“Even a blind man can see that,” Henry says. “Thanks. Words to live by.” He gets out of the cab and closes the door. He moves away, steps back, and leans in through the window. “Do you want to start on Bleak House tonight? I should get home about eight-thirty, something like that.”
“I’ll turn up around nine.”
By way of parting, Henry says, “Ding-dong.” He turns away, walks to his doorstep, and disappears into his house, which is of course unlocked. Around here, only parents lock their doors, and even that’s a new development.
Jack reverses the pickup, swings down the drive and onto Norway Valley Road. He feels as though he has done a doubly good deed, for by helping Henry he has also helped himself. It’s nice, how things turn out sometimes.
When he turns into his own long driveway, a peculiar rattle comes from the ashtray beneath his dashboard. He hears it again at the last curve, just before his house comes into view. The sound is not so much a rattle as a small, dull clunk. A button, a coin—something like that. He rolls to a stop at the side of his house, turns off the engine, and opens his door. On an afterthought, he reaches over and pulls out the ashtray.
What Jack finds nestled in the grooves at the bottom of the sliding tray, a tiny robin’s egg, a robin’s egg the size of an almond M&M, expels all the air from his body.
The little egg is so blue a blind man could see it.
Jack’s trembling fingers pluck the egg from the ashtray. Staring at it, he leaves the cab and closes the door. Still staring at the egg, he finally remembers to breathe. His hand revolves on his wrist and releases the egg, which falls in a straight line to the grass. Deliberately, he lifts his foot and smashes it down onto the obscene blue speck. Without looking back, he pockets his keys and moves toward the dubious safety of his house.
PART TWO
The Taking of
Tyler Marshall
5
WE GLIMPSED A janitor on our whirlwind early-morning tour of Maxton Elder Care—do you happen to remember him? Baggy overalls? A wee bit thick in the gut? Dangling cigarette in spite of the NO SMOKING ! LUNGS AT WORK ! signs that have been posted every twenty feet or so along the patient corridors? A mop that looks like a clot of dead spiders? No? Don’t apologize. It’s easy enough to overlook Pete Wexler, a onetime nondescript youth (final grade average at French Landing High School: 79) who passed through a nondescript young manhood and has now reached the edge of what he expects to be a nondescript middle age. His only hobby is administering the occasional secret, savage pinch to the moldy oldies who fill his days with their grunts, nonsensical questions, and smells of gas and piss. The Alzheimer’s assholes are the worst. He has been known to stub out the occasional cigarette on their scrawny backs or buttocks. He likes their strangled cries when the heat hits and the pain cores in. This small and ugly torture has a double-barreled effect: it wakes them up a little and satisfies something in him. Brightens his days, somehow. Refreshes the old outlook. Besides, who are they going to tell?
And oh God, there goes the worst of them now, shuffling slowly down the corridor of Daisy. Charles Burnside’s mouth is agape, as is the back of his johnny. Pete has a better view of Burnside’s scrawny, shit-smeared buttocks than he ever wanted. The chocolate stains go all the way down to the backs of his knees, by God. He’s headed for the bathroom, but it’s just a leetle bit late. A certain brown horse—call him Morning Thunder—has already bolted from its stall and no doubt galloped across Burny’s sheets.
Thank God cleaning ’em up isn’t my job, Pete thinks, and smirks around his cigarette. Over to you, Butch.
But the desk up there by the little boys’ and girls’ rooms is for the time being unattended. Butch Yerxa is going to miss the charming sight of Burny’s dirty ass sailing by. Butch has apparently stepped out for a smoke, although Pete has told the idiot a hundred times that all those NO SMOKING signs mean nothing—Chipper Maxton could care less about who smoked where (or where the smokes were butted out, for that matter). The signs are just there to keep good old Drooler Manor in compliance with certain tiresome state laws.
Pete’s smirk widens, and at that moment he looks a good deal like his son Ebbie, Tyler Marshall’s sometime friend (it was Ebbie Wexler, in fact, who just gave Jack and Henry the finger). Pete is wondering whether he should go out and tell Butch he’s got a little cleanup job in D18—plus D18’s occupant, of course—or if he should just let Butch discover Burny’s latest mess on his own. Perhaps Burny will go back to his room and do a little fingerpainting, kind of spread the joy around. That would be good, but it would also be good to see Butch’s face fall when Pete tells him—
“Pete.”
Oh no. Sandbagged by the bitch. She’s a fine-looking bitch, but a bitch is still a bitch. Pete stands where he is for a moment, thinking that maybe if he ignores her, she’ll go away.
Vain hope.
“Pete.”
He turns. There is Rebecca Vilas, current squeeze of the big cheese. Today she is wearing a light red dress, perhaps in honor of Strawberry Fest!, and black high-heeled pumps, probably in honor of her own fine gams. Pete briefly imagines those fine gams wrapped around him, those high heels crossed at the small of his back and pointing like clock hands, then sees the cardboard box she’s holding in her arms. Work for him, no doubt. Pete also notes the glinting ring on her finger, some sort of gemstone the size of a goddamn robin’s egg, although considerably paler. He wonders, not for the first time, just what a woman does to earn a ring like that.
She stands there, tapping her foot, letting him have his look. Behind him, Charles Burnside continues his slow, tottery progress toward the men’s. You’d think, looking at that old wreck with his scrawny legs and flyaway milkweed hair, that his running days were long behind him. But you’d be wrong. Terribly wrong.
“Miz Vilas?” Pete says at last.
“Common room, Pete. On the double. And how many times have you been told not to smoke in the patient wings?”
Before he can reply, she turns with a sexy little flirt of the skirt and starts off toward the Maxton common room, where that afternoon’s Strawberry Fest! dance will be held.
Sighing, Pete props his mop against the wall and follows her.
Charles Burnside is now alone at the head of the Daisy corridor. The vacancy leaves his eyes and is replaced with a brilliant and feral gleam of intelligence. All at once he looks younger. All at once Burny the human shit machine is gone. In his place is Carl Bierstone, who reaped the young in Chicago with such savage efficiency.
Carl . . . and something else. Something not human.
He—it—grins.
On the unattended desk is a pile of paper weighed down with a round stone the size of a coffee cup. Written on the stone in small black letters is BUTCH’S PET ROCK.
Burny picks up Butch Yerxa’s pet rock and walks briskly toward the men’s room, still grinning.
In the common room, the tables have been arranged around the walls and covered with red paper cloths. Later, Pete will add small red lights (battery powered; no candles for the droolers, gosh, no). On the walls, great big cardboard strawberries have been taped up everywhere, some looking rather battered—they have been put up and taken down every July since Herbert Maxton opened this place at the end of the swingin’ sixties. The linoleum floor is open and bare.
This afternoon and early evening, the moldy oldies who are still ambulatory and of a mind to do so will shuffle around out there to the big-band sounds of the thirties and forties, clinging to each other during the slow numbers and probably dampening their Depends with excitement at the end of the jitterbugs. (Three years ago a moldy oldie named Irving Christie had a minor heart attack after doing a particularly strenuous lindyhop to “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me.”) Oh yes, the Strawberry Fest Hop is always exciting.
Rebecca has all by herself pushed together three wooden flats and covered them with a white cloth, creating the basis for Symphonic Stan’s podium. In the corner stands a brilliantly chromed microphone with a large round head, a genuine antique from the thirties that saw service at the Cotton Club. It is one of Henry Leyden’s prize possessions. Beside it is the tall, narrow carton in which it arrived yesterday. On the podium, beneath a beam decorated with red and white crepe and more cardboard strawberries, is a stepladder. Seeing it, Pete feels a moment’s possessive jealousy. Rebecca Vilas has been in his closet. Trespassing bitch! If she stole any of his weed, by God—