Virginia tried to shut the words out. Usually, to hear her husband speak the poems of Revelations was a joy to her, but not tonight. Tonight the words seemed ripe to the point of corruption, and she sensed-perhaps for the first time-that he didn’t really understand what he was saying; that the spirit of the words passed him by while he recited them. She made a small, unintentional noise of complaint. Gyer stopped reading.
“What is it?” he said.
She opened her eyes, embarrassed to have interrupted him.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Does my reading disturb you?” he wanted to know. The inquiry was a challenge, and she backed down from it.
“No,” she said. “No, of course not.”
In the doorway between the two rooms, Sadie watched Virginia’s face. The woman was lying of course, the words did disturb her. They disturbed Sadie too, but only because they seemed so pitifully melodramatic: a drug-dream of Armageddon, more comical than intimidating.
“Tell him,” she advised Virginia. “Go on. Tell him you don’t like it.”
“Who are you talking to?” Buck said. “They can’t hear you.
Sadie ignored her husband’s remarks. “Go on,” she said to Virginia. “Tell the bastard.”
But Virginia lust lay there while Gyer took up the passage again, its absurdities escalating.
“And the shapes of the locusts were unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men.”
“And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions.”
Sadie shook her head: comic-book terrors, fit to scare children with. Why did people have to die to grow out of that kind of nonsense?
“Tell him,” she said again. “Tell him how ridiculous he sounds.”
Even as the words left her lips, Virginia sat up on the bed and said: “John?”
Sadie stared at her, willing her on. “Say it. Say it.”
“Do you have to talk about death all the time. It’s very depressing.”
Sadie almost applauded. It wasn’t quite the way she would have put it, but each to their own.
“What did you say?” Gyer asked her, assuming he’d heard incorrectly. Surely she wasn’t challenging him?
Virginia put a trembling hand up to her lips, as if to cancel the words before they came again, but they came nevertheless.
“Those passages you read. I hate them. They’re so…”
“Stupid,” Sadie prompted.
unpleasant,” Virginia said.
“Are you coming to bed or not?” Buck wanted to know.
“In a moment,” Sadie replied over her shoulder. “I just want to see what happens in here.”
“Life isn’t a soap opera,” Buck chimed in. Sadie was about to beg to differ, but before she had a chance the evangelist had approached Virginia’s bed, Bible in hand.
“This is the inspired word of the Lord, Virginia,” he said.
“I know John. But there are other passages
“I thought you liked the Apocalypse.”
“No,” she said, “it distresses me.”
“You’re tired,” he replied.
“Oh yes,” Sadie interjected, “that’s what they always tell you when you get too close to the truth. ‘You’re tired,’ they say, ‘why don’t you take a little nap?”‘
“Why don’t you sleep for a while?” Gyer said. “I’ll go next door and work.”
Virginia met her husband’s condescending look for fully five seconds, then nodded.
“Yes,” she conceded, “I am tired.”
“Foolish woman,” Sadie told her. “Fight back, or he’ll do the same again. Give them an inch and they take half the damn state.”
Buck appeared behind Sadie. “I’ve asked you once,” he said, taking her arm, “we re here to make friends. So let’s get to it. He pulled her away from the door, rather more roughly than was necessary. She shrugged off his hand.
“There’s no need for violence, Buck,” she said.
“Ha! That’s rich, coming from you,” Buck said with a humorless laugh. “You want to see violence?” Sadie turned away from Virginia to look at her husband. “This is violence,” he said. He had taken off his jacket; now he pulled his unbuttoned shirt open to reveal the shot wound. At such close quarters Sadie’s .38 had made a sizeable hole in Buck’s chest, scorched and bloody. It was as fresh as the moment he died. He put his finger to it as if indicating the Sacred Heart. “You see that, sweetheart mine? You made that.”