“Ring-Ding,” she said and ate half of it. Louis popped the tab on the beer.
“A beer this late is going to give me acid indigestion,” he said.
“Crap,” she said good-humoredly. “Come on, Doe.”
Louis put down the can of beer and suddenly grasped the pocket of his robe as if he had forgotten something—although he had been aware of that small packet of weight all evening long.
“Here,” he said. “For you. You can open it now. It’s after midnight. Merry Christmas, babe.”
She turned the little box, wrapped up in silver paper and tied with wide satiny-blue ribbon, in her hands. “Louis, what is it?”
He shrugged. “Soap. Shampoo sample. I forget, exactly.”
She opened it on the stairs, saw the Tiffany box, and squealed. She pulled out the cotton batting and then just stood there, her mouth slightly agape.
“Well?” he asked anxiously. He had never bought her a real piece of jewelry before, and he was nervous. “Do you like it?”
She took it out, draped the fine gold chain over her tented fingers, and held the tiny sapphire up to the hail light. It twirled lazily, seeming to shoot off cool blue rays.
“Oh Louis, it’s so damn beautiful—” He saw she was crying a little and felt both touched and alarmed.
“Hey, babe, don’t do that,” he said. “Put it on.”
“Louis, we can’t afford—you can’t afford—”
“Shhh,” he said. “I socked some money away off and on since last Christmas. . . and it wasn’t as much as you might think.”
“How much was it?”
“I’ll never tell you that, Rachel,” he said solemnly. “An army of Chinese torturers couldn’t get it out of me. Two thousand dollars.”
“Two thousand—i” She hugged him so suddenly and so tightly that he almost fell down the stairs. “Louis, you’re crazy!”
“Put it on,” he said again.
She did. He helped her with the clasp, and then she turned around to look at him. “I want to go up and look at it,” she said. “I think I want to preen.”
“Preen away,” he said. “I’ll put out the cat and get the lights.”
“When we make it,” she said, looking directly into his eyes, “I want to take everything off except this.”
“Preen in a hurry, then,” Louis said, and she laughed.
He grabbed Church and draped it over his arm—he didn’t bother much with the broom these days. He supposed that, in spite of everything, he had almost gotten used to the cat again. He went toward the entryway door, turning off lights as he went. When he opened the door communicating between the kitchen and garage, an eddy of cold air swirled around his ankles.
“Have a merry Christmas, Ch—”
He broke off. Lying on the welcome mat was a dead crow. Its head was mangled. One wing had been ripped off and lay behind the body like a charred piece of paper. Church immediately squirmed out of Louis’s arms and began to nuzzle the frozen corpse eagerly.
As Louis watched, the cat’s head darted forward, its ears laid back, and before he could turn his head, Church had ripped out one of the crow’s milky, glazed eyes.
Church strikes again, Louis thought a little sickly, and turned his head—not, however, before he had seen the bloody, gaping socket where the crow’s eye had been. Shouldn’t bother me, shouldn’t, I’ve seen worse, oh yeah, Pascow, for instance, Pascow was worse, a lot worse— But it did bother him. His stomach turned over. The warm
build of sexual excitement had suddenly deflated. Christ, that bird’s damn near as big as he is. Must have caught it with its guard down. Way, way down.
This would have to be cleaned up. Nobody needed this sort of present on Christmas morning. And it was his responsibility, wasn’t it? Sure was. His and nobody else’s. He had recognized that much in a subconscious way even on the evening of his family’s
return, when he had purposely spilled the tires over the tattered body of the mouse Church had killed.
The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis.
This thought was so clear, somehow so three-dimensional and auditory, that Louis jerked a little, as if Jud had materialized at his shoulder and spoken aloud.
A man grows what he can. . . and tends it.
Church was still hunched greedily over the dead bird. He was working at the other wing now. There was a tenebrous rustling sound as Church pulled it back and forth, back and forth. Never get it off the ground, Orville. That’s right, Wilbur, fucking bird’s just as dead as dogshit, might as well feed it to the cat, might as well—
Louis suddenly kicked Church, kicked him hard. The cat’s hindquarters rose and came down splayfooted. It walked away, sparing him another of its ugly yellow-green glances. “Eat me,”
Louis hissed at it, catlike himself.
“Louis?” Rachel’s voice came faintly from their bedroom.
“Coming to bed?”
“Be right there,” he called back. I’ve just got this little mess to clean up, Rachel, okay? Because it’s my mess. He fumbled for the switch that controlled the garage light. He went quickly back to the cupboard under the kitchen sink and got a green Hefty Bag. He took the bag back into the garage and took the shovel down from its nail on the garage wall. He scraped up the crow and dropped it into the bag. Then he shoveled up the severed wing and slipped that in. He tied a knot in the top of the bag and dropped it into the bin on the far side of the Civic. By the time he had finished, his ankles were growing numb.
Church was standing by the garage doorway. Louis made a threatening gesture at the cat with the shovel, and it was gone like black water.
Upstairs, Rachel was lying on her bed, wearing nothing but the sapphire on its chain . . . as promised. She smiled at him lazily.
“What took you so long, Chief?”
“The light over the sink was out,” Louis said. “I changed the bulb.”
“Come here,” she said and tugged him gently toward her. Not by the hand. “He knows if you’ve been sleeping,” she sang softly; a little smile curved up the corners of her lips. “He knows if you’re awake. . . oh my, Louis dear, what’s this?”
“Something that just woke up, I think,” Louis said, slipping off his robe. “Maybe we ought to see if we can get it to sleep before Santa comes, what do you think?”
She rose on one elbow; he felt her breath, warm and sweet.
“He knows if you’ve been bad or good. . . so be good. . . for goodness sake. . . Have you been a good boy, Louis?”
“I think so,” he said. His voice was not quite steady.
“Let’s see if you taste as good as you look,” she said.
The sex was good, but Louis did not find himself simply slipping off afterward as he usually did when the sex was good—slipping off easy with himself, his wife, his life. He lay in the darkness of Christmas morning, listening to Rachel’s breathing slow and deep, and he thought about the dead bird on the doorstep— Church’s Christmas present to him.
Keep me in mind, Dr. Creed. I was alive and then I was dead and now I’m alive again. I’ve made the circuit and I’m here to tell you that you come out the other side with your purr-box broken and a taste for the hunt, I’m here to tell you that a man grows what he
can and tends it. Don’t forget that, Dr. Creed, I’m part of what your heart will grow now, there’s your wife and your daughter and your son. . . and there’s me. Remember the secret and tend your garden well.
At some point Louis slept.
31
Their winter passed. Ellie’s faith in Santa Claus was restored—
temporarily at least—by the footprints in the hearth. Gage opened his presents splendidly, pausing every now and then to munch a particularly tasty-looking piece of wrapping paper. And that year, both kids had decided by midafternoon that the boxes were more fun than the toys.
The Crandalls came over on New Year’s Eve for Rachel’s eggnog, and Louis found himself mentally examining Norma. She had a pale and somehow transparent look that he had seen before. His grandmother would have said Norma was beginning to “fail,” and that was perhaps not such a bad word for it. All at once her hands, so swollen and misshapen by arthritis, seemed covered with liver Spots. Her hair looked thinner. The Crandalls went home around ten, and the Creeds saw the New Year in together in front of the TV. It was the last time Norma was in their house.
Most of Louis’s semester break was sloppy and rainy. In terms of heating costs, he was grateful for the thaw, but the weather was still depressing and dismal. He worked around the house, building bookshelves and cupboards for his wife, and a model Porsche in his study for himself. By the time classes resumed on January 23, Louis was happy to go back to the university.