In a voice blurred with sleep, she asked anxiously, "You haven't forgotten. You will throw them out, won't you? I'll make you so happy, Lester. Please let me be with you… here…"
He crawled up and off the rumpled bed. Shaking his head to clear it, he tried to remember the conversation. Christ! The girl was insatiable. He felt as old as Methuselah. They'd fucked all night it seemed and then he remembered. Before, during and after the fucking she'd nagged him about Gary and Bette Jean, calling them every filthy name ever invented. She'd made him promise to throw them out this morning, make them leave forever for what they'd done.
Wearily he pulled on some pants he found lying where he'd thrown them. The whole world felt as brown and rancid as the taste in his mouth. The shining sun streaming in was an effrontery after what had happened.
Wanda leaped from the bed and threw on a robe. She was beside him, peering anxiously into his face, catching his arm. "You promised… last night you promised… come on… let's do it now."
The door to the master bedroom was still open. Lester stopped in the doorway and looked at the shambles. Wanda clung to him anxiously. "Look at them!" she hissed.
On the strained crumpled sheets lay his wife, her arms outspread, legs split wide, asleep. There was a young boy curled under each arm, mouths stuck in sleep around each soft nipple. Between her legs Gary was sprawled, his head pillowed on a white thigh, nose nuzzling the hair fringed cunt, the breath whistling out in tiny sleeping sounds. Even in the obscene position with three young boys curved into her semen stained flesh, dried like white scum, she looked young and innocent, still vulnerable to Lester. He wondered dully where the other boys had gone… slipped out probably some time during the night.
Wanda suddenly wrenched away and stalked to the bed. She reached down and shook Bette Jean awake. "Wake up… come on… wake up…!"
The boys stirred. They looked up, confused and uncertain. Gary lifted his head and his mouth hung open in stupefied terror at the sight of his father in the doorway.
Lester saw Bette Jean come awake. Her eyes, so blue and innocent still, suddenly retreated like a wary animal as she took in his presence and Wanda's.
"Get up… get up and get out! Lester says you have to leave. Do you hear? Get up and take your whelp with you!" Wanda shrilled.
"Don't touch me, sister." Bette Jean said calmly. She looked at Lester just as calmly. "It isn't I who will leave… it's you… you and Lester. This is my house, do you hear? You brought carnality into it… you debauched my son and seduced my husband, committed adultery under my very nose… you, dear sister, are the serpent… the fruit of knowledge was your offering… well, as ye sow… so shall you reap…" She had risen up to a sitting position in the bed, the boys still lying curled and holding their breaths as she rose like the phoenix from her own ashes, her eyes blazing, her voice like a shrill oracle. "I don't need either of you! Leave us in peace… I don't need anyone except my boy, Gary… my boy and all the others! They will love me, as you never could! Get out… get out, do you hear!" She was screaming, the words tearing out of her pain like piercing bullets meant to destroy.
Lester turned, his shoulders slumped like an old man's, and cringing a little as the stream of words poured out and hit his back. Wanda went scuttling past him, sobbing and holding her ears. He had to get away, far away, but it was not a thing he could look forward to. He wondered dully how long it would be before he'd find Wanda in bed with half the neighborhood too. Sometimes the seeds of a whole family were bad. It had even tainted his own seed, Gary.
Bette Jean watched them go, with a smile of triumph on her face. Frigid, Lester had always called her. She laughed hollowly, and gathered the frightened boys to her again.