The Cast Stone (42 page)

At least it would be quick. Betsy put her palms to the floor, pressed down, held her breath. What was taking so fuckin' long? Let's get this done.

And Monica; what a silly bitch Monica was anyway, with her ideals, her fuckin' high ideals, her perfect world, perfect ecological order, perfect utopian crap. Crap; that's all it was, fuckin' crap. The world would never be the way Monica wanted it to be; there were too many Ernies, too many people who needed you to do what they said. And if you didn't, if you doubted, you never did anything ever again, and if your family was lucky they found your body on the side of the highway and your family had something to bury, if you were lucky.

What a fuckin' life. The hardwood wasn't slippery shiny anymore; it was sticky, sweaty and sticky and she wiped her hands on her pants, and the sweat showed on the floor, a smear, a dull smear on the gold-grained wood. Was that it? Was that all her life was going to amount to, a fuckin' smear on a beautiful floor where a baby once learned to crawl, and maybe even learned to walk?

She imagined a baby, a boy baby, crawling across the floor toward her, her imagination so vivid in this ultimate moment that she could almost see the child, her child, her child that never was. As soon as she began to feel, to experience an emotion other than anger; as soon as she started to open herself to the imagined child, Monica came unbeckoned and picked up the child from the floor and held it to her breast.

Fuck this.

Betsy hit the back door to 3112 Avenue H North at a dead run, across the backyard, through the place where someone once had a garden, and hurdled the back fence. At the alley she turned right, turned north, and ran as hard as her legs would carry her. At the house, just before the alley met the street, someone had left their car running, backed it out of the garage, left it in the driveway to warm up for a minute. Betsy didn't have a coat or even shoes and now maybe there was a God, maybe there was life after Ernie. The car doors were not locked.

Abe wasn't watching, he had turned away, just a glance down the snow-rutted street. Monica was watching. There was nothing that represented a falling star in the daylight. One second the house across the street was the same house that Monica had spent days and weeks confined to; it was the same house she had just watched her best friend walk bravely into, walk bravely to her end — and in the same second the house disappeared, replaced by a flash. It was very fortunate for Abe that he wasn't watching. The flash lasted through the end of that second and through the next second and part way through the second that followed that, but the brilliant flare in Monica's eyes did not end after the house was replaced by a glass-lined hole.

The flash continued, painfully, as though someone had thrown sand into her eyes, blinking hurt and did not dim the bright blue that Monica continued to see. Even though tears continuously poured from her eyes, they felt paper dry as she blinked and rubbed and desperately tried to relieve the pain. She considered using snow, but without sight was not sure she would select a handful clean enough to rub into the sockets and put out the fire that continued to burn there.

Monica clung to Abe — one hand with a desperate grip of his parka, the other constantly wiping at her face — as they both stumbled down a sidewalk that desperately needed the attention of a snow shovel.

Abe's growing belief that Monica might be faking her injury came from his own experience with welder's flash. Yeah, it hurt, your eyes watered, felt like there was sand in them, but you could still see. It wasn't until he had Monica back in his basement apartment, seated in the leather armchair, and he couldn't undo the zipper on his parka that he realized maybe her eye injury was serious. The nylon zipper, designed for cold weather, was melted together and would not open.

“They're getting it. They're trying to figure it out.” Ben untangled a dog from harness and gangline as Red looked on. “They mostly got it right.” With the dog free, Ben headed back to the sleigh. “What I really need is a leader.”

“How about the mom?” Red offered.

“Tried that, she won't stay on the trail, keeps trying to take us through the bush after any rabbit or squirrel or grouse that happens to catch her attention.”

“Hunter.” Red summed it up in one word.

“Hunter,” Ben agreed. “One of these six has to be the natural leader.” He indicated the team in front of him. “I just have to find out which one.”

“How you going to do that?” Red held the lead dog by the collar, kept the team in somewhat of a line as Ben got back on the sleigh.

“Just have to keep trying — let them go.”

Red stepped away from the dogs and they responded to Ben's “
Hike!
” by bursting into a sprint down the trail in a mix of puppy excitement and natural instinct. Ben held firmly to the sleigh handles. The team was a bit faster than he had anticipated and without his normal balance was having difficulty staying on the sled.

Red liked what he saw, liked the line of dogs and sight of his dad's sleigh and Ben determined to make a litter of puppies into a team. He liked the idea of it even more when the snow machine didn't start and he had to pump the primer again and again and pull on the starter cord again and again and again, until the engine sputtered, caught, ran rough for a few seconds before Red set off to follow Ben, thinking two-stroke engines were never designed to run on alcohol.

“Fuckin' Monica.” Betsy turned the car toward the pile of snow that marked the side of the street. “
Bitch!
” she screamed into the still frosted windshield. The heater was doing its best, but the engine wasn't warm enough yet and Betsy had the heat control set to the floor, toward her feet. As soon as she had the car in park, she immediately pulled her icy foot from the brake pedal. At first she just lifted it, like a shorthaired dog standing on the step whining to be let back inside, one paw in the air and then another. “Fuckin' Monica.” This time the words were more resigned — and more determined.

She vigourously rubbed a foot rested on her right knee, brushed the snow from the wet cotton sock, switched and rubbed the other foot. Her body vibrated with more than cold, more than the pain of fresh frostbite; she clawed a frozen chunk of snow from the heel of her right foot, fingernails angrily into the stiff cotton. “Who the fuck does she think she is?” Betsy pulled off the wet sock and threw it on the passenger-side floor, cupped her toes with both hands and applied pressure, firm, steady, strong, breathed in, held the breath in her lungs a full long second. Her body slowed, stopped vibrating.

Betsy's anger calmed, settled into a simmer, a glowing red coal that spread its warmth and chill. “Her and her fuckin' ideals. Who does she think she is anyway with her fucked superior morality.” She sat sideways on the seat, her back against the door. She banged her head against the glass, hard. “
Fuck Monica!
” she screamed into the empty car. “Fuck her and her Ben.” She banged her head again, harder. “
Fuck Ben.
” She calmed, an idea forming, banged her head again, not so hard, “Yeah, fuck Ben.”

Ben read slowly, carefully, enjoying the imaginary landscape of Yoknapatawpha County and the character Joe Christmas:

At last the noise and the alarms, the sound and fury of the
hunt, dies away, dies out of his hearing. He was not in the cotton
house when the man and the dogs passed, as the sheriff believed.
He paused there only long enough to lace up the brogans: the
black shoes, the black shoes smelling of Negro. They looked like
they had been chopped out of iron ore with a dull axe. Looking
down at the harsh, crude, clumsy shapelessness of them, he said
“Hah” through his teeth. It seemed to him that he could see
himself being hunted by white men at last into the black abyss
which had been waiting, trying, for thirty years to drown him
and into which now and at last he had actually entered, bearing
now upon his ankles the definite and ineradicable gauge of its
upward moving.

Benji disrupted the quiet afternoon, scraped a chair back and put his book on the table, “So, exactly what do you believe in?”

Ben laid Faulkner on his lap, his finger keeping his place at page 313. He noted the author of Benji's book: Russell, and answered accordingly. “I am beginning to believe in nothing.” He nodded toward the red dust jacket with big white letters in front of Benji, “I suppose he would call me a nihilist.”

“Really?” Benji looked closely at his father's face, looked for an explanation, looked for something that he might not have seen before. He couldn't find anything, it didn't make sense, didn't match with his understanding of Ben. “But, you pray.”

Ben took greater notice of Benji's book, beyond the author, he noted the title;
Why I am Not a Christian.

“I suspect your question is more religious than philosophical. Doesn't matter; it amounts to much the same thing.” Ben put a bookmark in place of his finger, turned behind and placed the yellowed novel on the little stand against the wall; it would be a while until he returned to it. “What I meant when I said I didn't believe in anything was that I am not a liberal, not a socialist, not a conservative; I really believe, more now than ever before, if we ignore government, maybe it will go away.”

“We'll just pretend it isn't there, just like that, and the Americans will go home?”

“Almost” Ben answered. “If we don't participate, they have no power. The only real power the Americans have is that we accept them.”

Rosie perked up, tuned in to the conversation over at the table. The light coming through Ben's front window was almost white, most of it reflected from snow. Rosie didn't even pretend that the reason she was at Ben's was because of the light as she sewed beads to leather, making a little pair of moccasins for Rachel. She was here because everyone else was here, Ben and Benji at the table reading, Elsie on the computer and Rachel asleep. It had been quiet, peaceful quiet, family quiet, a collection of people together, comfortable and safe with each other, comfortable with silence.