feelings; they were as inscrutable as the cats.
He only dimly grasped the twins’ bond with the cats. It was their
blessed mother’s gift to them just as his many talents were his mother’s
generous bequest to him, so he did not question the rightness or
wholesomeness of it.
Still, he wanted to hit Violet because she hadn’t saved the body for
him. She had known Frank had touched it, that it could be of use to
Candy, but she had not saved it until he’d awakened, had not come to
wake him early. He wanted to smash her, but she was his sister, and he
couldn’t hurt his sisters; he had to provide for them, protect them. His
mother was watching.
“The parts that couldn’t be eaten?” he asked.
Violet gestured toward the kitchen door.
He switched on the outside light and stepped onto the back porch. Small
knobs of bone and vertebrae were scattered like queerly shaped dice on
the unpainted floorboards. Only two sides of the porch were open; the
house angled around the other two flanks of it, and in the niche where
the house walls met, Candy found a piece of Samantha’s tail and scraps
of fur, jammed there by the night wind. The half-crushed skull was on
the top step. He snatched it up and moved down on to unmown lawn.
The wind, which had been declining since late afternoon suddenly stopped
altogether. The cold air would have carried the faintest sound a great
distance; but the night was hushed. Usually Candy could touch an object
and see who had handled it before him. Sometimes he could even see
where some of those people had gone after putting the object down, and
when he went looking for them, they were always to be found where his
clairvoyance had led him. Frank had killed the cat, and Candy hoped
that contact with the remains would spark an inner vision that would put
him on his brother’s trail again.
Every speck of flesh had been stripped from Samantha’s broken pate, and
its contents had been emptied as well. Pick clean, licked smooth, dried
by the wind, it might have been a portion of a fossil from a distant
age. Candy’s mind was fill not with images of Frank but of the other
cats and Verbina and Violet, and finally he threw down the damaged skull
in disgust.
His frustration sharpened his anger. He felt the need rising in him. He
dared not let the need bloom… but resisting was infinitely harder
than resisting the charms of women and other sins. He hated Frank. He
hated him so much, so deep he had hated him so constantly for seven
years, that he couldn’t even bear the thought that he had slept through
an opportunity to destroy him.
Need….
He dropped to his knees on the weedy lawn. He fisted his hands and
hunched his shoulders and clenched his teeth, trying to make a rock of
himself, an unmovable mass that would not be swayed one inch by the most
urgent need, not one hair width by even the most dire necessity, the
most demanding hunger, the most passionate craving. He prayed to his
mother to give him strength. The wind began to pick up again, an he
believed it was a devil wind that would blow him toward temptation, so
he fell forward on the ground and dug his fingers into the yielding
earth, and he repeated his mother’s name-Roselle-whispered her name
furiously into the grass and dirt, again and again, desperate to quell
the mention of his dark need. Then he wept. Then he got up. And went
hunting.
FRANK WENT to a theater and sat through a movie but was unable to
concentrate on the story. He ate dinner at El Torito, though he didn’t
really taste the food; he just pushed down the enchiladas and rice as if
feeding fuel to a furnace. For a couple of hours he drove aimlessly
back and forth across the middle and southern reaches of Orange County,
staying on the move only because, for the time being, he felt safer when
in motion. Finally he returned to the motel.