“No, it’s long distance.” She cleared her throat. “Are you Nick’s wife?”
“Yes, I am. Can I give Nick your number? Council meeting’s usually over before ten.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” Mary said. “I’m on my way there. I’ll just wait and surprise him. One more thing…see, I used to live in Freestone, a long time ago, and I’ve lost touch with people. Do you know Keith Cavanaugh?”
“Keith and Sandy. Yes, I do.”
“I tried to call Keith, but nobody’s home. I just wanted to make sure he still lived there.”
“Oh, yes. Their house is just down the road.”
“Good. I’d like to go by and see him, too.”
“Uh…may I tell my husband you called, Robin?”
“Sure,” Mary said. “Tell him I’ll be there in a couple of days.”
“All right.” The woman’s voice was beginning to sound a little puzzled. “Have we ever met?”
“No, I don’t think so. Thanks for your help.” She hung up, and then she dialed Cavanaugh’s number once more. Again there was no answer. Mary stood up, her thigh swollen and hot, and she limped to the Barcalounger and her can of beer. Two days and she’d be in Freestone. Two days, and she’d find Lord Jack again. It was a thought to dream on.
Mary fell asleep, with the lights on and the TV going and the wind shrilling outside. In her sanctuary of wishes, she walked with Lord Jack across a wide, grassy hillside. The ocean was spread out in a tapestry of blue and green before them, and the thunder of waves echoed from the rocks. She was young and fresh, with her whole life before her, and when she smiled there was no hardness in her eyes. Jack, wearing tie-dyed robes, held Drummer in his arms, and his blond hair flowed down around his shoulders and back like spun gold. Mary saw a house in the distance, a beautiful two-story house with rock chimneys and moss growing where the Pacific spray had touched. She knew that house, and where it stood. The Thunder House was where the Storm Front had begun, in its ritual of candles and blood oaths. It was where she had first been loved by Lord Jack, and where she had given her heart to him forever.
It was the only house she’d ever called home.
Lord Jack hugged their baby close, and he put an arm around the tall, slim girl at his side. They walked together through flowers, the air damp and salty with ocean mist, a lavender fog creeping across Drakes Bay. “I love you,” she heard Jack say close in her ear. “I’ve always loved you. Can you dig it?”
Mary smiled and said she could. An iridescent tear rolled down her cheek.
They went on toward the Thunder House with Drummer between them and the promise of a new beginning ahead.
And in the Barcalounger, Mary slept heavily in an exhaustion of blood loss and weary flesh, her mouth partway open and a long silver thread of saliva drooling over her chin. The bandages on her thigh and forearm were splotched with red. Outside, snow flurries spun from the sky and frosted the barren fields, and the temperature fell below fifteen degrees.
She was a long way from the land of her dreams.
Ten miles west of where Mary rested, Laura moaned in a fever sweat. Didi roused herself from a cramped sleep in the chair to check on Laura, and then she closed her eyes again because there was nothing she could do to ease the other woman’s pain, both physical and mental. The scissor blades had proved worthless for the task of removing screws from license plates, but Didi had gone through an assortment of junk in the Cutlass’s trunk and found a screwdriver that would work. The Cutlass now bore a Nebraska tag, its Playboy decal had been scraped away, and the red plastic dice trashed.
Sleep took the sufferers, and for a little while shielded them from hurt. But midnight had passed and a cold dawn was coming, storm clouds already sliding down from Canada in the iron dark. The baby woke up with a start, his blue eyes searching and his mouth working the pacifier. He saw strange shapes and unknown colors, and he heard the shrill and bump of muffled sounds: the threshold of a mysterious, frightening world. In a few minutes his heavy eyelids closed. He drifted off to sleep again, innocent of sin, and his hands clutched for a mother who was not there.
VII
FUNERAL PYRE
1
The Power of Love
HORN BLOWING.
Mary’s eyes opened, the lids gummy and swollen.
Horn blowing outside. Outside the house.
Her heart kicked. She sat up in the Barcalounger, and every joint in her body seemed to scream in unison. A gasp of pain came from Mary’s lips. Horn blowing outside, in the gray gloom of a winter morning. She’d gone to sleep with the TV going and the lights on; a man with a crew cut was talking about soybean production on the tube. When she tried to stand up, the jolt of agony that shot through her thigh took her breath. The bandages were crusted with dark blood, the smell of copper rank in the room. Her forearm wound pulsed with heat, but it was numb and so was her right hand. She stood up from the chair with an effort that made the air hiss between her teeth, and she hobbled to a window where she could see the front of the house.
A thin layer of snow had fallen during the night, and covered the fields. Out on the white-dusted road, about sixty yards from the farmhouse, sat a school bus with CEDAR COUNTY SCHOOLS on its side. Come to pick up Fudge Ripple, Mary knew. Except the boy wasn’t ready for school. He was fast asleep, under the hay. The school bus sat there for fifteen seconds more, and then the driver gave a last frustrated honk on the horn and the bus pulled away, heading to the next house down the road.
Mary found a clock. It was seven thirty-four. She felt weak, light-headed, and nausea throbbed in her stomach. She staggered into a bathroom and leaned over the toilet, and she retched a few times but nothing much came up. She looked at herself in the mirror: her eyes sunken in swollen folds, her flesh as gray as the dawn. Death, she thought. That’s what I look like. Her leg was hurting with a vengeance, and she searched through a closet in the bathroom until she found a bottle of Excedrin. She took three of them, crunching them between her teeth and washing them down with a handful of water from the tap.
She longed to rest today. Longed to go back to sleep here in this warm house, but it was time to get out. The school bus driver would wonder why Fudge Ripple hadn’t come out this morning when all the lights were on in the house. He’d tell somebody about it, and they’d wonder, too. Routines were the vital fabric of the Mindfuck State; when a routine was disrupted, like a missed stitch, all the little ants got stirred up. It was time to get out.
Drummer began to cry; Mary recognized it as his hungry cry, pitched a tone or two lower and less intense than his frightened cry. It was more of a nasal buzzing with a few pauses for the summoning of breath. She’d have to feed him and change his diaper before they left. A sense of urgency got her moving. First she changed her bandages, wincing as she peeled away the crusty cotton. She repacked the wounds and wrapped them tightly with fresh strips of torn sheet. Then she popped open her suitcase, put on fresh underwear, and got a pair of flannel socks from Rocky Road’s dresser. Her jeans were too constrictive at the thighs for her swollen leg, so she pulled on a pair of looser denims—again, courtesy of her departed host—and cinched them tight with one of her belts. She put on a gray workshirt, a maroon sweater she’d had since 1981, and she pinned the Smiley Face button on the front. Her scuffed boots went on last. In Rocky Road’s closet hung a tempting assortment of heavy coats and parkas. She took a brown corduroy coat with a fleece-lined collar off its hanger and laid it aside for later, and chose a green goosedown parka to zip Drummer up in as a makeshift bassinet. A pair of man-sized leather gloves were also set aside for later.
As Mary fed Drummer, she continually squeezed a tennis ball in her right hand to warm up the sinews. Her strength in that hand was about a third of what it normally was, her fingers cold and numb. Nerve damage, she thought. She could feel the twitching of the ravaged muscles down in the forearm wound; the damned dog had come close to gnawing an artery open, and if that had happened, she’d be dead by
now. The thigh wound was the real bitch, though. It needed fifty or sixty stitches and a hell of a lot better antiseptic than what she’d found in Rocky Road’s bathroom. But just as long as it stayed crusted over, she could make herself keep going.
The telephone rang as she was changing Drummer’s diaper. It stopped after twelve rings, was quiet for five minutes, and then rang eight more times.
“Somebody’s curious,” she told Drummer as she swabbed him clean with a Handi Wipe. “Somebody wants to know why the boy didn’t come out to the school bus, or why Rocky Road’s not clocked in at work yet. Yes somebody does, yes him does!”
She started moving a little faster.
The telephone rang again at eight-forty as Mary was loading up the Cherokee in the garage. It went silent, and Mary continued the task. She loaded her suitcase and a garbage bag full of food from the kitchen: the rest of the sliced ham, a pack of bologna, a loaf of wheat bread, a jug of orange juice and a few apples, a box of oat bran cereal and a big bag of Fritos corn chips. She found a bottle each of mineral supplement tablets and vitamins that might’ve choked a horse. She swallowed two of both. When she was packed and ready to take Drummer out, she paused for a minute to make herself a bowl of Wheat Chex and drink down a Coke.
She was standing in the kitchen, finishing the cereal, when she glanced through a window and saw a pig car coming slowly up the drive.
It pulled up in front of the house, and a pig wearing a dark blue parka got out. The car had CEDAR COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT on its side. By the time the pig—who was maybe in his early twenties, just a kid—reached the front door and rang the buzzer, Mary had loaded one of the remaining rifles from the gun cabinet.
She stood around a corner from the door, waiting. The pig rang the buzzer again, then knocked with a gloved fist. “Hey, Mitch!” he called, his breath showing in the frosty air. “Where you at, boy?”
Go away, Mary thought. Her leg had started hurting her again, a deep biting ache.
“Mitch? You to home?”
The pig backed away from the door. He stood looking around for a minute, his hands on his hips, and then Mary watched him start to walk to the right. She went to another window, where she could track him. He walked to the back door and peered in, his breath fogging the glass. He knocked again, harder. “Emma? Anybody?”
Nobody here you want to meet, she thought.
The pig tried the back door’s knob. Worked it left and right. Then she watched him turn his head and look toward the barn.
He called “Mitch?” and then he began walking away from the house, his boots crunching in the icy snow on his way to where the bodies and the van were.
Mary stood at the back door, the rifle in her hands. She decided to let him find Mitch and Emma.
The pig opened the barn’s door and walked inside.
She waited, her eyes glittering with a kind of lust.
It didn’t take long. The pig came running out. He staggered, stopped, bent over, and threw up onto the snow. Then he started running again, his long legs pumping and his face ghastly.
Mary unlocked the door and stepped out into the chill. The pig saw her, came to a skidding halt, and started reaching for his pistol. The holster’s flap was snapped down, and as the pig’s gloved fingers fumbled to unsnap it, Mary Terror flexed her numb hand, took aim, and shot him in the stomach at a range of thirty feet. He was knocked backward to the ground, the breath bursting white from his mouth and nostrils. As the pig rolled over and tried to struggle to his knees, Mary fired a second shot that took away a chunk of his left shoulder in a mist of steamy blood. The third bullet got him in the lower back as he was crawling across the crimson snow.
He jerked a few times, like a fish on a hook. And then he lay still, facedown, his arms splayed out in an attitude of crucifixion.
Mary breathed deeply of the cold air, savoring its sting in her lungs. Then she went back into the kitchen, set the rifle down, and finished the last two spoonfuls of Wheat Chex. She drank the milk, and followed it with the final swig of Coke. She limped to the bedroom, where she put on the corduroy coat and the gloves, then picked up Drummer in the folds of the goosedown parka. “Pretty boy, yes you are!” she said as she carried him to the kitchen. “Mama’s pretty little boy!” She kissed his cheek, a surge of love rising within her like a glowing radiance. She looked out the back door again, verifying that the pig had not moved. Then she put Drummer into the Cherokee, cranked open the garage door, and slid behind the wheel.
She pulled out of the garage, past the pig car and down the driveway. Then she turned right on the road that led back to I-80 and the route west. Her shoulder bag was on the floorboard, full of Pampers and formula and holding her Magnum and the new Smith & Wesson revolver to replace the lost Colt. She felt so much better this morning. Still weak, yes, but so much better. It must be the vitamins, she decided. Got some iron in her blood, and that made all the difference.
Or maybe it was the power of love, she thought as she glanced on the seat beside her at her beautiful baby.
The list of names and phone numbers was in her pocket, along with the bloodstained Sierra Club newsletter article. To the west the sky was a dark purple haze, the land white as a peace dove.
It was a morning rich with love.
The Cherokee went on, aimed toward California, freighted with firepower and madness.
2
Strip Naked
CHECKOUT TIME WAS NOON. At ten thirty-six the rust-eaten Cutlass with a Nebraska tag pulled out of the Liberty Motor Lodge’s parking lot. The red-haired woman behind the wheel turned right, onto the ramp that merged into the westbound lanes of I-80. The Cutlass’s passenger, a pallid woman with a bandaged hand and hellfire in her eyes, wore a dark gray sweater banded with green stripes. She kept an ice pack pressed against her left hand, and she chewed on her raw and swollen lower lip.
The miles clicked off. Snow flurries spun from the gloom, the headlights of cars on and their wipers going. The Cutlass’s wipers shrieked with a noise like a banshee party, and the car’s engine chugged like a boiler with spark plugs. In Des Moines, eighty miles farther west, Didi and Laura stopped at a Wendy’s and got the works: burgers, fries, salad bar, and coffee. As Laura ate with no thought of manners and an eye on the clock, Didi went to the pay phone and looked up pawnbrokers in the Yellow Pages. She tore the page out, rejoined Laura, and they finished their food.
The clerk at Honest Joe’s, on McKinley Avenue, examined the diamond through his loupe and asked to see some identification. They took the stone back and went on. The female clerk at Rossi’s Pawn on 9th Street wouldn’t talk to them without seeing proof of ownership. At the dismal, aptly named Junk ’n Stuff Pawnshop on Army Post Road, a man who made Laura think of John Carradine’s head stuck on Dom DeLuise’s body looked at the diamond and laughed like a chain saw. “Get real! It’s paste, lady!”
“Thank you.” Laura picked up the diamond and Didi followed her toward the door.
“Hey, hey, hey! Don’t go away mad! Hold up a sec!”
Laura paused. The fat man with the thin, wrinkled prune of a face motioned her back with a ring-studded paw. “Come on, let’s dicker a little bit.”
“I don’t have time for that.”
“What, you’re in a hurry?” He frowned, looking at her bandaged hand. “I think you’re bleedin’, lady.”
Spots of red had seeped through the bandages. Laura said, “I cut myself.” She drew up her spine straight and tall and walked back to the counter. “My husband paid over three thousand dollars for this diamond eight years ago. I’ve got the certification. I know it’s not paste, so don’t give me that crap.”
“Yeah?” He grinned. No horse had bigger or yellower teeth. “So let’s see the certification, then.”
Laura didn’t move. She didn’t speak either.
“Uh-huh. So let’s see a driver’s license.”
“My purse was stolen,” Laura said.
“Oh, yeah!” He nodded, drumming
his fingers on the countertop. “Where’d you steal the rock from, ladies?”
“Let’s go,” Didi urged.
“You’re undercover cops, right?” the man asked. “Tryin’ to sting my ass?” He snorted. “Yeah, I can smell cops a mile off! Comin’ in here with a phony southern accent! You people won’t stop roustin’ me, will you?”
“Let’s go.” Didi grasped Laura’s arm.
She almost turned away. Almost. But her hand was killing her and they were down to the last of their cash, a gloomier day she’d never seen, and Mary Terror was out there somewhere with David. She felt her frayed temper snap, and the next thing she felt was her hand reaching up under her sweater. She grasped the handle of the automatic in the waistband of her jeans, and she brought the gun up and pointed it at the man’s horse teeth.
“I’ll take a thousand dollars for my diamond,” Laura said. “No dickering.”
The man’s grin hung by a lip.
“Oh God!” Didi wailed. “Don’t kill him like you did that other one, Bonnie! Don’t blow the brains out of his head!”
The man trembled and lifted his arms. He had on cuff links that looked like little gold nuggets.
“Open the cash register,” Laura told him. “You just bought a diamond.”
He hustled to obey, and when the register was open he started counting out the cash. “Bonnie gets crazy sometimes,” Didi said as she went to the front door and turned over the WE’RE OPEN sign to SORRY WE’RE CLOSED. There was nobody on the street anywhere, the wind and the snow keeping saner people indoors. “She shot a guy through the head in Nebraska yesterday. Trigger crazy is what she is.”
“You want big bills?” the man gasped. “You want hundreds?”
“Whatever,” Didi answered. “Come on, hurry it up!”
“I’ve only…I’ve only got…got six hundred dollars in the register. Got some more in the safe. Back there.” He nodded toward a door with an OFFICE sign on it.