I’m not seeing this, you know. None of this is really happening. Justa little while ago we were listening to the Rainmakers, and Gerald turneddown the volume long enough to tell me that he was thinking about goingup to Orono for the football game this Saturday. U of M against B U. Iremember him scratching the lobe of his right ear while he talked. So howcan he be dead with a dog dragging him across our bedroom floor by thearm?
Gerald’s widow’s peak was in disarray-probably as a result of the dog’s licking the blood out of it-but his glasses were still firmly in place. She could see his eyes, half-open and glazed, glaring up from their puffy sockets at the fading sunripples on the ceiling. His face was still a mask of ugly red and purple blotches, as if even death had not been able to assuage his anger at her sudden capricious (Had he seen it as capricious? Of course he had) change of mind.
“Let go of him,” she told the dog, but her voice was now meek and sad and strengthless. The dog barely twitched its ears at the sound of it and didn’t pause at all. It merely went on pulling the thing with the disarrayed widow’s peak and the blotchy complexion. This thing no longer looked like Disco Gerald-not a bit. Now it was only Dead Gerald, sliding across the bedroom floor with a dog’s teeth buried in its flabby biceps.
A frayed flap of skin hung over the dog’s snout. Jessie tried to tell herself it looked like wallpaper, but wallpaper did not-at least as far as she knew-come with moles and a vaccination scar. Now she could see Gerald’s pink, fleshy belly, marked only by the small caliber bullet-hole that was his navel. His penis flopped and dangled in its nest of black pubic hair. His buttocks whispered along the hardwood boards with ghastly, frictionless ease.
Abruptly the suffocating atmosphere of her terror was pierced by a shaft of anger so bright it was like a stroke of heart-lightning inside her head. She did more than accept this new emotion; she welcomed it. Rage might not help her get out of this nightmarish situation, but she sensed that it would serve as an antidote to her growing sense of shocked unreality.
“You bastard,” she said in a low, trembling voice. “You cowardly, slinking bastard.”
Although she couldn’t reach anything on Gerald’s side of the bed-shelf, Jessie found that, by rotating her left wrist inside the handcuff so that her hand was pointing back over her shoulder, she could walk her fingers over a short stretch of the shelf on her own side. She couldn’t turn her head enough to see the things she was touching-they were just beyond that hazy spot people call the corner of their eye-but it didn’t really matter. She had a pretty good idea of what was up there. She pattered her fingers back and forth, running their tips lightly over tubes of make-up, pushing a few farther back on the shelf and knocking others off it. Some of these latter landed on the coverlet; others bounced off the bed or her left thigh and landed on the floor. None of them were even close to the sort of thing she was looking for. Her fingers closed on a jar of Nivea face cream, and for a moment she allowed herself to think it might do the trick, but it was only a sample-sized jar, too small and light to hurt the dog even if it had been made of glass instead of plastic. She dropped it back onto the shelf and resumed her blind search.
At their farthest stretch, her exploring fingers encountered the rounded edge of a glass object that was by far the biggest thing she had touched. For a moment she couldn’t place it, and then it came to her. The stein hanging on the wall was only one souvenir of Gerald’s Alpha Grab A Hoe days; she was touching another one. It was an ashtray, and the only reason she hadn’t placed it immediately was because it belonged on Gerald’s end of the shelf, next to his glass of icewater. Someone-possibly Mrs Dahl, the cleaning lady, possibly Gerald himself-had moved it over to her side of the bed, maybe in the course of dusting the shelf, or maybe to make room for something else. The reason didn’t matter, anyway. It was there, and right now that was enough.
Jessie closed her fingers over its rounded edge, feeling two notches in it-cigarette parking-spaces. She gripped the ashtray, drew her hand back as far as she could, then brought it forward again. Her luck was in and she snapped her wrist down at the instant the handcuff chain snubbed tight, like a big-league pitcher breaking off a curve. All of this was an act of pure impulse, the missile sought for, found, and thrown before she had time to ensure the failure of the shot by reflecting on how unlikely it was that a woman who had gotten a D in the archery mod of her two-year college phys ed requirement could possibly hit a dog with an ashtray, especially when the dog was fifteen feet away and the hand she was throwing with happened to be handcuffed to a bedpost.
Nevertheless, she did hit it. The ashtray flipped over once in its flight, briefly revealing that Alpha Gamma Rho motto. She couldn’t read it from where she lay and didn’t have to; the Latin words for service, growth, and courage were inscribed around a torch. The ashtray started to flip again but crashed into the dog’s straining, bony shoulders before it could roll all the way over.
The stray gave a yip of surprise and pain, and Jessie felt a moment of violent, primitive triumph. Her mouth pulled wide in an expression that felt like a grin and looked like a screech. She howled deliriously, arching her back and straightening her legs as she did. She was once again unaware of the pain in her shoulders as cartilage stretched and joints which had long since forgotten the limberness of twenty-one were pressed almost to the point of dislocation. She would feel it all later-every move, jerk, and twist she had made-but for now she was transported with savage delight at the success of her shot, and felt that if she did not somehow express her triumphant delirium she might explode. She drummed her feet on the coverlet and rocked her body from side to side, her sweaty hair flailing her cheeks and temples, the tendons in her throat standing out like fat wires.
“HAH!” she cried. “I… GOT… YOUUUU! HAH!” The dog jerked backward when the ashtray struck it, and jerked again when it bounced away and shattered on the floor. Its cars flattened at the change in the bitchmaster’s voice. What it heard now was not fear but triumph. Soon it would get off the bed and begin to deal out kicks with its strange feet, which would not be soft but hard after all. The dog knew it would be hurt again as it had been hurt before if it stayed here; it must run.
It turned its head to make sure its path of retreat was still open, and the entrancing smell of fresh blood and meat struck it once more as it did so. The dog’s stomach cramped, sour and imperative with hunger, and it whined uneasily. It was caught, perfectly balanced between two opposing directives, and it squirted out a fresh trickle of anxious urine. The smell of its own water-an odor that spoke of sickness and weakness instead of strength and confidence-added to its frustration and confusion, and it began to bark again.
Jessie winced back from that splintery, unpleasant sound-she would have covered her ears if she could-and the dog sensed another change in the room. Something in the bitchmaster’s scent had changed. Her alpha-smell was fading while it was still new and fresh, and the dog began to sense that perhaps the blow it had taken across its shoulders did not mean that other blows were coming, after all. The first blow had been more startling than painful, anyway. The dog took a tentative step toward the trailing arm it had dropped… toward the entrancingly thick reek of mingled blood and meat. It watched the bitchmaster carefully as it moved. Its initial assessment of the bitchmaster as either harmless, helpless, or both might have been wrong. It would have to be very careful.