Slob (5 page)

"By coincidence that's what we're having for dessert tonight." Lee Anne laughed impishly, showing her missing front tooth space. Edie smiled and took a bite of food, chewing slowly, tasting nothing.

She'd thrown herself into a paroxysm of premature spring cleaning, after having woken up filled with some nagging paranoia in a bed that she could never quite get used to, and spent an hour dawdling over coffee and a piece of toast. She had read everything on the cereal box as if it had been written by Dostoevsky and by the time she forced herself into action she had memorized the entire nutritional contents of a dubious breakfast concoction that promised "all the essential vitamins and minerals," and the recipe for a highly suspect party mix that would allow one to consume even more of the product.

It was an exorcism. A physical cleansing in more ways than one. Ed's old ties had slipped down into a dark pile where they gathered dust, twisted together like snakes. An errant slipper. A hat lodged in the blackest, far corner of a closet, anything of his she'd overlooked or couldn't stand to touch in her initial, grief-stricken whirlwind of reminders gathered up for Goodwill. She emptied bottom drawers, too-tall shelves, catchalls and hideaways and rat-pack caches long forgotten.

A heartbreaking comb with its teeth still holding strands of a dead loved one's hair, a lost cuff link, a dog-eared family Bible—each of these memory triggers inspired ten minutes of wordless fantasy conversation with her deceased mother, husband, and a favorite aunt, as she sat mesmerized by a framed bevy of family photographs, absentmindedly brushing her own hair with one of Ed's brushes. She was proud of her long hair, a luxurious abundance that he'd called her mane, and at thirty-eight it was still naturally dark and lustrous. Her skin was fair, with a light freckling, her eyes wide set and beautiful. They were darkly brown and hazel by turns, changing mysteriously in each light source. She had smile lines of wrinkling crow's feet at the corners of her eyes, and just the beginnings of lines at each corner of her mouth. Her nose was rather large, not straight, and in the center of another face it might have been unattractive.

She had never been pretty in the classic sense. She hadn't been an attractive child, but she was maturing into one of those interesting if somewhat forgettable looking women that other women describe as "poised" and "self-assured," and that men are sometimes drawn to partially because they seem so unapproachable. She was hot the snow queen she appeared to be.

In bed there was a natural lustiness and she had always secretly known that she was much the more—what's the word? Not carnal. But perhaps the more elemental of the two of them. She was closer to her genuine feelings. Edie was one of those rare creatures who didn't have an insincere or mean or malicious or selfish bone in her body. And she had given herself to the man in her life the same way she did everything else. Wholeheartedly. Honestly. With kindness and with the attitude that the real pleasure was in what you could give.

Sex had been pleasurable for her but not a wildly exciting or all-consuming thing the way it had been with so many of the kids she'd gone to school with. Edie had seen marriage after marriage crash against the rocks of divorce and sink. And many of those marriages were those in which the female had confided to the girls about the hot, burning flames of sex that kept the relationship with their spouse a thing of explosive, emotional extremes.

She had been born into a devoutly Christian home, but as she grew older and left her home in a West Virginia town that she joked was so impoverished that 'it made
Coal Miner's Daughter
look like it'd been shot in Beverly Hills," she had drifted away from the church. It was a thing that just happened. She'd blamed it on work schedules, illness, any number of convenient excuses. But the need for Jesus in her life had left an emptiness inside her.

Not long after she'd gone to work as a secretary for Chicago Carburetor she'd met a salesman named Ed Lynch and they had some dates. Ed was gentle, funny, and he was a good man with a strong religious faith. Now she started letting Ed lead her back and found herself looking forward to going with him. At first on Sundays. He'd pick her up and they'd go to church, and then around eleven-thirty or twelve head for a little place where they liked to eat lunch.

Soon she was going back on Sunday nights with him, and then they'd go to the Wednesday-night Bible studies, and before long they were regulars at the church socials, picnics, pot-luck suppers, fellowship classes, and she had given herself over to the Lord again. After a few months she got up in front of the congregation and confessed that she'd sinned and she asked the Lord to allow her to rededicate herself to Jesus. That evening Ed had proposed to her.

What Ed lacked in imagination he made up for in intensity. Sex with Ed was what she was sure God had meant for it to be, a warm and honest coupling between marriage partners. She appreciated the biological beauty of the act as a release but neither she nor her husband had been particularly preoccupied with it. Physiologically, it had assumed no more import in their lives than any other bodily function.

Once he had told her, "You know what I like about our love life?"

"Everything, I hope," she'd murmured to him with a smile.

That's right. Everything. But what I like about it most is you. Doing this with somebody else"—he shook his head—"it just wouldn't
matter"

"I feel like that too about you," she'd said, kissing him. Ed had made her a hot, loving, and complete woman. But now she had closed the door on that part of her life.

She found some old cologne in an unfamiliar bottle and tipped it to a finger, sniffing and saying aloud, "Arpege," to the mirror. She had cleaned out the freezer, gifting a next door neighbor with all manner of perfectly edible garden goodies, catfish Ed had cleaned, some unknown tinfoil-wrapped and unmarked leftover surprises, all of which the lady surreptitiously dumped in the garbage. She headed for the silver, then changed her mind and broke out the Easy-Off and cleaned the oven until it sparkled.

She made a shopping list, cut coupons, prepared a cup of decaffeinated coffee, and drank a third of it. Wrote a month-overdue thank-you note to someone she didn't know, took a long, hot bath, put on her best underwear, a long, suede skirt with high-heeled, leather boots, a blouse with a suede vest, and golden hoop earrings. Looked at herself, undressed, put on a ragged sweatshirt and her oldest blue jeans, threw out a piece of bric-a-brac that she was tired of dusting, retrieved it in a small rush of guilt, and decided she was spinning her wheels and quit for the day.

She chewed something, grateful for the sound of eight-year-old chatter nearby, a lovely thing to hear, now audible only subconsciously like the sonorous murmur from the TV set with the volume turned not quite all the way down in the living room, and she struggled inwardly to keep from thinking any depressing thoughts. None of this feeling sorry for yourself, missy, she thought, as she remembered thinking while she cooked dinner tonight that her life's wholeness had somehow drained like the liquid from a broken glass.

H
e has had extremely violent sexual fantasies for as long as he has memory. Because of his unique childhood they predate puberty. He fantasized in pitch-black, locked closets, inside a stifling metal box, chained under a filthy homemade bed, in a cell called the hole, in a thousand places, on death row in The Max, in The Nam on a hundred night patrols, on his lonely, wonderful one-man ambushes, on foot, in cars, in countless hiding places. He has the gifts of patience and stillness, and in his long, still waiting times he fantasizes unspeakable things.

The tape deck in the stolen car is blasting the bridge from Manhattan Transfer's "Route 66" and he does not bother to turn it down. Smiling broadly, he thinks how unusual and enjoyable it might be to rape and kill an entire group. Pondering the difficulties as a theoretical challenge, he diagrams the acquisition of the necessary intelligence, thinking how easy it would be for him to insert himself into their lives just long enough to take them.

He is capable of monstrous acts. He kills easily, effortlessly, with total pleasure. The place he is cruising through is on the outskirts of a small town in southern Illinois, "downstate" as they say there. The place is called Bluetown, a commercial error in judgment dating back to the post-Korean-fifties, when a group of desperate merchants who were watching their business desert a crumbling downtown and head toward the shopping malls, grasped at an all-blue theme as a cheap gamble. They had painted all their buildings blue and built their last-ditch hopes around an all-blue ad blitz, renaming their tiny community Bluetown, Illinois, and saturating media with blue bargains that were swept away by the onrushing tide of urban renewal and 1950s change.

Now the CHEAP!! USED FURNITURE!! signs hang from the fading blue walls of empty storefronts in the ghostly predawn as this monster of a man, squeezed behind the wheel of a stolen Mercury Cougar, drives through the place called Bluetown. He has a sore, throbbing ankle and his gall bladder is acting up again. He weighs close to five hundred pounds and he has taken three human lives in the last forty-eight hours. The steering wheel is digging into his gut as he drives gripping the wheel in those steel fingers, thinking about how he could easily find out where Janice Siegel lives. It is nothing personal with him, just a way of passing the time. But sometimes he will allow himself to take a fantasy daydream over the line and his head will feel funny and in the bloodroar he will do bad things.

A sixth sense tells him to control himself and concentrate and he jams a powerful index finger into the tape player's stop/eject switch spitting the cassette out. He kills the audio. He listens intently, hearing the Cougar's tires sing on the wet pavement, and the sixth sense nudges him again. Quickly, with surprisingly fast movements for such an enormous hulk, he reacts to the nudge and wheels the car into a dark parking lot next to a store, braking, killing the engine and lights, scrunching down out of sight on the passenger side, driving down the street one moment, now hiding in the shadows the next, operating on those unerring vibes.

He waits. Listening to the motor cool. Listening for what? A passing prowl car perhaps. He waits there in the dark shadows of a Bluetown parking lot. He waits for a long time listening and absorbing. Waiting. He shifts his weight and with a groan of springs sits up again and starts the car, pulling back out into the streets of Bluetown.

Out on his spooky, one-man night patrols in The Nam he would concentrate fiercely on preparation. He, the one they called CHAINGANG, was never caught unprepared. He believed in the Soviet dictum "plan hard, fight easy." Except that he planned hard and fought hard and by God if he fought you at all, this mountain of kill fury, you were going to have to—as the saying went—gut up and buckle for your dust. When he focused on a target with his special brand of laser-keen concentration and meticulous preparation, he was a remarkable adversary.

Each time he went out beyond the perimeter, whatever that might be, sprawling firebase or ragtag NDP, he itemized everything in his enormous ruck mentally. He carried a backbreaking storehouse neither you nor I could budge, in which would be packed an orderly array of every life-sustaining necessity from det cord to his precious freeze-dried "long rats," the goodies that let him have the slack to run free, untethered to Resupply and the idiots and amateurs who knew nothing of killing. And each time out he would painstakingly itemize each item. Not one to make mistakes, back then.

Now, calming himself, becoming more controlled as he winds through the ghost of some long-lost businessman's folly with the funky and meaningless name Bluetown, squeezed behind the wheel of a hot Merc Cougar, he begins acting more in character. Itemizing automatically, he remembers the plates that he took last night in the suburbs when he dumped the woman's tiresome Datsun. He decides which pair he will change to as he smiles over the kill last night, his thoroughly enjoyable suffocation of the salesman whose vehicle he now drives.

Wrenching his mind back to the current problem at hand, he brakes, pulling the Cougar over to the curb beside an abandoned gypsy storefront with the peeling legend USED RNITURE, and reconsidering, coasts into a narrow alley between the stores. With great effort he propels his bulk out from behind the wheel, and getting out of the car with a massive creaking of springs, he takes a small oil can and tool bag from his duffel and heads to the rear of the Merc.

He selects the most appropriate of the plates (he has memorized the current plate prefix and number code for all fifty states), gives the oil can a few squirts, and with bolts soaking briefly contemplates his current options. He then begins to unscrew the woman's rusted license plate bolts from out of the plates, and he substitutes a fresh tag.

Completing that task, he then bends the plates into an unrecognizable metal accordion and locks them back in the trunk to be pitched into the next creek he crosses. He will repaint the vehicle tomorrow if circumstances permit, and the words MASKING TAPE, and NEWSPAPERS, are mentally added to a subconscious list of want items he has filed away, his shopping list. He slams his humongous body behind the wheel again and takes off, leaving the desolate streets as he found them, dead and blue.

Out on the highway again he drives carefully, but with the rapid flow of dawn highway traffic, keeping it as close to sixty as the rest of the rapidly speeding cars and trucks will permit, trying to stay within a string of vehicles as much as he can without going to extremes of speed. At this hour a car moving at the legal fifty-five would probably be as conspicuous as one doing ninety, so he lets his heavy foot press the accelerator a little closer to the floor.