Rose Madder (52 page)

It wasn't a gun, but it was bad enough: he had a taser. Gert knew a crazy homeless woman downtown who had one and used it to kill rats with, the ones so big they thought they were Cocker Spaniels who just didn't happen to have pedigree papers.

“You want some of this?” Norman asked, still on his knees. He waved the taser back and forth in front of him. “You want a little, Gertie? You might as well come and get it, because you're gonna get some of it whether you want it or . . .”

He trailed off, looking doubtfully toward the corner of the building. Cries of female excitement and dismay drifted from that direction. They were still distant, but they were getting closer.

Gert used his moment of distraction to take a step backward, grab the handles of the fallen wheelchair, and jerk it upright. She stepped behind it, the chair's push handles completely lost in her big brown fists. She darted it at him in quick little pushes.

“Yeah, come on,” she said. “Come on, kidney-man. Come on, chickenshit. Come on, fagboy. You want to zap me? Got your phaser set to stun, do you? Come on, then. I think we got time for one more tango before the men in the white coats show up to take you away to Sunnydale Acres, or wherever they store weird fucks like y—”

He got to his feet, glancing again toward the sound of the approaching voices, and Gert thought,
What the fuck, I only have one life, let me live it as a blonde
and shoved the wheelchair at him as hard as she could. It struck him dead-center and he went over again with a yell. Gert lunged after him, hearing Cynthia's teary, wavering scream just one instant too late:

“Look out Gert he's still got it!”

There was a small but vicious crackling sound—
ziiittttt!—
and a bolt of chrome-plated agony shot up from Gert's ankle, where he had applied the taser, all the way to her hip. The fact that her skin was wet with urine probably made Norman's weapon even more effective. All the muscles in her left leg clenched eye-wateringly tight, then let go completely. Gert spilled to the ground. As she went, she grabbed onto the wrist of the hand with the taser in it and twisted it as hard as she could. Norman howled with pain and kicked out both booted feet. One missed completely, but the heel of the other caught her high up in the diaphragm, just below her breasts. The pain was so sudden and so strong that Gert forgot all about her leg, at least temporarily, but she held onto the taser, twisting his wrist until his fingers opened and the nasty gadget fell to the ground.

He scrambled back from her, blood bubbling from his mouth and snorting out of his nose in fine droplets. His eyes were wide and disbelieving; the idea that a woman had administered this beating hadn't sunk in, perhaps
couldn't
sink in. He staggered up, glanced in the direction of the approaching voices—they were very close now—and then fled along the board fence, back toward the amusement park. Gert didn't think he would get far before attracting the interest of Park Security; he looked like an extra from a
Friday the 13th
movie.

“Gert . . .”

Cynthia was crying and attempting to crawl to where Gert lay on her side, watching Norman disappear from view. Gert turned her attention to the girl and saw she'd taken a much worse beating than Gert had thought at first. A bruise like a thundercloud was puffing up over her right eye, and her nose would probably never be the same.

Gert struggled to her knees and crawled toward Cynthia. They met and held each other that way, arms locked around necks to keep them from tumbling over. Speaking with enormous
effort through her puffy lips, Cynthia said: “I would have thrown him myself . . . like you taught us . . . only he took me by surprise.”

“That's all right,” Gert said, and kissed her gently on the temple. “How bad are you hurt?”

“Don't know . . . not coughing up blood . . . step in the right direction.” She was trying to smile. It was clearly painful, but she was trying, anyway. “Pissed on him.”

“Yes. I did.”

“Bitchin-good,” Cynthia whispered, and then began to cry again. Gert took her in her arms, and that was how the first group of women, closely followed by a pair of Pier Security guards, found them: on their knees between the back of the bathroom and the abandoned, overturned wheelchair, each with her head against the shoulder of the other, clinging together like shipwrecked sailors.

R
osie's first blurred impression of the East Side Receiving Hospital Emergency Room was that everyone from Daughters and Sisters was there. As she crossed the room toward Gert (barely registering the men clustered around her), she saw at least three were missing: Anna, who might still be at the memorial service for her ex-husband; Pam, who was working; and Cynthia. It was this last which most sparked her dread.

“Gert!” she cried, pushing through the men with barely a glance at them. “Gert, where's Cynthia? Is she—”

“Upstairs.” Gert tried to give Rosie a reassuring smile, but it wasn't much of a success. Her eyes were swollen and red with tears. “They admitted her and she's probably going to be here awhile, but she'll be okay, Rosie. He beat her up pretty bad, but she'll be okay. Do you know you're wearing a motorcycle helmet? It's sort of . . . cute.”

Bill's hands were on the buckle under her chin again, but Rosie was hardly even aware of the helmet's being removed. She was looking at Gert . . . Consuelo . . . Robin. Looking for eyes that said she was infected, that she had brought a plague into their previously clean house. Looking for the hate.

“I'm sorry,” she said hoarsely. “I'm so sorry for everything.”

“Why?” Robin asked, sounding honestly surprised.
“You
didn't beat Cynthia up.”

Rosie looked at her uncertainly, then back to Gert. Gert's eyes had shifted, and when Rosie followed them, she felt a surge of dread. For the first time she consciously registered the fact that there were cops here as well as women from D & S. Two in plainclothes, three in uniform.
Cops.

She reached out with a hand that felt numb and grasped Bill's fingers.

“You have to talk to this woman,” Gert was telling one of the cops. “Her husband was the one who did this. Rosie, this is Lieutenant Hale.”

They were all turning to look at her now, to look at the cop's wife who'd had the deadly impudence to steal her husband's bank card and then try to flee from his life.

Normans' brothers, looking at her.

“Ma'am?” the plainclothes cop named Hale said, and for a moment he sounded so much like Harley Bissington she thought she might scream.

“Steady, Rosie,” Bill murmured. “I'm here and I'm staying here.”

“Ma'am, what can you tell us about this?” At least he didn't sound like Harley anymore. That had only been a trick of her mind.

Rosie looked out the window toward a freeway entrance ramp. She looked east—the direction from which night would come rising out of the lake not so many hours from now. She bit her lip, then looked back at the cop. She placed her other hand over Bill's and spoke in a husky voice she hardly recognized as her own.

“His name is Norman Daniels,” she told Lieutenant Hale.

You sound like the woman in the painting,
she thought.
You sound like Rose Madder.

“He's my husband, he's a police detective, and he's crazy.”

H
e had felt as if he were floating above his own head, somehow, but when Dirty Gertie pissed on him, all that changed. Now, instead of feeling like a helium-filled balloon, his head felt like a flat rock which some strong hand had sent skipping across the surface of a lake. He was no longer
floating;
now he seemed to be
leaping.

He still couldn't believe what the fat black bitch had done to him. He
knew
it, yes, but knowing and believing were sometimes worlds apart, and this was one of those times. It was as if a dark transmutation had occurred, changing him into some new creature, a thing that went skittering helplessly along the surface of perception, allowing him only brief periods of thought and strange, disconnected snatches of experience.

He remembered staggering to his feet that last time behind the shithouse, face bleeding from half a dozen cuts and scrapes, his nose stuffed halfway shut, aching all over from repeated confrontations with his own wheelchair, his ribs and guts throbbing from having about three hundred pounds of Dirty Gertie perched on top of him . . . but he could have lived with any of that—that and more. It was the wetness from her and the smell
of
her, not just urine but a
woman's
urine, that made his mind feel as if it were buckling each time it turned back that way. Thinking of what she had done made him want to scream, and it made the world—which he badly needed to stay in touch with, if he didn't want to end up behind bars, probably laced into a straitjacket and stuffed full of Thorazine—begin to fuzz out.

As he staggered along the fence he thought,
Get her, get her, you have to turn around and get her, get her and kill her for what she did, it's the only way you'll ever be able to sleep again, it's the only way you'll ever be able to
think
again.

Some part of him knew better, though, and instead of getting her, he ran.

Probably Dirty Gertie thought it was the sound of approaching people that drove him off, but it wasn't. He ran because his ribs hurt so badly that he could only draw half-breaths,
at least for the time being, and his stomach ached, and his testicles were throbbing with that deep, desperate pain only men know about.

Nor was the pain the only reason he ran—it was what the pain meant. He was afraid that if he took after her again, Dirty Gertie might do better than just fight him to a draw. So he fled, lurching along beside the board fence as fast as he could, and Dirty Gertie's voice chased him like a mocking ghost:
She left you a little message . . . her kidneys by way of
my
kidneys . . . a little message, Normie . . . here it comes . . .

Then one of those skips happened, a short one, the stone of his mind striking the flat surface of reality and flying up and off it again, and when he came back into himself, some little length of time—maybe as short as fifteen seconds, maybe as long as forty-five—had passed. He was running down the midway toward the amusements area, running as thoughtlessly as a cow in a stampede, actually running
away
from the park exits instead of toward them, running toward the Pier, running toward the lake, where it would be child's play to first bottle him up and then bring him down.

Meanwhile, his mind shrieked in the voice of his father, the world-class crotchgrabber (and, on at least one memorable hunting trip, world-class cockgobbler, as well).
It was a woman!
Ray Daniels was screaming.
How could you let your clock get cleaned by some cunt, Normie?

He shoved that voice out of his mind. The old man had shouted enough at him while he was alive; Norman was damned if he was going to listen to that same old bullshit now that the old man was dead. He could take care of Gertie, he could take care of Rose, he could take care of all of them, but he had to get away from here in order to do it . . . and before every Security cop in the place was looking for the bald guy with the bloody face. Already far too many people were gawking, and why not? He stank of piss and looked as if he'd been clawed by a catamount.

He turned into an alley running between the video arcade and the South Seas Adventure ride, no plan in mind, wanting only to get away from the geeks on the midway, and that was when he won the lottery.

The side door of the arcade opened and someone Norman assumed was a kid came out. It was impossible to tell for sure. He was short like a kid and dressed like a kid—jeans,
Reeboks, Michael McDermott tee-shirt (
I LOVE A GIRL CALLED RAIN
, it said, whatever the fuck that meant)—but his entire head was covered by a rubber mask. It was Ferdinand the Bull. Ferdinand had a big, sappy smile on his face. His horns were decorated with garlands of flowers. Norman never hesitated, simply reached out and snatched the mask off the kid's head. He got a pretty good handful of hair, too, but what the fuck.

“Hey!”
the kid screamed. With the mask off, he looked about eleven years old. Still, he sounded more outraged than fearful. “Gimme that back, that's mine, I won it! What do you think you're—”

Norman reached out again, took the kid's face in his hand, and shoved him backward, hard. The side of the South Seas Adventure ride was canvas, and the kid went billowing through it with his expensive sneakers flying up in the air.

“Tell anybody, I'll come back and kill you,” Norman said into the still-billowing canvas. Then he walked rapidly toward the midway, pulling the bullmask down over his head. It stank of rubber and its previous owner's sweaty hair, but neither smell bothered Norman. The thought that the mask would soon also stink of Gertie's piss did.

Then his mind took another of those skips, and he disappeared into the ozone for awhile. When he came back this time, he was trotting into the parking lot at the end of Press Street with one hand pushing against his ribcage on the right side, where every breath was now agony. The inside of the mask smelled exactly as he had feared it would and he pulled it off, gasping gratefully at cool air which didn't stink of piss and pussy. He looked down at the mask and shivered—something about that vapid, smiling face creeped him out. A bull with a ring through his nose and garlands of posies on his horns. A bull wearing the smile of a creature that has been robbed of something and is too stupid to even know what it is. His first impulse was to throw the goddam thing away, but he restrained himself. There was the parking-lot attendant to think about, and while he would undoubtedly remember a man driving off in a Ferdinand the Bull mask, he might not immediately associate that man with the man the police were shortly going to be asking about. If it bought him a little more time, the mask was worth holding onto.