Rose Madder

  "Do they?" she asked. "What a shame."

  He stopped, looked at her pale, thoughtful face, then gathered her into his arms and hugged her. "It doesn't have to happen," he said. "They've got along fine so far."

  "But it could happen. It could."

  He considered this, and nodded. "Sure, yeah," he said at last. "Anything could. Come on, let's eat. What do you say?"

  "I say that sounds like a good idea."

  But she thought she wouldn't eat much, that she'd been haunted out of her appetite by the vixen's bright regard. When he began laying out the food, however, she was instantly ravenous. Breakfast had been orange juice and a single slice of dry toast; she'd been as excited (and fearful) as a bride on the morning of her wedding. Now, at the sight of bread and meat, she forgot all about the foxes' earth north of the beach.

  He kept taking food out of the cooler--cold beef sandwiches, tuna sandwiches, chicken salad, potato salad, coleslaw, two cans of Coke, a Thermos of what he said was iced tea, two pieces of pie, a large slab of cake--until it made her think of clowns piling out of the little car at the circus, and she laughed. It probably wasn't polite, but she had enough confidence in him now not to feel she had to be merely polite. That was good, because she wasn't sure she could have helped herself, anyway.

  He looked up, holding a salt shaker in his left hand and a pepper shaker in his right. She saw he had carefully put Scotch tape over the holes in case they fell over, and that made her laugh harder than ever. She sat down on the bench running down one side of the picnic table and put her hands over her face and tried to get a grip. She'd almost made it when she peeked through her fingers and saw that amazing stack of sandwiches--half a dozen for two people, each cut on the diagonal and neatly sealed in a Baggie. That set her off again.

  "What?" he asked, smiling himself. "What, Rosie?"

  "Were you expecting friends to drop by?" she asked, still giggling. "A Little League team, maybe? Or a Boy Scout troop?"

  His smile widened, but his eyes continued to hold that serious look. It was a complicated expression, one that said he understood both what was funny here and what was not, and in it she finally saw that he really was her own age, or close enough not to matter. "I wanted to make sure you'd have something that you liked, that's all."

  Her giggles were tapering off, but she continued to smile at him. What struck her most was not his sweetness, which made him seem younger, but his openness, which now made him seem somehow older.

  "Bill, I can eat just about anything," she said.

  "I'm sure you can," he said, sitting down beside her, "but that's not what this is about. I don't care so much about what you can stand or what you can manage as I do about what you like and want to have. Those are the kinds of things I want to give to you, because I'm crazy about you."

  She looked at him solemnly, the laughter gone, and when he took her hand, she covered it with her other one. She was trying to get what he'd just said straight in her mind and finding it hard going--it was like trying to get a bulky, balky piece of furniture through a narrow doorway, turning it this way and that, trying to find an angle where everything would finally work.

  "Why?" she asked. "Why me?"

  He shook his head. "I don't know. Fact is, Rosie, I don't know very much about women. I had a girlfriend when I was a junior in high school, and we probably would have slept together eventually, but she moved away before it could happen. I had a girlfriend when I was a freshman in college, and I did sleep with her. Then, five years ago, I got engaged to a wonderful girl I met in the city zoo, of all places. Her name was Bronwyn O'Hara. Sounds like something out of Margaret Mitchell, doesn't it?"

  "It's a lovely name."

  "She was a lovely girl. She died of a brain aneurysm."

  "Oh, Bill, I'm so sorry."

  "Since then, I've dated a couple of girls, and I'm not exaggerating--I've dated a couple of girls, period, end of story. My parents fight over me. My father says I'm dying on the vine, my mother says 'Leave the boy alone, stop scolding.' Only she says it scoldink."

  Rosie smiled.

  "Then you walked into the shop and found that picture. You knew you had to have it from the word go, didn't you?"

  "Yes."

  "That's how I felt about you. I just wanted you to know that. Nothing that's happening here is happening out of kindness, or charity, or duty. None of what's happening here is happening because poor Rosie has had such a hard, hard life." He hesitated and then said, "It's happening because I'm in love with you."

  "You can't know that. Not yet."

  "I know what I know," he said, and she found the gentle insistence in his tone a little frightening. "Now that's enough soap opera. Let's eat."

  They did. When they were done and Rosie's stomach felt stretched drumhead-tight against the waistband of her pants, they repacked the cooler and Bill strapped it onto the Harley's carrier again. No one had come; Shoreland was still all theirs. They went back down to the waterside and sat on the big rock again. Rosie was starting to feel very strongly about this rock; it was, she thought, the kind of rock you could come to visit once or twice a year, just to say thanks ... if things turned out well, that was. And she thought they were, at least so far. She could not, in fact, think of a day that had been better.

  Bill put his arms around her, then placed the fingers of his left hand on her right cheek, turning her face toward him. He began kissing her. Five minutes later she did feel close to fainting, half in a dream and half out, excited in a way she had never conceived of, excited in a way that made sense of all the books and stories and movies she hadn't really understood before but had taken on faith, the way a blind person will take on faith a sighted person's statement that a sunset is beautiful. Her cheeks were burning, her breasts felt flushed and tender from his gentle touch through her blouse, and she found herself wishing that she hadn't worn a bra. The thought made her cheeks flush brighter than ever. Her heart was racing, but that was good. It was all good. Over the line and into wonderful, in fact. She put her hand on him down there, felt how hard he was. It was like touching stone, except stone would not have throbbed beneath her palm like her own heart.

  He left her hand where it was for a minute, then raised it gently and kissed the palm. "No more now," he said.

  "Why not?" She looked at him candidly, without artifice. Norman was the only man she had known sexually in her entire life, and he was not the sort of man who got hot simply because you touched him there through his pants. Sometimes--increasingly, in the last few years--he didn't get hot at all.

  "Because I won't be able to stop without suffering a most severe case of blue balls."

  She looked at him with such frowning, earnest puzzlement that he burst out laughing.

  "Never mind, Rosie. It's just that I want everything to be right the first time we make love--no mosquitoes biting our butts, no rolling in the poison oak, no kids from U.C. showing up at a vital moment. Besides, I promised to have you back by four so you could sell teeshirts, and I don't want you to have to race the clock."

  She looked down at her watch and was startled to see it was ten past two. If they had been sitting on the rock and making out for only five or ten minutes, how was that possible? She came to the reluctant but rather marvellous conclusion that it wasn't. They had been here for half an hour at least, maybe closer to forty-five minutes.

  "Come on," he said, sliding off the rock. He grimaced as the soles of his feet splashed into the cold water, and she caught just a glimpse of the bulge in his pants before he turned away. I did that, she thought, and was astonished at the feelings which came with the thought: pleasure, amusement, even a slight smugness.

  She slipped off the rock next to him and was holding his hand in hers before she realized she had taken it. "Okay; what now?"

  "How about a little walk before we start back? Cool off."

  "All right, but let's stay away from the foxes. I don't want to disturb them again."

  Her, she thought
, I don't want to disturb her again.

  "All right. We'll walk south."

  He started to turn away. She squeezed his hand to make him turn back again and when he did, Rosie stepped into his arms and slipped her own arms around his neck. The hardness below his waist wasn't gone entirely, not yet, and she was glad. She'd had no idea until today that there was something in that hardness a woman could really like--she'd honestly thought it a fiction of those magazines whose main job it was to sell clothes and makeup and hair-care products. Now she knew a little more, perhaps. She pressed herself firmly against that hard place and looked into his eyes.

  "Do you mind if I say something my mother taught me to say when I went to my first birthday party? I was four or five, I think."

  "Go ahead," he said, smiling.

  "Thank you for a lovely time, Bill. Thank you for the most lovely day I've had since I grew up. Thank you for asking me."

  Bill kissed her. "It's been nice for me too, Rosie. It's been years since I felt this happy. Come on, let's walk."

  They went south along the shore this time, walking hand in hand. He led her up another path and into a long, narrow hayfield that looked as if it hadn't been touched in years. The afternoon light lay across it in dusty beams, and butterflies skittered through the timothy grass, weaving aimless courses. Bees droned, and off to their left, a woodpecker tack-hammered a tree relentlessly. He showed her flowers, naming most of them. She thought he got a couple wrong but didn't tell him. Rosie pointed out a cluster of fungi around the base of an oak at the edge of the field, and told him they were toadstools, but not too dangerous because they were bitter. It was the ones that didn't taste bitter that could get you in trouble, or get you killed.

  By the time they got back to the picnic area, the college kids Bill had spoken of had arrived--a van and a four-wheel-drive Scout full of them. They were amiable but noisy as they went about carrying coolers filled with beer into the shade and then setting up their volleyball net. A boy of about nineteen was carrying his girlfriend, clad in khaki shorts and a bikini top, around on his shoulders. When he broke into a trot, she began to scream happily and beat the top of his crewcut head with the palms of her hands. As she watched them, Rosie found herself wondering if the girl's screams carried to the vixen in her clearing, and supposed they did. She could almost see her lying there with her brush curled over her sleeping, milk-stuffed kits, listening to the human screams from down the beach, her ears cocked, her eyes bright and crafty and all too capable of madness.

  It knocks the dogs down quick, but a vixen can carry it a

  long time, Rosie thought, and then recalled the toadstools she'd spotted on the edge of the overgrown meadow, growing in the shadows where it was damp. Spider toadstools, her grandmother had called them when she pointed them out to Rosie one summer, and while that was a name that must have been special to Gramma Weeks--certainly it was not one Rosie had ever seen since in any book of plants--she had never forgotten the somehow nasty look of them, the pale and waxy flesh swarming with dark spots that did look a little like spiders, she supposed, if your imagination was good ... and hers had been.

  A vixen can carry rabies a long time, she thought again. It knocks the dogs down quick, but ...

  "Rosie? Are you cold?"

  She looked at him, not understanding.

  "You were shivering."

  "No, I'm not cold." She looked at the kids, who did not see her and Bill because they were past the age of twenty-five, and then back to him. "But maybe it's time to go back."

  He nodded. "I think you're right."

  5

  The traffic was heavier on the return trip, and heavier still once they left the Skyway. It slowed them down but never quite stopped them. Bill darted the big Harley through holes when they appeared, making Rosie feel a little as if she were riding on the back of a trained dragonfly, but he took no unreasonable chances and she never doubted him, even when he took them up the dotted line between lanes, passing big semis on either side, lined up like patient mastodons as they waited for their turn to go through the Skyway tollbooths. By the time they began passing signs which read WATER-FRONT and AQUARIUM and ETTINGER'S PIER & AMUSEMENT PARK, Rosie was glad they had left when they had. She was going to be on time for her shift in the teeshirt booth, and that was good. She was going to introduce Bill to her friends, and that was even better. She was sure they were going to like him. As they passed beneath a bright pink banner reading SWING INTO SUMMER WITH DAUGHTERS AND SISTERS!, Rosie felt a burst of happiness which she would remember later on that long, long day with sickened horror.

  She could see the roller coaster now, all curves and complicated strut-work silhouetted against the sky, could hear the screams drifting off it like vapor. She hugged Bill tighter for a moment, and laughed. Everything was going to be all right, she thought, and when she remembered--for just a moment--the vixen's dark and watchful eye, she pushed the memory away, as one will push away a memory of death at a wedding.

  6

  While Bill Steiner was negotiating his motorcycle carefully up the lane leading to Shoreland, Norman Daniels was negotiating his stolen car into a huge parking lot on Press Street. This lot was about five blocks from Ettinger's Pier, and served half a dozen lakeside attractions--the amusement park, the aquarium, the Old Towne Trolley, the shops and restaurants. There was parking closer in to all these points of interest and refreshment, but Norman didn't want to get closer in. He might feel it necessary to leave this area at some speed, and he didn't want to find himself mired in traffic if that turned out to be the case.

  The front half of the Press Street lot was nearly deserted at quarter to ten on Saturday morning, not good for a man who wanted to keep a low profile, but there were plenty of vehicles in the day-and week-rate section, most the property of ferry customers who were off somewhere up north, on day trips or weekend fishing expeditions. Norman eased the Ford Tempo into a space between a Winnebago with Utah plates and a gigantic RoadKing RV from Massachusetts. The Tempo was all but invisible between these big guys, and that suited Norman fine.

  He got out, then took his new leather jacket off the seat and put it on. From one of its pockets he took a pair of sunglasses--not the same ones he'd worn the other day--and slipped these on, as well. Then he walked to the rear of the car, took a look around to make sure he was unobserved, and opened the trunk. He took out the wheelchair and unfolded it.

  He had pasted the bumper stickers he'd bought in the gift shop of the Women's Cultural Center all over it. They might have lots of smart people giving lectures and attending symposia upstairs in the meeting rooms and the auditorium, but downstairs in the gift shop they sold exactly the sort of shrill, nonsensical shit Norman had been hoping for. He had no use for keychains with the female sign on them, or the poster of a woman being crucified (JESUSINA DIED FOR YOUR SINS) on Golgotha, but the bumper stickers were perfect. A WOMAN NEEDS A MAN LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE, said one. Another, obviously written by someone who'd never seen a bimbo with her eyebrows and half her hair singed off by a malfunctioning crackpipe, read WOMEN ARE NOT FUNNY! There were stickers that said I'M PRO-CHOICE AND I VOTE, SEX IS POLITICAL, and R-E-S-P-E-C-T, FIND OUT WHAT IT MEANS TO ME. Norman wondered if any of these braless wonders knew that song had been written by a man. He bought them all, though. His favorite was the one he had carefully pasted in the center of the wheelchair's imitation leather backrest, next to the little customized holster for his Walkman: I AM A MAN WHO RESPECTS WOMEN, it said.

  And that's true enough, he thought, taking another quick check of the parking lot to make sure there was no one observing the cripple as he climbed spryly into his wheelchair. As long as they behave themselves, I respect them fine.

  He saw no one at all, let alone anyone watching him specifically. He pivoted the wheelchair and looked at his reflection in the side of the freshly washed Tempo. Well? he asked himself. What do you think: Will it work?

  He thought it would. Since disguise was out of the ques
tion, he had tried to go beyond disguise--to create a real person, the way a good actor can create a real person on stage. He had even come up with a name for this new guy: Hump Peterson. Hump was an army vet who'd come back home and ridden with an outlaw biker gang for ten years or so, one of the ones where the women have only two or three very limited uses. Then the accident had happened. Too many beers, wet pavement, a bridge abutment. He'd been paralyzed from the waist down, but had been nursed back to health by a saintly young woman named ...

  "Marilyn, " Norman said, thinking of Marilyn Chambers, who for years had been his favorite porn star. His second favorite was Amber Lynn, but Marilyn Lynn sounded fake as hell. The next name to occur to him was McCoo, but that was no good, either; Marilyn McCoo was the bitch who had sung with the Fifth Dimension, back in the seventies, when life hadn't been as weird as it was these days.

  There was a sign in a vacant lot across the street--ANOTHER QUALITY DELANEY CONSTRUCTION PROJECT WILL GO UP IN THIS SPACE NEXT YEAR! it said--and Marilyn Delaney was as good a name as any. He would probably not be asked to tell his life's story by any of the women from Daughters and Sisters, but to paraphrase the sentiment on the shirt the clerk in The Base Camp had been wearing, it was better to have a story and not need one than to need one and not have one.

  And they would believe in Hump Peterson. They would have seen more than a few guys just like him, guys who'd had some sort of life-changing experience and were trying to atone for their past behavior. And the Humps of the world, of course, atoned the way they had done everything else in their lives, by going right to the firewall. Hump Peterson was trying to turn himself into a kind of honorary woman, that was all. Norman had seen similar scagbags turn themselves into passionate anti-drug advocates, Jesus freaks, and Perotistas. At the bottom they were really just the same one-note assholes they'd always been, singing the same old tune in a different key. That wasn't the important thing, though. The important thing was that they were always around, hanging on the fringes of whatever scene it was they wanted to be in. They were like tumbleweeds in the desert or icicles in Alaska. So yes-he thought Hump would be accepted as Hump, even if they were on the lookout for Inspector Daniels. Even the most cynical of them would be apt to dismiss him as no more than a horny crip using the old "sensitive, caring man" routine to get himself laid on a Saturday night. With just a smidge of luck, Hump Peterson would be both as visible and as little noticed as the guy on stilts who plays Uncle Sam in the Fourth of July parade.