New England White (55 page)

CHAPTER 63

THE SCIENCE QUIZ

(I)

T
O THE LAYMAN
, and, sometimes, to the expert, scientific knowledge is little different from faith. It is believed in the absence of analysis, and often evidence—that is, we do not trouble to study the evidence ourselves but rely on our high priests to tell us what is so and what is not. And sometimes the high priests know no more than we do, yet their impassioned instruction forms the templates through which we view the world. If they are in error, so are we.

The lighter struck.

Flame, sudden and orange.

Spreading, leaping, hot.

Julia leaped back.

The fire flared, hissed, and then winked out, as Julia, former science teacher, had known it would. The high priests of Hollywood got it wrong every time, as every science teacher in America knew but dared not teach, because some fool would try. In the movies, cars crash and explode. Heroes shoot cars and they explode. Cars fall off cliffs and buildings and explode. In real life, gasoline hardly ever explodes unless confined, and, even then, only after the vapor has built up adequate pressure—but never if it builds up too much. Gasoline is difficult even to burn, especially in cold weather.

Frank Carrington had seen too many movies.

(II)

T
HE ONLY PROBLEM
with Julia’s theory was that it was incomplete. Because there was no explosion, Frank would soon be back. In a foul mood.

Julia decided not to wait around.

She hurried back to the car, but with the airbags deployed, it would not move. She leaned in close, took Mary’s pulse, then kissed her on the cheek. The skin was slick with perspiration. The writer was no longer moaning. Julia did not know if she was conscious. She squeezed Mary’s hand. There was an awful lot of blood.

“Listen to me,” she said. “There are sirens. Somebody’s on the way. They’ll help you. Otherwise I’ll send help. But I can’t stay here.”

An answering squeeze, the eyes briefly open.

“Go,” Mary whispered.

“I’m sorry.”

“This isn’t going to make me more charming.” She laughed. Then groaned. The eyes closed, and opened again. “Go!”

Julia went.

Frank Carrington had run off the way they came, so Julia decided to plunge deeper into the woods, and did, kicking and snarling through the high drifts, and higher underbrush. In two minutes she could no longer see the clearing. In three she was lost. Great. Just great. Exactly what she needed. For all she knew, Frank was circling back, and she would blunder into him trying to escape. She should have stayed where she was. Surely the sirens meant salvation.

Still she ran, and stumbled, and got up and ran some more, not sure where she was going, only sure she dared not stop, as snow trickled into her boots and into her collar and soon chilled her skin. She laughed or cried, both were the same; she had avoided death by gunshot and death by suicide, and here she was, asking to freeze to death.

She reached for her cell phone, but it was in the car.

The road. She saw the road. No, another road, the fork she had chosen not to take.

And heard the gunshots. A pair, echoing in the woods. A second later, animals and birds were in full flurrying flight. Julia reared around, deciding that she would follow the fauna, who would surely know, with their perfect sense of direction, which way was
away.

It occurred to her that the gunshots had been aimed in her direction.

Frank Carrington knew where she was.

She ran. She ran from her past and toward her future, ran from the Clan and from the heart of whiteness and from the world of expectations and also the world of hope. She ran from her husband and toward her children, from her job and toward her dreams. She ran, feet seemingly skimming the surface, pelting through the forest, as the cold seeped into her bones now from all the snow that had sifted into her clothes, but still she ran and ran and ran.

And stumbled into a ditch.

She was still trying to squirm out of it when she heard, behind her, a crunch in the snow.

“Well, that was a lot of fun,” said Frank Carrington, the gun firmly in his hand. “I always heard you were quite the science teacher.”

CHAPTER 64

THE HEART OF WHITENESS

(I)

T
HE WORST PART WAS
, as Frank happily pointed out, they were less than half a mile from Mitch Huebner’s shack. Julia begged to get help for Mary first, but Frank told her it was her own fault for wrecking the car. When she tried to defy him, he promised that if she did anything right now but walk with him to the Huebner place, he would shoot her in the back and let her bleed to death, then go back to the car and do the same to Mary.

“That’s inhuman,” said Julia, unable to come up with a sharper line.

“Come on, haven’t you read any history? It’s very human.”

So they marched through the snowdrifts on the forest floor, avoiding the roads, Frank now in charge, because he knew the way. The trek seemed interminable, and her feet were soon so cold she could not feel her toes, but it hardly mattered, because she was too scared to worry.

“That Zant was something, wasn’t he?” said the killer. “Kept everybody guessing.”

“He was something, all right,” said Julia, but Frank was not in the mood for irony.

“He was a real character. A showman. I liked him.”

“I noticed.”

“I didn’t have a choice, Julia. He’d worked it all out.” He was suddenly furious, perhaps detecting her unexpressed objection. “I was a kid, Julia. I was twenty-four years old! You can’t hold me responsible for what I did when I was twenty-four years old!”

“You were a little older when you shot Kellen,” she said softly.

They marched, snowy trees slipping past, each hiding its dark, archival history in the night. Kellen, country boy that he was at heart, professed to love snow. He loved it for its randomness, he said. For the fact that it needed us to give it a reason. Nothing in Kellen’s world had a purpose or meaning other than the one Kellen determined. All of creation was new and fresh to Kellen, because he did not care what anyone else thought. This quality of lightness, this casual rejection of convention, had once attracted her to him, because she saw it as rebellious and ideologically exciting, before admitting, after years as one among his companions, that Kellen was merely narcissistic; and, years later, that he was in some basic way evil.

“Here we are,” said Frank Carrington, with the same mad joy.

They had arrived at the rutted path leading to the dooryard of the slanting, empty shack. Mitch Huebner, as she had expected, was off plowing.

“I haven’t been here in years,” said Frank. “Not since I had to deliver a check one day or the old bastard wasn’t going to clear my driveway any more.”

“I can see where paying for services rendered would be inconvenient.”

“You really don’t know when to stop, do you?”

“Not lately, no.”

Frank Carrington put a hand on her shoulder, slowing her down. His flashlight played over the yard, picking out the scattered cords of wood, the broken windows of the lightless shack, the doghouse…the doghouse. “What’s that?”

“That’s Goetz,” said Julia, nervously.

“Dog?”

“Yes.”

“Is that a chain?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t like the looks of him. Maybe I should shoot him.”

She had recovered a bit of her hauteur. “He’s a she.”

They began to cross the dooryard. As they reached the steps, the dog growled. Frank glanced over his shoulder, let his light play over the chain, muttered to himself. “I should have shot him.”

“Be my guest,” said Julia.

“What, you have something against dogs?”

“Just that one. The last time I was here, she knocked me down.”

She felt his cool scrutiny in the darkness, wondered if she had said too much. But Frank only laughed. “Tell you what. If you try anything, I’ll feed you to her. How does that sound?”

Her shudder was genuine. “Let’s go in.”

They reached the door.

Julia carefully did not touch the knob. “It’s usually unlocked,” she said. “Do you want to go first?”

He said, “Do I look like six kinds of fool?”

“Are you sure?”

“Don’t waste time, Julia. Open the door.”

She nodded, and swallowed, and put her hand on the knob. Without her gloves it felt slimy, a live thing, twisting and squirming in her hand like a dying fish. She turned the knob, and pushed.

Silently, Goetz charged.

(II)

F
RANK WAS VERY FAST
. He turned and crouched and brought the gun across his wrist, sighting down the barrel, all of this in less than a second, and it would have been plenty of time, he would have blown the massive dog to bits, except that Julia spoiled his aim when she smashed the shovel against his ear: the same shovel that had so ineffectively shielded her on her first visit to Mr. Huebner’s shack.

The former deputy was not wounded, but he was woozy, and both shots went high and outside, and he grabbed shakily for Julia’s ankle, and was strong enough to bring her down, even as Goetz landed on his stomach. Another shot, and then he dropped the gun, and then he was shouting, and then he was screaming, it was awful, the worst sound she had heard in her life, and she covered her ears and crawled away, legs aching from the fall, wanting Frank Carrington to deserve what he got, wanting to be the force of earthly punishment and decision, wanting his flesh torn and mutilated by the dog for what he had done to Kellen, and to her family, and she prayed with all her might for the strength to will herself to hate her neighbor, to stand by indifferently, or even gleefully, as Goetz tore him to death.

And could not do it.

She could not let another mother’s child die this way.

Up on her knees, she swung the shovel hard, and smacked it against Goetz…

…and it was not hard enough…

…Frank screaming and scrabbling and helpless…

…blood everywhere, spurting blackly in the moonlight…

…she had never seen a mess like this…

…she hit the dog again and again, like a woman in a fever, and maybe sometimes she slipped and hit Frank instead of the dog, and maybe sometimes she hit Frank on purpose, swinging and swinging, again and again…

Julia turned.

The dog was dead.

She sat down on the porch.

Finished. Done.

Or not quite: beneath the dog’s battered carcass, something bloody and dangerous was beginning to stir.

Frank Carrington was alive, but when she looked into his eyes, something darkly inhuman gazed out at her. He spoke not a word but grinned shabbily, blood streaming from a badly torn face, and struggled upright, half dragging one foot at an impossible angle, and his dripping red hand again clutched, impossibly, the gun.

When, at last, his mouth opened, the empty, sepulchral sound was the voice of all her nightmares come to wakefulness.

“Julia,” the thing said, gurgling and coughing. “Not nice.”

He reached out with both hands, the gun shaking, but any hit would do, and Julia, her courage and strength running out, leaned back and waited for his demonic embrace.

Don’t be a fool, Sis,
said her brother, Jay, from deep inside.

She got up and ran.

(III)

F
LEEING ON FOOT
through snow leads only to the fool’s freedom. Julia realizes this after she has run ten yards. In the crisp moonlight, her tracks stand out in bold black relief from the gleaming white crust of the field. Frank Carrington, if he can walk reasonably fast, will have no trouble following her trail. She has no time for analysis, so she trusts the instinct that has so often preserved her.

Instinct warns her to make for the trees, where the gloom will make her tracks more difficult for a man in a hurry to see. Her cell phone would be easiest, but it is plugged into its carrier in the Escalade. So the trees are her only hope.

Back behind her, she hears him shouting, and, perhaps, another car slowing, but she dares not tarry.

She has made it to the forest. One foot, other foot. She is flying past the trees, listening for pursuit, hearing only the night sounds of any woodland, the tiny animals skittering for safe haven, the breeze teasing the frozen branches. She runs. The forest is eerie and seems alive to her presence, aware and worried, uncertain whether she is friend or foe. But for her certainty that ghosts are all creations of obsessive adolescent girls, Julia would be certain that they are running beside her through the woods. When she turns to look, there is never anyone there, or anything: just a glimpse of moonlight prismed through the evergreens…and the distant glow of streetlamps.

Julia stumbles and realizes that she has hit a curb and is standing on tarmac. Suddenly, the trees are not woods at all, but just a thin greenbelt dividing the houses looming before her from the road behind her. She has emerged into a subdivision she does not recognize, not really the high-end, cookie-cutter neo-Colonials built by white neo-Colonialists on a tract of land once owned by the native people.

Stop it, she tells herself, recognizing delirium.

In the eerie winter silence of the street, Julia decides that she can work out the racial irony of the moment later; for now, she is relieved to be out of the woods and near people, because people mean telephones, and telephones mean police. She races across the quiet road, barges up to the nearest door, a light-blue house with pretty curtains and a toddler’s plastic three-wheeled bike half buried on the lawn.

Julia bangs frantically on the door, and then, realizing that a late-night knock might be misconstrued as scary, demurely rings the bell instead.

She waits, glancing warily over her shoulder.

Nothing.

She rings again, then bangs again, calls, tentatively, “Help!” and then the same again, louder.

After a moment, a worried pale face, glasses on and hair in curlers, peeks from behind the curtained windows next to the door. The frightened eyes are huge, magnified by the lenses. A child clings to the woman’s leg.

Julia calls out, “Please, I need help,” and then, when the face does not budge, she makes a hand motion to indicate a telephone and puts on the most charming smile she can manage with a walking corpse out there trying to kill her.

Eyes widening with alarm, the woman inside shakes her head. The child continues to cling to her leg. The woman makes a shooing gesture, then mouths the words so that there will be no mistake:
Get away!
she is silently screaming. She allows the curtain to fall closed, and Julia, backing, stunned, down the well-salted walk, sees her in the window of what she takes to be the family room, watching with desperate satisfaction the flight of the darksome intruder.

(IV)

R
EJECTED AT TWO MORE HOUSES
, chased away by leaping dogs at a couple more, Julia has surrendered her dream that one of the homeowners, her fellow Landingers, might offer her shelter—warm fire, hot chocolate, maybe even a gun in the closet—while they await together the arrival of one of the town’s few police cars. Instead, she has watched through windows as the residents turned fearfully away, as though she is a terrorist, or a disease carrier, or black. Julia hurries toward the entrance to the cul-de-sac, far now from the greenbelt. Perhaps she should throw a rock through somebody’s window, on the theory that cowering owners might at least call the police for protection against a marauding Negro; but she has counted on sheltering in one of the homes, and does not dare risk hanging around waiting for the police to arrive, not with the Carrington-thing back there somewhere. Her cell phone is in the car. She is rushing, but not sure where she is rushing from, or to. Light snow has begun to fall, but, far more important, the wind has grown bitter. It is past ten, and this is getting ridiculous. She cannot possibly be so helpless in the middle of the town she has called home for the past six years. The moon, so bright half a lifetime ago, when she and Mary and Frank were riding along in the Escalade, has disappeared. She has no way to tell whether she is still being pursued, or, if she is, how close her pursuer might be. She only knows she dares not stop running.

For that is her posture now, a run, not a walk. Running through the crunchy snow in her high boots, certain at every step that she is about to take a spill. Leaving the U of houses, she realizes that the subdivision is larger than she thought, the identically cut wooden cookies going on for blocks. She must be in Cromwell Woods, the only development of this size in the town, named by some historically illiterate Anglophile builder for the regicidal Lord Protector who tyrannized England in the name of the people. She recalls that there are nearly a hundred homes in Cromwell Woods, priced to be affordable by the middling classes, and that the town fought like mad to keep them out.

Later, Julia. Think about it later. Concentrate.

You have to get out of here!

A subdivision in which you do not live is a bewildering and scary place, especially at night and on foot. You do not know the houses, or the trees, or the people. You do not know the names of the streets, which, in America, all sound the same: Belmont leads to Park leads to Colony. Never does a builder name a street Wojtyla or Montanez or Chen. It is as though all the nation, whatever its actual ethnicity, yearns to live in suburban Waspville. Julia Carlyle used to yearn, too; only, now that she does indeed live in Waspville, she finds it, in her moment of need, devoid of generosity, or, for that matter, of meaning.

She has stopped running, because she is so tired and because she does not know which way to go. Every street looks like every other street. Every time she thinks she has found the way out, she is curving back toward the trees, and Frank. Every time she thinks she has turned a new corner, she looks at the sign and finds she has been down this block before. Her legs tell her they have had enough. Her thighs tell her she is no longer entitled to give the orders in this body. It occurs to her that being shot by Frank Carrington is preferable to many other fates that could await her, like walking another step in this hateful weather. The snow is falling a good deal faster now, and Julia supposes that, were she to lie down right on the tiny lawn of the latest house to ignore her, she would shortly freeze to death. That might not be so bad.