“I really don’t know, Leo. I guess we’re gonna see.”
“Yeah, but…”
“I’m hopeful. We all are.”
“Right.” Bathgate offered an uncertain smile. “Hopeful, absolutely hopeful.”
Wasn’t that why Luke had been brought here at great expense, after all? To talk to his brother? To rekindle the tiniest shred of hope?
Luke’s brother, who was eight miles deep in the Pacific Ocean.
Luke’s bizarre and brilliant brother, whom nobody had heard from in days.
5.
LUKE DREAMED of his mother.
It was a familiar dream that came in times of stress. In it, his mother entered his bedroom. Luke was seven or eight years old. His mother was enormous, as she’d been at that point in his life. Over four hundred pounds.
She slipped into bed with him. Threw back his Star Wars bedcovers and slid under them with chilling dexterity. Her body was warm and soft as bread dough, perfumed with the excretions that leaked from her skin. Her breath feathered the hairs inside his ear canal. She began to whisper. Luke could never quite make out what she said. Her voice hit a subaudible pitch that crawled directly into his brain.
Luke awoke, his breath coming in leaden rasps. The dream drained from his brainpan, thick as syrup. He checked his watch; he’d slept less than two hours. Goddamn. His mother. All these years later she was still there, haunting the corridors of his mind like a hungry ghost. He closed his eyes and she bloomed in his mind’s eye again: Bethany Ronnicks—she had forsaken her husband’s family name, preferring her maiden one. Battle-ax Beth.
She was a huge presence in every way: her room-filling personality, her booming laugh, and in time, her vast physical bulk. She’d always been a large woman: broad shoulders, wide hips, over six feet tall. A lady skyscraper, as Luke had heard her spoken of around town. She held an imposing beauty, or she had before her “bad years,” and the two hundred pounds they had packed onto her frame. She walked with a regal bearing, her chest thrust out as if in the expectation that a visiting dignitary would affix a medal to it.
She worked at the Second Chance Ranch, a “home” for mentally troubled male youths—No Chance Ranch, as she referred to it in her poisonous moods. She had been hired as the duty nurse but soon transferred to orderly, the first female in the state hired for that position. She preferred the hands-on aspect. Better than doling out pills and sanitizing bedpans.
“It stinks,” Luke overheard her say once in conversation with Edie Emmons, one of her few friends. “The piss of those mad boys. There’s a chemical they produce—a compound specific to crazies. Trans-3-methyl-2-hexenoic acid.”
“Oh my,” said Edie, sycophantically. “Sounds terrible.”
“It is terrible. The stink of insanity, Edie, sharp as malt vinegar. It’s bad enough when they sweat it out. But their piss? The worst.”
At first the other orderlies—all male, predominantly black—grumbled. They had a bar bouncer’s mentality: yes, Beth had a no-bullshit disposition and could handle the nut jobs well enough with words. But what happened when words failed? Beth was a big woman, but still a woman—did she have the brawn to subdue a foaming-mad boy who cared little for his own body or that of others?
But Beth was a hellion. She was the first to jump on any dog pile, grabbing a boy’s wrist or neck and cranking with all her might. The orderlies came around to having her in their ranks. They nicknamed her Battle-ax Beth.
Many years later, working as a veterinarian, Luke had run into one of his mother’s old charges. Kurt Honey—whom Luke knew slimly, having gone to the same middle school—had spent time at the ranch for the aggravated assault of his eleventh-grade math teacher, whom he’d stabbed with a compass. Honey was a hired hand at a dairy farm where Luke had been summoned to tend to a sick Guernsey.
“She’s your ma, ain’t she?” Honey had asked.
Luke looked up from the cow’s inflamed udder. “Who?”
“Battle-ax Beth.”
Luke had no idea Honey knew she was his mother, but he assumed Honey would speak ill of her. Luke wouldn’t stop him. The days when he would’ve defended her were long gone.
“She was a viper.” Honey gave a spooked laugh. “Smart, you know? But in ways that don’t really profit a person, except in special situations.”
Luke went back to the udder, hoping that would be the end of it.
“She scared the bejesus outta this one guy, Brewster Galt. Ole Brew was none too smart—that’s half the reason he ended up at the ranch. This one time, he caught hell for stealing an apple from the cafeteria. Small things were big things at the ranch. Even a missing apple couldn’t go unpunished. Now Brew had this condition, okay? His one eye was all bugged out of its socket. He told me it was too much pressure, pushing the eyeball out. Your ma, she noticed that sort of thing.”
Luke had winced, his face turned away. Yes, his mother had always noticed things of that nature.
“After Brew got caught stealing the apple, your ma asked for a minute alone with him. Brew came away white as milk. A big kid, tough kid, but I ain’t never seen a boy so shit-scared. I found Brew one afternoon by the picnic tables a few days later. By and by, he gets around to telling me what your ma said…
“Brew said your ma told him he had two sets of eyes. One set behind the set in his face. That’s why his one eye was pushed out so bad, see? It was the other set trying to get out. Your ma said those other eyes were blood red and looked like a cat’s. Then she says maybe she’ll give that other set of eyes a little push—sneak into the bunks at night when Brew’s fast asleep and slit his eyes up with a razor blade. Then that would give those new peepers a chance to push out and see the world. The devil’s own eyes staring out of Brew’s face. ‘Wouldn’t that be real nice?’ she told him.”
Kurt Honey just shook his head. “Brew was fourteen. He didn’t have a damned clue what kind of black thing he’d run across.”
Black thing. Luke’s own mother. Black. Thing.
“That woman was half devil. Three-quarters, I’d go so far to say.”
“I’m sorry she said that,” was Luke’s only reply.
Honey snorted. “Christ, I’m sorry for you. You had to share four walls with that monster, didn’t you?”
Luke’s hands relaxed on the bed’s coverlet. The nightmare-sweat had dried on his chest, but his thoughts continued to circle restlessly around his mother. He hadn’t thought about her—really, clearly dwelled upon her—in years. Yet he couldn’t wrench her out of his mind tonight.
A few years into her stint at the ranch, Beth had been attacked by a resident, Chester Higgs. She’d been supervising the yard work assignments. After the incident, a few residents said that they’d seen Custodian Ronnicks talking to Higgs as he’d hoed the weeds… sidling up close and whispering to him.
Chester Higgs had been sent to the ranch on seven counts of animal cruelty. He’d snuck into a neighbor’s sheep pen and slit the yearlings’ bellies with a sickle knife known colloquially as a witch blade. When asked why he’d done so, Higgs said the lambs had been keeping secrets. That day and without warning, Higgs struck at Beth with the hoe. He brought it down on her leg, shattering her kneecap; then, as she’d screamed and grabbed for her riot baton, Higgs set about beating her mercilessly. A vicious and well-aimed swipe broke her left hip in three places.