Nobody knew Cora Reynolds would be so ready. Breather Betty was already in the car, riding shotgun, with a scarf tied over her red hair, dark sunglasses on her rubber face. A cigarette hanging between her red-red lips. This French girl returned from the dead. Rescued and seat-belted to keep her torso upright.
This person made into an object, now made back into a person.
The crippled stuffed animals, the ratty tigers and orphaned bears and penguins, they're all lined up in the car's rear window. The cat among them, asleep in the sun. All of them waving good-bye.
Cora hits the freeway, her back tires fishtailing, already doing twice the posted speed limit. Her four-door brown sedan already pulls a kite's tail of police cruisers, their lights flashing blue and red. Helicopters. Angry detectives in unmarked county cars. Television camera crews, each in a white van with a big number painted on the side.
Already there's no way Cora can't win.
She has the girl. She has the boy. She has the gun.
Even if they run out of gas, nobody will fuck her kids.
Even if the troopers shoot out her tires. Even then, she'll shoot up their silicone bodies. Cora will blow off their faces. Their nipples and noses. She'll leave them nothing any man would stick his dick into. She'll do the same to Breather Betty.
And she'll shoot herself. To save them.
Please understand. Nobody says what Cora Reynolds did was right.
Nobody is even saying Cora Reynolds was sane. But she still won.
This is just what human beings do—turn objects into people, people into objects. Back and forth. Tit for tat.
This is what the police will find if they get too close. The children mutilated. All of them dead. The animals soaked with her blood. Them all dead, together.
But until that moment, Cora has a full tank of gas. She has a bag full of evidence-room cocaine to keep her awake. A bag of sandwiches. A few bottles of water and the cat, purring asleep.
She has nothing but a few hours of freeway between her and Canada.
But, more than all that, Cora Reynolds has her family.
10
Mother Nature slips into some kind of black coat. It's a military uniform or an ice-skating costume, black wool with a double row of brass buttons up the front. A black velvet majorette with her split nose scabbed together with dark red. She gets her arms through each long sleeve, then says, “Button me up?” to Saint Gut-Free.
She wiggles what's left of her hands, and says, “I don't have the fingers I need.”
Her fingers are just stubs and knuckles. Only her index fingers are left for dialing telephones after she's famous. Punching buttons on a cash machine. Fame already reducing her from something with three dimensions to something flat.
Mother Nature, Saint Gut-Free, Reverend Godless, we're all dressing in black before we carry Mr. Whittier down to the subbasement. Before we play this next important scene.
Never mind that our funeral is just a rehearsal. We're just stand-ins for the real funeral, to be played by movie stars in front of cameras after we're discovered. By doing this, wrapping Mr. Whittier and tying his body into a bundle, then delivering him to the subbasement for a ceremony—this way we'll all have the same experience. We'll all be telling the same tragic story to the reporters and police.
If Mr. Whittier is stinking or not, it's hard to tell. Miss Sneezy and Reverend Godless carry the silver bags of spoiled food, each bag leaking a trail of stink juice. Trailing drips and spots of stink, they carry the bags across the lobby to the restrooms and flush them down the toilet.
“Not being able to smell,” Miss Sneezy says, and sniffs, hard, “it helps.”
This works fine, one bag at a time. Until Reverend Godless tries to hurry, when the smell gets choking-bad. Dry-heaves-bad. The stink soaks into their clothes and hair. The first time they try to flush two bags together, the toilets start to clog and overflow. Another toilet clogs. Already, the water is flooding out, swamping the blue carpet in the lobby. The bags, stuck in some main sewer pipe, they soak up water, swelling the way the turkey Tetrazzini killed Mr. Whittier, clogging the main pipe so even the toilets that look fine, they back up.
None of the toilets will work. The furnace and water heater are broken. We still have boxes of food, rotting. Mr. Whittier is not our biggest problem.
According to Sister Vigilante's calendar watch and Miss America's grown-out brown roots, we've been here about two weeks.
As he does the last of her brass buttons, Saint Gut-Free leans in to kiss Mother Nature, saying, “Do you love me?”
“I pretty much have to,” she says, “if the romantic subplot is going to work.”
Dead Lord Baglady sparkling on her finger, Mother Nature wipes the back of one hand across her lips, saying, “Your saliva tastes terrible . . .”
Saint Gut-Free spits in his palm and licks the spit back into his mouth. He sniffs his empty hand, saying, “Terrible, how?”
“Ketones,” Mrs. Clark says to nobody. Or to everybody.
“Sour,” Mother Nature says. “Like a lemon-and-airplane-glue aromatherapy candle.”
“It's starvation,” Mrs. Clark says, tying a gold silk rope around the bundle of Mr. Whittier. “As you burn up your body fat, the acetone concentration increases in your blood.”
Saint Gut-Free sniffs his hand, the snot rattling inside his head.
Reverend Godless lifts one arm to sniff underneath. There, the damp taffeta is darker black with sweat, in his pores, the memory of too much Chanel No. 5.
Lugging a body up- and downstairs, we're wasting our valuable body fat.
Still, we should have a gesture of mourning, says Sister Vigilante, still clutching her Bible. With Mr. Whittier wrapped and being carried to the subbasement, rolled tight in a red velvet curtain from the imperial-Chinese promenade, and tied with gold silk
