Pray To Stay Dead (26 page)

“
You can take this sack of potatoes,” he said, passing Little Huff to Sally. He walked over to the couch upon which Colleen sat, throwing himself onto the far end. A single seat cushion separated her from him, and Colleen wondered how long it would take him to glide across to her and place his hand upon her knee.

“
Agh,” he said, throwing his head back, rubbing his eyes, and staring at the ceiling. “Terrible damn day, ladies. Terrible damn day.”

“
I’m sorry, Papa,” Sally said, easing herself into her chair.

“
Mnph,” Niebolt said, pressing his thumb and forefinger into his eyes before sitting up straight and looking at Sally. “Where is everybody?”

“
Evie is sewing,” Sally said, and Colleen realized that she no longer heard the sewing machine. She hadn’t gotten a close look at the blankets, but she assumed that some of the more intricate designs were easier accomplished by hand.

“
Ah, yeah? And Mattie—still in class?”

“
Yeah.”

“
Okay, good,” he said, leaning back. “I’m going to close my eyes for a few.” He looked at Colleen, half-smiled once more and closed his eyes.

Colleen and Sally watched one another for what felt like several minutes, at which point Colleen realized that she was holding her breath. She let it out, slowly, and permitted her body to relax. She didn’t need to look at her palms to know that her fingernails had stamped little crescents into them. She looked around and it wasn’t until she became aware of Sally slowly shaking her head left to right, left to right, that she knew what she was looking for: a weapon.

Not now,
Sally’s eyes whispered, and Colleen held her gaze. Across the couch from Colleen, Niebolt snored gently, his massive gut rising and falling in the corner of her eye. The minutes stretched into years and she found herself wondering just what this pregnant woman had in mind when she said
jailbreak
. Was it so common for their captor lay asleep with his throat exposed? Why were they passing this moment up?

Colleen stared at Sally and Sally started at Colleen while big Huff and his little son slept, and eventually the door leading into the classroom opened and Mathilda stepped out, followed closely by Jack and David and the girl—once more, Colleen could not remember her name.

One of the boys—Colleen could not tell whom, nor did she care—leapt onto Niebolt’s lap, waking him.

“
Oh, hey,” he said, laughing. “Watch the stones, boy.”

He went through the routine, playing with each of them in turn. He bounced the girl on his knee and stroked and nuzzled her hair, and Colleen looked away, uncertain whether or not what she saw was fatherly adoration or something malignant. Soon Evie shuffled out of the back room, and from somewhere there came the sound of a crying infant. Yes, the infant—Mathilda’s child. Colleen had forgotten about it.

“
Not a lot of time, girls,” Niebolt said, snapping his fingers again. “Make it happen.”

Mathilda led the twins and the girl outside, to the courtyard, urging them to occupy themselves until the grownups were done talking. Little Huff slept and sighed across Sally’s chest, his small legs parted over the swell of her stomach. Evie went into the back and returned with the crying infant, whom she passed off to Mathilda shortly before relieving Sally of the sleeping potato sack and sitting between Colleen and Niebolt. Colleen watched all of this, out there in faraway, her mind aflutter at the outer reaches of itself, her body little more than a hum fashioned from meat and bone.

Then: silence. Little Huff asleep in the arms of Evie; the infant sucking at Mathilda’s breast, its tiny fists kneading pale, veined flesh, and Sally merely watching, her fingers interlaced atop her bulging stomach, interlaced like a prayer, like armor.

“
Okay,” Niebolt said, standing, looking from woman to woman to woman to woman. He scratched at his chin, and the braid hanging across his chest jerked like a dying snake. “None of this is going the way it usually does, and that’s, well, it’s
inconvenient,
but that’s also life, right, Sal?”

“
Yes,” Sally said, not missing a beat.

“
Yes. Damn right,” He said, pacing. “Life, by definition, is inconvenient. If it’s not, if it’s convenient it’s not life at all. It’s routine and complacency and it’s a lie. So this, this new thing, this is
life.
”

He strode over to the bookcase, walking with a purpose that was, Colleen knew, all a part of the show. She looked left and right, scanning the spines, brushing his fingertips across them. Finally, he faced them, once more meeting every line of sight. He nodded.

“
The men who wrote these books knew that,” he said, and Colleen imagined Kimberly at her side, could practically hear her:
men and women, you sexist piece of shit.
Then again, maybe not: Colleen had not taken the time to inspect the books heaped helter-skelter upon the many shelves. “They knew that, and we know it, too. Sometime we forget it, though.

“
So we don’t get to do things how we used to, but who cares? Our family has a new member,” he said, extending one hand, palm up, fingers and thumb held tight together. “Colleen. Mama Colleen. She came to us through blood and pain, and for that I am sorry. Really, I am.”

Again the apology. Only now it felt less real and more like a line in a play. Maybe it had always been such, and Colleen was only now able to discern the truth behind the façade.

Niebolt grew silent and became occupied with his right hand. With his thumbnail he picked at dirt beneath his fingernails, starting at the pinky and working his way to the forefinger. When he was finished, he looked up, his gaze falling upon Colleen, shrinking her.

“
Blood and pain,” he said, pursing his lips. “Blood and pain have always been the common language of mankind. Always, from the very beginning, from the
start.
But now? Now it is so much more than language. It is everything. It is the only thing there is. Colleen?”

Colleen sat pressing herself into the sofa. And into the back of her mind, but it was so much harder now to remain there. The shit in her blood was losing its edge, and she found herself inching forward, closer and closer still, in small measures, to the man before her and the world into which she had been delivered.

“
Colleen?”

“
Yuh,” She began, licking her lips. “Yes?”

“
You may have noticed that we have no television here.”

Colleen blinked and nodded agreeably, thinking of the old television in the abandoned tomb of a house at the bottom of the hill.

“
Nothing even remotely associated with the truth can be found upon its screen,” Niebolt said, turning once more to face the bookcases. He waved an encompassing spiral at the shelves. “Here, there is, at least, an attempt. These men sought truth, as we seek truth. Many of them discovered only lies and, finding those lies to be sweet, allowed themselves to stumble from the path. The path that leads to truth.”

Niebolt laughed. “Forgive me, ladies, there’s a point here, I promise. You’ll see. Now, doubt is a valuable thing, right?”

“
Right,” Sally and Evie and Mathilda each said, in unison. Colleen looked at Sally, who met her eyes but for a half-second, the time in which it took her to lift and lower her eyebrows.

“
Right, right,” Niebolt said, stepping past Sally and brushing his fingers across her stomach as he had brushed them across the books lining the shelves. “Doubt is a good thing. Doubt it a tool in the search for truth. I mean, where would we be if we believed everything everyone told us? We’d be like everyone else, right?”

“
Right,” they all said, and Colleen felt a chill ripple up and down her spine.

“
Sure. So I understand, trust me, I do,” Niebolt said, dropping the hammer. “I know that some of you have come to doubt my words.”

Colleen looked at Sally, and Sally met Colleen’s gaze, and neither of them were fast enough to sever their connection before Niebolt noticed. He smiled, lifted an admonishing finger.

“
Stay with me now, I’m coming to my point.”

He held out both hands, fingers splayed, made a show of balling them into fists. Bobbing and weaving, he jabbed the air with his left three times, four times, six times, fast, wrapping up his display with a solid right uppercut.

“
I was a boxer, Colleen,” he said, rubbing the knuckles of his right hand with the fingers of his left, distant eyes upon the ground at his feet, as if soaking in the unconscious sprawl of some fallen opponent. “A long time ago. A pretty good one, too. They called me The Nightmare. Huffington “The Nightmare” Niebolt. Silly, but hell did it look good up there on the marquee.”

He beamed, gaze somewhere far beyond the room in which they gathered.

“
God, did it ever. And it made the mooks I had to fight nervous. Helped build my reputation, even if I was just knocking out bums. Who the hell wanted to get into the ring with a nightmare?”

He shook his head.

“
A lot of guys didn’t,” he said. “And a lot of them did. One of them, this young wop called Tony ‘The Fire’ Faraci, he wanted it bad. He was a little thing, man, I tell you…” Niebolt shook his head.

His women kept their eyes on him, and Colleen wondered if any of them had noticed how the cadence and the rhythm of his voice had changed as he began speaking of his days in the ring. He no longer sounded like someone pretending to be wise and all-knowing: he sounded like a dumb kid from the streets looking to punch his way to happiness.

“
This little bastard, I mean, not everyone was enforcing the weight class back then, and we were fighting in some Chicago dive, so who gave a shit, right?” He paced faster now, the years carrying him away. “The point is, the guy was too small to be fighting me, and he was taking a risk getting in that ring. He was too small to be fighting The Nightmare, and he had no business almost killing my ass.”

Niebolt bobbed and weaved, unleashed another flurry of punches upon his unseen and long gone opponent, and stopped, just like that, his hands limp at his sides, his head down. Then he looked at Colleen, and it was as if no one else were there. The other women had heard this story—God knew how many times. Some of them had even heard different versions, if Sally was to be believed, but this—this was just for her.

“
He knocked me out in the third,” Niebolt said. “He was fast and strong, and I was full of myself. I knew he was strong, and I knew he could take a punch. His face was messed up enough to testify to that truth, Colleen.”

Niebolt mashed his grizzled features together between his large hands, smiling, and curiously enough it was only at this moment that Colleen was slammed with the certainty that he was insane.

“
I expected to pound his face into something uglier than it already was, maybe over the course of seven or eight rounds, before laying his ass out,” Niebolt said. “Instead his fucking hands worked my head like a hundred little bees, and I almost died. Between the ring and the hospital, that’s when I saw the angel.”

He looked from woman to woman, and Colleen knew that she was seeing something else, a remnant, something unfinished.

“
I don’t really want to get into how I can believe in angels and not believe in God, Colleen, despite what some of these ladies would like,” he said, holding out his hands. They were perfectly still, like stone. “Her hair was yellow and orange, like fire, and it was in a braid.” He fingered the braid hanging from his chin, looking a little embarrassed. “And she held me in her arms and told me that I was going to live forever. She said I was going to live forever, and that I would see much pain and blood, and that it would be up to me to go into the wild and to start a family, one that would escape the pain and the blood.”

He smiled once more, revealed his white mouthful of fake choppers, rubbing his hands together. “And that brings us to the end of this little digression: the angel was real, and the pain and the blood are upon us.”

He let the silence drag out, watched his women, the expression on his face a dare to all of them: say something right now and see what happens.

“
Doubt,
” he shouted. Little Huff jerked in his sleep, whimpered. The sermon was back on. “Some of you have the seed of doubt in your hearts.”

The women made faces that said otherwise, but Niebolt wasn’t having it. He waved them away. “No, no,” he said, the boxer gone. “It’s okay. Doubt is natural. I encourage you to doubt, but in this there can be no doubt. Its time is passed. Colleen?”

“
What?” She asked. Her blood was cold and her body was not elsewhere. It was right here and it was made of stone.

“
Blood and pain.”

“
Yes.”

“
You’ve seen it, out there.” He thrust an accusing finger toward the front door. Again Little Huff stirred. Sated and asleep, the infant resting in Mathilda’s arms jerked, its small arms rigid and quivering.

“
Yes,” Colleen said. Niebolt wasn’t talking about the attack on her, her brother, and their friends. Colleen glanced at Sally, saw fear in her eyes, and once more looked down at her hands. They shook.

“
The time is upon us. The dead walk the earth and eat the flesh of the living. I’ve seen them,” Niebolt said, walking over to Colleen, dropping to his knees, folding her hands into his own. “You have, too. Haven’t you, Colleen?”