The Kill Riff (19 page)

    
Say, have you heard the one about the doomed rock group? One bit a big blade, and then there were three…

    "I used to have a recurrent dream, when I was seventeen," she said. "I was being chased through a field of very tall grass, like reeds, head-high stuff. Maybe a wheat field. I never see what's chasing me, but I know it's big and ugly and hungry. And it's after me, specifically. The monster knows who I am, and it wants me. And I'm terrified that if I part the grass to either side, I'll be looking right into its face, all steaming and fanged and snorty, and a paw the size of a catcher's mitt will scoop me up, and that'll be the big finish. The end of me. The grass is both my protection and my greatest hindrance. If I was stranded on the fifty-yard line of a deserted football field, at least I'd know which way to run, see? Sometimes the monster is far away, sometimes it's closer, but always nearby. And I'll meet it inevitably, and that scares me, but I keep running. I'm determined to go down fighting."

    Cass smiled slightly, gesturing with her wounded hand, getting into her own story.

    "I come to a tree, a tall tree, a eucalyptus tree, maybe, something solid I can put between me and the monster. Maybe it can't climb trees. Or I can get high enough to survey the field and figure out where I am in relation to the monster. All I'd have to do is look for the swath it's cutting through the grass. As I reach out to grab the lower limb and swing up, that big fucking paw lands on my shoulder, puffing dust and fleas into my eyes… and I howl and wake up. End of dream."

    Lucas had dumped down two Dos Equis without feeling a thing. Cass said the alcohol made her raw throat feel better. He returned to the table with two freshly uncapped bottles.

    "So. My father, wheeler-dealer that he is, forks over money so I can go see a psychiatrist. Eight sessions. I rattled off my history, some of the exciting stuff, then I laid out the dream. Know what he told me?"

    "That you were sick, sick, sick," he said. They clinked bottles.

    "He told me I was afraid of losing my virginity. That the hungering, slobbering monster was phallic. The field of impenetrable grass was my fear of sex. And the tree was a biblical perversion of a celibacy facade, or something. I half expected him to pat me on the thigh, paternally."

    It was what Lucas expected to hear. Cass' shrink had been another Freudian basket case.

    "But the joke was on him, Lucas. This is what I meant about not trying to read dreams. I'd lost my cherry a year and a half before I'd ever had the dream, and gotten laid a couple of dozen times. Enough to think, even at seventeen, that there wasn't any mystique to sex, and certainly nothing that I was scared of. I'd lied to the shrink about being a virgin. I didn't want my father to know-don't ask me why, 'cos that'll waste a lot of time. So the shrink turned out to be full of it. End of story."

    A conclusion reached as a result of faulty input. It had the fascination of a box puzzle. Lucas thought of Sara and her quest to figure him out. He had so enjoyed leading her where she wanted to go. The blackly depressed widower, the suicidal father of the victim daughter. He wondered whether Kristen had ever had sex before her death. He thought he knew the answer, but it kept being overshadowed by the weaker idea that a father should not consider such things.

    "My recurrent dream was about Kristen, right before she died," he said. "Very stylized. Nothing useful there, either." His hands made an aimless effort to twist the air into something descriptive.

    "How did she die? Kristen."

    It was asked considerately but caused Lucas to worry his lips together a beat too long before he said, "An accident."

    "Sorry." Cass looked at him directly. "Sometimes my big nose gets my big mouth in trouble." She regarded her empty bottle. "Want to switch off to coffee?"

    He was pleasantly in half focus and willing to accede to nearly anything. He had not felt this good, this at peace, in a long time. Cass was really a remarkable young lady… no, a remarkable woman, with a tact and maturity that exceeded his low expectations of what twenty-three was supposed to look and sound like.

    She fiddled gingerly with the coffeepot over at the sink. She still moved very carefully, as though afraid she might shatter. "And no, I did not spend my time engaged in domestic chores while you were gone. I've had a lifelong phobia about lapsing into housewifery. The Great American Dream. The white picket fence that imprisons you."

    "White picket fence?"

    "Yeah. All that stuff I'm supposed to want from life, but don't. The house in Malibu. An El Blando hubby who busts his balls to stay inside a six-figure adjusted income. A station wagon and matching Porsches. Two point five blond kids. An afghan hound that shits more than it eats, two spayed cats, and one exotic pet-a toucan or a tortoise or an aardvark. Hired minorities to swab the toilets and polish the jockey on the front walk." She shrugged and made a face. "You know the life, Lucas: birth control pills, diet pills, sleeping pills, antacid pills… pills to counteract the draining effect of the other pills… vitamin pills to give you enough energy to swallow the sixty other pills you wind up taking every day. Yuck.''

    He thought of pills and of Cory. Pills could do good things, like expunge a harpy from your life. Like make a bad relationship into a good one. Cory had chided him about his performance in bed. After she was gone, he had done better. Maybe it was the pills.

    "You get your first nervous breakdown at twenty-seven, first facelift at thirty. Then you move on to your first serious extramarital affair, having had a bunch of tacky minor ones already. Then a tumor at forty, a stroke at fifty… and a nice white picket fence around it all. You put it up so the serfs will steer clear of what's yours, and you paint it every third year, and it's always white and pristine and undespoiled. And when you die, it'll be sitting there, like some kind of perverted legacy to the world. This is what I was, neat and attractive and forgettable. And then you and the rest of your neat nuclear family get put in the ground, and somebody new comes along and puts up their own white picket fence after they've uprooted yours and recycled it, and that's the end. Dark, ugly nothing."

    "That's sad," said Lucas as she brought him a fresh cup of coffee. She'd added cinnamon.

    "That's why I'm giving it lots of room to avoid me. If anyone uses the word 'lifestyle' it's a pretty good indication that they don't have one. Maybe they bought one. But they're trapped by the white picket fence."

    "The WPF." He grinned. Despite the age-old cliche of the woman's touch, the coffee was really much better than his own brew.

    "Life with good old Reese the psycho may not have lasted long," she mused, "but there was no white picket fence to worry about."

    
I'll be goddamned,
he thought. Cass was talking about him and his old life. With Cory, his life had been aimed down the very path Cass was lampooning. And two people had died, and he had gotten a clean slate at a mental hospital in exchange for a year of his life, and things were much better now, thank you. Overseas, he remembered, there were no abstruse reasons why, no political fluff to cloud reality. You were there for one reason only-to stay alive.
Yes, sir, I'm out there offing dinks for a damned good reason; the only reason. Staying whole
.

    "That's all done now," he said, as much in response to his own thoughts as Cass' abrupt stormcloud of depression. He was aware that he was examining what she said in an attempt to generate guilt over Cory. Guilt was his biggest enemy, Sara had told him. Guilt must not even enter into the equation.

    The sun was falling. In another day he had to be packed and gone again.

    "You're right," Cass said. "Another mood to slide into." She touched her fingertips to her face, appraising her shrinking bruises for the thousandth time. "Sometimes a traumatic experience forces you to become a better person. Sometimes you have to put up with an infinitude of assholes, and just when you're ready to give up, you stumble across somebody worthwhile, by purest luck."

    "Maybe not," he said. "Maybe you're due for a good guy."

    "Well, you're a pretty decent guy. Do you count?"

    "Of course not," he said, getting up to refill his mug. "Wait till you know me well enough to really despise me."

    She gave that an editorial hmmm, but intercepted him. "By the way, look-no more Ace bandage. Check this out, doctor." She unbuttoned her chambray workshirt and opened it up. Her breasts were unbound.

    They obviously did not pain her as much as before. Yellowish smudges were all that remained of the bruises there, except for some dwindling dark patches where the impact had been the worst. She took his hand and made him touch them; a caress for each.

    He gulped, more than a little surprised. "That's good," he said, feeling dumb.

    She held his hand to her chest while she stood up and kissed him. Her lips pushed his apart; he felt the hard little rind of scab brush his mouth. The contact was galvanizing. There was the briefest, delicious touch of her tongue, making tentative introduction, then she withdrew.

    "Thanks, Lucas."

    His voice had dried up with amazing speed. "Uh… don't worry about it." His brain scampered madly, seeking some new subject. "Are you tired?"

    "That's my good-night." She smiled her restricted smile. "I'm still too crippled for any heavy-duty action, if you know what I mean."

    He was just far enough ahead of her, in years, to be embarrassed. "Oh, wait, I didn't mean-"

    "I did. Lucas, you're blushing."

    And that, of course, brought on the blush full blast. Cass could be very evil when the mood arose.

    He sought a graceful escape and found none. "Oh… fucking hell," he mumbled.

    "It's cute," she said. "Attractive, I mean. Men hate looking sensitive, I know. Get your coffee. It's not as if I'm a princess, and I'm repaying the White Knight for his chivalry by fucking him blind."

    "That's nice to know." He drew the words out broadly, playing with her now.

    "I just wanted to make sure you think about me occasionally. While I'm snoozing. Over there. In my bag."

    "I do. And not wholly out of worry, not anymore. I'm glad you're getting better. I'd like to steal credit for it. But… you have noticed that I'm old enough to be your-'' He was thinking of Kristen again.

    He was thinking of fucking Kristen.

    "Oh, just barely," she cut in. "Besides, I don't recall bothering to ask if you were of age or not. Nor does that matter. You have to leave tomorrow; I just wanted to make sure you'd come back for some other reason than to make sure your cabin hadn't been stolen by a UFO."

    "I've already got more here than I ever had," he said. He kept his distance from her, idling near the sink. "Wait. All right? Just wait a bit." His smile was genuine. Soon everything would be perfect. But not tonight.

    "Sure." She limped over and held his face in her hands, touching, examining the planes, friendly. "Good night, Lucas."

    " 'Night." Her eyes seemed to glisten at him. The cabin had grown uncomfortably warm.

    She broke from him but kissed him again before she did, deeper, speaking volumes, and he enjoyed it.

    

    

    
White-faced haircut boys

    
They got their Jags and expensive toys

    
So-ror-i-ty pin

    
He gets her cornered and he sticks it in White Trash!

    
Money to bum White Trash!

    
You only yearn for Cold cash!

    
Let yo' dollar bills fly

    
But rock and roll will never die!

    While 'Gasm squirmed through the middle set of
Throw Down Your Arms
, Lucas put the finishing touches on the now assembled sniper's rifle, the lethal Dragunov. Cass slept soundlessly nearby, unthreatening, uncunous. Now, if only Cory had been more like her…

    … she wouldn't have taken the high dive into the pill bottle. And Cass wasn't like Kristen. Not really. Not yet.

    With the barrel attached, the Dragunov was a few inches over a yard long and weighed a neat ten pounds fully loaded. The stock was an outline of wood, shaped like a wire stock but firmer on recoil.

    
Throw Down Your Arms
spun out on the small Sony screen. Lucas listened through headphones at reduced volume. He watched Tim Fozzetto, the bassist, zip out of his outrageous checkerboard jumpsuit and expose his ass to a wildly cheering audience. Boom!-throw down your pants. Just quick enough to give the crowd a thrill, then all the onstage lights snap to dead black for Pepper "Mad Max" Hartz's big solo.

    The solo spot was the part that interested Lucas.

    A cobalt-blue spotlight picked out Hartz on his special stage dais as he writhed and belabored his Stratocaster. The Fender Strat was the guitar Jimi Hendrix had annoyed the world with.

    Back in the good old days, Lucas thought, guitars had a hard time displacing the saxophone as the centerpiece solo instrument of rock'n'roll. Solos were expected to have an inner consistency of structure that made them startling or notable. A natural outgrowth of this approach, due to the outspoken lack of talent in copycat bands and encouraged by the field hands of punk in the mid-1970s, was to use the guitar not to solo, but to provide the most grating and discordant noise of any individual instrument present-a kind of Big Stick theory for music. This begat the school of guitar abuse in which the strings were kicked, bitten, hammered with the fist, subjected to wine glasses and viola bows and chainsaws and anything else that could help produce a loud, obnoxious noise. Sometimes this was innovative. Most times it was tiresome.