17
Wilma and Nettle met on the corner of Willow and Ford. There they halted, staring at each other like gunslingers in a spaghetti Western.
The wind flapped their coats briskly to and fro. The sun shuttered in and out of the clouds; their shadows came and went like fitful visitors.
No traffic moved on either of these two streets, or on the sidewalks. They owned this little corner of the autumn afternoon.
You killed my dog, you bitch!”
’You broke my TV! You broke my windows! You broke my microwave, you crazy cunt!”
“I warned you!”
“Stick your warning up your old dirt road!”
“I’m going to kill you!”
“Take one step and someone’s going to die here, all right, but it won’t be me!”
Wilma spoke these words with alarm and dawning surprise; Nettle’s face made her realize for the first time that the two of them might be about to engage in something a little more serious than pulling hair or ripping clothes. What was Nettle doing here in the first place? What had happened to the element of surprise? How had things come so quickly to the sticking point?
But there was a deep streak of Polish Cossack in Wilma’s nature, a part that found such questions irrelevant. There was a battle to be fought here; that was the important thing.
Nettle ran at her, lifting the cleaver as she came. Her lips peeled back from her teeth and a long howl tore out of her throat.
Wilma crouched, holding her knife out like a giant switchblade.
As Nettle closed with her, Wilma drove it forward. It thrust deep into Nettle’s bowels and then rose, slitting her stomach open and letting out a spurt of stinking gruel. Wilma felt a moment’s horror at what she had don other end of the steel buried in Nettle?-and her arm muscles relaxed. The knife’s upward momentum died before the blade could reach Nettle’s frantically pumping heart.
“OOOOH YOU BIIIITCH!” Nettle screamed, and brought the cleaver down. It buried itself to the hilt in Wilma’s shoulder, splitting the collarbone with a dull crunch.
The pain, a huge wooden plank of it, drove any objective thought from Wilma’s mind. Only the raving Cossack was left. She yanked her knife free.
Nettle yanked her cleaver free. It took both hands to do it, and when she finally succeeded in wrenching it off the bone, a loose slew of guts slipped from the bloody hole in her dress and hung before her in a glistening knot.
The two women circled slowly, their feet printing tracks in their own blood. The sidewalk began to look like some weird Arthur Murray dance diagram. Nettle felt the world beginning to pulse in and out in great, slow cycles-the color would drain from things, leaving her in a blur of whiteness, and then it would slowly come back. She heard her heart in her ears, great slow snaffling thuds.
She knew she was wounded but felt no pain. She thought Wilma might have cut her a little in the side, or something.
Wilma knew how badly she was hurt; was aware that she could no longer lift her right arm and that the back of her dress was drenched with blood. She had no intention of even trying to run away, however.
She had never run in her life, and she wasn’t going to start now.
“Hi!” someone screamed thinly at them from across the street.
“Hi! What are you two ladies doing there? You stop it, whatever it is!
You stop it right now or I’ll call the police!”
Wilma turned her head in that direction. The moment her attention was diverted, Nettle stepped in and swung the cleaver in a flat, sweeping arc. It chopped into the swell of Wilma’s hip and clanged off her pelvic bone, cracking it. Blood flew in a fan. Wilma screamed and flailed backward, sweeping the air in front of her with her knife. Her feet tangled together and she fell to the sidewalk with a thump.
“Hi! Hi!” It was an old woman, standing on her stoop and clutching a mouse-colored shawl to her throat. Her eyes were mag ould it really be Wilma jerzyck on the nified into watery wheels of terror by her spectacles. Now she trumpeted in her clear and piercing old-lady voice: “Help! Police!
Murder! MURRRDURRRRR!”
The women on the corner of Willow and Ford took no notice.
Wilma had fallen in a bloody heap by the stop-sign, and as Nettle staggered toward her, she pushed herself into a sitting position against its post and held the knife in her lap, pointing upward.
“Come on, you bitch,” she snarled. “Come for me, if you’re coming.”
Nettle came, her mouth working. The ball of her intestines swung back and forth against her dress like a misborn fetus. Her right foot struck Wilma’s outstretched left foot and she fell forward.
The carving knife impaled her just below the breastbone. She grunted through a mouthful of blood, raised the cleaver, and brought it down. It buried itself in the top of Wilma Jersyck’s head with a single dull sound-chonk! Wilma began to convulse, her body bucking and sunfishing under Nettle’s. Each buck and thrash drove the carving knife in deeper.
“Killed… my… doggy,” Nettle gasped, spitting a fine mist of blood into Wilma’s upturned face with every word. Then she shuddered all over and went limp. Her head honked the post of the stop-sign as it fell forward.
Wilma’s jittering foot slid into the gutter. Her good black forchurch shoe flew off and landed in a pile of leaves with its low heel pointing up at the bustling clouds. Her toes flexed once… once more… and then relaxed.
The two women lay draped over each other like lovers, their blood painting the cinnamon-colored leaves in the gutter.
“MURRRRRDURRRRRR!” the old woman across the street trumpeted again, and then she rocked backward and fell full-length on her own hall floor in a faint.
Others in the neighborhood were coming to windows and opening doors now, asking each other what had happened, stepping out on stoops and lawns, first approaching the scene cautiously, then backing away in a hurry, hands over mouths, when they saw not only what had happened, but the gory extent of it.
Eventually, someone called the Sheriff’s Office.
18
Polly Chalmers was walking slowly up Main Street toward Needful Things with her aching hands bundled into her warmest pair of mittens when she heard the first police siren. She stopped and watched as one of the county’s three brown Plymouth cruisers belted through the intersection of Main and Laurel, lights flashing and twirling. It was doing fifty already and still accelerating. It was closely followed by a second cruiser.
She watched them out of sight, frowning. Sirens and racing police cruisers were a rarity in The Rock. She wondered what had happened-something a little more serious than a cat up a tree, she supposed. Alan would tell her when he called that evening.
Polly looked up the street again and saw Leland Gaunt standing in the doorway of his shop, also watching after the cruisers with an expression of mild curiosity on his face. Well, that answered one question: he was in. Nettle had never called her back to let her know one way or another. This hadn’t surprised Polly much; the surface of Nettle’s mind was slippery, and things had a way of sliding right off.
She walked on up the street. Mr. Gaunt looked around and saw her. His face lit up in a smile.
“Ms. Chalmers! How nice that you could drop by!”
She smiled wanly. The pain, which had abated for awhile that morning, was now creeping back, thrusting its network of thin, cruel wires through the flesh of her hands. “I thought we’d agreed on Polly.”
“Polly, then. Come inside it’s awfully good to see you. What’s all the excitement?”
“I don’t know,” she said. He held the door for her and she went past him into the shop. “I suppose someone’s been hurt and needs to go to the hospital. Medical Assistance in Norway is awfully slow on the weekends. Although why the dispatcher would send two cruisers…”
Mr. Gaunt closed the door behind them. The bell tinkled. The shade on the door was down, and with the sun now going the other way, the interior of Needful Things was gloomy… but, Polly thought, if gloom could ever be pleasant, this gloom was. A small reading lamp shed a golden circle on the counter by Mr. Gaunt’s old-fashioned cash register. A book lay open there. It was Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Mr. Gaunt was looking at her closely, and Polly had to smile again at the expression of concern in his eyes.
“My hands have been kicking up the very dickens these last few days,” she said. “I guess I don’t exactly look like Demi Moore.”
“You look like a woman who is very tired and in quite a lot of discomfort,” he said.
The smile on her face wavered. There was understanding and deep compassion in his voice, and for a moment Polly was afraid she might burst into tears. The thought which kept the tears at bay was an odd one: His hands. If I cry, he’ll try to comfort me. He’ll put his hands on me.
She buttressed the smile.
“I’ll survive; I always have. Tell me-did Nettle Cobb happen to drop by?”
“Today?” He frowned. “No; not today. If she had, I would have shown her a new piece of carnival glass that came in yesterday. It’s not as nice as the one I sold her last week, but I thought she might be interested. Why do you ask?”
“Oh… no reason,” Polly said. “She said she might, but Nettle… Nettle often forgets things.”
“She strikes me as a woman who has had a hard life,” Mr. Gaunt said gravely.
“Yes. Yes, she has.” Polly spoke these words slowly and mechanically. She could not seem to take her eyes from his. Then one of her hands brushed against the edge of a glass display case, and that caused her to break eye-contact. A little gasp of pain escaped her.
“Are you all right?”
