Butch Karp: Absolute Rage Part 30

"Truer words were never spoken," said Karp. "How about that two grand in the brown envelope?"

"Never mentioned. But he contrasted me as quote 'one of us' with you, 'the Jew b.a.s.t.a.r.d.' I blamed you for everything."

"Right move. Okay, we've gone about as far with him as we can right now. Let's wait for the physical evidence to firm up and we'll see where we go from there. But my sense is that this is going to be settled when we find the payoff. That's the key."

After he got off the phone, Karp called the inn again and again found no answer. He walked out of the Burroughs Building and looked down the street. McCullensburg shut down early. The courthouse was dark, as were the Market Street businesses. Traffic was light. It had been a while since the catfish supper and he was hungry. In the middle distance golden arches gleamed. He walked a couple of blocks and went in. There he found three-quarters of his missing family.

He slid into the booth and s.n.a.t.c.hed up the plastic movie-marketing toy in front of Giancarlo. "My monster!" he said, clutching it dramatically to his breast.

"Garcon!" Marlene called. "Encore de Happy Meal! They were whining for Micky D and they wore me down. I called you but you weren't in the office."

"I was fighting crime. And all of a sudden I realized that what I really wanted was not justice but a cheap plastic Disney figurine and a thin, tasteless burger."

"Dad, I have news for you," said Giancarlo. "You're a grown-up."

"No toy?"

"No. As a matter of fact, I think I'm outgrowing Happy Meals myself," said Giancarlo. "You can give it to Zak. He'll be ordering Happy Meals when he's forty-two."

The response to this from Zak was a quick knuckle to the ribs. Giancarlo flinched and yelped. "Dad! Zak punched me!"

"Yes," said Karp. "You abuse him verbally and he responds physically. A few minutes pa.s.s. Then you abuse him verbally and he responds physically. A few minutes pa.s.s. You abuse him verbally and he responds physically. Do you see a pattern here?"

"He's not supposed to hit me."

"No, and you're not supposed to insult him either." Karp handed back the toy. To his wife he said, "Have they been like this for long?"

"Only all day. I tried to drown them but they were too slippery. I heard about your big-boy day from Emmett. He came by after they sprung him. How's Lucy?"

"She seemed perfectly cool. Apparently the dog intervened before anything really nasty went down."

"Yes, that's what they're for," said Marlene. "In any case, dingdong the witch is dead. The bad guys are in custody. My work here is done."

"Planning on leaving?"

"I guess. It's not really fair to stick Billy with the whole burden."

"Oh, h.e.l.l, Marlene, take a break! Have him hire some more people. You've got the money and the whole thing's just a tax dodge anyway."

"We can't leave now, Mom," Zak interjected. "Emmett promised to take me hunting. We're going to go hunting at night, Dad, with real shotguns and dogs."

"When I'm dead, you can go hunting at night, darling," said Marlene sweetly. "It's not just a tax dodge. It's a tax dodge I have a substantial emotional investment in. It's my profession. I'm good at it and I like it."

Karp sighed and slid out of the booth. "Whatever. Do what you like, you always do. I'm going to get a couple of Big Macs."

He had been hungry, he decided, after the first Mac had vanished, and it had made him unnecessarily cross. The boys had left for the McPlayground just outside. Giancarlo had done a drawing on the back of the place mat, made with the crayons supplied by the franchise. It was a typical Giancarlo product, monsters in extraterrestrial landscapes. Karp was no connoisseur, nor could he draw a straight line himself, but even to his eye his son's artwork was more sophisticated than he imagined was typical of ten-year-old boys. The crayoning was layered, smudged, and mixed to yield colors not in the Crayola box, and the line was vigorous and confident. Where did it come from? he wondered. Another disturbing miracle, like the languages. Zak seemed to be the one normal kid, if saying four words a day and wanting to shoot everything moving was normal. Karp felt Marlene's eyes. Around a wad of the second burger he said, "Sorry for snapping. Besides the brats, how was your day?"

"I worked on my tan. I hated three teenagers who showed up at the pool for their sleek limbs. I swore I would never wear a bikini again. I flirted with Trooper Blake and reneged on my swear about the bikinis on his unspoken advice. I arranged for the truck to be deposited at Buddy's Body and spent a good deal of time waiting for Buddy to get to where he could look at the damage and let me know how long it would take him to fix it. Buddy is a deliberate fellow, which I guess comes naturally when you weigh three-fifty. Have you noticed how many remarkably fat people there are in this town?"

Karp looked around the restaurant to confirm this. "Yes. Are you afraid it's catching?"

"Frankly? I am; it may be something in the air. Buddy was telling me about Alma Knox, whose Chevy he had right there in the shop. Alma got into a little fender bender out on Route 11 that squished the latch on the driver's-side door. Well, Alma could not actually slide across to the pa.s.senger door to exit the vehicle. They had to call fire and rescue to cut her out with the Jaws of Life. In any event, I got to sit in the shade of Buddy's Body for a good long time, drinking diet RC and occasionally easing my bladder, while the rich life of McCullensburg flowed around me. Buddy's junkyard is one of the places to see and be seen, it turns out. A parade of codgers, mainly guys with few teeth and tobacco stains on their stubble. Very polite gents, all retired miners looking for junk parts to keep their 1978 Pontiacs humming. Apparently they occasionally get a little bonus of some kind from the union pension fund, and they all just got one and were blowing it on Delco alternators. They weren't fat, though. Would you still love me if I weighed three hundred pounds?"

"Of course, dear."

"How incredibly sincerely you lie. You must be a lawyer. On the strength of that guarantee, however, I will risk another french fry." She chomped. "In any case, Buddy says it will take the better part of a week to fix the truck, and there's no point in leaving before then."

"Good. When you're tired of McCullensburg, you're tired of life. I a.s.sume that our daughter has not reappeared?"

"Oh, her! Speaking of my work being done, that's the one good thing about this whole adventure. I don't have to resign myself to having raised a socios.e.xual failure. I will have grandchildren before I get Alzheimer's. I will!"

"She's still with that Heeney kid, huh?" Karp grumbled. "What, you think that's serious?"

"I saw a couple of looks pa.s.s that would've melted plastic."

"From him you mean?"

"Mutual. They were sliding their limbs over one another in the pool like sp.a.w.ning grunion."

"And you approve of this?"

"Darling, he goes to MIT, plus I'm almost a hundred percent certain he's not a junkie and not HIV-positive. He doesn't belong to a cult, he doesn't pick his nose, he doesn't weigh three-fifty, and he has excellent table manners. What more could a mom ask?"

Karp had stopped listening at HIV-positive. Mental pictures he did not wish to entertain entered his mind. "Wait a minute, you think they're . . ."

"f.u.c.king their brains out? I deeply and profoundly hope so. And about time, too."

Lucy and Dan had made their police statements, and Dan had been examined by paramedics, after which Lucy had volunteered to drive Dan back to his house. Lucy drove south on 130, Dan slumped in his seat, not speaking.

"What's wrong? Are you in pain?"

"No, I'm fine."

"I hate it when people say 'I'm fine' when they don't mean it, especially to people who are supposed to mean something to them. If you have cancer and the mailman asks how're you doing, then 'fine' is an appropriate answer, if false. But I really want to know."

"Well, what do you expect, cheerful? Happy? I just got the s.h.i.+t kicked out of me by a bunch of guys who probably killed my family. And they probably were going to do something really bad to you, and I didn't do s.h.i.+t."

"Yes, you did. You hit an armed man with a chair and while you were hurt, too. He might have shot Magog if you hadn't done it. I thought it was incredibly heroic."

Here he gave her a quick look to see if she was serious. He determined that she was, which was fine; but still the a.s.sociation of his sense of what he knew himself to be and the concept of heroism had a profoundly jarring effect on him, as if he had just been informed that he was adopted. He was not a hero; he was a shy bookworm; his father and brother were the heroes.

"The dog was the hero," he mumbled.

"Of course," said Lucy matter-of-factly. "That's what she's trained and bred to be. She'd give her life for me without a thought, a.s.suming she thinks at all. There are people like that, too, I guess, people who just, like, jump into danger without thinking. Like a dog. You can call that heroic, and people do, but that's not really all that impressive, when you think about it. It's like being strong because you happen to be six-seven with a big frame. Well, yeah ? It's really much more impressive when someone who's careful and thoughtful and imaginative does something courageous, because you know it was moral strength that got them over all their fears. Like my mother-she does brave things all the time, but you know it's really all in the nerves. She just acts without thinking. My dad's brave, too, but he suffers, before and after: 'What should I do, did I do the right thing?'"

"And which one are you like?"

"Both, I guess. I act without thinking a lot, but I still suffer." She laughed. "The worst of both worlds."

"You're just trying to make me feel better."

"True. Am I succeeding?"

"Mm. Try harder." This time they both laughed.

"But really," she said, "I meant it. If you hadn't behaved well, I would have told you that, too."

"Yeah, all the time I was thinking, take the girl, do whatever you want, just don't hit me again."

"No, you weren't."

"No, I wasn't thinking at all, except getting hold of a gun or weapon and killing all three of them."

"Yes, and if you'd done that, we wouldn't be sitting here."

"Oh, you don't approve of revenge?"

"It's not me that's in charge of approving or disapproving," said Lucy. "I'm obliged to love my enemies, being a Christian; you're not. But it would've changed you. You don't think it would've, and the movies and everything tell you it doesn't. The good guy kills the villain and hugs the girl, music up and fade to black. But that's not the way it is in real life, and believe me, I know. When you strike your enemy with a sword, the blade goes through your own body first. St. Augustine." She slowed the truck. "Is this the turnoff?"

"Yeah, but don't turn. Keep going on 130. I want to show you something."

"Ooh, yet another wonder of Robbens County! I have goose b.u.mps already."

"Yet another," he agreed, and sat back in his seat. Somehow, the darkness that had lately borne him down was gone. He placed his left hand on her thigh below the hem of her shorts and felt a tide of gladness when she removed a hand from the wheel and placed it on top of his.

"Dan handwich," she said, "on thigh."

Dan had heard the phrase she made him happy many times, but until just then he had thought it to be a mere figure of speech or hyperbole. Before he could think about it or reduce it to the level of strategy, his usual way with girls, he heard his voice saying it: "You make me happy." And blushed.

She nodded. "Uh-huh. I know. You make me happy, too. You won't believe this, but I was actually thinking just that, and how funny that phrase is. I was also thinking, I don't know where we're going, but I hope it's hours and hours."

It was only twenty minutes, though, before he directed her to a left turnoff. The asphalt lasted only a hundred yards or so, as usual, and then they were on oiled dirt and gravel, rat-a-tat-tat, steeply back and forth up the mountainside. Then off that road up a rutted track to a clearing dotted with little twisted pines and gray boulders on a field of whispering, pink-tinged ocher gra.s.ses.

"This's Mount Knox, the highest point in the county," he said. "You can see almost the whole thing from here." Hand in hand they picked their way among the boulders, the dog casting before them, nose asniff.

He helped her clamber up a whaleback boulder resting against a much higher ma.s.s of naked rock. "You're looking north. You can make out the town there."

"Yes, the storied towers of McCullensburg, and their promises of romance and adventure. What's that smear?" She pointed to where a dirty tent of yellow-brown haze hung under the dome of the sky.

"That's the pit. Majestic Number Two, Hampden Mountain. That mountain used to be nearly as high as this one until they cut the top off it. What do you think?"

She looked at the splotched landscape, scarred by coal working and obscured by colored smokes. " Terribilit. "

"Come again?"

"It's what they said in the Italian Renaissance for the mighty works of men. Iron furnaces and foundries. Horrible, but also terrific, what puny man has accomplished and so on."

"Yeah, I've felt that. I didn't know there was a word for it, though."

"Oh, there's a word for everything, just about, in some language."

"And you know them all, huh?"

"Yes. Or will." She bent down, scooped up a stone, and flung it into the void.

They tossed stones for a while. Then he said, "Come on, I want to show you something else. This is the real reason I brought you up here. Hold on to my hand, it's tricky."

He led her down a narrow path around the base of the cap rock. The tops of forty-foot pines waved like meadow gra.s.ses far below. The path curved south, then climbed upward over a set of natural stairs. She saw that the southern rock face of the peak had fallen away, leaving a high, rectangular niche, open at the top and flanked by a pair of horizontal ledges.

"It's like a huge chair!" she exclaimed.

"Uh-huh, it's called Aaron's Throne. This last part is a little rough. Watch where I put my feet. And don't look down."

He clambered up the vertical base of the throne, and after a moment she followed him. It was not as hard as it looked. Dan helped her onto the seat of the throne, an area three yards square, covered (to her great surprise) by short, soft gra.s.s. Below, Magog complained about not being able to follow.

"This is incredible," she cried. "It's like fairyland."

"Yeah, now turn around."

She did and gasped. Green and purple-blue, the corrugated mountains stretched in waves to the limits of vision, their hollows boiling with white mist. In the middle distance a large bird cruised some invisible torrent of air. There was no sign of man's mighty works at all.

He came up behind her and clasped his hands around her waist. "This is what this country looked like before people got here. The Throne is set so you look over the south end of the county and into Virginia. That's Jefferson National Forest to your left. Pretty, huh?"

"It's gorgeous. Is that an eagle?"

"Turkey vulture. But we do have eagles and hawks. We can sit down and lean against the back wall. It's just the right time of day for the light show."

They sat. They watched. The beams from behind them lit up the hills in odd colors, converting the view into something like a Maxfield Parrish landscape. They lay down on the gra.s.s. They chewed on each other's faces, wound tongue around tongue. His arm was up to its elbow in her baggy shorts, his hand exploring the country he had glimpsed for a second on the train, before everything . . .

"Whoops," she said, and rolled away, spinning on her long axis several times. She stopped a yard or so from him, looking up at the sky, catching her breath.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong. I'm about to sink into uncontrollable carnality, and as I think I mentioned on the love boat, I can't do that." Silence. She turned her head. "Oh, now you are pouting."

"Well, it's not fair to me. I mean it's not natural."

"You could procure a trollop," she offered. "To afford you carnal release."

"I don't want a trollop. I want you. Besides, wouldn't you care if I did? Procured one."

"It would pain me, but I'd try to live with it. I would offer it up, as we say. And I am yours, except in that way. As you very well know." She reversed her rotation and ended propped upon an elbow, looking down into his face. "Look, I have a feeling this is big-time, and I don't want to mess it up, and I don't want it to be some boring fifties-type thing, us grabbing at each other and me pulling back and you getting all cranky."

"We could do other stuff."

"Oh, right, b.l.o.w. .j.o.bs, the prep school solution. You're missing the point. The point is not to release it, because I know and you know that, once we start, we'll be on each other like minks and that'll be that. The thing is to raise the energy from here . . ."

And to his amazement she bestowed a gentle squeeze upon the bulging crotch of his jeans.