after this problem of Joe and The Hussy had been solved.
Or ... just last night. She had lain awake in bed long after Joe
was snoring beside her, thinking about numbers. It occurred to
'Becka (who had never gotton beyond Business Math in high school)
that if you gave numbers letter values, you could un-freeze them
you could turn them into something that was like Jell-O. When they
the numbers were letters, you could pour them into any old mold
you liked. Then you could turn the letters back into numbers, and
that was like putting the Jell-O into the fridge so it would set, and
keep the shape of the mold when you turned it out onto a plate later
on.
That way you could always figure things out, 'Becka had
thought, delighted. She was unaware that her fingers had gone to the
spot above her left eye and were rubbing, rubbing, rubbing. For
instance, just look! You could make things fall into a line every time
by saying ax + bx + c = 0, and that proves it. It always works. It's
like Captain Marvel saying Shazam! Well, there is the zero factor;
you can't let "a" be zero or that spoils it. But otherwise
She had lain awake a while longer, considering this, and then
had fallen asleep, unaware that she had just reinvented the quadratic
equation, and polynomials, and the concept of factoring.
Ideas. Quite a few of them just lately.
'Becka picked up Joe's little blowtorch and lit it deftly with a
kitchen match. She would have laughed last month if you'd told her
she would ever be working with something like this. But it was easy.
Jesus had told her exactly how to solder the wires to the electronics
board from the old radio. It was just like fixing up the vacuum
cleaner, only this idea was even better.
Jesus had told her a lot of other things in the last three days or
so. They had murdered her sleep (and what little sleep she had gotton
was nightmare-driven), they had made her afraid to show her face in
the village itself (I'll always know when you've done something
wrong, 'Becka, her father had told her, because your face just can't
keep a secret), they had made her lose her appetite. Joe, totally
bound up in his work, the Red Sox, and his Hussy, noticed none of
these tings ... although he had noticed the other night as the watched
television that 'Becka was gnawing her fingernails, something she
had never done before it was, in fact, one of the many things she
nagged him about. But she was doing it now, all right; they were
bitten right down to the quick. Joe Paulson considered this for all of
twelve seconds before looking back at the Sony TV and losing
himself in dreams of Nancy Voss's billowy white breasts.
Here were just a few of the afternoon stories Jesus had told her
which had caused 'Becka to sleep poorly and to begin biting her
fingernails at the advanced age of forty-five:
In 1973, Moss Harlingen, one of Joe's poker buddies, had
murdered his father. They had been hunting deer up in
Greenville and it had supposedly been one of those tragic
accidents, but the shooting of Abel Harlingen had been no
accident. Moss simply lay up behind a fallen tree with his rifle
and waited until his father splashed towards him across a small
stream about fifty yards down the hill from where Moss was.
Moss shot his father carefully and deliberately through the
head. Moss thought he had killed his father for money. His
(Moss's) business, Big Ditch Construction, had two notes
falling due with two different banks, and neither bank would
extend because of the other. Moss went to Abel, but Abel
refused to help, although he could afford to. So Moss shot his
father and inherited a lot of money as soon as the county
coroner handed down his verdict of death by misadventure. The
note was paid and Moss Harlingen really believed (except
perhaps in his deepest dreams) that he had committed the
murder for gain. The real motive had been something else. Far
in the past, when Moss was ten and his little brother Emery but
seven, Abel's wife went south to Rhode Island for one whole
winter. Moss's and Emery's uncle had died suddenly, and his
wife needed help getting on her feet. While their mother was
gone, there were several incidents of buggery in the Harlingens'
Troy home. The buggery stopped when the boy's mother came
back, and the incidents were never repeated. Moss had
forgotten all about them. He never remembered lying awake in
the dark anymore, lying awake in mortal terror and watching
the doorway for the shadow of his father. He had absolutely no
recollection of lying with his mouth pressed against his
forearm, hot salty tears of shame and rage squeezing out of his
eyes and coursing down his face to his mouth as Abel
Harlingen slathered lard onto his cock and then slid it up his
son's back door with a grunt and a sigh. It had all made so little
impression on Moss that he could not remember biting his arm
until it bled to keep from crying out, and he certainly could not
remember Emery's breathless little cries from the next bed
"Please, no, daddy, please not me tonight, please, daddy, please
no." Children, of course, forget very easily. But some
subconscious memory must have lingered, because when Moss
Harlingen actually pulled the trigger, as he had dreamed of
doing every night for the last thirty-two years of his life, as the
echoes first rolled away and then rolled back, finally
disappearing into the great forested silence of the up-Maine
wilderness, Moss whispered: "Not you, Em, not tonight." That
Jesus had told her this not two hours after Moss had stopped in
to return a fishing rod which belonged to Joe never crossed
'Becka's mind.
1 Alice Kimball, who taught at the Haven Grammar School,
was a lesbian. Jesus told 'Becka this Friday, not long after the
lady herself, looking large and solid and respectable in a green
pant suit, had stopped by, collecting for the American Cancer
Society.
2 Darla Gaines, the pretty seventeen-year-old girl who brought
the Sunday paper, had half an ounce of "bitchin' reefer"
between the mattress and box spring of her bed. Jesus told
'Becka not fifteen minutes after Darla had come by on Saturday
to collect for the last five weeks (three dollars plus a fifty-cent
tip 'Becka now wished she had withheld). That she and her
boyfriend smoked the reefer in Darla's bed after doing what
they called "the horizontal bop." They did the horizontal bop
and smoked reefer almost every weekday from two until three
o'clock or so. Darla's parents both worked at Splended Shoe in
Derry and they didn't get home until well past four.
3 Hank Buck, another of Joe's poker buddies, worked at a
large supermarket in Bangor and hated his boss so much that a
year ago he had put half a box of Ex-Lax in the man's chocolate
shake when he, the boss, sent Hank out to McDonald's to get
his lunch one day. The boss had shit his pants promptly at
quarter past three in the afternoon, as he was slicing luncheon
meat in the deli of Paul's Down-East Grocery Mart. Hank
managed to hold on until punching-out time, and then he sat in
his car, laughing until he almost shit his pants. "He laughed,"
Jesus told 'Becka. "He laughed. Can you believe that?"
And these things were only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. It
seemed that Jesus knew something unpleasant or upsetting about
everyone everyone 'Becka herself came in contact with, anyway.
She couldn't live with such an awful outpouring.