Hush (33 page)

She was the only person who had power over
him. She was the only person who could still make him tremble in
fear, still make him wet his pants.

"I . . . was in an accident," he said.
Anything to keep her calm, to keep her from yelling at him. "I
mean, I saw an accident, and had to stay there and talk to the
police."

"You're lying."

"No. No, it's the truth. It was a
hit-and-run. This guy was hit and left in the street to die."

Light from the kitchen reflected from the
metal chain around her neck, the necklace taken from the whore
Sachi Anderson. It was there, caught in the sweaty folds of her
skin, winking at him, beckoning.

"You're a worthless piece of shit. I should
have drowned you when you were born. I should have tied a concrete
block to you and tossed you into Lake Michigan."

"That would have been murder," he said
woodenly.

He could feel himself retreating, and
suddenly he was watching the scene with the detachment of a non-
biased observer. It was safe here. The power was still within him,
but it had gone into sleep mode, ready to be called forward when he
needed it.

"It ain't murder when you don't even qualify
as a human."

"Qualify." That wasn't a word she would
normally use. "Have you been watching People's Court again?"

He could see that his question baffled her,
just as his question had baffled the bartender. He picked up a lamp
and began walking slowly toward her, jerking the cord from the wall
socket as he moved.

The fear in her face!

It was glorious!

Glorious!

He would like to have a photograph of it, but
this wasn't the time. And anyway, he would never forget her
expression. It would be etched deeply into his memory, beside all
of his other memories of her.

"Put that down."

Never taking her eyes off him, she took a
step back. She tried to fall into her mother-bitch role, tried to
scare him into obeying her, but this time it didn't work. And even
when she was yelling at him, he could see the fear in her eyes, the
terror.

He didn't want the moment to end. He wanted
to embrace it, savor it, draw it out for as long as he could.

"Who's your sweet cakes?" he asked.

"Y-you are."

"Who do you love more than Elvis?"

"Y-you."

"Who do you love more than that dumb-ass on
that stupid soap opera?"

"You! You! You know it's you! S-so p-put
d-down the lamp," she pleaded, reaching imploringly toward him,
then pulling back her hands to clasp them together in front of
her.

He smashed the lamp down on the table. It
shattered, and he pulled the cord free of the broken ceramic. "Say
the words," he commanded, wrapping both ends of the cord tightly
around his hands. "Say the words."

"I love you!" She was sobbing now. Tears of
fear running down her cheeks, her jowls shaking.

"Again!"

"I LOVE YOU!"

With one swift movement, he wrapped the cord
around her neck and pulled tightly, his muscles bunching from his
power, his incredible power.

Across his mind flashed a picture.

A boy and a woman.

Mother and son.

Mother and son.

He watched as her face turned purple. Watched
as her eyes bugged out. He pulled and pulled and pulled. When he
finally let go, she fell heavily to the floor, air escaping her
lungs, rushing past her lips in a hiss.

There.

Finally.

Now she was quiet. Finally she was quiet.

Now she was the good mother. The mother he
loved.

"Time for bed," he told her. "You've been
staying up much too late."

He unwrapped the cord from her neck and
dragged her across the floor to the bedroom. Deadweight, a voice in
his head taunted. Deadweight. The bitch is dead, now go to bed. The
bitch is dead, now go to bed.

It took an enormous amount of strength, an
enormous amount of time. He shoved and lifted, shoved and lifted,
finally getting her into bed. He tugged at her arms, tugged at her
legs, trying to achieve a natural arrangement, but nothing worked.
He jerked the sheet from under her weight and covered her with it.
He was walking away when he thought he heard her say something.

"What?" he asked, turning around.

Dirty boy. Dirty, dirty boy.

"Shut up!"

He found a blanket on the floor and tossed it
over her face so she'd quit staring at him.

Dirty boy, dirty, dirty boy.

"I'm a good boy," he whispered, backing away
while not taking his eyes off the bump in the bed. "I'm a good
boy." He reached blindly behind him, found the wall switch, and
turned off the light, dousing the room in darkness.

Goodnight, sweetheart.

"Goodnight, Mommy."

The next morning he woke up late. He jumped
out of bed and ran upstairs, quickly putting together some juice
and oatmeal. He placed it on a tray, wishing he had a flower, then
he carried it into his mother's room.

"Time for breakfast," he announced, his heart
thudding heavily in his chest. "Rise and shine."

She didn't move.

"Rise and shine," he repeated.

She didn't move.

Grasping the tray with one hand, he slowly
approached the bed, then carefully lifted the edge of the blanket
with his free hand.

He dropped the blanket and jumped away.

His mother stared back at him, her face
grotesquely swollen, eyes bulging, tongue protruding. The tray slid
from his fingers and fell, the glass shattering, juice and oatmeal
splashing his pants. He dropped to the floor, shards of glass
embedding in his knees. He put a hand to his mouth and emitted a
choking sound. A gasp. A gag.

She was dead. His mother was dead.

Tears poured from his eyes. He could feel
them falling over the back of his hand, hot and burning.

She's dead.

The bitch is dead.

His mouth was hanging open. His breath came
in short, quick gasps, and he made a sound that was a cross between
a sob and a laugh.

Something sparked in his brain. A recent
memory. A blond-haired boy in a hockey uniform standing next to a
red-haired woman. If you took away the hair, they looked remarkably
alike.

Mother and son.

Mother and son.

"If you had to choose between having a big
head or a little one, what would it be?"

Preoccupied with the CD in his hand, Ethan
didn't answer at first. "Huh? Oh. I don't know. A big one, I guess.
People with big heads are smart. If you had a little tiny head,
then you'd be a moron."

Ryan's constant chatter was getting on
Ethan's nerves. He'd asked him to come along to the record show at
Navy Pier for purely selfish reasons: Ryan had a car. Ethan had
justified it by telling himself Ryan would get off on the show as
much as Ethan. He thought that once Ryan actually got there, he'd
enjoy it.

Vendors were there from all over the country,
all over the world. If you were looking for some obscure album from
a short-lived group nobody had ever heard of, chances were you'd
find it there.

They'd both purchased three-day passes, but
now, only five hours into the first day, Ryan was already bored.
He'd hit the first heavy-metal tables he'd seen. Then, without
bothering to do any comparison shopping, without bothering to go
any deeper into the myriad of tables and people, he'd spent all of
his money in the first hour.

"How much for the Cocteau Twins box set?"
Ethan asked the sleepy-looking guy with a nose ring and pony- tail
who stood at a long display table. Behind him hung a black
Stereolab T-shirt. Next to that was a long-sleeved Radiohead
shirt.

"Eighty bucks."

"I can order it through Cheapo for
sixty-five."

The guy took a long sip of soda. "If you can
get it. They might tell you they can order it, but it'll never come
in. Been out of print for years."

Ethan knew that. "How about this Guided by
Voices?"

"Twenty-five."

Guided by Voices were amazing, but this was
live, recorded at somebody's birthday party, which meant Robert
Pollard had probably been wasted. You don't want to listen to
Guided by Voices when they're wasted. You can be wasted, but they
can't. Music that was normally floaty and haunting turned into
harsh punk rock, and the vocals turned to shouting, not singing.
Shouting was okay in the right place, take the Clash, for instance.
It just didn't work for Guided by Voices stuff.

"Thanks." He put the CD back.

"How about Under the Bushes, Under the
Stars?" the vendor asked.

"Got it."

"Alien Lanes?"

"Got it." Ethan picked up a My Bloody
Valentine album. Loveless. He had the CD, but didn't know they'd
put Loveless on vinyl. He'd never seen it on vinyl before—and that
amazed him.

"Is this a reissue?" he asked.

To his right, just off his shoulder, Ryan
continued his prattle. "Ever noticed how it's hard to tell the
difference between a punk and a scurve?"

"No. That's really rare. They only pressed a
couple thousand."

Vendors always told you that crap. Ethan
wasn't stupid. And yet, it was really weird that he hadn't known
about it. Could it be a bootleg?

"It's because punks have that 'haven't washed
my hair in two weeks, just got out of bed thing' going— and it took
them hours to look like that. Where scurves, on the other hand,
really haven't washed or combed their hair in two weeks. There's no
shine to it, and they have a real bed-head thing going in the
back."

Ethan slid the album back into place and
turned to his friend. "Do you wanna leave?"

Ryan looked around, as if trying to find a
reason to stay. "This is boring," he said, apparently not finding
anything interesting.

"What would you be doing if you weren't
here?"

Hands deep in the front pockets of his cargo
pants, Ryan shrugged. "I don't know. Playing video games. That's
more interesting than this."

Ryan was addicted to video games. A lot of
Ethan's friends were addicted to video games.

"I'm not ready to leave," Ethan said. "I
won't be ready for a long time. Why don't you go on home?"

"Are you still spending the night at my
house?"

It seemed pointless now. "Nah. I'll go home
after I'm done here."

"How will you get there?"

"I'll figure something out. Maybe I'll take
the el to the police station and catch a ride with my dad. Or I'll
call him and he can pick me up."

It was always such a downer when you tried to
draw someone into your infatuation, thinking all they had to do was
listen to Galaxy 500's cover of Yoko Ono's "Listen, the Snow Is
Falling," or Spiritualized's Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating
in Space, The Chambermaids Down in the Berries, to see that music
was art in its most multilayered form, a combination of lyrics and
notes that could create a unique, cinematic wonder in your
head.

But they never got it. They didn't want to
get it. Ryan would rather sit in front of the TV playing Killing
Time with heavy metal blasting in the background than listen to
something with any depth.

"I'll find a way home," Ethan said. "Don't
worry. And hey, thanks for the ride."

"No sweat."

Ethan watched as Ryan bobbed away, moving
through the crowd to finally disappear.

He expected too much from people, that was
the problem, Ethan thought. He expected too much from life. In a
way, he wished he could be like Ryan, so easy to please, satisfied
to sit in front of the TV all day, killing imaginary people and
sometimes getting killed himself. Lyrics from a Kurt Cobain song
played in his head, the ones about wishing he could be easily
amused like everybody else.

After Ryan had gone, Ethan continued to
wander among the people and tables. He had a hundred dollars to
spend, and he was going to have a hard time deciding how to get the
most mileage out of his money. He had to take into account the
rarity of his purchases. If it was something he could get somewhere
down the road, then he should wait. But if finding a treasure was a
one-time deal, he should act now.

But eighty bucks for the Cocteau Twins box
set? Damn. That was a lot of money. He didn't know. He just didn't
know. Then there was the Velvet Underground box set with outtakes
from the Loaded sessions—

Somebody bumped into him, turned around,
grabbed him by the arm with a clawlike grip, and apologized.
"Sorry. Really sorry."

"That's okay," Ethan said, shaking him off,
even though he didn't think it was okay. Why didn't the jerk look
where he was going?

The guy was staring at him as if he expected
Ethan to say something else.

"You don't know who I am, do you?" the guy
asked.

Now Ethan remembered where he'd seen him
before. The hockey game. "You're my dad's friend, uh . . . Mr. . .
. Mr. . . ." Ethan didn't have a clue, but he was hoping Mr.
Whoever He Was would fill in the big blank space floating between
them.

"Grant."

"Mr. Grant."

He laughed in a good-natured way that Ethan
found irritating. "Grant's my first name. Grant Ruby. So, you're
taking in the big show, huh? Looks like we have some of the same
interests."

Ethan looked down and saw that in the guy's
hand was the burgundy, fabric-covered Cocteau Twins box set. What
the hell? Guess he could mark that one off his list. "You know
somebody who likes the Cocteau Twins?" Ethan asked, thinking it
couldn't be anybody at his school.

"It's for me. Rather an indulgence at seventy
bucks, but I've been looking for it for a long time, and it's
getting rarer and rarer."

Ethan didn't know what was more amazing, that
he'd been able to talk the vendor down to seventy bucks, or that
here was somebody else who liked the Cocteau Twins, and the guy was
a middle-aged fucking nerd.