Thicker Than Blood - The Complete Andrew Z. Thomas Trilogy (96 page)

"No, why?"

Luther drags the chair to the edge of the staircase and kicks it down.

Bones crack. Screaming ensues.

Maxine tilts her head back and laughs long and low.

"Thanks for dinner, Mama," Luther says.

Then he kisses her cheek and heads down the steps toward the whimpering boy.

"I tell you Andy…Andy, quit it with the peas already."

Andy looks up and grins at Rufus. His long hair and beard have been trimmed haphazardly, both now streaked with gray.

"You really let that boy down. You know, he followed you all the way out here from Canada. In the Vancouver airport, he overheard you calling for information on ferries to Ocracoke. Showed up at my front door the night before Miss King came knocking. I mean if it hadn’t been for him, you might have pulled one over on us. You used to be that boy’s hero until he read your manuscript. If he’d had it his way, you’d be dead right now. You don’t know how much he begged me to let him set you ablaze."

A series of clunks is followed by a scream as Horace and his chair descend another flight of steps.

Maxine giggles. "That Luther—he’s so funny."

"That boy thought you were the biggest fraud he’d ever seen. Called you a gentle spirit in his treatise."

"Oh, no," Andy says. "I’m very mean. I killed a guy once in the desert. Put a hole—BANG!—right through his head. And I shot your son! Ha! Ha! Did you know that? I tried to kill Luther, but he didn’t die."

Rufus smiles. "You’re a hoot, Andy."

"I’m a hoot, too," Vi says. "Hoot. Hoot."

"Yes, you are. You know a strapping young man named Max dropped by about a week ago."

Vi takes a sip of sweet tea, gurgles it, and spits it back out onto her plate.

"He came with your former sergeant, Barry something. A big bear of a man. Apparently, the whole police community of North Carolina is searching for you, young lady. They think Andrew Thomas, the Heart Surgeon," Rufus winks at Andy, "kidnapped you and buried you somewhere on Portsmouth."

"That is a
riot
!" Vi exclaims. "I’m right here!"

"Your husband looked absolutely heartbroken. He sat down in the living room, in the very chair you parked your caboose in when you stopped by in early November. He misses you terribly."

"He’ll get over it."

Beth wakes up suddenly from her nap, yams clinging to the side of her face.

"Feel rested, Miss Lancing?" Rufus asks.

"Lancing?" Andy says. "I knew a Lancing once. I killed a Lancing once. BANG!"

Andy slams his fist down on the table. Maxine chuckles.

"We were sitting in a car together. Then BANG! Blood everywhere."

Beth looks at Andy. She grabs the back of his neck, pulls him in close, and plants a sloppy kiss across his mouth.

"Hey, I knew your husband," Andy says. "What was his name?"

"Walter," Beth says dreamily.

"You know, he was an all right kind of guy."

Beth giggles. "He’s dead now."

"Oh, sorry to hear that."

"Well, it was for the best."

"Honey, do you have any kids?" Maxine asks as Horace’s chair thumps down the final flight of steps.

"Um, yeah."

"Where are they?"

"Who gives a flying fuck? I abandoned them."

"Why’d you go and do that?"

"Cause I didn’t want to be a mother anymore. Anything else, Miss Nosy?"

Rufus raises his wineglass of sweet tea.

"I’d like to propose a toast," he says. "To Andy, Elizabeth, and Violet. May our time together not end in your death."

A scream resounds from the lower recesses of the house, but Rufus continues, unfazed.

"May you break your tablets. May you find your way into the darkness and out again. And may you learn true freedom. Freedom from values. Drink with me."

The threesome clumsily locate their glasses and the party drinks.

Then Rufus and Maxine help their guests to a room on the third floor and shoot them all full of
Ativan
.

Leaving the supper dishes until morning, they walk hand in hand downstairs to the first floor. Rufus unlocks the small door under the staircase and holds it open for his wife.

As they progress together down this last rickety flight of steps to join their son in the basement festivities, Maxine inquires, "What’s that smell, Sweet-Sweet?"

They reach the bottom of the staircase and stand on the dirt floor amid the dim labyrinth of stone rooms.

Rufus chuckles.

"That’s gasoline, Beautiful. Old Horace is gonna get his wish after all. It’s a Christmas miracle!"

# # #

Winter on Ocracoke Island is a season of desert beauty—the lonely beaches ravishing and ravaged by the cold belligerent sea. The village streets are empty, the tourists having long since fled, wanting no part of a truly wild place. Nor’easters blow through, one after another. There is only wind and rain and skies of slate and the ongoing defiance of these eroding ribbons of land called the Outer Banks, daring the great Atlantic to consume them.

In February, two men walk up the beach north of Ramp 72, amid driving rain and spindrift and the deafening crush of surf. No other soul has ventured out into this raw gray madness, and on such a morning this barrier island feels like more than just the fringe of eastern America.

The slower of the two men stops walking, stoops down, and pries an enormous conch shell out of the sand. He turns it over several times, finding it perfectly intact.

"
Here.
" Rufus hands the shell to Luther. "We’ll take it back to Mom."

They continue on up the beach, the wind to their backs, whipping the sea oats, the old man musing on what it will be like after the Great Regression. Luther has heard it a thousand times, and what he once suspected, he now wholeheartedly yet secretly believes: his father is full of shit.

But Luther dutifully listens.

The wind reverses, now howling out of the north, spitting rain into their faces. They turn and walk back toward the access road.

"I love it like this," Rufus says. "Look at the chaos."

He points out into the rabid sea, pulverizing the beach.

"How’s your treatise coming?"

"It’s good, Pop," Luther lies.

"Can’t wait to read it. See what four years in those Manhattan libraries taught you."

Rufus playfully bumps shoulders with his son. Luther musters a dead smile.

They walk awhile without speaking, over kelp and driftwood and the footprints of sandpipers and myriad shells and all that the waves have flung ashore. Rufus puts his arm around Luther and grins against the knowledge that he’s losing his son.

# # #

They’ll have no linear memory of the winter they are spending in the belly of the house. Only slivers to haunt the people they become. Slivers of darkness and silence and faceless voices and hilarious violence. They won’t remember the space between injections and gas, when the fogginess lifted just enough to let the inhuman horror of it all sink in.
 

# # #

"Breath deep, young lady." Vi inhales the gas. The world floats down and sinks through her and
woooooooooooow
.

"Now I want you to watch this tape."

"
Okey
doke
."

As Vi fixates on the home video, the television screen begins to pulsate. It’s the funniest thing she’s ever seen. The star hangs upside down by his feet, and he keeps screaming and screaming.

From the other side of the room, Andy yells, "How meaningless!"

Another shot of NO
₂
and now Vi laughs hysterically.
 

That quiet man with the long black hair is in the movie, too, and he’s the one making the star scream. When the screaming stops, the movie ends.

Vi tries to give a standing ovation but keels over on the dirt floor.

"I see you enjoyed that."

"Oh, so much. Can I watch another one?"

"Of course you may. We have many. But first…"

Here comes the mask of joy.
 

# # #

Sometimes the three captives watch the movies together, filling the basement with their strange laughter and rolling around like idiots in the pile of spent
whippits
.

Their favorite is
Headless Harry
. Luther graciously plays it for them again and again.

# # #

One night, Luther sits on an old couch in that dim screening chamber of the basement, watching Beth and Vi, sprawled out on the floor, engrossed in the tape he made of Horace Boone.

Andy sits rocking in a corner. The gas hit him wrong tonight, so he’s shaky and panicky and having a conversation with his dead brother.

Beth turns suddenly and looks up at Luther as Horace’s screams reverberate off the stone walls. Even through the fantastic haze, she registers the black absence in his eyes.

"Can I have one?"

She points to the bag of Lemonheads in Luther’s lap. He hands her one.

"Here," she says cheerfully and offers him a condom swollen with nitrous oxide. "Why don’t you come down
here
and watch
Flamin
’ Boone
?"

Luther reaches forward, pinches the lips of the condom above Beth’s fingers, and leans back into the couch. After hyperventilating for twenty seconds, he brings the mouth of the prophylactic to his lips and inhales the gas. When he’s done, he flicks the limp rubber across the room, and his eyes fix on Horace, now charred, smoking, and softly groaning.

Beth still eyes Luther, so high on gas that the sounds from the television throb through her like waves.

"Quit looking at me," Luther warns.

"Why are you so sad?"

"I’m not sad. I’m not anything. Watch the tape."

# # #

Maxine Kite unlocks the door and enters the small, dark cell. She sets the candle on the floor. Its flame throws shadows and light upon the stone.

Vi sleeps on the floor. Maxine kneels down beside her and jams the needle into her backside. Vi stirs, moans softly, and turns over to face the old woman. Her eyes barely open. She’s hung over horribly from the nitrous oxide, as she has been every night for the last two weeks.

"What are you doing?"

"I came to read to you while you sleep," Maxine says. "Rufus thinks it helps."

"Will you promise me something?" Vi asks.

"No promises here."

"Please."

The lucidity of the young woman alarms Maxine. Rufus would be furious. She should’ve injected the sedative into a vein.

"What is it?" Maxine asks.

"Don’t give me the drugs when I have my baby. I want to feel it. I want to remember it. Please. You’re a mother aren’t you?"

The old woman hardens, her weathered face beautiful and haunting in the candlelight.

"I said no promises here."

# # #

Once more, Andy’s eyes close at the urging of the hypnotic drug. Though he’s conscious, he doesn’t feel Rufus slip on the headphones and the light frames. The soundtrack consists of a binaural beat—two pure tones, close in pitch, one amplified into each ear. Every seven seconds, the diodes emit a burst of red light. This goes on for nearly an hour, seducing his alpha waves. Then he sees things.

# # #

Orson occupies a rocking chair on the porch of his cabin in the desert. Andy approaches, having walked here from some great distance. The day is brilliant, sweltering. He’s sunburned and thirsty.