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The rape was bad enough, but Lois lived with Vic and he had never wanted anything she gave willingly. He had always taken it, enjoying the fight, the win. Hard and vicious use had become her life, and mostly the gin could blunt it. But Ruger was not Vic. By contrast Vic was almost kind. He was cruel and brutal, but he was a man.
What Ruger did…what he forced her to do…was beyond anything Vic could do to her. The thought of Ruger turning those appetites on Mike was too horrible to even think about, and Lois’s soul collapsed in on itself. “No,” she kept saying, over and over again, a mantra against Ruger’s hungers. She lay still and they listened to Mike’s footsteps upstairs and then heard the front door. Above them the house settled into empty stillness.
Ruger pushed Lois off him and she landed hard on palms and knees as he rose to stand over her. His skin was so white it was almost translucent and he stood above her, naked, indomitable, relentless.
“Hey,” he said, “want to learn a new game?” But since she didn’t answer he showed her anyway. Now that the house was empty it didn’t matter that she screamed. And screamed.
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Vic stood in the doorway to the cellar and watched Ruger stand up and, without cleaning any of the blood from his skin, begin slowly pulling on his clothes. All the while Ruger smiled. Ruger picked up Lois’s robe and tossed it over her, the bulk of it covering her face and chest, leaving the rest of her exposed to Vic’s stare.
The gun in Vic’s hand hung there, a dead and forgotten weight at the end of his arm, barrel pointing at the floor. Vic could have killed Ruger right then, shot him point-blank. The special loads in that gun would have snuffed Ruger out like a candle, yet the gun just hung there as Ruger tucked his penis into his pants and zipped up the fly. He took his time about it, too, staring at Vic, smiling with bloody lips.
It wasn’t Ruger’s smile that hurt Vic so deeply. It wasn’t even that Ruger had broken his house rules, had taken what belonged to him. Had taken his wife. It wasn’t that as much as it was the steady, slow, very soft laughter that echoed in his brain. His laughter. Not Ruger’s. His.
“Penance is a bitch,” Ruger said as he buttoned his shirt. He started to turn away and then paused, looking down at Lois. Then, glancing up at Vic as he did so Ruger sucked up a mouth full of bloody phlegm and spit on Lois.
And still Vic did not, could not, lift that gun.
“It’s a new world, pal,” Ruger whispered with his graveyard voice, “and it must be a real kick in the nuts—especially after all these years and all you’ve done—to realize that you’re on the wrong end of the food chain. ” Ruger tucked in his shirttails, then licked his fingers and used them to smooth back the hair from his widow’s peak.
“Griswold is my god,” he said, and turned away.
Chapter 19
1
Mike got to school early and managed to slip into the bathroom and clean himself up without being noticed. He drifted through the rest of the day in a kind of haze and at lunch sat with his friend Brandon and talked about comics. Mike could do that on autopilot. When Brandon shifted onto last night’s episode of Heroes, Mike just listened and nodded whenever he thought he should. He hadn’t seen the show last night and could not for the life of him remember what he had done. He knew that not knowing should bother him more than it did, but somehow he could not work up the energy to care.
One thing he did care about, one thing that wasn’t blunted by the apathetic glaze that seemed to be coated over everything in his mind, was his mom. He hadn’t liked the sound he heard in the cellar. He hadn’t liked that one bit, and even though he knew that she was supposed to be out—and that she never went down into Vic’s cellar willingly—that knowledge did little to ease that gnawing doubt.
“I gotta make a call,” he said abruptly, standing. Brandon, caught in midsentence, just stared at him. “I’ll be right back. ”
Mike turned and headed to the far side of the cafeteria where the pay phones were. No one much used them—everyone but Mike had a cell phone. He fitted some quarters into the slot and punched his home number. The phone rang six times and went straight to the answering machine. Mike slapped the receiver down, fed in more quarters, and dialed again. Maybe she just hadn’t gotten to the phone in time.
“C’mon, Mom,” he breathed, “pick up…. ”
Again the machine picked up. He hung up and leaned against the wall, staring across the cafeteria into nothingness.
After school he sped home on his bike, but as he was rounding the corner on his street he saw Vic walk through the side yard and into the front of the house. He was carrying a toolbox in one hand and under his other arm he had folded shutters. Mike slowed to a stop behind a parked SUV and watched.
Vic had a ladder against the front of the house and Mike saw that he’d already installed heavy slatted shutters on the porch windows and one of the upstairs master bedroom windows. He set the toolbox down and fished in it for a hammer, then climbed the ladder one-handed, the shutters still under his arm.
Vic was a very thorough craftsman. Mike knew that much about him, and he never did anything around the house that was slipshod. When he installed shelves for his DVD collection—mostly World War II movies and westerns—everything was precisely measured, perfectly cut, and as straight as an arrow. When something broke down, like the time the lawn mower crapped out, Vic worked on it with meticulous care and ever since the machine had never so much as sputtered.
What Mike was seeing now, however, was a completely different Vic Wingate. Standing on the ladder Vic pounded nails with sloppy force, brutalizing the wood around the nailheads. Mike looked at each shutter and not one of them hung completely straight. Mike could have done better himself and he barely knew which end of a hammer to hold. Vic’s love of tools had engendered in Mike a dislike of them.
He stood there, watching in perplexed concern, as Vic clumsied the shutters up and battered them into place. He had no idea what to make of it.
When Vic finished, he just pulled the ladder down and let it fall onto the front lawn. Snatching up his toolbox, he stomped up the steps and jerked open the front door. “There! You happy now, you stupid bitch?”
Those words rolled all the way down the street to where Mike hid. When Vic slammed the door the echo ricocheted off every house front on the block.
Mike picked his bike up and turned it around and headed back toward Corn Hill and the Crow’s Nest. As he rode away Vic’s vicious words pounded in his head. Vic always called his mom horrible names, but there was something worse about this. It felt worse somehow; it felt meaner, if that was even possible for Vic. As he pedaled away he could feel a sinking dread for his mother’s safety forming in the pit of his stomach; but at the same time he felt a white-hot scalding rage building in his hands and behind his eyes.
If he, or anyone else, had seen his eyes at that moment they would have been terribly afraid. All of the blue was gone, as was most of the white. What was left was a mingled cloud of black, like a storm cloud, veined with bloody flashes of red.
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