by Tabitha King
He nodded. “You won’t let them hurt you, will you?” he whispered back.
“No,” she said. “Now go on.”
He skittered away in the dark of the hall.
She picked up the knife and waited.
“She ain’t buying it,” Ricky said. He grinned happily.
Tight-lipped, Rand slammed his right fist into his left palm. He wouldn’t look at Ricky. He backed off to the edge of the porch and stared at the door. Lowering his head moodily, he padded toward the door and leaned heavily against it on his palms. He stared at his own boots, at the floor of the porch. His hands curled into fists. Suddenly his head snapped up and he pounded his fists on the door in rage.
“Let me in, bitch!” he bellowed. “Let me in!”
He punished the door steadily for a minute or so. It shuddered and bucked under the force of his blows. Then he stopped and cocked his head against it, listening.
There was no answer from within.
He pushed himself off the door and whirled around. “Come on,” he muttered, and bounded savagely down the steps into the blowing snow. Ricky shrugged and followed. Gordy Teed slunk out of the shadows after them like a cur dog with his tail between his legs. Behind them, the storm door swung in the wind.
Liv crouched behind the door, flinching with every blow. She heard Rand with a faint smile that was mostly bravado. She could not move for some time after the heavy thud of boots on the porch told her they were gone. Then she crept to the window to peer out. The porch was empty, save of shadow and the snow blowing onto it.
She hurried to the living room and tweaked the curtains aside. There was blurred light on the beach, the headlights of the snowmobiles, and an erratic engine cough under the sound of the wind. Liv let the curtain drop and sagged against it. Her stomach hurt where she had been punched, and from holding her breath. The roots of her teeth hurt, too, from clenching her jaw. Her fingers were stiff from clenching the knife. She released the knife gently into the nearest niche in the fireplace. She rubbed the edge of her jaw, swallowed hard, and hurried to the bathroom.
Knocking softly at the door, she said, “Travis, it’s me.”
The lock clicked, and Travis, wrapped in a towel, opened the door, and threw himself into her arms. She hugged him and ruffled his hair.
“Hey,” she said, putting on a good cheer she did not feel at all, “it’s okay.”
Travis snuggled closer. “Are they gone?” he asked.
“Yes,” Liv said. “They’re gone.”
She pulled up his towel, which was disarranged. “You must be cold. Let’s get you dressed again,” she said.
She thought an immediate return to routine would be reassuring and she was right. He let her finish drying him without protest, and consented to be wrapped up again in the towel and carried down the hallway to his bedroom.
Behind the bedroom door it was not quite pitch dark; E.T.’s heartlight still glowed, small and opaquely rosy, next to Travis’ bed.
Cold, Liv thought the instant she felt it. It’s cold in here. She hesitated on the threshold.
Travis tightened against her.
Out of the dark, Rand sprang upon him.
There was an instant when she howled, a wordless, wholly animal and at the same time emotional sound that was like a terrible rending and ripping, as he bowled her over.
Travis shrieked with her. She tried to turn, to put herself between Travis and Rand, as Rand’s weight propelled them backward into the hall, against the opposite wall, and onto the floor, and succeeded enough for Travis to roll himself away. He scrambled to his feet and skittered a few feet away.
“Run!” she screamed. She struggled against Rand, trying to wriggle out from under him, pounding at him with her fists. One of his hands caught in her hair and yanked her head back, while the other cupped her chin and thrust upward. The back of her head struck the floor in a burst of darkness. Dimly, she heard Travis, shrieking, and felt his weight as he leapt unexpectedly on Rand and Rand lost his balance, Rand’s whole deadweight dropping onto her along with Travis’, with an ooof and curses, and Rand’s elbow clipped her chin, and she passed out entirely.
Arden Nighswander leaned against the sagging post of his back porch and pissed unsteadily into the snowstorm. He grinned painfully, exposing his partial front plate to the very gums, in a grimace that would have suited a Halloween skeleton mask. Afterward, there was a terrible dull ache in his groin, but it was nothing to the misery he knew with a full bladder, or the agonizing burning of passing water. His urine was the color of weak coffee that had sat a while and then been moved, clouding it with sediment. Had been for some months. But he kept it to himself, telling himself the VA doctors at Togus were all quacks, and the doctors he had to pay out of his own pocket (though, in fact, he never did unless so forced by a Small Claims Court judge) were worse.
Only Jeannie knew, because she heard him cursing, in the night, from the toilet on the other side of the wallboard that separated their bedroom from the bathroom. They knew the habits of everyone in the house, knew the boys by the time and length and frequency of their movements, knew them by the characteristic sounds of their straining and grunting, knew also the sounds of slick magazine pages being turned and then faintly rattled as Ricky or Gordy masturbated.
At least the boys’ bedrooms, the large one that was Rand’s and the smaller, slovenly zoo shared by Ricky and Gordy, were at the other end of the house, so Jeannie and Nighswander did not have to hear what went on there at night. Rand had women in; had since he was fifteen or sixteen.
Jeannie protested just the once, when she had taken the bloody sheets off his bed and displayed them to Rand’s father.
Nighswander glanced at them, guffawed, and punched Rand’s shoulder playfully.
“She old enough?” he demanded.
Rand grinned. “Old enough to pee, old enough for me.”
Nighswander hooted and scratched his chest. “I’m getting old,” he announced. “Used to be me breakin’ ‘em in.”
The boys laughed dutifully, exchanging yeah-sure looks.
Nighswander turned on Jeannie suddenly. “Well, what are you standin’ around holdin’ them cunt-filthy sheets under my nose for? You’d think they was yours, provin’ you saved it for wedlock. ‘Course you’d a had to fake ‘em, wouldn’t ya?”
He laughed, and this time his boys laughed with him without reservation. Gordy blushed and looked confused.
Jeannie blushed, too, and bundled up the sheets. “It ain’t right,” she muttered.
It seemed to her that there was a lot of blood, more than she remembered from her first time, which in truth had happened in the bed of her Harry Teed’s 1951 Ford pickup truck, before he was her husband. Other explanations, that Rand had been unnecessarily rough, or the girl more of a bleeder than usual, or that it was not actually first blood but menstrual blood, did not occur to Jeannie. Jeannie was as modest as any countrywoman about her menses. She had no occasion to mention them at all to her first husband, except before they were married, in the cab of the ‘51 Ford truck, when, blushing fiercely, she told him that she had missed two monthlies. After Gordy’s father choked on his beer, he glared at her and demanded to know if she was sure. And then, when she meekly answered yes, he had wanted to know if she was sure he was the father, which he knew very well he was. Again she meekly answered yes, hurt but expecting to be hurt, assuming it was his right and privilege to hurt her with the implication of promiscuity. His pride as a man required it. But Nighswander had a fastidious horror of and contempt for menstrual blood.
She had come to look forward to that day of the month when she could say in a low voice, “Time of the month coming, need to go to Greenspark for my female notions,” and have Nighswander, lip curling with disgust, dig into his pocket and hand her the money, the only cash money she ever saw, as he did all their other cash dealings with the world. And then he would drive her into Greenspark and sit in the car outside the drugstore while she went inside a
nd bought what she needed. It was a chance to look at the makeup and the scents displayed on the cosmetics’ counter, and the garishly colored magazines on the magazine rack, the mysterious superfluity of products, shampoos and toothpastes and aspirins and baby oil that they never had because Nighswander bought a harsh tar-smelling shampoo by the gallon from government commissaries and baking soda for their teeth and nothing else, because he said they did not need such fripperies. Just a chance, and she dared not linger but made her purchases and cast nervous covetous glances over the luxuries she was not allowed during the transaction. The ride home, like the ride into Greenspark, would be wordless.
Then, of course, as soon as it started, Nighswander would leave her alone until she said it was done, which she sometimes lied about to gain an extra day of grace. He never came to her anyway except when he was drunk, and then was most often impotent, though neither of them ever made any connection between the two conditions. All Jeannie knew was that at a certain stage of drunkenness he would begin to paw at her and more often than not nothing would come of it except a beating for failing to rouse him sufficiently.
He made it clear it was her fault, for being old and ugly, and she knew it was true. She had lost what looks she had when she was young and fresh, and the large breasts that had once attracted Gordy’s father, and Nighswander in his turn, were sagging and wrinkled, like all the rest of her. That Nighswander had aged no less ungracefully did not matter to either of them.
She knew he had other women when he could get them. The women he picked up in bars and on street corners when he went to Portland or Boston on business, which was invariably the pressing of some claim against the Veterans Administration, were at best sluts and at worst prostitutes, the cheapest kind, as hard-used or harder than she herself, and lacking even her personal cleanliness. But she did not complain of them, not even when she had to be treated for the clap he picked up from them and passed to her. Giving a social disease to his wife did not embarrass him; he used it as an excuse to accuse her of being unfaithful to him and to give her a beating. Jeannie knew, had known all her life though she could not name the source of that information, which might have been something as insubstantial as the way the married women crossed their arms and set their mouths whenever two or more came together at the store, or the post office, the church, or at the side of the road, that men were different; they needed more sex and different women, could never be satisfied with merely marital relations. It made her less guilty about her failures as a sexual object and partner and about the relief she felt to be left alone a little while. Whatever he said to her or about her, she was a decent woman, even if her first marriage had been shotgun. Not the least of her proof was that she did not and never had enjoyed the sex act. So far as she knew, the only women who did, or admitted they did, were sluts. Even Nighswander’s contempt for her when she was fouled with her menstrual blood was bearable, not just because it was natural and right, for she was dirty then, wasn’t she, but because she did not deserve his contempt for being glad of it.
Nighswander zipped his fly with shaking hands and went back indoors. The clock on the wall said five-thirty. It was blacker and colder than a witch’s crotch outside. He was supposed to be meeting the boys at the landing near the Narrows, but he couldn’t see beyond the hood of the truck, the snow was that thick, and the wind that vicious.
Jeannie looked up from the table. She was peeling potatoes into a pail at her feet. She stole a look at him. He was poorly looking again, she thought. His waterworks giving him trouble still. She regretted his discomfort only because it made him uglier and meaner, but knew if she pushed him to see a doctor, she would most likely earn a black eye for her trouble.
“You going after the boys?” she asked.
“Christ-a-mighty,” he exploded. “I ain’t Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” He spat onto the stove. “It’s a goddamn fuckin’ roaring jeezer out there, woman.”
Jeannie wiped her hands in her apron. “Boys’ll take shelter, won’t they?”
“Rand and Ricky will,” Nighswander said. “Gordy ain’t got sense enough to come in out of a piss-storm.”
“Oh, now,” Jeanne said. “The boys’ll look after each other.”
Nighswander grunted.
“I wish they weren’t out, though,” she said. She got up and drew back the curtain to look out the window. She shivered. “Can’t think why they wanted to go out today with the weather report so bad.”
“This wasn’t supposed to hit until tonight,” Nighswander said. “They shoulda had plenty of time.”
Jeannie let the curtain drop and looked at him. “For what?” she asked. “Plenty a time for what?”
“A little run in the woods,” Nighswander snapped. “What the fuck business is it of yours?”
Walter McKenzie swabbed up the last of the bean juice on his plate with a fragment of bread and popped it in his mouth. He washed it down with cold tea and pushed his plate a few inches away from him. The accumulated litter on the table did not permit pushing it very far, but it was only habit, the signal he had finished his meal that he had given his wife for decades and still did, though she had not been alive to read it for too many lonely years. He settled back comfortably in the straight-back chair and farted softly.
On the floor in front of the stove, Fritzie opened one eye. Her nose tilted up from her paws a second and then dropped down again. She moaned.
“Go on,” Walter said. “I’ve smelled enough of yours, and they’re worse.”
Fritzie closed her eye and rumbled in her throat.
Walter carried his dishes to the sink and rinsed them off. The window over the sink was fogged with freezing condensation. The wind moaned in the chimney and the house shuddered.
“Bitch out there,” Walter said.
Fritzie snored.
The pendulum clock on the wall over the gas range tocked. It was six o’clock.
Walter dried his hands on a stained, old-fashioned roll towel, and wandered down the hall to the deal table where a thirty-five-year-old black telephone sat on a yellowed lace doily. There was no chair convenient to the table; Walter McKenzie conducted his telephone calls on his feet. He used his telephone for taking and sending messages, not chatting. Chatting was free at the post office or the diner or almost anywhere except on one end of a telephone set.
He picked up the receiver and fished the little brown leatherbound notebook in which he kept his telephone list from his back pocket. Muttering the necessary five numbers to himself as an aid to memory, he slipped the notebook back into his pocket and dialed the Russells’ summer house. He waited patiently with the receiver to one ear. The dial tone was staticky with the storm outside. There were clickings and ticks. Then a long dead silence, even the dial tone gone. Walter frowned. He dialed the operator and asked him to ring the Russells’ number for him. In a minute the operator came back on and told him the number was out of order.
Walter shuffled back to the kitchen and pulled the tea kettle forward on the woodstove, giving it a shake to measure the quantity of water in it.
“Missus Russell’s phone’s out,” he said to Fritzie.
Fritzie rolled over in her sleep and lay on her back. The hair on her belly was sparse and white. Her jaw dropped open a little. Walter could smell her breath. It was awful.
He showed his hands the stove and rubbed them together over the rising heat. “Don’t like that much, old girl,” he muttered.
Hauling a crumpled handkerchief out of one pocket, he went to the window over the sink and wiped a patch clear of condensation. Fat flakes whipped against the glass on the other side, melted, and dribbled downward. It seemed very dark out there, as if walls had come down all around his house.
Walter scratched the back of his neck. She had plenty of wood, he had seen to that. She should be all right. He hoped she and the boy weren’t scared, out there all by their lonesomes.
The kettle whistled at him. He stooped over Fritzie and rubbed her belly gent
ly. “First light, old girl,” he said. “We’ll have a look-see.”
The first public telephone Pat found in Greenspark was a booth in a down-at-the-heels shopping center, outside an abandoned K-Mart. It smelled of old cold pee. It was also out of order, which he discovered after it had eaten his last two dimes.
He slammed the receiver down violently, and stalked back to his car, swearing. Sarah huddled in the car.
“Goddamn phone’s out,” he muttered.
“Oh,” she said. “Great.”
Greenspark was shut up for the night. There was nothing open on Main Street, not even the police station under the courthouse, where Pat rattled the doorknob and shouted to no avail, while Sarah waited in the car.
The town was under the spell of sleep. The houses were all darkened, showing only porchlights or the lights of bathrooms or children’s nightlights, dimmed by curtains or frost, veiled by the falling snow, so it was almost as if he were seeing the lights at a great distance. The people inside were tucked into their beds, warm and safe. They would not like being wakened, or opening their doors to let in a stranger and let out the precious warmth. But he didn’t know what else to do, except knock on someone’s door and ask to use their phone until he noticed a rusted old public telephone sign on the side of a take-out pizza joint. Like everything else, the pizza joint was closed. But the phone was outside, hung on the cement wall under the protection of a hard plastic hood. If he leaned his elbows on the meagre shelf under the phone, and hunched over it, his head was almost covered by the hood, but the snow fell into the gap between his shirt collar and his wool cap, directly down the back of his neck.
He examined the change from his pockets and fed a quarter into the slot. Though he did not expect he would get his nickel’s change, he opened his palm under the change chute. He had never gotten a nickel’s change back from New England Telephone in his life, and he didn’t this time. Not only did he have to pay twenty cents for a call that in many other places in the country cost ten cents, if the only change he had in hand was a quarter, New England Telephone took a nickel premium, which Liv called the Wrong Change Again, Sucker, Tax.