Absolute Rage (2 page)

“Sure, honey, I'll come with you.” Rose was afraid of the water, too, afraid of letting the girl go in by herself, although Lizzie had been a good swimmer since the age of five. When had she become a coward? As soon as she asked the question, she knew.

From the water, floating on her back, she watched the other woman spread her blanket and set up her backrest, and, with somewhat more interest, her undressing. She wore a small, blue-striped bikini, although she was rather mature for a bikini—late thirties, early forties, Rose judged. A terrific, lithe body though, obviously one of those disgusting women who could eat anything and went wiry rather than slack with age. Another reason to dislike her. Rose rolled over and began to swim back and forth on the gentle swell. Maybe she could work off a few pounds before Red got here.

The next day, the woman was there again, with the boys and the dog, although the dog did not repeat its threatening dash. It played with the boys or sat like a basalt sphinx by the woman's side. She waved, and Rose returned a barely polite one. The next three days were the same. They arrived around four and stayed for a couple of hours. The woman rubbed herself with baby oil, but did not apply sunblock, nor was she apparently worried about her children burning up, unlike Rose herself, who was constantly laving her own skin and that of her daughter with Plus 20.

The boys were identical twins. Through her covert observations, Rose learned that the one with the red Speedo was called Zik, and the one in the baggies was Zak. They were oddly different: Zik spent his time making elaborate sand sculptures; Zak spent his chasing shore-birds, and throwing sticks for the dog, and building crude sand castles, which he demolished with thrown clods as soon as built. Eventually he would squash part of his brother's work and there would be a short, noisy brawl.

Rose was glad the woman kept to herself, but she could not help her curiosity. On a trip into Holden, she'd asked Donna Offut at the grocery, who knew everything, and learned that the family was from the City and had bought the old Wingfield farm. The woman raised big dogs and trained them for guard work. There was a husband, too, who worked in New York and came out on the weekends.

The woman was named Ciampi. Apparently she'd made a pile in the market and spent a chunk of it buying and fixing up the derelict place. In all, thought Rose, not the sort of person she particularly wanted to know. The South Shore was, of course, loaded with that type, but up until now the less attractive, less accessible far North Shore had been relatively unscathed by nouveaux hordes. But maybe that was going, too; another little gritty bit of sadness.

On the fifth day, the Ciampi woman arrived without the dog and with only Zik in tow. She waved, and Rose waved back and watched the usual baby oil routine. Rose was again astounded. Had the woman never heard of cancer? And letting that boy run around in this blazing sun was close to child abuse. Had she appeared stark naked, Rose could not have been more shocked. On the contrary, she might even have approved, as long as a reasonable sunscreen had been applied. Rose adjusted her position under the shadow of her beach umbrella to leave no skin subject to the toxic rays. Taking up her
Harper's,
she read four pages about the horrendous state of agricultural inspection before dozing off.

When she opened her eyes, she found Lizzie and the boy were building a sand castle of prodigious size, not the usual lumpy kid construction, but something far more sophisticated, with sheer, smooth walls pierced by arched gates, buttresses, and high, round towers. The boy was dabbing wet sand onto the structure and talking, weaving a story about the tiny lead figures they were arranging on the walls, a dungeons-and-dragons sort of tale: wizards, warlocks, imprisoned queens, dark riders, heroic elves. Lizzie was chattering along with this, as if she had known the boy for years. Rose listened, fascinated and amazed. It had never happened in her experience that a ten-year-old boy had volunteered to play with a girl of the same age. Then Lizzie became aware of her mother's stare and grew self-conscious enough to break the enchantment. She stood and walked over to Rose's blanket, the boy following.

“We want a drink,” said Lizzie, reaching into the insulated bag.

“Drink,
please.
And offer one to your friend, Elizabeth,” said Rose, smiling at the boy, and getting her first close look at him. He was at the very peak of his boyish beauty, and the peak in his case was remarkably high. Dark curls, bisque skin, large black eyes with thick, unforgivable lashes, a cupid-bow mouth, and the germ of what would become a straight Roman nose.

“What do you want, Giancarlo, Coke or Sprite?” asked Lizzie.

“Coke, please,” said the boy, and Rose said, “I thought your name was Zik?”

“Oh, that's my baby name. My brother is Isaac or Zak and so I had to be Zik. Parental humor, ho ho. My brother is the only one who still calls me Zik.” He lowered his voice and looked grave. “He's profoundly retarded.”

Rose's brow twisted in sympathy. “Oh, how awful. I'm sorry.”

“Yes, well, we try to cope and all. That's why he's not here today. He had to go to Creedmore for his . . . you know, his treatments.”

Lizzie said, “Their dog killed all their rabbits, Mom.”

“Yes,” said the boy. “It was a huge mess. He ravaged them. There were bunny parts all over. That's why he's not here either. My mother flogged him with the dog whip and locked him in the cellar. She might shoot him, or sell him to, you know, a dogfight man.” He took a long sip from his Coke as they stared. “Boy, I was really thirsty. My mom never brings anything but beer, but, you know, a couple of beers on a hot day and I get a headache and Zak is uncontrollable and has to be whipped.”

“Whipped?” said Rose with a gulp.

“Oh, sure. My mom's quite the flogger. Look!” He half-twisted to show his upper back. Two thin parallel scars ran from his shoulder almost to his spine, pale against the tan. “I overturned a pitcher of martinis and she got out the dog whip on me. She's totally out of control when she gets plastered. I think she feeds us beer to destroy our brain cells. She's really quite sadistic. She used to give my sister sherry in her baby bottle.”

“Did it work?” asked Lizzie, openmouthed.

“Partially. My sister speaks forty-eight languages perfectly, but otherwise she's a complete idiot. She sometimes puts her shoes on the wrong foot.”

Rose sighed and said tartly, “You know, it's one thing to make up stories and another thing to tell fibs. I'm sure your family would be very unhappy if they heard you talking about them that way.”

Giancarlo's response was a smile of such devastating charm that light seemed to leap from his face, and Rose's irritation melted away and she laughed, reflecting in the moment that laughs had been few and far between recently. Lizzie broke into giggles, too. In a moment they were all three roaring like a sitcom laugh track.

“What's the joke?”

Rose looked up and saw that Giancarlo's mother was standing at the edge of their beach blanket, holding a long-neck Schlitz.

“I was being amusing, Mom,” said Giancarlo.

“I bet,” said Marlene. She nodded to Rose. “Hi, I'm Marlene Ciampi. I'm more or less responsible for this creature.” Rose introduced herself and her daughter, who asked, “Did your dog really eat up all the rabbits?”

Marlene gave her son a sharp look. “A rabbit got out and Gog chased it. Gog is not built for chasing rabbits. The rabbit is safe. What other lies did he concoct?”

“He said you flogged him with a dog whip and gave him a scar,” said Lizzie.

“That's more of a prediction,” said Marlene. “In point of fact, he got those scratches falling on a bale of razor wire he was told more than once not to go near.”

“And I assume his brother isn't retarded either,” said Rose.

“What!”

“He
is,”
insisted the boy. “She's in total denial about it.”

Marlene went after him with an openhanded roundhouse aimed at the red Speedo, which he easily dodged. He danced away, laughing maniacally. “See! Child abuse! That proves it, Mom.”

The children went back to their sand castle, chortling.

“Pull up a beach,” said Rose, and Marlene sat. Rose noticed with a distinct shock that the woman was missing several joints of the small fingers of her left hand. Otherwise, she was remarkably beautiful, in a Mediterranean way. “He must be quite a handful,” Rose said, “with that imagination. Is his brother the same?”

“Completely different in every respect. You can barely get a word out of him. Gianni, as you see, is an artist.” Giancarlo was carving a delicate arch in a thin curtain of sand.

“I don't see how he gets it to stick together,” said Rose. “It's marvelous.”

“Oh, yes. Sometimes a little too marvelous for daily use. Zak never picks up a crayon. His thing is war, guns, blowing things up, taking things apart, heavy machinery. That's why he skipped the beach today. We're having a backhoe in to rip out and replace a water pipe to the kennels. Watching a backhoe is his idea of paradise.”

“He should meet my husband. They'd have a lot to talk about.”

“Your husband runs a backhoe?”

“A dragline. Or did. He's with the union now.”

“Really? I'm not sure I know what a dragline is.”

“It's an excavation machine. The bucket can take a hundred and fifty yards at a bite, three hundred tons or so. The powerhouse is the size of a small office building. They use them in open-pit mining.”

“Presumably not on Long Island, though.”

Rose laughed. “Oh, no. Robbens County, West Virginia. That's where we're from. Or that's where Ralph is from. I'm from next door. The big white house.”

“There's a story there.”

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes, indeed.”

“I want to hear it. Let me get the beer.”

So Marlene dragged her cooler over and they sat under the umbrella and slowly drank and rubbed the icy bottles against neck and forehead, watching the slow, remarkable extension of Giancarlo's sand palace, and talking. Rose talked, rather, and Marlene listened. She seemed good at it, professional even, and Rose was not surprised to learn that she had been a prosecuting attorney in New York and later a private detective.

Marlene, for her part, after offering the minimum personal data, was content to let the other woman ramble on. Rose Heeney was the sort of woman she had never been much interested in, a type she privately called the Cheerleader. She had been exposed to a number at Smith. They had golden hair and blue eyes and were fair and round of limb. They wore kilts and circle pins and had bright, straight teeth. They strolled in laughing gaggles, dated fraternity boys, and married early—she read their names (invariably triple-barreled) in the alumnae news. And Rose Wickham Heeney was what they became, it seemed. Or not quite. Heeney had not been in the master plan of the Wickhams. They had not envisioned an Irish roughneck dragline operator for their golden girl.

They focused, naturally enough, on the kids. Besides Lizzie, there were two sons, Emmett, twenty, and Daniel, eighteen. The former had gone to Wheeling for a couple of years, then dropped out to work in the pit. Dan was at MIT. Marlene detected regret in her tone, and a pride in the younger that could never be fully expressed lest it hurt the older boy.

“Do you really have a daughter,” Rose asked, “or did he make that up, too?”

“No, Lucy's real enough. She's in Boston, too, as a matter of fact, at BC, a freshman.”

“Oh, good,” Rose said, smiling. “And I assume she doesn't speak forty-eight languages and can put her shoes on right.”

“I don't know about the shoes, but she does speak something like that many.”

“You're kidding me!”

“No, actually not. She's some kind of language prodigy. Scientists come in from all over the world to study her, and good luck to them. I have not been blessed with normal children. Although, Zak seems normal enough, except for being Gianni's twin. I think he makes a practice of it. So how did you and . . . ?”

“Ralph, but everyone calls him Red.”

Marlene glanced at the blaze of copper on Lizzie's head. “I should have guessed. How did you and Red hook up?”

“Oh, you know, my social conscience. After I got out of Vassar I messed around in New York for a year, working for a magazine, which folded, and I guess I was supposed to get a job at another magazine and wait around to get married. I mean that's what Mom did, right? That or be a modern woman and go to professional school like you. But I didn't want to go to professional school, and I wasn't exactly sure I wanted to be a modern woman. The guys I was dating . . . I mean, they were all right, but you know . . .”

“Bland.”

“Bland, or totally focused on the greasy pole, or . . . I dated a sculptor with a loft in SoHo for a while, but honestly, all those people . . . I couldn't take them seriously, the black clothes and that attitude and the constant backbiting about everyone's work. And so I applied to VISTA.”

“After the sculptor broke your heart.”

Rose laughed longer than necessary and drank some beer. “Yeah, you got me pegged. The Foreign Legion of the white girls. They sent me to Haw Hollow, West Virginia, to help run a craft cooperative. It mainly involved bookkeeping and writing grant applications and arranging child care so the women could quilt and weave. Well, you can imagine it was quite a shock. You don't think people live like that in America anymore. I mean white people.”

“Poor.”

“Is not the word. The whole county is kept alive by miners' pensions. They won't take any help from the government, you know. Extremely proud, living in these little hamlets up in the hills—
hollers
is what they call them. The water's all rotten from the acid drainage. Half the county looks like moonscape from the strip and pit mines. They're supposed to rehab the land, but a lot of them don't—the coal companies. And they won't just leave and go to the cities for work. They want to stay by their home places.” Rose sighed. “And so there I was, a little middle-class girl doing her social obligation, and one night I drove down to McCullensburg—that's the local metropolis, population twelve thousand, a Mickey D, three gas stations, and a Bi-Lo—for a meeting of all the various do-good types, and after all the social workers had droned on for a while, this guy steps up to the mike, and he gives this incredible, incredible speech, all about the hard lives of the people, and how bad they'd been treated by the mine companies and the government, and how they deserved dignity. He said the mountain people were the best people in America, how they were the only ones still living the original vision of America. I mean, it was a stem-winder, and you could see he really believed it.”