted to feel washed.
Finishing this, he stepped off the stone and walked to the kiln shed, where he kept several tarpaulins on shelves. He took one of them and went over to the edge of the courtyard in front of the studio and unfolded it on the ground. He went back to the front of the shed, where he found the bottle of Glenfiddich he’d thrown off the Jeep, turned off the low-wattage light, and took the Scotch back to the tarpaulin and sat down.
Exhausted, he looked at his watch. At nearly 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit he thought it would take, maybe, three hours for the kiln to do its work. That would be a little after three o’clock. He would check through the kiln window then, but he wasn’t going to look before that.
Shit. He stretched out on his side and opened the bottle and took another drink. It was done. Whatever happened now, he was in for the ride. He couldn’t get out now no matter how desperately he wanted to. It wasn’t a dream, not a nightmare. This was as real as anything could ever get.
Another drink.
He thought of the two sisters and what they were going through. At
least he didn’t have to do the endless scrubbing, room after room of reminders of what they all had done. Whenever he began to feel weak about what he was doing, he forced himself to think of Lacan and what Lacan had done. If Ross had broken the law, fine, then he had, but he didn’t think he’d broken the spirit of the law.
Leda had taken the law into her own hands, and that was wrong. And he had helped her cover it up, and that was wrong. But if they had called the police, and if the legal system could have been convinced that in Leda’s state of mind she believed her only recourse for deliverance from this man was what she did . . . if they could be convinced of that, wouldn’t, in the end, it all have resolved itself in the same way? More than likely, if he was thinking about it soberly, she would have gotten a probated sentence. But the damage to his life, to their lives, would have been so much greater. The media would have done what the media did best: sensationalize.
He took another drink.
No doubt about it, he had violated the statutes of the criminal legal system. But he wasn’t going to let himself believe he was guilty under a moral law.
He thought about that. And for a moment he felt justified. Yes, he could live with that. He felt justified.
Then, in the next instant, he knew deep down that he had done what he had done not out of moral indignation, not out of a moral sense of justice, but out of a deep desire to save his ass from disaster, to save his image and his career. He had done it to save himself from indignities and from embarrassment. Good God, was he that shallow?
Yes, he was.
Again he was beginning to feel the Scotch. He lay naked on the stiff canvas, resting on his elbow as he watched the light from the kiln window reflect a peach glow off the huge millstone and the front of the Jeep. The light flickered. Normally it didn’t. When he was firing a maquette or a statue there was nothing to consume. Now there was. So it flickered.
Watching it made him nauseated again. He lay on his back and looked up at the sky. Stars were visible, but not a sea of them. Still, he could see enough of them to want to stare at them and wonder.
It didn’t matter whether all of this was resolved in a court of law or not. He knew that everything had changed anyway. Everything. He wasn’t the same man. Well, maybe he was the same man, but he was more than the same man, too. And less. When you did what he had just done, you were both more and less. More of a coward, more of an outcast, more of an outsider. Less worthy, less stable, less comprehensible. More unpredictable. Less acceptable.
He drank some Scotch.
The kiln roared like a dragon, and he realized that never before had the sound of that conflagration sounded sinister to him. Always before it had meant the culmination of a creative process of which he was proud. The firing of the modeled clay was the christening of a creative act.
But now, goddamn it, he was in the process of burning a man to cinders, and the sound of the fire was as appalling to him as the sound of his own thinking, the sound of the hard work of his own thoughts trying to justify what he had done and what he had become.
Chapter 28
He didn’t sleep, but he wasn’t exactly conscious, either. Rather, he floated through a twilight of dreadful images that too much resembled scenes in Goya’s Caprichos: “He sees Céleste’s stricken face”; “A naked body in bloody sheets”; “Leda explains the murder”; “A corpse is hard to handle”; “Lacan rides flaming into hell.”
• • •
When he woke at dawn, he was stiff and thickheaded from the Scotch. The only sound he heard was the rumble of the kiln, the far-off thunder of fire. The surface of the tarpaulin was glazed with dew, and his hair was damp with it, and he was chilled.
Unsteadily he sat up, waited a moment to recover his equilibrium, and then got to his feet. He made his way to the small window in the kiln, where the radiant heat was so intense that he had to turn aside to approach the glass. He looked in. The gurney was empty, except for a long scattering of white flaky crumbles where Lacan had laid.
He went to the control box at the front of the shed and turned off the burners. The roar subsided. He folded the tarpaulin and returned it to its shelf. He picked up the Scotch bottle, tightened the cap, and started down the path to the house.
The whole time he showered and shaved and dressed he thought about Céleste and Leda and what they were doing. A breeze drifted through the screened panels of his bedroom, and the mourning doves were already moaning in the morning shade. How could everything be so unchanged? Everything should be different. Everything should be . . . less so. For some inexplicable reason, the fact that nothing had changed saddened him. It made him feel as if he had been cut off from all the beauty of the place, that he had been separated from it by what he had done, and it was going on without him. It was as if he had died and nothing had changed.
He made coffee and a couple pieces of toast, which had no flavor. Even though he really didn’t want it, he ate a peach. He poured another mug of coffee and walked out of the house and back to the kiln. It had been only an hour and it was still as hot as if it had never been turned off.
He walked over to the Jeep and looked at it. He didn’t know what he expected to see, but he didn’t see anything different except that the damn thing was cleaner than it had been in years. He got in, started the motor, and drove back around the house to the front drive and on to the front gate. He unlocked it and drove away, leaving the gates open as always.
• • •
Céleste answered the door. She looked exhausted, but she had bathed and wore a fresh, crisp sundress. She pushed open the screen door, and he went inside. They stood awkwardly in the entry hall.
“Where’s Leda?”
“Upstairs in her bedroom, asleep.”
“You finished?” he asked, looking past her.
“Yes. About four-thirty.” She paused. “Go ahead. Look around,” she said wearily.
He couldn’t help it. He did.
He walked through the entire house, at least that part of it where there had been blood, and everything looked bright and clean. He could smell the bleach. Windows were open everywhere, and morning light came in through thin curtains that lifted pleasantly now and then on the soft breeze. The place looked innocent.
When he returned to the front door, Céleste was sitting on a sofa in the living room. He went in and sat on the other end from her.
“What did you do with him?” she asked.
“The kiln. There’s nothing left.”
She didn’t react. She was sitting in the corner of the sofa with one leg folded underneath her, her elbow on the arm of the sofa, her head tilted to the side, resting in her hand. She was so tired that she looked weak. He wanted to put his arms around her and hold her, but he didn’t know if they could ever do that again. He didn’t know how any of this was going to affect anything.
“We had a chance to do it differently,” she said as if she knew what he was thinking.
“None of us wanted to pay the price.”
“No, we didn’t.” She stared at the floor. “Do you really think this is going to work?”
“It’d better.”
“The question was: Do you think this is going to work?”
“I don’t know.” But that wasn’t what she wanted to hear. He knew he needed to do better than that. “It can,” he said. “Yeah, it can work. The hardest part now will be going on as usual. As if last night never happened. We’ll have to do that.”
“‘As usual,’” she said to herself. “Nothing will ever be ‘as usual’ again . . . ever.”
“We’d sure as hell better act like it is. I’ll be through over there by the end of the day. Let’s wait another day. Let the adrenaline subside.”
“And then?”
“Business as usual. Leda comes back to the studio. We pick up where we left off.” He paused. “She can do this?”
“You’ll have more trouble with it than she will,” Céleste said bluntly.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you will have more trouble with it than she will.”
“Well, can you elaborate on that?”
“She’s not exactly a weakling, Ross. You know that by now, don’t you?”
“Are you trying to tell me something?”
“No. Nothing more than what I’ve said.”
For some reason he didn’t quite buy that, but he didn’t know why.
“You mean she’s not as shaken by this as she seemed?”
“No, she was shaken. She just wasn’t damaged.”
He was beginning to feel funny about the conversation, as if maybe he should be reading between the lines.
“You think I’ve been damaged?” he asked.
She looked at him. “I’ve been damaged, Ross. And I hope you have been, too.”
A tingling crept along the top of his shoulders. He didn’t know what the hell was going on here, but it seemed to be more than he was understanding.
The lazy sounds of palm fronds rustling in the breeze wafted in through the opened windows from Santa Elena Boulevard in front of the house. The odor of bleach that stirred through the rooms suddenly seemed as nauseous to him as something rotten. The large old house seemed achingly lonely, and he had an adolescent desire to be somewhere else with Céleste, somewhere away from everything that had brought them together, away from the ghastliness of the last twelve hours.
She was looking at him, and he thought he saw in her face that she knew what he was thinking. Maybe it showed in his face, too. As they looked at each other, they seemed to understand that the distance between them was growing with the imperceptible and inexorable swing of an hour hand. He didn’t see tears in her eyes, but he saw anguish, and it made him afraid. This time he was not afraid of the disaster that would befall them if this weak fabric they had woven began to unravel. Rather, he was afraid that what he and Céleste had begun they would not be allowed to finish.
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