Peaceable Kingdom (mobi) (43 page)

She did.

“All right, now keep it open, understand? I’m gonna show you something. I’m gonna show you how to do CPR.”

He reached over and pinched her nostrils shut. Her eyes skittered. He took a deep breath and put his mouth over hers and exhaled hard and heard her gasp when he pulled away and try to catch her breath but he did it again before she could, emptied his lungs into her and this time when he let her up for air she was coughing and her eyes were gleaming with tears.

She tasted like smoke and tequila.

The coughing stopped. She leaned back against the desk, chest heaving.

“There you go. Of course you’d be on your back, normally. But you get the idea. Grab the cash box. Come on.”

He marched her back the way they’d come and saw her wipe her cheek with one hand and thought, good start.

David sat on the steps of a brownstone across the street from the ornate blue-and-gold Pythian building, a lit cigarette in his hand, trying to will his heart to stop pounding. He’d gotten halfway down the block when it felt like somebody had put a hand to his chest and said,
asshole, don’t you take another step further
. Don’t even think it.

He had no business being here.

Not on the steps, nobody would care about that—but
being here
. This close. Thinking what he was thinking.

She’d said she didn’t want to see him, period and no hedging this time, that she couldn’t see him, that seeing him had become a kind of grief played over and over again and that they simply had to stop, get away from one another and go lick their wounds until maybe in time they could be friends again or something like friends but that now they could be nothing.

It was the act of a willful selfish child to be this close to her.

What he needed to do was go home. Be an adult.

He’d made his choice. He should live with it.

He gasped at a sudden unexpected rush of tears.
That he should have to choose at all
. Not fair.

He wiped away the tears and drew on the cigarette and sat there, slowly calming.

“Pour me another Amstel, Claire. This one’s gone flat. Use one of those good frozen mugs you’ve got there.”

She did as he told her to do while he transfered the contents of the cash box to his briefcase, poured the beer and set it in front of him, trying to keep her hands from shaking, trying not to spill it, not to show. The taste of him was still in her mouth. He handed her the empty box.

“Put that on the floor or something, will you?”

She did that too, bent over and set it beside the garbage can and when she stood up again something hit her in the
chest and she gasped, something freezing cold sliding down off her chest and over her belly.

He was laughing. The frosted glass was empty.

“Ooops. Little spill there. Gee, sorry.”

“You. . . . !”

He leaned in close over the bar.

“You
what
, Claire? You
what?
What do you want to call me? You want to call me names? Pour me another beer you dumb little shit and keep your fucking mouth shut. And I want a new glass.”

She looked down at herself, arms out to her sides. She didn’t know what to do. You could see almost everything through the thin material and the bra was thin too so you could even see her nipples puckered by the cold.
He
could see them, goddammit. If she brushed at it that would only make it worse, plastering the material to her body. She wanted to cry.
She wouldn’t cry
. She turned to the freezer to get the glass and that was when she brushed herself off because then he couldn’t see.

She drew the beer and set it in front of him on the bar. And almost wasn’t surprised when he lifted it and threw it all over her again.

But when he laughed the second time, then she did cry. She couldn’t help it. It just happened. Whether it was humiliation or frustration or fear or all of these together she just stood there, eyes closed and quietly sobbing.

“Look at me,” he said.

She wouldn’t. If she couldn’t see him then she could almost pretend he couldn’t see her.

“I said, look at me, dammit!”

She opened her eyes. What she saw was a man enjoying himself immensely. She couldn’t understand. Why was he putting her through this? Shouldn’t he be running away right now? Wasn’t he at all worried about the cops?

How could anybody
be like
this?

“You stink of beer, Claire. Clean yourself off. You smell like a slut. Use that hand towel there. Dip it in some water.
That’s right. You have nice nipples, Claire. Say
thank you, sir
. I’m the customer. The customer’s always right.”

“Thank you.”

She plucked the material out in front of her and wiped at it with the wet rag. The blouse was going to be stretched and ruined.

“Thank you, sir, Claire.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Better. Now hand me that spindle.”

“The what?”

“Jesus Christ, Claire, you’ve worked in bars for how long? The spindle. The goddamn spindle. The spike you stack your checks on, for chrissake!”

“I . . .”

She didn’t want to do this. Her heart was suddenly hammering. She hated those things. Always had. Even just to look at them. The spike was maybe eight inches long rising straight up out of a thick coil of wire at its base. This one was set at the service station below one of the wine racks and whenever she had to climb up onto the counter to get to one of the more pricey wines up top she had visions of losing her balance and falling right onto it, of being impaled. She could see it. Ridiculous, horrible way to die.

The spike was as sharp and thick as an icepick.

“Please . . . I don’t . . .”

“Ah, begging. I like that.”

“Those things scare me, okay?”

“Why? You use it every day.”

“They just do.”

“Maybe I want to scare you.”

“What? Please . . .”

“Maybe I want to scare you. Maybe I don’t like you one goddamn bit, Claire, and maybe I want to scare you so much I could almost come in my pants just thinking about it? What if the money’s only a kind of perk? Maybe this is what it’s all about. You ever consider that, you dopey whore?”

“Why . . . ?”

“
Why
? Because I want to. Because this gun tells us both I can. You hear me, you ugly fuck? You get ugly when you cry, Claire, you know that?
You want to know why? Because after me you’ll never feel safe again, Claire. Never. Not at work, not at home. Nowhere. Because that’s my wish for the whole fucking world and for you, Claire, in particular
. Now hand me the goddamn spindle!”

She could barely see him through the tears but she could feel the heat of his anger reach out to her across the bar. For a split second she imagined him bursting into flame.
Where did all this come from? Why? What had she done
?

David thought,
if she hates me for it, so be it. I have to see her
.

He crushed out the cigarette and stepped down off the brownstone.

“I want to show you how we’re gonna do this, Claire. Stop blubbering, for chrissake. Take one of those cocktail napkins there. Wipe your goddamn nose. You’re gonna do it once first, just so you can see how hard it is, and then it’s my turn. See, I put my hand on the bar, palm down, just like this. Then you pick up the spindle. You raise it over the center of my hand to exactly the level of this beer mug, no lower and no higher. Lower’s cheating. Higher and it’ll never work. Then you try to spike me.”

“I can’t . . .”

“Sure you can. I’ll give you some incentive. You spike me and the game’s over right now and you get to keep whatever’s in your tip jar. I don’t think you will, though. Like I say, it’s hard. Assuming you don’t, then I get three tries. I miss all three, you keep whatever’s in your tip jar. I don’t miss . . . well, then you’re shit out of luck, Claire. Now pick up the spindle. And remember, the gun’s in the other hand so you don’t want to be thinking about doing anything else with it other than playing our little game.”

He watched her eyes. The eyes always flickered when they made their move. The eyes were a dead giveaway. But he didn’t even need the eyes this time. Instead of bringing it straight on down she raised it a half inch first so it was an easy thing to pull his hand away. Gave it a lot of force, though. She was game, he gave her that much. He freed the spindle from the bar.

“Okay. My turn.”

“No. Please. Just take the money. Just leave me alone, please? Enough, all right? All right??”

The husky voice had turned into a whine. The eyes were red with tears.

He smiled.

“Not enough, Claire. Not all right. But what are you worried about? You saw how tough it is. I’ll probably lose anyway, right? Of course maybe I won’t.”

“I can’t, please . . .”

“You can, Claire. You have to. See the gun? See this tubing at the end? It’s called a silencer. I made it myself. That means I can shoot you three or four times if I want to without even killing you, you dumb piece of shit and nobody’s going to hear it, the neighbors upstairs will never be the wiser. And
that
, Claire, is a world of pain, I promise you. You want it to go down that way? Fine by me. Different game is all. Nastier.”

“Oh, Jesus! Why . . . ?”

“You know the little
pffttt
sound silencers always make in the movies? Doesn’t happen. More like car door closing. So what’ll it be?”

She thought of her widowed mother in Queens and how in another month it would be Christmas and then of her sister married three months almost to the day and pregnant out in Oregon and that she’d never visited, thought of the paintings just finished and half-finished and of David still not free of her nor her of him and she thought about the kitten who curled between her feet each night and who
would feed her and take care of her and apprehended something of what the world would be like without her in it, an almost impossible concept just an hour ago but glimpsed now for a moment and thought
I’m so afraid, I’m so afraid of what I won’t get to see
and she put her hand down on the bar.

. . .
and now his control is complete. He can see it in her eyes. He can see she knows a truth he’s known all along, that there is no help in this world, that what will happen will happen and no amount of pleading to God or Jesus or to the milk of human kindness will get you any goddamn where at all, that in the face of loathing as deep and strong as his is she is just another worker ant in an anthill he can bring down in a second, crush beneath his feet at any time he wishes—her hand on the bar says all of this to him, and the temptation is there to do it to her on the very first plunge of the spike, to bring it instantly into even more stark perspective for her, the perspective of flesh, of spilled blood, of pain
.

Yet he resists that. He lets her pull away and listens to her gasp and the dull thud of the spindle against the bar and raises it again and watches her hand slide across the bar to submit a second time and wonders, is she hopeful? does she see an end to this? because he seems to have missed? That this might be true is delightful to him too because he can wipe it all away so quickly, he has lied again and he is very good at this, he has had practice and if hope is not yet there he can place it in her heart on this second try, bait his trap for the hungry animal which is all she is after all—hungry for the truth of what he knows to be.

And this time he can practically hear her heart beating, racing as she pulls away because yes! he can feel the hope there coiled in her like a snake—he has missed by a mile it seems to her and he can smell the stink of hope, its sudden sweet reek as he positions the spike above her hand a third and final time and then, prescient and sly and born of months and years
watching his back, trusting his senses, he glances out the plate glass window to the street
. . .

“Who the hell is that?” he says.

And at first she can only think it’s part of this game he’s playing, this insane evil fucked-up game and she doesn’t look up at all but only at her hand on the bar waiting for the courage to pull it away if she can a third time but then the words and the tone of the words seem to spill through to her and what she hears is unexpected, wrong in these circumstances, a flat even tone as if he’d said
well that’s interesting, it’s raining out
and she looks first at him and then at where he’s looking and sees David on the corner by the closed dark flower shop across the street. Their eyes meet and he’s scowling, puzzled and she thinks,
oh no, oh God no, I was so close, I might have finished this here and now
. She remembers seeing him down on the street across from her apartment building many nights ago and drawing away from the curtain before he glimpsed her at the window and remembers thinking how terribly sad it was for both of them and how wasteful that she could never, ever have come out to meet him and thinks
David, why in hell are you here again? what in hell have you done now?

She holds his gaze and slowly shakes her head.
Don’t even think it
. The scowl disappears. Instead the eyes plead with her, confused and uncertain. Eyes so well known and loved. She needs to deny these eyes. For both of them.