Becky threw herself at Ross, heaved her weight forward. He stepped back, put his foot on that arm, and it turned beneath his heel. He made an angry, grunting cry of distress as he spilled over, pulling her with him. He did not let go of her throat until he hit the ground, his teeth coming together with an audible clack!
He absorbed most of the impact, the springy mass of his suburban-Baptist gut softening her own fall. She shoved herself off him, began to scramble on all fours into the grass.
Only she couldn’t move quickly. Her insides pulsed with a dreadful weight and feeling of tension, as if she had swallowed a medicine ball. She wanted to vomit.
He caught her ankle and pulled. She fell flat, onto her hurt, throbbing stomach. A lance of rupturing pain went through her abdomen, a feeling of something bursting. Her chin struck the wet earth. Her vision swarmed with black specks.
“Where are you going, Becky DeMuth?” She had not told him her last name. He couldn’t know that. “I’ll just find you again. The grass will show me where you’re hiding, the little dancing men will take me right to you. Come here. You don’t need to go to San Diego now. No decisions about the baby will be necessary. All done now.”
Her vision cleared. She saw, right in front of her, on a flattened bit of grass, a woman’s straw purse, the contents dumped out, and amid the mess, a little pair of manicuring scissors-they almost looked more like pliers than scissors. The blades were gummy with blood. She didn’t want to think how Ross Humbolt of Poughkeepsie might have used that tool, or how she herself might now use it.
Nevertheless, she closed her hand around it.
“Come here, I said,” Ross told her. “Now, bitch.” Hauling on her foot.
She twisted and shoved herself back at him, with Natalie Humbolt’s manicure scissors in one fist. She struck him in the face, once, twice, three times, before he began to scream. It was a scream of pain, even if, before she was done with him, it had turned into great, sobbing guffaws of laughter. She thought: The kid laughed, too. Then for quite a while she thought nothing. Not until after moonrise.
In the last of the day’s light, Cal sat in the grass, brushing tears off his cheeks.
He never gave way to full-on weeping. He only dropped onto his butt, after who knew how much fruitless wandering and calling for Becky-she had long since stopped replying to him-and then for a while his eyes were tingling and damp, and his breath a little thick.
Dusk was glorious. The sky was a deep, austere blue, darkening almost to black, and in the west, behind the church, the horizon was lit with the infernal glow of dying coals. He saw it now and then, when he had the energy to jump and look, and could persuade himself there was some point in looking around.
His sneakers were soaked through, which made them heavy, and his feet ached. The insides of his thighs itched. He took off his right shoe, and dumped a dingy trickle of water from it. He wasn’t wearing socks, and his bare foot had the ghastly white, shriveled look of a drowned thing.
He removed the other sneaker, was about to dump it, then hesitated. He brought it to his lips, tipped back his head, and let gritty water-water that tasted like his own stinking foot-run over his tongue.
He had heard Becky and the Man, a long way off in the grass. Had heard the Man speaking to her in a gleeful, inebriated voice, lecturing her almost, although Cal had not been able to make out much of what was actually said. Something about a rock. Something about dancing men. Something about being thirsty. A line from some old folk song. What had the guy been singing? Twenty years of writing and they put you on the night shift. No-that wasn’t right. But something close to that. Folk music wasn’t an area of expertise for Cal; he was more of a Rush fan. They had been surfing on Permanent Waves all the way across the country.