Greenmantle (8 page)

Had there been anyone there at all? The music, the stag, the girl… Slowly, he got to his feet and shook his head. He felt like he’d just broken a long fever. Looking at Ali’s house, he wondered if he should knock at the door to see if they were all right. He seemed to remember a scream….

* * *

A dream, Frankie thought with relief as she woke abruptly on the couch. Her own cries had roused her and it had all been a dream. She sat up and looked around herself. The stag in Ali’s room, the little twig men or squirrels, or whatever they’d been, scurrying around in the attic… She swung her feet to the floor just as Ali burst into the living room.

“Mom!” Ali cried, then slowed to an undignified halt. “Mom…?”

“I’m all right,” Frankie said. “I was just dreaming.”

“It wasn’t about…?”

“It wasn’t about you,” Frankie assured her. “Or at least not exactly. C’mere and give your mother a hug.”

Ali plonked herself down beside Frankie and gave her the hug. “Boy, you really missed something,” she said. “There was this deer out in the backyard with horns—”

“Antlers,” Frankie corrected automatically.

“Whatever. But you should have seen it. It was
huge
!”

“I did see it.”

“But you said…”

Frankie laughed. “I know. I said I was dreaming. And what I was dreaming was that you had this great big deer stashed away in your bedroom. I heard it moving around and when I opened the door to your room it was staring me right in the face.”

“Is that ever weird,” Ali said.

“You’re telling me, kiddo. Synchronicity and all that.”

“Did you hear any music at all?”

“Music? What kind of music?”

“Sort of like on your Georges Zamphir record—you know, panpipes? Only without the orchestra and not so smooth. More…primal.”

Frankie’s eyebrows lifted. “Primal?”

Ali laughed. “No, really. I heard it up in my room and went out to the backyard to see if I could tell where it was coming from, only then the deer was out there and I guess I just forgot about it. But it was really something.”

“Well, I was asleep,” Frankie said, giving her daughter’s shoulders a squeeze, “and if I’d heard any kind of music, I’m sure it would’ve been the theme to
The Exorcist
or something like that because I was scared.”

“Me too. He was so big.”

“You’re telling me.” They looked at each other and laughed. “Listen to us,” Frankie said. “You’d think we both really saw your stag. I’m going to make some tea. Would you like some?”

Ali nodded and followed her mother into the kitchen, but something was bothering her. She remembered how quickly the big animal had just…disappeared. She couldn’t have turned her head for more than a few moments, but when she looked back it was just…gone….

* * *

Scream or no scream, Valenti decided to leave well enough alone for the night. After watching the house for a while, he saw Ali and her mother enter the kitchen like nothing was the matter. Since he didn’t even know Ali’s mother, and he sure as hell wasn’t up to explaining what he’d been doing skulking around in their backyard tonight, he might as well just go home.

Besides, he had too much on his mind right now. He had to sort through what was real and what wasn’t before he talked to anyone about it. For all he knew, he might have been imagining Ali out on the lawn as well.

After taking a last look around, he set off through the trees, heading for home. The wind that had sprung up just before the stag appeared had died down now and the mosquitos were back. This had been one helluva weird night, he thought, no question about that.

7

The sound of Tommy’s pipes, once heard, was not easily forgotten, even for a man of such limited imagination as Lance Maxwell. He hadn’t heard them so clearly again as he had on the day of that February thaw when he’d gotten the flat tire, but the memory of them and their vague sound, carried some evenings like pollen on a high wind, continued to trouble him all through the spring.

Whereas their music awoke a longing deeply held in Tony Valenti—a need to unravel the mystery he heard hidden between the notes of the tunes—they just made Lance horny. He looked for release in his marriage bed, bringing a vigor to his lovemaking that had been absent for years.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into him,” Brenda confided to a neighbor one day, “but I’m not going to complain. It’s nice to know I’ve still got what it takes.”

She might not have been so ready to accept it if she’d known what was going through Lance’s head when they were making love. He liked to enter her from the rear now; he wanted to rut her like a goat, pumping away like Dooker mounting the Sneddens’ bitch when it was in heat. It wasn’t a woman under him, but a doe, and he was the buck; a nanny, and he was the billy goat; a bitch, and he was the hound. And afterward, lying spent and staring up at the peeling ceiling of their bedroom, he’d still be hard, his seed sown, but the release he needed had been stolen away on the strains of a music he didn’t even know he remembered.

He’d gone to see the doc a week or so after he’d had what he thought was a heart attack. Bolton put him on a diet, told him to take it a little easier because he wasn’t getting any younger, adding, “Lay off the cigars, Lance, because if a heart attack doesn’t get you, then lung cancer surely will.”

He’d cut down to two cigars a day, followed the diet as much as their budget allowed, but there wasn’t a whole lot he could do about taking it easier. He barely made ends meet as it was. If he cut out the hauling and odd jobs he did, they’d be on welfare faster than you could shake your dick dry after a piss. So he followed the doc’s advice as he could, and damned if he didn’t feel better, but he couldn’t explain the wanting in him, the feeling of incompletion, and he couldn’t explain his new virility, either.

“What’s gotten into you?” Brenda asked him one night as they started to make love for the second time in as many hours.

“Got a need, Boo,” he grunted, hands moving quick, maybe a little rough, all over her.

His penis stood at attention, hard as a rock against her belly. Brenda took it in hand. The marvel to her was that after reading about orgasms in
Women’s Weekly
and
Redbook
and the like for years and never really knowing what they were talking about, for the first time in their twenty-eight years of marriage she was actually having them. And, Lord, but didn’t it feel good. And maybe she was getting a little plump, and maybe there were gray hairs hidden by the regular use of Miss Clairol, but wasn’t it something that at her age she could still turn a man on like she did? Wasn’t that
something
?

Moving under Lance, pulling him inside her, she had to smile. Lord, but those Maxwells had known what they were about when they were naming their little boy.

* * *

Lance tended to avoid driving by the old Treasure place, though he couldn’t have said why. He knew it was fixed up—Buddy’s little girl, all grown up, was living there now—but the spot just gave him a shiver. About the only thing that had changed for him when Frances Treasure moved in was that he was out the bucks it cost for a case of two-four.

It had been a private bet that he’d made with Frank Clayton—they were the only two who knew anything about it—but he’d paid up all the same. Hell, he was just glad to be alive instead of lying in the slush, praying someone found him before his ticker gave right out. Frank had nothing to do with him making it, and the Treasure place had nothing to do with his having the attack, but he paid the former and avoided the latter all the same.

* * *

Tuesday night he and Brenda were watching
St. Elsewhere
on their old Zenith TV. Lance had a beer in his hand; Brenda was dividing her attention between darning socks and the latest dramas of the St. Eligius hierarchy. Lance lifted his bottle, pausing before he took a swallow.

“Let’s get to bed, Boo,” he said suddenly.

Brenda looked at him. “But—”

“The darning can wait, and so can that,” he said, nodding at the tube. He set his beer down on the scratched coffee table. He was already hard. “Let’s
go
, Boo.”

That night he was a buck, fourteen points if it had one. There was something chasing him and he had to drop his load, quick, or something bad was going to happen. The hounds were out hunting tonight, looking for him, and maybe he’d stand and fight them off, and maybe he’d just run, but first he had to hide his seed. That was what they wanted. The dogs wanted his seed. But he was going to hide it away so deep and so far they were never going to find it, no way.

When he finally pulled away from her and rolled over, Brenda lay quietly for a long time. Not until she was sure he was asleep did she get up and pad into the bathroom. She started to sit on the toilet, but suddenly Lance was there, filling the doorway.

“What’re you doing?” he demanded. “Christ on a cross! What the hell do you think you’re
doing
?” He was wild-eyed, a stranger.

“I’m just—”

He grabbed her by the arm and hauled her off the toilet. “You want them to find it?” he roared. “Jesus H. Christ, woman, what do you think I was hiding it for? So you could piss it down the drain?”

“Lance, I…”

Her voice trailed off. Lance was slowly shaking his head. He lifted a hand to rub his temple.

“Jesus,” he said in a softer voice.

“Lance. Are you okay?”

“Got a headache, Boo. That’s all.”

Brenda massaged her arm where he’d grabbed her. That was going to bruise, she thought. She looked at her husband, remembering the stranger he’d been for a moment there. For the first time since his ardor had returned, stronger even than when they were teenagers and going at it in the back of his father’s car, she was scared. This wasn’t natural. There was something happening to him, but she didn’t know what to do about it.

“Do you want an aspirin?” she asked.

“Yeah. Sure.”

She went to the medicine cabinet, shook a couple out of the bottle. We just got this bottle last week, she thought. A hundred tablets. It was half empty now.

“Maybe you should make an appointment with Dr. Bolton,” she said as she brought him the tablets and a glass of water.

He swallowed the pills. “Maybe I should.”

When he returned to the bed she stood in the doorway, waiting until he was under the covers, then returned to the toilet. Any minute she expected him to come bursting in again, but she finished her business in peace and returned to the bedroom to find Lance staring up at the ceiling.

“What’s the matter, hon?”

He shook his head. “Nothing, really. I just can’t sleep sometimes.”

She pulled back the covers to get in beside him and saw that he was hard again. She wanted to look away, wanted to hold on to the memory of him standing in the doorway and being rough with her—not because she had liked it, but because it had scared her, and she wanted to remember it as a warning—but she couldn’t look away from his hard-on.

What had happened to him? Her breasts tingled, already feeling his hands on them. She was damp between her legs. His ardor wasn’t natural, she thought. Nor was what she was feeling now. But she reached over and took hold of his penis all the same.

Downstairs, the television continued to operate for its absent audience.
St. Elsewhere
had long since ended. The news was on now, followed by sports and the weather….

* * *

Outside, behind the Maxwell’s house, Dooker whined in his sleep. His legs moved as though he were chasing something in a dream. Perhaps his imagination was even more limited than his master’s, but the dream was very real all the same.

The stag ran before him, the pack all around him. The night was filled with scents, sharp and biting. The music called them on like a huntsman’s horn. It felt so good to just be running.

* * *

After Lance fell asleep for the second time, Brenda lay quietly beside him, not wanting to move. She went over that moment in the bathroom, the crazy things Lance had said, and then the way that he didn’t even seem to be aware of it right after. Like it had never happened.

She rubbed her arm softly. Well, the bruise was there. It
had
happened. But she didn’t know what to do about it. There was no one she could talk to about something like this. Lord, she could just imagine the way people’d stare at her if the word got out. No, she had to keep it to herself, hoard it like a secret and just pray—dear Jesus—that it wouldn’t happen again.

It was a long time before she finally fell asleep herself.

8

“’Lo, Lewis.”

Leaning on his rake, Lewis looked up into the branches of the oak tree that stood between his cabin and the small vegetable plot he was working on. A familiar fox-thin face regarded him through the leaves, the morning sun dappled on her brown skin.