Keith. . . .
She started toward Sam’s room.
Which is when the other man stepped into the hall from the living room and got his arm around her chest, saying in the same sort of sick voice that his partner had been speaking in, “Whoa my! Big gun for a little girl.”
My God, she recognized him! It was one of the twins. The ones who owned that disgusting junkyard outside of town. Billy, or Bobby, had his hand over her face and was groping for the stock of the gun, trying to pull it out of her strong, desperate grip.
She felt painful pressure on her breast as he fondled her with his other hand. “Hmmmm,” he said with approval. She smelled his cheap musky aftershave and coal tar.
He was very strong but so was she. Neither could wrest the gun from the other’s grip.
So she pointed the gun into the kitchen and pulled the trigger.
The explosion filled the hall with sulfur-stinking smoke. The Sanyo microwave door blew into a dozen pieces. The recoil slammed Meg backwards into the twin. Through the ringing in her ears she heard him inhale in surprise. With a resounding crack his head hit the front doorknob.
“Ow, damn! Shit, that hurts.” He let go and grabbed his head with both of his hands.
Meg dropped to her knees, tore open the breech of the gun. The spent cartridge, hot and smokey, popped out, and she reloaded the rifle.
The twin blinked, squeezing the back of his head, spun around, undoing latches and locks on the front door. Blood stained the white enamel door and spattered the carpet.
Chain off, one latch, deadbolt.
Meg slammed the breech closed.
The door swung open.
Cocking the gun . . .
“Fucking cannon,” he called to his brother, who must’ve been outside. “She’s got a fucking cannon!”
Then a scream behind her.
“Mommy!” Sam had left the guest room and was running down the corridor toward her.
Meg turned toward him. “No, Sam, no!”
She spun back. But it was too late. The twin jumped toward her. Meg couldn’t get the gun on full cock in time and she swung it like a club. He caught it easily and jabbed his fist into her jaw.
“Mommy,” Sam cried again as she dropped to her knees.
The brother stepped forward and, furious, hit her again, harder. A burst of electric pain just under her ears. Her vision went black and grainy around the edges. She slid down against the cornflower-blue wall. Tried to get up. Billy ripped the gun from her hands. Her head sagged against the wall.
Sam reached her, put his arms around her head. He screamed, “Go away, go away, you!”
The twin opened the door and shouted. “Yo, Bobby. It’s under control. Come on in.”
Bobby walked inside. Sniffed the air. “Stinks. Brimstone. Lookit that thing.” He nodded at the Springfield in admiration. Then he saw the sheriff’s body. “You have to do that?”
“He seen me coming through the window,” Billy said, massaging his head where he’d struck it on the doorknob. “The fuck you think I should’ve done? Said ‘Howdy-do’?”
Bobby closed the door, looked over at Sam. “Hey, young fella. Don’t worry. You’ll be okay.”
His brother muttered, “Son of a bitch, I’m bleeding.” He looked with satisfaction at Meg, whose head lolled back and forth against the wallpaper. Her face was white. He asked, “Where’s Keith?”
Meg didn’t answer. He slapped her hard. Still silence. She was only half conscious.
“No!” the boy cried.
“Where’s your father?”
He hesitated then said, “He’s at the office but he’s coming home any minute and he’s going to kill you.”
“Any minute,” Billy repeated, looking at his brother.
But Bobby was looking over at the little boy. “How ’bout you and me go watch TV or something. In the living room there? While we wait for him.”
“No.”
“You don’t want me to hit your mommy again, do you?”
Sam didn’t say anything, just shook his head, wiped tears.
Bobby smiled. “Come on. Let’s you and me go in there.”
Billy said, “We don’t have time for that now.”
Feeling good that he’d thought of something his brother hadn’t, Bobby said, “We gotta wait anyway, don’t we?”
THE ROADSIDE SIGNS
gave him messages.
The scientist within Keith Torrens would see a yellow warning sign with a curve and a side road painted on it and he’d think of a sigma bond. And his mind would shift into thoughts about electron sharing and the unequal charge distribution in a chloride-bromine molecule.
Or he’d see a yield sign and think,
delta,
and, bang, there it would be in his thoughts: the Gibbs free-energy exchange formula.
Wandering, his mind. Going down those odd paths, just like it did when he was a pudgy kid with a slide rule. The Magic Moments happened then too, didn’t they?
Another sign—this one on an old, abandoned White Castle hamburger stand. Castle . . . He saw the faded paint of the parapets as he sped past.
Castle. Medieval castles. Alchemists.
He thought about the location scout.
Pellam . . .
He was tired. It was nearly eleven and he’d put in a full fourteen hours at the plant. Another Sunday gone. Pushing the Cougar along the deserted, dark road, listening
to the damn front-end squeak. A scientist. I’m a scientist and I can’t fix a noisy hunk of metal.
But none of that mattered: the fatigue, the squeak, the headache. He didn’t care. What was there to bitch about? He’d buy a new goddamn Cougar, a Cadillac, a Mercedes.
He was riding on a Magic Moment.
The answer had come all at once. At two that afternoon in a crisp unfolding of thoughts that he fought to put into numbers, Greek letters and scientific symbols. He had run from the factory into his office, closing the door, shutting off the telephone, and wrote furiously—frantic, terrified that he’d miss something. Keith had felt the shock of fear rise up to his scalp, like the first and only time he took speed—in college, struggling to get his master’s degree project in on time. That warm clarity, everything focused, sweeping forward.
A Magic Moment.
That the problem solved—a new stabilizer for one of his company’s cough syrups—wasn’t exactly earth-shattering or in proportion to his euphoria didn’t occur to him. And if it had, the excitement wouldn’t be the least dampened.
The magic worked. He’d packed a problem into his brain, let it bake and out came a solution. He was high, he was alive. Those moments validated everything—all the business bullshit he put up with, all the long hours, the risks, the ulcers he was sure he was developing. All the time away from Meg and Sam.
All of that was paid for in one moment. A Magic Moment.
Thinking about Meg . . .
And he regretted for the tenth time that day, as every day, that she couldn’t really be a part of what he’d done, his business. She’d benefit, of course. She’d be a millionaire too. But she couldn’t be a partner.
That was Keith Torrens’s greatest regret.
Castles, medieval alchemists.
Alchemy, turning gold into brighter gold.
Rings of gold. Wedding rings. Meg.
He remembered a line from some country-western station—one that she listened to all the time.
If we tell a lie while we’re lying together, then that’s nothing more than a port in bad weather. . . .
He wondered again whether she was seeing anyone. He didn’t think so. But Keith Torrens (who’d never cheated on his wife) believed that while men and women both had an equal capacity for deception, women were better equipped to cover their tracks. Keith (empirical, rational Cartesian—a
scientist
) had decided this was because as mothers, with broods to attend to, and possessing less physical strength than men they had honed their skills in guile for protection.
A tertiary basic nitrogen . . .
So, he’d found no circumstantial evidence. Nothing in her eyes. No Amex receipts (he could imagine what bastards those little blue tissue clues must be). Couldn’t recall any times she was supposed to be at home when she wasn’t (though how would he know? He was at the plant twelve hours a day). Sam had never referred to an uncle who’d come to help mommy with the yard, the gutters, the shopping.
. . . a quaternary carbon . . .
Who could be more devoted than he was? A better father? He never took long business trips, like some of the men who worked for the big companies by the Hudson. He didn’t uproot Meg and Sam and drag them around the country. He wasn’t like the fellow he’d met at the golf course one Sunday, a friend of a friend, who worked for IBM (I’ve Been Moved) down in Westchester. Four houses in six years.
. . . an ethylene chain and a ketone . . . Put them in the oven, and let them bake. Bang, a Magic Moment, and out comes something new.
No, she was faithful. Though questions of fidelity were the type you ask yourself in a certain way—fast, distracted—so as to avoid the possibility of a real answer. A scientist is not equipped to ask questions like that. Scientists aren’t happy until they find the truth and he wasn’t sure he wanted the truth.
Keith Torrens drove toward his home. He’d make it up to her. Make up for what?
He wasn’t sure.
How?
He didn’t know that either.
PELLAM PULLED THE
camper into the driveway.
He saw the beige car parked in the road just past the drive and thought: Oh, hell. No . . . He recognized the car. Knew who the visitors were.
Thinking about Big Mountain Studio’s promise to put mobile phones in all the campers. None of Lefkowitz’s minions had ever gotten around to it. And here the nearest house was several miles up the road. No time to get there.
No time for anything.
He doused the lights, parked on the grass, opened the camper door and climbed out.
No one inside seemed to have noticed him.
Everything seemed slowed up, the way they shoot karate fights in those charmingly bad Hong Kong karate flicks, or the way Sam Peckinpah shot his violent scenes. Pellam stepped out of the camper, breathing deeply. He started toward the house, avoiding the gravel.
At least he had surprise on his side.
As he walked steadily forward he thought, Man, no question it was fall. That smell of the air’s dry coldness, the sweet scent of oak or cherry fires.
Pellam was thinking how seasonless the big cities are. New York, L.A. And it was odd how coming to the country during a blatant time of year—the first deep snow, the week of the most colorful leaves—is more than anything a return to youth. Painful nostalgia, a rearrangement of priorities and possibilities.
Blatant seasons.
Pellam figured that was a pretty good observation and he wondered if he’d live long enough to use it in a film.
The sky was almost completely clear now, swept clean by the cold front. He glanced up, seeing the stars in the black vacuum that domed over him from one horizon of trees to another.
A perfect fall night in Cleary, New York. Home of the perfect cemetery.
That’s how they’d ended up in Cleary in the first place, he reflected, looking for the ideal, A-number-one cemetery.
A perfect fall night.
As he moved over the lawn. He saw shadows inside. The flicker of a TV screen. Keith’s car was gone. So the twins were in there alone with Meg and Sam.
He hurried toward the house. He slipped the gun in his waistband. There was a window to the right of the door, opening into a dark room. He could go up a rose trellis and through the window. Come around from behind.
Two of them, both armed, probably.
A car pulled into the driveway and sped to the house, catching Pellam in its beams. It gave a long blare on the horn.
From the house, fifty feet away, lights clicked on, blinding him.
Keith parked and climbed out. “What’s going on?”
Pellam called, “Stay there. Stay back.” He turned back to the house. The front door opened and one of the twins stepped out, holding a pistol on Pellam’s chest.
So much, he thought, for surprise.
PELLAM SUPPOSED THAT
he’d known all along it would come to this.
Lifting his hands, he walked to the right, out of the glare, onto the driveway, gravel scrunching beneath the worn soles of his Noconas. He stopped and felt an odd sensation—growing into the drive, like roots going down, solid as the granite slabs the gravel used to be.
“Hey, mister. Hey, Mr. Torrens.”
“What the hell—”
“Quiet,” Pellam ordered Keith. The man froze.
This was definitely the ending of a film—not like one of his, though, in which viewers felt all that tension, then nothing happening, the principals moving vaguely off into the credits (boy, he took flak for those endings.
Resolve it, John, resolve it.
How the world hates the truth of ambiguity).
But here it was. Pretty damn clear to him. A man slouching out onto the porch, holding in his hand an automatic pistol. Meg said she didn’t like handguns. They’re man-killing guns, she’d have been thinking, no other purpose for them.
The man slouching.
“You interrupted me,” the twin said. “Was just
about to sit down and watch some TV with a little friend in there.”
And where’s the other one, Pellam wondered, his brother?
Behind him?
Behind me?
Inside, with Sam?
“Where’s Meg?” Pellam asked.
“Whatcha doin’ here, mister?”
“Which one’re you?”
“Bobby. Hey, don’t you move there, Mr. Torrens. You do, I’ll have to kill you too.”
“Both of you brothers, get the fuck out of here—”
“Shut up, Keith,” the twin said, half-cheerfully.
Pellam asked, “You the one who did it?”
“Did what?” Bobby asked.
“Killed my friend.”
“S’pose you know if I tell you I’ll have to make sure that fact doesn’t go any further.”
“That’s pretty much on the agenda anyway, isn’t it?” Pellam asked.
“Heh.”
“No!” Keith cried. “Please! Just leave.”