CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (22 page)

He and his two older brothers were playing outdoors. Their parents were in town shopping, leaving them alone for several hours. It was a Saturday, summertime, suffocatingly hot. They were bored, the juvenile wildness rising in them to such heights that they felt impelled to whoop and holler as they chased one another around the frame house. Lannie came onto the front porch yelling for them to stop acting like "wild Injuns," but they ignored her warnings.

Tiring of the game of chase, rolling and wrestling on the grass in the backyard, Cruise thought of something to cool them off.

"Let's dig holes and get in them," he said. "That's what dogs do to get cool. It's better than walking all the way to the creek to go swimming."

Orson, fourteen, and Edward, twelve, immediately agreed to a hole-digging expedition. They found shovels in the tool shed. They made shallow holes to begin with, but that didn't seem satisfactory to Cruise. "Let's dig them deep enough we can squat in them and then cover each other up to the necks!"

That suggestion was happily adopted. The holes grew deeper. The earth around them cooled the air by several degrees as they stood in the holes throwing out dirt over their shoulders into huge piles.

"I'll bury you two first," Cruise offered. His brothers hunched themselves into the holes and laughed uproariously while Cruise shoveled the dirt on top of them. When nothing but their heads were above ground, Cruise squatted and asked what it was like. "Isn't that cool? Like being in a 'frigerator, ain't it? Wasn't I right?"

Orson and Edward both agreed it was indeed cool to their hot, sunburned skins. It was super-duper. It was swell.

"Here, y'all bury me." Cruise hurriedly dug his brothers out until they could wriggle free and pull themselves from the holes, dirt falling from their pockets and around the waists of their pants.

Cruise couldn't wait. His skin felt oven-heated. Sticky sweat fell from his forehead into his eyes. Sweat ran into his ears and slipped snakelike down the back of his neck. He jumped into the hole and gestured for his brothers to cover him over. Orson and Edward had him half-buried before Cruise saw the exchange of sly looks. By then it was too late. "What's up?" he asked. "Don't do anything mean, okay? I didn't hurt y'all none. And it was my idea. Wasn't it my idea?"

He was trying to get out of the hole, worried about the shared look between his brothers, but they were working faster now, filling in the dirt quicker than he could find a purchase out. "C'mon, y'all, I changed my mind. I don't wanna be buried."

"Well you
are
buried, so there," Orson said. He scooped dirt around Cruise's thin neck, then stepped near enough to make his brother flinch. He grinned evilly, foot held in the air before he lowered it to tamp the dirt down with his bare feet.

The pressure set in on Cruise's chest. He thought maybe he wasn't going to be able to breathe. "I want
out
now!"

"Not yet, Herod. We got a surprise for you." Orson snapped his fingers at Edward. Edward ran from Cruise's restricted field of vision.

"Where's he going?" Cruise wanted to know. He felt cooled off, that's for sure. Felt his blood congealing. He was nine. His older brothers often played cruel tricks on him. He knew this was going to be one of those times. He just hoped they wouldn't bury his head. One more shovelful and he'd be underground completely. They'd dark the hot, hateful sun from his eyes for good.

Cruise heard his destiny before he saw it. "It's the lawn mower!" he screamed. He heard the
clackedy-clack-clack
of the push mower as the blades rolled over the ground in his direction.

"Yeah! We're gonna mow down your head." Orson looked fit to be tied. He jiggled on his tiptoes and waved his arms for Edward to hurry.

Lannie came out the back and saw in a glance what was happening. "You boys quit it right now. Put up that lawn mower before someone gets hurt."

"Somebody's gonna get hurt! And it ain't us," Edward squealed, bringing the mower around so that Cruise could see it.

Cruise's vision, ground level, gave him an impeccable view of the sharpened blades of the push mower. They sat still now, gleaming, bits of cut grass clinging along the curved metal surfaces.

Sweat rolled down and stung Cruise's wide eyes. A grasshopper flopped onto his forehead and he had to shake vigorously to make it hop off again. "Make 'em stop, Lannie, make 'em stop!"

"Edward, get away from there," she called.

Edward and Orson looked over their shoulders to see their sister coming down the back steps, furious red spots on her pale cheeks.

"Oh, you don't let us ever have any fun," Orson said.

He ran to Edward, pushed him over a little so they could both hold on to the mower's push handle. They glared down at Cruise, demented and determined.

"Scared, huh? Remember the slivers of soap you put in our soup last week? Remember that squashed frog you put in Edward's bed?"

"Stop it, stop it, stop it!"

"Let's back up to get a running start," Orson said.

The two boys quickly backed away until they were near the rear of the house. They were making the sounds of revving motors. "Varrooommm. Varrooommm! VAARROOMM!"

Lannie was running now, trying to reach them.

Cruise saw it all in slow-motion agony. Lannie coming into his peripheral vision, her feet slapping the ground. Edward and Orson pushing down hard on the mower handle, the blades whirring, chopping, the grass flying from the rear to cover his brothers' feet. He could already feel the crunch and explosion of the blades hitting him square in the face. He struggled mightily. He jerked his shoulders, clawed at the dirt with both hands, tried turning his torso this way and that to get free of the prison of earth. He arched his neck, the tendons tight with his long drawn out scream.

That's when he woke sweating and brushing at his arms in Lannie's bed during the twilight hours.

His heart knocked madly against his rib cage. His mouth was open in a silent scream of terror. In the darkness of the bedroom he thought he saw his brothers bearing down on him with the killer machine. Then there was a snap in the air and he was sucking in rapid breaths, his head between his hands.

Lannie saved him that time. He never knew if Edward and Orson really would have tried to mow down his head as if it were a fat watermelon. She stopped them inches from his paralyzed face, the blades halting magically. Cruise fainted that day. He didn't wake until they had him dug from the hole, and he was lying on his back on the green, freshly mowed grass. The sun scorched his eyes. He thought he might be dead. He had hated the sun from that day forward. His tortures happened in the daylight. People left him alone at night.

Lannie had to help him walk into the house and bathe. His bladder had loosened in his fright and there was mud on his legs. He could have told his father and gotten his brothers beaten for their stunt, but he never told and neither did Lannie. It was an unspoken code between the children that tattling was
verboten
. They were punished enough. They wouldn't bring down extra wrath on one another's heads for any reason.

Cruise wondered why he'd had that particular nightmare tonight. He might have had the lawn mower dream ten times in his whole adult life. It always left him so tight he thought he might burst from his skin. He wanted out. Out of the hole and away from the danger. Out of harm's way. Out of the family that drove him crazy in the beginning.

He came onto his feet unsteadily and felt his way in the dark to Lannie's bathroom that was connected by a door to her bedroom. He left the light off, urinated into the toilet. In the bedroom again, he sat on the side of the bed trembling.

Had to do it. Had to release the pressure, the anxieties. Might kill everyone in the house if he didn't.

He reached beneath his long hair for the knife. He held it in his right hand and turned over his left hand until the palm was up and the wrist and inside of his arm was available to the blade. He was thinking of nothing but finding relief. All his nerve ends screamed for it. He sat making short decisive cuts in the skin between wrist and elbow. He switched the knife to his left hand and began operating on his right arm the same way. Blood oozed from the cuts and dripped onto Lannie's sheets.

It was the first time he had ever done this. He thought that it helped immensely. The feeling of tightness escaped through the slits in his flesh like air seeping from a bicycle tire. He wouldn't die; he hadn't cut into the veins or arteries. He wouldn't get infected; he knew how to disinfect the cuts and bind them.

He just
felt better.

He'd have to remember this remedy when his fears and his anxieties grew impossible to bear.

For a while he wouldn't have to kill anyone, though if he hadn't already dispatched Edward and Orson to their deserved rewards, he would find them right now and take off their heads again. In a slower, more torturous way.

Just the way they'd tried to take his. The scummy bastards.

#

8:15 P.M. Cruise stood next to Molly in the open door. They were ready to leave. He had to move her by holding on to her arm. Her wrists were too badly burned by the ropes for him to touch without her crying out loud.

Lannie's children milled around getting in the way. Lannie had the baby in her arms. Her hair fell over one eye and she squinted from her glasses. She looked tired. Haunted. What right did she have? She just took care of a bunch of rug rats and his father. She didn't really have anything to complain about. He gave her money to help out on the bills. She didn't have to look so bad if she'd wash and roll her hair, put on some unwrinkled clothes that weren't so stained with baby shit and throw up.

"Thanks, Lannie. Tell Daddy I'll be back," he said.

Lannie shrugged.

"I know he'll forget. Tell him anyway."

"All right." She shifted the baby onto her opposite hip bone, shook the hair from her eyes. Cruise saw she wasn't wearing a bra beneath her shirt. Her breasts sagged like pennies in a sock.

"Remember what I told you," Molly said to Lannie as he hustled her outside.

Cruise put her into the Chrysler and slammed the car door. He didn't care what she told Lannie. Wouldn't do her any good. Lannie'd never turn him in. He waved good-bye to his sister.

Flagstaff at night was a dead town. All the stores were closed down. Not many drivers on the streets. He filled up the gas tank at an all-night service station, checked the oil and water and tires. Doing these chores he kept a careful watch on Molly. She never moved from the front seat. She didn't even glance toward the cement box where the station attendant sat in a metal folding chair reading a muscle magazine.

From the station he drove to the turnoff for 17 south and took it. They'd go to Phoenix, take I-10 down to Eloy where he'd pick up I-8 to San Diego.

"You think getting Alzheimer's disease is a bad way to go, right?" he asked Molly.

"It's pretty bad," she said softly.

"There's a thousand ways to die. For most people first the heart goes bad."

"You mean they get heart disease?" Molly asked.

"No, I mean when the inside of a person changes, when the landscape gets all black and stinking. I had an old aunt when I was a kid. My father's sister. She was widowed and maybe that alone was too much, the overload that blew all of her circuits, that blackened the landscape in her blood red heart.'' Cruise maintained his speed at fifty-five heading down from the mountains into the plateau where he'd find Phoenix. He repeated in his thoughts what he'd said to Molly.
Blood red heart
. It was a comforting vision that leapt to mind. The rhythm of the tires on pavement lulled him as he told his story.

"My mother told us Aunt Maddie was senile, but it was more than that. I saw the deterioration happen over a period of years while I was growing up. She wanted something. I think she needed someone to care about her.

"She had sons. Four of them, all rotten apples, every one. Her husband had taken a long time dying. It was Parkinson's disease, I think. He just got weaker and more frail and disoriented. His hands shook so bad he couldn't hold a glass of water, his head shook like it was a flag blasted by a high wind. Maddie loaned him so much of her energy just to keep him going that she didn't have any left over for her boys. They were wild, always in trouble. One of them attempted suicide. They found him in the chicken coop hiding underneath the hens' nests. Maddie stitched his wrists herself and bound them in white gauze."

He paused and looked down at his own arms. The bandages were hidden by the long-sleeved shirt he wore. Molly didn't know about that. No one did. When Lannie asked about the blood on her sheets he told her he had had a nosebleed in his sleep.

"The boy who tried to slash his wrists was never right again. Then the youngest one, Randy, started stealing. Money from his mother's purse, the family silver--what there was of it. Finally he was breaking into houses and carting off the neighbors' televisions. Two of the boys joined the army together. One was drunk on patrol in Vietnam and ate a Claymore. The other one struck his C.O. and was thrown out of the service for insubordination. He runs a junkyard in Jersey. Lives in a shack with a pack of stray dogs last I heard of him.

"So Maddie finally lost her husband to Parkinson, then the boys forgot her, and she was left alone.

"Daddy tried to check on her when he could, but she got to where she was hateful to visitors. Once we moved to another house and he went by to see Maddie. 'You want our new address and phone number?' he asked. She wouldn't look at him. 'No,' she told him. 'You don't?' '
No
,' she said. He just walked out shaking his head; there wasn't much he could do with her by that time.

"After that Maddie went down fast. She saved everything, turned into a damn old pack rat. She had shelves of paper grocery bags. Empty jars and cans. Newspapers. Buttons. Lace. Ribbon. Vases. Her house became a garbage dump of useless things. Drawers overran, counter tops were heaped with things; she couldn't walk through it all without tripping. Roaches were so thick they scattered every time she made a move.