Fear itself elp-2

by Jonathan Nasaw

  The first time the devil’s face popped up, it gave her a start, no denying that. But a start was all it gave her-she yelped and clutched her hand to her chest, then laughed weakly, same as most adults would have.

  As for the tot, it was probably the first time he’d actually managed to scare somebody; he circled around the row and came around again, and again, and again, and each time Dorie laughed a little harder, not at the boy, but at the absurdity of it all.

  “You sure you don’t want me to tin the little bastard?” asked Pender as the kid came around for the fourth time.

  “Are you kidding?” she replied. “The little bastard is a messenger from God.”

  “From God, eh? And what’s the message?”

  “The message is, Dorie Bell, you’ve wasted two-thirds of your life being afraid of being afraid. Why not unpucker, and enjoy the ride?”

  “Now, there’s an advertising slogan for you,” said Pender. “United Airlines: Unpucker and Enjoy the Ride!”

  3

  A hot shower, a shave (but not the scalp: Simon had decided to let the stubble sprout, lest Grandfather Childs be tempted to make another unscheduled appearance), a good breakfast, a handful of crosstops, and a stout joint, and Simon was himself again. He’d been through some rough moments, what with the death of his mother and all, and for a while there he might have been closer to the precipice than he cared to think about, but that was all behind him. This morning’s grandfather sighting was only a flashback, he told himself. Too many drugs lately-or at least too many of the wrong drugs in the wrong combinations. From now on he’d be sticking to crosstops and weed, the former for energy and clarity of purpose, the latter for imagination and creativity-all of which would be required for the game.

  As would handcuffs and either a scalpel or a narrow-bladed knife-at any rate, something with a pointed, thrusting edge, as nasty-looking as it was sharp, to go along with the box cutter he’d picked up at Conroy Circle. As he searched the house, it occurred to Simon that if he wanted to hear Pender pleading for Skairdykat and Skairdykat pleading for Pender, then he’d have to leave both their mouths free. Which meant at least part of the game had to take place in the cellar, where, if pleading turned to screaming, the screams would be less likely to be heard down by the canal. Later in the afternoon, he decided, he would bring one of the kitchen chairs down to the cellar-for now, he would continue to search for the handcuffs, and further refine his game plan.

  Pain had been no stranger to Linda Abruzzi in recent months, but she’d never known agony like this. Catch the snake first, worry about holding on to it later, was easier said than done.

  Linda’s sense of the passage of time was necessarily vague. It felt as if she’d been lying on her side at the foot of the stairs, holding the coral at arm’s length and listening to Childs’s footsteps overhead for days now (whenever it sounded as if he was approaching the kitchen, she would replace her gag and hide both the coral and the parted rope behind her back), but the dim cellar light told her it was still Thursday afternoon.

  The living room television came on. From Linda’s current location, she couldn’t make out the program. Sounded as if it might be Rosie or Oprah or Sally Jesse Raphael-at any rate, it was a female voice with an excitable audience, and the footsteps had stopped for a while.

  No rest for Linda, though. And as if the pain, the thirst, and the hunger weren’t bad enough, she had to fight the cramps that for the last few hours had been hopscotching unpredictably up and down her arm-now the thumb, now the shoulder, now the wrist, now the elbow. If she could have changed hands, she would have, but she couldn’t trust the benumbed fingers of the left one anymore.

  More insidious than the pain and cramping was the almost hallucinatory exhaustion. She’d been awake since yesterday morning. And unlike her pain, she knew, the exhaustion could well prove fatal. The coral was no longer thrashing, but neither had it gone back to sleep. Instead it was waiting, biding its time. And every so often, it tried her-a powerful, quicksilver-smooth shifting of the bands of muscle beneath the scales; she would tighten her grip and it would relax again. Waiting. Biding.

  Just a little bit longer, she promised it in her mind. And when it’s all over, I’ll let you go. You can live here under the house forever and I’ll bring you all the fat mice you can eat, and a hamster every Christmas.

  The television fell silent; the footsteps began again. By the time Childs actually opened the cellar door and started down the steps, Linda had been visualizing the scenario for so long that it was almost as if it had already happened. He trots down the steps, she plays possum, he bends over her, she thrusts the coral at his eye, his neck, his-

  The footsteps came halfway down the stairs, then receded; the cellar door closed again. The disappointment was crushing. Linda hadn’t been willing to admit to herself how whipped she really was until she thought her ordeal was nearly over; now she didn’t know how much longer she’d be able to hang on.

  Oh, you scumbag, she called after him in her mind-get back here, you shitsucking scum-

  The coral, perhaps sensing a moment of inattention, gathered itself and lunged for freedom. Linda’s grip tightened reflexively, but she had it around the midsection now instead of behind the head; as she brought her left hand over to grab it higher, she felt a sensation like two needles sinking into the back of her left wrist.

  4

  It must have been quite a sight. The middle-aged couple, huge man with a Panama hat and a broken arm, big woman with a long brown braid and a broken nose, all but skipping down the ramp into the terminal.

  “We did it!” Dorie exulted, still flushed with the glory of having licked her last phobia.

  “You did it,” said Pender. He was happy for her, of course, and not unmindful of his contribution, but mostly he was just glad to be out of goddamn coach. One first-class flight with Sid had been enough to spoil him forever.

  Normally, Sid would have been waiting at the curb in front of the baggage claim. There are friends, and then there are friends who pick you up at the airport-Sid was the latter to Pender, and vice versa. Pender hadn’t asked him this time, though-he wasn’t sure Sid was still talking to him, after the stunt he’d pulled at SFO last Friday. So after they picked up Dorie’s baggage, the suitcase and footlocker-and mirabile dictu, both arrived safely, sliding down the designated carousel in the designated airport-Pender hailed a cab.

  The ride from Virginia to Maryland was Dorie’s first experience with honest-to-God autumn foliage. Pender got a kick out of watching her-the expression on her face was MasterCard-ad priceless: not so much that of a kid in a candy shop as a teenage boy in a whorehouse.

  Pender turned tour guide for the last leg of the drive, pointing out Civil War sites, detailing the history of the C amp;O. At the bottom of Tinsman’s Lock Road, a canopy of yellow-leaved box elders shut out the sky. Dorie had never seen light like that before-where she came from, bowered light was always green.

  Pender pointed out his driveway, warned the cabbie about the ruts. They jounced the last few hundred yards. Then, as the driver carried the luggage to the front doorstep, Dorie told Pender she wanted to see the canal while it was still daylight.

  “Follow that path around the side of the house,” Pender told her, “and keep going downhill until you see a woman in a bloodstained nightgown looking for a redheaded baby. I’ll catch up as soon as I pay the man.”

  Phasmophobia-fear of ghosts. Despite her protestations last night, Dorie didn’t have it, had never had it-after all, who ever heard of a ghost wearing a mask?

  The path was steep and narrow; it wound down through a dense wood, then opened out suddenly on a scene Dorie longed to paint with all her heart, and doubted she could ever capture. Pender had been right-she would need to add a few new oils to her palette to get it all: the formal strips of color in the foreground, emerald green lawn, malachite green water, reddish brown canal wall built of rough-hewn, fitted sandstone blocks; the particulate air, the long bl
ack shadows, the horizontal light streaming in from dead ahead, but cut into dazzling vertical columns by the single row of flaming trees towering behind the towpath running along the raised berm of the far bank.

  Impossible, though, to capture all that in a plein air, then paint in any of the detail-the footbridge, the miniature waterfall tumbling down the flume, the split-rail wooden fences, never mind the joggers and dog walkers on the towpath-before the light faded entirely.

  Still, wouldn’t it be something to try! If the weather held, she could set up her easel in the same spot a few days in a row, paint in one section at a-

  “Well? Did I lie?” Pender caught up with Dorie as she mentally began cutting the scene into horizontal sections-the landscape defined its own verticality.

  “It’s beautiful, Pen. I can’t wait to paint it. Or try, anyway. Where’s the nearest art supply store?”

  “We’ll have to consult the yellow pages on that, scout,” said Pender as they started back up the path to the house. “The last time I bought any art supplies, they came in a Crayola box with a built-in sharpener.”

  “I loved that built-in sharpener,” said Dorie.

  “Me too.”

  When they reached the house, Pender nodded toward the porch. “Let’s go in that way-I want you to see the panorama.”

  “Technically, a panorama is an unbroken view or a series of pictures representing a continuous scene,” Dorie explained as she trudged up the steps after him.

  Pender stopped on the landing and turned back to her as if he had something important to say. Actually, he was just winded from the climb. “Did anybody ever tell you you were extremely argumentative?”

  “Yes. I always took it as a compliment.”

  The view from the porch was spectacular, Dorie had to admit. It occurred to her, as Pender unlocked the sliding glass door, that she could paint from up here in the morning, then go down to the canal in the afternoon. It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it, she thought, following Pender into the house. God, I love my work.

  5

  Simon was ready. He’d been ready for hours, fussing around the house, watching TV, smoking a joint out on the porch, refining the game. At the last minute, he changed his mind about taking a chair down to the cellar beforehand. He was halfway down the stairs with it when it dawned on him that if Pender did enter the house through the porch door, he was as likely to head for the kitchen as the bedroom-best to leave everything as is.

  Simon did an about-face on the steps. He was still in the kitchen when he heard a car coming down the drive. He raced into the living room, peeked out through the drawn blinds, saw the cab pulling up behind the Geo. He saw Pender climb out-nice hat, duude; wha’ happen, somebody break your arm? Then he saw a second figure climbing out.

  Simon’s heart dropped-please let it be a cab-share-and when he recognized Dorie Bell, his jaw dropped as well. Last time he’d seen her, she was naked in the galvanized tub in the basement of 2500 and he was holding her head underwater. He knew she hadn’t drowned, but as the only participant ever to have survived the fear game, she had somehow slipped into another dimension of Simon’s consciousness, neither dead nor living; he wasn’t quite as surprised to see her as he would have been to see, say, Wayne Summers-but it was a near thing.

  As the cabdriver dropped the suitcase by the front door and went back for the footlocker, Simon raced into Pender’s bedroom, thinking furiously. Dorie’s presence wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Snatch her first, put a gun to her head, he’d have himself a bargaining chip. Think Edward G. Robinson: Freeze, G-man, or I blow her brains out. Hero cop like Pender, he’ll freeze all right. He’ll do anything I tell him to do-she’s his sweetie pie now. Some hero: he saves ’em and screws ’em.

  And as he closed the bedroom door behind him, breathing hard, as engaged and excited as a soldier going into combat, Simon realized that having a second shot at Dorie was the only thing that could possibly have improved what was already promising to be the ultimate fear game. Not just a triple-header, but a chance to erase his only loss. Because when he was finished with Dorie (and this time he would insist on having a piece of what Pender had been enjoying, if it took him all night to get it in), the final score in the fear game would be Childs: 27, World: Zip-and that was without counting Zap, any of the old folks, any of the cops, or what’shis-name, Gloria’s husband, the Chinese guy in the red bikini underwear.

  Linda spat out her gag. Somehow she’d held on to the coral; she had it behind the neck again with her good right hand. She told herself not to panic-it hadn’t gotten her that badly. Small mouth, short fangs, Reilly had said-they have to chew their way in. And hadn’t Reilly also said the venom was only borderline lethal and that there was always a delayed reaction. Or had he said often rather than always? Or only sometimes? And how delayed-how much time did she have?

  Related question: what was going on upstairs? Linda could hear Childs running from the kitchen to the living room, then into the bedroom wing. Was Pender home? She hadn’t heard his footsteps yet-and she would have, heavy as he was. Which meant it might be too late to save herself, but she could still save him.

  How? Concentrate-never mind the pain. Use it to focus. You wait until you hear a door, a heavy tread. Then you scream, “Pender, watch out! Pender, Childs is here!” If you can hear him upstairs, he can hear you downstairs.

  But what if Childs already has a gun on Pender? Then all you’ve done is blow your only advantage-surprise.

  No, you have another advantage: he’s already told you he plans to blind Pender while you watch. So you know you have time; he’s not going to shoot Pender as soon as he comes in. You also know he has to come back down to the cellar eventually. Wouldn’t it be smarter to-

  But by then the burning sensation had begun traveling up Linda’s arm: when it reached her elbow, she understood that waiting for Childs to come to her was no longer a viable strategy.

  6

  As Pender crossed the living room, heading for the vestibule-the bags were still out on the front doorstep-he saw the basket of mail on the table beside the answering machine. The letter on top caught his eye. Noble J. Heinz-Ida’s lawyer. The Judge, everybody in La Farge called him. An imposing, wintry man with arctic blue eyes and a mane of snowy hair. Always wore Clarence Darrow galluses and navy serge suits as dark as blue can be, and still be blue. But why would the Judge be writing him? He decided the baggage could wait.

  “Where’s the bathroom?”

  Pender glanced up from opening the envelope. It was good to see Dorie standing in his living room. She was looking mighty fine, too. Her cheeks were rosy from the nippy air, the discoloration around her eyes had faded to a faint yellowish green, and the blue eyes themselves were as bright as if she were high. Maybe she was, thought Pender-maybe landscapes were her drug of choice. “First door on the right or third door on the left.”

  Inside Judge Heinz’s envelope was a second envelope, with Pender’s name written in Ida’s Palmer Method handwriting. He opened it with a sharp pang of dread and unfolded a sheet of her familiar lavender stationery, so thin it was almost transparent.

  May 29, 1997

  Dear Eddie,

  If you’re reading this, that means I’m gone.

  I’ve arranged to have some things sent on to you. The family papers and photo albums, Mom’s jewelry, a few knickknacks from the Cortland house, et cetera.

  Everything else has been left to the Down Syndrome Foundation. Judge Heinz is handling the estate, which he says is an attorney’s dream. Most of my assets, including the title to the house, have already been transferred into a trust for the DSF, so Uncle Sam is going to reap precious little out of the transaction, which warms the cockles.

  Cleland’s is handling the auction, and Seland’s Funeral Home will haul my carcass up to the crematorium in La Crosse. They have strict instructions not to bring anything back. No tarted-up corpse in an overpriced casket for me, no cremains in an overpriced urn. Ashes are ashes a
nd dust is dust, and it is ghoulish superstition to treat them as if they were anything else.

  As for a funeral or memorial service, you know how I feel about that sort of thing. I didn’t bury Walt, I didn’t bury Stanley, and I won’t have you burying me. If you want to, you can raise a glass in my memory, but don’t go off on a bender on my account.

  I guess that’s about it, except to tell you that I love you dearly, as did Walt and Stanley, and that no big sister was ever prouder of her little brother than I am of you.

  Your Loving Sister,

  Ida

  Pender was still trying to digest all that-in fact, he was still trying to digest the first sentence-when Dorie appeared in the doorway leading to the bedroom wing. “Pen?”

  He looked up. The high color of a moment ago was gone, leached from her face. “Dorie, what-”

  As Dorie shuffled reluctantly into the room, chin in the air, hands in the air, Pender saw first a pistol barrel against the back of her neck, then a hand yanking her tightly by the roots of her braid, then a bald Simon Childs behind her, turning her, angling her body toward Pender, to keep it between Pender and himself.

  “You move, she dies,” said Childs.

  Everybody dies, thought Pender, letting Ida’s letter slip from his fingers; the flimsy lavender sheet fluttered slowly to the floor.

  Twelve steep wooden steps, each with a lip that overhung the step below. Wall and railing on the left, ascending; sheer drop to the cellar floor on the right. Holding the thrashing coral aloft in her right hand, Linda grabbed the railing with her damaged left hand and hauled herself to a standing position. The pain shooting up her arm was…excellent. First rate.

  By raising her left knee, she managed to lift her floppy left foot high enough to clear the first tread. When the sole was planted firmly on the bottommost step she leaned forward, put her weight on it, and by straightening the left leg she managed to drag the trailing right foot up to the step, though not without banging her toes on the overhanging lip.