Prayer for the Dead (24 page)

“Never trust a religious man,” he said aloud.

Dyce was silent. The car had to negotiate a series of blind curves, weaving its way through the last of woodland and then they would see the sign that said, “Minnot. Town Limits.” Then through the town with its white, three-story houses and green lawns, through the three stoplights, and out into the country again, but this time startlingly different as the land flattened out and a shallow basin of green corn and yellow wheat replaced the forested hills. Dyce urged the car forward, through the dangerous turns, through the town, and to his grandfather’s huge stone house—and safety.

“Especially if he gives up his religion and finds God,” Dysen said.

“Grandfather has a personal relationship with Christ,” said the boy.

“Which is pretty interesting, considering ‘grandfather ‘ is a Jew.”

“Jesus was a Jew.” said Dyce.

Dysen clenched his jaw. “You don’t have to believe all the shit the old man tells you. You could try some common sense for a change. “

“And I’m a Jew and a friend of Jesus, too.”

“Goddamn it, stop that shit!” Dyce recoiled to avoid the blow, but Dysen merely turned down the windshield visor in front of the boy to reveal the mirror.

“Look at yourself. You‘re a Dysen, you look like me. That means you‘re a Norwegian; you go back to the goddamned Vikings. You’re not a Jew, that’s ridiculous.“

“My mother was a Jew.”

“Your mother is dead. Look at your face, look at yourself. Look!” Dysen squeezed his son’s head in steely fingers and made him stare at his reflection in the mirror.

“See what you see? Those care Dysen bones, that’s a Dysen nose and ears and eyes and mouth. Look at your chin, boy. Look at my chin. Jewish, my ass. You’re a Norwegian, and proud of it, or you better be, or I‘II kick some pride into you.”

When Dysen released his grip they were through the curves and into the town. Dysen was still muttering.

“Jew, my ass. The old bastard is just trying to steal my own son away from me.”

Yes, please, thought Dyce. Please, please, grandfather.

“It’ll take more than a goddamned check every blue moon to get my own flesh and blood off of me. He can’t buy you, Rodger-Dodger, he can’t buy my boy.”

Dysen was close to tears again, swept up with love for his son—until the boy tipped his head, eluding another affectionate ruffle of the hair.

Dysen took one last sip at the final stoplight in town, and to hell with anyone who happened to be watching.

The cultivated basin beyond the town came upon Dyce with all the welcome warmth of an embrace. He could smell his grandfather in the scent of overturned earth, he could see his beard moving with the wheat, sprouting from the ears of corn. When they reached the turnoff for the long drive through fields to his grandfather’s house, Dyce was holding his breath. His heart still raced from the mention of his going to live with grandfather. It was the first time he had heard anyone else mention the possibility. Until now he had thought it was a secret wish held only in his own heart.

Buy me, grandfather, he yearned. Buy me away from him. Let me come to live with you. I’ll pay you back no matter how long it takes or what I have to do for the money.

The house had been built over one hundred fifty years earlier to shelter the owners of the farm against the harshness of the Connecticut winter, and it was built to last from stone wrenched by the plow from the New England soil. The original builders had been clever in the use of stone—they had had to be because the land was covered with them like leaves from a tree after a storm. Stones made the fences separating fields, and stones made the wells, and stones made the houses, rough, uncut stones that still had the shape with which they had been yanked from the soil. The house was stone piled on stone three stories high and laid across by beams cut from the timbers of Connecticut’s forest. There were two chimneys on Nate Cohen’s house, one on either exterior end of the huge building and, like the walls, they too were constructed of stone. It was not a house that wind or storm or fire would defeat.

Much of the original farm was gone, split into parcels and swallowed by the more successful neighbors, but the house and the barn and the outbuildings remained, still intact and maintained scrupulously, just as Nate Cohen maintained all that over which the Lord had given him dominion. Because he was a good husband to the Lord and that which was His, and because he despised all that which was slothful and decayed and fallen to ruin—including his son-in-law.

He waited for them now on the porch of the old farmhouse, having spied them when they turned onto the access road and watching their progress since by the thin trail of dust that followed above and behind their car as it drove through the fields.

The old man was the first thing Dyce saw, before the house, before the barn. Standing on the porch impatiently, his hands on his hips, waiting for his grandson.

He was also the first thing Dysen saw and he muttered under his breath, “king of the assholes, “but Dyce didn’t care now. He was safe now and protected, at least for the length of their stay.

Dyce ran from the car while his father was still slipping the bottle under the seat and chewing on a clove to hide the scent of alcohol. He ran to his grandfather, who came down the porch steps, arms extended. The boy leapt into his arms and was lifted off the earth and pressed against the old man’s neck and beard. Dyce could smell skin and hair and sweat and he thought his heart would burst.

Chapter 13

L
ying in Cindi’s arms, Becker heard
the low whine of car tires on pavement as the cruiser prowled by. The night was very quiet, otherwise, with the kind of hushed awareness with which nature anticipated a coming storm. The lights of the car ran quickly across the wall, then onto the ceiling before vanishing.

Cindi stirred and rolled away from him, which told him she was ready for sleep in earnest. She liked to make a show of drowsing off while clinging to Becker as if he were some enormous Teddy bear, but finally she would turn her back to him and slip into real sleep the only way she knew how, on her side, legs up, clasping a pillow to her. It never failed to touch him to see her thus, such a brave and secure young woman giving in to such vulnerability at night.

Easing himself out of bed, Becker glanced at the red numerals of the digital clock. It was 2:45. He wondered when Tee slept, if he was still cruising by at this hour. Perhaps when Becker himself did—when he could no longer put it off, when it came on him with a rush and swept him away without a chance to fight or care what lay in store for him in his dreams.

Standing at the window, naked but for his shorts, Becker stared into the unusual silent stillness of the night. The normal night sounds were stifled and the sky was unyieldingly black. Becker had a sense of dark clouds roiling atop each other, gathering strength and violence, but he could not see them.

Tee’s cruiser came back down the road, completing its swing of dutiful vigilance. Becker stepped back from the window. He did not want Tee to see him watching Tee watching him. There seemed no need to complicate the game. As the headlights hit the window, Becker turned to see Cindi’s body glowing palely in the illumination dimly reflected from the walls and ceiling.

She was completely naked and her shape seemed to meld into the white pillowcase at her breast as fine distinctions faded in the brief and feeble light. When the headlights were gone, Cindi’s image continued to shine on Becker’s retina.

He waited a moment for his eyes to adjust and when they did Cindi seemed nearly to have disappeared. Becker could make out the brighter whiteness of the sheets and pillows, but Cindi’s flesh, pale though it was, had all but vanished in the gloom.

Becker closed the bathroom door and turned on the light. He searched until he found a container of baby powder. Turning the ventilated lid, he sprinkled some on his hands and rubbed, feeling the silky smoothness of corn starch. The scent reminded him of Cindi, of certain hollows and depressions where the odor lingered long after application.

He smiled wryly at his reflection in the mirror. “You’re going to have a fine time explaining this in the morning,” he thought.

Leaving the bathroom door open a crack for the light, Becker returned to the bed and gently dusted Cindi’s legs with the powder, then her buttocks and her back. She moaned happily as he rubbed it delicately on her body with his palm. But when she turned her head, half awake, for his kiss, Becker eased her back into position. He kissed her softly on the cheek, then slipped away from the bed as she smiled and settled back into sleep.

Becker closed the bathroom door entirely. A line-thin ray of light shone through over the sill and seemed to die, exhausted, a few feet into the room. Becker paced away from the bed, six steps to the corner, as far away as he could get from the bed. Dyce’s chair had been twenty feet from the makeshift table or altar. With his back against the wall, Becker sat in the corner and looked at Cindi’s body on the bed.

She was now as white as the sheets, a peculiar, unnatural, spectral pale in the dun light. After a few minutes, as he continued to stare at her, his eyes began to rebel against the conditions, and the body appeared to rise slightly above the bed and to float in position all on its own.

A ghost, thought Becker. The optics necessary to create a ghost. Is this what you were looking for, friend Dyce? When you covered yourself in talcum powder and looked in the mirror, what did you want to see? A spook? Something as silly as that, children in bedsheets, Halloween tricks? And when you sat and stared at your victims, did you see the same thing? In Helen’s bathroom, dusting yourself in the dark, were you trying to create the same vision in yourself you sought in the men you killed? But not just ghosts; it had to be something more than that, something profound enough to kill for.

Cindi’s leg jerked and she groaned in her dreaming. Becker watched as her breathing became more even again, slowly subsiding to a rhythmic rise and fall. It wasn’t just optics that made her appear ghostlike, he realized. It was the slight motion caused by her breathing that gave her the sensation of hovering. Ghosts moved, they quivered, they shook.

But you didn’t want them to move, did you, Dyce? The drug you gave them, PMBL, is a hypnotic; it reduces men to a coma-like state. Metabolism is reduced, bodily functions slow, and that means breathing, too. They were scarcely alive. You sat and watched them. In the dark? In the gloom. That room was sealed off from sunlight like a cavern. You sat like this, watching the men who were laid out flat, men who could not twitch and toss and turn to spoil your illusion, men who barely moved. Did your eyes play tricks on you, too? Did you see these men as ghosts—or did you see them as something real? Something from your own experience, friend Dyce? All of our perversions come from something real in the beginning; they don’t just arrive from nowhere. Men lying flat, barely breathing, pale as talcum powder, pale as ghosts. Pale as death. Ghosts move, dead men don’t. You wanted them dead, didn’t you, Dyce?

You sat in the dark and saw them dead, wished them dead, and ultimately made them dead. Like in the graveyard, you were communing with the dead, weren’t you, you son of a bitch.

On the bed, Cindi rolled toward the center, tossing the pillow aside so it fell on the floor. She reached out an arm for Becker’s body but her eyes did not open. Becker rose and slid into bed beside her. The light from the bathroom made the door above it appear as dark as the entrance to a cave.

Lying under the eaves, Dyce could hear the rain on the roof, which seemed Just inches above his face. It was a comforting sound, one of many in the old house. Dyce loved the sounds of the insects in the country night, he loved the way the wind moved across the open flatland and made the house whistle when it blew hard. He even loved the groan of floorboards, the squeak of doors that age had tilted slightly off the square. None of the sounds frightened him, no matter how dark it was or how late—and it got so very dark in the country on a cloudy night. When his grandfather went to bed for the night, all lights in the house were off and it was as if the old man had pulled the switch on the universe. Even that did not frighten Dyce. He felt safe and protected in his grandfather’s house; he knew the presence of the old man would ward off evil. If there were any spirits hovering in the dark, they were from Christ, attracted by grandfather’s goodness.

Dyce tried to concentrate on the rhythm of the rain this night, to let the gentle patter lull him into sleep— but the voices kept intruding. Try as he might, he could not shut off his hearing and blank them out. They were louder tonight than usual, angrier. Although he could not make out the words, he could distinguish the voices—his father’s tone, high, on a rising pitch, alternately whining and yelling, then slipping occasionally lower, as he uttered imprecations in what he thought were asides to himself but could be clearly heard by anyone in the room. And his grandfather’s voice, much lower than his father’s, slower and more measured—the voice of God, Dyce sometimes thought—not Jesus who he thought would speak in a gentle tenor, but God the Father, strong but compassionate. This night even grandfather’s great patience was being tried and he, too, was angry.

Dyce slipped out of bed and opened his dormer window. Light from the parlor below his bedroom spilled out into the night, swallowed immediately by the rain. And the rain kept him from hearing, too. The voices were louder this way but still masked by the constant tapping on the roof. Dyce did not really need to hear them to understand. The two men had this same argument every time, and in his mind Dyce could see them as he had seen them several times before when he crept from his bedroom and stole halfway down the stairs to peek into the parlor. His father would be pacing, jabbing at the air with his fists, snarling sometimes as he faced the old man. All pretense at sobriety would be long gone by now after repeated visits to the bottle under the car seat. The bottle itself was probably gone and the knowledge that he would have nothing more to drink until midday when the Minnot liquor store opened would be enough to drive Dysen into desperation.