Trash Sex Magic, page 28
King stretched his back over the oars and pulled for the near shore. It was the best position he could find, with his head turned to watch the shore—that way he didn’t have to look at his parents, or the trailers on the west bank, or his brothers, who were loony with emotion. As long as he didn’t see them, he didn’t feel anything.
He could hear Willy talking in a giddy childlike voice with his mother. “Oh, Mom, I missed you! I missed you! Why did you stay away so long?”
“Well, we didn’t mean to,” Gloria said in that slow, unearthly way. “We got planted.”
“Oh, Mom!” Willy cried again. The boat rocked, as if, behind King, Willy had thrown his arms around her.
Davy shouted excitedly in King’s ear, chanting out the progress of the river as it climbed the far bank and swamped the twins’ house, then the smokehouse, then the Somershoe trailer. Then he shrieked, “They’s burning, King! The trailers is burning!”
King heard Willy soothing his brother. “Somebody must have left a lamp on. It’s okay, Davyboy. The river will put it out.” The river would crush the trailers like Styrofoam cups, King thought, feeling terrible power in the current every time he dipped his oars. He couldn’t spare it a thought.
Carl was silent. King resisted the urge to look back and make sure he was there. He pulled strongly on the oars. This is the strangest feeling. He couldn’t bear it, yet he was feeling it anyway, as if his insides had done something odd, changed shape and color perhaps, and his head was slow to catch up. I can’t think of what to think.
At that moment the boat struck a chunk of old concrete pier and cracked open. Carl took his wife by the shoulders and led her splashing through the last four feet of water to shore. Willy helped Davy disentangle himself from the seat board. It happened so quickly that King was left standing alone, up to his thighs in cold water, the oars in his hands, staring at how gently his father held his mother on the shore.
“I thought you killed her,” he said.
Carl spoke low and slow. “Come out of the river.”
King sloshed to shore. “How—” he said, his chest beginning to heave, the big sobs coming to the surface. He was shivering now. His mother came to him and put her arms around him. King shut his eyes. No fair. He had a right to be angry. No fair. There’s never any sense. They led him up the bank. The cold sobs shook out of him like water off a shaking dog, on and on.
It was Davy who stuck out his thumb on the road and got them a ride into Rimville.
Chapter Fifty
The sky was dumping rain when Mr. Stass stopped running in the weeds outside an apartment complex south of the trailers. He bent over, sides aching, and grabbed for breath. Looking back, he found his view blocked by trees. Were the trailers burning? Two gallons of gas should have done it.
Well, he wouldn’t go back. He’d had to wait nearly an hour for the residents to go away. Nobody’d told him they had a dog. His raincoat was torn and his arm ached where the beast had snatched at him. He would have shot it, only the damned gun was registered. He couldn’t afford to have a witness, not even a dead dog with his bullet in it, right there on the property.
He stumbled out of the reeds into a parking lot. His rental car was parked back at a bar in Berne. To hell with that. He’d have to walk right past that dog again. He might go to the road, hitch a ride into town and get around the dog that way. The rain got colder with every gust. Icy water lashed him in the face.
A loud moan sounded directly over his head. He shied. The moan crescendoed, became a wail coming out of a big metal siren on top of a pole beside him. Fire department? He hoped he’d got ’em burning good. With a sigh he headed back toward the river. He could work his way farther north, away from the fire, maybe drop into a bar in Rimville until he dried off. The siren hooted for two solid minutes and then died miserably.
The rain was now coming almost horizontally, mixed with hail. Pellets of ice whacked his head and plonked on parked cars as he trudged across the lot. Behind him some deeper sounds rang like blows of steel pipe on pavement. He looked back. Under the light of cracked white light-globes, a gleaming doggy form loped toward him. He gasped, wheeled, and bolted north.
The parking lot gave out and he was up to his shoulders in cattails again. Someone behind him was beating on a car with a hammer, lots of hammers. Ahead, the cattails ended. He would be on smooth grass soon. Encouraged, he looked over his shoulder. Two beasts now followed him, one on the blacktop, one scampering over the hoods of parked cars.
He turned, hoping to get across the lawn before they should be through the cattails and able to see him again.
From where he ran he could see that he had two tennis courts and a picnic shelter to get past, then maybe a fence and then a factory building. The factory building appealed to him greatly. A yip behind him made him realize how exposed he was, and he quickly scrambled round a stand of shrubs, stumbled, sprawled. The grass was crisp with ice pellets that cut his palms. He was on his feet again in one jump. He ran.
He sprinted across two tennis courts, another strip of lawn, and a barbed-wire fence that tried to grab him. To his intense relief, there was a gravel alley on the other side of the fence.
He skirted the factory building. It was brick, with long casement windows looking out on the riverbank, and a railed wooden sidewalk. He stopped to try a window. The glass was reinforced with chicken wire, but he could see the latch was loose. As he tried to tear away the chicken wire, he heard a pattering of little hammers on the wooden sidewalk. The first dog came straight for him, bobbing its head and scrabbling its forepaws, so excited was it to reach him at last.
Well, I’ve got you, too, he thought, yanking his pistol out. Tail too long, he thought dreamily, as the beast leaped forward. He aimed, squeezed. Looks like a fox.
With a tremendous clang, the fox met the bullet and hurtled back against the sidewalk railing. It crashed through the railing and disappeared with a splash into the river.
Mr. Stass didn’t wait. He pelted heavily past a footbridge, through the yards of two little warehouses. The railroad tracks closed with his path here. Twice he hopped through the rails and ties only to find them curving back into his path fifty yards on. He came to a street, crossed it, ducked around the back of a darkened supermarket along its bush-covered riverbank, clambered up a steep street, and found himself on the main drag of Rimville, panting, wavering between a little bar on his right and the welcoming terracotta front of the Beard Hotel across the street. His heartbeat made an ungodly noise in his ears. Sounded just like someone pounding the concrete with a piece of pipe.
Pain lashed up his right leg. He snarled, whirling around. There was no way to tell if it was the same fox or a different one that danced around him, every footfall a blow of metal on stone. He took aim with his automatic, missed, aimed again and hit it squarely in the side. There was the same horrific clang. The beast tumbled over and over down the sloping street. Mr. Stass stood panting, holding his leg with his gun hand. Hot blood ran over his fingers. He watched the fox stop rolling, stand, shake itself, and come loping up the street again. Streetlight reflected off a tiny shiny spot on the fox’s side.
He didn’t know how long or far he ran. The foxes herded him away from the buildings, snapping with bear-trap jaws at his calves and ankles, keeping him running. The Beard Hotel’s piazza overlooked the river. He crossed this, scrambled over the low wall at the other end of the piazza, and found a gravel parking lot. He ran through the parking lot with the river on his right and the foxes just off his flank in the road to his left.
To the right, the river boiled. Big tree limbs groped out of its folding currents and were sucked under again. Mr. Stass saw the earthworks of a railway trestle bridge looming up ahead. He started climbing.
It wasn’t much of a bridge. He could run along one of two steel rails a couple of inches wide or take his chances on hitting the horizontal ladder of ties suspended sixty feet over the river. He looked down between his flashing white socks at black water moving toilsomely in whirlpools around the feet of the bridge. He slipped once. The gun fell from his hand. If he had waited to see it splash they would have had him.
Behind him, their feet pattering like the blows of ballpeen hammers on the rails, came the foxes.
Fifty yards later, on the other side of the river, he leaped over the rails and bowled head over heels down the north side of the railway embankment into a park.
He could see a riverboat thirty feet away, riding high over the submerged dock, bouncing against her moorings. His wind was gone. Fear and pain had stimulated him, briefly, to the terrible crossing on the open trestle, but now the last of his strength seeped out of him through the rip in his leg.
He had an inspiration. He staggered forward. When he came to the wooden dock he found it under two and a half feet of water. Only its guardrail showed. He splashed down the submerged dock to the rail, lost his footing, fell into the water, and was hurled immediately against the rail by a swift current. He didn’t bother to try to find the walkway with his feet. He seized the rail and pulled himself hand over hand to the end of the dock. From there he could reach the stair rail that bridged the gap between dock and boat and, from there, the boat’s low rampart.
He lay on the rampart, supported on his left side by the narrow shelf, half in and half out of the water. The water was shatteringly cold. The current pulled at his heavy clothes. An icy spot on his thigh told him where he was losing blood into the river. The foxes danced on the high ground above the water, yipping excitedly. He couldn’t count on them falling, as he had, into water over their heads. Nightmarishly he wondered if they could swim, or even float. The foxes yipped on shore. The big, empty boat slewed and danced against the dock. Stalemate.
His hands were freezing into position where he gripped the rail. With an effort he clambered over the rail into the boat, broke a window in the door to the lower deck, and tumbled into the boat’s parlor. The wind was working with the current to drag the riverboat over on her side. Inside the parlor he rolled on broken glass, feeling at the gash in his leg with cold, numb hands.
There was a jerk as the first forward mooring line pulled its cleat free of the rotting dock. Then the second cleat pulled out. The boat swung drunkenly until its port side was banging against the dock. The aft mooring lines stretched like taffy, rubbing back and forth against the gunwale.
Mr. Stass sat heavily. He lay down and laid his head on the floor. He could hear the wet rope rubbing on wood clear on the other side of the boat. The sound echoed deeply through the twin cavities of the riverboat’s hull. It was like a bullfrog’s voice, a remarkably peaceful sound. He closed his eyes. Warmth crept over him. He missed the snapping of the aft mooring lines. The boat drifted rapidly downstream, slowly righting herself, bumping shoulders with the trestle bridge abutments, shoving through the spiralling crowd of tree limbs in the whirlpools, and hanging up by her twin hulls on the brink of the dam.
From the Rainbow Ballroom at the Beard Hotel, the Delta Queen was clearly visible, a white building suddenly erected on the brink of the dam. Gelia Somershoe pressed her nose to the window and framed her eyes with cupped hands to shut out the candlelight in the ballroom.
Driven from behind by ever-rising water, the riverboat tipped over slowly, slid forward on her hulls a few feet and hung up again on her wooden paddlewheel. Vane by vane the paddlewheel came apart. The last vane broke. The wheel gave. The Queen shot ahead, skidded over the dam, buried her nose in the roiling water below and backflopped. Glass and white banisters puffed away like crumbs.
Gelia thought perhaps the boat was too big a bite for the flood, but soon she realized the backflop had loosened all the Queen’s joints. The water hurried over the dam, gathered itself behind the old boat, and pushed. The Queen floated again. In a very few seconds she had drifted thirty yards downstream and broken into pieces against the Route 64 bridge.
Chapter Fifty-One
Mink circled the silver perimeter of the chain-link fence around the construction office trailer. There was no way she could squeeze her four-footed body under it. Something in there called to her. Mink had never taken orders from anyone in her whole life, but the silent voice from the trailer dragged her irresistibly forward. At the base of the fence she crouched, looked up, and whined. Seven feet is a long way to climb on paws. She backed up. Eyeing the fence a moment, she coiled herself. Then she sprang. Five feet up she hit the fence. Expertly she put her paws into its diamond-shaped gaps the way a cat or a child would, and climbed the rest of the way to the top. The fence had a nice broad pipe running long the top. She ran along the pipe, slipping in the rain and flattening her ears at thunder-cracks, until she was near a stack of lumber on the inside of the fence. From the fence she dropped to the lumber, then to the ground inside.
The screen door would be a bit more of a problem. She was very reluctant to leave the shelter of her new coat. Well, it would have to be done. Her nose couldn’t tell her what was going on inside. Alexander, whiskey, beer, that was all right, but Cracker was in there, too, and something gamey. Who had called her? She snapped her jaws in frustration. Her paws dug into the mud. Slowly, with creeping horror at the itch buried half an inch under her skin, she wriggled inside out. Naked now and shivering in the rain, she ran to the screen door of the trailer and yanked at the handle.
It was locked.
Wailing, Mink hammered on the aluminum door. It was no good. She had to get inside, she had to. Snivelling, she circled the trailer until she found a long two-by-four. With this she pried the screen door open, then screamed with frustration again when she realized the inner door of the trailer was locked, too. She backed up and pelted forward, slipping in the muddy approach to the trailer, ramming the lock with the two-by-four. The impact knocked the two-by-four from her hands and sent her sliding across the gravelly mud.
A third blow sent the knob and lock shooting out of the door into the room inside. Mink climbed the wooden steps painfully and, putting her small hand through the doorknob hole, felt for the latch. Click. She let herself into the warmth and fluorescent glare of the office trailer.
The first thing she smelled was Cracker. Then she saw him. Asprawl across the chair nearest the door, he smelled feral and sour. She laid a hand on his shoulder. His skin was paper-dry, hard, pebbly, and slick. Dark blotches like shadows lay across his shoulder.
He still wore his overalls, lying draped over the canvas chair. His head dangled oddly over one shoulder. One leg of the overalls flopped empty, and a wad of folded papers lay fallen on the floor. She crouched beside the chair. Cracker’s face was no longer human. Drunken snores wheezed out of the hard slit nostrils. Spittle collected on the tips of the fangs and dripped, smelling sourly of beer and whiskey, to the floor.
She stood up, heart thumping, and pressed one hand against her mouth. Her eye fell on the papers on the floor and she took them up, feeling them and sniffing them. Two days ago she would have stepped right over stray papers, never even have touched them. The world had changed, or she had.
A warm hand curled round her naked ankle. She started and looked up. The papers fell to the floor again.
Alexander was naked to the waist, bound to the floor by all his toes. His jeans hung in shreds around his waist. His body went up and up. He crouched, his neck bent against the ceiling. The room was littered with his roots.
He said in that unrefusable voice, “Hello.”
To Alexander, Mink was a green flame full of curling, convulsing threads of light. He gathered his attention from all its many points and focused on her. “What’s the matter?”
She just stared at him, her eyes getting bigger and bigger. One root had already curled around her ankle.
He pointed at it. “Better move. I can’t watch all of it at once.” Even as he spoke the root took another turn around her ankle and then inched slowly higher, tightening as it swelled.
She leaped away, hopping on one foot as she disentangled herself. “Are you going to be like that now?”
“Like what?” He cleared his throat. “I am going to be—like what?”
“The other one. Before they cut it down.”
A long time ago in another life, Alexander had watched a big tree come down, not far from here. His whole body cringed along its length, the roots retracting, his belly going cold.
The child crept closer. She shivered. To Alexander’s strange new eyes there was something wrong with the crackling lines of light in her flame. Inside her small body the green fire jumped and crackled and shorted out against her skin.
Mink knew that she was at last in the center of the place she had been looking for. She knew what was supposed to happen now. She was supposed to climb up in the tree and disappear for a while, the way Rae used to do.
The idea terrified her. She felt she was already vanishing, losing her shape, being eaten from the inside out.
She shrank from coming any closer to Alexander.
Her gaze traveled up his body, up and up to the ceiling where his neck and shoulders brushed the top, bent over. His dreads hung over his face like black roots, half-hiding it. His real roots cascaded away to the walls.
She pranced on tingly feet. It felt like standing in front of the power plant at the Berne dam. I don’t want to be here!
Alexander was having trouble focusing on her. The colored flame drew him, as Rae might draw him. She was cracked inside, or disconnected, or something. He could mend that, perhaps—
Mink saw him reach for her. She skipped frantically out of range. This put Cracker between her and the door. Everywhere underfoot she tripped over yards of Alexander spilling across the room. His roots were beginning to climb the walls.
