Danny made a feint for the fridge, then said fuck it, there’d be other food out there. He ran out of the house and he and Wolf slalomed through the moonlit headstones to the gate. Locked. Ribbons of siren furled loudly in the curved highway air off left, coming closer. Fucking cops gonna bust my ass, kill me all over again. Danny grabbed the bars of the gate and shoved outward in fury. To his surprise they flew apart, twists of lock rocketing upward and jangling solidly on the highway. Wolf took it all in stride and bounded out; he tensed on the white line, teeth bared toward the loudening sirens.
“Fuck ’em, Wolf,” shouted Danny, “this way, boy. Let ’em chew on your last meal for a while, that and the empty grave.” Abandoning his post, Wolf dashed after Danny, who veered right, toward Loomis, leaving the highway in favor of underbrush. Behind him, he heard the police car slow, shut off its siren, turn cautiously and drive through the shattered gates. The flashing lights rotated their crazy way along the access road. Danny felt an urge to go back and tear those blue porkers to shreds, but his unfinished business came to mind, Karin came to mind, and he damped down his bloodlust. Ahead, the twinkling lights of a new development beckoned: food, clothing, a car or truck he could commandeer, yes, but what he craved right now was a fucking shower to wash off the puke and the blood and the foul miasma of death that rode in on every breath.
***
“Clarence Benson, you fat old tub of lard, the dishes are done and it’s almost eight, time for Death Squad.”
“I’m watching C-SPAN.” He tried to shut her out, put his voice on automatic so he’d be able to catch every word of Brian Lamb’s question. The man was amazing.
“Clarence!” She stood between him and the set, arms not quite at her sides because of the flabby ham hocks her biceps had turned into over the years.
He flared at her. “Dammit, Nancy, you’re a real pain in the you-know-what. Country’s been on the skids for two decades,” he gestured at the set with the remote, “Reagan and Bush’ve packed the damned court with a raft of closet fascists, and you want to dull your mind—what there is of one in that thick skull of yours—with some vigilante cop show, vacant-eyed Hollywood stud-bunnies wreaking weekend violence on fantasy sleazeballs the law won’t touch.”
Nancy punched the TV’s Off button, but Clarence was ready for her and hit the remote. A bespectacled Post reporter smeared off and then on, the faintest hint of a smile on his face as he listened to the ravings of some hinterland caller. “You ask me,” she said, “the country’s in a hell of a lot better shape than it was when the left wingers were running the show.”
“Well I didn’t ask you.”
“The Republicans brought decency back into style.”
“Don’t know why I married you.”
“No respect for the flag, dragging it down in the mud with their talk of freedom when all they meant—”
“To hell with the flag!”
“—was license, do what you damn-well please—yes!” into high gear now as she heard him and responded, “you see, just like that! ‘To hell with the flag,’ as if it had no meaning, as if the boys who gave up their lives to keep it waving proud and free died in vain.”
“Oh for the love of Christ, Nancy, you ever seen the old films of the Nuremberg rallies, flags flapping a mile high, dwarfing seas of sieg-heiling fools?” The doorbell rang. “There are people dying of cold and hunger in this country every minute of every day. Wrap them up in the goddamned flag, not your lying politicians.”
“There’s someone at the door.” She wore a look of exasperation, her standard argument look. He knew why he’d married her: There was the sex of course, and the food, both still served up in reasonable portions even after thirty years. But mostly he loved to triumph over her father’s politics, hear the old man spout out of her lips and trounce him like he’d been too cowed to do to the man himself when he was alive. Cheapskate had left it all to his widow, still hanging on, scatterwitted at seventy; nothing to his daughter, cut off at the knees because old Mister Moneybags couldn’t abide the pinko commie prevert his daughter had married.
Clarence muted the TV and worked his way to his feet. “I’ll get it,” he said, “but don’t go changing channels on me.” Remote clutched in one hand, he headed for the door.
“Check who it is first, Clarence. You never check.” Yadda, yadda, yadda. Same damned thing.
“Ah, the hell with that. Been alive fifty years and never opened the door to an unfriendly soul.” He flicked off the deadbolt and put his hand on the knob, turning it. “Nance old girl, if you can’t trust people, what kind of a world have you got?”
It was as if the door had been tensed on a powerful steel spring. It leaped at him, whipped his hand behind him so vehemently that his shoulder socket snapped loudly and his fingers stung from the hardwood assault. The knob gouged the wall and the door swung back as if to ward off the fury now storming in. He was stunned for a moment by the sheer volume of information his brain had to process: the bristled growling barreling dynamo that leapt in, all jaws and rabid eyes, fouling the air with stench, and the bulkier figure behind him, a man of muscle in a tattered soiled suit, the whole charging hulk of him caked in dirt and smelling like shit stew.
But before Clarence could even think to respond, the dog claimed his leg, sinking its teeth tight and deep into his right calf, a jag of daggers lancing through a wet hot compress of slaver and growl. The door slammed and a fist gripped his shirt, twisted cloth and chest hair, wrenching his rotund body forward as if he were no weightier than a helium balloon clone of himself, right up to that grinning grime-caked face, to those eyes that torched fifty years of trusting his fellow man as if those years were so much flash paper. His glasses whipped off and skittered across the tile, the remote not far behind in its wild clattering tumble. Blood pounded in his leg as though to surge away the reseating razors of canine grip and worry below.
Clarence knew he was about to die, but what startled him was that his terror washed away under a rush of anger. This intrusion was an outrage, a rape, and by God he would fight it. “Get out of my house!” he shouted, his face all red and his hands tearing ineffectually at the muscled arm of the invader. Pain was searing up his leg but he tried to kick free of the attack dog, the ferocious mass of fur whose hot breath he could feel where the blood poured out of him. “Get out! And take your stink with you!” But the man just grinned, just pulled him deeper into the dark unwavering flame of his eyes. By God, Clarence thought, all my life I’ve been a pacifist and now I want to kill this sick bastard so bad I can taste it, and Jesus I love my dear Nancy and now it’s too late to tell her and I’ve put her into terrible danger, and in all my years I have not done one thing, not one single thing, to change the world in any way, just sat on the sidelines and grumbled as the parade passed by.
Then the bad man slammed him hard in the gut. Again. Again. So hard he couldn’t breathe. The last sight that came to him was the bad man’s fist slamming into his belly over and over and over, special delivery from God or his darker angels. The last sound he heard was the sole of his left shoe randomly tapping on tile as the bad man’s mongrel ripped bleeding chunks of flesh from his leg.
***
Nancy watched her husband die and felt relief.
That shocked her. But she had other shocks in store. Other beautiful and new things Nancy Benson was poised to learn about herself—not day by day, as the show tune had it (she didn’t have days), but moment by moment.
The violent rush of the animal and its master into her house had overwhelmed her at first, shocked her. She gasped when they wrenched Clarence around like a rag doll and made his glasses fly. But the intruder glanced once into her eyes and the smell of him forked up her nostrils at that same moment. The power was overwhelming, wicked and pure as a straight shot of heroin. All her life she had sheltered herself from vile things, kept herself from big cities and places that served hard liquor and men who stared at you too long or fixed their eyes on your covered par
ts. Now the vileness had come charging right into her home, as concentrated and heady as vanilla extract. It almost felt like watching a movie, seeing the blood stream off Clarence’s torn pant leg, watching him take fist after fist in his fat gut—it almost felt as if she herself were in no danger at all, no more danger than anyone else with a tub of popcorn in her lap and a girlfriend or two beside her to share the screams with.
She was less sure of that, felt the hackles rise at the back of her neck, when the man unbunched her husband’s shirt and let him fall, his skull loudly cracking against the tile. The only thing of Clarence’s that moved was the leg being sampled by the dog, which tore away blood-soaked cloth and chomped anew on the wet red meat. The man came toward her, his look demonic under bent brow. He was one compact man, not an ounce of his flesh withered or gone to fat. The sight and smell of her husband’s killer thrilled and repulsed her. Her honey-colored rug turned brown and soiled under his feet. He stopped not six feet from her, his dog chomping wetly by the door.
“You gonna give me any trouble?” he asked.
When he spoke, the memory slammed into focus: George Gault, her first boyfriend, her first and only hard-bodied lover, the high school football hero who’d punted his way into her heart ages ago. If dear George had gone through a dozen years of hell, then been steeped in filth, this is what he would look like. Careful, girl, she thought, this isn’t George and that isn’t affection beaming in his eyes. “No,” she said, “I’ll . . . I’ll do what you say.”
“Good.” She saw a hint of smile in his eyes, then he walked back to the animal. “Wolf, that’s enough. Lay off the poor bastard.” To her: “You got a name?”
She told him.
“Nancy, which way’s your bedroom?”
“It’s upstairs,” she said. Her head was pulsing. It was like some brightly lit dream, a woozy intravenous wow of distraction just before surgery.
He reached down, George to a T, and put a choke-hold on Clarence. “Follow me,” he said, dragging the bleeding corpse across her carpet as if it were a scarecrow stuffed with straw. She followed him up the stairs, trying not to hear the thump-thump-thump of her husband’s shoes on the steps nor the low growl of the dog behind her, but fixing her eyes on the taut legs and buttocks of the intruder who led the way, the muscular V of his torso.
In the bedroom, while he hoisted her dead husband on to the bed, Nancy eased open her night table drawer, took out the Smith & Wesson Model 60 she kept there, stainless steel with a three-inch barrel, and waited for him to turn around. She had a hard time holding it steady.
He saw the gun and grinned. The dog’s growl rose but it held its ground and she tried not to look at it. “Why Nancy, you little pistol-packing mama, is this your idea of no trouble?”
“I’ve had lessons. I know how to use this gun, so don’t try anything.” Oh lordy, the impish grin on his face—George in his bedroom, home alone with her for the first time, parents gone, his powerful hands tentatively lifting to enclose and caress her breasts.
He laughed, then slowly peeled off his dirt-encrusted jacket and dropped it behind him. “I bet if I rushed you, you’d shoot old Wolf here, then me, as clean and calm as if you were swatting a couple of flies.” His hands rose to the top button of his shirt, worked at it.
“Clarence thought the class was a waste of money. He said it was dangerous to have a gun around the house. Why are you doing that? Stop. Put . . . put your hands up.”
His fingers never faltered moving down the shirt. A glance at the bed. “That his name? Clarence? You don’t seem too upset at his passing.”
“That’s none of your business. If you don’t put your hands up, I’ll shoot you.” He tugged the shirt out. The tight plane of his abdomen showed itself, the dark whorl of the navel like a crater of love.
“Nancy, Nancy,” her name was smooth as whiskey on his tongue, “what a cold-hearted woman you’d have to be—and I can tell you’re not—to shoot a man for taking his clothes off.” He unbuckled his belt, lowered his fly. “You like my body? Lots of muscles, lots of life in me.” He raised an arm, flexed his biceps for her.
It wasn’t fair, she thought. You made uneasy peace with your life, put away the emotional turmoil of younger days—and suddenly it all came rushing back in. This was George all right, but a demonic George, looking like he’d climbed off the cover of a Harlequin Temptation, gleaming with life, stinking of death, and the crazy thing was, she couldn’t tell which held more allure. “Enough,” she said, but her voice was weak.
“Seventh grade, that greasy fuck of a history teacher Mister Orland told us how the guy who killed the king used to get his queen.” He stripped off his jockey shorts. He was huge, blue-veined and ruddy and thick. “You like what you see? Keep the gun on me, it’s turning me on something fierce. I’m going to take a shower now, Nancy. Wash the smell of death off me. No tricks while I’m gone.”
“Stay where you are.” There was no conviction in her voice. The gun refused to stop trembling.
“I’ll take the phone with me.” He yanked it off her husband’s night stand. The cord snapped out of the wall, its plastic end pinging off Clarence’s lamp. “Wolf, don’t you let Nancy out of this room.” The dog glared at him as if it wished he’d said Attack!, but she could tell it was smart enough to obey its master.
Then he was gone into the bathroom, closing the door and locking it behind him, and Nancy found she could think of nothing but George, how soft his huge hands had been on her naked body that first time, how he’d eased inside her, how she’d wrapped her girlish legs around those powerhouse hips, that animal juggernaut that treated her like a found cache of gems—sweet tender George, shy little boy peering out of the eyes of a hulking beast.
***
Danny soaped himself up good. All over. First time, the suds washed off coffee brown, the shampoo blacker and grittier than that; second time, it was closer to whipped cream consistency, closer to what he’d been used to while he was alive. Fuck that, you’re still alive, he thought, but he knew it wasn’t as simple as that. He’d been dead, buried for a whole fucking year, Wolf too; but somehow he and his dog had come back to life, just decided to wake up and dig themselves out of the ground. Right. Shit like that didn’t happen outside of the Cinedome. But here he was, brimming with dark energy, gargling Doctor Bronner’s (whoever the fuck he was) Peppermint Soap in an effort to lose the taste of gravedirt in his mouth.
Karin had something to do with it, that much he knew. Her face rose up, twisted and streaked with tears, and his whole body shuddered in rage. He wanted to pound her face under his fist, tenderize the hurt meat of it, tear it off her skull, and toss it on the barbee—a few scraps to Wolf but most of it savored and swallowed as his strapped-down wife suffered and bled and begged for the knife, the kriss she’d used on him, to open her heart. Then he was in the shower again, under the steady spray of water, feeling his heart pound like a dynamo and wondering at the savagery that had just washed through him. Sure he’d been bad to her when he was alive, but he’d known, even while he was beating her, even while he was forcing her to look at the hidden side of him—the photos, the magazines, the videos of topless chicks firing machine guns in the desert, the filmed gang-bang where you knew the redhead’s terror was not faked, the dog and donkey shows, the snuff flick that got him weirdly horny—he’d known it was wrong, known too that when it had run its course, his good side would wash back in and he’d castigate himself and beg her forgiveness and be so grateful when she forgave him and came rushing, all warm and lovely, into his arms. But now he felt as if that part of him had stayed dead, and it unsettled him.
One last plunge under the shower head, mouth open and sounding like a dentist’s suck-tube as the water furied in and out of it, and he twisted the faucets off. He sniffed himself, seemed clean. Still some unreachable grime under the fingernails though. A whiff of something foul in his nose, too, like lingering traces of vomit, only worse. He hoped it would go away on its own.
/> Stepping out onto the throw rug, he toweled off, then wrapped the towel around him and tucked it in. Habit, old modes; fuck it, he thought. He undid the towel, tossed it on the floor. Time to deal with granny, to sweet-talk the gun out of her hand, then off the stupid bitch, maybe nail their bodies together on the bed. Better odds naked, that was certain. Little Miss Nancy was one hot mama, he could tell, under that prim exterior of hers. Too bad her face and manner reminded him of his fucking stepmother, prissy Helen Daniels whose idea it had been to adopt Danny in the first place but whose regret for her decision hadn’t taken long to make itself known.
When he opened the door, the first thing that hit him was Wolf’s foul stench. Then the sight of Clarence’s legs sticking out from behind the bed, one shoe caked in blood. And finally Nancy, who had rolled her husband off the bed and now lay there in a sheer black peignoir, not trying to hide her varicose legs, not hiding much of anything at all in fact. She still had the pistol in her hand, the tip of its barrel making small circles over the sheer fabric that clung to her stiff right nipple. “Hello there,” she said, sounding like Lauren Bacall on a bad day.
“Beautiful,” he said. Pathetic, he thought. Of all the houses he’d had to choose from, he’d picked one with a crazy hausfrau in it. “Nancy, you’re one surprising lady, you know that?”
She twisted on the bed in what perhaps in her heyday had been a sexy way. But his penis, God love it, appeared to agree with her. What had some dead fart once written? Faces may age, but pussies don’t. Obviously some truth in that. “Come over here, you handsome hunk, and I’ll show you how beautiful I can be.”
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