Rose Madder

  Norman paused to pluck the Beav's fallen hat off the steps, and when they passed the open driver's-side window of the black-and-white, he leaned through quickly to drop it on the seat and pluck the keys from the ignition. There were a formidable number of them on the ring, so many that they couldn't lie flat against one another but stuck out like sunrays in a child's crayon drawing, but Norman had no trouble picking out the one which opened the trunk of the car.

  "Come on, he whispered comfortingly. "Come on, just a little further, then we can get backup rolling. " He kept expecting the cop to collapse, but he didn't. He had given up on trying to pull the letter-opener out of his throat, though.

  "Watch the curb here, Officer, whoops-a-daisy. "

  The cop stepped off the curb. When his black uniform shoe came down in the gutter, the wound in his throat gaped open around the blade like the gill of a fish and more blood squirted onto the collar of his shirt.

  Now I'm a cop-killer, too, Norman thought. He expected the idea to be devastating, but it wasn't. Perhaps because a deeper, wiser part of him knew that he really hadn't killed this fine, tough police officer; someone else had. Something. Most likely it had been the bull. The longer Norman thought about it, the more plausible that sounded.

  "Hold it, Officer, here we are. "

  The cop stopped where he was, at the back of the car. Norman used the key he had picked out to open its trunk. There was a spare tire in there (bald as a baby's ass, too, he saw), a jack, two flak vests--kapok, not Kevlar--a pair of boots, a grease-stained copy of Penthouse, a toolkit, a police radio with half its guts spilling out. A pretty full trunk, in other words, like the trunk of every other police-car he'd ever seen.

  But like the trunk of every other police-car he'd ever seen, there was always room for one more thing. He moved the toolkit to one side and the police radio to the other while the Beav's partner stood swaying beside him, now completely silent, his eyes seemingly fixed on some distant point, as if he now saw the place where his new journey would begin. Norman tucked the jack behind the spare tire, then looked from the empty space to the person for whom he had created it.

  "Okay, " he said. "Good. But I need to borrow your hat, okay?"

  The cop said nothing, simply swayed back and forth on his feet, but Norman's sly bag of a mother had been fond of saying, "Silence gives consent, " and Norman thought it a good motto, certainly better than his father's favorite, which had been "If they're old enough to pee, they're old enough for me. " Norman took off the cop's hat and put it on his own bald head. The baseball cap went into the trunk.

  "Bluh," said the cop, holding one smeared hand out to Norman. His eyes didn't bother; they seemed to have floated away completely.

  "Yes, I know, blood, that goddam bull, " Norman said, and shoved the cop into the trunk. He lay there limply, with one twitching /eg still sticking out. Norman bent it at the knee, loaded it in, and slammed the trunk shut. Then he went back to the rookie. The rook was trying to sit up, although his eyes said he was still mostly unconscious. His ears were bleeding. Norman dipped to one knee, settled his hands around the young cop's throat, and began to squeeze. The cop fell backward. Norman sat on him and kept squeezing. When the Beav had ceased all movement, Norman put his ear against the young man's chest. He heard three heartbeats from in there, random and disordered, like fish flopping on a riverbank. Norman sighed and slid his hands around the Beav's throat again, thumbs pressing into his windpipe. Now someone will come, he thought, now someone'll come for sure, but no one did. Someone called, "Yo, muthafucka!" from the white blank of Bryant Park, and there was shrill laughter, the kind only drunks and the mentally retarded can manage, but that was all. Norman bent his ear against the cop's chest again. This guy was stage-dressing, and he didn't want his stage-dressing coming to life at a crucial moment.

  This time there was nothing ticking but the Beav's watch.

  Norman picked him up, carted him around to the passenger side of the Caprice, and loaded him in. He jammed the rookie's hat down as far as he could-black and swollen, the kid's face was now the face of a troll--and slammed the door. Now every part of Norman's body was throbbing, but the worst pain of all had once more settled in his teeth and jaws.

  Maude, he thought. That's all about Maude.

  Suddenly he was very glad he couldn't remember what he had done with Maude ... or to her. And of course it really hadn't been him at all; it had been ze bool, el toro grande. But dear God, how everything hurt. It was as if he were being dismantled from the inside out, taken apart a bolt and a screw and a cog at a time.

  The Beav was sliding slowly to the left, his dead eyes bulging out of his face like croaker marbles. "No you don't,

  whoa, Nellie, " Norman said, and pulled him upright again. He reached in farther and buckled the Beav's seatbelt and harness. That did the trick. Norman stood back a little and took a critical look. He didn't think he'd done badly, all in all. The Beav just looked conked out, catching an extra forty or fifty winks.

  He leaned in the window again, careful not to disturb the Beav's position, and pawed open the glove compartment. He expected to find a first-aid kit, and he wasn't disappointed. He popped the lid, took out a dusty old bottle of Anacin, and swallowed five or six. He was leaning against the side of the car, chewing them and wincing at the sharp, vinegary taste, when his mind took another of those skips.

  When he came back to himself time had passed, but probably not too much; his mouth and throat were still filled with the sour taste of aspirin. 'He was in the vestibule of her building, snapping the light-switch up and down. Nothing happened when he did it; the little room stayed dark. He'd done something to the lights, then. That was good. He had one of the Charlie-David cops' guns in his other hand. He was holding it by the barrel, and he had an idea he'd used the butt to hammer something. Fuses, maybe? Had he been down cellar? Maybe, but it didn't matter. The lights here didn't work, and that was enough.

  This was a rooming-house--a nice one, but still a rooming-house. It was impossible to mistake the smell of cheap food, the kind that always got cooked on a hotplate.

  It was a smell that seeped into the walls after awhile, and nothing could get rid of it. Two or three weeks from now the characteristic sound of rooming-houses in summer would be added to that smell: the low, intermingled whine of small fans set in many different windows, trying to cool rooms that would be walk-in ovens in August. She had traded her nice little house for this cramped desperation, but there was no time to puzzle over that mystery now. The question right now was how many roomers lived in this building, and how many of them would be in early on a Saturday night. How many, in other words, might be a problem?

  None of them will be, said the voice from the pocket of Norman's new topcoat. It was a comfy voice. None of them will be, because what happens after doesn't matter, and that simplifies everything. If anyone gets in your way, just kill them.

  He turned, went out onto the stoop, and pulled the vestibule door shut behind him. He tried it and found it locked. He supposed he'd picked his way in--the lock certainly didn't look like much of a challenge--but it was mildly disquieting not to know for sure. And the lights. Why had he gone to the trouble of killing them, when she would most likely come in alone? For that matter, how did he know she wasn't in already?

  This second was easy--he knew she wasn't in because the bull had told him she wasn't, and he believed it. As to the first question, she might not be alone. Gertie might be with her, or ... well, ze bool had said something about a boyfriend. Norman found that frankly impossible to believe, but . . . "She likes the way he kisses her, " Ferd had said. Stupid, she'd never dare . . . but it never hurt to be safe.

  He started down the steps, meaning to go back to the cop car, meaning to slide behind the wheel and start waiting for her to show up, and that was when the last flip happened, and it was a flip this time, a flip and not a skip, he went up like a coin flipped from the thumbnail of a referee in a pre-game ritual, who to kick, who to rec
eive, and when he came back down he was slamming the vestibule door behind him, lunging into the darkness, and locking his hands around the neck of Rose's boyfriend. He didn't know how he knew the man was her boyfriend and not just some plainclothes cop who had been charged with seeing her home safe, but who cared? He did know, and that was enough. His whole head was vibrating with outrage and fury. Had he seen this guy

  (she likes the way he kisses her)

  swapping spit with her before going in, maybe with his hands sliding down from her waist to cup her ass? He couldn't remember, didn't want to remember, didn't need to remember.

  "I told you!" the bull said; even in its fury its voice was perfectly lucid. "I told you, didn't I? That's what her friends have taught her! Nice! Very nice!"

  "I'm going to kill you, motherfucker, " he whispered into the unseen face of the man who was Rose's boyfriend, and forced him back against the vestibule wall. "And oh boy, if I can, if God lets me, I'm gonna kill you twice. "

  He clamped his hands around Bill Steiner's throat and began to squeeze.

  11

  "Norman!" Rosie screamed in the darkness. "Norman, let him go!"

  Bill's hand, which had lightly been touching the back of her arm ever since she had pulled her key out of the door, was suddenly gone. She heard stumbling footfalls--foot-thuds--in the darkness. Then there was a heavier bump as someone drove someone else into the vestibule wall.

  "I'm going to kill you, motherfucker," came whispering out of the dark. "And oh boy, if I can, if God lets me--"

  I'm gonna kill you twice, she finished in her head before he could finish out loud; it was one of Norman's favorite threats, often yelled at the TV screen when an umpire made a call that went against Norman's beloved Yankees, or when someone cut him off in traffic. If God lets me, I'm gonna kill you twice. And now she heard a choking, gargly sound, and of course that was Bill. That was Bill in the process of having the life choked out him by Norman's large and powerful hands.

  Instead of the terror Norman had always roused in her, she felt a return of the rage she'd experienced in Hale's car and then at the police station. This time it seemed almost to engulf her. "Let him alone, Norman!" she screamed. "Get your fucking hands off him!"

  "Shut up, you whore!" came out of the darkness, but she could hear surprise as well as anger in Norman's voice. Until now she'd never given him a single command--not in the entire course of their marriage--or spoken to him in such a tone.

  And something else--there was a band of dull heat above the place where Bill had been touching her. It was the armlet. The gold armlet the woman in the chiton had given her. And in her mind, Rosie heard her snarl Stop your stupid sheep's whining! at her.

  "Quit it, I'm warning you!" she screamed at Norman, and then started toward the place from which the choking sounds and the effortful grunts were coming. She went with her hands held out before her like the hands of a blind woman, her lips drawn back from her teeth.

  You're not going to choke him, she thought. You're not, I won't let you. You should have gone away, Norman. You should have gone away and left us alone while you still could.

  Feet, drumming helplessly against the wall just ahead of her, and she could imagine Norman holding Bill up against it, lips drawn back in his biting smile, and suddenly she was a glass woman filled with a pale red liquid, and that liquid was pure and untinctured fury.

  "You shit, didn't you hear me? PUT HIM DOWN, I SAID!"

  She reached out with her left hand, which now felt as strong as an eagle's talon. The armlet was burning fiercely--she felt she should almost be able to see it, even through her sweater and the jacket Bill had loaned her, glowing like a dull ember. But there was no pain, only a kind of dangerous exhilaration. She grabbed the shoulder of the man who had beaten her for fourteen years and dragged him backward. It was astoundingly easy. She squeezed his arm through the slippery waterproof fabric of his coat, then whipped her own arm out and slung him off into the darkness. She heard the rapid rattle of his stumbling feet, then a thud, then an explosion of breaking glass. Cal Coolidge, or whoever it was in the picture over there, had taken a dive.

  She could hear Bill coughing and gagging. She groped for him with splayed fingers, found his shoulders, and settled her hands upon them. He was hunched over, tearing for each breath and immediately coughing it back out. This didn't surprise her. She knew how strong Norman was.

  She slipped her right hand down his left arm and grasped him above the elbow. She was afraid to use her left hand, afraid she might hurt him with it. She could feel power humming in it, throbbing through it. Perhaps the most terrifying thing about the sensation was how much she liked it.

  "Bill," she whispered. "Come on. Come with me."

  She had to get him upstairs. She didn't know exactly why, not yet, but she did not doubt at all that when she needed to know, the knowing would come. But he didn't move. He only leaned on his hands, coughing and making those gagging noises.

  "Come on, goddammit!" she whispered in a harsh peremptory voice . . . and she had come so close to saying you, as in Come on, goddam you! And she knew who she sounded like, oh yes indeed, even in these desperate circumstances, she knew very well.

  He got moving, though, and for now that was all that mattered. Rosie led him across the vestibule with the confidence of a seeing-eye dog. He was still coughing and half-retching, but he was able to walk.

  "Halt!" Norman shouted from his part of the darkness. He sounded both official and desperate. "Halt, or I'll shoot!"

  No you won't, that would spoil all your fun, she thought, but he did shoot, the dead cop's .45 slanted up at the ceiling, the sound terrific in the enclosed space of the vestibule, the smell of burnt cordite sharp enough to make the eyes water. There was also a momentary shutterflash of reddish-yellow light, so bright it printed afterimages on her eyes like tattoos, and she supposed that was why he'd done it: to get a look at the landscape, and a look at where she and Bill were in that landscape. At the foot of the stairs, in fact.

  Bill made a choked vomiting sound and staggered against her, sending her into the wall of the staircase. As she struggled to keep from going to her knees, she heard a rush of footsteps in the dark as Norman came for them.

  12

  She lunged up the first two steps, hauling Bill with her. He paddled with his feet, trying to help; perhaps he even did, a little. As Rosie gained the second step, she flung her left hand out behind her and swept the coat-tree across the foot of the stairs like a roadblock. As Norman crashed into it and began cursing, she let go of Bill, who slumped but did not fall. He was still gagging and she sensed him bending over again, trying to get his breath back, trying to get his windpipe to work again.

  "Hang in," she murmured. "Just hang in there, Bill."

  She went up two stairs, then came back down on the other side of him, so she could use her left arm. If she was going to get him to the top of the stairs, she'd need all the power the gold armlet was putting out. She slipped her arm around his waist, and suddenly it was easy. She started to go up with him, breathing hard and canted over to the right, like a woman counterbalancing a heavy weight, but not gasping or buckling in the knees. She had an idea she could have hauled him up a high ladder like this, if that had been required. Every now and then he'd put a foot down and push, trying to help, but mostly his toes just dragged up the risers and across the carpeted stair-levels. Then, as they reached the tenth step--the halfway point, by her count--he started to help a little more. That was good, because there was a splintering sound from behind and below them as the coat-tree snapped beneath Norman's two hundred and twenty pounds. Now she could hear him coming again, not on his feet--at least it didn't sound that way--but crawling on his hands and knees.

  "You don't want to play with me, Rose," he panted. How far behind? She couldn't tell. And while the coat-tree had slowed him down, Norman wasn't dragging a man who was hurt and only three-quarters conscious. "Stop right where you are. Quit trying to run. I only want
to talk to y--"

  "Stay away!" Sixteen ... seventeen ... eighteen. The light was off up here, too, and with no windows it was as dark as a mineshaft. Then she was staggering forward, the foot that had been searching for the nineteenth step finding only more level going. Apparently there were only eighteen stairs in the flight, not twenty. How marvellous. They had made it to the top ahead of him; at least they had managed to do that much. "Stay away from me, Nor--"

  A thought struck her then, one so terrible that it froze her where she was. She sucked the last syllable of her husband's name back into herself like someone who has been punched in the stomach.

  Where were her keys? Had she left them dangling from the lock in the outside door?

  She let go of Bill so she could feel in the left hand pocket of the leather jacket he had loaned her, and as she did, Norman's hand closed softly and persuasively around her calf, like the coil of a snake which squeezes its prey rather than poisoning it with venom. Without thinking, she kicked powerfully backward with her other foot. The sole of her sneaker connected squarely with Norman's already battered nose, and he gave voice to a sick howl of pain. This changed to a yell of surprise as he grabbed for the bannister, missed it, and toppled backward into the darkened stairwell. Rosie heard a double crash as he somersaulted twice, heels over head.

  Break your neck! she screamed silently at him as her hand closed on the comforting round shape of the keyring in her jacket pocket--she had stuck it in there after all, thank Christ, thank God, thank all the angels in the Kingdom of Heaven. Break your neck, let it end right here in the dark, break your stinking neck, die and leave me alone!

  But no. She could already hear him stirring and moving around down there, and then he was cursing her, and then there was the unmistakable marching thud of his knees as he started crawling up the stairs again, calling her all his names--cunt and dyke and whore and bitch--as he came.

  "I can walk," Bill said suddenly. His voice was pinched and small, but she was grateful to hear it just the same. "I can walk, Rosie, let's get to your room. The crazy bastard is coming again."