Only Begotten Daughter (43 page)

Phoebe had read somewhere that after a person commits a revenge murder, he typically experiences excruciating regret. Not at his deed, but only at his failure to tell the victim two facts: who was killing him, and why.

“Hold it right there, Billy baby!” she screamed, thrusting the curtain aside.

Bastard. He allowed no explanation. He simply ran to the glass door, tore it open, and started onto the balcony.

He was halfway across when she caught him, springing onto his back like a lioness attacking an antelope. Together they arced over the balustrade, dangling toward the watery street. He spat in her face. She bit his hand, drinking his salty blood.

They fell. Fell with the raindrops.

Oh, shit, oh, God, oh, Katz, Katz, if you ever had a mother …!

The night air whizzed by and
splat,
exactly that,
splat,
a cartoon sound effect, and with it a redeeming ooze, blessedly soft. A sharp green stench cut into Phoebe’s brain. She rolled over. Rigid fingers scraped her cheek. Lifeless eyes watched her; a crossbow bolt ran through the corpse’s brow like a toothpick through an olive. She blinked. Another body, another. Corpses everywhere. Milk, dazed, lay wedged between two headless women. So much death, and yet these rumblings, these vibrant winds against her face.

Her mind cleared. Truck. Pickup truck, Circus truck: corpse removal. She laughed. Saved by the sinful dead. Already the vehicle was surging through the Tropicana Gate and onto the wet ribbony blackness of the expressway. Unmoving, Milk snorted and wheezed. Condos rolled past. Apartments, churches, farms. A solitary flame writhed and roared atop an oil refinery tower like a burning flag.

She made a fist, squeezed metal. Metal, glorious Smith & Wesson metal. Throwing herself atop Milk, she rammed the steel muzzle against his skull … ah, but there was a better entrance, wasn’t there? She flipped back his eyepatch and slid the pistol into the socket until it bumped scar tissue, a sound like a doctor’s rubber hammer striking a knee. “Know who I am?” she asked.

Milk seemed oddly pleased, as if the excitement of being under a woman compensated for her evident intent to murder him. “Babylon, is that you? You’ve grown darker, sister!”

Phoebe’s mother had once told her every woman tries to imagine having a penis, every man a vagina. Well, Reverend Milk, she thought, twisting the revolver as if operating a screw driver, here we have it.

“Ravage me, Babylon!”

The truck lurched to a stop. Steadying the revolver inside Milk’s head, Phoebe leaned back in time to see the driver jump from the cab and, preceded by the beam of his flashlight, hurry through the rain to the nearest roadside exhibit, a mass of wired bones chained to a cattle fence. He inspected the skeleton carefully, as if to determine whether it needed replacing.

“Take me, Babylon!”

“I’m not Babylon, you crazy man.”

“Ah … you’re from the junta!” Milk cried. A pale light hit his face. Phoebe turned. Briefly the driver contemplated the two living corpses tussling in the back of his truck. “Colonel Ackermar sent you!” Milk persisted, pawing at Phoebe’s parka.

Dropping his flashlight, the driver dashed into the stormy darkness like a frightened deer.

“You killed my best friend!” Phoebe sawed the Smith & Wesson back and forth. Why couldn’t she pull the trigger? Why these spasms of hesitation? “Burned my mother! Cut my father in half!” Gunmetal ground against bone.

“In half?” Milk grimaced. “I remember. Your father died a saved man.”

“You—” She smiled. Stopped sawing. Withdrew the revolver. The gospel according to Phoebe—she was really going to write it, really and truly. “Take a hike,” she muttered, tucking the Smith & Wesson into her parka. The gospel according to Phoebe—and she didn’t want a tawdry murder on page 301, no, she had more class than that, more style. “Out!”

Of the gulls, Katz had said.

Like a disappointed lover evicting her partner from bed, she levered Milk over the side of the truck and dumped him into a wet gunky ditch. The flying mud spattered her face.

Lightning exploded with flashbulb suddenness. The cranberry bog stretched in all directions, interrupted only by the expressway and its crop of ebony bones. A second flash: Milk, struggling to his feet. A third: Milk, hopping through the bog like an immense black cricket. Quite so, bastard, you are smart to run. Run your dick off. My mercy’s not terribly reliable.

The smell, the pervasive unholy stink. And so she jumped, words pouring from her mouth, a speech heard only by the rain and the decaying sinners. “Katz, Katz”—she lifted her revolver heavenward—“you really got your hooks into me, didn’t you?” She glanced at Milk’s retreating figure. “Me, I would’ve shot the bastard. Oh, yes—”

Crack:
a long, forking thread of lightning, slicing open the sky.

Whitening the bog. Striking Milk.

Phoebe blinked. Indeed: a running man, a bright zag, and—gone.

Lightning. Jesus. Wasn’t that a bit much? Yet it had certainly done the job, a crisp, clean hit.

She sensed the regret spreading through heaven, and she laughed. One: he hadn’t known who’d killed him. Two: he hadn’t known why.

But Phoebe did. This was no fluke of nature, this was an assassination, plain and simple. Katz, no doubt, would’ve called it coincidence. “A universe without coincidence would be an exceedingly strange place,” she’d said in one of her stupid columns. Stubborn Julie Katz, whose worldview did not admit of guest editorials by God.

Phoebe ran, rain washing over her face. Even before reaching Milk’s corpse, she knew how the bolt had transformed him. God’s punishments always fit: eye for eye, bisection for bisection. She gazed upon the miracle. A bisection indeed, only not at midriff as with her father but lengthwise, like a rail split by Abraham Lincoln.

Lightning. Perfect.

She staggered to the nearest tree and collapsed, curling her body around the trunk as if it were the core of her mother’s womb, and soon the drumming rain carried her into a thick and dreamless sleep.

April’s first sun rose fiercely, drawing steam from the cranberry bog. Gradually Phoebe gained her feet, jeans soggy with dew, chest heavy with milk. She slipped her damp fingers into her parka and, drawing out her ecclesiastical pass, noted that it had expired twelve hours earlier. What clever tricks would it take to reach America now, she wondered, what escapades, what lies? No point in worrying. She’d cross that bridge—that literal bridge, she thought with a quick smile, that Benjamin Franklin Bridge—when she came to it. The important thing was to get going. If Irene kept Little Murray on formula too long, he’d never go back to the tit.

The previous night was a hundred years in the past. Had it even happened at all? But then she started walking, and there he was, stretched out in the precise light of morning, his entire body a wound, the two halves cauterized. She felt sick, a sensation owing less to Milk’s condition than to her incriminating proximity. If caught, she’d be blamed, no doubt about it. Phoebe Sparks, God’s fall guy.

And so she began her furtive trek, sneaking from farm to farm and store to store like a marauding animal, living on pilfered fruit, stolen candy bars, and milk from her own fecund breasts. She shoplifted a backpack, the better to carry her plunder. She slept in cornfields, ate in Revelationist churches, peed in gas stations. On Thursday night a fresh thunderstorm arose, slashing a thousand creeks and ponds into the republic’s face. She claimed someone else’s umbrella from a bus depot lost-and-found and began looking for shelter, starting with the obvious—restaurant, laundromat—but in each case something made her lose heart: an armored van, a milling soldier, an Inquisition helicopter, a stranger’s suspicious glance. The Smith & Wesson sustained her. A mere touch and she felt nourished, renewed. Every girl should have a gun.

A mile outside Cherry Hill she came upon a shabby and demoralized farm. A rusting John Deere tractor and two moribund threshing machines sat amid a grove of spidery apple trees. A battered windmill turned jerkily in the storm like a telephone rotor being spun. Phoebe slipped into the barn and, peeling off her parka, flopped down in the hay. To judge from the two dozen stalls, the owner had once raised horses or dairy cows, but now the place belonged wholly to hens and roosters, a fragrant, fidgeting kingdom, their clucks breaking through the howl of the storm like some animal Morse code.

Phoebe’s stolen backpack held a feast. Swiftly she emptied it, setting out her imported Oscar Mayer hot dogs, an apple the size of a croquet ball, and a peanut-butter jar into which she’d expressed over a pint of breast milk. She devoured three weiners, washing them down with milk; her gastric juices sizzled. Satisfied, she stretched out in the cool, shit-sweet dark. Tomorrow afternoon she’d finally be back in America, kissing Irene, arranging a service for Katz, nursing Murray. God, how she missed that kid.

Sleep rolled across her like warm surf.

A peeing urge woke her. She’d had to urinate three times a night during her final month of pregnancy, and the conditioning lingered. She looked at her watch. Two
A.M
. Full bladder, full boobs, what a bloatoid she’d become.

“Hello, child.”

Phoebe clutched her revolver.

“I see you finally got some tits.” A male voice, fuzzy and thin.

Twenty feet away, a match flared. The tiny flame staggered through the air like a drunken firefly, alighting atop a cigarette.

“I’m armed,” Phoebe announced.

“Nobody here but us chickens,” the man replied, simultaneously coughing and laughing. A foul odor ripped through the air, rotten oranges soaked in rancid honey. “You remember me, don’t you? Years ago we met on Steel Pier. We rode the carousel together. Same one they nailed Katz to.”

A sudden glow suffused the barn as Andrew Wyvern ignited a kerosene lamp, a kind of miniature Angel’s Eye suspended on a nail. Sallow and collapsed, his face suggested a jack-o’-lantern kept till Christmas. He sat propped against a cow stall, surrounded by nesting hens, a burning, filtertip Pall Mall wedged between his lips.

“You’ve aged,” said Phoebe.

“So’ve you. Want to hear a joke?” A small snorting pig—round, pink, and bristled, a belly with legs—waddled across the barn and climbed into Wyvern’s lap. “Billy Milk was planning to let your friend go free. Can you imagine?” With casual cruelty Wyvern dug his talons into the piglet and began skinning it alive. “I had to intervene.”

Phoebe tightened her hold on the Smith & Wesson. “Know something, Mr. Wyvern?” The pig squealed horribly, bloodily. “You’re sick.”

“It was my poison that killed Katz, not the merry-go-round, not the spikes.
Conium maculatum,
a whole spongeful.” Like a depraved potter, Wyvern molded the pig’s red gooey flesh into a football. “Once again, the devil himself comes off the bench and throws the touchdown pass!” He lobbed the football into the adjacent stall, creating loud fluttery panic among the hens. “That’s me, a winner all the way.”

“You don’t look it.”

Wyvern mashed out his Pall Mall, lit another. “Her hand around your dynamite,” he sighed. “Her lousy insulation. But I’m feeling much better, thank you. Give me some milk.”

“Huh?”

“I want some milk.” The devil aimed his clawed index finger at the peanut-butter jar. A large, empty swallow traveled down his throat. “Please.”

“Thought you were a vegetarian.”

“Lacto-ovo.” He took a drag on the Pall Mall. “Bring it here.”

“Come and get it.”

“
I
don’t walk terribly well these days.” Wyvern exhaled a jagged smoke ring. “Temporary infirmity. Now that she’s dead, I’ll be back on my feet”—he snapped his fingers, and a luminous sphere of brimstone jumped out—“like
that.
”

Rising, brushing hay from her jeans, Phoebe carried her milk across the barn.

“Thanks.” Wyvern wrapped a mud-encrusted hand around the jar and, unscrewing the lid, took a huge gulp. “Great stuff, child. Nothing like home cooking.”

“I made it for my baby, not you.”

“Nevertheless, let me reciprocate.”

“With what? Horse piss?”

“With this.”

Scrabbling through the hay, Wyvern drew out a glass bottle. Phoebe shivered, gripped by nostalgia laced with terror. Ah, the paradisiacal places rum had taken her, sun-kissed beaches, blue lagoons, Jacuzzis filled with ass’s milk.

“Fresh from Palo Seco, child.” He pressed the fifth of Bacardi into her palm.

Bacardi, the best. She studied the tense and slender bat on the label. Her old friend.

“Live it up,” said Wyvern.

“Hi,” Phoebe addressed the bat.

“Cheers,” said the devil.

“Hi,” said Phoebe again, breathing deeply as her mother had taught her. “Hi, I’m Phoebe, and I’m an alcoholic.”

She scooped out a miniature grave in the hay and promptly reinterred the rum.

“I knew you’d say that, I just knew it.” Wyvern puffed on his Pall Mall, coughing so violently Phoebe expected his ribs to separate from his sternum. “No matter. This has been a marvelous week for me. The Circus nailed her up real good. Why didn’t you shoot him?”

“Who?”

“The grandpastor. Billy boy. You were supposed to shoot him.”

“Yeah? Well, it started looking like a poor idea.”

“You disappointed me, Phoebe. You hurt me.”

“The whole thing would’ve looked bad in Katz’s biography. I’m writing it. But then God came along and did the job.”

“The biography?”

“The assassination.”

“No, that was lightning, child.” The devil coughed, a sound like a tubercular calliope. “If you’re really writing her biography, be sure to get the facts right. She and I are two of a kind now. Obsolete. Even hell doesn’t need me. Last I heard, they’d put in a fucking parliament.” Again he coughed. “Time was, I could split open an entire Exxon supertanker with a wave of my hand. A simple nod from Satan and suddenly Mount Popocatepetl’s dumping molten shit on Quauhnahuac. I’d just have to
think
about counterinsurgency, and—
bang
—a million Tanzanians are disemboweling each other. From now on, if people want evil and violence on their planet, they’ll have to get it from sources other than me. From nature. From themselves.”