Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [133]
“No, you don’t. You never did.”
“Not tonight I don’t.”
“Not ever,” she said.
“Not after that little performance.”
“Of course. Anything that doesn’t conform to your narrow preferences is a performance. Well, this isn’t a goddamn performance. It’s the real thing.”
He held his right hand up to her face and went blah blah blah with his fingers.
“You’re pathetic,” she said. “Pathetic. And a coward.”
“Go to hell.”
“You don’t take a stand on anything. Or stand up to anybody.”
He turned on the radio.
She switched it off. “You don’t stand up to your father. You’re just his little boy living out his little vision of your little life.”
“Shut your mouth about my family.” He was doing eighty-five, the tires humming with the speed.
“So you carry out these little rebellions,” she said, “to give yourself the illusion that you’re big and free.”
He licked his upper lip.
“You don’t stand up to your wife. You don’t end things with her even while you whisper how you love me. So with three little words you manage to disrespect us both.”
“Keep your mouth shut.”
“You don’t even take a stand right now. ‘Not after that little performance.’ As if that were the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“Will you shut the hell up?”
“God, was I a fool. Robert was a good man. He loved me. At least he knew what love was. What his limits were.”
Sheppard was laughing now, so mad he could spit. He touched ninety and wanted to yank the wheel left and send them rocketing over the void, just to see her fear as they hurtled toward the Pacific.
“I always lose with you!” she said. “You’re like a curse on my life. You’re like a curse on everything.”
“I’ll be gone tomorrow.”
“Who’s next for you, I wonder? What lucky lady doesn’t know that sometime soon Sam Sheppard’s coming to suck her dry.”
“You’re the last one, believe me. You’re a permanant fucking caution.”
“I pity your wife!”
He turned and put his finger in her face. “Don’t you dare talk about my wife!”
She screamed—at something ahead of them, her eyes widening while she threw both hands against the dash.
And in the split second that he turned back toward the road and punched the brakes, Sheppard saw the form—and brown hair, the exact color of his wife’s—right before impact, and what he wanted to scream was “Marilyn!” sure that some horrendous coincidence or demonic convergence had brought her hundreds of miles down from Big Sur to this road at this instant, that the body they’d struck was hers. The sound was sickening, the crunching and tearing of flesh and bone synchronized at impact, more detonation than collision, followed by the thud of it under the right rear wheel as they fishtailed. His time spent racing cars saved their lives: instead of correcting, he turned into their spin, the MG rising briefly on its left wheels like a catamaran and then immediately retouching the road, a banshee whine during all three revolutions while they drifted into the other lane and then came to rest, pointed in the same direction they’d been headed.
A good hundred feet beyond the smash, they sat for several seconds in silence.
“What was that?” Susan said. “My God, was that a woman?”
Sheppard put the car in reverse, flooring the accelerator and stopping within view of what looked like a limb. “Stay here,” he said, then pulled the emergency brake and got out.
By training, the rush of adrenaline conferred on him a hyperalertness and cool. The brake lights had cast the scene red, and though his mental state was one of crisis assessment he felt palpable relief on seeing that the limb belonged to a dog. He went toward the body—it was a large breed, a standard poodle—and only when he got within a couple of feet could he tell the animal was still alive.
He stood over her. She was lying on her right side, and the gash where the front leg had been sheared away revealed entwined snakes of muscle that were corded and shining in the crimson light.
He kneeled down. Her torso was black with blood, her hind legs broken severely near the paws. Both proximal tibias were compounded at the joints,