She was a long way from the land of her dreams.
Ten miles west of where Mary rested, Laura moaned in a fever sweat. Didi roused herself from a cramped sleep in the chair to check on Laura, and then she closed her eyes again because there was nothing she could do to ease the other woman's pain, both physical and mental. The scissor blades had proved worthless for the task of removing screws from license plates, but Didi had gone through an assortment of junk in the Cutlass's trunk and found a screwdriver that would work. The Cutlass now bore a Nebraska tag, its Playboy decal had been scraped away, and the red plastic dice trashed.
Sleep took the sufferers, and for a little while shielded them from hurt. But midnight had passed and a cold dawn was coming, storm clouds already sliding down from Canada in the iron dark. The baby woke up with a start, his blue eyes searching and his mouth working the pacifier. He saw strange shapes and unknown colors, and he heard the shrill and bump of muffled sounds: the threshold of a mysterious, frightening world. In a few minutes his heavy eyelids closed. He drifted off to sleep again, innocent of sin, and his hands clutched for a mother who was not there.
Part VII – Funeral Pyre
1: The Power of Love
Horn blowing.
Mary's eyes opened, the lids gummy and swollen.
Horn blowing outside. Outside the house.
Her heart kicked. She sat up in the Barcalounger, and every joint in her body seemed to scream in unison. A gasp of pain came from Mary's lips. Horn blowing outside, in the gray gloom of a winter morning. She'd gone to sleep with the TV going and the lights on; a man with a crew cut was talking about soybean production on the tube. When she tried to stand up, the jolt of agony that shot through her thigh took her breath. The bandages were crusted with dark blood, the smell of copper rank in the room. Her forearm wound pulsed with heat, but it was numb and so was her right hand. She stood up from the chair with an effort that made the air hiss between her teeth, and she hobbled to a window where she could see the front of the house.
A thin layer of snow had fallen during the night, and covered the fields. Out on the white-dusted road, about sixty yards from the farmhouse, sat a school bus with CEDAR COUNTY SCHOOLS on its side. Come to pick up Fudge Ripple, Mary knew. Except the boy wasn't ready for school. He was fast asleep, under the hay. The school bus sat there for fifteen seconds more, and then the driver gave a last frustrated honk on the horn and the bus pulled away, heading to the next house down the road.
Mary found a clock. It was seven thirty-four. She felt weak, light-headed, and nausea throbbed in her stomach. She staggered into a bathroom and leaned over the toilet, and she retched a few times but nothing much came up. She looked at herself in the mirror her eyes sunken in swollen folds, her flesh as gray as the dawn. Death, she thought. That's what I look like. Her leg was hurting with a vengeance, and she searched through a closet in the bathroom until she found a bottle of Excedrin. She took three of them, crunching them between her teeth and washing them down with a handful of water from the tap.
She longed to rest today. Longed to go back to sleep here in this warm house, but it was time to get out. The school bus driver would wonder why Fudge Ripple hadn't come out this morning when all the lights were on in the house. He'd tell somebody about it, and they'd wonder, too. Routines were the vital fabric of the Mindfuck State; when a routine was disrupted, like a missed stitch, all the little ants got stirred up. It was time to get out.
Drummer began to cry; Mary recognized it as his hungry cry, pitched a tone or two lower and less intense than his frightened cry. It was more of a nasal buzzing with a few pauses for the summoning of breath. She'd have to feed him and change his diaper before they left. A sense of urgency got her moving. First she changed her bandages, wincing as she peeled away the crusty cotton. She repacked the wounds and wrapped them tightly with fresh strips of torn sheet. Then she popped open her suitcase, put on fresh underwear, and got a pair of flannel socks from Rocky Road's dresser. Her jeans were too constrictive at the thighs for her swollen leg, so she pulled on a pair of looser denims – again, courtesy of her departed host – and cinched them tight with one of her belts. She put on a gray workshirt, a maroon sweater she'd had since 1981, and she pinned the Smiley Face button on the front. Her scuffed boots went on last. In Rocky Road's closet hung a tempting assortment of heavy coats and parkas. She took a brown corduroy coat with a fleece-lined collar off its hanger and laid it aside for later, and chose a green goosedown parka to zip Drummer up in as a makeshift bassinet. A pair of man-sized leather gloves were also set aside for later.
As Mary fed Drummer, she continually squeezed a tennis ball in her right hand to warm up the sinews. Her strength in that hand was about a third of what it normally was, her fingers cold and numb. Nerve damage, she thought. She could feel the twitching of the ravaged muscles down in the forearm wound; the damned dog had come close to gnawing an artery open, and if that had happened, she'd be dead by now. The thigh wound was the real bitch, though. It needed fifty or sixty stitches and a hell of a lot better antiseptic than what she'd found in Rocky Road's bathroom. But just as long as it stayed crusted over, she could make herself keep going.
The telephone rang as she was changing Drummer's diaper. It stopped after twelve rings, was quiet for five minutes, and then rang eight more times.
"Somebody's curious," she told Drummer as she swabbed him clean with a Handi Wipe. "Somebody wants to know why the boy didn't come out to the school bus, or why Rocky Road's not clocked in at work yet. Yes somebody does, yes him does!"
She started moving a little faster.
The telephone rang again at eight-forty as Mary was loading up the Cherokee in the garage. It went silent, and Mary continued the task. She loaded her suitcase and a garbage bag full of food from the kitchen: the rest of the sliced ham, a pack of bologna, a loaf of wheat bread, a jug of orange juice and a few apples, a box of oat bran cereal and a big bag of Fritos corn chips. She found a bottle each of mineral supplement tablets and vitamins that might've choked a horse. She swallowed two of both. When she was packed and ready to take Drummer out, she paused for a minute to make herself a bowl of Wheat Chex and drink down a Coke.
She was standing in the kitchen, finishing the cereal, when she glanced through a window and saw a pig car coming slowly up the drive.
It pulled up in front of the house, and a pig wearing a dark blue parka got out. The car had CEDAR COUNTY SHERIFF'S DEPARTMENT on its side. By the time the pig – who was maybe in his early twenties, just a kid – reached the front door and rang the buzzer, Mary had loaded one of the remaining rifles from the gun cabinet.
She stood around a corner from the door, waiting. The pig rang the buzzer again, then knocked with a gloved fist. "Hey, Mitch!" he called, his breath showing in the frosty air. "Where you at, boy?"
Go away, Mary thought. Her leg had started hurting her again, a deep biting ache.
"Mitch? You to home?"
The pig backed away from the door. He stood looking around for a minute, his hands on his hips, and then Mary watched him start to walk to the right. She went to another window, where she could track him. He walked to the back door and peered in, his breath fogging the glass. He knocked again, harder. "Emma? Anybody?"
Nobody here you want to meet, she thought.
The pig tried the back door's knob. Worked it left and right. Then she watched him turn his head and look toward the barn.
He called "Mitch?" and then he began walking away from the house, his boots crunching in the icy snow on his way to where the bodies and the van were.