Coronado - Dennis Lehane [29]
I say, “How come?”
He shrugs, his eyes wide. He’s kind of crouching a bit, shoulders tensed like he expects the ceiling to come crashing down on him. “Don’t know. Just don’t. Ain’t no place to set.”
I look around at all the couches and antique chairs. “Ain’t no place to—?”
“We just don’t like it,” Vaughn Lewis says. “We just don’t like it at all.”
Vaughn too is all tensed up, his eyes darting around, like he expects something with teeth and claws to charge him.
“We’re fixing to go,” Terry tells me.
“I want to look around some more,” I say, though I’m not sure I do.
“Come on,” Lurlene says. “We got some damage to do!”
Terry shakes his head. “Ain’t wanna touch nothing in this here house.”
I look at Vaughn and Morton. They both look ready to dive out the window.
And I can feel it too. Ain’t nothing here but an empty house, but it’s some mean house. Some big, mean, icy house. Too clean, too gleaming, ready to swallow us all.
Terry says, “We gone git, son.” He steps up to me, meets my eyes. “Got to git. Got to.”
I say, “Okay. Git then.”
“You coming?”
I look at Lurlene. The hope in those green eyes has gotten bigger and more desperate.
I say, “No. You boys git along. I’ll catch up.”
“You sure?”
I meet his eyes and nod. “We’ll see you.”
They each give Lurlene a shy nod as they leave, but they can’t get out of there quick enough. Seems half a second after they close the door behind them, I hear the Cougar roar out of there.
“The gate,” I say.
Lurlene shakes her head. “You on the inside, it opens by itself as you approach it. You on the outside…” She shrugs and walks around the living room looking at stuff.
I wander into a den and open up a gun cabinet. I look at all these beautiful shotguns with carvings on the barrels and in the stocks, but I don’t touch them. I go to the next cabinet and look at the handguns. I find one I like. It’s a black Walther with a bone white handle. Fits in my hand real nice. I drop the magazine into my palm, even though I can tell from the weight that it’s loaded. I slide the magazine back in. It’s the first thing in the house I’ve touched, and for a second I see my mother with her hand over her eyes as she looks off across miles of scrub and dead land, and I put that Walther behind my back and walk out of the room.
Me and Lurlene wander the house for the next hour and I don’t think we see but half of it. She shows me the scars on her wrists at one point, tells me it wasn’t but a “cry out.” Still, she says, all that blood on the bathroom tile. Like you never saw, she says. Like you’d never want to.
We find a bedroom that’s got its own TV and a walk-in closet and dolls piled to the ceiling atop this wide dresser. There’s a hi-fi in there and pictures on the walls of Davy Jones and Bobby Sherman and Paul McCartney, and I know we’re in the girl’s room, the one who used to be Lurlene’s friend.
We stand in the doorway and I say, “You want to bust it up?”
And Lurlene says, “I want to.”
I start to walk in. “Then let’s—”
She pulls me back. She sags into me. She says, “No,” in a sad crush of a voice.
I hold her as we wander around some more and eventually work our way back downstairs to the kitchen. There’s a staircase off the kitchen, kind of tucked away by the pantry, and we follow it down. We find a bedroom down there with a tiny bathroom and its own small kitchen. About the only small things I’ve seen in this whole house. The walls in the bedroom are bare, but there’s women’s clothes in the closet.