Bob Feller. Hmmm. Well. Bob Feller. He was a pitcher. They used to say Feller only had three pitches, a fast ball, a burner, and a high hard one.'
“That's all any man needs.'
“Yeah?'
“Sure. You guys can do just fine as long as you got a couple of balls and a hard one.” She said it very seriously.
“Uh huh.'
“Be right back,” she said, getting up off the floor. “Don't you two go away.'
“We won't,” he promised.
“I'll be right back,” she repeated as she bounced off down the hall. A few moments later she reappeared. The sweatshirt and jeans were gone. She had on his shirt again, and the Mets cap.
“Hello there,” he said, checking her out. “That was a quick costume change.'
“Like you always say, I aims to please.'
“Uh.'
She was bare legged and wore no shoes. And the shirt was open in front and he could see the beautiful swells of those proud twin globes. She pulled the shirt apart a little farther and said, “You wanna come inside and play?'
“Right,” he said hoarsely. He got up and followed her down the hall toward the bedroom to inspect her fast- breaking curves.
Tuffy was busily batting his crumpled ball of paper all over the living room, his little fur ball of a body flying at top speed until he chased left when he should have chased right and ran right smack dab into a wall. The little kitten got back up, dazed, shook it off, and looked around.
Where the heck did everybody go?
When Jack snuggled against her something was changed. She could tell immediately, even as he was touching her, that her husband was just going through the motions, and to Donna Eichord it was a confusing irritation. This time she couldn't hold her tongue and said, “I can tell I'm driving you insane with desire,” in a tone that made him draw back from her and he smiled a little and kept touching her but he didn't try to fake a response.
“It isn't you, love.'
“That's good news,” she said.
“Come on,” he said very softly, feeling her draw away from his touch. “You know better.'
“I thought I did, but...” She knew how she must sound. She let it trail off into space.
“Really,” Jack said, sighing, “it's work. You know. Sometimes it just doesn't shake off at the front door.'
“That's okay. But you know, before, we've always talked about it if something is bothering one of us.'
“I know.'
“I'm starting to wonder if I'm doing something wrong.'
“Hey. Don't be silly.'
“I don't think it's being silly. Obviously something is out of kilter all of a sudden,” she said.
“Nothing about us. I just have a lot on my mind.'
“It hasn't been a problem before.” (Let UP for crissakes—what is
“I love ya a lot, you know that.” He touched her lightly on the tip of her nose. “I'm just having an off week.'
“Okay.” She smiled. “If you feel like talking about it...” Jeez, kid, she thought to herself, why can't you shut your trap? But she couldn't. It was too important not to let anything ever wedge itself between them. “You know I'm here to listen. Whatever it is.'
“Some things are just better left unsaid.” He sat up against the headboard. “If you really want to hear about it I don't mind telling you about it. It's no mysterious thing. You really want me to tell you the details?” He could no more stop himself now than she could.
“It might make YOU, you know'—long pause—'feel better to have, uh, to be able to talk about it. I don't mind.” Her voice very quiet.
“A multiple homicide and robbery in a Chicago butcher shop. It was something got called to my attention. Just one of those awful killings where the sickness of the perpetrators keeps screaming at you. So we make bad jokes. We do this and that. Usually we can let it all drop at the front door. This one's just been harder to shake. Somebody butchered the butchers, you might say. Cut their throats in a very cold-blooded way the same way you might slaughter something for food.” She seemed to shrivel as he told her about it. And the more Donna recoiled from it, the more it irritated him that she'd goaded him into telling her about it. And the more he told her of the gory details, the more he felt like he did when he was trying to gross out some woman reporter in the squad room, or some TV schmuck at a crime scene. And when he'd finished she was still irritated, and he was irritated, and nobody was feeling very loved, and something awful and sick and horrible had inserted itself into the intimacy of their warm marriage bed.
“It has NOTHING to do with us,” he said, knowing even then that what he'd just said couldn't be further from the truth.
Daniel had a trot line in back of the Darnell's Field, and adjacent to a place known locally as Gum, which led to the New Cairo Ditch. But he'd never walked that far, nor had he ever wanted to go through all the tall weeds, swamp, quickmud, poison ivy, and thickly overgrown areas between Michael Hora's ground and the New Cairo. There was also a shallow ditch that ran down through Gum parallel to the Sandy Road, running past Darnell's, Hora's, Thurman's, and the Lingo Field to the extreme eastern edge of the land on this side of the river, the point of the fishhook. The top left of the hook as one saw it on a map would be the New Cairo, a deep and swift-moving ditch that curved back around the farmland feeding into the river. There was good fishing in the New Cairo, and Daniel had driven all the way to Texas Corners and put a line in there, which he ran when he thought about it.
He had decided he was going to try to walk the whole distance, a long, boring, tough, solitary march to wear himself down. Just one more variation on his daily theme—to tire himself to the point where he could ignore his hungry, screaming belly, which was shrinking just as his companion's seemed to grow more prominent by the day.
So it was a new experience as he cut down through the swampy Dutch Barrow, plowing through the high, wet grass, moving up a little weed-covered hill full of cottonwoods and willows, down over the ditch bank, and in that eyeball click he was back in Vietnam.
The McDermotts had 160 acres of rice and this is what he saw as he came through the overgrown ditch bank foliage, stepping out into a rice field that lay across his field of vision all the way to the far tree line. Chaingang had gone over the bank and between a pair of cottonwoods and a willow and some horseweed, but he came out in high elephant grass between two palms in the Rung Sat Special Zone, in another time, another lifetime.
To the mind of this insane killer and precognitive genius and childlike retard and atavistic two-legged mastodon—a strong emotion or a quick psychic jolt will not be the same as it will be for you or me. This bestial man draws on a lifetime of cruelties; tortures and deprivations beyond the line of normal human tolerance.
To us a surprise or shock or consternation will register in a different way. We forget our coffee, which has been sitting there for a quarter-hour and we lift the cup to our lips, preoccupied, busy with something else, and the unexpected coldness is a minor, unpleasant moment. Nothing more. An insignificant annoyance. But to this man, a sound—the metal-cleated footfalls on certain surfaces—or the smell—a feces-clogged tenement toilet—or the sight—a tattooed arm reaching out in a certain way: these are the nuances that can trigger fast, steel-muscled, relentless, deadly responses that strike out to silence the nearest human heartbeat.
