Absolute Rage (6 page)

Circular thoughts, sliding into obsession. He told himself to stop it. It was the weekend, take a break, Butch. Take the kids to the beach. Lie down and hang out. He had one of those fat fact-filled history books he read for pleasure, no beach thrillers for Karp, no, usually something like Norwich on Byzantium, or the rise of the Dutch Republic, or McPherson or Page Smith. Okay: book, beach, relax. Round up the gang, then.

He went into the barn, which was large, sagging, plank-built, painted crumbling white, and still smelled faintly of hay and its former tenants, with an added top-note of kibble and dog. It had a loft at one end, and at the other a flight of stairs leading to the trainer's apartment. Karp inspected the nursing Magog and her puppies. The bitch lifted her great head and gave him, the stranger, an unfriendly look and a coughing growl. Backing away, he heard a rustle from above and then a loud pop, followed by a cry from a boyish throat: “Got you!”

“Hello, who's up there?”

“Dad, I got another one!” In a moment Zak appeared at the edge of the loft high above, grinning and dangling a huge, dead rat by the tail. Karp took a step back to avoid a falling drop of rat gore.

“Do you want to go to the beach?”

“Maybe later. I want to hunt some more. This place is crawling with them.” Zak dropped the dead animal, which fell with an unpleasant sound at Karp's feet.

“Do you have the safety on that thing?”

“It's automatic, Dad,” said Zak, with a touch of patronage. “It goes on when you cock it.” Zak placed the butt of the rifle against his knee and heaved the barrel down, then up with a smart click. He struck a Hemingway pose and pointed to the red tab sticking up from the foot of the breech. “See?”

Yet another thing to place in the worry file. The weapon was not, as Karp had once thought, a BB gun, but a Diana 34, a precision German weapon that could propel a .17-caliber pellet at a thousand feet per second and blow the brains out of a rat. Or child. The crazy wife had bought it for Zak's last birthday, and he loved it more than life.

“Well, just be careful,” said Karp, and left the barn. He proceeded around the barn, where he found Marlene in consultation with a couple of contractors. Marlene gave him a friendly squeeze, but continued with her conversation, which was technical, boring, and presaged enormous expense.

After a few minutes of staring at the large rock that blocked the trench, he asked, “Where's Giancarlo?”

“In his garden.”

Karp himself had never gardened, and as far as he knew, Marlene's vegetable expertise was limited to windowsill herbs and houseplants, but Giancarlo had decided to grow veggies on what seemed to his father an absurdly large scale. He had studied books on the subject and arranged for the rental of a rototiller and talked his brother into helping him break the soil for it. Then he had laid the garden out with mathematical precision, using stakes and strings, and had planted and watered and fertilized and weeded. Now the taut strings were nearly obscured by young growth. Karp had no idea what any of it was, although he thought he recognized young corn. They showed it a lot in the movies.

Giancarlo was in the field with a hoe. He was wearing bib overalls over bare skin, and on his head was a ragged straw hat, once Marlene's. When he saw Karp standing by the wire fence, he stopped, pulled off his hat, wiped his brow theatrically, looked up at the heavens, and said, “Paw, if it don't rain soon, we gonna lose the farm.”

“Yes,” said Karp, “we'll have to move to the city and live in miserable tenements, but someday your grandchildren will go to college. What're you doing?”

“Hoein'.”

“I see you are. Why exactly does one hoe?”

“To rip out the weeds. You can use herbicides, too, but I don't like them. I like hoeing. It's hard work but it's also really like restful. You want to try it?”

“Sure, if you think I can.”

“Well, I don't know, Dad, it's totally tricky.” The boy grabbed up another hoe from a collection of tools lying by the fence. “You see, the metal part here, that goes down in the dirt, and the wood part, you hold in your hands.”

“Met-al? Down?”

Giancarlo giggled. “Sorry, I guess I was going too fast for you there. See, you kind of chop down and then up and pull the weed out roots and all. You have to make sure you rotate your hips and always keep your eye on the weed. Follow
through
the weed.” He demonstrated.

“Got it. Point me at some weeds.”

It
was
restful, Karp found. After half an hour he had taken off his shirt and tied a bandanna around his head and was going down the row of feathery plants with a will, making the dirt fly. At first, his mind was full of the office, and he took out his several frustrations on the dandelions and plantains. Later on, however, these thoughts faded, and he became interested in the hoeing itself, how to lift the weed with a minimum of effort, how to keep a gentle rhythm going. At this stage it was very much like shooting baskets, he was thinking, and he briefly speculated that athletic prowess largely depended on the constant repetition of acts that were essentially as boring as pig shit. Both of the boys were reasonable athletes, but neither was as yet outstanding. They didn't seem impelled to practice in the way he had. Still, it was early for them. He had not pushed them at all yet. Should he? He hated the men he had observed who lived their athletic dreams out through their kids, and though his own athletic dreams had been more or less blasted, he had firmly resolved not to do this to them. He had himself been a high school all-American and a standout in college until he had screwed up his knee. The knee was an artificial one now, an emptiness there that worked well enough when it worked, as now. Gradually even these thoughts faded, replaced by mere sensation: the beat of the sun on his back, the shock of impact in his hands, and the dull burning of friction where he gripped the handle. Mindless work; what he needed.

After an unknowable interval, he stopped to stretch and saw that his wife was standing by the fence, staring at him in wonder.

“I never thought I'd see the day.”

“Bring me little water, Sylvie,” sang Karp.

“How did he talk you into it?”

“He promised me a quarter of the crop and a peck o' salt. I thought it was a pretty good deal.”

“But now you're ready to go to the beach and have a picnic, which your wife has lovingly prepared, despite the urgencies of running a vast and complex enterprise. You look remarkably sexy as a peasant, by the way.”

“Mistress
like
Ivan?” said Karp, throwing down his hoe and advancing on her all sweaty and filthy, and she shrieked and they had a little chase around the garden, while Giancarlo looked on with benign interest, like a faun.

At the beach, they found Rose Heeney and her daughter, and Marlene set up her blanket and establishment adjoining and made the introductions. The boys and Karp ran off to splash around. Marlene looked sympathetically at Lizzie, who was making a good show of pretending that she did not care and rolled her eyes at Rose. “Men!”

Rose's smile in return was weak, and her face showed more strain than it had the previous day. She said, “Lizzie, go off and play with the boys. They have a raft.”

“I'd rather stay here.”

“No, go. Build a castle, swim. Go ahead.”

Lizzie took the hint and wandered off.

“Something wrong?” Marlene inquired.

“Oh . . . yes, as a matter of fact. Red called late last night. He came back from a meeting and found someone had shot Lady, our dog. She was dead in the yard. A big stupid mutt, loved everybody. Completely useless as a guard, of course. Dan used to say she was a reverse watch-dog. She barked continuously until a burglar arrived and then she'd shut up and go lick his hand.” Rose pulled her sunglasses off and stared out to the water. Marlene saw that her eyes were wet. “Stupid dog. I don't know how I'm going to tell Lizzie. She practically grew up with her.”

“Do they think it was a burglar?”

“No. It was some evil son of a bitch working for Weames. Escalating the threat.”

“Weames is . . . ?”

“Lester Weames. Red's running against him for the union presidency. The Union of Mining Equipment Operators. Known as UMEO. It's a small outfit, basically covers strip mine operators in three or four states, very Appalachian and totally corrupt. Weames has been in there for eighteen years, screwing the workers and staying cozy with the mine operators.”

“I thought they didn't allow that anymore. I thought the feds came in . . .”

“Well, you thought wrong,” said Rose bitterly. “Southern West Virginia is not really that much a part of the US of A when you come down to it. Weames keeps the coal flowing, and the coal keeps the lights turned on and the Internet humming. Yeah, there've been investigations, but he's smart. He lives modestly and he's got a gang of loyalists around him who keep him clean. On the few occasions the feds picked up something, they threw them a couple of small fry and they went back inside the Beltway feeling they did a good day's work. The bottom line is nobody much cares, except Red.”

“Will he win?”

“Oh, he might get the most votes. Red's real popular among the rank and file. But whether Weames will let him actually take office is a whole other story. His guys count the ballots. It would be better for Weames, though, if Red just forgot about it. That's been suggested in very strong terms.”

“Threats?”

“Expressions of displeasure, yeah. Phone calls in the middle of the night. A dead skunk in the mailbox. Tires slashed. Now, Lady . . .” Rose sighed. “That's why I'm spending the summer here with Lizzie, instead of supporting him in McCullensburg, like a good wife. When they started to get rough, I discovered I was easily distinguishable from Mother Jones.” A self-deprecating laugh here, but Marlene saw it was eating at her. “He's coming up here next weekend to try to talk me into coming back with him.”

“Will he succeed?”

“Oh, I guess. I don't know. It's really confusing. A life of struggle and relative deprivation, that I can deal with. Dead dogs and death threats? I don't know if I can take it. It's a whole different thing, especially with kids.”

“Uh-huh, I know what you mean.”

Rose looked at her sharply. “Do you?”

“Oh, my, yes indeed,” said Marlene fervently.

D
ANIEL
H
EENEY
,
RUNNING LATE
,
TOOK
the last open seat in the car. The westbound Amtrak out of Boston's South Station was full with a weekend crowd. As he sat, he glanced at the girl sitting across the aisle from him in the way most young men glance at girls on public transportation, in quick appraisal, and the first thing he took in were the legs. They were long, extremely long, too long for Amtrak's mingy accommodations, and she had to park a dozen inches or so of them in the aisle. They were well shaped, too, with slender ankles and bare, all the way from her leather sandals right up to where they vanished into baggy khaki shorts. When people moved past in the aisle, she hiked her knees high, presenting him with an appealing glimpse into the shadowed higher reaches. The rest of her was not so appealing, however. Homely, was his first take. Very short hair, nearly a buzz cut, a big nose, too. She was wearing a black T-shirt with some kind of red design on it, and it hung loose in front. A shame, he thought, nice legs, no tits, and that face. He pulled a physics text and a yellow highlighter out of his pack and began to study.

When the train stopped at Providence, he became aware of a low muttering coming from across the aisle and he looked up from his book. The girl had equipped herself with a set of headphones, hooked into a tape player sitting on the tray table. The phones were not the flimsy kind that come with tape players, but big, padded Bose jobs with a tiny red LED glowing on the side, which indicated to his experienced eye that they had sound-damping electronics built in. At first he thought she was voicing the words to a song, in the annoying way some people did while using earphones, but as he observed her, it became clear that something else was going on. She had a notebook out and she was writing rapidly in it, occasionally stopping to reverse the tape and repeat a section. Her mumbles seemed to be in a foreign language. Listening to a taped lecture, he thought. And a foreign student, too, probably. The train started again and her mumbling faded against the ambient sounds of the train.

When study at last paled, his gaze moved again from his text to the girl. She had a fat volume on the tray now; it looked like a dictionary. One of her legs was thrown up over the arm of her chair, her sandal hanging loosely on her toes, moving slowly with the motion, like a plumb bob. She seemed completely at ease, oblivious to her surroundings. There was something erotic about studying her he found, like spying through a dorm window. He liked the way the armrest dug into the meat of her thigh, exposing its tender inner skin. The shorts were so baggy, he could see almost up to her crotch. His eyelids twitched with the strain of peripheral visioning.

She looked up just then and he flicked his glance back to physics, to a page of equations whose meaning he had quite forgotten. He felt stared at, and his ears reddened. A minute or so later, he got up and went to the lavatory. His face in the spotted mirror looked even less attractive to him than it usually did. Dan Heeney owned the visage of a rococo cherub: milky skin, red-rose mouth, silky golden curls, the sort of face that was entirely out of fashion in an age that preferred the dangerous, hard-bitten, stubbled look. Although he had found that a certain kind of woman doted on such a face as his, he did not dote in return upon that kind. They reminded him of his mom. He had a taste for the crazy ladies, with the piercings and the spiked hair, but by and large they did not have a taste for him.