They were almost in front of the house, now.
“I don’t know,” Ellen said. “I just think…”
Then both of them saw the woman. She was behind the front door; she could see them, they knew. But she was looking straight ahead, at the road.
Gary and Ellen watched her for a few seconds.
“Let’s go, Gary.”
“Yeah, I guess,” he said, and, surprising Ellen, touched the accelerator gently and rolled past the house at a safe, slow speed.
She looked questioningly at him. After a moment, and with effort, he grinned. “Don’t wanna disturb the lady in her meditations, do we?” He paused a moment, then went on, “Road ends up here. We’ll stop there. We’ll have some fuckin’ fun. That all right with you?” He chuckled.
And yes, it was quite all right, quite, quite all right. Perfect.
And Gary again brought the car to a quick halt. He turned the ignition off, looked around. There were sunlit yellow fields to either side of the road and, ahead, and to the west, at the horizon, a small, dark pine forest.
“Nice, huh?” Gary said.
A honeybee, logy in the cool air, bounced against the windshield a few times.
“Can we roll the windows up?” Ellen said.
“You roll ‘em up. I gotta drain the lizard.” He opened his door. “I’ll be right back. You can get those clothes off in the meantime.” He nodded at Ellen’s green, bulky sweater and white Levi’s. Ellen grabbed the bottom of the sweater with both hands, lifted, exposed her ample breasts, hesitated. She felt his eyes on her, enjoyed it, then pulled the sweater over her head. “Like that?” she said, and threw the sweater into the back seat.
“Yeah,” he said, “like that. But don’t get started without me.” He got out of the car, leaned over, stared, grinning at her breasts for a long moment. “Keep ‘em warm,” he said, turned, and walked off, into the fields.
Ellen waited. When only the back of his head was visible above the tall weeds, she unbuttoned the Levi’s, slid the zipper down, pushed the pants, and her underwear, to below her knees. She hesitated, certain she had heard something on the road behind the car. She turned, looked. Nothing. She turned back, slipped out of the pants and underwear, threw them into the back seat. She sat quietly for a moment, then glanced to her left. Hurry up! she wanted to call, wonderfully, ecstatically aware of the moisture collecting between her legs, of the warm, tingling sensation in her breasts. She turned slightly to her right, closed her eyes, waited, body bent forward, hands between her thighs. Hurry up! she thought.
She heard the car door open, opened her eyes.
“Well,” she whispered, “it’s about fucking time!” She started to turn to face the door. Stopped. Enjoyed the warm hand on her breast. “That feels good,” she murmured. She closed her eyes again, felt the other hand come around and cup her right breast. “That feels so good, Gary.”
“Gotta drain the lizard,” she heard.
The hands left her breasts, pushed her head gently toward the passenger door, descended to her waists, lifted her, set her down so she was lying on her stomach on the car seat. She spread her legs happily.
“Gotta drain the lizard,” she heard again. She wished vaguely that he’d stop saying it; it almost spoiled the mood.
“Do it, Gary!”
And Gary screamed—a harsh, tortured, fear-ridden scream. A scream at a distance. From the fields.
Ellen froze.
The hands left her.
“Gary?” she whispered.
She heard the screams repeated.
She scrambled to a sitting position, instinctively reached for her clothes on the back seat, saw a mound of dark hair through the back window.
Another scream. Closer. Louder.
Naked, clothes in hand, she threw her door open and got out of the car.
“Oh Jesus, Jesus!” Gary shouted, and screamed again.
Ellen pulled her sweater on.
“Gary?” she called. “Gary, what’s the matter, Gary?” What’s happening here? Oh, God, what’s happening here!
Gary appeared suddenly at the side of the road. His pants were bunched up at his ankles. He was clutching his right thigh and half hopping, half-stumbling toward her. Ellen could see blood around his hands.
“Gary! My God, Gary—“
“I been bit. Somethin’ bit me bad!” And he collapsed.
Ellen ran to him, bent over, pulled his hands away from his thigh. She screamed. Stood. Ran to the car, hesitated, looked back. Gary had regained consciousness, had pushed himself to his feet, was stumbling toward her. She watched him a moment, unable to move. She ran to him, helped him to the car, put him in the driver’s seat.
“Gary, someone…someone—“
“Damn you, bitch! Get in the fuckin’ car! I gotta get to a fuckin’ doctor!”
She ran around to the passenger side, noted, briefly that, like Gary—whose pants had come off completely when he’d struggled to his feet—she was naked from the waist down, though, more briefly, how foolish they’d look if they were stopped, and got in.
Gary started the car and executed a quick K-turn. He slammed the accelerator to the floor.
Three miles south of the house, on a particularly narrow stretch of road, Gary again lost consciousness. Ellen screamed and watched helplessly as the gully came up at them. She thought how slow the whole process—Death—really was.
*****
Rachel put her hands on the sides of the chair, locked her arms, pressed down. Well, at least the chair didn’t creak and shiver—it would probably hold her.
She adjusted the chair under the back window, checked the alignment. She picked up the hammer and a nail from the floor, put one foot on the chair seat, paused. She was forgetting something, she realized. But what? She thought a moment. The curtain rod. She had to get that measurement right before she put any nails into the window frame. She took her foot off the chair seat and glanced around the room. The curtain rod, the curtain, all those little fixtures; she’d laid them out somewhere earlier that morning. Right here in the living room, she thought.
She crossed to her desk, flicked the light on, studied the room carefully. No curtain, no curtain road, no fixtures.
“Damn,” she whispered.
Then she remembered. Paul had laid everything out for her the previous evening. On the kitchen table. But she’d been in there to fix coffee earlier, and to get the chair, and she didn’t remember…
She took a couple of steps to her right. It was all there, she saw, on the kitchen table. Her coffee cup, too.
She sighed. This was becoming routine—forgetting. Especially in the morning, especially within an hour or so after waking, before she had been able to build a good fire in the fireplace. Yesterday morning it had been, Did I have breakfast, yet? And the morning before that, when she had been upstairs putting clear plastic over the bedroom windows, it had been, Did I build a fire? The question had gnawed at her while she worked and, eventually, she had to go downstairs to answer it.
She went into the kitchen, gathered the curtain, rod and fixtures into her arms, and went back to the window. She set the curtain and fixtures on the floor and, rod in hand, stepped up on the chair.
She found, as she worked, that she was humming. It pleased her. It meant something—that she was contented, happy. And the little things, like the memory loss, and that dull ache in her breasts and around her thighs—an ache that had been with her for a week or so—had not altered that contentment. There were even times that, inexplicably, it all seemed interconnected—the ache, the memory loss, the contentment (magic). As if one followed the other in succession.
She did not recognize the tune she hummed. It was certainly a very simple melody; it could, she thought, have easily been a Gregorian chant.
She finished putting the rod up, stepped off the chair, and checked the alignment again. Satisfied the rod was straight, she picked up the curtain and got back up on the chair.
She heard the
front door open and looked toward it, startled. Paul appeared in the living room doorway.
“Hi,” he said, took his coat off, threw it on the kitchen table, came over and put his hands on her waist.
“Hi,” she said. “What are you doing home so early?”
“Early?” He lifted her a few inches and set her down on the floor.
She turned to face him and he kissed her softly on the forehead. “Yes,” she said. “It can’t be much past twelve.”
“Twelve?” No. It’s closer to four, Rachel.” He checked his wristwatch. “Three-fifty-six, to be exact.”
“It can’t be, Paul. I mean, I just woke up a couple hours ago.”
“You slept pretty late, didn’t you?” It was an accusation.
“No, Paul. I woke up at seven-thirty. I remember looking at the alarm clock.”
He chuckled softly. “Do you mean you’ve misplaced, what…four hours?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Apparently, I have.”
He stepped away from her and gave her a slow once-over, as if what she had done with the four hours was printed somewhere on her body.
“You’ve been outside,” he said. “I can tell you that.”
She looked questioningly at him. “Outside? No. I haven’t.”
“Look at your arms.”
“My arms?”
“Look at them.”
She held her arms up.
Paul said, “You didn’t have those scratches this morning.”
“My God,” she whispered. “I don’t remember…I have no idea—“
She was wearing one of Paul’s flannel shirts with the sleeves rolled. Short, narrow, barely visible scratches crisscrossed the outside of both forearms.
“It’s some kind of rash, Paul. It has to be. I did not go outside today.”
“You must have…”
“Wait a minute,” she interrupted. An image had flashed through her mind—sunlit fields, the house, a long distance off, cut by tall grasses—vaguely, as if she were seeing it through a clouded fish-eye lens. “Wait a minute,” she repeated, the image reappearing, clearer. She smiled. “Yes, I remember now. I woke up, I got dressed, I went outside.” She paused again. “I went down that path. Yes, I went down it, then I went into those fields to the north. And then…” Another pause.
“Yes?” Paul coaxed.
“And then I…I went to sleep. I took a nap. I went outside and took a damned nap.”
Paul laughed shortly again. “It was pretty cold today, do you remember that?”
“No,” she answered at once. “No, I remember being very warm, very comfortable.”
“Well, that’s okay, too,” Paul said, stepped forward, and put his arms around her. He drew his head back a little. “What’s this?” he said, and gently coaxed something out of her hair; he held it up for her to see. “A burr,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” she said, and put her head against his shoulder. “Paul,” she said, “I’m a little frightened, not remembering like this. Something’s wrong. Maybe I’ve got, I don’t know, Alzheimer’s or something. I’m frightened. And, at the same time, I feel so happy. So contented.”
“Well, then, that’s all that should concern you,” Paul said. “Just…enjoy, that’s all. So what if your memory’s been a little fuzzy. It’s just this house, the land everything works its…”
Magic!
“…magic on you, that’s all. Your mind, your emotions are making a big adjustment, and I, for one, am very pleased by it.”
She said nothing.
He stepped away from her. “Now, let me take you out to the car and show you what I got in town today. For one, we’ll have no more cold mornings. I got one of those portable electric heaters, if the generator can handle it. Only cost 30 bucks, on sale. And I got a couple gallons of bottled water—we’ll use it only for coffee, okay? And—“
She listened, bewildered, at first, as he explained his day’s activities, then, as he led her outside, still talking—nonstop, so unlike him—she became aware that she was being caught up in his enthusiasm, almost hypnotized by it. By the time they had brought the heater, the water, a heavy quilt, a dozen paperback books, mostly mysteries, two fifty-pound bags of rock salt, and twenty pounds of various meats (“A lot of it should keep pretty well in the fruit cellar, Rachel.”) into the house—she noted that she was no longer troubled, no longer frightened, that she even felt a bit foolish remembering the way she’d talked, and a little embarrassed, like an adolescent who, trying hard to act like an adult, throws a tantrum and reflects on it later.
And after they’d put everything away and Paul was seated at the table and waiting for his dinner, Rachel, at the stove, said matter-of-factly, “Sorry for the way I acted earlier. You can imagine the way I felt.”
“Yes, I can,” Paul said. “I certainly can. But that sort of thing happens to all of us every now and then. It’s nothing to get upset about.”
Rachel agreed that it did indeed happen to everyone, though she could think of none else it had happened to, and that she was no longer upset, that she was, and had been, and would be, quite comfortable. Thanks to him.
Chapter Twenty-Four
November 8
It was the first time in weeks that Paul had left her alone at the house. He had said he would the night before; “We’re going to have to restock the cupboards and that means I’ll have to go into town tomorrow. It would be helpful if you’d stay here, Rachel. I know it’s asking a lot, but I think it would be…for the best.”
She had, surprising herself, given him no argument. HE would leave her alone at the house, she would stay alone, and that was that. She would merely be certain all the doors and windows were locked. Very simple. No one could get in, then.
Paul had left without waking her. Part of his plan, she supposed (if he still felt he needed one, and he probably did: he would always be protective of her. It was only natural and forgivable and chauvinistic and sweet). God, she loved him. And the changes that had come over him. His temper had all but disappeared, for instance (how he used to scare her with that temper). He was more talkative, sillier, perhaps (an image of the lopsided pyramids came to her), but that was all right—no one needed to spend his life in deadly, smothering seriousness, unwilling to laugh or to say stupid things on occasion; such people were obviously afraid of themselves.
She wasn’t sure, however, about his lovemaking, about the direction it had taken in the last couple of weeks. For a while, a few days, she remembered, it had been unbelievably good. They had shared each other, their bodies, their love, rather than taken from another. But there was little or nothing of that sharing left. Something had taken its place. For both of them. Greed, maybe, though that word was, somehow, too civilized, too accusatory, too judgmental. It only scraped the edges, wore away the protective layer. It was impossible to define or even to know what lay beneath. Something very…powerful. And that, she knew, accounted for her aching thighs, her aching pelvis, her aching breasts—the power he had brought to their lovemaking. The power she had returned. As if some freedom had suddenly been given to them, a freedom without boundaries. And they were using it.
They. It was that reality which set aside much of her uneasiness about his new lovemaking. Because she had quickly reciprocated. Looked forward to it. Needed it.
She glanced at the old tub and thought how ugly it was, that the water smelled bad, like a sewer (“It’s well water, Rachel. Well water always smells like that.”), that the room had always been so dismal and unappealing. And she thought, also, how logically, how objectively, she was looking at it, as if she were a visitor or an interior designer and didn’t really have to live here.
She slipped out of her nightgown and faced the mirror above the sink. For a few seconds, she found herself preoccupied by a web of thin brown lines near the lower right hand corner of the mirror. Then she saw her breasts reflected and she smiled. It was a satisfied smile. These breasts pleased Paul, and they pleased her, too. She cupped them
gently in her hands; her smile vanished. She studied her face, enjoyed the quiet pleasure registered on it, the quiet power.
She let her hands fall slowly, turned, bent over the tub, put her fingers in the water.
She heard a door being opened somewhere in the house and she cocked her head slowly; had she locked all the doors? she wondered.
She got into the tub.
Jesus, the water smelled bad. “It’s well water, Rachel. It’s got sulfur in it.”
Had she locked all the doors, yet? she wondered distractedly, as if locked doors didn’t really matter.
She heard something moving slowly and quietly across the living room.
“Higgins?” she called. “Higgins,” she whispered.
Highly sulfurous. It smelled bad. And it caressed her so lovingly, as if it actually could caress her, and wanted to.
She let her body relax, let her eyes close, felt her eyelids fluttering, the sides of her lips draw upward.
Her hands moved freely over her body, paused momentarily at her breasts, pressed lightly, lovingly, powerfully, as if they were extensions of the water, as she was.
And then her hands fell to her belly (a child would be there, eventually), to her thighs, between them, and then inside, and loved the water moving in a little, wanting to move in.
Highly sulfurous. “It smells bad, Paul.”
“Just full of minerals, like I said.”
She felt her arms relax; they moved slowly to the water’s surface. Floated. She let her eyes relax. They opened halfway.
She felt the water being moved. Felt the small warm hands on her, the thin fingers probing gently, wonderingly, powerfully.
*****
Mike Raspberry muttered a quick, squeaking obscenity. He was a big man—“Moose” in his high school days—and the obscenity, made high-pitched by fear, did not please him. He tried again, forcing his voice down. The result was a guttural, rumbling, “Fuckin’ shit!” which pleased him a lot, and even eased his fear a little.
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