Once more using the hand not bunched around the red bicycle grip, he picked up the oxygen mask, sucked deeply, then dropped it back in his lap. He grinned — an unspeakable grin of complicity that revealed gums the color of iodine.
‘She good? That little horrrrrr of yours? She must be good to have kept my son prisoner in that nasty little trailer where she lives. And then along comes you even before the worms had finished with my boy’s eyes. Does her cunt suck?’
‘Shut up.’
Rogette Whitmore threw back her head and laughed. The sound was like the scream of a rabbit caught in an owl’s talons, and my flesh crawled. I had an idea she was as crazy as he was. Thank God they were old. ‘You struck a nerve there, Max,’ she said.
‘What do you want?’ I took a breath . . . and caught a taste of that putrescence again. I gagged. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help it.
Devore straightened in his chair and breathed deeply, as if to mock me. In that moment he looked like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, striding along the beach and telling the world how much he loved the smell of napalm in the morning. His grin widened. ‘Lovely place, just here, isn’t it? A cozy spot to stop and think, wouldn’t you say?’ He looked around. ‘This is where it happened, all right. Ayuh.’
‘Where the boy drowned.’
I thought Whitmore’s smile looked momentarily uneasy at that. Devore didn’t. He clutched for his translucent oxygen mask with an old man’s overwide grip, fingers that grope rather than reach. I could see little bubbles of mucus clinging to the inside. He sucked deep again, put it down again.
‘Thirty or more folks have drowned in this lake, and that’s just the ones they know about,’ he said. ‘What’s one boy, more or less?’
‘I don’t get it. Were there two Tidwell boys who died here? The one that got blood-poisoning and the one — ‘
‘Do you care about your soul, Mr. Noonan? Your immortal soul? God’s butterfly caught in a cocoon of flesh that will soon stink like mine?’
I said nothing. The strangeness of what had happened before he arrived was passing. What replaced it was his incredible personal magnetism. I have never in my life felt so much raw force.
There was nothing supernatural about it, either, and raw is exactly the right word. I might have run.
Under other circumstances, I’m sure I would have. It certainly wasn’t bravery that kept me where I was; my legs still felt rubbery, and I was afraid I might fall down.
‘I’m going to give you one chance to save your soul,’ Devore said. He raised a bony finger to illustrate the concept of one. ‘Go away, my fine whoremaster. Right now, in the clothes you stand up in. Don’t bother to pack a bag, don’t even stop to make sure you turned off the stoveburners. Go.
Leave the whore and leave the whorelet.’
‘Leave them to you.’
‘Ayuh, to me. I’ll do the things that need to be done. Souls are for liberal arts majors, Noonan. I was an engineer.’
‘Go fuck yourself.’
Rogette Whitmore made that screaming-rabbit sound again. The old man sat in his chair, head lowered, grinning sallowly up at me and looking like something raised from the dead. ‘Are you sure you want to be the one, Noonan? It doesn’t matter to her, you know — you or me, it’s all the same to her.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
I drew another deep breath, and this time the air tasted all right. I took a step away from the birch, and my legs were all right, too. ‘And I don’t care. You’re never getting Kyra. Never in what remains of your scaly life. I’ll never see that happen.’
‘Pal, you’ll see plenty,’ Devore said, grinning and showing me his iodine gums. ‘Before July’s done, you’ll likely have seen so much you’ll wish you’d ripped the living eyes out of your head in June.’
‘I’m going home. Let me pass.’
‘Go home then, how could I stop you?’ he asked. ‘The Street belongs to everyone.’ He groped the oxygen mask out of his lap again and took another healthy pull. He dropped it into his lap and settled his left hand on the arm of his Buck Rogers wheelchair.
I stepped toward him, and almost before I knew what was happening, he ran the wheelchair at me. He could have hit me and hurt me quite badly — broken one or both of my legs, I don’t doubt
— but he stopped just short. I leaped back, but only because he allowed me to. I was aware that Whitmore was laughing again.
‘What’s the matter, Noonan?’
‘Get out of my way. I’m warning you.’
‘Whore made you jumpy, has she?’
I started to my left, meaning to go by him on that side, but in a flash he had turned the chair, shot it forward, and cut me off.
‘Get out of the TR, Noonan. I’m giving you good ad — ‘ I broke to the right, this time on the lake side, and would have slipped by him quite neatly except for the fist, very small and hard, that hammered the left side of my face. The white-haired bitch was wearing a ring, and the stone cut me behind the ear. I felt the sting and the warm flow of blood. I pivoted, stuck out both hands, and pushed her. She fell to the needle-carpeted path with a squawk of surprised outrage. At the next instant something clouted me on the back of the head. A momentary orange glow lit up my sight. I staggered backward in what felt like slow motion, waving my arms, and Devore came into view again. He was slued around in his wheelchair, scaly head thrust forward, the cane he’d hit me with still upraised. If he had been ten years younger, I believe he would have fractured my skull instead of just creating that momentary orange light.
I ran into my old friend the birch tree. I raised my hand to my ear and looked unbelievingly at the blood on the tips of my fingers. My head ached from the blow he had fetched me.
Whitmore was struggling to her feet, brushing pine needles from her slacks and looking at me with a furious smile. Her cheeks had filled in with a thin pink flush. Her too-red lips were pulled back to show small teeth. In the light of the setting sun her eyes looked as if they were burning.
‘Get out of my way,’ I said, but my voice sounded small and weak.
‘No,’ Devore said, and laid the black barrel of his cane on the nacelle that curved over the front of his chair. Now I could see the little boy who had been determined to have the sled no matter how badly he cut his hands getting it. I could see him very clearly. ‘No, you whore-fucking sissy. I won’t.’
He shoved the silver toggle switch again and the wheelchair rushed silently at me. If I had stayed where I was, he would have run me through with his cane as surely as any evil duke was ever run through in an Alexandre Dumas story. He probably would have crushed the fragile bones in his right hand and torn his right arm clean out of its socket in the collision, but this man had never cared about such things; he left cost-counting to the little people. If I had hesitated out of shock or incredulity, he would have killed me, I’m sure of it. Instead, I rolled to my left. My sneakers slid on the needle-slippery embankment for a moment. Then they lost contact with the earth and I was falling.
I hit the water awkwardly and much too close to the bank. My left foot struck a submerged root and twisted. The pain was huge, something that felt like a thunderclap sounds. I opened my mouth to scream and the lake poured in — that cold metallic dark taste, this time for real. I coughed it out and sneezed it out and floundered away from where I had landed, thinking The boy, the dead boy’s down here, what if he reaches up and grabs me?
I turned over on my back, still flailing and coughing, very aware of my jeans clinging clammily to my legs and crotch, thinking absurdly about my wallet — I didn’t care about the credit cards or driver’s license, but I had two good snapshots of Jo in there, and they would be ruined.
Devore had almost run himself over the embankment, I saw, and for a moment I thought he still might go. The front of his chair jutted over the place where I had fallen (I could see the short tracks of my sneakers just to the left of the bitch’s partially exposed roots), and although the forward wheels were still grounded, the crumbly earth was running out from beneath them in dry little avalanches that rolled down the slope and pit-a-patted into the water, creating interlocking ripple patterns. Whitmore was clinging to the back of the chair, yanking on it, but it was much too heavy for her; if Devore was to be saved, he would have to save himself. Standing waist-deep in the lake with my clothes floating around me, I rooted for him to go over.