“You’ve got to get the business out of your head sometime. You’ve got to simply relax and forget it.”
“Yeah, well, it’s easier said than done.”
“How about going up to Phil’s Holiday tonight? We could have a few drinks and listen to the band.”
“I don’t know. I’ve got this headache, and we promised Billy we’d take him to the circus tomorrow.”
“Wouldn’t have to be late.”
“I don’t know. We’ll see.”
She knew that meant no. As they turned down Main Street and headed toward Turtle Creek Road, she looked back at the dark and deserted hamlet. All the stores, save the bar and grill, were shut tight. Only a few dogs and stray cats roamed the streets. The scene depressed her, and she groaned under her breath. What had happened to the excitement, to the music, to the dazzle of lights? When had it all passed from her life, and why hadn’t she seen it go? She looked again at Greg. He was so drawn and weary-looking for a man of forty-two. She recalled the energy he used to have, how she was so quickly captured by the light in his eyes, the softness in his voice, the strength in his hands.
Damn, she wasn’t going to permit herself to be relegated prematurely to an old-age home. It wasn’t right; it wasn’t natural. When they pulled into their driveway and she saw how dark the house looked, she thought about her daughter. Most likely she was sitting in her room reading. Billy was probably watching television by himself.
“It’s Saturday night,” she said when Greg turned the engine off.
“So?”
“People usually go out and have a good time.” She slammed her door and began walking to the house.
“That’s ridiculous, going out just because it’s Saturday night. If we had somewhere special to go …”
“We never have anywhere special to go. It’s just good to get out sometimes. It helps you relax. The doctor told you to relax more.”
“Don’t use the doctor.”
“Oh, I don’t care,” she said, and entered the house quickly. She was surprised by the darkness in the living room. “Where is everybody? Billy? Lois?”
“What’s the matter?”
“Your children seem to have disappeared.”
“What d’ya mean?” He closed the door slowly. Dorothy walked down to the kitchen entrance and then went on to the bedrooms. Gregory put the lights on in the living room.
“Not here.”
“Not here?”
“Not in their bedrooms and not here,” she said. “Did Lois call and tell you she was going someplace and taking Billy?”
“No. Maybe they’re upstairs.” He looked at the stairway and then walked up quickly. Dorothy waited a moment. She was about to follow when she heard muffled steps. The only thing that prevented her from screaming when the basement door opened suddenly was the way she sucked in her breath. Billy stumbled out, his hands all black with dirt. Lois followed calmly behind him.
“Not here,” Gregory called.
“They’re here. What were you doing in that basement?”
“Basement?” Gregory came down the stairs. “We found a family of bats,” Billy said excitedly.
“Bats!”
“I heard them passing down the chimney,” Lois said, revealing the flashlight she carried in her right hand. “Since we had the glass doors on the fireplace, they simply traveled on through the ash release into the basement.”
“Bats?” Gregory said. “But this isn’t the season for them. It’s not warm enough yet. Don’t they sleep throughout the cold months?”
“Yes,” Lois said. “They usually do. That’s what makes these bats interesting. For some reason they’ve aborted their hibernation.”
“Bats!” Dorothy stepped back. “And you took Billy down there?”
“I wanted to go,” he said, with some pride in his voice.
“They’re perfectly harmless, Mother.”
“Sometimes they carry rabies,” Gregory said. “There hasn’t been a case of rabies in this area for years and years.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Oh, Greg, you’ve got to kill them. Maybe you should get an exterminator.”
“Oh, no,” Lois said. “Let them be. I want to study them for a while.”
Dorothy Wilson looked at her daughter as though she were a creature from outer space.
“Study them? Are you crazy? Are you totally out of your mind?”
“All right, just relax,” Gregory said. “Lois will show me where they are tomorrow and we’ll get them out of here.”
“But can’t they get into the house tonight?”
“No,” Gregory said, but he eyed his daughter to see if she would concur. She simply looked disgusted.
“Well, I don’t see how I’m going to fall asleep thinking about bats in the house. I can see where this is goin’ to be one helluva Saturday night.”
“Damn it,” Gregory said, “I’ll get a broom and go down there now. How many were there?”
“Four,” Billy said quickly.
“But two of them flew out through the soot hole,” Lois added. “You might as well wait until tomorrow.” She shot a quick glance at Billy. He was silent.
“I’m going to need a Valium,” Dorothy said. She headed for the stairway.
“Why didn’t you say they all flew out?” Gregory asked his daughter, in a low voice. “That would have eased her mind, and I could have gone down and blocked up the soot hole after killing the two that are there.”
“I keep forgetting that Mother has to be kept in a world of perpetual fantasy,” Lois said. Then she turned and walked to her room.
Gregory stood there a moment, his heart beating faster. He looked down at his little boy, who stared up at him quizzically.
“You weren’t afraid of the bats, huh, Tiger?” he said, rubbing the top of Billy’s head.
“Oh, no, Dad,” he said, straightening up his little body. “Not with Lois there.”
The smile faded from Gregory Wilson’s face. He didn’t relish the thought of having to face four bats in a dark cellar. From where did his daughter draw her courage? Was it courage? Or was it something unnatural? His ruminations were broken when Dorothy shouted for him.
“You’re going to have to go back to the store,” she said, talking from the top of the stairs. “There isn’t a single Valium left in the bottle.”
“Wow. You’ve got to take it easy with those things.”
“I have. Maybe you’ve taken more than you think.”
“I haven’t taken one for weeks.”
“Then …”
“I saw Lois give one to one of her rats once,” Billy said. He regretted saying it the moment the words came out and shut his mouth instantly, almost biting his tongue.
“Oh,” Gregory said, and looked toward his daughter’s room.
“Don’t tell I said it,” Billy pleaded. Gregory was surprised by his son’s real look of fear.
“That’s all right,” Gregory said. “I don’t like a snitcher, either,” he added to put Billy at ease. As he left the house he thought about those pills he couldn’t account for at the store. It wasn’t many, but … he knew he should talk to his daughter about it and made a mental note to do so. And yet he felt strangely reluctant to do so. It was almost as if he were afraid of what he would learn.
He imagined the sound of bats’ wings and walked quickly to his car.
4
Despite the one-hundred-fifty-watt bulb he had in the cellar fixture, Gregory couldn’t get very much illumination through the basement. The house had only half a cellar because the back of the building was constructed over a shelf of solid rock. The old fieldstone foundation had been reinforced with cement, but here and there the rocks were naked to the view. There had never been anything but a dirt floor, and the Wilsons, having little use for the basement other than for storage and as a place for the hot-water heater and water pump, had done little to modernize it. Now, with only one light to work by, Gregory regretted that
he had not done something about the electricity.
He had gotten up early in the morning, collected a flashlight and a broom, and made his way down the creaky, soggy-looking wooden steps. Dorothy was still asleep, having sedated herself into it last night. Just before he reached the cellar door, he met Lois in the hallway. It was as if she had been waiting for him. He said nothing to her, but she followed close behind him.
“Where are they?” he asked when he reached the bottom of the stairway.
“Just to the right of the hot-water heater.”
He pointed his flashlight in that direction. The cellar’s ceiling was just six feet high, but there were some floor beams that hung a few inches lower, making it necessary for him to crouch. He moved slowly, the flashlight in his left hand, the broom, held like a lance, in his right hand. He stopped when he saw the furry black mounds huddled beside one another on the wall.
“Hold the light on them,” he said. Reluctantly, she came up beside him and took the beam. “God, they’re ugly.”
“I don’t see why you say that,” she said. “Actually, they’re a marvel of nature, with their built-in sonar and their wings. I find them fascinating.” She said it with such relish that he hesitated for a few moments. Perhaps it was wrong to kill them, but he had no other way to rid the house of them. He wasn’t going to pick them off the wall and throw them out.
“They don’t belong in the house.” He lifted the broom like a baseball bat.
“I’m sure they didn’t know they were entering the Fleur mansion.”
He swung a little wildly, catching only the one on the far right. It crumpled to the floor. Lois followed it down with the light and they could see it move its tiny legs. He slapped it again and it stopped all movement. Only one of the other three moved at all, inching a little away from the other two. He hit it with a much straighter and harder stroke than he had the first and it fell crushed to the floor. He was sweating now and he could feel his heart beating so rapidly and pounding so hard he thought it would come crashing out of his chest. He paused to wipe his forehead.
“Thank God they’re too stupid to know what’s going on.”
“It’s not in their experience to know what it means to be attacked with a broom while sleeping,” Lois said dryly.
“Just keep the light on them.”
He lifted the broom, more confident now, and brought it down with a swift stroke, smearing the next-to-last nocturnal creature down the wall. It rolled into a ball and died quickly. When he looked up, Lois had moved the light off the last one.
“Get the light back on it.”
“Can’t you let me have this one?”
“What?”
“I want to study it. I’ll keep it trapped down here. I can do it,” she pleaded.
“Are you crazy? That’s all your mother has to find out.”
“She won’t if you don’t tell her.”
“It’s out of the question, Lois. Now get the light back up.”
“But—”
“Get it up.”
When she moved it to the spot, the last bat was gone.
“Damn,” he said. “Give me that light.”
He backed up when she handed it to him. Then he ran it up and down the wall and over the ceiling, checking the rafters until he spotted the creature secured between a floor beam and the ceiling. “Now hold this light on it,” he commanded, turning the broom around so he could jam the handle into the bat.
“No,” Lois said. “I don’t want to be part of this vicious cruelty.” She turned to the stairs.
“Lois, I told you …” She kept walking. “Shit.” He held the light in his left hand now and tried to coordinate his stabbing. His first thrust was off the mark. The creature moved farther into the crevice. When it did so, Gregory instinctively stepped back, afraid that it would fly out at him. The tension had brought a sharp pain to his head. He looked back, but Lois was already up the stairway and out of the cellar. Stepping closer, he studied the bat, brought the broom handle up higher, paused, and then jammed it as hard as he could into the crevice. He felt it crush the creature’s body, but the animal did not fall out. He had to work its body out. When it fell forward, he jumped back.
He ran the flashlight beam back to the other three bodies to be sure they were still there. Then he looked about for something to put them in. There was a carton filled with some old clothes. He emptied it quickly and swept the dead bats into the box. Before he left the cellar, he ran the light over the beams and walls to be sure there were no more. He didn’t want to find any and really made only a perfunctory search.
As he walked up the stairs he thought about Lois’s impertinent desertion and grew angry. He took the box of dead bats out to the garbage pail and shoved them, box and all, into the can. After he closed the lid, he paused for a few moments to get his breath and calm his nerves. The morning fog had the house clutched in its cloudy fist, making it look ethereal and dreamlike. Indeed, he felt as though he had just traveled through a nightmare. He was still dressed in his slippers and bathrobe.
When he got back into the house, he went right to Lois’s room. She was sitting on her bed, her back against the pillow, thumbing through a copy of National Geographic. She didn’t even look up when he entered.
“Do you think that was right, to leave me like that?”
“I couldn’t stand there and watch that wanton killing.”
“Wanton killing? For Christ’s sake, they’re vermin.”
“I hate that word. It’s such a stupid word,” she said, her eyes small. She looked as though she would cry. He hesitated. Her reactions confused him.
“Look, Lois. If you want to live in a zoo, that’s fine when you’re on your own. You can move in with rats and spiders and bats, whatever makes you happy; but while you’re living here, you’ll have to understand that the rest of us don’t share your views on animals, OK?”
“It’s not OK, but I understand.”
“Don’t get smart with me, young lady.”
“I’m not getting smart. I just wanted to have one to study, that’s all.”
“That kind of studying belongs in a laboratory, Lois. This is just a house—a house.”
“All right.”
There was a long pause between them. She turned the page of her magazine.
“And before I forget it, did you take some of your mother’s Valium to use on your lab animals?”
“Who said that?”
“Nobody said it. I’m just asking you.”
“I was going to do a personality transformation with a drug catalyst,” she said quickly. “I read about—”
“Then you did take them. Where do you get off doing that without asking me or your mother first?”
“You can’t be serious. Ask Mother?”
“I am serious, and you’re getting too damn smart. Now, did you take any other drugs from the store?” She stared at him, eye to eye. “Well?”
“No,” she said, and looked down at the magazine.
“You’re lying.” She didn’t deny it. “We’re going to have to all sit down and have a serious talk about this, your attitudes, your stealing, your experiments.”
“What attitudes?”
“I’m going upstairs now. My head feels like a neon light. I don’t want your mother to know any of this, and I’ve got to take your brother to the circus today. I want to get some rest.” He turned but stopped in the doorway. “But you and I have to have a long talk, young lady,” he added, holding his forefinger up. She shut her magazine and turned away. He looked at her for a moment and left.
She didn’t come out for breakfast, using as her excuse stomach cramps brought about by an impending period. Dorothy brought her in some Midol and felt her head to be sure it wasn’t a virus. Then the three of them left. Lois waited a good five minutes after she heard the front door slam; then she came out of her room, got the flashlight, and went to the cellar door. She turned on the light and went down the stairs quickly. When she r
eached the bottom, she went to her left quickly. She turned the flashlight on the upside-down water pail. Kneeling, she carefully lifted it and directed the beam under it. The small bat remained still, frozen by the light. Without the slightest hesitation, she pinched it behind the neck and dropped it into the right-side-up pail.
When she got to her pantry laboratory, she uncovered the old birdcage, put the bat inside, and covered it again. She went back to the cellar door, opened it, and threw the pail down the stairs. Satisfied, she turned from the cellar door, put the flashlight back, and went to make herself a big breakfast. All this morning activity had given her a big appetite, she thought. Besides, she was anxious to eat and then sit down and plan the afternoon’s experiment involving Barbara Gilbert and Bernie Rosen. It was going to be a good day.
With a quick and surprisingly graceful motion, Lois lifted her T-shirt over her head, revealing her braless small breasts. They quivered and then became firm with erect nipples, nipples that were rather large for the size of her bosom. Their deep, dark brown hue brought out the milky whiteness of her breasts. Heavy blue veins ran along the surfaces, mapping the flow of her blood as vividly as a medical diagram.
Bernie Rosen was both shocked and excited. His mouth remained open and his eyelids blinked rapidly. He made a quick attempt to smile, but it was as though he felt that the slightest motion would erase the scene being created before him. He practically held his breath. For a moment no one said a thing. The silence became heavy, even oppressive. Then Barbara shook her head and looked at Bernie. His intensity frightened her.
“Lois!” she said, bouncing in her seat. She was undecided whether or not she should place herself in Bernie’s view.
“We’re all going through certain predictable physiological reactions,” Lois said in an amazingly calm tone of voice. In fact, her calmness made Barbara question the reality of what was happening. Lois folded her T-shirt over the back of her vanity-table chair and then sat down to face Bernie, who continued to gape. His Alfred E. Neuman smile melted away and his face became frozen with intensity—eyes small, lips still.
“I don’t believe you,” Barbara said, holding her arms across her own covered bosom. Somehow Lois’s partial nudity made Barbara feel nude as well. “I had no idea she was going to do this,” she said, turning to Bernie. He didn’t look her way.
Brain Child Page 5
