The Animal Hour (44 page)

Oliver was reaching in his pocket for his key. He would have a key, wouldn't he? He was muttering to himself. “If her fucking ex is in there … if this is you, Randall, if it's you, you just don't know, you can't imagine the hurt I'll put on you, pal, no one can …”

He was slipping the key in the door. Zach just watched him sulkily. He could think of no way to stop him. He was out of ideas.
Damn her!
he thought helplessly. His mouth worked bitterly.
Damn, damn, damn her!
She had tricked him. Tricked.

Oliver pushed the door open. The baby's cries were suddenly loud. The hoarse, choking sobs washed out over them in waves. Oliver stepped into the apartment.

Zach sighed miserably.
Shit
, he thought. He shook his head. He did not bother to follow his brother into the apartment until he heard Oliver's wild cry rising up to mingle with the baby's. Then, sagging, he humped to the doorway. The bug-woman frittered along behind him.

“Oh God!” Zach heard her gasp.

Oliver stood just within the threshold. His head was thrown back. His hands were clutching at his sweater. He was tearing at his sweater, tearing it open. Frowning, Zach watched as his older brother cried out wildly again.

Zach thought:
Oh come on, Oliver. Don't overdo it, for Christ's sake.

Oliver sobbed and looked down at Avis Best. She lay still and silent on the floor where Zach had left her. She lay on her back near the canvas chair. One arm was resting on the seat, the other was flung outward. Her blonde hair was fanned out, turning black at the edges where it had sunk into the pool of blood that surrounded her head like a scarlet corona.

Her face was tilted back, her chin was lifted. Her glasses were askew on her nose. Her eyes were shut.

Her throat was slashed open.

In the other room, the baby cried and cried for her to come. But she was surely dead.

“O
liver Perkins!” she said into the phone.
My father is dead
, she thought. She had to shout to be heard above the drunken teenagers. There were three of them, white boys, on the sidewalk. Dressed in black rags, their faces blackened. They were spraying each other with some sort of green slime from aerosol cans. They were laughing and screaming. Staggering back and forth on the sidewalk behind her. They were screaming, “Hallloweeeen! Halllooooweeeeeen!”

“No: Perkins,” Nancy shouted into the phone. “That's right. I need his address too.”

There was a pause. A truck rumbled downtown on the far side of Park Avenue. Sparse traffic zigzagged uptown at a lick. The drunk boys' hilarity was momentarily washed away by the sound of sirens. More sirens: two more cop cars howled down Park. Screeched around the corner toward Gramercy, right by Nancy's phone booth.

My God, she thought, am I the only thing they have to do tonight?

A recording came on the phone line. Nancy stuck her finger in her free ear. The boys were skipping in a circle now, as in a war dance by Hollywood Injuns. They were shrieking the words to “Bad Moon Rising.”

“The number is …,” the recorded voice said distantly.

Nancy listened with her eyes closed. She repeated the numbers in a whisper. With her eyes closed, she waited for the live operator to return.

My father's dead
, she thought. And, with her eyes closed, she saw the empty hallway outside her childhood bedroom. It was so dark now—now that he was gone. It was so full of the old, half-feared phantoms. The fanged monsters and snakes and red-eyed ghosts. They were crawling out of their closets now, rising in wisps from under the baseboard. The house was big and empty all around her. It was unprotected; no longer patrolled by her father's aura of strength. Her father was dead. He had fallen. He had fallen into something bad …

Company. Yes. Bad company.

He had fallen into bad company. She leaned against the phone booth, the receiver to her ear, her eyes closed. She remembered her mother's voice.
They were very, very bad men. They were gamblers. Gangsters. They wanted his money, you see, and … and, well, he didn't have enough, he didn't have enough to give them …

“It's bound to take your liiife!” the drunken boys screamed behind her.

Nancy leaned against the phone booth, her eyes closed. She had to press her lips together to keep from crying. Even now, at this moment, she could feel the rage in her stomach. The boiling, tarry rage; the nausea of rage. It was rage at
her:
at her mother. It was a burbling fury at the weary-eyed woman who sat, night after night, at the edge of her bed. Weak comfort against her fear of the dark. All she could do was
sit
there? Just sit there and
tell
her that about her father, and
say
those horrible things about him. How could she just have let it happen? Why didn't she
do
something?

“Can I help you?”

Nancy's eyes came open. Park Avenue stretched uptown under bright green traffic lights. The night breeze rattled the bushes and trees in the center islands. The traffic hissed by pleasantly. The drunken boys were staggering downtown, their voices fading.

“I need his address,” she said hoarsely. “Oliver Perkins. I need his address too.”

“Cornelia Street,” the woman answered.

The words touched Nancy like ice and she shivered.
Cornelia Street
, she thought.
He lives on Cornelia Street. He lives. He's real. Something is real. Something.

She hung up and dialed again at once, repeating Perkins's phone number under her breath. She could not hear her own whispers, because now another flashing police car was speeding down the avenue. Wailing, howling. Dimly, she heard Perkins's phone begin to ring.

Hi, Mr. Perkins
, she thought.
I'm a schizophrenic murder victim and I'm coming to kill you tonight. Love your work, by the way. Run for your life, okay?

The phone rang and then rang again. The siren grew louder. It deafened her as the police car reached the corner. She could not hear whether the phone was ringing anymore or not. The cop car's flasher bathed her face in red and white as its tires screeched, as it took the corner full speed.

Then the sound of the siren softened. Then it stopped. She could hear now: The phone was still ringing. There had been no answer. She laid the handset down. She stood for another moment, gazing up the avenue. There was a hardware store there, just a few feet in front of her. Her eyes lit on its window, on the clock in its window.

It was 7:25.

“Cornelia Street,” she whispered aloud.

She started limping for the subway.

P
erkins sat on the floor next to Avis's body. His hand, dripping with her fresh blood, cradled her nearly severed head against his knee. He patted her cheek with a bloody palm as if to comfort her. Her cheek still felt soft and lifelike to him. Her skin was still warm.

Perkins stared across the empty room. He stared at the stained white walls; at the window; at the night; all without seeing, without hearing anything. It was funny, he thought, how dull-hearted you felt at first. He remembered that from when his mother died. At first, you did not really feel anything. You could not cry. You only wished you could cry. He hung his head. He did wish it. He wished he could feel for Avis right now because she had been his friend and he was going to miss her day after day. He looked down at her, to see her face; hoping to connect with her, to the idea of her at least so he would feel something. But she lay there like a broken thing. Her face was smeared and sticky with the blood from his hand. Her mouth was slack. The gash in her neck was like a second mouth, scarlet, gaping like a fish's: hideous. When he patted her cheek again, a gout of new blood dribbled from the opening. Her head wobbled strangely on its torn stem.

Perkins looked away from her. He stared at the white walls.

Then, after a while, he heard the baby. The baby was making noises in the nursery. Little coughs of complaint. Perkins turned his face toward the room. He heard Mrs. Philippa Wallabee, the Englishwoman from next door. She was in there with the baby now, talking and cooing to him. She had marched in there for him right away, sturdy as stone after her first gasp. She had marched past Avis's body even as Perkins was dropping to his knees beside it …

“He must …” Perkins had to clear his throat. “He must be hungry,” he called in to her. “There's formula in the fridge, Philippa.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Wallabee called back. “But I don't think I should bring him out there, Oliver. Maybe you could bring it in for me when you're all right.”

Mrs. Wallabee owned a candle and pottery store on Sixth Avenue. Perkins had always found her kind of sniffy, a stuck-up prig. It did not seem to matter very much now, though, what he had thought of her. What he had thought of anyone or anything. Nothing seemed to matter to him very much.

“All right,” he said. “I'll get it.”

He let Avis's body go. He got to his feet. That did bring tears to his eyes for a moment. Avis lay there on the floor beneath him, and she was a piece of clay now and the Avis whom he'd known was nowhere. That did bring the tears. There was a hint, a whiff, of a feeling that was nearly unbearable. He forced it down.

He walked away from the body with his back hunched over, his arms hanging heavily. Shock had slackened the sharp planes and deep lines of his face. He stared straight ahead as he walked. He did not know that his mouth was open.

He found a can of baby formula in the refrigerator. He poured some into a plastic bottle. Screwed a nipple on. Without looking at the body again (or at his brother, who had been standing in the room with him all this time, who was standing now near the front door), he walked heavily into the nursery.

Mrs. Wallabee was there, in the middle of the room. She had the baby on her narrow hip and was bouncing him up and down. She was trying to entertain him by waggling a stuffed walrus in his face. They stood under dangling airplanes. Surrounded by hanging Kermits and elephants, and cardboard cutouts of Mickey Mouse and Goofy. The room looked horrible to Perkins; nightmarish. All the cartoon characters were smiling crazily. What the hell did they have to smile about now? Slack-mouthed, he approached Mrs. Wallabee and handed her the bottle. The baby reached for it at once with both hands. Mrs. Wallabee helped him plug the nipple into his mouth. He sucked hungrily, but his eyes turned. He looked at Perkins. Perkins forced himself to give him a big smile, just like one of the cartoon characters. The baby let the bottle go and drew breath.

“Pah!” he said, and he laughed with delight. He twisted in Mrs. Wallabee's arms. He reached for Perkins now with those two small hands. Perkins took the kid, lifted him up against his shoulder and held him there. “Pah!” murmured the baby into his ear. The small hands clutched Perkins's torn sweater. The little face nestled in his neck.

Perkins thought:
Well, the father will probably get him.
He pressed the baby to himself with his bloody hands.
That shit-head Randall will probably take custody of him
, he thought. There was nothing he could do about it. The father would probably get the baby and then destroy him. Slowly. Abuse him. Every day. A little bit, every day. Some days a lot …

“Pah! Pah!” The baby wriggled and squeaked in his arms. Perkins's face crumpled. His whole body shuddered and a tear spilled from each eye. He felt the soft baby in his arms; saw the blood on his hands; the cartoons grinning crazily all around, in the air, on the wall. “Oh man!” he whispered.

He became more dull-hearted than ever. He did not care what happened anymore.

The baby wriggled away from him, looking back over his shoulder. He wanted his bottle again. Perkins handed him to Mrs. Wallabee. She took him into the crook of her arm and fed him the bottle. The baby sucked and looked at Perkins. He extended a hand to Perkins. Perkins turned his eyes away.

He looked at the woman. “Listen, Philippa,” he said tonelessly. He swallowed. “You have to listen to me carefully, all right?”