Strangers (32 page)

In the putrid closeness, he lay silent. He drifted from full consciousness to a state of mercifully dulled awareness that let him view what was happening in a detached way. He decided it was very possible that he would be killed. It was numbly bothering that he might not learn why.

It was sometime later
—sometime
because
fear has its own clock and a minute might be a day or an hour the sharp finger—snap that connects terror
then
to terror
now—
that Kevin Bollender’s claustrophobic journey ended.

The rain had stopped. On shaky legs, he climbed out of the trunk into a wet coldness. They were in the woods, a forest preserve, Kevin thought. The battered Impala stood alongside a Ford LTD on a
gravel parking
patch. Kevin thought it might be the Glenvale Forest Preserve but he could not be sure.

“That way,” Eddie Markell said. He gestured with the pistol at a picnic shelter fifty yards away. The wall-less structure had a concrete floor:
a gently pitched roof was supported by redwood columns
.

Kevin saw a man there. He was of average height, sandy-haired, wearing mechanic’s baggy, dark green coveralls. At his feet was a canvas bag.

“Move it, shit-heel,” Eddie Markell said.

An adrenalin-spiked hate coursed through Kevin. He was bigger and stronger than this motherfucking sonofabitch! He could pick him up and snap him, toss half of him north and the other half south.

But there was the gun.

Kevin walked to the picnic shelter.

“Glad to see you, Kevin,” said the man in the coveralls.

“I don’t know you and I don’t know what this is about,” Kevin said.

“You don’t know me? You know my wife. You’ve fucked her, you sonofabitch!”

“You’re…”

“I’m the Lone Ranger,” Michael said. He punched Kevin in the jaw.

Kevin staggered back. He had no doubt now. They meant to kill him. He felt like a dead man and because he had nothing to lose, not anymore, when Michael swung again, Kevin grabbed his arm and the wrist and elbow and spun him around into Eddie Markell.

“Sonofabitch!”

Kevin tried to run. Off-balance, Michael whirled, caught him around the waist. Kevin shot his elbow into Michael’s mid-section. Michael grunted.

Eddie Markell smashed the long ribbed barrel of the magnum against the side of Kevin’s head.

Kevin’s knees buckled. Once more, Eddie hit him.

“You can turn the pus-bag loose,” Eddie said. “He’s not in the mood for the hundred yard dash.”

Michael unfastened his grip and Kevin dropped to his hands and knees. Kevin ordered himself not to surrender to the churning undertow that was trying to pull him down into unconsciousness.

“Get up, asshole,” Eddie Markell said. “Take your clothes off.”

Kevin tried to rise but couldn’t. They hauled him up, stripped him. They pushed him against one of the shelter’s roof supporting beams, cranked his arms back around it, and tied his wrists with picture-hanging wire.

Michael said, “My wife a good lay, Kevin? You make her suck your cock? You know, I taught her that.
That your idea of fun?
Having another man’s wife give you head?”

Michael drew back his fist. There was nothing Kevin could do to avoid the blow or lesson its force. Michael smashed him squarely in the mouth. “Well,
my
idea of fun is killing shit-heads like you.”

Kevin’s mouth opened bloodily.

“I think he’s interested in some conversation,” Eddie Markell said.

“Beth,” Kevin croaked. “Don’t… hurt her…”

Michael patted himself on the chest. “My wife has broken my heart, but no, how could I hurt that dear sweet lady? Shit, what kind of guy do you think I am?”

Kevin glared at him with pain-slitted eyes. “Bas…tard…”

From the canvas bag, Michael took out
a jack-knife
and opened it. He touched the point to Kevin’s chest at the center of the sternum. Then he pressed just hard enough to pierce the skin.

Kevin jerked, slamming the back of his head into the column. Tears rolled down his cheeks as Michael slowly sliced a shallow line down to his navel.

“He’s going to scream,” Eddie Markell said.

“He’s got damned good reason.”

“No, let’s keep him quiet,” Eddie said. “I don’t think we’re going to be interrupted by any goddamned nature-lovers on a day like this, but just in case, we don’t want to have to leave the asshole until we’re finished with him.”

They gagged Kevin by shoving one of his socks in his mouth. Then Michael began cutting, not hurrying in the least, talking to Kevin with the tone of a shoe store clerk saying, “Have a good day.” After a time Kevin couldn’t stand it, couldn’t bear hearing the cold whisper of the blade opening his flesh so that the pain could hellishly flower along new lines of nerve-endings. He passed out.

He came to to biting cold and a smell so stingingly sharp that it overpowered the scent of his own blood.

Michael’s coveralls, saturated with gasoline, were draped over his neck and wrapped around Kevin’s lacerated chest and stomach.

Michael struck a match.

“What’s up, Doc?” Bugs Bunny asked the hapless Elmer Fudd. With the door to the basement open, the rabbit’s question carried up from the rec room, where the girls were watching Saturday morning cartoons, to the kitchen.

Michael sat at he kitchen table with the newspaper. Beth was at the sink, finishing the breakfast dishes.

Michael checked the front page of the
Sun-Times,
then opened the newspaper and skimmed the headlines until he found what he was looking for on page five.

“Beth?”

She turned around.

That smile…
he thought. All right, in about five seconds, she was going to swallow that grin and get puking-sick on it!

“Don’t you know a”—he glanced down at the paper—“Kevin Bollender? I think you told me he taught your psychology class?”

She tipped her head to the side, reminding him of a parakeet contemplating a new cuttlebone. She was still smiling. “That’s right,” she said.

He stood up, walked over to her, and handed her the paper. “Here’s something about him. Bottom of the page.”

Nothing happened quite as he’d been expecting.

A half-minute later, Beth threw the paper at him and as he started back, the pages flying around him, she screamed, “You killed him! You son of a bitch!” and punched him in the nose.

“Ow!” Michael cried out. Tears flooded his eyes. He touched his nose; there was a trickle of blood seeping through the left nostril. “You hit me!”

“You… You killer!”

Footsteps banged up the stairs. Kim stuck her head in the door. “
Who
killed someone? Hey, Dad, you got a bloody nose!” Marcy peered over her sister’s shoulder.

“Nobody killed anybody…”

“Your nose—did Mom pop you?”

Michael pointed. “Both of you, scoot back down there and stay put until I tell you otherwise.
Now!”

With the children gone, he closed the door and leaned his back against it. He wiped the half-mustache of blood from his lip. “Look,” he said, “I don’t know what the hell is going on with you, Beth…”

“Don’t you?” She rigidly stood at the sink. A tic in her cheek twitched and fluttered like a mouse’s beating heart.

“No,” Michael said, “I do not. You smack me in the nose, call me a killer…” Shaking his head
—He was the long-suffering husband doing his damnedest to be patient and understanding—he walked over to her—but he was angry now, angry and hurt
!—
and, raising his voice said, “If I killed someone, this Kevin Whatshisname, then you’d better call the police, Beth.”

She stared at him.

“Go on!” His voice got louder still. “You don’t want to be in the same house with a murderer. Call the cops. Now!”

She maintained her stare for only another second and then she lowered her head and her shoulders drooped. “I… I’m going to call Dr. Pretre,” she said in tight, barely audible whisper. “I feel like I have to talk to him. Today if he can see me.”

“All right,” Michael said. He sighed deeply.

“If I can get an appointment, Michael… would you take me to his office? I don’t want to drive myself.”

Now what happened to the independent New Era woman Beth thought she was?
Michael asked himself.
And all because her
between-the-sheets buddy got barbecued!

“Of course,” he said. He was extremely pleased with his next gesture. He put his hands on her shoulders and she flinched but did not pull away. In the most sorrowful, syrupy voice he could produce—It was a goddamn shame he couldn’t cue the violins—he asked, “Beth, what’s happening to us?”

It was an emergency, she explained over the phone, and Dr. Pretre agreed to see her at one o’clock. Marcy and Kim were dropped off at the Engelkings. Michael drove her to the psychiatrist.

During the
one hour
session, Dr. Pretre said, “I see,” and “I’m following you,” and “I understand,” or echoed her statements rephrased as a question. What she needed more than anything else, he told her, was rest, relief from this crushing
anxiety.
He handed her a plastic pill bottle. “Here, this is one of the samples I get from the drug company. Take one as soon as you get home. If it makes you groggy, that’s fine. Sleep would be good for you.”

Later that afternoon, Beth sound asleep, Michael telephoned Jan Pretre. They spoke for five minutes. They agreed that Beth should go on a vacation where there was no chance of her saying something that might cause anyone any trouble.

Dr. Pretre had just the ticket to send her on her trip.

— | — | —

EIGHTEEN

IT WAS
a few minutes after eight on Monday night. The Loudens were in the rec room, watching
MASH
like most of the United States. The girls were already in their pajamas. Michael and Beth sat on the couch and she was losing her mind.

On Saturday, when Michael had brought her home from Dr. Pretre’s, she took a pill and fell asleep within minutes. After that, Beth knew only that she awakened some time later—
Was it still Saturday
?—
and there was Michael with another pill, and she went back to steep: awake, a pill, asleep, a cycle, repeated and repeated.

Beth thought she had to have eaten during that time—all
that time:
awake asleep a pill—gone to the bathroom. She didn’t think she had washed her face. She knew she hadn’t changed out of this faded nightgown; she wanted to be flannel—warm in something that held her own scent. It was like wrapping up in an additional layer of self.

When had she last brushed her teeth?
she
wondered.

“Brush your teeth!” says Mr. Hap E. Tooth. “Curses!” says Mr. Tooth Decay, “Foiled again!”

She remembered the children had gone off to school this morning—it
had to
be this morning—and she was with them at breakfast—was that this morning or last week
?—
and that Michael had stayed home from the office today to give her pills.