Mary Terror turned to face the old man, who had crushed himself up against the wall, and she said, “Paula thinks you’ve saved a lot of money. Is it true or not?”
“What do you know about Paula? You’ve never even met my daughter!”
Mary went to the bedroom closet, opened it, and ran-sacked it as Shecklett kept asking her how she knew his daughter. Mary overthrew the mattress and then the entire bedframe, finding nothing but TV dinner trays and old newspapers under the bed. She bulldozed through the bathroom’s medicine cabinet and tore into the kitchen cabinets, and when her search was over she realized she knew Shecklett a lot better than Paula did.
“There’s no more, is there?” she asked, training the Colt on him.
“I said there wasn’t! Jesus Christ, look what you did to my place!”
“Give me your wallet.”
Shecklett fished it from his pants and handed it over. There were no credit cards, and the wallet held a five and three ones. “Listen,” Shecklett said as Mary pocketed the cash and tossed the wallet aside, “you’ve got every cent now. Why don’t you just get out?”
“Right. The faster I get out, the faster you can call the pigs, huh?”
Shecklett’s gaze dropped to the gun. He looked up from it into Mary’s face, then back to the gun again. His Adam’s apple wobbled. “I won’t tell anybody,” he said.
“Take off your clothes,” Mary ordered.
“Huh?”
“Your clothes. Off.”
“My clothes? How come you want me to—”
She was on him before he could utter another word. The gun rose and fell, and the old man dropped to his knees with his jaw broken and three teeth loose. Moaning with pain, he began to take his clothes off. When he was finished, his bony white body nude, Mary said, “Get up.” He did, his eyes deep-sunken and terrified. “Into the bathroom,” she told him, and she followed him in. “Get in the bathtub on your hands and knees.” He balked at this, and began to beg her to leave him alone, that he wouldn’t tell anybody, wouldn’t ever tell anybody. She pressed the gun’s barrel against the staircase of his spine, and he got into the tub in the position she’d demanded.
“Head down. Don’t look at me,” she said. Shecklett’s skinny chest heaved, and he coughed violently for maybe a minute. She waited until his coughing was done, and then she slid the knife from her waistband.
“Swear I won’t tell a soul.” His chest heaved again, this time in a sob. “God, please don’t hurt me. I never did anything to you. I won’t tell anybody. I’ll keep my mouth shut, I swear to—”
Mary picked up a washrag from the sink and jammed it into Shecklett’s mouth. He gasped and gagged, and then Mary leaned over his naked body. She thrust the knife into one side of Shecklett’s throat, her knuckles scraping the sandpaper of his skin. Before Shecklett could fully realize what she was doing, Mary cut his throat from ear to ear with the serrated blade, and crimson blood fountained into the air.
Shecklett tried to scream around the washrag. As the blood sprayed into the bathtub from his severed carotid artery, Shecklett grasped at his throat with his one hand and started to rise to his knees. Mary put her foot into the small of his back and jammed him down again. His body thrashed and writhed under Mary’s strength, blood spewing into the tub as if released from a pulsing faucet. “My name is Mary Terrell,” she told him as he bled and died. “Soldier of the Storm Front. Freedom fighter for those without rights in the Mindfuck State, and executioner of the state’s pigs.” He was trying to get up again, his knowledge of death affording him a last surge of power. She had to bear down hard on him, and his adrenaline flood ceased in a few seconds. He writhed at the bottom of the tub as if doing a breast stroke in his own gore. “Defender of the just. Protector of the weak. Crusher of the Mindfuck mentality, and keeper of the faith.”
He had a lot of blood for a gaunt old dude.
Mary sat on the edge of the tub and watched him die. There was something about him that made her think of a baby swimming through a sea of blood and mother’s fluid to reach the light. He died not with a shudder or a moan or a final desperate thrashing; he simply got weaker and weaker, until the weakness killed him. And there he lay in the tub with his life going down the drain, his eyes open, and his skin the color of a fish Mary had once seen washed up and swollen-bellied on a gray beach.
Mary stood up. She slashed the mattress open in the bedroom, just to make sure no money was hidden inside. Cotton wadding puffed out, and it served to clean the blade. Then she left Shecklett’s apartment and closed the door behind her, richer by five hundred fifty-one dollars and some change.
The uniform was ready. She took a shower with God cranked up on the speakers, the bass pounding at the walls like an eager fist. Before the day was done, she would be a mother. She scrubbed spatters of blood from her hands, and she smiled in her veil of steam.
6
Big Hands
ON SATURDAY MORNING JUST AFTER ELEVEN O’CLOCK, DOUG stood at the window of Room 21. He watched the clouds move in the pewter sky, and he thought about the question Laura had just asked him.
How long has the affair been going on?
Of course she knew. He’d seen yesterday that she knew; it was in her eyes when he’d told her he hadn’t been able to get away from work until long after midnight Friday morning. Her eyes had looked right through him, as if he were no longer truly there. “I don’t want to hear it,” she’d said, and she’d lapsed into silence. Every time he spoke to her, he was met with the same wall of words: “I don’t want to hear it.” He’d known she’d be upset because he wasn’t there at David’s birth, and that fact gnawed at his guts like little piranhas that meant to devour him to the bones, but then he realized there was more to it. Laura knew. Somehow, she knew. How much she knew he wasn’t sure, but just knowing was bad enough. All day yesterday and all night last night it had been either “I don’t want to hear it” or cold silence. Laura’s mother, who’d come to Atlanta yesterday with Laura’s father to see their grandson, had asked him what was wrong with Laura, that she didn’t want to talk, that all she wanted to do was hold the baby and croon to David. He hadn’t been able to say because he didn’t know. Now he did, and he watched the pewter sky and wished he could think of something to say.
“The truth,” Laura said, reading his mind in the stiff reluctance of his body. “That’s what I want.”
“An affair?” He turned from the window, a salesman’s smile plastered to his mouth. “Laura, come on! I can’t believe you—” He stopped speaking because his son was down the hall in the maternity window, and he couldn’t carry off the lie.
“How long?” she prodded. Her face was wan and pale, her eyes tired. She felt light of body and leaden of spirit. “A month? Two months? Doug, I’d like to hear it.”
He was silent. His mind was searching for cracks like a mouse who hears a footstep in the dark.
“She lives at the Hillandale Apartments,” Laura went on. “Apartment 5-E. I followed you there on Thursday night.”
Doug’s mouth opened. Hung open. A small gasp escaped his chest. She saw the color bloom in his cheeks. “You…followed me? You actually…my God, you actually followed me?” He shook his head incredulously. “Jesus! I can’t believe this! You followed me like…like I was some kind of… common criminal or something?”
“STOP IT, DOUG!” The thunder crashed out of her before she could contain it. She was not a yeller—far from it—but the anger sprang forth seemingly from every pore in her body like scalding steam. “Stop the lies, all right? Just stop lying, right now!”
“Keep your voice down, will you?”
“Hell, no, I won’t keep my voice down!” The expression of shocked outrage on Doug’s face was like kerosene on her charcoals. The flames leapt high, out of her control. “I know you’ve got a girlfriend, Doug! I found the two tickets! I found out Eric was in Charleston the night he was supposed to have called you to the office! Someone called me and told me what
her address was! You’d better believe I followed you, and by God I was hoping you wouldn’t go to her, but there you were! Right there! How was the beer, Doug?” She felt her mouth contort in a bitter twist. “Did you two enjoy the six-pack? My water broke right there in the parking lot, while you were walking to her door! While our son—my son—was being born, you were shacked up with a stranger across town! Was it good, Doug? Come on, tell me, damn you! Was it good? Was it really really good?”
“Are you finished?” He was grim-lipped and stoic, but she saw the shiny fear in his eyes.
“NO! No, I’m not finished! How could you do something like this? Knowing I was about to have David? How? Don’t you have a conscience? My God, you must think I’m so stupid! Did you think I’d never know? Is that it? Did you think you could have this secret life forever, and I’d never figure it out?” Tears burned her eyes. She blinked them back, and they were gone. “Come on, let’s hear it! Let’s hear how you figured you’d have your little piece of cake at home and your little piece of…” She couldn’t say the word she was thinking. “Your little girlfriend at the Hillandale Apartments and I’d never find out!”
The bloom had faded from Doug’s cheeks. He stood there, just staring at her with his eyes that glinted like false coins, and he seemed very small to her. He seemed to have shrunken in the space of a minute or so, until his Dockers khaki trousers and his Polo sweater hung on a framework of bones and lies. He lifted his hand and touched his forehead, and Laura saw his hand tremble. “Someone told you?” he asked; even his voice had gotten small. “Who told you?”
“A friend. How long has it been going on? Will you tell me that, or not?”
He drew a breath and let it leak out. He was deflating, right in front of her. His face had gotten pasty and pallid, and he spoke with what seemed a great effort: “I…met her…in September. I’ve been…I’ve been seeing her since…the end of October.”
Christmas. All through Christmas Doug had been sleeping with another woman. For three months as David grew inside her, Doug had been making his heated runs to and from the Hillandale Apartments. Laura said, “Oh my God” and pressed her hand to her mouth.
“She’s a secretary at a real estate agency,” Doug went on, flaying her with a small, hushed voice. “I met her when I was doing some work for one of the realtors. She seemed…I don’t know, cute, I guess. I asked her out to lunch. She said okay. She knew I was married, but she didn’t mind.” Doug turned away from Laura, his gaze scanning the clouds again. “It happened fast. Two lunch dates in a row, and then I asked her out to dinner. She said she’d make dinner for me at her apartment. On the way over there I pulled off the road and just sat and thought. I knew what I was doing. I knew I was stepping on you and David. I knew it.”
“But you did it anyway. Very thoughtful of you.”
“I did it anyway,” he agreed. “I have no reason for it other than an old tired one: she’s twenty-three, and when I was with her I felt like a kid again. Just starting out, no responsibilities, no wife, no child on the way, no house payments, no car payments, nothing but the wild blue yonder ahead. That sounds like bullshit, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe so, but it’s the truth.” He looked at her, his face ancient with sorrow. “I meant to stop seeing her. It was just going to be a one-time thing. But…it got away from me. She’s studying for her real estate tests, and I helped her with her homework. We drank wine and watched old movies. You know, talking to somebody that age is like talking to a person from another planet. She’s never heard of Howdy Doody, or Steppenwolf, or Mighty Mouse or John Garfield or Boris Karloff or…” He shrugged. “I guess I was trying to reinvent myself, maybe. Make myself younger, go back to how I used to be before I knew what the world was all about. She looked at me and saw somebody you don’t know, Laura. Can you understand that?”
“Why didn’t you show that person to me?” she asked. Her voice cracked, but she held the tears at bay. “I wanted to see you. Why didn’t you let me?”
“You know the real me,” he said. “It was easier to fool her.”
Laura felt the crush of despair settle upon her. She wanted to rage and scream and throw something, but she did not. She said, in a quiet voice, “We did love each other once, didn’t we? The whole thing wasn’t a lie, was it?”
“No, it wasn’t a lie,” Doug answered. “We did love each other.” He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, his eyes glazed and unfocused. “Can we work this out?” he asked.
Someone knocked on the door. A nurse with curly red hair came in, carrying a small human being wrapped up in a downy blue blanket. The nurse smiled, showing big front teeth. “Here’s the little one!” she said brightly, and she offered David to his mother.
Laura took him. His skin was pink, his skull—reformed into an oval by Dr. Bonnart’s gentle hands—covered with light brown fuzz. He made a mewling noise, and blinked bis pale blue eyes. Laura smelled his aroma: a peaches-and-cream smell that she’d caught the first time David was brought to her after being cleaned. Around his pudgy left ankle he wore a plastic band that had Boy, Clayborne, Room 21 typed on it. His mewling became a hiccupy sound, and Laura said, “Shhhhh, shhhhh,” as she rocked him in her arms.
“I think he’s hungry,” the nurse said.
Laura unsnapped the top of her hospital gown and guided David’s mouth to one of her nipples. One of David’s hands closed on the flesh of her breast and his mouth went to work. It was a feeling ripe with satisfaction and—yes—sensuality, and Laura sighed deeply as her son fed on the mother’s milk.
“There we go.” The nurse offered a smile to Doug, then reclaimed it when she saw his sallow face and sunken eyes. “Well, I’ll leave him with you for a while,” she said, and then she left the room.
“His eyes,” Doug said, leaning over the bed to look down at David. “They look like yours.”
“I’d like you to leave,” she told him.
“We can talk about this, okay? We can work everything out.”
“I’d like you to leave,” Laura repeated, and in her face Doug found no mercy.
He straightened up, started to speak again, but saw no use in it. She paid him no further attention, all her attention being focused on the baby cradled against her breast. After a minute or so in which there was no sound but that of David’s mouth sucking on Laura’s swollen nipple, Doug walked through the door and out of her sight.
“Make you big and strong,” she crooned to her son, a smile relighting her face. “Yes it will. Make you big and strong.”
It was a hard world, and people could burn love to cinders and crush the ashes. But in this moment of time the mother held her son close and spoke softly to him, and all the hardness of that world was shunted aside. Laura didn’t want to think about Doug and what was ahead for both of them, so she did not. She kissed David’s forehead and tasted his sweet skin, and she traced the faint blue lines of veins in the side of his head with a forefinger. Blood was rushing through them, his heart was beating, and his lungs were at work: the miracle had come true, and it was right there in her arms. She watched him blink, watched the pale blue eyes search the realm of his sensations. He was all she needed. He was everything she needed.
Her parents returned in another fifteen minutes. Both of them were gray-haired, Miriam firm-jawed and dark-eyed and Franklin a simple, jocular smiler. They didn’t seem to want to know where Doug was, possibly because they smelled the smoke of her anger lingering in the room. Laura’s mother held David for a while and koochy-kooed him, but she gave him back when he started to cry. Her father said David looked as if he was going to be a big boy, with big hands fit for throwing a football. Laura suffered her parents with polite smiles and agreements as she held David close. David cried off and on, like a little switch being tripped, but Laura rocked him and crooned to him and soon the infant was sleeping in her arms, his heart beating strong and steady. Franklin settled down to read the newspaper, and Miriam had brought her
needlepoint. Laura slept, David nestled against her. She winced in her sleep, dreaming of a madwoman on a balcony and two gunshots.
At one twenty-eight, an olive-green Chevy van with rust holes in the passenger door and a cracked left rear window pulled to the loading dock behind St. James Hospital. The woman who got out wore a nurse’s uniform, white trimmed with dark blue. Over her breast pocket her plastic tag identified her as Janette Leister. Next to the name tag was pinned a yellow Smiley Face.
Mary Terror spent a moment pulling a smile up from the depths of her own face. She looked fresh-scrubbed and pink-cheeked, and she’d put clear gloss on her lips. Her heart was hammering, her stomach twisted into nervous knots. But she took a few deep breaths, thinking of the baby she was going to take to Lord Jack. The baby was up there on the second floor, waiting for her in one of three rooms with blue bows on the doors. When she was ready, she climbed the steps to the loading dock. A laundry hamper and a handcart had been left there. She guided the hamper to the door and pressed the buzzer, and then she waited.
No one answered. Come on, come on! she thought. She pressed the buzzer again. Damn it, what if no one could hear the buzzer? What if a security guard answered? What if someone instantly saw through the disguise and slammed the door in her face? She was wearing the right uniform, the right colors, the right shoes. Come on, come on!
The door opened.
A black woman—one of the laundry workers—peered through.
“I locked myself out!” Mary said, her smile fixed and frozen. “Can you believe that? The door closed and here I am!” She started to push the hamper before her through the doorway. There was a second or two when she thought the woman wasn’t going to give way, and she said merrily, “Excuse me! Coming through!”
“Yes ma’am, come on, then.” The laundress smiled and backed away, holding the door open. “Blowin’ up a rain out there!”