The Captive Condition (15 page)

“Our daddy would want you to come live with us,” Madeline agreed. “We'll go home and ask right now.”

Lorelei shook her head. “I would never live with your dad.”

“Why not?”

“Think. Think real hard.” She wiped her lips on the pillowcase, leaving a streak of color like fresh blood.

The girls listened to the moan of warped joists and trusses and the pop of rusted nails freeing themselves from the barn's heavy timbers. Above the mattress, spinning faster and faster, the grotesque wind chimes created a dissonant clank and clatter that mimicked the rattle of ghostly chains.

“A gift from the Gonk,” said Lorelei. “A reminder that he wants certain favors.”

“The Gonk?”

“Yes, he was greedy with lust. Probably no different from your father.”

“Our dad isn't like that at all!” Sophie snapped.

Lorelei smirked. “What do you two know? You're just a couple of dumb kids.”

“Maybe
you're
the dumb one,” said Madeline. “You're fat. Getting fatter by the day. Maybe we should stop feeding you. Or maybe you've been hunting on your own.” She turned to her sister. “See, she
is
a werewolf. Didn't I tell you? She has the evil eye.”

“You girls watch too much TV,” Lorelei said.

“Evil eye! Evil eye!”

“If I was your father, I'd swat you for watching so much TV.”

“What's wrong with TV?”

“It turns people into dummies,” Lorelei answered. “Fills their heads with silly ideas. Makes them think and say stupid things. Me, I never watch TV.”

“Yeah, because you don't have one,” Sophie jeered. “You don't have anything. You don't have a mommy or a daddy.”

“That's enough,” Lorelei mumbled.

“See, she's just like us,” said Madeline. “She wants a mommy, too!”

“That's enough, I said.”

“Aw, look, she's tongue-tied,” Madeline continued. “She's traumatized. She's got issues. We learned all those fancy words from TV. We learn lots of good stuff from TV. You're troubled. Emotionally disturbed. You need counseling, medication, around-the-clock psychiatric care.”

Lorelei leveled her eyes at Madeline and slapped her with enough force to knock her to the floor. “Why don't you go home, you brat?” she said with a scowl. “Go home to your daddy. Go on, both of you.”

Sophie shrank from a face that seemed so suddenly unfamiliar to her, a nightmare mask distorted by uncontrollable rage. She should have known better than to be taken in by Lorelei's counterfeit affection. “You can't hit my sister!” she cried. With surprising agility she lunged across the mattress and managed to snatch the gun from Lorelei's back pocket.

Lorelei screamed. “Don't point that thing at anyone!”

Sophie ignored her and lifted the barrel so it lined up nicely with Lorelei's heart, where all of the nastiness could be found. Hearts were known to explode from gunshot wounds, and there would be much blood, foul and black and bitter splashed against the faded wood.

A single tear ran slow and heavy down Lorelei's stricken face. “I know you're upset with me. But please put the gun down. I'm asking nicely.”

Sophie now aimed at the bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape beside the mattress. “You shouldn't drink wine,” she said coldly. “Alcohol is a very bad thing. You oughta see what it's done to our daddy.”

Unable to cope with this new nightmare, Lorelei buried her head under a pile of pillows and seemed to dissolve bit by bit into the shadows so that all that remained of her body was a round, heaving mass at the center of the mattress.

Sophie squeezed the trigger, and before the force of the blast sent her flying backward and the bottle exploded in a thousand pieces, she saw a single silver bullet suspended magically in the air. She threw the gun to the floor, faint smoke curling whitely from the hot barrel. Careful to avoid the jagged shards of glass, she scampered across the loft and hurried down the ladder, Madeline following close behind her.

Racing home through the twilight fields, plowing through trussed cornstalks and withered goldenrod, giggling like a pair of madhouse sisters, Sophie and Madeline suddenly wanted Lorelei to suffer in new and unimaginable ways, wanted her to die if such a thing could be arranged, and they prayed for the sinister flapping of wings, a storm of vampire bats unleashing a torrent of deafening squeals and drowning out Lorelei's cries of terror. Deep in the woods the gamesome girls, their hearts untouched by sin, heard the unsettling song of coyotes and wished for a famished pack to invade the barn, to pounce on Lorelei, to tear at her tender flesh, a dozen beasts competing madly to be the first to crouch on her belly and feast on her guts all stuffed with that tantalizing wild fruit.

Wrecked lives, wrecked marriages, wrecked college careers, wrecked cars. In Normandy Falls the boundaries between these things could never be clearly delineated. Desperate to break free from the confinement of his house, hoping to put an end to his maddening thoughts, Charlie Ryan donned a baseball cap and jacket and went to Metal Mayhem, held every Saturday night at the edge of town. “Any car! Any year! Station wagon, limo, or hearse!” He sat near the top row of the bleachers and for hours watched teams of wild-eyed men (“pree-cision car crushers,” as they billed themselves) careen their three-thousand-pound steel skeletons into one another at terrific speeds. Like everyone else in attendance, Charlie applauded the spectacular head-on collision of two Corsairs that came plunging through moonlit breakers of black exhaust. Unrecognizable hunks of cast iron whirled like shrapnel through the stadium lights. The destruction was utterly inane, the cheers wonderfully mindless, and the evening air reeked of a witch's brew of gasoline and hot oil.

Unprepared for the ferocity with which it wormed its warm way into his brain, Charlie took surreptitious sips of moonshine from a jar that his wife had stashed away in one of the kitchen cupboards, and then let out a satisfying belch, the proud and uninhibited roar of a mountain man. All around him the boozed townies slapped their knees and laughed. I laughed, too, appreciated their good humor, their easygoing manner. Back home the people I knew would have scowled with disapproval at such low-class antics, and they would have flinched at my horrifically swollen face, but not the good citizens of this town, and certainly not here, not at Metal Mayhem, because in Normandy Falls ugliness reigned supreme, and beauty, if it could be found at all, existed only in the degree of ugliness, the ferocity of it. Ugliness, if ugly enough, could sometimes be sublime.

The men seated beside Charlie said, “We've missed you, fella. Haven't seen you at the derby all fall. Where've you been?”

In order to hear his response above the terrible grind of twisting metal, I leaned forward and cocked my head. Charlie sat one row below me and looked just as terrible tonight as he had on that late summer afternoon at the funeral home.

“Haven't been anywhere,” he said. “Just trying to manage Madeline and Sophie.”

“And how are the girls doing?”

“The best they can, I suppose,” he answered. “We all are.”

“Bet they keep you plenty occupied.”

He drummed his fingers on his knees. “Oh, they're rambunctious all right. It's a full-time job keeping track of those two. Their mother could barely handle them. Probably drove the poor woman batty.” Startled by his own words, he quickly added, “I mean, they've reached the age when children become very willful. It must have happened while I was sailing the lakes. Six months ago I waved farewell to two sweet little girls. But when I came home I found a pair of hellions. I actually thought about calling the pastor and asking him to perform an exorcism. Maybe he'd be willing to give me a deal. A two-for-one discount or something.”

Charlie cracked a weak and wavering smile but stopped short of telling them that he'd left the house while the girls were off exploring the valley. He was convinced the twins possessed unholy powers—telepathy, clairvoyance, a tyrannical taste for retribution. On those rare occasions when he was sober enough to formulate a coherent sentence, he often accused them of trying to publicly shame him by disclosing some awful impropriety. He had betrayed their mother, and somehow they knew about it. From his subtlest gestures and the slightest shift of his eyes, the girls could divine what he was thinking, or so he believed, and for this reason he tried his best to avoid them, leaving them to fend for themselves.

Ultimately, his apparent lack of concern turned out to be a blessing. Children tend to derive comfort from the familiar, but such was not the case with Madeline and Sophie. They eagerly sought out new and secret worlds, far from a father who fostered hopelessness and misery, miles from a home seething with insurmountable problems, a place with no past and no future, only a terrible present. Restless by nature, the girls often hurried home from school and then disappeared down the dark tunnel of trees that led to the valley floor. Charlie didn't seem to care. If anything, he was grateful the girls weren't around to torment him with their tall tales. “But we swear it, Daddy. We saw a
pirate
sleeping by the pool on the night Mommy drowned!”

He promised himself he would be gone for a couple of hours, three at most. The girls could survive on their own until he returned. He just needed a break, needed to see something other than those two bereaved and wretched faces floating in the dark like disembodied Venetian masks, watching him with constant worry and wondering if Daddy, just like Mommy, would ever come home again. Dirty, hungry, slightly terrified, they looked more like penned-up animals wallowing in their own filth than darling little girls. If only there were some way he could help them. Late at night, while lying alone in bed, he was forced to press a pillow over his head in order to silence the sounds of the girls crying themselves to sleep. He felt guilty about this, but he felt guilty about a lot of things. He hadn't cleaned the house or cooked a meal or washed a load of laundry in weeks. He hadn't answered the phone or spoken to the neighbors or paid a single bill. In the mailbox angry notices from collections agencies were piling up. All of the down-to-earth duties of running a household had been left to Emily, and Charlie didn't quite know where to begin.

Now, since he had no one in his life to whom he could unburden his heart, he turned to the other spectators and said, “Yeah, I came back to a house swarming with devils. But that's not the worst of it, no, not even close.” He shook his head like a man mildly astonished by a streak of bad luck. “Whenever I returned from a long voyage, I made my wife wear a turquoise sari. Every time, every single time. Forcing Emily to wear the sari, that was the worst thing I ever did, the very worst thing.”

The spectators had no idea what he was talking about and hoped they weren't about to witness a public breakdown. The poor man, twenty years on the high seas had given him intimate knowledge of tempests so terrific that storms must have raged day and night in the back of his brain. But I knew all about the sari. Emily had revealed everything to me, left nothing out. On my kitchen countertop I now had several notepads covered in her careful handwriting, long and detailed descriptions of their very own South Seas adventure, and I knew the sari was a grim reminder of that fateful moment in Emily's life when she discovered how her husband no longer loved and respected her.

Before leaving Metal Mayhem that night, Charlie waited in line at the concession stand behind a group of whining children who demanded waffle cones, cotton candy, chocolate-covered potato chips. He ordered a hard cider to cut whatever moonshine remained in his jar and then shoved his way through the crowd. As I followed a few paces behind him in the gravel lot, I heard an echo of familiar laughter and saw my fellow ticks loafing outside the gates of the derby.

“Hey, Cyclops!” they called. “We have a question for you. Do you think it's possible to capture an owl and keep it as a pet? Do people do such things in these parts?”

“Lunatics,” I muttered, and strode toward my car.

“What's the hurry, Cyclops? Listen, we have some important news for you. We're launching the sailboat tomorrow morning. We intend to pass through the fifteen locks and five canals of the Saint Lawrence Seaway. A distance of more than two thousand miles! And then we'll follow the great, beetling headlands of the East Coast. She gave us all the information we need and told us to set sail for the South Seas.”

I stopped. “
Who
told you this?”

“The goddess. For years we thought a god was speaking to us. But we were mistaken.” The men looked around as though she might be listening. “We heard her voice in the night. Like the song of the dove when it returned to Noah. Like the song of the rainbow after the deluge. A siren song. And her voice has the power to inspire, to incite, to inflame.”

“To render insane,” I said, opening my car door.

“You're learning the ways of the world, Cyclops, and now it's time you stop with all of your fiction writing and your Greek poets with their fondness for buggery and enchanted islands. Instead of those candy-ass professors, maybe you oughta listen to us fanatics for a change. Them teachers spend too much time trying to figure out reasons why a god don't exist instead of reasons why a god
does
exist. Maybe they should start studying the world as it is, the world as god,
any
god, made it. What if they're wrong, huh? At least if they believed in a power greater than themselves, they wouldn't suffer from so many questions, their brains wouldn't burn with so much fire. Either there is a supernatural order or there is not. You must place your bet. You have no alternative.”

Listening to them express their philosophical views was like listening to them discuss their sex lives. It was mildly disgusting and incredibly dull; it was also easy to see through their certainty, their bullshit, their braggadocio. Brainless beyond description, they had fallen completely under the sway of some pitiless paranormal power and now lived in constant fear of it. I climbed into my car and turned the ignition. The wind was beginning to pick up now, shifting direction out of the northwest, and on the radio the announcer warned of a freak snowstorm, the first of the season, with sub-zero temperatures and significant lake-effect snow. Donner Party kind of stuff, judging from the irrepressible excitement in the man's voice.

“Gentlemen,” I said, rolling down my window, “you've inadvertently stumbled upon an argument of sheer genius.”

“Huh?”

“You know. Pascal's wager.”

They continued to shake their heads. With soot-covered fingers they probed the waxy canals of their great, flopping ears and massaged the bloody gums of their crooked, yellow teeth. “Huh?
Huh?
”

“Pascal's wager,” I repeated. “Pascal's
wager
!”

“So you got yourself a little learning. And that's supposed to make you better than the rest of us, right?”

“Oh, do I give you that impression? That I'm somehow better than you?” I flashed a superior smile of straight white teeth. I'd started brushing regularly again, three times a day. The advantages of having clean teeth and healthy gums were not to be underestimated. One could always tell the difference between the townies and the college students from the condition of their choppers.

“Naw, we know you're not better, Cyclops. We said
you
think you're better. You think a whole lot of things. That's your problem. You think too much. You don't stop thinking. But it's all in your head. None of it's real.”

“What you're saying is I'm neurotic.”

“Well, if that's what ‘neurotic' means, then yes, you're neurotic as they come. Your mind spins round and round like a hamster running on one of them wheels. The hamster thinks he's pretty clever, too, going absolutely nowhere.”

I put the car in drive. “I'd say I'm more like the ball in a roulette wheel.”

“You see! Pure crazy. But we know the truth. We're here for a purpose, and soon, very soon, we'll know what that purpose is.”

Finding this whole conversation a terrific bore, I pulled away and tailed Charlie Ryan, but I could not ignore their final words to me, and from the rearview mirror I glared at them, my eye glowing like a burning brand.

“Remember, Cyclops! You're one of us now! And on Sunday at dawn we sail south! Did you hear, Cyclops? Tomorrow at dawn!”

Charlie Ryan hadn't thought about his own South Seas adventure in quite a long time, wouldn't permit himself to think of it, tried to blot it from his memory, but instead of a black ribbon of road cutting through the barren countryside, he found himself gazing again at the methylene-blue waters of Delacroix Cay, a holograph whose diaphanous image seemed to solidify in the autumn air. For a moment he was in two places at once, hovering somewhere between the reality of the open road and his suppressed memories of fishing boats moored to the pontoon docks along the shore, a thatched-roof palapa bar surrounded by palmettos, and in a distant sweep of green fields the small shipwrecked shanty that for seven days and nights he and Emily shared.

On the afternoon he told her the exciting news, Charlie noticed how his wife's expression became faintly clouded by suspicion. Emily wanted to know why a merchant marine who worked six months out of twelve on the Great Lakes thought they should spend their anniversary on a remote island in the middle of the Caribbean. Wouldn't he prefer to see the Smoky Mountains, the Rockies, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Joshua Tree, any incalculably vast land mass or rock pile or dusty desert? Charlie forced a smile, trying to disguise the shameful fact that he'd forgotten it was their anniversary. When a man sails the lakes in winter, he told her, when for a six-month stretch he has to stare at endless miles of gray ice floes, he gets desperate to see a fair sky, a blue and cloudless horizon.

“The holy trinity of sun, sand, and serenity,” he said.

There was some truth to this, and on his better days, when his mind wasn't muddled by lust, Charlie envisioned a pristine bay teeming with schools of tropical fish instead of heaps of sheepshead and walleye moldering on stony beaches, the screeching gulls picking madly at tough scales and bones. What he failed to tell his wife was that he'd won the trip by answering trivia on a radio talk show. He'd phoned the station on multiple occasions, but every time his calls got through, he suddenly lost his nerve and hung up. He shook, he trembled, he gasped for air, fighting desperately for every breath. With the receiver still in his hand, he fell to his knees and called upon heaven for guidance, but his flesh was weak, and no matter how intensely he prayed he could not rid his mind of the tormenting images he'd seen in those brochures.