“Not yet,” she told him, pushing away. “We’ve got all night.”
The edge the pill created seemed acute and sharp but with a wave of sadness pushing behind. He imagined that Billy-T had felt the same way, just before he was killed, and that the Zomboid had had a similar feeling, a kind of refinement of his senses shoved forward by sadness into a precise, particular moment. As if she had read his thoughts, Wendy was quietly crying, her tears bleeding, glistening with sparkles down her cheeks, and when she rubbed them away there was a violet bloom of color that faded into green. He could only imagine that she was thinking about her own loss, or about the mutual shared loss she had with Meg. He wanted to ask her, but when he began to speak she put her fingers to his lips and shushed him and got up and began to get dressed, slipping into her pants and then pulling a shirt on and telling him — with a wave of her arms — to do the same, motioning to the door and then leading him down the hallway, past MomMom’s room, past Meg and Hank’s room, down the stairs, and through the kitchen to the back porch, where they sat watching the yard burst into brightness and then diminish into residual light, pale silver and green, as another gust arrived — the sound raking the air far off, reeding through the dry grass and through a million dying leaves with a low, toothy hiss — and she raised her voice to speak through it, and he listened as she told him that when the Zomboid came home — when Steve came home, she said, softly — he was angry and violent, first at his legs, at what was missing in his body, and then at her, at what was missing in her, because no matter what she did, it wasn’t enough, not even close.
“Nothing’s missing from you,” Singleton said. “Nothing at all.”
“Nothing that you can see,” she said, taking his hand.
* * *
When the rain started they went inside, back through the kitchen, up to the bed. The pills — he’d later think — provided them with the necessary acuity, funneling all sensation into the fingertips and eyes, into the sensations that under normal conditions would simply be erotic.
When she told him to fuck her — that’s how she said it, direct, no buildup, fuck me—he drew himself over her in the bed but she stopped him and turned him onto his back, holding her hands flat on his chest, fanning her fingers over his scars again, leaving a faint handprint when she moved them back. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them a few minutes later he saw that her head was tossed back like a floating swimmer, keeping her head above water for air, her lips parted, her hair sizzling with static. The nearness — a tenseness at the back of his cock, deeper still — caused him to ease up, because he wanted it to last a long, long, long time, but it didn’t because he was pushing up into the sweet vacuum, the airless zone somewhere deep inside, the same one he had felt months ago, and he felt himself slipping away not into another unfolded vision but into something much calmer. Then there was the same backdraft as another wind gust gathered far off, and for a few seconds — maybe it was minutes — while the clouds recharged, there was a pause in the lightning and thunder and the house was silent except for her moans, and his, and then she came and he came, a flutter and tightness, and when she was done she collapsed against him and he wrapped his arms around her back and they stayed still for a few minutes, rocking gently.
They talked deep into the night and at some point he heard himself declaring his love for her, and she listened and accepted it. It was that simple. He was not finished with his sense of mission, of being inside something that was larger, a conspiracy or whatever, but the fact that he had admitted it, that he had met someone with a shared memory, had released him, freed him.
“You’re full of shit,” Wendy said. “But that’s OK. I think you meant what you said.”
At another point in the night — the zip pills had worn thin and an acute but pleasant exhaustion had taken over, birds were waking each other up in the trees, and the grainy twilight was materializing the dresser, the bed frame, the walls — she went to her bag and got the veil and held it in her hands, flat against her palms, and stood in the center of the room for a few minutes and waited until he got on his knees and kissed her belly and said maybe he would, and she asked would what? And he said betroth himself to her someday, and she asked him where he got such a pretentious word, and he said he didn’t know, maybe from a book, it’s not a word he would normally use, and he went down the hall to the bathroom to pee and came back and found her in bed, sleeping soundly, and he got in next to her, and in beautiful exhaustion of the diminished pill, cradled in the sounds of dawn, he fell asleep.
THE DUEL
Rake had begun sharpening all the blades in the house one day in early August, starting with the ax, using a file and whetstone, buffing it to a shine before starting on his knife collection — switchblades, his deer-gutting knives, his swords, taking them to the kitchen window to check them in the sunlight, dabbing water and running a cloth along the edge. All action a manifestation of some end point, Hank thought, watching. He went out to find Meg, who was in the yard, chained to a post near the shed.
“It’s time, tonight,” he whispered. “He’s totally charged. He’s on edge enough to believe it when I get Haze to say what he has to say. Rake’ll hear what he wants to hear and not what’s being said. He’s so high, so angry that he’ll twist anything that he hears into a provocation, and we’ll provide that provocation in the form of a name, and then if I’m right, if we’re lucky, we’ve found the right connection, and all we have to do — I should say all I’ll have to do, because what you have to do is just follow my lead — is to channel that anger into the direction of a duel, which, given how many times I’ve already planted the idea, he should go for — if we’re lucky.”
Hank went back to the kitchen, where Rake lifted a sword, ran his fingers along the edge, and pointed it at him.
So you’re saying this is about my honor?
I’m saying it’s about honor, hell yes. There’s a way to kill Haze with honor and then burn his body and make it hard to identify, put it somewhere agents will find it. They’ll think it’s you and not you. Both at the same time? You’ll tap their ineptitude, the fact that the cops, who’ll find the body for sure if we put it near the bridge, will send their liaison down there with the news, with snapshots and all that, and they’ll open your case even wider and send some agents up looking, he said. Get it, man, they’ll speculate that you’re fucking with them but they’ll wonder, too, and you know, I mean, I’ve been telling you that Haze has been back-talking you. Just look at his face and tell me he isn’t thinking things he can’t say aloud, the dumb shit, and like every other sidekick you’ve ever had, with me as the exception, he’s figuring a way to disappoint you. And he’s been talking. He’s been speaking the unspeakable.