"Don't frown. It's me," Cruise said. "And a friend."
Lannie shut the door, lifted the chain, then opened up to them. She stood back in a dark hallway, one hand holding closed the robe. Her glasses had slipped down on her nose and she peered over them like a schoolmarm.
"You look like shit, Lannie'" Cruise moved past her down the hall, pulling Molly behind him. They came out into a living area stuffed with Salvation Army and garage sale furniture, toys scattered on the matted dirty carpet, clothes draped everywhere. Old newspapers teetered in stacks on every conceivable surface.
Cruise wrinkled his nose. "Home sweet home,' he said.
"I don't need your bullshit, Cruise. What do you want?"
Lannie slouched into the room and cleared a place on the stained and worn orange upholstered sofa.
"Don't you want to meet Molly first? Molly, this is my sister, Lannie. Lannie, Molly. She's Irish you can tell by her hair. She doesn't want to stay with me now, so watch her."
"Goody. Another one of those."
"Where's Daddy?" Cruise moved toward another hallway that led to the bedrooms.
"He's sleeping, what do you think? We don't usually get up around here before dawn in case you forgot."
Cruise paused, his back to the room. "Is he worse?"
He heard Lannie sigh the way she might with one of the kids when they asked too many unanswerable questions. "He's not going to get better, Cruise. You already know that."
Cruise nodded. He moved on down the hallway until he came to the door of his father's bedroom. This is where his father had slept for the past ten years. Lannie wouldn't put him in a home. She knew Cruise would have killed her if she tried.
He opened the door slowly, his fist swallowing and squeezing the doorknob. Breathed in the smell of age that bathed the room with its aroma. Old clothes, old skin, old air going in and out of old lungs.
Feeble light from the one window in the far wall made the bedroom appear watery and insubstantial. There was too much furniture in the room. An iron bedstead, unpainted and gray as lead. A bedside table covered with a lamp, a Bible, bottles of vitamins, tubes of salves. A standing wardrobe made of dark cherry, the mirror on its front cracked right down the middle. A stuffed easy chair, torn on the arms. A metal tube-legged kitchen chair, seat in canary-yellow. Rips in the vinyl. There was more, so much more. A battered chest of drawers, flaking white paint, the top stacked with newspapers and folded clothes.
Cruise approached his father's bed. He stared down at the old man. Here lay the monster of his dreams, the master of his past, the fearsome right hand that so often struck him low. He didn't look much changed except for the skin on his face and hands that lay atop the sheet. The skin had been ruddy and weathered and tough as oiled leather. Now it was papery white and thinly veined with blue. His father still retained his thick brown hair, tinged gray on the sides. He still had the massive forehead, the large nose that dominated his features, the narrow mean lips.
Where the real change had come with age was in the old man's brain. He'd been diagnosed as suffering from Alzheimer's disease the week Lannie took him into her home to care for him. His mind was a quicksand pit where you could throw in anything and get nothing back. He forgot his name. He forgot to go to the bathroom, how to hold his dick to take a piss, how to wipe himself. He forgot how to feed himself, forgot where he was, who he had been, and all of what he had done.
Cruise reached out a tentative hand and touched his arm. The old man woke immediately, eyes swiveling to the side of the bed without moving his head. "Who?" he asked.
"Hi, Daddy. It's Cruise."
"Who?" The old man came up onto his elbows to squint at Cruise. "Who are you?"
"Your son. Herod, remember?"
"I don't know you. Who are you?"
Cruise reached behind him and caught the back of the kitchen chair. He dragged it close to the bedside and sat in it. He held his father's hand in both his own.
"Don't worry about it," he said. "I know you, that's enough, isn't it?"
"Where am I?"
"You're at Lannie's house. You've been here for years, Dad."
"I'm hungry." He smacked his lips.
"Lannie will cook breakfast soon. Why don't I sit here and tell you about a few things while she does? Wouldn't you like that?"
The old man stared at him the way he would a stranger. Cruise began to tell him about his latest trip across country. He told him, in detail, about the Lot Lizard who called herself Minde. How she'd almost gone with Dirty Old Man and how he, Cruise, got to her first. How he'd already prepared a shallow grave outside of Charlotte. How fiercely Minde had fought for her life. Then he told him about Molly, picking her up at a truck stop in Mobile. What a pretty girl she was, so naive, so young, so trusting. He told him how much it meant to him to have company along. How lonely he got without someone at his side.
He told his father about Riaro, about the visit to the cemetery after he killed him. He told how Molly tried to call her father, how he'd almost missed finding her in time. He brought the old man up-to-date on his life since the last time he'd seen him. He ended with the story of the tornado, the rap on the window, the way it felt to kill the frantic fat man who jiggled and struggled as he died in his arms.
When he finished, Cruise reached into his pants pocket and withdrew the diamond ring his last victim had been wearing. It was the first time he'd really looked at it. There were six big diamonds encircling a round center stone. It was a beauty. He slipped it onto his father's hand. "Here, this is for you. Isn't it nice? A real diamond, I think."
The old man held it up to his face, inches from his nose. "What is it?"
"A diamond ring. Lannie said you lost the other one I gave you. It doesn't matter. You can lose it. I'll get more."
"Pretty," the old man said, admiring the sparkle as he turned the stone back and forth on his finger. For long seconds he was lost in the glitter of the material world.
"Yeah. I knew you'd like it."
"I'm hungry."
"All right. Get up and I'll take you to the kitchen."
"Where is it?"
"I'll take you." Cruise helped him from the tangle of covers, brought the slippers from beneath the bed for his feet. He guided him to the door and down the hall.
Molly sat in a rocking chair across from Lannie. Her eyes were red. Crying. Always crying. They did that so much at Lannie's house. Why would they think she'd help them escape? She knew better.
"This is my father." He smiled as he showed off the old man to Molly, but it was a wisp of a smile, a shadow. And it made him ache in his chest. The smile cost him the limit of what he was able to pay.
#
Molly had begged her. "You have to help me. Your brother's crazy. He's killed people. He'll probably kill me."
Lannie pursed her lips and shook ash-blond hair from the frames of her glasses. "Don't waste your breath. I can't do a thing."
"Why not? You know what he's doing. He has to be stopped. He kills people!"
"He won't be stopped by me. I never could stop him. Daddy couldn't stop him. The only thing that will end it is a cop's bullet."
"Are you afraid of him, is that it? He wouldn't have to know..."
"He'd know the second I touched the telephone."
"But why haven't you told before? When he left, why didn't you call the police the first time you knew for sure?"
"You don't understand. Cruise is like a flood or an earthquake. He won't be stopped by me turning him in. They'd never catch him. He's too smart. He's been doing this for half his life."
Molly tried to think. Half his life. If he was about forty, that meant twenty years of killing and he hadn't been caught.
She couldn't believe it. "Twenty years?" she whispered.
"Longer."
"But if you don't do something, he's going to...he'll..."
Lannie turned away her face. She picked at lint on the red chenille robe. "I can't help you," she said. "I won't. He helps pa
y for Daddy's care. I couldn't do it without him. I work like a dog just to pay the mortgage on this dump. Who's going to take care of my kids if I don't? Who will feed them and give them a place to live? I have to have someone come in when I'm working. My no-good bastard of a husband left me when the last one was born. I can't leave Daddy alone. It takes money; living, by God, takes money."
"You're no better than he is," Molly said. Her cheeks flamed and tears rushed to her eyes. "Those aren't excuses. There is no excuse for what you're doing. You're as much a killer as he is if you don't try to stop him. They'd make you an accessory; you'll go to prison."
"So I'll go to prison. It can't be much worse than what I'm in now. Look the fuck around you."
Cruise walked the old man into the room and Molly turned to face her executioner. He proudly introduced his father. When she saw Cruise smile, she said boldly to the old man, "Your son's a murderer."
She waited for him to react. She expected him to turn on his son. Instead he blinked stupidly and murmured, "I'm real hungry."
Molly's mouth dropped open. Lannie stood from the sofa. She stepped over the laden coffee table and made her way to the kitchen. Molly heard her opening the refrigerator door.
Cruise placed the old man carefully on the sofa where Lannie had been sitting. He patted his shoulders, settling him in. When he turned back to Molly he wasn't smiling.
"He's got Alzheimer's," he said. "Leave him alone."
"No wonder you come here. No one hassles you. No one cares enough."
She flinched when Cruise moved across the room and grabbed her by the arms. He spoke into her face, spittle flying. When she tried to turn her head, he shook her until her eyes rolled in their sockets. "They care!" he shouted. His green eyes darkened to a drab hazel color. "My father loves me!"
He dropped her into the rocker, turned on his heel to his father. "You love me, don't you, Daddy? Tell her!"
"I don't know, I don't know. Who is she? Where am I? I'm so hungry.."
#
Cruise lay on Lannie's unmade bed unable to sleep. Molly was bound to the faucets in the second bathroom at the end of the hall. She sat in the tub. He told her she wanted to pee, she'd have to do it in her clothes, he wasn't coming to see about her until he was ready to leave. It was his way of saying fuck you. He thought she probably got his drift.
He reflected that Molly was right, he liked it in this house. He came back because no one cared enough to do anything about him. Even Lannie's kids didn't give a damn. They got up, the three oldest ones dressed for school, ate breakfast, and were out the door to catch the bus. Said one word to him, hello, that was it. The two little ones, Sherry in diapers hardly knew him, and Judy, the three-year-old, didn't think much of him one way or the other. Unca Cruise, Judy could say. But she never came to him or hugged his neck. She talked to her baby doll and poured water from a toy teapot.
Then there was Lannie. Broken like an aggressive dog you kick until it hides under beds when you walk in the room. She had about as much spirit as a June bug.
That left Daddy. Brain like grapefruit pulp. Who did he love? Who had he ever loved? It sure wasn't Cruise or Lannie or any of the others, not even his mother. His father hadn't known how to love anyone, hadn't the capacity. He made a living, he fucked his wife, he raised his children to fear him. That's all his life amounted to. A duty to persevere, never mind having any fun, feeling any joy, experiencing any hope. That made him one of the strange imposters who could never live by society's rules. Cruise grew to love him if only for that reason. He wasn't like other men. He viewed the world one way while other men saw it another. Cruise thought if his father really knew what his son had done with his life, he would have admired it. Before he came down with Alzheimer's he made no remark to dispute Cruise's feelings. He never made any remark at all. Cruise took that for approval.
Cruise always felt belittled and powerless as a kid, but he didn't blame Daddy. Nothing in a young person's world was under his control. His father had that iron fist, that razor strap, those chains. That's what fathers were supposed to do. That was the job entrusted to them.
Cruise wanted more than anything to possess the same power his father wielded. He thought for a while he'd never find a way. It wasn't enough to get some woman and raise kids the way his father had done. He wanted to go beyond that narrow scope, break out into the wider world where his actions determined whether men would live or they would die. His father was satisfied with punishment. Cruise wanted to wipe out the lights behind the eyes, take away the years people had coming to them, rob them of the future. In the hierarchy of control, his chosen way was at the pinnacle. He was at the top, man, he was at the zenith, no one was above him.
He was a man made in his father's image.
He could sleep if he honestly believed that.
#
Molly thought her bones were going to rub holes through her skin. If she had more padding she wouldn't be in such horrible pain. Cruise tied her wrists to her ankles before looping the rope around the faucet handles of the tub. He ended by taking the rope up from them to the shower head. Even if she managed to get herself undone from the many knots around the stainless-steel faucet handles, she'd still be fastened to the shower head.
The bath cloths Cruise had wrapped around her wrists and ankles to take some of the friction off her skin were beginning to slip loose. The yellow nylon rope dug into her flesh like a hundred stinging wasps. She cried for a while, cried until she started getting sick to her stomach and had to quit.
She cataloged her surroundings. There was a Rorschach blotch of rust around the lever in the tub that closed off the drain. As she stared at it the shape brought to mind an airplane, a bouquet of flowers, a casket, and a baby in a crib.
There was a bathtub ring. Lannie wasn't any too meticulous in her housework. The tub looked as if it hadn't been scrubbed in a month or more.
The caulk sealing the tub into the wall and the caulk around the square egg-yolk-yellow tiles were growing patches of mildew. A douse of Clorox would cure that, Molly knew, but maybe Lannie didn't. From her biology class study on fungus, Molly remembered how the mold looked under a microscope. Thin and furry like little thousand-legged insects. Truly unappetizing.
There was a constant drip from the tub faucet. It had no recognizable rhythm. Not enough beat, couldn't dance to it. Just an irritating drip, drip, drip that kept the drain wet.
After a while, Molly stopped even hearing it, but she could smell the faint chlorine scent that rose from the drain, and there was a dampness that hung in the air of the tub area.
Around noon Lannie came into the locked bathroom and offered her a drink of water from a coffee mug that had red hearts all over it. Molly drank the tepid fluid gratefully. She begged to be freed so she could use the toilet, but Lannie just shook her stringy hair and left again.
"Are you really going to let me wet all over myself?" Molly yelled.
She heard the key turn in the door. They must have used the bathroom as a holding cell before. She suspected it was Cruise who had put in the new burnished silver doorknob with the outside locking mechanism. Or maybe Lannie locked the old man in here so she could get some peace and quiet. She wouldn't put anything past this family. They were all bent in some unimaginable way.
The next time Lannie came with water, Molly refused to drink. Already her bladder was full to aching and they obviously weren't going to let her out of the tub until Cruise woke. She'd be damned if she'd soil herself. So she wouldn't drink. Or eat. Not that food had been offered her since the burned bacon and scorched eggs Lannie served
up at breakfast.
Molly had another day to think. While Cruise slept in Mexico she'd decided she must be careful or she'd get herself killed. She still thought that, even more so now. The murder of the man at the lake horrified her much more than the Mexican's death. She could still lie to herself about the Mexican. Try to believe Cruise was in his seriously warped way protecting her. But when he killed t
he fat man at the side of the road, she knew for certain that her first suspicions were correct. Cruise killed without motive, randomly, whenever he felt like it, and it meant no more to him than if he were snuffing out a bee crawling over a summer picnic.
Sitting all day in the rub, shifting her weight from one bony hip to the other, she had time to think over everything after she had finished noting the grime around the toilet bowl, the mildew in the caulking, the dead bugs caught in the cover over the fluorescent bar light that hung above the bath mirror.
She dissected her decision to leave home. No use lying to herself. She loved her stodgy father with his old-fashioned ideas of discipline. What a spoiled baby she was for not trying to cooperate with the counselor who advised her to go easy on her dad, try to understand his position, that although he was tough on her it was because he loved her. And because she was all he had left.
She hadn't tried to work it out with him. She thought, well, her life was set into stone, it would never change. She wasn't stimulated by any of the subjects at school, she didn't have any really close friends, she pitied herself for not having a mother, and she gave her father hell for being who and what he was as if he could change more easily than she. She saw now that people probably didn't change once they were adults. Her father was a Marine, and although he had retired, he would always be a Marine, a lifer. He thought kids no different than his boot-camp trainees. They had to be whipped into shape. They had to learn duty and responsibility and how to take orders. Now she knew that was a mistake he'd made, but from the perspective she had in the bathtub of a strange house, captive of a killer, she figured her father's method of child raising, mistaken as it was, seemed highly preferable to the present situation she found herself in. She realized only now how self-centered and selfish she had been. How...immature.
She'd suffer boot camp any day compared to one night on the road with Cruise Lavanic.
And if adults never changed, that meant Cruise was locked into murder as a way of life. His sister was imprisoned by her own circumstances and her deathly fear of her brother. Even the old man was lost, his mind held hostage by deterioration of his brain cells.
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