“I wipe my fucking ass on your last warning!” she cried, and threw the papers away.
She looked around the kitchen again with the wondering eyes of a child. A hole in the microwave. A big dent in the Amana refrigerator.
Broken glass all over. In the other room the TV, which had cost them almost sixteen hundred dollars, smelled like a FryO-Lator full of hot dogshit. And who had done it all? Who?
Why, Nettle Cobb had done it, that was who. Miss Mental Illness of 1991.
Wilma began to smile.
A person who did not know Wilma might have mistaken it for a gentle smile, a kindly smile, a smile of love and good fellowship.
Her eyes shone with some powerful emotion; the unwary might have mistaken it for exaltation. But if Peter jerzyck, who knew her best, had seen her face at that moment, he would have run the other way as fast as his legs could carry him.
“No,” Wilma said in a soft, almost caressing voice. “Oh, no, babe. You don’t understand. You don’t understand what it means to fuck with Wilma. You don’t have the slightest idea what it means to fuck with Wilma Wadlowski jerzyck.”
Her smile widened.
“But you will.”
Two magnetized steel strips had been mounted on the wall near the microwave. Most of the knives which had hung from these strips had been knocked loose by the rock Brian had pegged into the RadarRange; they lay on the counter in a pick-up-sticks jumble.
Wilma picked out the longest, a lcngsford carving knife with a white bone handle, and slowly ran her wounded palm along the side of the blade, smearing the cutting edge with blood.
“I’m going to teach you everything you need to know.”
Holding the knife in her fist, Wilma strode across the living room, crunching glass from the broken window and the TV picturetube under the low heels of her black for-church shoes. She went out the door without closing it and cut across her lawn in the direction of Ford Street.
15
At the same time Wilma was selecting a knife from the clutter of them on the counter, Nettle Cobb was pulling a meat-cleaver from one of her kitchen drawers. She knew it was sharp, because Bill Fullerton down at the barber shop had put an edge on it for her less than a month ago.
Nettle turned and walked slowly down the hallway toward her front door. She stopped and knelt for a moment beside Raider, her poor little dog who had never done anything to anyone.
“I warned her,” she said softly as she stroked Raider’s fur. “I warned her, I gave that crazy Polish woman every chance. I gave her every chance in the world. My dear little doggy. You wait for me.
You wait, because I’ll be with you soon.”
She got up and went out of her house, bothering with the door no more than Wilma had bothered with hers. Security had ceased to interest Nettle. She stood on the stoop for a moment, taking deep breaths, then cut across her lawn in the direction of Willow Street.
16
Danforth Keeton ran into his study and ripped open the closet door. He crawled all the way to the back. For a terrible moment he thought the game was gone, that the goddam intruding persecuting motherfucker Deputy Sheriff had taken it, and his future along with it.
Then his hands fell upon the box and he tore back the lid. The tin race-track was still there. And the envelope was still tucked beneath it. He bent it back and forth, listening to the bills crackle inside, and then replaced it.
He hurried to the window, looking out for Myrtle. She mustn’t see the pink slips. He had to take them all down before Myrtle got back, and how many were there? A hundred? He looked around his study and saw them stuck up everywhere. A thousand? Yes, maybe. Maybe a thousand. Even two thousand did not seem entirely out of the question.
Well, if she got here before he was done cleaning up, she would just have to wait on the step, because he wasn’t going to let her in until every one of these goddamned persecuting things was burning in the kitchen woodstove. Every… damned… one.
He snatched the slip dangling from the light-fixture. The tape stuck to his cheek and he pawed it away with a little squeal of anger.
On this one, a single word glared up from the line reserved for
OTHER VIOLATION(S):
He ran to the reading lamp by his easy chair. Snatched up the slip taped to the shade.
OTHER VIOLATION(S):
The TV:
HORSE-FUCKING The glass of his Lions Club Good Citizenship Award, mounted above the fireplace: CORNHOLING YOUR MOTHER The kitchen door: COMPULSIVE MONEY-CHUCKING AT LEWISTON RACEWAY The door to the garage: PSYCHOTIC GARBAGE-HEAD PARANOIA He gathered them up as fast as he could, eyes wide and bulging from his fleshy face, his thinning hair standing up in wild disarray.
He was soon panting and coughing, and an ugly reddish-purple color began to overspread his cheeks. He looked like a fat child with a grown-up’s face on some strange, desperately important treasure hunt.
He pulled one from the front of the china closet: STEALING FROM THE TOWN PENSION FUND TO PLAY THE PONIES Keeton hurried into his study with a pile of slips clutched in his right hand, strands of tape flying back from his fist, and began to pluck up more of the slips. The ones in here all stuck to a single subject, and with horrible accuracy: EMBEZZLEMENT.
MISAPPROPRIATION. BAD STEWARDSHIP. EMBEZZLEMENT. That word most of all, glaring, shouting, accusing:
He thought he heard something outside and ran to the window again.
Maybe it was Myrtle. Maybe it was Norris Ridgewick, come by to gloat and laugh. If so, Keeton would get his gun and shoot him. But not in the head. No. In the head would be too good, too quick, for scum like Ridgewick. Keeton would guthole him, and leave him to scream himself to death on the lawn.
But it was only the Garsons’ Scout, trundling down the View toward town. Scott Garson was the town’s most important banker.
Keeton and his wife sometimes took dinner with the Garsonsthey were nice people, and Garson himself was politically important.
What would he think if he saw these slips? What would he think of that word, EMBEZZLEMENT, screaming off the pink violation slips again and again, screaming like a woman being raped in the middle of the night?
He ran back into the dining room, panting. Had he missed any?
He didn’t think so. He’d gotten them all, at least down lieNo!
There was one! Right on the newel post of the stairway!
What if he had missed that one? My God!
He ran to it, snatched it up.
MAKE: SHITMOBILE MODEL: OLD AND WEARY LIC. #: OLDFUCK I OTHER VIOLATION(S): FINANCIAL FAGGOTRY
More? Were there more? Keeton coursed through the downstairs rooms at a dead run. His shirttail had come out of his pants and his hairy belly was bobbling wildly over his beltbuckle. He saw no more… at least not down here.
After another quick, frantic look out the window to make sure Myrt wasn’t yet in sight, he pelted upstairs with his heart thundering in his chest.
