a pair of stained white boxers. His breasts were little trembling sacks of flab, furred with curling, snow-white hairs. Martin stepped forward, planted his heel on the heart-shaped box, crushed it flat.
And he snapped his wrist, and the razor flipped out of the handle, a mirror in which Jude was briefly able to see his own astonished face.
Martin lunged at Jude, slashing at him with the straight razor, but Jude stuck out his foot, jammed it between the old man’s ankles. At the same time, he pitched himself to the side with an energy he didn’t know he had in him. Martin fell forward, and Jude felt the razor whicker through his shirt and the biceps beneath, with what seemed no resistance at all. Jude rolled over the rusted steel bar at the foot of his cot and crashed to the floor.
The room was almost silent except for their harsh gasps for breath and the shrieking of the wind under the eaves. His father scrambled to the end of the bed and leaped over the side—spry for a man who had suffered multiple strokes and not left his bed in three months. By then Jude was crawling backward, out the door.
He made it halfway down the hall, as far as the screen door that looked into the pigpen. The hogs crowded against it, jostling for the best view of the action. Their squeals of excitement drew his attention for a moment, and when he looked back, Martin was standing over him.
His father dropped onto him. He cocked his arm back to slash the razor across Jude’s face. Jude forgot himself and drove his bandaged right hand up into his father’s chin, hard enough to snap the old man’s head back. Jude screamed. A white-hot charge of pain stabbed through his ruined hand and raced up into his forearm, a sensation like an electrical pulse traveling right through the bone, withering in its intensity.
He caught his father flush and drove him into the screen door. Martin hit it with a splintering crunch and the tinny sound of springs snapping free. The lower screen tore clean out, and Martin fell through it. The pigs scattered. There were no steps below the door, and Martin dropped two feet, out of sight, hitting the ground with a dry thud.
The world wavered, darkened, almost disappeared.
The world brightened again, a drop of light that widened and spread, blurred gray ghost shapes appearing before him, then coming gradually into focus. The hall was still. Pigs grunted outside. An ill sweat cooled on Jude’s face.
He rested awhile, ears ringing. His hand ringing, too. When he was ready, he used his heels to push himself across the floor to the wall, then used the wall to work his way up into a sitting position. He rested again.
At last he shoved his way to his feet, sliding his back up the wall. He peered out the wreck of the screen door but still could not see his father. He had to be lying against the side of the house.
Jude swayed away from the wall, sagging toward the screen door. He grabbed the frame to keep from falling into the pigpen himself. His legs trembled furiously. He leaned forward to see if Martin was on the ground with a broken neck, and at that moment his father stood up and reached through the screen and grabbed for his leg.
Jude cried out, kicking at Martin’s hand and recoiling instinctively. Then he was a man losing his balance on a sheet of black ice, pinwheeling his arms foolishly, sailing back down the hall and into the kitchen, where he fell yet again.
Martin pulled himself up through the torn screen. He crawled toward Jude, made his way to him on all fours, until he was right on top of him. Martin’s hand rose, then fell, a glittering silver spark falling with it. Jude brought up his left arm, and the straight razor struck his forearm, scraping bone. Blood leaped into the air. More blood.
The palm of Jude’s left hand was bandaged, but the fingers were free, sticking out of the gauze as if it were a glove with the fingers snipped off. His father lifted the razor in the air to strike again, but before he could bring it down, Jude stuck his fingers in Martin’s glimmering red eyes. The old man cried out, twisting his head back, trying to get free of his son’s hand. The razor blade waved in front of Jude’s face without touching skin. Jude forced his father’s head back, and back, baring his scrawny throat, wondering if he could push hard enough to break the cocksucker’s spine.
He had Martin’s head back as far as it would go when the kitchen knife slammed into the side of his father’s neck.
Marybeth was ten feet away, standing at the kitchen counter, beside a magnetized strip on the wall with knives stuck to it. Her breath came in sobs. Jude’s father turned his head to stare at her. Air bubbles foamed in the blood that leaked from around the hilt of the knife. Martin reached for it with one hand, closed his fingers feebly about it, then made a sound, a rattling inhalation, like a child shaking a stone in a paper bag, and sagged to his side.
Marybeth snapped another wide-bladed knife off the magnetic rack, then another. She took the first by the tip of the blade and chucked it into Martin’s back as he slumped forward. It hit with a deep, hollow
“Keep away,” Jude said to her. “He won’t lie down and die.” But she didn’t hear him.
In another moment she stood over Martin. Jude’s father looked up, and Marybeth whacked the knife across his face. It went in close to one corner of his lips and came out a little past the other corner, widening his mouth into a garish red slash.
As she struck at him, he struck at her, lashing out with his right hand, the hand that held the razor. The blade drew a red line across her thigh, above the right knee, and the leg buckled.
Martin pitched himself up off the floor as Marybeth started to go down, roaring as he rose to his feet. He caught her in the stomach in an almost perfect flying tackle, smashed Marybeth into the kitchen counter. She slammed her last knife into Martin’s shoulder, burying it to the hilt. She might’ve pounded it into a tree trunk for all the good it did.
She slipped to the floor, Jude’s father on top of her, blood still foaming from the knife planted in his neck. He slashed his straight razor toward her again.
Marybeth grabbed her neck, clutching it weakly with her bad hand. Blood pumped through her fingers. There was a crude black grin dug into the white flesh of her throat.
She slid onto her side. Her head banged the floor. She was staring past Martin at Jude. The side of her face lay in blood, a thick, scarlet puddle of it.
Jude’s father dropped to all fours. His free hand was still wrapped around the base of the knife in his own throat, fingers exploring it blindly, taking its measure, but doing nothing to pull it out. He was a pincushion, knife in the shoulder, knife in the back, but he was interested only in the one through his neck, didn’t seem to have noticed the other pieces of steel sticking into him.
Martin crawled unsteadily away from Marybeth, away from Jude. His arms gave out first, and his head dropped to the floor, his chin striking with enough force to make his teeth audibly click together. He tried to push himself up and almost made it, but then his right arm gave out, and he rolled onto his side instead. Away from Jude, a small relief. Jude wouldn’t have to look into his face while he died. Again.
Marybeth was trying to speak. Her tongue came out of her mouth, moved over her lips. Her eyes pleaded for Jude to come closer. Her pupils had shrunk to black dots.
He pulled himself across the floor, elbow over elbow, dragging himself to her. She was already whispering. It was hard to hear her over his father, who was making the cough-choking sounds again and kicking his heels loudly against the floor, in the throes of some kind of convulsion.
“He’s not…done,” Marybeth said. “He’s comin’…again. He’ll never…be done.”
Jude glanced around for something he could stick against the slash across her throat. He was close enough now so his hands were in the puddle of blood surrounding her, splashing in it. He spotted a dishrag hanging from the handle of the oven, pulled it down.
Marybeth was staring into his face, but Jude had an impression of not being seen—the sense that she was staring right through him and into some unknowable distance.
“I hear…Anna. I hear her…calling. We have…to make…a door. We have to…let her in. Make us a door. Make a door…and I’ll open it.”
“Stop talking.” He lifted her hand and pressed the rolled-up dish towel against her neck.
