shoulders slumped, head hung, one hand covering her face, collecting
herself.
The lamp featured a three-way switch, and Bobby clicked it to the lowest
level of light. The shade was rose-colored silk, which left the room
still mostly in shadow but bright enough to prevent us from succumbing
to an attack of the brain twitches.
I spotted my flashlight on the floor, snatched it up, and jammed it
under my belt again.
Trying to quiet my breathing, I went to the nearer of two windows. The
drapes were a heavy tapestry, as thick as an elephant’s hide, with a
blackout liner. This would have suppressed the sound of gunfire almost
as effectively as the plush pillow through which Sasha had fired the
revolver.
I pulled aside one drape and peered out at the lamp lit street. No one
was pointing or running toward the Stanwyk residence. No traffic had
stopped in front of the house. In fact, the street appeared to be
deserted.
As far as I can recall, none of us said anything until we were all the
way downstairs and in the kitchen again, where the solemn cat was
waiting for us in the light of the oil lamp. Perhaps we simply didn’t
say anything memorable, but I think that we did, indeed, make our way
through the house in numbed silence.
Bobby stripped off his Hawaiian shirt and black cotton pullover, which
were damp with blood. Along his left side were four slashes, wounds
inflicted by the cleric’s teratoid hand.
That was a useful word from my mom’s world of genetic science. It meant
something monstrous, described an organism or a portion of an organism
deformed because of damaged genetic material. As a kid, I was always
interested in my mother’s research and theories, because she was, as she
liked to put it, searching for God in the clockworks, which I thought
must be the most important work anyone could do. But God prefers to see
what we can make of ourselves on our own, and He doesn’t make it easy
for us to find Him on this side of death. Along the way, when we think
we’ve located the door behind which He waits, it opens not on anything
divine but on something teratoid.
In the half bath adjoining the kitchen, Sasha found first-aid supplies
and a bottle of aspirin.
| Bobby stood at the kitchen sink, using a fresh dishcloth and liquid
soap to clean his wounds, hissing between clenched teeth.
“Hurt? ” I asked.
“No.”
“Bullshit.”
“You? ”
“Bruises.” The four cuts in his side weren’t deep, but they bled freely.
Roosevelt settled into a chair at the table. He’d gotten some ice cubes
from the freezer and wrapped them in a dish towel. He held this compress
to his left eye, which was swelling shut. Fortunately, the bud vase
hadn’t shattered when it hit him, because otherwise he might have had
splinters of porcelain in his eye.
“Bad? ” I asked.
“Had worse.”
“Football? ”
“Alex Karras.”
“Great player.”
“Big.”
“He run you down? ”
“More than once.”
“Like a truck, ” I suggested.
“A Mack. This was just a damn vase.” Sasha saturated a cloth with
hydrogen peroxide and pressed it repeatedly to Bobby’s wounds. Every
time she took the cloth away, the shallow cuts bubbled furiously with
bloody foam.
I couldn’t have ached in more places if I’d spent the past six hours
tumbling around in an industrial clothes dryer.
I washed down two aspirin with a few sips of an Orange Crush that I
found in the Stanwyks’ refrigerator. The can shook so badly that I
drizzled more soda over my chin and clothes than I managed to drink
suggesting that my folks had been misguided when they allowed me to stop
wearing a bib at the age of five.
After several applications of the peroxide, Sasha switched to rubbing
alcohol and repeated the treatment. Bobby wasn’t bothering to hiss
anymore, he was just grinding his teeth to dust. Finally, when he had
ground away enough dental surface to be limited to a soft diet for life,
she smeared the still-weeping wounds with Neosporin.
This extensive first aid was conducted without comment. We all knew why