“Well, yes, I did. Yes, that was fun.”
Fun? Tony heard the word. He gathered himself together and expressed shock. “You sit there and tell me it was fun to kill my wife and daughter?”
“It’s a acquired taste,” Ray said. “It’s something you gotta learn, like hunting. You gotta get over the hump. You gotta kill someone before you know what it’s like.”
Tony was experiencing a sensation like a dazzling light.
Ray kept talking. “My pals Lou and Turk, they didn’t get it. They were scared shitless when your folks died. Shitless. They thought they was going to be charged with murder. It takes some people longer to catch on than others.”
“You don’t deserve to live,” Tony said.
“You ought to try it, Tony. Kill somebody, I guarantee you’ll want to do it again. You’re no different from nobody else.”
“Is that why you did it?” Tony said. “Because it was fun?”
“Sure. That was why.”
At that moment, Tony felt an explosion of what he thought was disgust but was really joy. The light was blinding, and it lit clearly the difference between himself and Ray, how simple it was. The fact was that Ray was wrong, Tony was not like his notion of everybody, he belonged to a different species of which a savage like Ray was completely ignorant. It was not that Tony was inhibited or asleep to the joys of killing, but that he knew too much, had too much imagination to be capable of such a pleasure. Not that he had not yet grown up to appreciate such joys but that he had grown out of them as a natural part of the process of maturation. The possible fun of killing had been trained and cultivated out of him by a civilizing process of which Ray had no comprehension, and Tony was full of fierce and vengeful contempt for that lack of comprehension. It gave him a luminous clear feeling, where he had hitherto been murky and uncertain. He felt confident. He felt right, knowing he could trust his instincts and feelings. He felt invigorated, and in this exciting mood he made a decision.
He said, “Okay Ray, enough talk. It’s time to go.”
“I told you, I ain’t going nowhere.”
They sat there a minute. Tony cocked the gun again. “Why don’t you just leave then?”
“You’ll let me?”
“I didn’t think it mattered whether I let you or not.”
“That depends on whether you can shoot that gun or not.”
“I can shoot it.”
There was a look from Ray, and Tony saw he had lost his confidence, he had seen the change in Tony.
“Maybe I’d better not leave then.”
“In that case, maybe you’d better go out and get in that car.”
“I ain’t gonna do that.”
“Then you just want to wait until they come and get you?”
“Maybe I will leave, now that you mention it.”
“I’m not going to let you.”
“Then I’d better stay.”
“Go ahead and leave. I dare you.”
“I don’t think I will.”
“I think you ought to at least try.”
“I think maybe it’s safer just sitting here.”
“I don’t think that’s so safe.”
“You don’t. Maybe you’re right.”
He stood up. “Maybe I will go.” He took a step forward, watching Tony’s hand with the gun, stopped, stepped back.
“You’d better not.”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
“You don’t know what to do, do you?”
“I know what I’m doing.”
“I didn’t shoot you the other time. That was Bobby Andes. So what makes you think I’ll shoot you now?”
“Just to be on the safe side of things.”
“You think I’ve changed, do you? You think I’ll shoot you now?”
“It’s a dangerous weapon. You have to be careful around dangerous weapons like that.”
“The safest thing for you is to come out to the car with me.”
“I see no need of that.”
“You’re scared of me. You’re really quite frightened.”
“Don’t overrate yourself, man.”
“Why don’t you go, then?”
“I think I will.”
“What’s keeping you?”
He looked Tony in the face. He began to grin, the insolent grin of recognition Tony knew so well. “Why, nothing I guess,” he said, and stepped forward again.
Toward the door, with nothing in his way. Tony felt his lungs freeze, himself paralyzed and all his courage gone, failure and humiliation the rest of his life. Meanwhile, the gun went off. He heard the yell, “Ow! you sonofabitch,” after the explosion, which knocked the gun in his hand up bang against his forehead as the chair tilted and he fell over backward. There was Ray roaring down on him like the world, holding something, and time only to cock the gun again before the sun exploded.
EIGHT
The sun explodes, so does the book. Susan Morrow stops a last time to appreciate, reading almost over, only one chapter left. Dorothy and Henry are upstairs, having returned from skating just when Tony put his fingerprints on the door latch. She heard them stomping on the porch, calling good bye across the snow, then in the vestibule breathing and giggling. Now they are talking upstairs, Rosie too, probably a rehash.
Again Susan finds the screened porch in her mind, the one in Maine, the path and rocky steps by the boathouse, the still harbor with a mirror afternoon sheen across to the trees. Dying, like her mother and father. Like Bobby Andes. Like her jealousy. Like Edward’s writing. Like this book.
Edward is coming, so is Arnold. Susan, for no reason at all, is full of dread.
Nocturnal Animals 26
The trailer was open to the woods, its walls gone, its roof propped on stakes to make a shelter. He was under a picnic table, and Ray had escaped down a stream bed, and others were looking for him because they knew Tony could not. The people who had been fussing over him had disappeared, the picnic bench was on his chest, he couldn’t push it away, he thought if he rested he would be all right.
The sky beyond the trees was a dome of darkness weakening into light, dim green. Beyond it was another dome which he could not see, world within a world. It was the inside of an eyelid the size of a world, but he lacked the strength to open it. This is dream, he said.
There was no sky and no eyelid, however, and it was no dream. It was total dark, and the picnic tables and trees were inventions of thought. He knew that sometimes in a dream you wonder if it is real, but in waking life there is never a doubt. He knew now. He was awake, with something on his eyes like a bandage. He could not see, but it was no dream.
He remembered the trailer, Ray coming after him, the sun bursting. He was lying on a floor, the back of his head against a wall, his right arm crowded against a bulky object. Something had fallen on his legs. Something else was pushing his head.
He could not feel what was on his eyes. He raised a hand from the floor, a move he could make, moved his hand toward his eyes, then stopped, frightened. It was no bandage. He did not want to touch his eyes, afraid what he would find there. He wanted to know, am I in the darkness or is the darkness in me? If Ray had turned out the light, could it be this dark? He tried to test, look for the window, the door, but he did not know how to look, something was missing in the forward part of his face, a blank space, wires cut. He heard the news whispered in the back: I’m blind, which in younger years would have been the worst of all possible news.
He moved his right leg, it was okay, his left leg too. The object lying across his legs was the chair, he remembered falling backward. He raised his knee and shoved it aside. He wondered what Ray had done to his eyes, whether he had blinded him with a blow to the head or had attacked them directly, fingers or knife or fork, torn them or stabbed them with a pain he was yet to feel. He wondered why Ray had not grabbed the gun and shot him dead. He wondered how much time had passed, how far Ray had gone by now. He would have taken my car, Tony said. If he had gone. If he was not sitting over there now watching and waiting for me to wake up so as to torture me.