Mr. Peanut (39 page)

And with a sudden clarity he understood what his wife’s last words had meant.
Don’t have
too
much fun
. She knew. She
always
knew. He smiled humbly. From the minute she came out here, and probably long before, she knew that he’d see Susan. She knew and she forgave him from the outset, but that was only part of what she meant. The rest was this:
she was waiting
. If this was to be their end, so be it. If this was just another of his flings, that was fine. She, meanwhile, would wait for him to come around. He might cut her loose; he might embrace her. But she wouldn’t end them. She would wait. She loved him, would give them another chance—and that was final.

Lord, Sheppard prayed, get me home.

“Stop the car,” Susan said.

“Why?” he said.

“I’m
freezing,”
she said. “I want you to put the top up.”

“The cold keeps me alert.”

“Stop this car, Sam, or I swear to God I’ll jump out.”

“Jump out, then. I don’t give a damn.”

“No, you don’t. You never did.”

“Not tonight I don’t.”

“Not ever,” she said.

“Not after that little performance.”

“Of course. Anything that doesn’t conform to your narrow preferences is a performance. Well, this isn’t a goddamn performance. It’s the real thing.”

He held his right hand up to her face and went
blah blah blah
with his fingers.

“You’re pathetic,” she said.
“Pathetic
. And a coward.”

“Go to hell.”

“You don’t take a stand on anything. Or stand up to anybody.”

He turned on the radio.

She switched it off. “You don’t stand up to your father. You’re just his little boy living out his little vision of your little life.”

“Shut your mouth about my family.” He was doing eighty-five, the tires humming with the speed.

“So you carry out these little rebellions,” she said, “to give yourself the illusion that you’re big and free.”

He licked his upper lip.

“You don’t stand up to your wife. You don’t end things with her even while you whisper how you love me. So with three little words you manage to disrespect us both.”

“Keep your mouth shut.”

“You don’t even take a stand right now. ‘Not after that little performance.’ As if that were the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

“Will you shut the hell up?”

“God, was I a fool. Robert was a good man. He loved me. At least he knew what love was. What his limits were.”

Sheppard was laughing now, so mad he could spit. He touched ninety and wanted to yank the wheel left and send them rocketing over the void, just to see her fear as they hurtled toward the Pacific.

“I always lose with you!” she said. “You’re like a curse on my life. You’re like a curse on everything.”

“I’ll be gone tomorrow.”

“Who’s next for you, I wonder? What lucky lady doesn’t know that sometime soon Sam Sheppard’s coming to suck her dry.”

“You’re the last one, believe me. You’re a permanant fucking caution.”

“I pity your wife!”

He turned and put his finger in her face. “Don’t you dare talk about my wife!”

She screamed—at something ahead of them, her eyes widening while she threw both hands against the dash.

And in the split second that he turned back toward the road and punched the brakes, Sheppard saw the form—and brown hair, the exact color of his wife’s—right before impact, and what he wanted to scream was “Marilyn!” sure that some horrendous coincidence or demonic convergence had brought her hundreds of miles down from Big Sur to this road at
this
instant, that the body they’d struck was hers. The sound was sickening, the crunching and tearing of flesh and bone synchronized at impact, more detonation than collision, followed by the thud of it under the right rear wheel as they fishtailed. His time spent racing cars saved their lives: instead of correcting, he turned into their spin, the MG rising briefly on its left wheels like a catamaran and then immediately retouching the road, a banshee whine during all three revolutions while they drifted into the other lane and then came to rest, pointed in the same direction they’d been headed.

A good hundred feet beyond the smash, they sat for several seconds in silence.

“What was that?” Susan said. “My God, was that a woman?”

Sheppard put the car in reverse, flooring the accelerator and stopping within view of what looked like a limb. “Stay here,” he said, then pulled the emergency brake and got out.

By training, the rush of adrenaline conferred on him a hyperalertness and cool. The brake lights had cast the scene red, and though his mental state was one of crisis assessment he felt palpable relief on seeing that the limb belonged to a dog. He went toward the body—it was a large breed, a standard poodle—and only when he got within a couple of feet could he tell the animal was still alive.

He stood over her. She was lying on her right side, and the gash where the front leg had been sheared away revealed entwined snakes of muscle that were corded and shining in the crimson light.

He kneeled down. Her torso was black with blood, her hind legs broken severely near the paws. Both proximal tibias were compounded at the joints, bent toward the road like a pair of kickstands. Blood leaked from her
ears and mouth, yet she still possessed comprehension. At the sight of him, of master and man, she lifted her head up to face his and whimpered, curling the forelimb beneath her in surrender.

“There now, girl,” he said. “There, there.”

He felt her neck: no collar.

“I’m going to take care of you,” he said, then marched back to the car.

“Is it a woman?” Susan asked. “Or a boy?”

He said nothing and opened the trunk. He grabbed the lug wrench and strode away, Susan following him until the leg came into sight and suddenly retching.

Sheppard knelt down before the dog once more.

This, he thought, was the cost, every step in the chain from three years ago when he and Susan had first met leading to
this
. And things could end here if he was strong. This could be the
only
casualty, or else a harbinger of others to come. He must not let that happen.

He touched the dog’s cheek, his palm now warm with her blood. She tried to get up again and yelped, then sprawled back and relaxed. “Easy,” he said. Her legs curled into her—the contracted muscles at the gash alive—and she stared straight into his eyes. And the love with which she regarded him, imploring and passive and utterly obedient,
that
was what he’d defiled.

He got on one knee, took her scruff gently in his right hand, and beat on her head in blows so fast he roared, raining them down on her skull, until the wrench broke through to the road and gonged, the X splitting in half and ringing in the silence, until he himself was drenched with gore, until no sound came from her and he could hear only his own breath—Sheppard sure, for the first time he could remember, of what was right.

It’s a rare thing, Richard Eberling thought, when what you most deeply wish for comes true.

He had four houses to clean today, a schedule to keep, but from home to home Marilyn accompanied him in his mind, and he recalled sitting with her on the patio, his missed chance and then her offer (“You could swim at our house after you’re finished and have a chance to play”), and he thought that the harder he worked, the sooner Wednesday would come. Time would otherwise be a torture. He thought about his days in the orphanage and how he’d learned to sleep for fifteen hours if need be. But that was impossible now. Things had to be done. He kept rehearsing how his day with Marilyn would go, and every time he ran through the fantasy that
ended with him going up to her bedroom, he told himself: I must be brave. I must believe. I must not hesitate for a moment. I will slide under the cool sheets and then I will tell her my secret.

He wanted to get her a gift. He thought maybe a book would be the ticket, perhaps of poetry, and while at the Newharts’ house in Huntington Park he studied their massive library with its windows looking out over the water (and a bitch to dust), pulling down random volumes by authors he didn’t know, flipping through the pages hoping chance itself might show him what he needed.

I’m a boy too, Eberling thought, amazed. Tender and easily swayed. And love had resented him. If he’d become a doctor like Dr. Sam, then it might not have, and he flashed back to how the man had brushed by him when he’d said hello the other day, like he was invisible. Or the high school football game when Dr. Sam rushed out onto the field to tend to a boy who’d torn up his knee, and a pretty girl behind him sighed and said to her friend, “A doctor like that makes me want to be sick”—which made Eberling sick too. He read more but he didn’t understand much of it, the following lines full of strange names and deeds—though he could imagine himself reading the poetry aloud to Marilyn. That could be his gift. She would understand it. And later, when Marilyn read it by herself, it would be like
he
was reading to her, like he was still there. She’d hear his voice when she read it. It would be like he was impossibly small while she was a giantess, and he would climb into her ear and whisper. He slid the book into the back pocket of his coveralls.

He made good time through the Newharts’—neglecting the guest room, but it seemed untouched since last week—and he had the Bradfords’ house next, where he was sure he’d find something for Marilyn. Mrs. Bradford’s mother, Priscilla, lived in the bedroom above the garage. The old coot didn’t even know her name anymore but she had a drawer full of jewelry organized in little decorative boxes and grouped by type (rings, earrings, necklaces) and on top of this dresser was a multishelved glass box full of odd knickknacks: a silver fish whose mouth was a locket that opened, a ring with a secret compartment behind the stone, a delicate watch with a black face and gold hour and minute hands. The key to taking anything from here
was putting Mrs. Bradford at ease about the old lady. “Mrs. Bradford, did you want me to bring some tea up to your mother?” Or, “Mrs. Bradford, maybe you should come up there with me when I clean, in case your mother gets upset at the sight of a stranger.” And she’d touch his shoulder—a horny old girl herself—and say, “Dickie, for all she knows you’re the son she never had,” then light one of her thin little cigarettes and laugh.

When Eberling went up, Priscilla was sitting in the corner, her chair turned toward the back window that overlooked the lake. At first he made a big to-do, rattling his pail and mops, cleaning the toilet and tub energetically, letting the seat slam, waiting for the screen door to clap shut and to see Mrs. Bradford, whiskey sour in hand, slink down to the beach. And then he went up to Priscilla, standing so close he could see his reflection in her creamy eyes, and studied the jewelry she had on (Mrs. Bradford dressed her every morning) and once he got a fix on the rings and earrings and necklace—the hag tilting her head at him unknowingly and expectantly, like a friendly dog—he sifted through the drawers to match it all as best he could, the pearl earrings, say, or the gold locket, then held each piece up to its closest twin as if Priscilla were a mute model. Then he swapped them out and dropped her jewelry in his murky pail, the old bird helping him, in fact, turning her earrings toward him or even lifting her arm slightly when he took her hand to look at the rings.

Thinking of Marilyn, he mouthed:
I want to tell you my secret
.

Eberling had been cleaning the Bradfords’ large house for two years now and had yet to meet Mr. Bradford himself. He knew he was around, though, because sometimes in the room off the master the bed was unmade, and a suit matching those in the closet was laid out across a wingback chair. Eberling often felt the breast and pants pockets of the suit and found surprising treasure: good cigars wrapped in cellophane, monogrammed golf tees, a silver business-card holder, an engraved money clip. The key, here too, was
never
to take everything opportunity presented you, to abstain from the most obvious valuables, because these easy catches could be traps, trust’s pop quizzes and employers’ ambushes that he
always
left right where he found them. No, the true gifts were to be discovered beneath dressers and bedside tables, in boxes stuffed in closets marked
PICTURES
but with that label crossed out and therefore written off as forgotten, hidden in places where their discovery would come only during a move—or by a child or spouse rummaging through them after a loved one’s death.

“Dickie?” Mrs. Bradford called. “Come upstairs, Dickie, and take a break.”

Oh, she was horny, all right. She’d be waiting for him in bed, both arms outstretched against the high headboard, resting her high mound of silver hair against it too, a set of wings carved into the wood that seemed to spread from her shoulders, her drink always perfectly refreshed, the glass frosted and a cherry trapped beneath the ice like a red iris in a brown eye, her cigarette burning out in the never-to-be-filched gold tray on the bedside table. Mrs. Bradford liked to undress ahead of him for efficiency and waited now atop the sheet, which he’d dutifully wash afterward. He moved upstairs glancing at the pictures hung on the walls with their happy-family poses, with mother, father, son, and daughter alike staring just off to the right and smiling, of course. But every marriage in every house Eberling had ever cleaned had its own brand of dirt, unique as scent, as ingrained as a lifetime’s cooking. Thinking this is how he would move up the stairs at Marilyn’s next week, he could already smell the cigarette smoke and taste the ash and sugar in Mrs. Bradford’s mouth, on her long, cold tongue, the remnants of cherry in her teeth, a touch of lipstick smeared on an incisor like dried blood, his secret already bubbling up, his mind returning to his foster home, the Eberling farm, where after moving between five different families he finally grew up, where his foster mother, Christine, would crawl into his bed if he cried out from a dream and hold him until he slipped off to sleep, who in the middle of the night pulled his boy’s body on top of her as if in a trance, like the dream you sometimes have that the person beside you is someone else, who pressed his pajama bottoms down with her foot, his underwear clawed between her toes, her nails scratching his thin legs, and pulled her nightgown up, still trapped, Eberling was sure, in her lovely dream, telling him “slow, slow, slow,” and who afterward took his face by the ears—Eberling fearful of her strength—and pushed it between her legs as if the head itself were separate from him, holding it there, lifting it up and down, adjusting the pitch and angle of his outstretched tongue that she sometimes pinched between her thumb and index finger, who then wiped his mouth with her hand afterward, still asleep it seemed, and whispered in his ear that he was “precious and lovely,” though she never said his name, that he could “do anything he wanted,” which he thought meant with his life, that he “shouldn’t be afraid,” that he was her “special thing.”