Slice Of Cherry (8 page)

Kit started singing again, and even the birds seemed annoyed by the song, fleeing high over the shady road.

Since Fancy liked “all that Depression-era crap,” normally she would have been glad to see Kit being so broad-minded,
but she was still upset over how Kit had behaved with the Turners yesterday. And to make it even worse, Kit had told Madda everything that had happened, and the two of them had wasted their whole dinner talking about boys in general and Gabriel in particular until Fancy had been ready to burst her eardrums with her fork.

“Who’s Esme?” Fancy asked. Anything to keep the singing at bay.

“The lady who owns the record store that we’ve been going to for the past four years. God, Fancy, don’t you
ever
pay attention to people?”

“Why should I?”

“They’re not always boring. Remember that girl we saw in the square playing ‘Heart and Soul’ on a recorder?
With her nose?
It was the coolest, freakiest thing ever.”

“I’ve done cooler, freakier things than that. And so have you. Remember that time you made that squirrel eat its own liver?”

Kit shrugged off her sister’s praise, unimpressed with herself. “What’s the point of being freaky if you can’t show off like the recorder girl? Picture me on the street: ‘Hey, mister, is that your dog? Wanna see me make him eat his own liver?’
I can’t really see anybody giving me a standing ovation for that.”

“Since when do you care what other people think?”

“I don’t,” said Kit, quickly. “I’m not saying that people don’t suck. I’m just saying maybe they don’t suck
all the time
.”

Before Fancy could rebut, the sisters came upon a man standing by his truck with the hood up, and Fancy’s urge to speak shriveled.

He was old and bald beneath his trucker hat, which was dirty white like his truck. He wore a white T-shirt and blue jeans that rode low beneath his formidable beer gut. Obviously he was from out of town. Porterenes always wore black, except in church on Sundays. It was a cultural thing, an acknowledgment that death, like the monsters, was all around them.

“Hey, girls!”

The sisters slowed their bikes but didn’t stop.

The quiet two-lane road the sisters were biking along was part of historic El Camino Real. It cut through the woods right past their house and hardly ever got traffic since the highway had been built.

“Y’all got a cell phone?” He was trying to flag them down with his hat. “I gotta call for a tow or something! This truck . . .”
He paused, as if having to describe how his truck had let him down was more than he could bear.

“I got a cell,” yelled Kit, doing her bubbly thing.

“You do not,” hissed Fancy, coming to a halt beside her sister, across from the old man and his truck.

Kit hopped off her bike and retrieved a cell from the bag with the records and whispered, “I swiped it from that shop-girl. I been using up all her anytime minutes calling people in Houston and Miami. And Japan.”

“No good deed goes unpunished,” Fancy warned.

But Kit ignored her and crossed the road, wiggling the cell at the old man. “Here you go! And if you wanna download some games and songs while you’re at it, feel f—”

The old man snatched the phone from Kit’s hand and threw it into the woods. Before either sister could react, he hooked his arm around Kit’s throat and held a grimy screwdriver to her cheek.

“You!”

Fancy flinched from the harshness of his voice, how it had devolved so quickly from harmless to beastly. “Get over here. Stop right there! Close the hood. Good, now get in the truck.”

Fancy did everything the old man said, and then mouthed
Told you so
at Kit while he nervously scanned the road for traffic. Kit made a moue of annoyance.

The old man shut Fancy inside the backseat of the hot, stale-smelling truck, where there were no handles to get out; a mesh partition kept her from crawling into the front seat. “You sit there,” he said through the rolled-up window, calm now that he had control of the situation. “You sit there till I come for you. Meantime, your sister and me can get better acquainted.” When he nuzzled his veiny nose into Kit’s cheek, her annoyed look intensified.

The old man shoved Kit ahead of him into the woods, and they soon disappeared into the thick foliage. Fancy began to count, and when she reached fifty, an agonized scream silenced the forest.

Fancy heard the scream again just as Kit burst from the trees, grinning as she opened the truck door to free Fancy.

The air outside felt almost cool compared to the inside of the truck. Fancy fanned herself with her hat and glared at Kit. “
Told
you not to talk to strangers.”

The grin vanished. “Okay. You were right. I admit it.” Kit threw open her arms to embrace the surrounding forest. “Hear that, bats and bunnies? Fancy was right and I was wrong!”

The only answer was another scream.

“What’d you do to him?” She gave Kit an admiring stare. “And in only fifty seconds?”

“Come see.”

The sisters hurried back into the woods, tramping single file along a deer trail. They found the old man lying motionless just off the path on a bed of cloverleafs and . . .

Fancy laughed. “Ghoul’s delight?”

“Yep.” Kit pointed to the fuzzy ivory flowers clustering over the solid ground cover beneath the old man.

“He pushed me to my knees and told me to eat him. So while I was on the ground, I plucked one of the flowers and then shot up and stuck the pistil into the moist little ball of his eye, and down he went. Then I stabbed him with his own screwdriver, because if there’s one thing I can appreciate, it’s irony.”

The old man’s muddy right eye was as glassy and motionless as a doll’s; his left, however, glared daggers at the sisters as he screamed at them, the screwdriver poking tumorously from his shoulder.

Kit dropped next to the old man, careful of the ghoul’s delight. “Obviously you ain’t from here and don’t know about
all the crazy plants that grow in Portero. These flowers you were so eager to do me on cause paralysis.”

Not that he was completely paralyzed; he could shrug his shoulders a bit and wiggle his knees.

“You wouldn’t have minded if
I’d
been paralyzed, though, right?” said Kit. She produced her switchblade and waggled it in the old man’s face. “Would’ve made raping me way easier. But not funner.”

Fancy rapped Kit on the back of the head. “Don’t say ‘funner.’”

“Lemme alone.” Kit swatted her back. “It’s playtime.”

Fancy didn’t feel the reluctance to harm that she’d felt with Franken. Or even the shopgirl. For the old man, twitching on his back like a dying cockroach, she felt nothing.

“You said you didn’t mind violence,” said Kit, misreading her hesitation. “And anyway, he tried to hurt me.”

“I know.” When Kit looked at her with disappointed eyes, Fancy realized she felt something after all. “That’s why we’re gone kill him.”

Kit jumped to her feet and grabbed Fancy by the shoulders, face shining brighter than the sun burning along the trail. “Really?”

Fancy took Kit’s switchblade and lifted the old man’s
T-shirt. She jabbed the knife into the left-hand side of the old man’s enormous gut. He screamed when the knife went in. He couldn’t feel it, of course, but he could still see.

“There.” Fancy stood and made an
after you
gesture to Kit. “Now you can unzip him and see if you really do like evisceration.”

Kit squealed and hopped in place like a kid on Christmas Day, and when she finally reached for the knife, her hands were shaking. She rolled him onto his side as she yanked up on the hilt of the switchblade, which parted his belly as easily as Moses had parted the Red Sea, and then laughed when Fancy squealed and skipped back with the old man’s guts decorating her Mary Janes. “Look what you did to my sister’s shoes!”

But the old man didn’t want to see; his one working eye swirled every which way except down at his intestines.

“I wanna unzip something else,” Kit exclaimed, pulling the switchblade free. “Maybe his liver?”

“No, he needs that,” said Fancy. “People can live a long time with their guts hanging out. But livers are important. Cut out his eyes, or sever his fingers. He doesn’t need those.”

“What does it matter if I cut out his liver and it kills him? We
are
killing him, right?”

“Yes, but I want him alive when the animals come.”

“Animals?”

Fancy grimaced at her shoes and cleaned them as best she could in the grass. “All this offal is sure to attract ’em.” She leaned over the old man’s face, forcing him to look at her. “You said you wanna be eaten? Let’s see if you get your wish.”

An hour later the sisters sat in a tree, legs dangling, watching the pack of hogs through the waxy magnolia leaves as they feasted on the old man. His flat eyes stared blankly at the sky. His paunch had deflated, empty of all the stuff that had fallen out of him. His bloodstained cap was turned to the side on his head as though he had become a B-boy in the afterlife.

“We should go,” said Fancy nervously, as the hogs fought over the old man’s scraps.

“Why?” Kit watched the scene below as raptly as some women watched soap operas. “This is great! Besides, you’re the one who wanted to wait and watch him get eaten.”

“But what if
monsters
come?”

“Fancy.” Kit looked away from the drama to stare at her sister, surprised. “We
are
the monsters.”

W
E CAME HOME AND SAW
M
ADDA IN THE LIVING ROOM CROUCHED ON THE FLOOR EATING RAW STEAK.
S
HE HAD FANGS.
W
E RAN TO HER AND HUGGED HER. WE SAID, YOU’RE JUST LIKE US.
M
ADDA TOOK THE TEETH OUT —THEY WERE SHINY AND PLASTIC—AND SAID, NO
I’
M NOT.

Kit burst into the cellar. “Look what I have, Franken!”

She hopped onto the cot where Franken lay pale and still, as if Kit had pulled him out of a drawer at the morgue.

He studied the jar she held to his face, the ear that flopped against the glass as she shook it. “Who’s that?”

“Some guy we met on the road who wanted to commit ungentlemanly acts upon my person. We ripped out his guts and let the hogs eat him. But this!” Kit tapped her red fingernail against the jar. “This is mine.”

Franken looked away from the jar and frowned at the ceiling. “Is that why you didn’t come see me?”

Kit stopped smiling. “I wanted to come, but”—she shot
a quick look at Fancy, who was scowling at her—“Fancy wanted to shop for records. And then the old man showed up and—”

“Sometimes I think you’ll never come back,” Franken whispered. “That you’ll leave me down here to rot till I’m just a pile of stitches and bones.”

“I wouldn’t do that!” Kit stroked his pale hair. “I wouldn’t be taking such good care of you if I meant for you to r—Jesus, is that lice?” Kit peered at the bug she’d picked out of Franken’s hair.

“Is it?” Fancy asked, backing away toward the shelves.

“Nah,” Kit decided, crushing the bug between her fingers. “Just a mite. I’d better bathe him again, though.”

“You bathed him yesterday,” Fancy complained, as Kit filled a bowl with bottled water and hand soap from the shelves. “He just lays there all day. How could he get dirty?”

“I don’t know,” Kit said, kneeling by the cot. “Dead skin cells? Sweat? Mites? Go play with something and don’t bother me.” Franken didn’t have a shirt, not since Kit had cut it off him, so she just pulled down his pants. “And don’t look at his junk! You know how shy Franken is.”

Fancy huffed as far away from them as she could, which in
the small space wasn’t as far as she would have liked. She sat on the floor near the cellar steps and played jacks and wondered for the millionth time why Kit had to get so involved with people.

“You girls down there?”

Fancy jerked and looked toward the stairs before she realized it was just the intercom on the wall above her head. Kit made a shushing gesture to Franken as Fancy pressed the button.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, come on up and help me with dinner. It’s getting late.”

“We’re on our way.” Fancy let go of the button and turned to Kit. “She wants us to help with dinner.”

“I can hear.”

“So come on!”

“In a minute.” Kit wrung out the washcloth and gently rubbed Franken’s legs.

“This is ridiculous!”

“Cleanliness is next to godliness, Fancy. Besides, the constant washing also helps prevent infection.”

“You just like seeing him naked.”

“I’m not even looking at him! I feel sad when I look at him.” Kit ran her hand over all the scars she’d put on his body. “I feel sad because
he’s
so sad. You really should let me put him outta his misery.”

“No.”

“You can’t blame her for wanting me dead,” Franken said to Fancy, startling her. He always acted as though she weren’t in the room. Even now, though he was talking to Fancy, he was looking at Kit. “I’m all cut up and hideous now. She can’t stand the sight of me.”

“That’s not true,” Kit exclaimed. “You’re not hideous. I swear.” She held her hand to her chest, over the empty space she was always complaining about. “You’re like a doll I had when I was a kid. She was all stitched together and her head kept falling off, but I loved that doll. That’s what you look like. Like somebody just loved you to death.”

“Isn’t that the doll you ripped to pieces?” said Fancy. “After Daddy got arrested? Classic misplaced aggression, Franken; she really wanted to rip
Daddy
to pieces.”

Kit shot her an outraged look. “I did not!”

“But it’s too hard, ripping a grown man apart.”

“Not
that
hard.” Kit got off her knees and ran her eyes
down Franken’s body. “Not with the right tools. The hard part would be finding the right-size jars for all the pieces.”

When Fancy saw a wash of terror chase away the mushy, lovelorn expression on Franken’s face, something tight in her chest relaxed, and with relaxation came enlightenment. She knew now what she would wish for—the ability to kill whenever she wanted without getting caught.