After taking thought, Diana returned with the key that she’d told Janet had been lost. Not that she feared Janet might try to leave the room, but she did not want Kelly going in.
But this, she knew, was a temporary solution, if only because it required Janet’s quiet compliance. Shame, sheer horror, and a modest ration of white wine in a plastic bucket just inside the bedroom door could be counted on to keep Janet from open rebellion for a while.
But what was Diana to do if Janet became fractious, as she surely would? She could not simply go into her sister’s room and kill her. Such dirty business was what men were for. The mechanics, the plumbers and electricians. The butchers, if it came to that. Merle had dealt expeditiously with that problem when it had come time to slaughter the growing population of pigs in the sty. But Merle had not been answering his phone. He had assured her, such times as he chose to call, that Alan was a goner, that he was almost gone, that the end was nigh. And she had enjoyed going back to her anxious, booze-sodden sister and assuring her that Alan was just fine but didn’t want to talk with her just yet. It had seemed no more than a refined form of torture.
Had Merle been lying? Did he have some agenda of his own? Undoubtedly he did, but Diana had thought of him as dependably malign. What could be in it for Merle to keep Alan alive? Once he’d squeezed some juice from him, the risk of having him about would outweigh the little juice still to be had.
But what if Merle had gone off on his damned motorcycle and just left Alan to die on his own? What if, what if—there was nothing but what-if’s so long as Merle kept avoiding her.
And meanwhile there was a different kind of problem, with Kelly.
Kelly was Diana’s anchor to whatever was human in her own nature. Kelly was still, though difficult at times, a child, and Diana had appointed herself the child’s mother. What else is a teacher, a substitute teacher at that, but, in the legal phrase, a loco parentis? Diana had a responsibility toward the girl: she must be spared the trauma of seeing that her mother had become some gruesome approximation of a pig.
The thought of a summer camp had occurred to Diana, that old standby for dealing with children who should not be witness to the behavior of the adults about them. But her first inquiries in that direction had been discouraging: she lacked the legal authority to have the girl shipped off. The bureaucracy of summer camp enrollment had become almost as complicated as that of the regular school system. In any case, it was better to be able to keep her eye on the girl.
Happily, Janet, after her first dismay, was not raising a ruckus. Kelly, however, was resistant to the idea that her mother didn’t want to see her, but when Janet (at Diana’s strong urging) assured her daughter, through the locked door, that she must be patient, Kelly remained docile.
Or so Diana had believed. Now it appeared that Janet and Kelly had been hatching their own little plot. She had known that the two would sometimes confer in whispers through the locked bedroom door, but this had seemed a harmless steam valve so long as Kelly did not misbehave.
Then, today, in the late afternoon, when Diana had gone upstairs to prepare Janet’s evening bucket of cheap white wine, she’d heard Kelly’s voice downstairs. Who could Kelly be talking to? If the phone had rung, Diana would have heard it. But if Kelly had dialed someone herself…? Whom? Diana went quietly to the head of the stairs and strained to hear what Kelly was saying, and caught, “Hello! Alan, is that you?…”
It couldn’t have been Alan, of course. Kelly must have called Navaho House; she knew that phone number well enough. But then, as Diana started down the stairs to put an end to the nuisance, she heard the girl say, “Please, Alan, Mommy’s in trouble,” and more to that effect.
Diana was incensed and did what she would not have thought herself capable of. She bolted down the stairs, ripped the receiver from Kelly’s hands, and swatted her across the face. Kelly screamed and went tumbling backward in her chair.
“Merle, is that you?” Diana insisted. “I’ve been trying to get in touch for days.”
Kelly, on her back in the overturned chair, began to bawl. Diana grabbed her by the arm and jerked her up to her feet. “Get up to your room, young lady!” Then, into the phone: “Merle, I know you’re there. Don’t start playing games with me. We’ve got trouble. Merle?”
The voice that responded wasn’t Merle’s. “Help!” was all he said, but that was enough. She knew Alan’s voice.
“Alan?” she said, but the line had gone dead.
As she’d been doing for days with mounting exasperation, she pressed the redial button. As ever, the phone rang and went on ringing until Diana returned the receiver to its cradle. But her question had been answered. Kelly—probably at Janet’s suggestion—had done what she’d just done herself, pressed redial.
And Alan, not Merle, had answered. And had called for help. Diana had not mistaken that nasal whine. And now no one was picking up. But the fact that Alan had been able to speak to Kelly when she’d called was more than ominous.
Up till now she had avoided going to Merle’s cabin to confront him about why he was avoiding her. Such prudence had become a luxury. She had to go there. But first she had to make sure that Kelly didn’t make any more mischief.
Kelly had not gone to her room, as she’d been told. She wasn’t anywhere upstairs, or in the house. Diana went out the back door and called aloud, “Kelly! Kelly, I have to talk to you.” But if Kelly had taken fright (as she must have, after the wallop Diana had given her), then she must have hidden somewhere, and she had all outdoors to hide in. The girl was almost six and much more devious in the game of hide-and-seek than she’d been when Diana had first come to the farm last winter. There wasn’t time to spare looking for her.
What Diana did instead was disconnect the phone, so Kelly could not use it again. She dumped it in the front passenger seat of Carl’s Chevy, which she’d been driving lately for economy’s sake.
Then she returned to the house to make sure Janet’s door was locked. When Janet heard her twist the handle, she said, “Is that you, Diana? Is something wrong?”
“No, dear, everything is fine,” she assured Janet in her most teacherly voice.
“I thought I heard…”
“Kelly and I had a little argument. But it’s all over. I have to leave the house for a bit. But I’ll be right back. If you talk to Kelly, tell her I’ve gone to get a pizza for our dinner. Okay?”
Janet said nothing.
“Okay!” Diana answered herself.
And thought: “I’m going to have to kill her after all.” The thought distressed her, but what was more distressing was the thought she did not put into words—that she would have to kill Kelly, too.
Before she got the keys for the Chevy, it occurred to her that it would be wise to bring along the shotgun and a box of shells. She’d protested when Merle had insisted on teaching her how to load and fire. The recoil had almost dislocated her shoulder. Merle had smirked, but then he’d shown her a better way to hold the thing, and how to aim.
What a sorry state the world has come to when women have to learn how to use firearms!
54
“I’d like to see some ID,” the state trooper told Diana once she’d rolled down the window on the Chevy.
“Of course,” said Diana. After she’d made a pretense of looking at the seat beside her, where the shotgun and the box of shells and the telephone with its cord wrapped round it were all in plain sight, she said, “Oh. I must have left my purse at home.”
“Uh-huh. How about the registration?”
“That’s in here,” she said brightly. When she opened the glove compartment, the pint bottle of Jack Daniel’s spilled out, but the registration for the Chevy was in its little plastic envelope where it was supposed to be, thank heaven. She handed the registration to the trooper, who pretended to study it as he backed away from the door and took his gun from his holster.
“You’re Carl Kellog?” he asked with a practiced neutrality.
&nb
sp; “That is my brother-in-law. I use his car sometimes, and he uses mine.”
“Step out of the vehicle, please.”
What choice had she? She raised the lock, which she’d pressed down when the trooper had pulled her over.
“So,” he asked, adjusting his classic mirror-shade sunglasses, “where’s the fire?”
She took a deep breath. She could not afford to offend the man.
“Was I over the speed limit? I confess, I wasn’t looking at the speedometer.”
“Uh-huh.” He nodded toward the passenger seat. “So tell me, what’s that?”
“It’s… my brother-in-law’s gun.”
“Yeah, I can see that. I mean, the bottle.”
“Oh! Oh, it’s not what you think. I haven’t been drinking. That’s a tisane.”
“A what?”
“An herbal tea. I was bringing it to my mother. It’s a stomach remedy.”
“Yeah? I’ll tell you, lady, that’s one I haven’t heard before.”
Diana smiled an entirely beguiling smile. “I know what you must think. But open it. Smell it. Taste it, if you like. It’s not alcohol.”
“Right.”
“Smell my breath if you like.”
“No, thanks,” he said, but he did reach into the car and retrieve the bottle. He screwed off the cap and sniffed and yes, yes, he sampled it! And puckered his lips with dismay.
“Was I lying?” she asked him, and now there was a taunt in her voice. Her back solidly against the wall, she could afford bravado.
“Put your hands on the side of the car, please.”
She did not comply, but looked him in the eye, and said, “Do you know what you are? You are a pig.”
She had made no threatening gesture, and he showed no alarm, only a mild amazement.
“A pig,” she repeated, as a gambler at Vegas might have asked for a single card, hoping to fill an inside straight.
And then, though there was no alteration in his features and he remained only the state trooper who meant to arrest her, she said it again, a third time, with cool conviction. “A pig.”
The shudder of metamorphosis passed through his body. He fell forward, his pistol dropping to the asphalt, his hooves scraping furrows in the Chevy’s paint.
They’re all pigs! she thought triumphantly. All of them!
And the magic still worked.
She had to help him out of the tangle of his uniform, then sicced him off into the woods along the road. “Run!” she shouted after him. “As fast as you can! And keep running!”
When he’d vanished into the undergrowth, she picked up the fallen pistol and tossed it into his patrol car. Then she took the keys from the ignition and flung them in the direction in which he’d disappeared.
It felt good to know that she still had the power of her magic. She was Woman. She was Invincible.
Even so, she kept her eye on the speedometer the rest of the way to Merle’s cabin.
55
For a little while Carl had thought he was human again, that he’d done something animals can’t do. In a choice between love and duty, he’d followed the path of duty. Instead of hightailing it home to help Kelly, he’d stayed in the vicinity of the cabin to see what he could do for Alan. Alan’s case had seemed the more desperate, and Carl, by profession, helped those in the most desperate situation of all, prison. Was that looking at the thing too rosily? Was he flattering himself?
But even to be pondering such questions was human, and that was the great thing. Like the liberals were always saying, hey, my skin might look different than yours, but inside I’m just like you. If pigs could laugh, he would have had a good chuckle at that. At the fucking irony. And maybe that was the most human thing of all.
As with his pig namesake, Hamlet, all this soliloquizing was a way of spinning his wheels before the action started. Diana was definitely taking her time, and Carl, crouched down behind some teaberry bushes at the far edge of Merle’s property, had begun to wonder if he dared venture back to the cabin, when he was astonished to see his own Chevy bouncing toward the cabin on the gravel road. He felt a flash of possessive rage: she was in his car!
But (he realized when she got out of the car) she also had his shotgun. Or a shotgun (for his distance vision was not very keen as a pig). So, with an enemy armed and decidedly dangerous, Carl bided his time behind the bushes.
A light came on in the cabin window (it was getting to be twilight), and then Diana appeared in the doorway with Alan beside her, his arm slung over her shoulders for support. Very slowly they made their way to the Chevy. Alan was groaning, but Diana seemed intent on helping him.
Carl waited until she had helped Alan into the passenger seat of the car, and then made a low grunt. It didn’t seem to register, so Carl raised the decibel level. This time she looked up. She had heard him, and now he let her see him—but only his hindside, for he feared her power to command his actions if their eyes should meet.
In her most commanding tone she shouted, “Stop!”
He did not stop.
And then he did—but of his own volition. Waiting, baiting the trap with the target of his ass.
After a longish silence he risked looking back at the cabin. She had retrieved the shotgun, as he’d expected, but she was not yet very close.
He headed for the path that would lead to Merle’s body. There was one blast from the shotgun, and he felt the sting of pellets in his hindparts, but pigs do have thick skin. He knew she would follow where he led her—and felt a whoosh of triumph when she came upon the body and screamed.
She had seen what he had done to Merle, and that was a great satisfaction.
But as so often, success made him careless. When, not long later, he’d heard the Chevy drive off, he decided that a little celebration was in order and returned to the cabin. He remembered the food he’d kicked into the basement. The Hungry Man dinners, the frozen sunfish, all of which would be thawed now. Plus whatever treats had been wrapped in the foil, or was melting in the plastic tub. Alan wouldn’t need those provisions now, and Carl was hungry.
The fight in the basement had been left on, and Carl was careful on the steps. But he’d broken one tread himself, and Diana’s and Alan’s combined weight had seriously weakened two others. Both broke under Carl’s weight.
No way would he get up those stairs again.
But the sunfish were a meal to die for.
56
It is commonly believed, wrongly, that Eden was lost by the sexual transgression of Adam and Eve, that the apple they ate was a euphemism for sex. In fact, they had often had sex before they fell from grace, but like animals, they didn’t remember what they’d done. After their fall and exile from Eden, they remembered everything and regretted everything, for once we are aware that there is an ethical dimension to the universe, evil becomes intrinsic to our existence. We live by eating other living things, and all our heirs are born to follow us (if not precede us) to death. That is the meaning of original sin.
Alan had thought a great deal about original sin and related matters while he’d been chained in Merle’s basement and was starving. A slow death fosters theological meditation, and Merle himself, for his own reasons, had often engaged Alan in discussions on such subjects. He had wanted to bring Alan to a state of complete despair, and they had both been very candid, Alan from a hope that candor might soften Merle’s heart, and Merle? Merle had a cat’s simple curiosity. He’d quizzed Alan endlessly about his peculiar upbringing as the son of a Lutheran minister who had sired Alan on his own daughter. When, he wondered, had Alan begun to guess? How sincere, Merle asked, had been the religious beliefs of Reverend Johnson? Was he consumed by guilt or inured to it?
These were matters of interest to Alan as well (though a torment to the spider hidden in his ear), but the more he thought about it, the less he understood. The matter, for instance, of his virginity: how had that protected him from Diana’s magic? He had grown up cocooned in evil, lied to and hated
by both his parents. Yet he seemed to have preserved some essential innocence. Merle himself remarked on the oddity of this. Alan hypothesized, in a Lutheran way, that perhaps it was a gift of God’s grace, which is always inexplicable and unearned. Merle allowed as how that made sense; his own gifts were of the same sort.
Finally, neither of them was much changed by all their theological talk. Merle remained merciless and Alan suffered, though never entirely despaired, for he’d always known that somehow things would work out for the best. This was his closest-kept secret and, as well, a real embarrassment, for another way to put it was that he’d been chosen by God or Destiny or whatever as an exception to the general rule that Shit Happens. He always had believed in the Psalm he’d had to memorize so long ago: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.
Even now, sitting beside Diana in the car, heading he didn’t know where, he feared no evil. Diana was as evil as they come, he knew that now. And he’d long ago realized that being in love with her had been a big mistake. But even so he wasn’t afraid of her, and rationally he should have been. Maybe he was having a sugar high from all that ice cream.
The road was zipping by on fast-forward. He’d asked at first if they were going to the police, but Diana had got a cagey look and started explaining why that would not be a good idea. There was nothing to be afraid of, she insisted, because Merle was dead, she’d seen his body, the nightmare was over.
“You’re upset,” she said, “I can understand that. Anyone would be. But that’s all over. The important thing is, we’re together again.”
She put her hand on the dirty denim of his jeans and squeezed. It hurt. Almost anything did.
THE SUB A Study In Witchcraft Page 29