Thrust (15 page)

"Don't take whatever she offers you, man!
 
Don't you use it!
 
How you gonna do that?"

Howard had x-ray eyes, same as Chase's father.

There's a point when you realize you can't help yourself or anybody else and you just get through to the next minute by having an enormous capacity for forgiveness.
 
Mary's shoulders shook but she wasn't sobbing again yet.
 
They were about five minutes ahead of that, and when it hit she'd fall forward into his arms as if she'd been
shotgunned
in the spine.
 
Chase had to be careful of where he put his hands, anticipating everything and then watching it occur.
 

Get her inside, even if the husband continued squawking.

"Don't let her inside, man!
 
No!"

Touching her on the safest spot he could think of, the thumb, Chase drew her into the apartment but left the front door open.
 
Howard might run down with a golf club or meat cleaver or .32.
 
There was no way of knowing how much coke the guy had done today.
 

"What's wrong, Mary?"
 
Chase asked.
 

This had been the way he always spoke to his mother, in the same tone of voice. Hoping to sound like a man even when he was longing for somebody else to treat him like a child.
 
Come in and hug him, pick him up, carry him out of harm's way.
 
If your mother died before you were ten, you'd search for her for the rest of your life.
  

She said nothing and proffered the condom again.
 
It didn't make for a sexy situation.
 

So Howard's getting a little action on the side, Mary finds out, and the usual absurdity ensues.
 
Plans for revenge are honed only so far as nabbing rubbers and making a rush for the guy below, who's always home during the day.
 

Adversity didn't have to come knocking, sometimes it just clawed at the door and you let it in because you're stupid and that's what you do.

She handed him the condom and swept around the living room in circles, arms held out, making a wide circuit like she was ballroom dancing.
 
They did it on the ward all the time.
 
Chase looked up to see if Howard had started drilling holes through the ceiling yet.
 

"Mary?"

Her silence really threw him.
 
Considering that she was always talking, rambling, rattling, he didn't like the heaviness of her false composure.
 
This was when you went over the big edge.
 
She twirled some more, clomping her heels now, making the place shake with a nice salsa beat.
 

Chase nodded his head in time, finding the same rhythm, understanding how to put it down on the page.
 
She slung herself past the couch and glanced at the pad.
 
Mary stopped cold and picked it up.
 
She tore the top piece of paper off and held it in front of her face, peering through the rips at him.
 

Another time he would've said "Go home, Mom," but he was still consciously making the effort to focus.
 
She wasn't his mother.
 
Probably not, anyway.
 

"Go home, Mary."

"I want to stay," she told him, getting a little girl twitter in her voice.
 
Maybe it was meant to arouse him, but all it did was make him think of the teenagers in the Falls who were always getting their stomachs pumped.
 

Howard started creeping around upstairs, throwing a fit, mewling.
 
He wailed his wife's name doing his best Stanley Kowalski.
 

She didn't appear to notice.
 
A flash of cognizance entered and vanished from her eyes.
 
She moved with great deliberate care, wanting to take her time as events developed.
 
People often thought important moments needed to be lengthened.
 
You held on to drama hoping to find significance.
  

An expression of concern pleated the angles of her face into a severe but affectionate pout.
 
The way the nuns used to give it to him in grade school.
 

Like this was going to work out somehow, and be of help to everyone.
 
She opened her arms and his flaws and weaknesses nearly propelled him into them.
 
It was a reflex action. You learned to accept intimacy when you found it, no matter how crazy it got afterwards.
 
He wanted to cry out for Mama.
 
You always whimpered for Mama before you took the final step off the rim of the world.
 

He found he was still holding the condom and didn't know what to do with the packet.
 
Give it back?
 
Throw it away?
 
His garbage was overflowing in the basket.
 
This is why it paid to be organized and tidy, for situations exactly like this.
 

He decided to just put it in his pocket.
 
Nobody knew what the hell was going to happen tomorrow anyway.

"I'm going to stay," Mary said, "for a while.
 
You don't mind do you?"

"If you want to talk about what's going on between you and Howard, I'll listen," Chase said.
 
"Otherwise, you should leave."

And still the guy was screeching upstairs, "How you gonna do that, man, huh?
 
It
ain't
right!
 
It's not right!"

Chase wasn't about to argue.
 
He'd been down a lot lower than these two, and the shrieking helped.
 
Being able to talk to Shake and
Jez
and the dead girl Stacy was all that kept him alive for a while in there.
 
He didn't underestimate the power of a white heat
bitchfest
.
 

He wondered where they were in the countdown, how close to zero.
 
Mary's fingers quivered badly, her nails clicking together.
 
Maybe he ought to feed her some of his medication.
 
He searched for the bottle of
Haldol
thinking that if everybody was
tranqued
there'd be a whole lot less problems in the city.
 

There was nothing humiliating about taking the easy way out.
 

You could search for years and never find the easy way—when you found it, you had a God-given right to take it.
 

So, he could either sit her down and try to nurse her through this ordeal or get her back into her own apartment where she and Howard could pour it all out in front of one another.
  
Mom and Dad should keep the kids clear of the middle.
 

"Mary, go back upstairs please.
 
You need to leave now."

"Screw me, Charlie," she said.
 

It took him back.
 
"What?"

"I need you, Charlie.
 
I want you."

With Howard smearing himself against the floorboards.
 
"Don't do it, Charlie!"

Christ, they didn't even know his name.

Sometimes you had time to fuck around and sometimes you didn't.
 
He realized then that he couldn't help either of them, no matter what he did. Chase grabbed her by the upper arm and tugged her towards the open door.
 
She didn't resist and he could feel her legs wavering, about to give out.
 
Gently he steered her into the hall and supported her while they took the steps.
 
Twice she nearly dropped but he held her steady, enjoying the feel of her weight against him.
 

"It's your choice if you want to leave," he told her.
 
"I'm not saying you should stay.
 
You do what's right for you."

For all he knew he was handing the girl right back to somebody like Joe Singleton.
 
Perhaps, like Annie Singleton, Mary, his Mom, couldn't make the choice on her own.
 
Maybe she was a fool, and would someday pour meth into the stew and try to get Daddy to OD.

When they got to her apartment he shouldered the door open.
 
Howard was still on the floor, crying, with a daub of coke on his nose.
 
The bottle of wine had fallen off the dinette table and settled in the middle of the room.
 
That cheap shit looked like spatters of blood.

It made Chase check the kitchen for any butcher knives, potato peelers, can openers, or corkscrews that might be around.
 
There were none out in the open.
 
Not even in the drawers.
 
The dishwasher was loaded.
 
That was good.
 
No one killed somebody else with a dirty utensil.

He got an arm around Mary and reached down to grab Howard by the wrist.
 
The guy was definitely hitting the powder too hard, he was down to around one thirty-five.
 
Chase pulled and Howard came flying upwards, weightless as cigarette ash.
 

Chase carried the two of them, both quietly weeping now, into their bedroom and laid them out on the bed side by side.
 
They started whispering and Chase got the hell out of there.

He hit the steps and looked down.

Jez
stood at the bottom of the stairway.
 

This blade is going to snag your intestines and slide them out.

Mama, mama.

"Hello, Killer," she said.
 
"Did you miss me?"

Y
es, he missed her, and every day it somehow grew worse, no matter how he tried to press it back, he only craved and wanted her more.
 

When you didn't have somebody on hand to help you through the desperate minutes, then you went and found her wherever you could.
 
Why shouldn't you fall in love in the nuthouse?
 
It made more sense than falling in love in a coffee shop, an overpriced dance club, a Jewish Deli.

"Yes," he said, "I do."

Only then did he fully understand that he shouldn't have left his place, that a maniac was on the prowl for him.
 
Jesus, he couldn't stay on his toes even when his life depended on it.
 
He squinted, really concentrated, pushing past the face he saw as
Jez
, expecting Singleton under the mask, with his sharpened piece of metal already out and arcing forward.

But no, it was only the girl, Dawn Miller, and beside her was standing the kid, Jasper Cox.

"Hey!" she said.
 
"I hope you don't mind us dropping over like this."

He descended the stairs and they followed him back to his apartment.
 
The fey blonde winked at him.
 
She smiled and the dimples creased her cheeks.
 
That erotic pouty lower lip jutted at him.
 

Jasper's deviated septum made his breath come out in panting bites, and his wheezing stirred the down under Dawn's ears.
 
The rich pink flush of her neck was almost red and looked like somebody had been grabbing her, choking her.
 
Those blue eyes shifted to green and stayed there.
 
Chase waited, but they didn't change back.
 
Maybe he just had bad lighting in his apartment.

They had both been drinking and were a little hammered.
  

Chase actually let out a chuckle.
 
He rarely had people over, and it felt good to have somebody inside who wasn't a phantom and probably wasn't trying to kill him.
 
So far as he knew.

"We thought we could take you out to dinner before your reading tonight."

"Yeah, have a couple of cocktails.
 
Get you in the zone."

They were watching him, making sure he didn't crap out again like last time.
 
His own personal trustees.
 
So this was how Jasper was making his move up the ranks—get in close, do some back-patting, feed folks Mom's soup, and make sure the old guard didn't topple before inviting in the new.
 
If only Chase had been smart enough to play the game that way when he was Jasper's age.

"What a great place," Dawn said.
 
"It's wall to wall books."

He had to look.
 
After so long, Chase didn't really notice anymore.
 
His bookcases and their contents all flowed together into one solid object, like a painting that constantly grew larger.
 

Jasper's slightly crooked nose aimed at Chase's brag shelf bookcase and, magnetized, drew towards it with his hands out.
 
He ran his fingers across the spines of Chase's published collections, clearing away the dust and rubbing further, as if he could take Chase's name off and replace it with his own.