The Extinction Event (19 page)

Caroline's great-great uncle, the Under Secretary of Something, had lush, silver hair, bushy eyebrows, smiling eyes behind circular steel-framed glasses, a fleshy nose, and a mustache and goatee, both darker than his hair.

“He looks like Colonel Sanders,” Jack said.

“Do you always have to be so negative?” Caroline said.

“Getting fired helps,” Jack said. “So does getting beat up. Getting shot at.”

“You're not the only one who was shot at,” Caroline said.

“We don't know you were shot at,” Jack said.

“Fuck you, Jack,” Caroline said.

“You're not negative,” Jack said. “You're Little Mary Sunshine.”

The kettle Caroline was watching sent up a trail of steam, which to Jack, from the dining room, looked like the spectral mist in the woods.

Jack took another look at the Under Secretary of Something.

“When I was a kid,” Jack said, “
my
great-uncle stood up—he'd been sitting on the side of the bed, shaving with an electric shaver, that was his one big luxury—and hit the floor. Just toppled. Face first. Broke his nose when he landed. He was hemorrhaging—a stomach ulcer. We got him to the hospital. The doctor said he needed a transfusion. Fast. He had an hour, maybe two. He was in the Carpenters Local. He said,
I don't want no scab blood in me. You find me a union donor—and I want to see his card—or you let me bleed to death
.”

“You think anyone with money is corrupt?” Caroline said. “Don't you?”

“What's the old line?” Jack asked.
“Behind every great American fortune is a great American crime…”

“Then,” Caroline said, “I'm an accessory after the fact. My great-great uncle, Voorhees—”

“That his name?” Jack asked, looking back over his shoulder at Caroline. “Voorhees?”

“—didn't have any children. That's where I got most of my money.”

“How much money do you have?” Jack asked.

“Next,” Caroline said, “are you going to ask my age?”

“Don't get coy with me, Five Spot,” Jack said.

Caroline shot Jack a curious look.

“You haven't called me that for a while,” she said. “Are you trying to apologize or pick a fight?”

“Apologize for what?” Jack asked.

Using a purple oven mitt, Caroline took the whistling kettle off the stove.

“Sometimes,” Caroline said, “you can be a real prick.”

“Sounds to me like you're the one trying to pick a fight,” Jack said.

On a low table under the far window, facing the street, between garnet-colored drapes, was a silver platter holding half a dozen bottles: three Scotch—Lagavulin, Teacher's, and Talisker—Six Grapes port, Calvados, Wild Turkey. Beside the tray was a bottle of B & B.

Jack took the bottle of Wild Turkey by the neck. As if he were about to ring a bell.

On his way back to the kitchen, he grabbed a jelly glass from the cupboard.

3

They were both silent as Caroline steeped her tea and Jack sipped his bourbon.

“Why the hell am I drinking tea?” Caroline said.

Jack poured another four fingers of bourbon into his glass.

Caroline opened the refrigerator and took out a can of beer, which she put on the table next to her teacup. She turned back to the fridge and, leaning over, found another two cans of beer on the bottom shelf.

Jack realized he was staring at her ass.

“You planning a party?” Jack asked, as Caroline straightened up and popped open a can. “A little game of beer pong?”

“In LA,” Caroline said, “we used to call it
Beirut
.”

“Why?”

Caroline shrugged.

“Maybe it was less offensive than calling it
Baghdad
?”

“Why not call it
Bel Air
? Or
Passaic
?”

“Why don't you go home?” Caroline said.

She had glugged the first beer and had popped open the second.

“I don't need a baby-sitter,” she said.

Jack poured another glass of bourbon. He eyed the bottle.

“I hope you've got more of this in this great, big house,” Jack said.

Caroline had a dimple in the left corner of her mouth, and her right eye was slightly crossed.

Jack had never noticed that before.

“You really want me to go?” Jack asked.

Caroline's shoulder-length hair was a little darker in the part, not dark enough to suggest she'd changed her hair color. Jack didn't think she was the kind of woman who'd dye her hair.

“You're too drunk to drive now,” Caroline said.

Jack went back into the pantry and studied the rows of cans.

“You shouldn't have hit Robert,” Caroline said.

From the open shelves, Jack took down a can, Dinty Moore beef stew, and read the label.

“
Nutrition facts,
” he said aloud. “
Total fat ten grams.
”

“Did you think that would make him cooperative?” Caroline asked.

“
Cholesterol thirty milligrams
,” Jack read.

“That was a real smart move.”

“Sodium nine hundred seventy milligrams.”

“Hurt him—”

“Total carbs. Six percent.”

“—humiliate him—”

“Dietary fiber one gram. Protein eleven grams.”

“What the fuck were you thinking?” Caroline asked.

“I guess,” Jack said, “you've decided to blame me for Robert's death.”

In three strides, Caroline was in the pantry.

Her slap knocked Jack's head back.

Jack put the can back on the shelf and said to Caroline, “Take off your sweater.”

Caroline glared at him.

“Take off your sweater,” Jack repeated. Softer. More dangerously.

“You do a pretty good imitation of Robert,” Caroline said. “But, if I'm remembering correctly, you got undressed first.”

Locking eyes with Caroline, Jack methodically stripped.

When his clothes were on the pantry floor, Jack nodded. Her turn.

Caroline pulled her sweater over her head.

“I wouldn't give my ex blow jobs,” Caroline said.

She unhooked her bra.

“I played the English horn,” she said, “and I was afraid of ruining my embouchure.”

She unbuttoned her skirt and let it fall.

“I gave up the English horn,” she said.

She stepped out of her panties and kicked off her shoes.

“My ex was a cellist,” she said, putting Jack's hand on her cunt. “Have you ever watched a cellist's fingers when he's playing vibrato?”

“You don't want to make love to me,” Jack said. “I've got gray pubic hair.”

Caroline arched her back as Jack fingered her.

“You want to talk about it first?” Jack asked.

Caroline said, “No.”

Over Caroline's shoulder, Jack saw a can of chicken soup with stars.

“Not here,” Caroline said, “with Dixie asleep upstairs.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

1

Their clothes bundled in their arms, just like when Robert forced them out of his father's house, Jack and Caroline, naked, shivering in the chill, went into the field behind Dixie's house. Beyond the gaze of anybody accidently glancing out a window. The grass was damp. The sky was starless. Muddy. With a red seam along the horizon.

Some of the flower beds were already mulched, early, for the coming cold weather. A few plants were tented. In the rising light, a tree showed a scarlet clump of early turning leaves.

Holsteins were standing in the pasture beyond the field, half of them typically aligned north to south, the other half lying down, a fifty-fifty sign another storm was coming. A few cows were still trailing up from the barn.

The sky grew lighter.

They found a spot in a thicket. On a deer track. Bordered by goldenrod and purple loosestrife. Asters, white speckled like nonpareil candies. Dandelion puffs like hair electrified straight out from the head by a Tesla coil. Horse chestnuts lay scattered around. Glossy brown with cream-colored circles like dead eyes. There was a patch of mushrooms, which looked like nipples—a dozen nipples from a many-breasted fertility goddess.

Mother Earth.

Jack remembered a woman he dated in the Seventies, who used to say,
The Great Goddess is coming back, and, boy, is she pissed.

Caroline hugged herself.

Jack draped his shirt over her shoulders.

“You have a someone?” Jack asked.

“I don't love him,” Caroline said.

“But you fuck him?” Jack said.

“Not for months,” Caroline said.

Jack spread out their clothes to make a nest.

“We should have brought a blanket,” Caroline said.

They knelt face-to-face. Their chests touching. Their thighs touching. Jack pushed his shirt from her shoulders, so she would be like him, completely naked.

“Goose bumps,” Caroline said in a childlike voice.

Later, when she lay in his arms, both gazing at the brightening sky, he said, “My grandparents used to burn cannel coal for heat. The pieces cracked like a gun shot. The biggest treat I used to get was a Hoodsie Cup, vanilla ice cream in a small cardboard cup. On the bottom of the cardboard lid was a picture of a ball player. You'd lick the ice cream off to see what player you got. The knife-and-scissor man still came around, shouting,
Sharpen your tools … Sharp tools make work easy.
Coal chute. I remember the iceman, the straw sticking to the ice blocks to keep them from melting together, the smell of the peroxide from the permanents in the department store beauty parlor, the X-ray machine in the shoe store where you could look at the bones in your feet.… Milk delivery was a luxury. As I grew older it become a necessity, then old-fashioned, then an embarrassment.”

“I don't think you're too old for me,” Caroline said.

“Do you know who The Great Gildersleeves is?” Jack asked. “Henry Aldrich? Little Annie Roonie? Frank Pangborn?”

“I've watched Preston Sturges movies,” Caroline said.

In the dawn light, the ghost of the moon vanished.

“For my first science fair in junior high, I built a dinosaur,” Caroline said.

Jack levered himself up on an elbow and smiled at her.

“Life size,” Caroline said. “A brontosaurus.”

Jack kissed her upturned face.

“Out of two-by-fours, chicken wire, and papier-mâché,” Caroline said. “No, I didn't realize how heavy it would be. And it never occurred to me that it wouldn't fit through the bulkhead. Dixie helped me cut it into three parts. The neck and head. The body. The tail. Which we just managed to get out onto the driveway. With lots of help. We then hooked the three parts together. Using pulleys and cables. Put it on wheels. We cut a view port just under where the neck met the body. I recruited half a dozen friends to go inside the body with me. Together, we pushed it down the streets, a mile, to school. I couldn't understand why I didn't win a ribbon.”

Jack kissed her again. This time on the mouth. He covered one breast with his hand—and felt Caroline go rigid.

“It was around the time I was waiting for my first period,” she said. “The boy I was in love with—he used to dry hump me under the school stairwell. But when I raised my skirt and hooked my finger under my panties to pull them aside, he wouldn't fuck me.”

Caroline, lying legs straight, arms close to her sides, looked past Jack to the sky.

“It wasn't his fault,” Caroline said. “I don't think he had a clue. But I wanted revenge. For two weeks, I went everywhere with Kotex. Just in case. At a dance, when I felt myself getting moist down there, I took him into an empty class room, lifted my skirt, stepped out of my panties, and sat on his lap. The front of his khakis were covered with my blood.”

Jack touched her cheek, but she turned her head away.

“I stood,” she said, “clipped on the Kotex, pulled up my panties, and smoothed my skirt. He look down at his lap. Horrified.”

She met Jack's eyes.

“I'm a difficult girl,” she said.

2

“Bleeding on that kid's lap isn't exactly a sin,” Jack said.

“Shouldn't we say a prayer for Robert?” Caroline asked.

“Maybe when I'm not so angry,” Jack said.

Caroline started to say something else. Jack put his finger to her lips.

“As Bette Davis once said about Joan Crawford,” Jack said, “
just because someone's dead doesn't mean they've changed
.”

3

The sunlight came at a low angle across the fields.

When Jack climbed on Caroline again and started making love to her, he became aware of something approaching, coming out of a spinney along the deer track on which they lay. He raised his head, raised his chest from Caroline's, and saw a young man in Nikes, gym socks, gym shorts, and T-shirt heading toward them—his face, as he noticed them, turning into a mask of woe.

Too embarrassed to stop, unsure what to do about the two naked, coupled bodies in his path, the cross-country runner jumped over Jack and Caroline.

And, before Jack and Caroline could rise, roll out of the way, hide in the thicket, a second, appalled cross-country runner leaped over them. A third. A fourth. Each one, as they saw the fucking couple, stricken with expressions ranging from embarrassment to glee. A fifth. A sixth … A dozen runners in all.

After the last runner jumped over them, they lay still for a long while. To make sure no one else would appear on the path.

Jack's head was still up, his back arched as he watched for oncoming cross-country team members. When he was sure the coast was clear, he forced himself to look down at Caroline—who, instead of being humiliated, was trying to suppress giggles.