Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [134]
“There now, girl,” he said. “There, there.”
He felt her neck: no collar.
“I’m going to take care of you,” he said, then marched back to the car.
“Is it a woman?” Susan asked. “Or a boy?”
He said nothing and opened the trunk. He grabbed the lug wrench and strode away, Susan following him until the leg came into sight and suddenly retching.
Sheppard knelt down before the dog once more.
This, he thought, was the cost, every step in the chain from three years ago when he and Susan had first met leading to this. And things could end here if he was strong. This could be the only casualty, or else a harbinger of others to come. He must not let that happen.
He touched the dog’s cheek, his palm now warm with her blood. She tried to get up again and yelped, then sprawled back and relaxed. “Easy,” he said. Her legs curled into her—the contracted muscles at the gash alive—and she stared straight into his eyes. And the love with which she regarded him, imploring and passive and utterly obedient, that was what he’d defiled.
He got on one knee, took her scruff gently in his right hand, and beat on her head in blows so fast he roared, raining them down on her skull, until the wrench broke through to the road and gonged, the X splitting in half and ringing in the silence, until he himself was drenched with gore, until no sound came from her and he could hear only his own breath—Sheppard sure, for the first time he could remember, of what was right.
It’s a rare thing, Richard Eberling thought, when what you most deeply wish for comes true.
He had four houses to clean today, a schedule to keep, but from home to home Marilyn accompanied him in his mind, and he recalled sitting with her on the patio, his missed chance and then her offer (“You could swim at our house after you’re finished and have a chance to play”), and he thought that the harder he worked, the sooner Wednesday would come. Time would otherwise be a torture. He thought about his days in the orphanage and how he’d learned to sleep for fifteen hours if need be. But that was impossible now. Things had to be done. He kept rehearsing how his day with Marilyn would go, and every time he ran through the fantasy that ended with him going up to her bedroom, he told himself: I must be brave. I must believe. I must not hesitate for a moment. I will slide under the cool sheets and then I will tell her my secret.
He wanted to get her a gift. He thought maybe a book would be the ticket, perhaps of poetry, and while at the Newharts’ house in Huntington Park he studied their massive library with its windows looking out over the water (and a bitch to dust), pulling down random volumes by authors he didn’t know, flipping through the pages hoping chance itself might show him what he needed.
Thanks be to Venus, I too deserve the title of master
Master of Arts, I might say, versed in the precepts of love.
Love, to be sure, is wild and often inclined to resent me;
Still, he is only a boy, tender and easily swayed.
I’m a boy too, Eberling thought, amazed. Tender and easily swayed. And love had resented him. If he’d become a doctor like Dr. Sam, then it might not have, and he flashed back to how the man had brushed by him when he’d said hello the other day, like he was invisible. Or the high school football game when Dr. Sam rushed out onto the field to tend to a boy who’d torn up his knee, and a pretty girl behind him sighed and said to her friend, “A doctor like that makes me want to be sick”—which made Eberling sick too. He read more but he didn’t understand much of it, the following lines full of strange names and deeds—though he could imagine himself reading the poetry aloud to Marilyn. That could be his gift. She would understand it. And later, when Marilyn read it by herself, it would be like he was reading to