The light.
The light was wrong.
This realization brought others in quick succession. Her stiff neck. The circles of sweat darkening her dress under her arms. And
Her hand flew to her crotch. There was a faint dampness there, drying now, and she isolated a dim ammoniac smell in the car. It had been there for some time, but her conscious mind had just now tumbled to it.
I Pissed myself. I pissed myself and I've been in this fucking car almost long enough for it to dry
(and the light, Anne)
The light was wrong. It was sunset light.
Oh no-it's nine-thirty in the
But it was sunset light. There was no denying it. She had felt better after vomiting, yes… and she suddenly understood why. The knowledge had been there all along, really, just waiting to be noticed, like the patches of sweat under the arms of her dress, or that faint smell of drying urine. She had felt better because the period between closing the door and actually starting the car again hadn't been seconds or minutes but hours-she had spent all that brutally hot summer day in the oven of the car. She had lain in a deathlike stupor, and if she had been using the Cutlass's air-conditioning with all the windows rolled up when she stopped the car, she would have cooked like a Thanksgiving turkey. But her sinuses were nearly as bad as her teeth, and the canned air manufactured by automobile air-conditioners irritated them. This physical problem, she realized suddenly, staring at the old farm with wide, bloodshot eyes, had probably saved her life. She had been running with all four windows open. Otherwise
This led to another thought. She had spent the day in a deathlike stupor, parked by the side of the road, and no one had stopped to check on her. That no one had come along a main road like Route 9 in all those hours since nine-thirty was something she just couldn't accept. Not even out in the sticks. And when they did see you in trouble in Sticksville, they didn't just put the pedal to the metal and keep on going, like New Yorkers stepping over a wino.
What kind of town is this, anyway?
That unaccustomed trickle again, like hot acid in her stomach.
This time she recognized the feeling as fear, seized it, wrung its neck… and killed it. Its brother might show up later on, and if so, she would kill it too, and all the sibs that might follow.
She drove into the yard.
Anne had met Jim Gardener twice before, but she never forgot a face. Even so, she barely recognized the Great Poet, although she believed she could have smelled him at forty yards, if she had been downwind on even a moderately breezy day. He was sitting on the porch in a strappy T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans, an open bottle of Scotch in one hand. He had a threeor four-day beard-stubble, much of it gray. His eyes were bloodshot. Although Anne didn't know this-and wouldn't have cared-Gardener had been in this state, more or less, for the last two days. All his noble resolves had gone by the board since finding the dog hairs on Bobbi's dress.
He watched the car pull into the dooryard (missing the mailbox by bare inches) with a drunk's bleary lack of surprise. He watched the woman get out, stagger, and hold on to the open door for a minute.
Oh wow, Gardener thought. It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Superbitch. Faster than a speeding hate-letter, able to leap cringing family members at a single bound.
Anne shoved the car door closed. She stood there for a moment, throwing a long shadow, and Gardener felt an eerie sense of familiarity. She looked like Ron Cummings when Ron had a skinful and was trying to decide if he could walk across the room.
Anne made her way across the dooryard, trailing a steadying hand along the side of Bobbi's truck. When she had passed the truck, she reached at once for the porch railing. She looked up, and in the slanting light of seven o'clock, Gardener thought the woman looked both aged and ageless. She also looked evil, he thought -jaundiced and yellowish-black with a “heavy freight of evil that was simultaneously wearing her out and eating her up.
He raised the Scotch, drank, gagged at the rank burn. Then he tipped the neck of it at her. “Hello, Sissy. Welcome to Haven. Having said that much, I now urge you to leave as fast as you can.”
She got up the first two steps okay, then stumbled and went to one knee. Gardener held out a hand. She ignored it.
“Where's Bobbi?”
“You don't look so good,” Gard said. “Haven has that effect on people these days.”
“I'm fine,” she said, at last gaining the porch. She stood over him, panting. “Where is she?”
Gardener inclined his head toward the house. The steady hiss of water came from one of the open windows. “Shower. We've been working in the woods all day and it was esh-extremely hot. Bobbi believes in showering to remove dirt.” Gardener raised the bottle again. “I believe in simply disinfecting. Shorter and pleasanter.”
“You smell like a dead pig,” Anne remarked, and started past him toward the house.
“While my own nose is undoubtedly not as keen as your own, dear heart, you have a delicate but noticeable odor of your own,” Gard said. “What do the French call that particular perfume? Eau de Piss?”
She turned on him, startled into a snarl. People-people in Utica, at least-didn't speak to her that way. Never. But of course, they knew her. The Great Poet had undoubtedly judged her on the basis of his jizz receptacle: Haven's resident celebrity. And he was drunk.
“Well,” Gardener said, amused but also a trifle uneasy under her smoking gaze, “it was you who brought up the subject of aroma.”
“So I did,” she said slowly.
“Maybe we ought to start again,” he said with drunken courtesy.
“Start what again? You're the Great Poet. You're the drunk who shot his wife. I have nothing to say to you. I came for Bobbi.”
Good shot, the thing about the wife. She saw his face freeze, saw his hand tighten on the neck of the bottle. He stood there as if he had at least temporarily forgotten where he was. She offered him a sweet smile. That smartass crack about Eau de Piss had gotten through, but sick or not, she thought she was still ahead on points.
Inside, the shower shut off. And-perhaps it was only a hunch-Gardener had a clear sense of Bobbi listening.
“You always did like to operate without anesthetic. I guess I never got anything but exploratory surgery before this, huh?”
“Maybe.”
“Why now? After all these years, why did you have to pick now?”
“None of your business.”
“Bobbi's my business.”
They faced each other. She drilled him with her gaze. She waited for his eyes to drop. They didn't. It suddenly occurred to her that if she started into the house without saying more, he might attempt to restrain her. It wouldn't do him any good, but it might be simpler to answer his question. What difference did it make?
“I've come to take her home.”
Silence again.
There are no crickets.
“Let me give you a piece of advice, Sister Anne.”
“Spare me. No candy from strangers, no advice from drunks.”
“Do exactly what I told you when you got out of the car. Leave. Now. Just go. This is not a good place to be right now.”
There was something in his eyes, something desperately honest, that brought on a recurrence of her earlier chill and that unaccustomed confusion. She had been left all day in her car at the side of the road as she lay in a swoon. What sort of people did that?
Then every bit of her Anne-ness rose up and crushed these little doubts. If she wanted a thing to be, if she meant a thing to be, that thing would be; so it had been, was, and ever would be, alleluia, Amen.
“Okay, Chumly,” she said. “You gave me yours, I'll give you mine. I'm going inside that shack, and about two minutes later a very large chunk of shit is going to hit the fan. I suggest you go for a walk if you don't want to get splattered. Sit on a rock somewhere and watch the sun go down and jerk off or think up rhymes or do whatever it is Great Poets do when they watch the sunset. But you want to keep out of what goes on in the house, no matter what. It's between Bobbi and me. If you get in my way, I'll rip you up.”
“In Haven, You're more likely to be the rippee than the ripper.”
“Well, that's something I'll have to see for myself, even though I'm not from Missouri,” Anne said, and started for the door.
“Anne… Sissy… Bobbi's not the same. She.
“Take a walk, little man,” Anne said, and went inside.
The windows were open but for some reason the shades were drawn. Every now and then a puff of faint breeze would stir, sucking the shades into the openings a little way. When it happened, they looked like the sails of a becalmed ship doing their best and failing. Anne sniffed and wrinkled her nose. Bluh. The place smelled like a monkey-house. From the Great Poet she would have expected it, but her sister had been raised better. This place was a pigsty.
“Hello, Sissy.”
She turned. For a moment Bobbi was just a shadow, and Anne felt her heart go into her throat because there was something odd about that shape, something all wrong
Then she saw the white blur of her sister's robe, heard the patter of water, and understood that Bobbi had just come from the shower. She was all but naked. Good. But her pleasure was not as great as it should have been. Her unease remained, her feeling that there was something wrong about the shape in the doorway.
This is not a good place to be right now.
“Daddy's dead,” she said, straining her eyes to see better. For all her straining, Bobbi remained only a dim figure in the door which communicated between
