Red - Jack Ketchum [48]
“Ah well, hey,” he said, “no one’s really hurt here, right?”
“No one…no one’s…what?”
“He’s a kid, Belle. An adolescent. Adolescents have urges. Boys will be boys, right? And all cleaned up like she is, I gotta say, she’s not half bad to look at, y’know? These things happen.”
He had seen his wife mad before, but — in the parlance of his own adolescence — he had never seen her flip out before. And he had to wonder if it didn’t have something to do with last night. Whatever it was, she got right up into his face with it.
“You can’t fucking do this anymore!“ she said.
Belle? Use the word fucking?
“You can’t do this to us, Chris! This has gone too far! Have you lost your mind? You can’t just stand there and smile when your own son thinks it’s okay to…”
“Okay to what, Belle?
“You’re an officer of the court! She’s a human being! Do you know what would happen to all of us if you got caught? Even what’s going on with the goddamn dogs out there would be enough to put you in prison!”
“Anophthalmia, Belle. Your shame. Anophthalmia, remember?”
“I remember, all right. And I never condoned what you did. Never. But you can’t just keep putting one thing on top of another and expect to get away with it forever! You can’t! Enough‘s enough! I’ve had it!”
At this point so had he. His face burned.
“So what are you going to do, Belle. Huh? Tell me. What the fuck are you going to do about it?”
Her face had turned into one big ugly sneer. One big ugly sneer at him.
And he realized something. His wife had just this moment made a decision. It was like inspiration was all of a sudden written all over her. Her body went utterly rigid.
“I’m leaving, that’s what I’m going to do about it!” she said. “And I’m taking the girls with me. You can have your little rapist son all to yourself. You’re already teaching him every goddamn thing he needs to know, aren’t you? You two can damn well burn in hell together, the two of you. But you’re not going to hurt these girls anymore. It’s finished. It’s over. You hear me? Right now. You can’t do this! I can’t do…”
There was a moment when all he saw was a bright blank yellow. Like he was looking directly into the flash of a camera. And then he was hitting her in the stomach one two three with his whole body behind it, a sound like the heavy bag made when he still worked out on it back in the day and the next thing he knew his right fist connected with her left temple and he watched her go down, legs falling out from under her like a well-shot deer.
I can’t? He heard himself roaring at her inert body sprawled across the linoleum. I CAN’T?
His kids were looking at him. Peg with horror. Brian with…what?
His son he couldn’t read. Fuck it.
Then Peg was down on the floor beside her slapping her cheek.
“Mom? Mother?”
He brushed her away.
“She’s okay. She’ll be okay,” he said.
He bent down and lifted her, his forearms under and through her armpits which were damp with sweat, an unpleasant feeling. And there was a taste in his mouth he didn’t like. He wanted to spit. He kicked a chair out from the table next to Brian and sat her down. Positioned her carefully so she wouldn’t fall out of it and gently held her there.
“Get a cold cloth, will you, Peg?”
His daughter didn’t move. His daughter just stood there, frozen, angry-looking.
“Peg!”
He watched her snap out of it finally, get out from under wherever the hell she was and walk over to the sink, wet a cloth and kneel beside her mother.
And that was when the doorbell rang.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“Want to get that first,” her father said. “See who it is?”
He’d flipped a switch and was all at ease now. That quiet almost southern drawl of his.
Her father was fucking crazy.
She felt a deep conflict here. On the one hand to go to the door would be to admit into their home the potential for some sort of normalcy, a breath of air from the outside world, some person or persons who in all probability weren’t beating up on their wives and keeping women in the fruit cellar and their kids under lock and key.