The Glory Hand (20 page)

Melanie licked her lips nervously; Jo's eyes were wide; and Chelsea was digging the purple points of her nails into her neck. The way the seniors moved
was
hypnotic, Cassie thought, their bodies a blur, backlit by the torches. It seemed as though the only ones who refused to yield were the three newcomers to the camp this year, the three misfits: herself, Robin and Iris. Robin was hugging the kitten close to her, as if to protect it from the chanting. Iris was crossing herself, again and again, as if the movement were a nervous tic. But Cassie could feel her eyes drawn to the ring of seniors circling them.

Don't look into Abigail's eyes,
she thought. But how could she avoid them? In the blur of movement, it seemed that Abigail's eyes were everywhere, surrounding her, glazed eyes that made Cassie think Abigail was drugged. But as Abigail led the others whirling in the dance, Cassie sensed that her ecstacy came from something much more potent than drugs, and much harder to explain.

Circling . . . circling . . . the seniors' dance spawned a wind that fanned the dying campfire to a roar. And still they spun faster, their white faces dissolving into rows of grinning teeth in the firelight, their feet pounding a strident tempo in the sand. Cassie glanced down and noticed one of the marshmallow sticks poking into the fire an arm's length away. The marshmallow had burned away, leaving a pointed tip that the fire had heated into a red-hot poker.
Grab it,
she thought . . .
Use it to force your way out of the circle before they can stop you . . .
But as she leaned down for the stick, it was already too late. Because the seniors had stopped.

'The Spinning holds the key.'

Stretching out their arms until they extended over the flames, they turned, their fingers like the pointers of compasses stabbing north.

Pointing at one of the girls from Lakeside, and Cassie refused to accept it, refused to accept the name the seniors' spoke as one.

'Robin.'

Robin pressed a hand to her stomach, as if the mention of her name had made her sickness worse.

'Robin . . . Robin . . . Robin . . .'
The seniors chanted,
'Robin . . . Robin . . . Robin,'
as though the syllables were an incantation with its own magical powers. Slowly, Abigail raised her palms upward, beckoning for Robin to stand.

'Stay here,' Cassie whispered. 'They can't make you

Robin's voice was distant. 'I have to.'

'Don't be dumb!'

'I
. . .
I
. . . want
to.'

'Are you out of your mind?' But in her calm, Robin seemed anything but that. It was Cassie whose voice cracked, Cassie who seemed to be ranting. 'Come on . . . You don't have to go with them . . /

'Fuck off! I'm sick of you telling me what to do!'Robin let the kitten slip from her hands. Though it rolled so close to the fire the flames singed its fur, Robin made no move to help.

Cassie snatched it up. 'Robin!' That cold, hard look - it was something Cassie had never seen in her friend before. 'Robin,
please . . .'

Smiling her most-popular-girl-at-camp smile, Abigail held out a pendant on a thin silver chain. Cassie strained to see the bauble that flashed in the firelight, but before she could make it out, Abigail had slipped the chain around Robin's neck,, and the pendant disappeared down her sweatshirt. From the jealous stares of her cabinmates, Cassie guessed that any of them would have gladly taken Robin's place.

Abigail reached out for Robin's hand, and as if someone had thrown on fresh kindling, the bonfire leapt higher, shooting sparks into the sky. Defying the heat, Abigail led Robin towards the firepit, where windblown flames lashed out at them in blades of orange and yellow and red. Cassie wanted to pull Robin away, but she couldn't get near her -the heat was too intense.

'Robin, don't. . .'

As Abigail slipped an arm around her and pulled her close, Robin didn't resist. They stood belly to belly in the scorching heat, Abigail pressing her hips against her. Then Robin closed her eyes and opened her mouth. Abigail plunged her tongue inside.

The brackish taste of Miss Grace's tongue welled up in Cassie's throat, as if it had been coiled there since the first night of camp. The old woman's nameless hunger - she wondered if that was what possessed Abigail tonight.

I can't let them do this to her.
But Cassie knew no one was making Robin do anything, that she was doing it because^ she wanted to.

The other seniors embraced Robin in turn, pressing their bodies against hers one by one, caressing her breasts in the firelight. And she opened her mouth to accept their kisses.1

Then she looked back at Cassie with a defiant smile, Abigail picked up her torch, and as Robin followed her, the night seemed darker to Cassie than before.

One by one the girls from Lakeside stood up slowly, seemingly disappointed that their turn had not come, and headed back towards the cabin. Cassie lingered on the beach, watching the seniors' procession as it snaked into the forest.

She's gone. She left you, like your mother.

On the eastern horizon, a campfire crouched on a distant hilltop far beyond the lake, orange, feline, like a tiger eyeing its prey. Why hadn't she noticed it before? Or had they flared suddenly, like lava spewing from a volcano? It was impossible for Cassie to say. But she sensed that the torches were moving towards it.

And that she would never see Robin again.

Chapter 16

Jake crumpled up the pieces of composition paper and threw them, one by one, into the fire, waiting as breathlessly for them to explode into flame as if they were hand grenades. 'Pay attention. This is as close as I intend to come to suicide tonight.' The toad perched on the Moog didn't condescend to reply. It just stared at Jake, its throat throbbing, the membranes over its eyes glazed in boredom. 'One funny thing about me,' Jake said. 'Desperation makes most people shut up. It only makes me run off at the mouth.'

The cabin was stifling. The tin roof absorbed the heat of the day and left the room roasting after dark. He had stripped off his cut-offs, and stood naked before the fireplace. It crossed his mind that he must have looked like someone indulging in an ancient, secret rite. 'Don't get me wrong, I've tried the real thing before. No leaps from tall buildings ... no bullets in the brain, of course. Just valium. Mucho valium. I took them like M&Ms, all at once. But I was chickenshit. I knew Barbara had heard the crazies in my voice over the phone . . . that she'd come home early that day . . . and that there'd be plenty of time for the stomach pump. Christ, you're married ten years and your wife knows what you're thinking before you do.' He scanned the notations on another sheet of composition paper, then crumpled it into a ball and threw it into the flames after the others. 'This kind of suicide takes more guts. A lot more.'

The toad puffed out its throat. 'Okay, so you're not impressed. You know something, you web-footed son-of-a-bitch? You're iousy in bed. The nights here have been the worst, thanks to you. But tonight's a lot easier. Because it's my last night here. I mean, who needs it?' He ran the tip of his finger along the toad's warty back. 'Sorry, but I have to admit it. The only reason I'm indulging in a one-sided conversation with an amphibian is because it's easier to look into your beady eyes than those.' He glanced nervously at the tiny red lights on the synthesizer that had been staring him down for hours.

Flicking a dial on the console, he played a few chords on the keyboard, the strident notes resounding in the cramped room. Then he took a drag on his joint and winced. 'I don't know which is staler, my grass or my music.' The electronic hum of the synthesizer annoyed him and he mashed a button. The red eyes of the Moog died stubbornly.

Satisfied to have killed it, he took another long drag on the joint, his eyes smarting from the acrid smoke. Grass made him paranoid, he knew, and yet he puffed on it anyway. 'Just because you're paranoid,' he mused, 'doesn't mean they're really not all out to get you.' But who needed enemies? he thought. As long as he had himself.

Grudgingly, Jake lay the joint stub on the console and turned to the tapes, the one he had played for Cassie, and those that he had laboriously mixed together to make it. One by one he let the transparent plastic reels unspool their shiny brown tape into the fire. The acetate strips flared brightly, and the poisonous smell of burning plastic filled the room. Then the fire went out.

'A flash in the pan,' Jake mused. 'Like all my work . . , like my life. A moment of brilliance, followed by . . . Damn kid. It was her fault.' He turned to the toad. 'A thirteen-year-old teenybopper shoots me down, and I cave in?' He shook his head. 'No, it was just a matter of timing. If she hadn't wandered in out of the woods, I would have been able to kid myself for three more weeks . . . maybe four. Until I got back to the Big Apple and played it for someone who would have been a lot less polite. At least she let me down easy . . .'

He took a final hit from the joint stub. It burnt his lips and mixed sourly with the taste of Wild Turkey, but instead of bringing the numbness he wanted, the two intoxicants canceled each other out, and forced him back to reality. 'Okay, so the nature-boy bit was a disaster. No snappy tunes came out of the Wurlitzer.' He sighed. 'So I guess it's back to New York.' He said the word as though it was Siberia. The end of the line. For going back meant admitting to himself that he didn't have it anymore, admitting that it was gone.

He threw a battered canvas suitcase on the mattress and flipped open the latches. A photograph of his wife stuck out of the side pocket. It was Barbara's favorite picture of herself, taken at the Metropolitan when she was restoring the gold leaf on an illuminated letter of a medieval Book of Kells with a tiny paintbrush and a magnifying glass. She had given him the picture to take with him, but he hadn't put it up. He wouldn't have been able to stand her supremely competent gaze, judging him.

Reluctantly, his eyes returned to her face. The intelligent brunette with the impudent smile would have
seemed
striking to him, had not ten years of marriage dulled the edge. She had become an expert at preserving antiquities as
_a
curator at the Met, but their marriage felt so old, so stale, it was like one of those fragile artifacts she handled with such caution - breathe on it and it might crumble to dust.

'Her patience is her best quality,' he said to the toad. 'She must have learned it restoring all those rotting manuscripts. God knows, she's patient enough with me . . .'
When I can't get it up in bed
, he should have added. But he didn't have the heart to tell even the toad that. 'I wonder what she'll say when I show up on her doorstep three weeks early, and tell her I couldn't get it up with my music either?'

The toad shot out its tongue to pick off a fly from the rim of a beer can on the console, but the fly darted away. Jake managed a wan smile. 'Looks like I'm not the only one who can't get it up.'

He wedged the photograph back into the pocket of the suitcase. 'Maybe I'll walk in and find her in the arms of another man. A clean-cut Gentile instead of a nervous Jew. No, she's too damned faithful. Besides, the other curators in that mausoleum are too light on their feet to get turned on by her.' He threw some T-shirts into the suitcase. 'Face it, what you're afraid to admit is that if your wife were making it with another man, you wouldn't give a damn. You don't have any more passion left for her than you have for your music. Even that kid from Casmaran could see that.'

The toad's eyes were drooping. 'You look just like my old shrink.' The amphibian's eyes sealed shut. 'I get the message: my fifty minutes are up.' Jake lay down on the mattress, the unwashed sheets gritty against his bare back. 'When I pull out tomorrow, I'll leave the Moog ... all the other crap here. It's yours, Horatio, for services rendered. Maybe you can lay eggs in it or something . . .'He looked up at the cobwebbed rafters. 'I should make it back to the city in time for a little borscht at the Carnegie Deli, with a healthy dollop of sour cream. And my first hot pastrami in a month. Now that, my friend, could arouse a spark of Passion even in me.'

* *
*

Impossible to sleep. The only effect of the booze and dop
_e
had been to turn Jake's stomach. An owl screeched as it circled over the cabin, hunting for rats. Even the rats were different up here, he thought, more devious, more elusive than the variety that made themselves at home in his
Upper
West Side apartment.

The room was suffocatingly hot, and reeked of burnt plastic. He stood up unsteadily, slipped on his cut-offs and pushed open the screen door. Outside on the porch he took a deep breath: the air smelled of pines, but the perfume bored him. Without the asbestos particles, the soot, the carbon monoxide he was used to, the night wind was too thin to revive him. At least in New York, he remindec himself, there was always enough human misery to distrac him from his own.

He looked up into the sky. All right, so for once in his life he could actually see stars. But they mocked him, like the lights of his Moog, rendered him puny and insignificant.

The Milky Way, the chirping cicadas, the rustling pine branches, the wind moaning, rippling across the lake . . i He didn't understand them. They were much more baffling much more ominous to him than the sirens and saxophone of Manhattan.