Ride a Cockhorse (41 page)

He pushed past Mrs. Fitzgibbons, forcing her aside, and opened the back door to his house. He didn't trouble to greet his wife, or even indicate having seen her. Insulted, Mrs. Fitzgibbons turned on Emily.

“Take her for a ride in the garden,” she ordered.

“Oh, no, it's too cold for that today,” Amanda objected. She looked about in confusion. Mr. Zabac was already indoors.

“It's not too cold,” Emily grumbled, and instantly started Mrs. Zabac's wheelchair rolling down the plywood incline.

“I'll be too cold,” Amanda protested. “It's much too cold for me.”

Hunched over the handles, Emily laughed nastily, and pushed Mrs. Zabac's wheelchair quickly onto the nearest path and headed out into the garden with her. The soft white curls on Mrs. Zabac's head trembled fluffily in the cold, windy air.

Inside the house, Louis Zabac was removing his overcoat. He was beside himself with vexation. Through the kitchen windows behind him, Mrs. Fitzgibbons could see the dark, crouched figure of Emily Krok thrusting Mrs. Zabac up the pathway toward the top of the garden. From where Mrs. Fitzgibbons stood, the featureless, gray-white horizon line of the garden looked like the final edge of the world.

“You knowingly and willfully deceived me,” said Mr. Zabac. “You gave me your pledge that you would do nothing outrageous, nothing crude, sudden, or violent in my absence. No sooner had I gone,” he flared up, “than you deliberately resumed your vicious, high-handed tactics.” Mr. Zabac had hung his tweed overcoat on a wooden hanger and reached it into the closet. His face was pocked and mustardy, marked with a tiny wine spot of frustration on either cheekbone.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons was standing behind him in the vestibule, with her left hand hooked over the belt of her coat. Her scorn was apparent. The sight of Mr. Zabac's boy-sized overcoat, as he prepared to hang it up, and of his glassy little shoes, struck her as embarrassingly freakish. Mr. Zabac must have noticed the pained, disbelieving look on her face when he turned to speak to her, because his angry excitement mounted. Mrs. Fitzgibbons interrupted him.

“I didn't come out here to talk about Elizabeth Wilson.”

“Mrs. Wilson,” the chairman came right back at her, “has been a model employee of mine for twenty years. Longer than most. Longer than you, or Mr. Frye, or Mrs. Lecznar, or dozens of others. It was she who helped set up our money machines. I don't want to know your reasons. I am not asking for explanations. There is no excuse, Mrs. Fitzgibbons, for such an egregious exhibition of willful insubordination.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons's heart rate accelerated with the chairman's remonstrating manner. She stood, legs wide apart, in front of him, obstructing his emergence from the hall closet, glaring at him. She was too tongue-tied with frustration to speak right away.

“And where is Mr. Hooton?” he persisted. “He didn't come to work today. Where is he? Why doesn't he answer my calls at his residence? What have you done to him?” He worked himself into a lather. “Have you fired him, as well? What in God's name do you think you're doing? Have you gone mad?”

With a brisk forward movement then, Mr. Zabac bumped Mrs. Fitzgibbons to one side and strode forth into the vestibule. “Today,” he said, gesturing, “I'll have my satisfaction.”

In her charged state of mind, Mrs. Fitzgibbons's general inability to brook criticism was rapidly replacing any tolerance she might have possessed over the ravings of a pompous little figurehead. Her heart was thumping. When the chairman looked over his shoulder at her, he must have noted the truculent lift of her chin and flash of her frozen blue eyes, for a shadow of worry passed quickly through his face.

“Who do you think you're talking to?” she fired at him. She was striding along behind him in the corridor, her heels ringing solidly on the floor.

“I don't even know what you're doing here,” he cried all of a sudden. “What are you doing in my house?”

If Mrs. Fitzgibbons knew nothing else, she knew that she could crush the man like a bug. She spoke to him now in the harshest manner. Her voice dropped a full octave. “How dare you speak to me that way?”

The walls of the prettily papered hallway that divided the ground floor were decorated with framed Norman Rockwell prints, ten or twelve of them, which Mrs. Fitzgibbons, in mounting indignation, would like to have gone about smashing with a hammer. Her voice was commanding.

“You're the one who reaps the profits from what I do. The little Midas!” she taunted. “Crying in his beer. ‘You do my dirty work, and I'll sweep in the gold.' It was
I
,” she exclaimed, “who brought Schreffler to the table. I did that! You're too kind and considerate to do that, you are. You're too nice. You're too namby-pamby.” She had backed Mr. Zabac to the newel post of the front staircase and was letting him have it. The fact that she was a head taller than the chairman of the Parish Bank and had lately shown a disposition to take physical measures when feeling thwarted, contributed powerfully to the force of her reproaches.

“I bring him fresh game on a platter,” she said. “Killed, cooked, and carved! A big fat roasting bird every week.”

“You're going to have to leave.” Mr. Zabac spoke up tonelessly, his back to the stairway, his face more sallow than ever. Like all creatures, wild or domestic, Louis Zabac obviously possessed an instinctive warning system that left him looking hypnotized in the face of impending violence. He stood stock still. He was staring into her eyes. “You're going to have to leave, Mrs. Fitzgibbons.”

Her face was not six inches from his own. The scent of his Paco Rabanne shaving lotion dilated her nostrils. The man's ingratitude combined with his seeming self-assurance exasperated her. “
I
run things,” she said, “you don't. You haven't in weeks. What does it take to penetrate that thick skull?” Mrs. Fitzgibbons's voice grew louder and harsher as she inched closer. “I attract deposits. I negotiate loans. I meet with the press. I fire whomever I please. What in God's name is the matter with you?” She gritted her teeth. She was shouting in his face. “Don't you understand? You're my rubber stamp. You're a title in a big office. You're a name printed on a piece of paper! I'm real. I do things. Things happen. Money comes in. People lose their jobs. People work harder.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons had raised a gray-gloved hand palm up and was striking it softly with the blade of the other hand, in rhythm with the points she was making.

“My computers make a noise, and a piece of paper comes out,” she said, “with your name on top. Just read down the column of figures on the paper to see what you're worth. That's what you do. That's your job. And that's all you do. And I'll tell you something else. More is coming! There's going to be a bloodbath this week at Cabot and High. I know it, my staff knows it, and Schreffler knows it.
Put it from your mind!
” she cried facetiously. “Pretend it's not happening. Play with your rosebushes. Watch TV. Your hands will be clean. I'll be the one at Cabot and High. I'll be the one throwing bodies into the street.”

Mr. Zabac couldn't even blink, let alone utter a word of exception.

“You'll be home sitting by the fire in your silk smoking jacket, with your wife and your hunting dogs and your cocktails, and I'll be cracking heads, and nobody,” she shot a finger past his eyes, “will say boo. Not Schreffler, or the people under him, or your labor complaint boards, or the newspapers, or anybody. When I go into Citizens, and shut the doors behind me, not one fucker will lift a finger to stop me.”

Her brain was churning; she couldn't believe that this diminutive person with his princely ways had had the temerity to speak up as he had.

“It wasn't enough for us to remain cordial and polite,” she said, “to smile at each other like two jackasses and go on pretending that you were responsible for my victories. No,” she lectured, “you call me on the telephone. You tell me to do nothing, and now come in here, pulling a long face, to show everybody how unhappy you are. I've got millions of new deposits in one pocket and an entire bank in the other, and he,” she said, “is unhappy.”

Mr. Zabac could bear the tension no longer. “Mrs. Fitzgibbons,” he said, “you're fired.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons reached with her left hand and took hold of Mr. Zabac by his shirt collar and the knot of his necktie, thrusting two gloved fingers down behind his tightly buttoned collar in a way that immediately altered the flow of blood moving down from his head. Mr. Zabac's face darkened.

“He doesn't even want to hear about it,” she said. “He wants to reproach somebody. I have my way of doing things — which is to get things done fast, and in a way that no one in his right mind will ever forget — and
he
has a better way. He flies off to Falmouth.” While it was apparent in the way Louis Zabac's head was forced back, and by his rising color, that he was about to begin striking Mrs. Fitzgibbons with his fists, she betrayed no sign of alarm. “I have a man out in the car who would like nothing better than to come wading in here and break up the place, smash some furniture,” she said.

Mr. Zabac was struggling. “Where is my wife?” he cried.

That made her laugh. She grabbed a fistful of Mr. Zabac's suit jacket just above the breast pocket with her right hand, and was simultaneously lifting and pushing him. “Your wife! That Grandma Moses?”

When at last the time came for Mr. Zabac to deliver the desperate retaliatory blow that he had been preparing, which was to have been a punch of considerable consequence to judge by the look on his face, the backs of his ankles came into contact with the lip of the bottom stair and instantly rearranged the gravitational axis of his body, with the result that the powerful forward delivery of his arm expended its force in space, rather like that of a frenzied schoolgirl. He toppled backward. Even as his spine collided with the fourth and fifth steps, Mrs. Fitzgibbons was upon him, unbelting her coat.

“Where have you been these past twenty years? On the planet Pluto? No,” she mocked again, “he wants proof positive. He wants to be shown.” Twice in rapid succession, Mr. Zabac strove to rise, each effort accompanied by a shout of outrage; but the natural downward pressure of Mrs. Fitzgibbons's own body weight redoubled the force of her rigid left arm upon his neck.

More than once, she actually bared her teeth, as she was using all her physical strength to pin him securely to the stairs. To anyone watching at this moment, it would have seemed that Mrs. Fitzgibbons was lifting him up and banging him down on the stairs, whereas in reality Louis was thrusting himself upward again and again, only to be met with superior force. The two of them were expressing themselves simultaneously.

“This is my house!” Mr. Zabac's face was the blood red of an overripe tomato. His breath was failing him. “What do you think you're doing?” he cried.

“Louis wants to be loved by everybody. Louis wants to be the boss.” She mocked him in a sissified voice.

“You've gone insane. You're a madwoman!”

“He wants to see what I'm made of.” She was tearing furiously now at Mr. Zabac's belt buckle. “He wants to see how much bilge I'll take. He wants to agitate me. He wants to fire my balls.”

Flat against the stairs, with Mrs. Fitzgibbons full-length upon him, Mr. Zabac was not only disadvantaged physically, but was rendered additionally helpless by the growing recognition of what in fact was happening. For, of the many exigencies of life against which a man is expected to prepare himself, this was not one of them. Mr. Zabac was being raped.

Snapping his trousers and boxer shorts down free of his waist, Mrs. Fitzgibbons clapped her hand over his exposed sex. Mr. Zabac's eyes bulged scarily. He emitted a cry. “Come on,” she yelled at him, “show us!”

Apart from her physical aggressiveness, Mrs. Fitzgibbons's moral leverage now precluded the likelihood of prolonged resistance. The hammers were going in her brain; her breathing was short. With her gloved fingertips under his testicles, she kneaded the hard ridge of flesh there with such force that it set her own torso rocking back and forth. She was still clutching him at the throat with her left fist. The amount of blood in his face was worrisome. “You and that gimpy little wife of yours. I should have given you the law weeks ago! I'm going to bang your brains out.”

Unfortunately for Louis Zabac, whose eyes were flooded with tears, and who squirmed futilely from side to side, snapping his head this way and that, the reactions aroused in the genital area by Mrs. Fitzgibbons's violent rubbing and the imprecations streaming from her lips were not what she expected. Nothing was happening. With an astonishingly swift movement, Mrs. Fitzgibbons reached and swept back the sides of her gun-colored coat, hiked up her dress, and, with two or three deft jerks, yanked down her underpants. She was berating Mr. Zabac all the while. “You're going to sign what's put in front of you! You'll ratify my every wish.”

At one point, Mr. Zabac twisted his head and cried for help, but the feebleness of his shout could only have revealed more acutely the thoroughness of his plight. The house was empty.

“You'll be Mrs. Fitzgibbons's helper. I'll put you in little overalls. You'll go to the store for me.
Come on!
” she hollered. “
Where is it?
”

What followed was so outrageous in nature, an occurrence so singular in the affront it paid to his maleness, that the expression on Mr. Zabac's face in the instant that Mrs. Fitzgibbons pushed herself forward and his head disappeared under her loins, was one of eye-popping horror. She was sitting atop him then, with her buttocks planted on his collarbone, her knees buried in the stair carpet. Mr. Zabac was being sodomized. Only his legs remained in view. From beneath the outspread hem of her leather coat, his legs flew straight up, thrashing and flailing the air, like a bicyclist pedaling furiously. He was being suffocated.