Wild Horses (39 page)

Madeline slid it toward her using the barrel of the shotgun, pleased to have someone to show it to. Who might appreciate it. A drab little country mouse who’d stuck close to home, what had she seen of lights and glitter and celebrity, other than what she’d seen on TV, and magazine covers while in line at the supermarket?

“These are you?” Constance said, and Madeline said they were, if neglecting to mention that the earliest pictures went back nearly thirty years. But Constance cared nothing for dates, absorbed by the elaborate costumes, their brilliant colors and the towering headpieces that capped them off. Madeline remembered them as having turned her from a young woman who was merely lovely into one who’d been stunning, with the graceful stature of a heron and the plumage of a peacock.

And look at her now, stuck with a dodo.

“Oh, the Tropicana, Caesars Palace, Bally’s, Stardust,” she said. “I danced on some upscale stages, you’d better believe it.”

“And just look at some of the people you got to meet!” For a moment, you’d never know that Constance had two guns on her and a legbreaker in her bed. “Is that who I think it is? Is that Frank Sinatra you’re with?”

“The Chairman of the Board himself. Oh, I met some names, all right. Wayne Newton’s in there. Buddy Hackett. Dean Martin. Joey Bishop. Phyllis Diller. Don Rickles. Anybody you don’t recognize, feel free to ask.”

“Elvis?” she said, with hope.

Madeline shook her head. “Him I missed.”

Constance paged through to the end. When she gave the album back, Madeline glimpsed a look on her face, as if in contrasting the glimpses of then with the reality of now, Constance could ask only one thing:
Whatever could’ve happened to you?
To answer would be fatuous. She could figure out time, the simple passage of time, easily enough.

“I should be looking like that again before the year’s out,” Madeline said. “New Year’s Eve, you won’t know me to look at me. Which isn’t a bad idea at all, considering how I’ve spent the last couple of weeks.”

She lit a cigarette to keep herself busy, awake, then cocked her head toward the room where Gunther lay sleeping.

“I used to attract smart men. Maybe not geniuses, but smart. I think what they appreciated was that I actually could carry on a conversation. The average man? If every showgirl in Las Vegas went mute overnight, you think he’d care? So it was always a pleasure to surprise them. Smart men,” she said, and shook her head. “You can’t help but wonder, when gravity really starts to hit home, if they think it goes for the mind, too. They should know better.”

She thought of yesterday, how much she had become willing to put up with — to crave, even, in a sick way — and wondered if she wasn’t kidding herself; if her sense hadn’t gone to hell the same as everything else except her legs.

She’d thought that Gunther had done them in for sure yesterday, in the middle of Louisiana, that his brain had been baked beyond repair while in the car trunks. For all the good it would’ve done them, they might have reached Yazoo City one day sooner, had it not been for Gunther and the Whack-A-Mole game.

They’d walked into a truck stop and near the front had been a group of video games and the like. Gunther stopped before one, doubtless attracted by its more kinetic nature. He watched as a young boy stood before two rows of four holes each, while plastic rodents randomly popped their silly heads from the holes. The boy beat wildly at them with a padded mallet chained to the console.

Gunther watched, intrigued. “So the object is, you pound the shit out of the moles. That’s it?”

“Uh-huh,” said the kid. “Only afore they hunker back down in them holes.”

“Well, how hard can
that
be?” he said, and slipped a quarter onto the console to reserve the next game.

She rolled her eyes and left him to his innocent diversions while she went to place a carry-out order. Behind her rose the dull, frantic thudding of the mallet, then a venomous blue streak of swearing, and a chilling bellow of rage. Upon hearing the first gunshot, Madeline believed that the manhunt had ended, and whirled to deal with it, only to see that Gunther had abandoned the mallet and was now jamming the muzzle of the Browning down each mole hole and pulling the trigger as fast as he could. The red video display went berserk, and the game began to thump ominously.

Their food order forgotten, she’d rushed over to Gunther and given him a roundhouse slap across the face, dragging him out by the arm as he continued to curse the spiteful moles. Another quick exit with squealing tires and dust clouds.

“Low profile?”
she screamed from behind the wheel. “What the hell kind of low profile was
that
!”

“Little bastards, they’re faster than they look,” he said, turning sheepish, then sullen. He stripped the gauze bandage from his eye socket. “And I’ve about had it with this fucking thing.”

The stunt had necessitated a brand-new round of car stealing, plate switching, and cost them a full afternoon of travel time, as well as another possible pushpin on a law enforcement map. Yet for all the inconvenience and risk, it was the most alive she’d felt all day.

And now, sitting on the hallway floor at the Wainrights’, she rethought the episode, wondering instead if it wasn’t just the way Gunther was hardwired these days, that he could no longer consider himself finished with anything if he hadn’t first left everything dead in his wake.

*

When he could string thoughts together again, Boyd wondered, considering how gruesomely awful he felt, if it might not be even worse had he not gulped all that codeine earlier.

“Can you hear me now?” Krystal’s voice, from far out in the prickly red haze. “How … how are you feeling?”

“Like if you could go to work on me, we’d need a rock the size of a basketball.” To his ears it sounded mumbled, forced past swollen lips. “How do I … look?”

Boyd met her eyes with the one he had left, the right nearly hidden behind puffy folds. She sat trussed into her chair, green sundress lashed and wrinkled against her body, and looked him over with a sickly cast to her face, until the expression began to quiver, as if all that remained were the tears.

“Oh, sweetie,” she pleaded, “don’t … make me…”

“That’s okay, I get the idea.”

Krystal brightened with a tiny spark of optimism. “At least Madeline talked him out of using the drain cleaner first thing.”

“Ah,” he said. “Well, that’s some good news, isn’t it? And for a minute there I thought we were screwed.”

“I’ve been focusing,” she told him in a sudden whisper. “And I mean hard, too …
really
hard. I’ve been focusing for hours and hours, Boyd. Visualizing us walking out of here and everybody okay and nobody else hurt. You’ve got to put the vibes out there to get them back.”

“Power of positive thinking,” he mumbled, “like that?”

“It got me out of jail once, when the vice squad cracked down last election year. Usually they don’t hassle working girls except for the streetwalkers downtown, and then it’s mostly a racial thing. We’re just another part of the local economy. Except when election time comes around, then they do it for appearance.”

“And you just pictured yourself walking out of jail without arraignment.” Intrigued as he was by this prospect of the power of her will, he had to clarify matters. “That’s all you did.”

“Well, that, and give head to a detective lieutenant. But I’m pretty sure I created the opportunity to begin with.”

“No doubt,” he moaned.

The room where they were being kept must have belonged to Allison’s nephew. The windows had been blacked out with newspaper, so no one could see in. From each side, he and Krystal were watched by a malevolently gleeful crew of wallpaper clowns, juggling and turning cartwheels and puttering about in tiny cars, unleashing their ghoulish painted grins as though they were delegates dispatched from the twisted depths of Gunther’s mind.

“God have mercy, I hate this room. How does her kid sleep in here without having nightmares?”

“There, there,” Krystal soothed. “I’m sure they look entirely different to him.”

“At least there’s one bright side to that beating I took,” he said. “I can only see them with one eye.”

Gunther had done it downstairs with the butt of the shotgun, slamming it across his face without warning, with glaring bursts of pain, huge and repetitive, until unconsciousness had overtaken him as the last defense. Codeine could carry you just so far.

Boyd’s only clues to the horrors of his face lay in the pity on Krystal’s, the throbbing sensation of swollen mass where once had been contours, and the broken, pulpy textures he found while exploring the inside of his mouth with his tongue. The right inner cheek was as raw as an ulcerous boil. Three teeth along the side were gone, broken off and jagged, a fourth loose enough to wobble if he wished; he’d cut his tongue already on a spiny ridge. Of those missing entirely, he assumed either they were on the family-room floor or he’d swallowed them.

At least he’d not had to contend with the Drano. This had been Gunther’s original intent, as Krystal explained, turning into a loud debate between him and Madeline, who’d been pragmatic if not sentimental in sparing Boyd’s sight. She’d argued that the last thing they needed was a lot of screaming emanating from this happy southern home.

With coils of clothesline they’d been tied into heavy chairs brought up from the dining room. While their upper arms had been pinioned, their right forearms were oddly loose, sticking out from the hip. He could scratch his groin, but that was about all.

“What I can’t understand,” she said, “is why they left our right hands free like this. Not that it does us any good.”

“I feel like a T-Rex.” Boyd groaned after he gave it more thought. “If Gunther’s remembering what we talked about Saturday, I can guess what he has in mind for later.” He would explain no more, so as not to worry her, adding only, “If he comes at you with a deck of cards and has you cut high-low, start visualizing like crazy.”

Pitfalls of unconsciousness opened beneath him now and again, when the pain gathered as if by tidal cycles. He would sink into fitful dreams, hazy red, to be tossed there awhile, then deposited back into the hard chair later on. Through the open door he could sometimes hear voices in the hall, at other times noticing Gunther or Madeline checking on them, but immediately on each awakening he would seek Krystal, at his left, thinking that if he awoke to find her gone, he would just give up and somehow let himself die.

Most often she was waiting for him to rouse again. Twice he caught her awake but with her eyes half lidded and her lips softly murmuring, as though she’d entranced herself before some court of higher appeal to petition on their behalf. Finally, very late, he found her slumped in sleep like a normal person.

He watched over her, an impotent guardian, as flickers of bad dreams twitched at her features. He dwelt on an argument against her continuing in her chosen line of work that he’d come up with yesterday, with his usual pretzel logic, but hadn’t gotten around to presenting: that if she was karmically atoning for the pain inflicted in a past life, of what benefit was that when this call-girl thing caused him such fresh pain every time he thought of it?

Stating his case didn’t seem quite as important now.

Morning came, daylight seeping around the edges of the papers covering the windows, and soon there came a stirring in the hall. Gunther filled the doorway, toting the shotgun, two handguns stuck into his waistband.

“Looking good, Gunther,” Boyd told him. “Couple ammo belts across your chest, maybe an NRA hat, and nobody could tell you from the native rednecks down here.”

“Redneck — get the fuck out of here.” He took a step back and called down the hallway. “Maddy? I don’t look like a redneck, do I? Carrying these guns around?”

“Redneck?” Madeline called back. “You? Whatever gave you that idea?” A pause. “You’re not listening to Boyd again, are you? I’m warning you, you better not forget what happened the last time you listened to that weasel. Is that what you’re doing again?”

“No!” he shouted angrily, then ducked back into the doorway, glaring, and shook a finger at Boyd. “Blow me.
Blow
me.”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to cause trouble,” Boyd told him. “Look, could you send Constance back in with my piss cup? I really have to go again.”

Gunther balked, then went to fetch her from the kids’ room. Boyd had voided his bladder once this way, hours earlier, and it was completely humiliating, having to fish himself out of his pants and aim into a plastic cup that she held. Better, though, than the position in which Krystal found herself. They’d refused to untie her, even to go to the bathroom, and she’d held it in and held it in, until she could hold it no more, and had to let go in the chair. As the room warmed and her urine cooled, soaking her dress, Krystal sat in the indignity and the rising stink as if none of it could touch her anywhere that mattered.

Gunther marched Constance through the doorway, and she held a large plastic cup with dinosaurs on it. She knelt, held the cup in place. Boyd paused with his hand on his zipper, scowling at Gunther with all the annoyance left in his ravaged features.