Constellations of black and silver sparks exploded at the edges of her vision. Pinwheel stars, she thought. It was oddly fascinating, watching as new universes were born and died, appearing and winking out. She would soon be winking out herself, she understood. This did not seem such a terrible thing. Urgent action was not required.
Cal was screaming her name from very far away. If he had been in Manitoba before, now he was down a mine shaft in Manitoba.
Her hand tightened on the key ring in her pocket. The teeth of some of those keys were digging into her palm. Biting.
“Blood is nice, tears are better,” Ross said. “For a thirsty old rock like that. And when I fuck you on the stone, it’ll have some of both. Has to be quick, though. Don’t want to do it in front of the kid. We’re Baptists.” His breath stank.
She pulled her hand out of her pocket, the end of her house key protruding between her pointer and middle finger, and jabbed her fist into Ross Humbolt’s face. She just wanted to push his mouth away, didn’t want him breathing on her, didn’t want to smell the green stink of him anymore. Her arm felt weak, and the way she punched at him was lazy, almost friendly-but the key caught him under the left eye, and raked down his cheek, sketching a jaggedy line in blood.
He flinched, snapping his head back. His hands loosened; for an instant his thumbs were no longer burrowing into the soft skin in the hollow of her throat. A moment later he tightened his grip again, but by then she had drawn a single whooping breath. The sparks-the pinwheel stars-bursting and flaring at the periphery of her vision faded out. Her head went clear, as clear as if someone had dashed icy water into her face. The next time she punched him, she put her shoulder behind it, and sank the key into his eye. Her knuckles jarred against bone. The key popped through his cornea and into the liquid center of the eyeball.
He did not scream. He made a kind of doglike bark, a woofing grunt, and wrenched her hard to one side, trying to yank her off her feet. His forearms were sunburnt and peeling. Close up she could see his nose was peeling too, badly, the bridge of his nose sizzling with sunburn. He grimaced, showing teeth stained pink and green.
Her hand fell away, let go of the key ring. It continued to dangle from the welling socket of his left eye, the other keys dancing against each other and bouncing against his stubbly cheek. Blood slicked the entire left side of Humbolt’s face, and that eye was a glimmering red hole.
The grass seethed around them. The wind rose, and the tall blades thrashed and flailed at Becky’s back and legs.
He kneed her in the belly. It was like being clubbed with a piece of stovewood. Becky felt pain and something worse than pain, in a low place where abdomen met groin. It was a kind of muscular contraction, a twisting, as if there were a knotted rope in her womb, and someone had just yanked it tight; tighter than it was supposed to go.
“Oh Becky! Oh girl! Your ass-your ass is grass now!” he screamed, a note of mad hilarity wavering in his voice.
He kneed her in the stomach again and then a third time. Each blow set off a fresh, black, poisonous detonation. He’s killing the baby, Becky thought. Something trickled down the inside of her left leg. Whether it was blood or urine, she could not have said.
They danced together, the pregnant woman and the one-eyed madman. They danced in the grass, feet squelching, his hands on her throat. The two of them had staggered in a wavering semicircle around the corpse of Natalie Humbolt. Becky was aware of the dead body to her left, had glimpses of pale, bloody, bitten thighs, rumpled jean skirt, and Natalie’s exposed grass-stained granny panties. And her arm-Natalie’s arm in the grass, just behind Ross Humbolt’s feet. Natalie’s dirty, severed arm (how had he removed it? had he torn it off like a chicken drumstick?) lay with fingers slightly curled, filth under her cracked fingernails.