Rhonda reached the boy in two strides and turned his head sideways with a slap.
Donald blinked, touched his cheek. Rhonda shouted something-Deke thought it was something dramatic like, You killed him, but perhaps it was only a string of curse words-and then she hit him again, this time with her closed fist.
Donald frowned, shook his head. Then he leaped on her.
Rhonda fell to the floor, Donald on top of her, his hands locked around her throat. Donald was fast, and strong. But still no argo.
Deke’s memories of the next few minutes were disjointed, a collection of snapshots. He remembered his arm swinging down like a wrecking ball. He remembered Donald suddenly on the other side of the room, sprawled on the floor. An armchair and a lamp between them had been knocked over.
Then suddenly Donald threw himself toward the couch, reaching under it. Was there a gun? Deke couldn’t remember if there was a gun.
The next moment Deke was across the room and Donald was tumbling through the open door like a rag doll. There was a sickening whump as he struck something outside-a car, as it turned out.
Deke wanted to destroy the man. It was that simple. And he got what he wanted.
Outside, Donald lay half sitting up against the crumpled front fender of Willie’s Ford pickup, his head bent at a too-steep angle, as if he were trying to look inside his own chest.
Rhonda, Barron, and Jo came out sometime later. Maybe it was only a few seconds. “I fucked up,” Deke remembered telling Jo. “I fucked up.” Jo leaned over him and circled her arms around his gray neck.
A little later Jo and Rhonda would work out where Barron would take the body, who would call the authorities, what mix of manufactured and true facts they could agree upon-the standard bookkeeping of conspiracy. Rhonda would take care of the charlie girls who’d fled from the house. It would turn out to be almost comically easy to convince them that now that Donald had run off, and who knew if the police would ever find him, the only way they could avoid being charged with Willie’s murder-accessories, at least-was to follow Rhonda’s instructions to the letter. Rhonda told him that by the end they were thanking her, tears in their eyes, for protecting them.
But before all that, they waited for Deke. He took a long time to get to his feet. When he stood, Barron looked at him like he was a monster.
But not Jo, and not Aunt Rhonda. “You saved my life,” Rhonda told him. “And this thing here?” She jerked her head toward Donald Flint’s body. “You will not spend one second regretting the day you took this evil piece of shit out of the world. I’m only sorry you beat me to it.”
Words.
He thought about Donald every day.
He walked downtown to Donna’s Sewing Room-a too-quaint name for such a noisy workshop. He stepped through the back door and into a big room loud with the growls of industrial sewing machines, the blare of country radio, and the deep-voiced chatter of half a dozen argo women. Donna stood at the end of a row of machines, a huge bolt of cloth on her shoulder, explaining to her youngest employee how to clear a jam in her machine. The girl, Mandy Sparks, was only seventeen, and the bulky, secondhand JUKI sewing machine was older than she was. All the machines were secondhand and prone to breakdowns. Donna spent half her time playing mechanic.
She frowned to see him there-they usually didn’t bother each other during the day. He said, “You got a second?”
Donna told the girl to cut the cloth and start over-“But slow down, for goodness’ sake. Slow is steady and steady is fast”-and set the bolt of cloth down against one wall. She led him out to the smaller showroom, which was empty of customers.
“What is it?” she asked.
He slipped his arms around her waist and looked up at her. She was nearly a foot taller than him, but both of them were still growing. No one knew how long argos could live. Some days he felt in his bones that they had decades in them, maybe centuries. Years of slow growth, their bodies stretching up and out and into each other like trees. And some days he felt the future coming at them like an axe.
“Come on, Deke, I have to get back to work.”
He wanted to make something better than him. Something as beautiful as she was.
“I’ve got some good news,” he said.
Chapter 12
THEY’D COME TO him Sunday morning as he lay sprawled out on the grass. The voices crooned to him, making pitying, motherly sounds. Hands brushed the hair from his eyes, caressed the welts on his face.
Pax pushed himself onto his back, groaned. A voice like chocolate said, “There there. We got you.”
Small hands slipped under thighs and waist-“One, two…”-and then he was off the ground and swaying. Bruised skin awoke. Nerves totaled up damages.
“Wait,” he said. His voice cracked.
He forced open one eye. Two beta children cradled him between them, moving sideways toward the house. The girls were identical, with placid faces the color of wine.
“I can walk,” he said.
“Are you sure?” the girl to his left said, and the other one said, “We got tired of waiting.”
The sky vanished as they carried him inside the house. His father’s house; even with his eyes closed he would have known it from the smell.
They lifted him easily onto the couch. They carefully peeled off his shirt, damp from dew, and tsked at his bruises. They found washrags and dabbed at the crusts of blood on his face, then plastered him with Band-Aids. He asked for aspirin and they brought him two ancient powdery tablets and a water glass. The water pinked with his blood.
They tucked a blanket around Pax, then one of them sat next to him while the other attended to him. The girls traded places every ten or fifteen minutes. Sometime in the early afternoon they brought him Campbell’s tomato soup and packets of Lance crackers they dug out of their backpacks.
The girls seemed most comfortable when Pax was asleep; several times he dozed, and he’d wake to hear them babbling to him and over him-about his injuries, or what was on TV, or some minor adventure they’d had in the woods-but when he spoke or asked them a question they would go silent, change the channel, or slip from the room to bring him Ziploc bags freshly packed with ice cubes.
He woke once to the phone ringing. He shouted for them not to answer it, and the girls obeyed: They looked at the phone as it rang seven, eight times before going silent. A few minutes later it rang again and he told them to unplug it.
Sometime before dusk they said that they had to leave, but they wouldn’t stop fussing over him.
“Girls,” he said. He still couldn’t tell them apart. Was it Rainy in the jeans with the torn knee, and Sandra in the dress? “Thank you. I’m fine now.” His lips were swollen and his jaw ached, so the words came out glued.
“We’ll be back in the morning,” one of them said, and the other said, “Don’t you worry.” They slung their packs onto their shoulders and slipped out the door.
The nightmares woke him, or else it was the pounding headache, or the stale scent of his father lingering in the air. He tried to sit up and his ribs scraped painfully. It took him many small movements to ease onto his side, then lever himself onto his feet. He shuffled to the bathroom, edged past the gigantic toilet, and flicked on the light above the sink. He opened the mirrored door to the medicine cabinet before he could look too closely at his reflection.
He turned on the faucet, splashed water onto his face and let it run down his neck. He pushed a handful of aspirin into his mouth and bent, wincing, to drink from the tap.
He’d been dreaming of fists, and elbows, and knees.
It had taken him only seconds to surrender everything, to submit. One punch, really. He was on the ground, his cheek scraping the pavement, before he registered the blur of the fist that struck him. He raised his hand as if signaling, Yes, that was a good one, you got me. Then Clete began the beating in earnest.