The Witch of the Wood (7 page)

It wasn’t difficult math. The Aunt was the forbidden mother-figure Sam had reconfigured into the safer fantasy. He even got to transpose the white stockings, for God’s sake.

Sam wasn’t looking in the car window anymore. He was looking away toward the reservoir, and when Rudy followed his sightline he didn’t see any bus stop or walking trail. It was a long hallway, and at the end of it was a sofa with flower patterns and vinyl slipcovers, and sitting on it was Aunt Esther. She had her Seventies perm, but it was bobby-pinned back behind her ears and topped off by a starched white cap. She was wearing a belted white pinafore over a short-sleeved blue blouse with a white collar, and she’d just kicked off her padded white shoes.

She pivoted a bit to the side and drew her knees in, one leg arching up and out, toe pointing, and she slowly began to remove those white panty hose.

Sam started walking toward her, head cocked a bit in dumb disbelief. By the time the panty hose lay in a feathery pile on the floor, Sam was halfway to her, walking faster now, and by the time he reached her, she was rubbing the back of her ankle as if she required as potent a physical soothing as the mental comforts she’d just supplied to her patients.

Sam reached to touch those legs, and she let him.

Rudy felt them too; she had goosebumps.

As if back to the grainy black-and-white film stock, she jumped camera frames then, making Sam move ten feet laterally to get to her, lying on her back on the kitchen table, knees up, ankles together. He approached and palmed those knees, spreading them slowly, her heels making rubbing sounds on the tablecloth, letting the shadows disappear up her thighs, and Sam saw her dark pussy, one of the lips sticking just for a moment, then coming off the other in a sweet unfolding, and Sam bent in to tongue it, his back cracking softly, and he and Rudy smelled her deep musk.

But right at the very moment he made to slide his tongue into her, she jumped frames again, now twelve feet deeper into the house in the baby’s playroom, naked on all fours and sunken down in front with her elbows and forearms flat to the carpet, ass pointed ceiling-high in a lovely heart shape, waiting there, just for him.

Sam was desperate now, bright purple in his passion, eyes rolling, and he stumbled to her, unbuttoning his pants, wading and waddling as they fell to his ankles, voices in his head pleading, “Oh my God,” and “No, please . . .” and that made it better somehow as he fell to his knees to ram his second aunt from behind, and he was amazed in a distracted sort of way by the roughness of the carpet.

Then the playroom vanished, and so did his second aunt.

“Oh,” Sam said, voice small. Initially, he hadn’t been running his fingers along goosebumped flesh, but the pitted bumper of the old Chevy illegally parked and booted with three old tickets fluttering from under the windshield wipers. He hadn’t been palming knees and spreading a pair of bare legs, but rather, he’d moved down the sidewalk to the bike rack and strategically pushed apart the tires on a couple of old ten-speeds that had been abandoned, and now he was in the street with his pants down, knees scraped, bus braking desperately because it had been doing fifty-seven with “Express” flashing across its automated route identification board.

“Wait,” Sam said, just before the bus hit him dead on.

The kid in the Alaskan parka, the one who had actually said, “Oh my God,” was still digging to try to get a bit of this on his cell phone. The woman next to him who had said, “No, please . . .” was looking away, face screwed in like a prune.

The front of the bus plowed into Sam and kicked him backward, his head slapping down to the street, blood bursting behind in an egg-shaped spray. The tires screeched and smoked over him, the back end of the bus fishtailing, Sam’s body puppet-jumping as it was caught up and mangled by the under carriage.

Rudy got out of the car and moved toward the apartment’s rear entrance.

“Thanks for the subtle diversion,” he muttered numbly. Before taking hold of the doorknob, he looked down at his son.

Wolfie was smiling.

Rudy brought his child in, put him on a blanket on the living room floor, drew a bath, went through the motions. Every three seconds or so he looked back over his shoulder from the bathroom to check, and Wolfie basically stayed put like a good little baby, reaching his fingers playfully into the red ambulance lights washing across him through the picture window facing the reservoir. It gave the illusion of movement, a lunatic carousel.

“You’ve got to kill him before it’s too late
,”
Rudy whispered under his breath. Then he said back to himself, “Yeah, right.”

So did Wolfie, and he was right in the doorway, wobbly, but standing there naked and bloody. Rudy’s heels kicked out from under him and he sat hard, right on the spot where two of the tiles had come loose, and his ass hit an edge. He winced, bit it back. Yes, he’d forgotten about this particular foreshadowing. Wolfie moved when you blinked. He’d also learned to talk through this psychic sort of connection they had going, and even though it was a mimic, Rudy was pretty sure it wouldn’t be too long before the kid was making speeches.

“Safe,” Wolfie said, and then he waddled straight into Rudy’s lap. The professor drew him in, held him, lost himself for a moment in the warmth of it. He loved this boy suddenly, deeply; he felt it in his neck, his back, high in the temples, and this was no media-driven piece of hyperbole.

“Of course you’re safe,” he murmured.

“I meant you,” the boy responded.

Rudy started a bit, and then it was all game face, lifting Wolfie into the tub, washing him, making sure to hit all the tucks and creases. Of course Rudy Barnes was safe, and the math was staggering. Wolfie could read minds, at least to some degree. He somehow knew even at this early juncture that his father was a moral figure and would struggle with the bloodshed. He also knew that at the end of the long cycle . . . with the returning arc of the pendulum . . . when the roller coaster finally slowed at the exit gate, pick your metaphor, love and loyalty would be Rudy’s landing point. Flat and fundamental. Personal, not publicized.

And Wolfie was aware of this psychological roundabout at the age of an hour. Rudy dried him off and kissed his forehead mechanically, searching for something cushy to wrap him in. It was mind-boggling, the puzzles Wolfie would be able to solve in a matter of weeks, days, hours, that would leave his own father behind in a state of absolute ignorance.

Rudy got the Eagles floor cushion with the couch-arms, two pillows from his bed, and a quilt from the linen closet. He arranged them in the middle of the floor the best he could with Wolfie in the crook of one arm, and then set the boy there and wrapped him. He stayed there for a second, above him on one knee.

Blind faith. No choice here.

His son worked his tiny hands above the top edge of the quilt covering, and for a moment they played at the air spasmodically, like the hands of any infant painting his formless colors into the world. Then he gained a level of motor function right there before Rudy’s eyes, turning his palms in, staring at them with the interest of a much older boy looking at his butterfly collection. He flexed his fingers, then closed them, making slow fists. Stopped. Looked at Rudy directly.

“There will be gifts,” he said.

And Rudy believed him.

The Super Fresh was crowded, and Rudy felt ridiculous, pushing his big cart around like some “Main Line Mom” gone haywire. Usually, he was in and out with a handbasket scattered at the bottom with the stuff he needed for a day or two: a rib-eye steak, a purple onion, a pack of double-A batteries, a stick of Gillette Cool Wave gel. But here, he was blocking the aisles at weird angles, pausing, reading labels, loading up on diapers, wet naps, formula, paper towels, Band-Aids, cotton balls, ammonia, the works. Next would be the “Baby Store,” and he wondered how much of this shit he could fit in the car. He needed a Diaper Genie, a playpen, a chest of drawers, clothes, and about fifty thousand other things he couldn’t think of right now. At least he’d pretty much decided to nix the crib. They’d sleep together in the big bed no matter what the psychologists had to say about it. In fact, Rudy looked forward to it.

A woman wearing a beret and those popular tight black leggings she was really too fat for cut Rudy off in front of an end cap stacked with cases of sale water and Coke Zero. Her little one was in the built-on baby seat facing her, slapping at the plastic shapes on the arched wire-mount, spinning them. The kid smacked the blue elephant straight on and it whirred around to a blur.

“Whoa!
Awe
some!” Mom said.

A voice slipped into his mind.

Rudy shuddered, palmed his ears hard. Felt like a spider web floating along the regions of his mind, sticking to the ridges.

“That you, Wolfie?”

Beret Lady glanced over casually and noticed he had no ear-to-phone hookup. She pushed her cart away hard then, actually nipping the corner of his, her sneakers squeaking on the smooth shiny floor. Her fat ass looked no better in retreat then it had from the side.

“The same,”
Wolfie said, voice itching, teasing, all sticky silk.
“I’m getting bored here all by myself.”

“Right. Got it,” Rudy said sort of into his collar. His face had gone scarlet, and it wasn’t because it looked as if he were talking to himself like a mental patient. Just how many literal and ethical laws had he broken, leaving that child by himself in the house? And worse, had he really a choice?

He navigated his way to the self-checkout lanes, jumped in front of an old guy rolling his dentures around in his mouth, and started beeping barcodes as quickly as he could. He swallowed hard, tasting copper.

What he going to come home to, anyway?

He bagged up quick and shoddy, pondering these last three questions and trying to discern which of the answers scared him the most.

Rudy reached to the passenger seat to make what would be the first of multiple trips inside with the plastic bags of groceries and everything else. He hoped that when he finally lugged up the boxes containing the particle board for the baby bureau in the big oblong crates no one would question why he’d bought particle boards for a baby bureau, or the two cases that made up the changing station, or the glider, or the new lamp with stars and moons on the shade.

The mess out on Maple Grove Avenue had been cleaned up already, and the only reminder was an arc of residue on the asphalt where Sam’s head had struck down. From the car just now it had looked shadowed, still damp on the glistening street, and from the puddles in the gutter, Rudy had figured the EMTs or the police had had some kind of portable pressure washer.

Gorge rose up in the back of Rudy’s throat, and he almost threw up right there in the car. He couldn’t do this. A man had died. And what had been a distracted sort of passing fear in the grocery store was now coming back to him in glorious Technicolor; Rudy had left a baby all by himself in a dark apartment where there were about a thousand and one things that could hurt him. Just how advanced was this kid, and in how many subject areas? Just because he could talk and “promise gifts” didn’t mean his other facets of intelligence had fully developed.

For God’s sake, Rudy hadn’t locked up his poisons, and they were waiting there for Wolfie under the kitchen sink, all skulls and crossbones and danger flags and other various icons and logos that any kid would find nifty just for the colors. If the kid could speak he could probably read warning labels, but would he? For sure? And the iron, oh God, the iron—no more than a heavy steel arrowhead right there in the living room closet, lurking at the edge of the top shelf, cord possibly dangling down just waiting for a good pull. There were electrical outlets all over the place, sharp edges and corners, knives in the drawers, medicines on the shelves, and the toolbox was out.

Rudy got out and slammed the car door a bit too hard, bringing the bags around with the momentum and clacking some of the Gerber jars loud enough to indicate he might have cracked them. The wind came across and made his eyes tear up. He folded himself into it, head down, and once inside, his shoes made gritty echoes on the stair grids.

Wolfie would be curled up dead on the floor by the radiator, face blackened, lips blue, throat mottled and stretched to the shape of the bottle of White-Out he’d tried to swallow. That, or he’d be face down in the toilet, arms limp on each side of the bowl because he’d thought he’d found a neat little tunnel to try and dive down, or worse, he’d be this smiling, skeletal cinder because he was advanced enough to walk, he moved when you blinked, and he’d evolved to the point that he could jump up on the stove, monkey-squat there because the perspective was new, then lean over the front and turn on the knobs.

At his door, bags thrust up one forearm, Rudy struggled with the key and heard some kind of moan from inside. He stopped. Silence. And the noise was hard to identify now in retrospect because of the relative racket he’d been making, mistaking his Widener office key (as he so often did) for the one that fit the apartment lock because the two copper stamps looked so much alike.

Something fell inside the apartment, something distant, as in the back by the bathroom, and Rudy fumbled the proper key in the hole, thrusting the door open.

Semi-dark. Vacated, it seemed.

“Wolfie?” he said, voice dead and close.

Something came from around the corner of the bedroom, the shaft of sunlight from the picture window cutting across on an angle. It was the silhouette of a little girl, hair tousled and frayed, shoes clicking on the hard wood floor. She stopped, head tilted.