The Bad Place

Page 11

He lowered his eyes and studied the crumbs on the table.
Violet said, “Frankie was here.”
At first he was more surprised by the fact that she had spoken than by what she had said. Then the meaning of those three words reverberated through him as if he were a brass gong struck by a mallet. He stood up so abruptly that he knocked over his chair. “He was here? In the house?”
Neither the cats nor Verbina twitched at the crash of the chair or the sharpness of his voice. They lay somnolent, indifferent.
“Outside,” Violet said, still sitting on the floor beside her reclining sister, working on the other twin’s nails. She had a low, almost whispery voice. “Watching the house from the Eugenia hedge.”
Candy glanced at the night beyond the windows. “When?”
“Around four o’clock.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
“He wasn’t here long. He’s never here long. A minute or two, then he goes. He’s afraid.”
“You saw him?”
“I knew he was there.”
“You didn’t try to stop him from leaving?”
“How could I?” She sounded irritable now, but her voice was no less seductive than it had been. “The cats went after him, though.”
“Did they hurt him?”
“A little. Not bad. But he killed Samantha.”
“Who?”
“Our poor little puss. Samantha.”
Candy did not know the cats’ names. They had always seemed to be not just a pack of cats but a single creature, most often moving as one, apparently thinking as one.
“He killed Samantha. Smashed her head against one of the stone pilasters at the end of the walk.” At last Violet looked up from her sister’s hand. Her eyes seemed to be a paler blue than before, icy. “I want you to hurt him, Candy. I want you to hurt him real bad, the way he hurt our cat. I don’t care if he is our brother—”
“He isn’t our brother any more, not after what he did,” Candy said furiously.
“I want you to do to him what he did to our poor Samantha. I want you to smash him, Candy, I want you to crush his head, crack his skull open until his brains ooze out.” She continued to speak softly, but he was riveted by her words. Sometimes, like now, when her voice was even more sensuous than usual, it seemed not merely to play upon his ears but to slither into his head, where it lay gently on his brain, like a mist, a fog. “I want you to pound him, hit him and tear him until he’s just splintered bones and ruptured guts, and I want you to rip out his eyes. I want him to be sorry he hurt Samantha.”
Candy shook himself. “If I get my hands on him, I’ll kill him, all right, but not because of what he did to your cat. Because of what he did to our mother. Don’t you remember what he did to her? How can you worry about getting revenge for a cat when we still haven’t made him pay for our mother, after seven long years?”
She looked stricken, turned her face from him, and fell silent.
The cats flowed off Verbina’s recumbent form.
Violet stretched out half atop her sister, half beside her. She put her head on Verbina’s breasts. Their bare legs were entwined.
Rising part of the way out of her trancelike state, Verbina stroked her sister’s silken hair.
The cats returned and cuddled against both twins wherever there was a warm hollow to welcome them.
“Frank was here,” Candy said aloud but largely to himself, and his hands curled into tight fists.
A fury grew in him, like a small turning wheel of wind far out on the sea but soon to whirl itself into a hurricane. However, rage was an emotion he dared not indulge; he must control himself. A storm of rage would water the seeds of his dark need. His mother would approve of killing Frank, for Frank had betrayed the family; his death would benefit the family. But if Candy let his anger at his brother swell into a rage, then was unable to find Frank, he would have to kill someone else, because the need would be too great to deny. His mother, in Heaven, would be ashamed of him, and for a while she would turn her face from him and deny that she had ever given birth to him.
Looking up at the ceiling, toward the unseen sky and the place at God’s court where his mother dwelled, Candy said, “I’ll be okay. I won’t lose control. I won’t.”
He turned from his sisters and the cats, and he went outside to see if any trace of Frank remained near the Eugenia hedge or at the pilaster where he’d killed Samantha.
19
BOBBY AND Julie ate dinner at Ozzie’s, in Orange, then shifted to the adjoining bar. The music was provided by Eddie Day, who had a smooth, supple voice; he played contemporary stuff but also tunes from the fifties and early sixties. It wasn’t Big Band, but some early rock-and-roll had a swing beat. They could swing to numbers like “Dream Lover,” rumba to “La Bamba,” and cha-cha to any disco ditty that crept into Eddie’s repertoire, so they had a good time.
Whenever possible, Julie liked to go dancing after she visited Thomas at Cielo Vista. In the thrall of the music, keeping time to the beat, focused on the patterns of the dance, she was able to put everything else out of her mind—even guilt, even grief. Nothing else freed her so completely. Bobby liked to dance, too, especially swing. Tuck in, throw out, change places, sugar-push, do a tight whip, tuck in again, throw out, trade places with both hands linked, back to basic position ... Music soothed, but dance had the power to fill the heart with joy and to numb those parts of it that were bruised.
During the musicians’ break, Bobby and Julie sipped beer at a table near the edge of the parquet dance floor. They talked about everything except Thomas, and eventually they got around to The Dream—specifically, how to furnish the seaside bungalow if they ever bought it. Though they would not spend a fortune on furniture, they agreed that they could indulge themselves with two pieces from the swing era: maybe a bronze and marble Art Deco cabinet by Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, and definitely a Wurlitzer jukebox.
“The model 950,” Julie said. “It was gorgeous. Bubble tubes. Leaping gazelles on the front panels.”
“Fewer than four thousand were made. Hitler’s fault. Wurlitzer retooled for war production. The model 500 is pretty too —or the 700.”
“Nice, but they’re not the 950.”
“Not as expensive as the 950, either.”
“You’re counting pennies when we’re talking ultimate beauty?”
He said, “Ultimate beauty is the Wurlitzer 950?”
“That’s right. What else?”
“To me, you’re the ultimate beauty.”
“Sweet,” she said. “But I still want the 950.”
“To you, aren’t I the ultimate beauty?” He batted his eyelashes.
“To me, you’re just a difficult man who won’t let me have my Wurlitzer 950,” she said, enjoying the game.
“What about a Seeburg? A Packard Pla-mor? Okay. A Rock-ola?”
“Rock-ola made some beautiful boxes,” she agreed. “We’ll buy one of those and the Wurlitzer 950.”
“You’ll spend our money like a drunken sailor.”
“I was born to be rich. Stork got confused. Didn’t deliver me to the Rockefellers.”
“Wouldn’t you like to get your hands on that stork now?”
“Got him years ago. Cooked him, ate him for Christmas dinner. He was delicious, but I’d still rather be a Rockefeller.”
“Happy?” Bobby asked.
“Delirious. And it’s not just the beer. I don’t know why, but tonight I feel better than I’ve felt in ages. I think we’re going to get where we want to go, Bobby. I think we’re going to retire early and live a long happy life by the sea.”
His smile faded as she talked. Now he was frowning.
She said, “What’s wrong with you, Sourpuss?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t kid me. You’ve been a little strange all day. You’ve tried to hide it, but something’s on your mind.”
He sipped his beer. Then: “Well, you’ve got this good feeling that everything’s going to be fine, but I’ve got a bad feeling.”
“You? Mr. Blue Skies?”
He was still frowning. “Maybe you should confine yourself to office work for a while, stay off the firing line.”
“Why?”
“My bad feeling.”
“Which is?”
“That I’m going to lose you.”
“Just try.”
20
WITH ITS invisible baton, the wind conducted a chorus of whispery voices in the hedgerow. The dense Eugenias formed a seven-foot-high wall around three sides of the two-acre property, and they would have been higher than the house itself if Candy had not used power trimmers to chop off the tops of them a couple of times each year.
He opened the waist-high, wrought-iron gate between the two stone pilasters, and stepped out onto the graveled shoulder of the county road. To his left, the two-lane blacktop wound up into the hills for another couple of miles. To his right, it dropped down toward the distant coast, past houses on lots that were more parsimoniously proportioned the nearer they were to the shore, until in town they were only a tenth as big as the Pollard place. As the land descended westward, lights were clustered in ever greater concentration—then stopped abruptly, several miles away, as if crowding against a black wall; that wall was the night sky and the lightless expanse of the deep, cold sea.
Candy moved along the high hedge, until he sensed that he had reached the place where Frank had stood. He held up both big hands, letting the wind-fluttered leaves tremble against his palms, as if the foliage might impart to him some psychic residue of his brother’s brief visit. Nothing.
Parting the branches, he peered through the gap at the house, which looked larger at night than it really was, as if it had eighteen or twenty rooms instead of ten. The front windows were dark; along the side, toward the back, where the light was filtered through greasy chintz curtains, a kitchen window was filled with a yellow glow. But for that one light, the house might have appeared abandoned. Some of the Victorian gingerbread had warped and broken away from the eaves. The porch roof was sagging, and a few railing balusters were broken, and the front steps were swaybacked. Even by the meager light of the low crescent moon, he could see the house needed painting; bare wood, like glimpses of dark bone, showed in many places, and the remaining paint was either peeling or as translucent as an albino’s skin.
Candy tried to put himself in Frank’s mind, to imagine why Frank kept returning. Frank was afraid of Candy, and he had reason to be. He was afraid of his sisters, too, and of all the memories that the house held for him, so he should have stayed away. But he crept back with frequency, in search of something —perhaps something that even he did not understand.
Frustrated, Candy let the branches fall together, retraced his steps along the hedge, and stopped at one gatepost, then the other, searching for the spot where Frank had fended off the cats and smashed Samantha’s skull. Though far milder now than it had been earlier, the wind nevertheless had dried the blood that had stained the stones, and darkness hid the residue. Still, Candy was sure he could find the killing place. He gingerly touched the pilaster high and low, on all four faces, as if he expected a portion of it to be hot enough to sear his skin. But though he patiently traced the outlines of the rough stones and the mortar seams, too much time had passed; even his exceptional talents could not extract his brother’s lingering aura.
He hurried along the cracked and canted walkway, out of the chilly night and into the stiflingly warm house again, into the kitchen, where his sisters were sitting on the blankets in the cats’ comer. Verbina was behind Violet, a comb in one hand and a brush in the other, grooming her sister’s flaxen hair.
Candy said, “Where’s Samantha?”
Tilting her head, looking up at him perplexedly, Violet said, “I told you. Dead.”
“Where’s the body?”
“Here,” Violet said, making a sweeping gesture with both hands to indicate the quiescent felines sprawled and curled around her.
“Which one?” Candy asked. Half of the creatures were so still that any of them might have been the dead one.
“All,” Violet said. “They’re all Samantha now.”
Candy had been afraid of that. Each time one of the cats died, the twins drew the rest of the pack into a circle, placed the corpse at the center, and without speaking commanded the living to partake of the dead.
“Damn,” Candy said.
“Samantha still lives, she’s still a part of us,” Violet said. Her voice was as low and whispery as before, but dreamier than usual. “None of our pusses ever really leaves us. Part of him ... or her ... stays in each of us ... and we’re all stronger because of that, stronger and purer, and always together, always and forever.”
Candy did not ask if his sisters had shared in the feast, for he already knew the answer. Violet licked the corner of her mouth, as if remembering the taste, and her moist lips glistened; a moment later Verbina’s tongue slid across her lips too.
Sometimes Candy felt as if the twins were members of an entirely different species from him, for he could seldom fathom their attitudes and behavior. And when they looked at him—Verbina, in perpetual silence—their faces and eyes revealed nothing of their thoughts or feelings; they were as inscrutable as the cats.
He only dimly grasped the twins’ bond with the cats. It was their blessed mother’s gift to them just as his many talents were his mother’s generous bequest to him, so he did not question the rightness or wholesomeness of it.
Still, he wanted to hit Violet because she hadn’t saved the body for him. She had known Frank had touched it, that it could be of use to Candy, but she had not saved it until he’d awakened, had not come to wake him early. He wanted to smash her, but she was his sister, and he couldn’t hurt his sisters; he had to provide for them, protect them. His mother was watching.
“The parts that couldn’t be eaten?” he asked.
Violet gestured toward the kitchen door.
He switched on the outside light and stepped onto the back porch. Small knobs of bone and vertebrae were scattered like queerly shaped dice on the unpainted floorboards. Only two sides of the porch were open; the house angled around the other two flanks of it, and in the niche where the house walls met, Candy found a piece of Samantha’s tail and scraps of fur, jammed there by the night wind. The half-crushed skull was on the top step. He snatched it up and moved down onto the unmown lawn.