One Door Away From Heaven (47 page)

“Yes.” Leilani wrote faster, determined to record her mother’s every word, with notations as to the rhythms and inflections of her speech. By treating this mean monologue as an exercise in dictation, she could distance herself from the cruelty of it, and if she kept her mother at arm’s length emotionally, she couldn’t be wounded again. You could be hurt only by real people, by real people about whom you cared or at least about whom you wished you
could
care. So call her “old Sinsemilla” and “hive queen” and “dear Mater,” regard her as an object of amusement, a lurching slapstick figure, and then you won’t care what she does to herself or what she says about you, because she’s just a clown whose gibberish means nothing except that it might be useful in a book if you live long enough to write novels.

“To be close to normal,” said old Sinsemilla the hive queen, the electroshocked snakehandler, the wizard-baby breeder, “you’ve got to
face
up to what’s
screwed
up. You’ve got to look at your lobster-claw hand, got to truly
see
your scare-the-shit-out-of-little-babies hand, and when you can truly
see
it instead of pretending it’s like anyone else’s hand, when you can
face
up to what’s
screwed
up, then you can improve it. And you know how you can improve it?”

“No,” said Leilani, writing furiously.

“Look.”

Leilani raised her eyes from the journal.

Sinsemilla slid one fingertip across her forearm, tracing the snowflake scars. “Put your pigman hoof-hand right here on the carving towel, and I’ll make it beautiful like me.”

Having fed on egg-white omelets with tofu cheese, also having feasted on a banquet of illegal chemicals, Sinsemilla still harbored appetites that perhaps could never be satisfied. Her face was drawn by hunger, and her gaze had teeth.

Eye to eye, Leilani felt as though her mother’s stare would gnaw her blind. She looked down at her left hand. Sensing Sinsemilla’s attention settle upon those deformed fingers, Leilani expected to see bite marks appear upon her skin, psychic-vampire stigmata.

If she bluntly rejected the offer to have her hand carved to “make it pretty,” she might anger her mother. Then the risk was that Sinsemilla’s desire to sculpt some skin would soon darken into an obsession and that Leilani would be hectored ceaselessly for days.

During this trip to Idaho and, possibly, to that quiet corner of Montana where Luki waited, Leilani needed to keep a clear mind, to be alert for the first sign that Preston Maddoc was soon to act upon his murderous intent, and to recognize an opportunity to save herself if one arose.

She couldn’t do any of those things if her mother bullied her relentlessly. Peace wasn’t easy to come by in the Maddoc household, but she needed to negotiate a truce in the matter of mutilation if she were to have any chance of staying clearheaded enough to save herself from worse than a little hand carving.

“It’s beautiful,” Leilani lied, “but doesn’t it hurt?”

Sinsemilla withdrew another item from the Christmas-cookie tin: a bottle of topical anesthetic. “Swab this on your skin, it gives you the numbies, takes away the worst sting. The rest of the pain is just the price you pay for beauty. All the great writers and artists know beauty
only
comes from pain.”

“Put some on my finger,” Leilani said, extending her right hand, withholding the deformed hand that her mother wanted to whittle.

A ball of spongy material attached by a stiff wire to the lid served as a swab. The fluid had a peppery scent and felt cool against the soft pad of Leilani’s index finger. Her skin tingled and then grew numb, strangely rubbery.

As old Sinsemilla watched with the red-eyed, squint-eyed, hard-eyed hunger of a ferret watching an unsuspecting rabbit, Leilani put down the pen and, not in the least unsuspecting, raised her deformed hand, pretending to examine it thoughtfully. “Your snowflakes are pretty, but I want my own pattern.”

“Every child’s got to be a rebel, even baby Lani, even little Miss Puritan, she wouldn’t eat a slice of rum cake ’cause maybe it would turn her into a gutter-livin’ drunkie, wrinkles her nose at her own mother’s most harmless pleasures, but even little Miss Tight-ass has to be a rebel sometime, has to have her own
pattern.
But that’s good, Lani, that’s just like it ought to be. What a useless suck-up sort of kid would ever want to wear homemade tattoos exactly like her mother’s? I don’t want that, either. Shit, next thing you know, we’d be dressin’ alike, doin’ our hair the same, goin’ to afternoon tea parties, makin’ cakes for some stupid church bake sale, and then Preston would have to shoot us quick and put us out of our misery. What pattern do you have in mind?”

Still studying her hand, Leilani strove to match the tropes and rhythms of her mother’s drug-shaped speech, hoping to encourage the hive queen to believe that they were bonding as never before and that many tender hours of shared mutilation were indeed in their future. “I don’t know. Somethin’ as unique as the cracked-glass patterns on a horsefly’s wings, somethin’ awesomely cool, that everyone thinks is bitchin’, kind of beautiful but edgy, scary, the way your road-kill pictures are beautiful, somethin’ that says
Screw you, I’m a mutant and proud of it.
”

Ferret fierce, storms in her eyes and pent-up thunder waiting to break in her voice, old Sinsemilla did a mood turn on a dime of flattery, caged the ferret, pressed the looming storms back beyond the mountains of her madness, and became kittenish, filled with a girlish sunniness. “
Yes!
Give the world the finger before the world gives it to you, and in this case,
decorate
the finger! Maybe there’s a little bit of me in you, after all, sweet Leilani, maybe there’s rich blood in your veins, just when it looked like there was nothin’ but water.”

At sixty miles an hour, as the Nevada sky boiled to a pale blue and as the white-hot sun slowly described a glowing forge-hammer arc toward the anvil mountains in the west, with hula-hula girls swiveling their hips to the rhythm of tire rotation, Leilani and her mother huddled at the table, like pajama-party teenagers gossiping about boys or swapping makeup and fashion tips, but in fact circling around various schemes for engraving one already odd hand.

Her mother favored a multiyear project: obscenities carved in intricate and clever juxtapositions, descending every finger, curling in lettered whorls across the palm, fanning in offensive rays across the opisthenar, which is the name for the back of the hand, a word that Leilani knew because she had studied the structure of the human hand in detail, the better to understand her difference.

While pretending to entertain the concept of transforming her hand into a living billboard for depraved and demonic ravings, Leilani suggested alternatives: floral designs, leaf patterns, Egyptian hieroglyphics, a series of numbers with magical properties culled from Sinsemilla’s books on numerology….

After nearly forty minutes, they agreed that the unique canvas represented by Leilani’s “freak-show hand” (as dear Mater put it) must not be misused. As much fun as it would have been to drench a finger in topical anesthetic and slash at it vigorously with scalpels and razor blades right now, without delay, they both acknowledged that great art required not only a price of pain but also contemplation. If Richard Brautigan had conceived and written
In Watermelon Sugar
on one summer afternoon, it would have been so simple that Sinsemilla would have understood its message in a single reading and would not have been wonderfully involved in its mysteries through so many rewarding perusals. For a few days, they would mull over approaches to the project and meet again to consult further on design.

Leilani gave the art form a name,
bio-etching,
which rang more pleasantly on the ear than did
self-mutilation.
The artist in old Sinsemilla thrilled to the avant-garde quality of the term.

So successfully had the danger of a major Sinsemilla storm been averted that dear Mater repacked her mutilation kit without either taking a scalpel to Leilani’s hand or elaborating upon the snowflake frieze on her arm. For the time being, her need to cut had passed.

Her need to fly, however, drove her to the produce drawer of the refrigerator, from which she withdrew a Ziploc bag packed with exotic dried mushrooms of a potency not recommended for salads.

By the time that they were hooked up to utilities at a campsite associated with a motel-casino in Hawthorne, Nevada, the hive queen had worked up a hallucinogenic buzz. This buzz was of such intensity that if focused as tightly as the laser weapon of Darth Vader’s Death Star, it would vaporize the moon.

She lay on the floor of the lounge, gazing at the smiling sun god on the ceiling, communing with that provider of island heat and surf-gilding rays, speaking to him sometimes in English, sometimes in Hawaiian. In addition to mystical and spiritual matters, the subjects that she chose to discuss with this plump deity included her opinions of the newest boy bands, whether her daily intake of selenium was sufficient, recipes for tofu, what hair styles were likely to be the most flattering to the shape of her face, and whether Pooh of Pooh Corners was a secret opium smoker with a secondary Prozac habit.

With sundown coming, Dr. Doom stepped over his wife, who might not have been aware of him if he had tramped on her, and he went out to get dinner for the three of them, leaving Leilani in the company of her murmuring, muttering, giggling mother and of those battery-powered hula girls who remained in perpetual sway.

Chapter 54

FRIDAY EVENING in Twin Falls, Idaho, is not likely to be much different from Saturday or Monday or Wednesday in Twin Falls, Idaho. Idahoans call their territory the Gem State, possibly because it is a major source of star garnets; the primary product, by tonnage, is potatoes, but no one with a sense of civic pride and PR savvy wants to call his home the Potato State, if only because Idahoans would risk being referred to as Potatoheads. Perhaps the most breathtaking mountain scenery in the United States is located in Idaho, though not around Twin Falls, but even the prospect of gorgeous alpine vistas could not induce Curtis Hammond to play tourist this evening, for he prefers the comforts of hearth and home as manufactured by Fleetwood.

Besides, no show produced by humankind or nature could equal the beauty and the wonder of Castoria and Polluxia preparing dinner.

In matching Chinese-red silk pajamas with billowy bell-bottom sleeves and pants, standing tall on platform sandals that glitter with midnight-blue rhinestones, their fingernails and toenails no longer azure-blue but crimson, their glossy golden hair swept up in chignons with long spiral curls framing their faces, they glide and turn and twist around the cramped galley with an uncanny awareness of each other’s position at all times, exhibiting choreography that might please Busby Berkeley as they whip up a feast of Mandarin and Szechwan specialties.

A mutual interest in the culinary arts and in the flamboyant use of knives in the manner of certain Japanese chefs, a mutual interest in novelty acts involving tomahawks and cleavers thrown at brightly costumed assistants strapped to spinning target wheels, and a mutual interest in personal defense employing a variety of sharp-edged and pointed weapons have enabled the twins to prepare dinner with enough entertainment value to ensure that, given their own program, they would be a huge hit on the Food Network. Blades flash, steel points wink, serrated edges shimmer with serpentine light as they slice celery, chop onions, dice chicken, shave beef, shred lettuce….

Curtis and Old Yeller sit side by side at the back of the U-shaped dining nook, enchanted by the sisters’ style of full-tilt cooking, eyes wide as they track the scintillant blades, which are handled with flourishes that invite the expectation of mortal injury. The finest scimitar dancers, whirling and leaping among flashing swords, would be humbled by the twins’ performance. Soon it’s clear that a delicious dinner will be served, and that no fingers will be severed and no one decapitated in its preparation.

Sister-become merits a place at the table for many reasons, including that she helped to save their lives, but also because she has been bathed. Earlier, rising from seven hours of sleep, before taking their own showers, Polly and Cass scrubbed the dog in the bathtub, styled her with a pair of sixteen-hundred-watt blow-dryers, brushed and combed her with an imposing collection of hair-grooming instruments, and atomized two light puffs of Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds perfume on her coat. Old Yeller sits proudly at Curtis’s side: fluffy and grinning, smelling just as the glamorous movie star must smell.

Like crimson butterflies, like fire billowing, but really like nothing so much as themselves, the twins bring forth so many fragrant and delicious dishes that the table won’t entirely hold them; some remain on the kitchen counter to be fetched as appetites demand. They also bring to the dining nook one 12-gauge, pistol-grip, pump-action shotgun and a 9-mm pistol, because since the crossroads in Nevada, they have gone nowhere, not even to the bathroom, without weapons.

The sisters pop open bottles of Tsingtao beer for themselves and a bottle of nonalcoholic beer for Curtis, so that he might have some appreciation for the exquisite combination of good Chinese food and cold beer. Plates are piled high, and the sisters prove to have appetites more prodigious than Curtis’s, even though the boy must eat not only to sustain himself but also to produce the additional energy that is necessary to control his biological structure and continue being Curtis Hammond, an identity that isn’t yet natural to him.

Old Yeller is served strips of beef and chicken on a plate, as though she is like any other guest. Curtis is able to use the boy-dog bond to ensure she refrains from wolfing down the food, as programmed in her canine nature, and to ensure she eats the meat one piece at a time, savoring each morsel. She finds this dining pace to be odd at first, but soon she recognizes the greater pleasure to be had from a meal when it isn’t consumed in forty-six seconds flat. Even if she had been able to use silverware, hold a porcelain teacup in one paw with her dew claw raised like a pinkie, and converse in the flawless English of an heiress who had attended a first-rate finishing school, Old Yeller could not have conducted herself more like a lady than she did at this Chinese feast.

Throughout dinner, the sisters prove to be vastly entertaining, recounting adventures they have had while skydiving, bronco-busting, hunting sharks with spear guns, skiing down the faces of seventy-degree cliffs, parachuting off high-rise buildings in several major cities, and defending their honor at chichi Hollywood parties attended by, in Polly’s words, “rodent hordes of grasping, horny, drug-crazed, dimwitted, sleazebag movie stars and famous directors.”

“Some of them were nice,” Cass says.

Polly demurs: “With all respect and affection, Cassie, you would find
someone
to like even at a convention of cannibal Nazi kitten killers.”

To Curtis, Cass says, “After we left Hollywood, I performed an exhaustive analysis of our experiences and determined that six and one-half percent of people in the film business are both sane and good. I will admit that the rest of them are evil, even if another four and one half percent are sane. But it’s not fair to condemn the
entire
community, even if the vast majority of them are mad swine.”

When they have all eaten to excess and then have eaten just a little more, the table is cleared, two fresh bottles of Tsingtao and one of nonalcoholic beer are opened, a dish of water is provided for Old Yeller, candles are lit, the electric lights are turned off, and after Cass has determined that the ambience is “deliciously spooky,” the twins return to the dining nook, clasp their hands around their bottles of Tsingtao, lean over the table, and focus intently on their guests, both boy and dog. Cass says, “You’re an alien, aren’t you, Curtis?” Polly says, “You’re an alien, too, aren’t you, Old Yeller?” And they both say, “Dish us the dirt, ET.”