Ash Wednesday (9 page)

"Did I
hit
him?" he flared. "Do I
ever
hit him? Or
you?
Or Linda?"

"No, but—"

"I never lay a
hand
on you!"

"But your temper!"

"
Fuck
my temper. So I got a temper, so what?"

"So what?" she asked astounded. "So you're getting impossible to live with is what."

"Then get the hell out." He turned away from her, as if ashamed of what he'd just said, and sat down.

"You mean that?" she said quietly.

His head shook almost imperceptibly. "No. No, I don't mean it." The voice was calm, his anger gone. She stepped behind his chair and put her hands on his shoulders. "I'm sorry," he said. "I don't know what happens sometimes. I just . . . I just blow up, you know?"

"I know."

"I don't mean to. And I'd never want you to leave. I need you, Bonnie."

"I know that too." She sighed. "If you'd just try to keep your temper, keep control of yourself—"

"I will."

"The littlest things get you going, Brad, it's scary—”

“I will, I promise. I'll really try."

She thought she heard his voice break, and when she looked, his eyes were wet with tears. She left him alone then, having forgotten how to be tender.

That night he didn't drink any more beer. Instead, he played with Frankie and Linda and read them bedtime stories. Later, when the children were asleep, he and Bonnie made love for the first time in several weeks, and she had one of her intense but infrequent orgasms. They fell asleep exhausted, holding each other, and sometime in the middle of the night, after comfort had placed them on their appointed sides of the bed, Brad had his first bad dream.

He did not normally dream, at least not so that he would remember when he awoke. But the dream he had that night was so real, so crystalline, that it seemed for months afterward that it had actually happened.
Déjà vu
was not a primary factor, for although memory was a part of what formed the deep scenario, it was only a small part. The dream was born of wishes as well, and desires and fears and possibilities.

It began as a sexual encounter. The girl was young, younger than Bonnie. Her skin was smooth as a child's, her body fully formed, and though she seemed anxious and willing for each variation he imposed upon her, still there was a hesitancy, as though all this were new, done to please him, as though she feared his displeasure. At the last he was in her mouth, pounding away as savagely as at the true coin of a vagina, hardier, made to accommodate power, built to accept the force of seed. And as his pleasure and intensity grew until he was within a wisp of coming, she drew back from him and turned into darkness, a monolithic blackness that engulfed him only momentarily, then brightened to become a green vastness of overhanging limbs lit by orange flame. He looked down at himself. He was still naked, his erection failing, shrinking before the mystery of his situation. Then suddenly he knew.

Flames lit the whole sky in a canopy of fire, and he began to notice the bodies around him. Most of them lay face down, and he could see the black hair charred even blacker, and he knelt beside one and touched it. As he had expected, the hair turned to powder in his hand, exposing blackened skin the texture of moldy oranges that parted like scum on pudding as his fingers pressed down on it.

He felt horror in the dream, but felt too that he had known what his hands would encounter, that he was somehow meant to press and probe at these burned, dead things, and though he knew there was no reason, though he knew that sane minds would recoil in revulsion at what he did, he touched the bodies scattered about him, rigid fingers piercing flaking skin, hands sinking into hollow stomachs, drumhead-thin barriers of flesh parting like tissue paper at his caress.

I'm bathing in it. I'm washing. Why am I doing this? How will I be clean?

He could not answer himself. He could only move from corpse to corpse, now walking, now crawling, anointing his hands over and over again, a supplicant washing in the blood of the lambs.

Here were two together, a father and son perhaps, the man lying face upward, charred coal eyes staring out of blackness through blackness into blackness, lips that smiled and kissed now only twin red-black sponges crisped and curled, brow that wrinkled in concern or smoothed with joy now fissured in basaltic ridges, once-living lava hardened by the passage of fire. It was a face sculpted in a furnace.

What he had worn for clothes was forgotten, no more than a thin layer, clumped in spots, that clung to his body like a second skin. His fingers were black twigs.

The boy lay across him face down, small head pressed into the man's stomach. His bare arms and legs were smooth and light brown, not black, and Brad knew that fire had not touched him. But something else had, for where his head lay on the father's stomach was a great puddle of blood that ran over the edges of the man's rib cage like water over a birdbath onto the dark ground below.

There had been no sound in the dream to this point, only the thin, high keening that comes at times of absolute silence, heard by the brain and not the ear. But now there was something else—a wet bubbling, slow and methodical, like the
gurglings
of a pot carefully tended. He looked down again where the boy's head nestled in the cavity of his father's bowels, and saw fat bubbles explode on either side.
Drowning. Drowning in blood
. He bent down to lift the boy out of the red pool, and his limbs moved slowly, as through a thick jelly. But as his fingers finally touched the yellow-brown shoulders, the head came up of its own accord and turned toward him, the almond eyes glowing, the cheeks and mouth crimson with gore. The nostrils were pulsing rhythmically like an animal's, and between the teeth Brad could see, just disappearing down the bobbing throat, a morsel of what the boy had been feeding on.

Eating the dead
.

The terror started low in him, at the knees, and moved up with the force of a riptide, and suddenly the boy's eyes were his, and he was looking up at himself, no longer naked, but clothed in khaki. He ignored his own horrified expression and felt a growl form deep in his throat. In another second he had sunk his head into the open wound of the man beneath him, blowing air out through his nose like a diver, and, despite the mind that shrieked at him to stop, began to tear and gnaw with strong white teeth at the slick, gleaming viscera within the bloody cavern. The bubbling increased in volume, rising in pitch, until he realized that what he heard was his own strangled voice trying to shout himself awake.

He came to consciousness with a start and a sob, striking his head against the headboard in his haste to pull himself erect, as though remaining prone would throw him back into the nightmare.

Bonnie awoke immediately. He could hear the panic in her voice. "Brad? Brad!"

He couldn't speak at first, couldn't answer. He tasted the salty sting of blood in his mouth.

"Brad? What's wrong?"

"Nothing," he was finally able to say. "I'm all right.—

"Bad dream?"

"Uh-huh." He let her put an arm around him and pull him down beside her, but he would not go back to sleep. He was too scared. After Bonnie fell asleep he went into the kitchen and opened a beer. It relaxed him, so he had another. And another. After the third, he thought he could sleep, and he did, dreamlessly.

From that night on he would not go to bed without having at least thirty-six ounces of beer in his stomach, and sometimes more. He never had the nightmare again that vividly, but traces of it would creep into his mind when sleep took him, making him awaken with a start.

The temper returned as quickly as it had fled, and Bonnie began looking for excuses to be away from home with the kids on weekends. Left alone, Brad drank harder, and Sunday nights were often times of mental savagery in the Meyers home, Bonnie and the children returning to find Brad drunk and sullen, with perhaps two or three friends from Universal in nearly as nasty a mood. One night Brad suggested that they "pull a train" on Bonnie. She hadn't known what he meant until later, but luckily the others were not so drunk as not to be embarrassed by Brad's offer. The party broke up early that night.

Brad was not always difficult to live with. At times he was kind and loving. Holidays seemed to bring out his better nature, and he loved going trick or treating with Frankie and Linda Marie, cutting out paper turkeys and Pilgrims to decorate the house at Thanksgiving, trimming the tree, always a live one, and setting up his old Lionel O gauge in the basement at Christmas. There were times when things he would do or say would wrench her heart, and she would find herself wishing that he would never be kind, would always be an unmitigated son of a bitch so that she would not be forced to love him. But when she saw him bending over Frankie's bed, tucking the covers around his fragile shoulders. whispering "I love you, pal" and meaning it, when he pushed the light brown curls back from Linda Marie's sweating forehead on summer nights and blew gently on the girl's face to cool her, kissing her softly before he left the room, when she saw these things, she weakened, and hugged him, and decided to wait a little longer, give him another chance to make up for his last outburst, not leave him. Not just yet.

So she hung on for the children's sake, and her own, and Brad's. She tolerated the drunkenness, the shouts, the cruelties. At first she even tolerated it when he pushed her, then one night actually slapped her face. But there was always a point, she told herself, beyond which he would not go. She knew he would not hit the children. And he never did. No matter how irrationally outraged he would become at Frankie or Linda Marie, he never struck them. Instead, some other object received the blow—a table at which he sat, a magazine he held, a can he had just emptied, or perhaps Bonnie herself.

She could not, however, put up with it permanently. Life with Brad hardened her, annealed her in the furnace until his moments of tenderness meant less to her and his times of brutality meant more and more. At one time she had worried about what he would do if she left him, but eventually she was past caring. Being murdered, she told herself, might even be preferable to the life she had with him.

In 1979, three years after his fits of rage began, Bonnie Meyers filed for divorce on grounds of mental cruelty. She did not tell him she was leaving, not because she was frightened of his reaction, but because she felt he did not deserve to be told. She took Frankie out of school and the three of them went to Allentown to stay with
Bonnie's
aunt until Brad could hear of and react to the desertion. She'd left him a note explaining things as well as she could, and the attorney she'd hired called Brad the next day at noon. He'd been sleeping, and had seemed calm and reasonable, the attorney told Bonnie. "In fact," the attorney said, "he told me he was surprised you hadn't walked out a long time ago."

Brad's mother called him, finally breaking her self-imposed lack of intervention in her son's affairs, to ask him if he didn't think the marriage was worth saving. "It's dead," he told her. "You can't save the dead."

Arrangements were made. Bonnie got the house, the children, and child support, while Brad got visitation rights, the only thing he had specifically asked for. He had not even hired an attorney. Taking his personal effects and what furniture and kitchen things Bonnie felt inclined to share, he rented a small two-bedroom apartment on Market Street for $150 a month. He drank less after the separation, for his weekends were spent working at the 7-Eleven down the street. Along with his job at Universal, his work totaled fifty-two hours a week and as many as seventy-six if he got some extra days at double shift. Often he went home, drank a few beers, and fell into bed, getting up in seven or eight hours to go back to work again. With this schedule, he was able to handle the child-support, mortgage, and rent payments, and save a considerable amount as well, since he seldom had time to spend anything. Slowly he began to put the money into the furnishing of his apartment, buying a water bed one month to replace the single mattress on the floor, a Pioneer stereo system the next, with hundred-watt speakers, on which he played a mixture of rock and classical that had the third-floor tenant, old and half deaf as he was, pounding on the floor, and a four-
seater
padded bar the next month, on whose shelves he placed no liquor, but only bottles of Heineken. The Nazi flags were almost an afterthought.