on.
That way you could always figure things out, 'Becka had
thought, delighted. She was unaware that her fingers had gone to the
spot above her left eye and were rubbing, rubbing, rubbing. For
instance, just look! You could make things fall into a line every time
by saying ax + bx + c = 0, and that proves it. It always works. It's
like Captain Marvel saying Shazam! Well, there is the zero factor;
you can't let 'a' be zero or that spoils it. But otherwise
She had lain awake a while longer, considering this, and then
had fallen asleep, unaware that she had just reinvented the quadratic
equation, and polynomials, and the concept of factoring.
Ideas. Quite a few of them just lately.
'Becka picked up Joe's little blowtorch and lit it deftly with a
kitchen match. She would have laughed last month if you'd told her
she would ever be working with something like this. But it was easy.
Jesus had told her exactly how to solder the wires to the electronics
board from the old radio. It was just like fixing up the vacuum
cleaner, only this idea was even better.
Jesus had told her a lot of other things in the last three days or
so. They had murdered her sleep (and what little sleep she had gotton
was nightmare-driven), they had made her afraid to show her face in
the village itself (I'll always know when you've done something
wrong, 'Becka, her father had told her, because your face just can't
keep a secret), they had made her lose her appetite. Joe, totally
bound up in his work, the Red Sox, and his Hussy, noticed none of
these tings ... although he had noticed the other night as the watched
television that 'Becka was gnawing her fingernails, something she
had never done before it was, in fact, one of the many things she
nagged him about. But she was doing it now, all right; they were
bitten right down to the quick. Joe Paulson considered this for all of
twelve seconds before looking back at the Sony TV and losing
himself in dreams of Nancy Voss's billowy white breasts.
Here were just a few of the afternoon stories Jesus had told her
which had caused 'Becka to sleep poorly and to begin biting her
fingernails at the advanced age of forty-five:
In 1973, Moss Harlingen, one of Joe's poker buddies, had
murdered his father. They had been hunting deer up in
Greenville and it had supposedly been one of those tragic
accidents, but the shooting of Abel Harlingen had been no
accident. Moss simply lay up behind a fallen tree with his rifle
and waited until his father splashed towards him across a small
stream about fifty yards down the hill from where Moss was.
Moss shot his father carefully and deliberately through the
head. Moss thought he had killed his father for money. His
(Moss's) business, Big Ditch Construction, had two notes
falling due with two different banks, and neither bank would
extend because of the other. Moss went to Abel, but Abel
refused to help, although he could afford to. So Moss shot his
father and inherited a lot of money as soon as the county
