Wormwood

He pulled the trigger and Brian twitched, a small black stain appearing on his shirt, just below the right shoulder blade. The boy paused, his head no longer shaking, his hand drawing back from the door.

Larry felt a strong urge to duck back inside, as if he’d just dropped a water balloon instead of a bullet and didn’t want his son to know who was playing such a terrible joke on him.

But Brian went back to scratching as if the bullet were only a teasing tap on the shoulder, trying to draw his attention from what lay beyond the door.

Larry exhaled despondently, wiping the sting from his eyes as he retreated far enough to reload the rifle.

God, it seemed, was going to make him get it right.

God was going to make him keep on shooting until he ran out of bullets or until Brian was properly dead.

Larry ejected the spent casing: it bounced along the counter, came to a tentative halt, then rolled in a slow circle off the edge to the kitchen floor. He picked a fresh round from the box. There were, he estimated, at least fifty more tries lined up inside, not counting the dozen or so he had jingling in his pocket. Nor the four or five extra boxes down in the shelter.

Pushing the shell into the breach, he wondered if even God could be that persistent.

It turned out to be a moot point, because his next shot found its mark. He was able to hold the gun steady and the bullet entered Brian’s skull almost dead center, right where the soft spot had been when he was a baby. A time both impossibly distant and impossibly near.

He died with little protest or fanfare, which Larry thought was something of a blessing, considering how he’d died the first time. Considering that, being shot in the head by one’s father was almost like being rocked to sleep.

It was all a question of perspective.

Edging himself down from the sink, Larry decided he’d had enough perspective for one day. He felt a deep need for sleep, to retreat from the world and crawl down inside himself. Down so far he wouldn’t even dream.

There was a name, he knew, for such a place.

A name he’d feared all his life.

But that too, he was discovering, was a matter of perspective.

20

Mike looked gravely at Rudy, all the color gone from his face, replaced with a pale shade of blue imparted from the windowsheers. “I can’t do this,” he said, the look on his face helpless; the desperate pinch of a man about to be sick. “Seriously,” he added.

Rudy nodded, as if to say he understood, that there was no shame in knowing this and admitting it.

The two of them had searched the Navaro house from back to front, finding answers to questions they hadn’t yet asked (most tellingly in the empty bottle of sleeping pills and water glass left out near the bathroom sink), but so far they hadn’t found Zack. He might be in the crawlspace or the attic or, more likely, he may have simply slipped out unobserved. Whatever the case, they found themselves lingering in this blue and cheerless room, transfixed by the one small thread in need of snipping before pressing on.

The Navaros had an infant son; they’d both known that. A boy born to them last fall — late October, it seemed; a very short life…

“Why don’t you wait outside?” Rudy suggested, gazing down into the crib where it wriggled like a bloated salamander, bumping its bald head from corner to corner.

“Are you sure?” Mike asked, making a quick study of his face.

Rudy nodded, not sure of anything anymore. Since quitting the Iverson’s back yard, Helen’s face had been following him, haunting him, frozen at the terrible moment Bud had bit into her. Was there really any surprise in her expression? he wondered, or just the grim agony of acceptance, as if she’d been thinking of him just as Rudy had, her own shovel calling from its hook in the garage.

In the end, she’d seen the shotgun coming and had been grateful. After thirty-five years of marriage, taking care of Bud was all she knew.

Rudy guessed the Navaros would want the same, the baby included. He had to force himself to believe that, if only for the next minute or two.

Mike cast a last troubled look into the crib and offered Rudy his shotgun. Rudy shook his head, hefting his own rifle slightly. “This will be fine.”

Fine? Had he said fine? That seemed an extraordinarily bad choice of words. Nothing about this day had been fine. Neater was what he’d meant; the rifle would be neater, less like overkill, though he guessed Mike probably knew that. His neighbor clapped him firmly on the shoulder, either in gratitude or to wish him luck.

Rudy told him to keep an eye out for Zack and Mike murmured something to the affirmative, then his footsteps receded, winding down the hall and passing out the front door. In the murmuring silence that followed, Rudy found himself alone with the baby.

He looked into the crib with a shudder. The boy was staring up at him, its eyes slightly luminescent, like glowing coins. It smacked its mouth as if calling for its bottle, its front teeth barely through its gums.

Rudy set the rifle aside long enough to search through the closet for an extra blanket. Unfolding it, a circus theme appeared. He threw it over the wriggling lump in the crib and a blue ghost with smiling baby elephants took its place. The blanket began to move on its own, like a cheap magic trick, the smacking sound muffled beneath. Muffled, but not fooled. It knew that Rudy was still there.

He took a step back and raised the rifle. It seemed very long and ridiculous in his hands, completely out of proportion to the task and to the room, like a lumberman’s axe in the kitchen to chop celery. Nevertheless, he brought it to bear on the head of the blanket, closed his eyes, and quickly pulled the trigger.

The report was deafening within the walls of the nursery, so much so that it startled Rudy into opening his eyes, almost against his will.

The blanket had been thrown to the far side of the crib, a rusty stain slowly spreading through its folds, poisoning the elephants. The stain dripped down the wall behind the crib as well; its flow thicker there, more essential.

Rudy stood in the blue nursery listening to the raspy caw of a crow beyond the flat space of the windowpane. He stood with the rifle in his hands and stared at the blanket for a long time, waiting for the elephants to move, to march, to wave their rubbery trunks.

Nothing happened.

He exhaled loudly, not even aware he’d been holding his breath. That he’d been holding it ever since he pulled the trigger.

The baby was dead. It was with its family.

Rudy knew that he could never come back to this room, that he would have to carry it away with him.

Elephants and all.

21

Mike heard the gunshot as he was crossing the street to his own house. He paused a moment to look back, but the Navaro’s looked the same as it always had. Gazing at it from fifty feet away, he couldn’t have guessed at the horrors inside.

He supposed it was like that all over — rows of nice, ordinary houses filled up to the ceiling with nightmares, each its own quiet tragedy; each its own private hell.

He glanced briefly at the Sturling’s — the front door still standing open — and continued across the street, stepping onto his lawn and wading in far enough to ask his wife and son how they were doing.