When She Was Bad Part 23

"Doesn't this thing go any faster?" said Max. He'd tossed his knapsack into the back of the mule, and was facing rearward, with the barrel of the pistol braced on the railing behind the bench seat. But the way the mule was bucking along up the rutted track, he'd have been lucky to hit the taillight-if the mule had had a taillight, that is; it possessed only a single, center-mounted front spotlight.

"Yeah, right, I'll switch on the f.u.c.kin' afterburners," said Lily. Being Lilith was second nature to her by now-she hardly even had to think about it. "Look, don't sweat it-where we're going, they ain't gonna be able to follow in that fancy-a.s.s Infiniti."

Max's head whipped around sharply. "How would you know?"

Whoops, thought Lily, almost jocularly-somehow, the longer she impersonated Lilith, the more of Lilith's qualities she began to take on. "Dotted line on the topo map," she improvised confidently. "Should be coming up right...about...Yeah, here it is. Hold on tight."

She jerked the wheel hard to the left and steered the vehicle through a steep, uphill, J-turn onto a rutted track only a little less narrow than the mule itself-one side of the vehicle almost sc.r.a.ped the rocky cliff as the mule jolted up the side of the canyon, while the other nearly overhung the steep drop-off.

"Where does this come out?" Max asked her.

"According to the topo map, it swings north back up toward Big Sur," said Lily, improvising hurriedly as she guided the mule through the first of a series of hairy-looking switchbacks.

"It G.o.dd.a.m.n well better," said Max.

Pender slumped forward with his head resting against the top of the steering wheel.

"I'm sorry," Irene said. In a way it would have been less painful if she'd simply forgotten to bring along her key ring. (Lyssy and Lily had thoughtfully taken only her spare car key.) But she had brought it along: it was in her Coach bag, which she'd left in the Barracuda. "I don't suppose there's any way you could...what do you call it, hot-wire it?"

By way of answer, Pender banged his head lightly against the padded wheel-thud, thud, thud.

"No, I suppose not," said Irene.

"Oh well." Pender sighed. He sat up again and reached for the door handle. "You know what the Chinese say about a journey of a thousand miles, don't you."

Irene: "It begins with a single step?"

Pender: "Bingo!"

But they hadn't gone much farther than that first step when Pender pointed to the lonely light winding its way up the side of the cliff, a hundred feet or so above the canyon floor. "I thought you said that way doesn't lead anywhere but the top of the ridge?"

"It doesn't," said Irene, taking off her watch cap.

"Does Lily know that?"

"Of course." She ran her fingers through her damp, flattened hair. "What could she be thinking, Pen?"

"You're the shrink, you tell me."

"I don't know!" Despairingly. "Sometimes I think I don't know anything anymore."

"Knowing one knows nothing is the beginning of wisdom, Gra.s.shopper," said Pender.

Irene smacked him across the arm with her sweaty watch cap. They started off again, and again hadn't gotten far when Irene tripped over something small and hard. When she saw what it was-the snubnosed revolver Max had tossed away earlier-she knelt down and, under the pretext of tying her sneaker, slipped it into the roomy front pocket of her cargo pants before Pender could decide to pull rank again and take it away from her.

Dr. Al is as gone as the day before yesterday. In his place, a dreamlike sense of motion-bucketing along, rising and falling, swaying, a roller-coaster ride through sheer undifferentiated blackness. Then a vision coalesces out of the blackness, a soundless, slightly skewed, camera's-eye vision, which Lyssy can neither control nor direct, of a narrow dirt road winding dead ahead through the darkness along the side of a cliff.

Suddenly the camera's-eye view rotates to the left. Lyssy catches a glimpse of Lily in profile, the hood of her sweats.h.i.+rt thrown back, her eyes narrowed in concentration and her lips pressed resolutely together as she wrestles with the steering wheel. Lily, he wants to shout-Lily, I'm here.

But before he can figure out whether it's a dream, or his first experience of co-consciousness, the view rotates around to the right again, then s.h.i.+fts downward, and instead of Lily, Lyssy finds himself looking down at a black pistol gripped tightly in a clawlike, fire-scarred hand.

7.

They left the clearing at a fast walk, then by mutual and unspoken agreement broke into a trot as the trees began to close in overhead until they could no longer see the tiny light clinging doughtily to the side of the canyon.

Irene, a veteran jogger, started to pull ahead, s.h.i.+ning her flashlight in front of her. Pender called to her to wait; he was breathing hard when he caught up. "What is it?" she said.

"It could be...a trick.... Max could have...bailed out, he could be...hiding in the bushes waiting to...pick us off."

She extinguished her flashlight and they started off again, Pender walking ahead of her, gun in hand. When they reached the fork in the road Pender turned to Irene. "Guess what?" he whispered, his big hand resting on her shoulder.

"Forget it," said Irene.

"One of us has to go for help." The top half of his face was in deep shadow; against the dark background, the green iguana logo on his baseball cap seemed to be floating an inch or two over his head. "You're a faster hiker, I'm better with this." Indicating the Colt in his other hand.

"But-"

"You know I'm right, don't you?" he whispered, almost tenderly.

Seconds ticked by while she tried to think of a reason to say no, but all she could come up with was an atavistic need to not be alone, and an unreasonable fear that if she left now, she'd never see Pender or Lily again. "Is this one of those Davy Crockett moments?" she said, looking up at him, feeling dwarfed by his height and bulk in the dark as she never had in the light.

"Yes, ma'am," said Pender, in his best frontier drawl. "Yes ma'am, Ah reckon it is."

"I reckon we'd better go ahead, then," said Irene.

The last switchback was the tightest, the steepest, and the most severely banked. As it jolted upward the mule tilted precariously to the right, sending Max sliding sideways across the cracked vinyl padding of the bench. At the last second he managed to hook his elbow over the railing behind him, and found himself leaning out over empty s.p.a.ce, staring down into the abyss.

"Jesus f.u.c.k," he said, hauling himself back to safety as the mule righted itself. "You trying to get us both killed?"

No, just you, thought Lily. "Looks like we're over the worst of it," she told him, as the track began to level off. They traveled briefly northward along the ridge at the top of the canyon, then turned due west, the mule b.u.mping across the gentle rise of a broad, gra.s.sy, humpbacked meadow dotted with widely s.p.a.ced live oak and madrone.

The road itself, though, seemed to have petered out. Behind them were two s.h.i.+ny tracks made by moonlight refracted off the blades of gra.s.s flattened under the mule's tires; ahead there was only virgin gra.s.s. Then the mule topped the rise and Max saw that the gra.s.s ended abruptly at the edge of the continent. Far below, beyond the meadow, there was only the flat black expanse of the Pacific, stretching onward beneath a dome of stars toward a nearly indiscernable horizon.

Pender walked ten, jogged ten, walked ten, jogged ten, while his internal Rock-Ola played an appropriate medley of oldies: I'm walkin', yes indeed: walkin' in the rain, walkin' to New Orleans, walkin' back to happiness, these boots are made for walkin', and you'll never walk alone.

Pick 'em up, lay 'em down, pick 'em up, lay 'em down. The footing was treacherous, the incline pitiless, the ache in his thighs relentless. Whether he walked in or out of the ruts, his ankles, unsupported by the Hush Puppies loafers, threatened to turn at every step. Cursing himself for all the miles of exercise he'd blown off riding in golf carts, Pender soon abandoned even the pretense of jogging.

The first time he went down (what looked like shaley rock in moon-shadow turned out to be a shelf of dirt that crumbled underfoot), he landed hard on his left side and lay there in suspense, waiting to see how badly he'd f.u.c.ked up his ankle.

Not at all, as it turned out-the shooting pain he'd been antic.i.p.ating never materialized. So he picked up his gun, picked himself up off the ground, and resumed the upward trudge, his infernal jukebox kicking in with "Twenty-five Miles."

But it soon felt like he'd already gone fifty miles. His breath coming harder now, his stride degenerating to an oldster's shuffle, at first Pender attributed the pain in his left arm to his earlier tumble. He flexed his shoulder, worked the arm around in a circle. The pain sharpened, grew jagged, turned a screaming crimson. A steel band tightened around his chest. He saw the fireflies again, points of dancing, colored light, then the world tilted crazily onto its side.

8.

Lily had toyed with the idea of driving the mule over the edge of the cliff and jumping out at the last second, but every time she took her foot off the accelerator, the mule slowed, with the obvious intention of rolling to a complaisant halt. And even if it didn't, what was to stop Max from bailing out as well?

So she s.h.i.+fted into neutral and engaged the hand brake. The vehicle shuddered and trembled, pocketapocketapocketa, until Max leaned over and switched off the engine by closing off the choke. The mule backfired and fell silent. The vista, even at night, was magnificent: the domed, starry sky; the endless ocean; the faint glow marking the vast arc of the horizon.

"I thought this was supposed to be the back way to Big Sur," said Max, turning toward Lily and placing the muzzle of his gun against her right temple.

"I musta misread the map," said Lily evenly. The Lilith persona was coming to her effortlessly now-she no longer needed to ask herself what Lilith would do or say, how Lilith might react-but something in Max's eyes told her the distinction was rapidly becoming irrelevant to him. "Think about it. Why the f.u.c.k would I bring you up here? What do I have to gain?"

"I don't know yet," said Max. "But I'm going to find out." His left hand shot out, grabbed the bunched hood of her zippered sweats.h.i.+rt, rammed her head against the steering wheel, yanked her upright, jammed the pistol against the side of her head again. "Now, what are you trying to pull?"

It was all so like a dream-a sense of gliding movement, of a perpetual nightscape, of darkness around the edges, and of helplessness. Heartbreaking helplessness when his (no, Max's, he reminds himself ) hand slams Lily's head against the steering wheel. But Lyssy knows better. It's not a dream, it's co-consciousness. He's seeing through Max's eyes. And hearing now-distantly but clearly, although there's a hint of disconnect between what he sees and what he hears. It's not as severe as a streaming video: more like watching singers trying to lip-synch on TV.

"Put the f.u.c.king gun down," Lily is saying....

Dazed and angry, with a trickle of blood descending from her hairline, Lily said, "Put the f.u.c.king gun down, Max, before I take it away and shove it up your a.s.s-a.s.suming there's room for it with your head up there."

Max twisted the bunched hood, choking her with her own sweats.h.i.+rt. "Don't try to out-bada.s.s me, girl."

"I wouldn't...think of it."

"Think anything you like-just do exactly what I tell you to do." It felt so good, so right, to have a live body wriggling in his grasp again. A warm, intensely familiar feeling washed over Max. It was the closeness, a sense of connection, a feeling almost of oneness, of love turned inside out, that the s.a.d.i.s.t develops for the m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t, the torturer for the subject, the psychopath for his victim, which supersedes all other considerations. Suddenly he had to have her.

"Get out-no, this way." He climbed backward out of the mule, good leg first, hauling her with him by the hood of her sweats.h.i.+rt. Still holding the gun to her head, he shuffled to his left, dragging his right leg, and Lily, all the way around to the back of the mule. He ordered her to unsnap the plastic webbing that served as a tailgate. When she'd done so, he pressed himself tightly against her from behind, gently pus.h.i.+ng the hair back from her ear with the barrel of his gun.

"Drop your drawers and bend over," he whispered. He wasn't hard yet-like many psychopaths, Max had trouble achieving erection. Still, there were always alternatives to an erect p.e.n.i.s: he was holding one of them in his right hand, it had a nice long barrel, and when it came, it came with a bang.

Circling around the wagon, or whatever it was, dragging/shoving Lily by her sweats.h.i.+rt, Lyssy watching from a Max's-eye view, thinking stop, thinking don't, thinking let her go, G.o.dd.a.m.n you, let her go.

Then he hears Max say, "Drop your drawers and bend over."

No, thinks Lyssy, you can't, I won't let you. But he's powerless...or is he? If he could hear Max talking to him when he was conscious and Max was in co-con, then maybe there's a way to make Max hear him. He fills his mind the way you fill your lungs, then: no, stop, let her go! Screaming the thought, thinking the scream. Stop, let her go, leave her alone....

It had seemed so simple at the time, Lily remembered: lead Max away from Uncle Pen and Dr. Irene, give him the slip, then outrun him-he's a cripple, after all.

But somehow the right moment had never presented itself. Or if it had, she had missed it-one minute she was driving the mule, the next he had her by the hood of her sweats.h.i.+rt and was holding a gun to her head-slip this, smart girl-and now here she was, bent over the back of Fano's mule and apparently out of options.

Except of course for the old reliable: give in. They're big, you're little, they have all the power, you have none. And if you cry or struggle, they'll only hurt you worse.

Only this time it wasn't working. She'd been tasting what it was like not to feel helpless all the time, not to feel an emptiness at your very core, not to define yourself by what had been done to you, or lose yourself in the delicious, unabashed self-pity of childhood-in short, what it was like to be Lilith-long enough to realize that that avenue of retreat had been closed to her forever. She could no longer lose herself in the old familiar sadness-nor did she really want to.

So up your a.s.s with a piece of gla.s.s, Max, she thought to herself as he shoved her head down toward the oily-smelling boards. And twice as far with a Hershey bar. If you want to actually do anything to me, sooner or later you're gonna have to let go my hood or put down the gun. And then you'll find out what it means to f.u.c.k with me and Lilith.

Me and Lilith-she kind of liked the way that sounded. Like she wasn't alone, like she had an ally.

Then suddenly she sensed Max growing distracted. He muttered something under his breath...she felt the absence of the constant pressure of the gun muzzle against her temple...but he still had that death grip on her hoodie.

Next time, she promised herself-once again he had shoved the muzzle against the side of her head-next time she'd be ready. Slowly, she began unzipping the sweats.h.i.+rt, her mind running faster and clearer than ever, thinking up and dealing with contingency after contingency: if he says anything, tell him you thought he told you to get undressed. Be ready to go when he moves the gun again. Whatever you do, don't let him get your pants down. If he does, get them all the way down, step out of them. He won't stop you. Because he can't f.u.c.k you if- But the moment had arrived: Max was talking to himself again, and the gun was no longer pressed against her temple. No more hesitating: Lily threw herself violently to her left, her arms stretched straight out behind her like a high-diver, wriggled free, and ran for her life, leaving Max holding her empty sweats.h.i.+rt by the hood.

9.

For some reason-or maybe for no reason: he didn't seem to be thinking all that clearly-sitting up had become of immense importance to Pender. It felt as though lying there in the dirt was the same as giving up-and he already knew that giving up was the same as dying.

So he dragged himself over to the side of the road and pulled himself to a seated position with his legs outstretched and his back against the cliff wall, feeling like a beached whale. What with all the pain, he couldn't even get the ol' jukebox working right, though there were so many songs about hearts breaking it would take days to get through them all. Instead he found himself listening to that old Beatles song, the one about turning off your mind, relaxing, and floating downstream.

Tempting-oh so very tempting. Except for this friggin' tyrannosaur crus.h.i.+ng his chest between its jaws.

It wasn't until she was over the rise of the humpbacked meadow that Lily stopped feeling the tingling in her spine, dead center between her shoulder blades, and was finally able to banish the image of Fano throwing his arms into the air and pitching forward, dead.

She even allowed herself a triumphant, Rocky Balboa double fist pump. We did it, she thought, trotting steadily downhill, sneakers pounding the dirt as she followed the beige ribbon of the mule path in the pale moonlight. n.o.body got shot, n.o.body got raped, and surely Uncle Pen and Dr. Irene would have contacted the authorities by now-soon the cops will be here with their dogs and helicopters, and sweep up Max like yesterday's garbage.

And as for Lyssy, it only took a little clear, Lilith-like thinking to understand that if he couldn't maintain control over Max, their sketchy plans to escape to the villa in Mexico were only so many pipe dreams. Like what's-her-name says in Casablanca, we'll always have f.u.c.king Paris. Or in their case, La Guarida.

Slowing as she reached the first switchback, Lily listened for pursuing footsteps and heard none. Leaning back, brus.h.i.+ng her hand against the ground for balance, she half-skidded down the slope, regained her feet, and broke into her steady, downhill trot again, until she reached the next switchback. Then it was ease up, lean back, skid down, stand up, jog on to the next switchback, and the next, achieving an easy, comfortable rhythm, stopping only when she rounded the fourth or fifth turn and spotted a bulky, shadowy figure, like a bear in a baseball cap, sitting up with its back to the cliff wall.

"Uncle Pen?" She stooped by his side.

He turned his head slowly. "Lily?"

"What happened? Are you all right?"

"Ticker. Turns out the...doctors were...right. Imagine my...surprise."

"Where's Dr. Irene?"

"Gone for help. On foot." The corners of his mouth twitched; if it was a grin, it was a ghastly one. "She forgot...her keys."

"Can you walk?"

"Where's Maxwell?"

"Up-" Up there, Lily started to say. Then she heard footsteps above her, and falling pebbles. "Please get up, Uncle Pen-here, I'll help."

But before he could get his feet underneath him, she saw a small figure limping down the road toward them. "Where's the gun?" she whispered frantically. "Do you still have your gun?"