Thicker Than Blood - The Complete Andrew Z. Thomas Trilogy (98 page)

Rufus smiles. He sucks on the pipe but his flame has extinguished. He relights it and smoke clouds around him again like a foggy halo.

I’m fighting tears when I tell him, "But I read Orson’s journals. That’s how I found your house. I read about him kidnapping Luther."

Rufus shakes his head.

"You’re telling me Luther never attended Woodside College?"

"My boy never finished high school, Andy."

"I don’t understand. Why would Orson make that—"

"It isn’t necessary that you understand. Besides, it wouldn’t be the first thing Orson made up."

Rufus rises and walks over to the window. The sleet has turned to rain.

"I know Orson took you to his cabin several years ago," Rufus says. "He told me all about it. Please understand. That was a poorly rendered model of the experience you’re having with me."

I cannot ignore the horror that statement inspires in me. Rufus sets his pipe on the windowsill and runs his fingers through his hair. Then he nods at something behind me and a needle stabs into my shoulder.

Maxine stands behind my chair in a nightgown.

"Come on, boy," she says as the drug begins to envelop me. "Time for
beddie
-bye."

"Where are the girls, Rufus?" I ask. "Please. Are they dead?"

"Come on, boy," Maxine urges, pulling on my shoulder.

I rise to my feet, face the tiny old woman.

Then I punch her fucking lights out.

She hits the floor, unconscious. I hope I broke her jaw.

Rufus claps his hands and laughs and laughs.

"She is a pushy bitch, isn’t she? I’ve wanted to do that for forty-nine years."

I start limping toward him, intending to rip him the fuck apart with whatever strength I can muster. But the drug overpowers me and I sit down on the floor.

Rufus stands over me now, grinning and shaking his head.

"Hope you killed her, cause Maxine’s gonna want a little payback after that sucker punch, and I’m not sure I can blame her."

Rufus blurs.

The back of my head smacks the hardwood floor and I stare at the ceiling.

It’s sleeting again.

There’s no greater horror than knowing your mind is softening back into clay, and the potter is a psychopath.

# # #

Several weeks later, at sunset, the Kites take their class on a fishing fieldtrip to the ocean. It’s the first time Andy, Beth, or Vi have seen daylight in more than five months, and they emerge from the stone house as frail and sun-shy as astronauts returning to Earth after months in space.

Everyone except Maxine and Rufus piles into the back of the old pickup truck.

The class is giddy, and as the teacher cranks the engine and they roll down the driveway through the thicket of live oaks, Luther passes around the mask and gives everyone a hit of gas from the silver tank between his legs.

Through gaunt, sunken eyes, Beth looks over the edge at the path speeding beneath the tires. Vi leans her head against Luther’s shoulder, and Andy lies on the rusted bed, staring up through spindly, leafing branches at pieces of a cobalt sky.

He wears a silly grin on his face. They all do.

At the end of Old Beach Road, Rufus turns north onto Highway 12, and they cruise the strip, passing realties and B&Bs and motels and gift shops. The tourists are back, out in force on this cool spring evening.

Just beyond Howard’s, Rufus makes a right turn onto the dirt road called Ramp 72. For three miles, over tidewater creeks and marshland, it winds toward the ocean. When the dirt road turns to soft white sand, Rufus stomps the gas pedal, and the truck hauls through a gap in the dunes straight for the sea. Upon reaching the harder,
tidesmoothed
sand, Rufus turns south, the old pickup truck now hurtling to the end of the island.

The sky is endless out here, the ocean stretching east into approaching darkness, the sand reaching south and west into the horizon, where the falling daystar, now halfway below the dunes, deepens from red into oxblood.

The incoming tide runs up under the truck, and the tires spray cold saltwater on everyone. Laughter abounds. Gleeful shrieks. Even Luther smiles.

Headlights of other Jeeps and trucks are visible far in the distance, cutting their own trajectories across the beach. Rufus veers up into the softer sand to avoid a fisherman marching in waders out into the surf.
 

At the end of the island, Rufus parks the truck beyond the reach of the tide and kills the engine. With the vegetation of Ocracoke hidden beyond distant dunes, there is nothing to see but acres upon acres of white beach, the inlet and sand spits to the south, and the sea, now shimmering and crimson as it catches the parting rays of sunlight.

Rufus and Maxine step down into the sand.

"Off with the shoes!" Maxine declares. Though the bruise on her jaw is fading, she still speaks predominantly from the right side of her mouth.

The class climbs out of the truck and the barefooted party lumbers off together toward the sea, like a flock of psyche patients.

"Gas ’em up!" Rufus says, and Luther, toting the heavy tank, calls Andy, Beth, and Vi over and hits them again with a ridiculous dose of nitrous oxide.

"Let’s run into the ocean!" Vi screams, and she sprints toward the sea, followed by Beth and then Andy, limping on his bad leg.

Not until he’s knee-deep in saltwater does Andy register the stinging. Though it’s been more than a week, the wounds on his back and legs are still fresh and raw from his hour-long whipping session with Maxine. But they’re friends again. Because they’re even.

After a cold frolic in the ocean, Andy and Beth stagger down the beach toward the rest of their party. In the distance, Rufus and Maxine have stopped to talk to someone, and Luther has left the tank in the sand and gone running after Vi, who has taken it upon herself to hike to a rise of dunes a half mile away.

Beth and Andy fall down in the sand and laugh until it hurts.

Andy stops laughing when he doesn’t remember what he was laughing about.

"I’m so happy," Beth says. "I’ve never been so happy."

"Oh fuck, my buzz is fading."

They scramble to their feet and head for the tank. Andy puts the mask over his mouth and inhales several deep breaths.

"I think you have to turn it on!" Beth yells.

"Why are you yelling?"

"Oh, sorry. Hey, old fart!" Beth hollers at Rufus. "Come show us how to work this thing!"

Rufus jogs over, opens the valve, and gives them so much gas that Beth and Andy both lose all motor coordination and collapse in the sand.

Side-by-side, they lie there, staring up into the sky. The first stars and Mercury twinkle in the heavens, throbbing like tiny glowing hearts.

"I feel like I knew you in another life," Beth says.

"Me, too."

"I feel so good."

"Yeah."

"Oh,
God
I feel good!"

Beth rolls over on top of Andy.

"I love you."

She kisses his mouth.

"Oh, God I love you so much I want to."

"Okay."

Rubbing against him now.

"Love me, oh, love me right up!"

"But I can’t feel my eyes."

Then Andy is sitting in the bed of the moving truck. It’s full blown night. Cold and starry. The man who Rufus and Maxine befriended is sitting next to Luther, talking his ear off. Andy catches a fragment of the one-way conversation.

"…don’t know if you’ve ever been out of the country, but when you come back, it’s so difficult to buy into all this capitalist bullshit, especially when you’ve lived six months in a third world country where people don’t even have
fuckin
’ clean water to drink. Hey, could I get a little more of that?"

Luther helps the world-traveler to another lungful of laughing gas.

Andy leans against the side of the truck as they bump along the dirt road, back toward the village and the House of Kite. Even through the haze of gas, he can see the fate of the world-traveler in Luther’s face, gone absolutely horny for violence. And Luther sees that he can see it and offers the mask to Andy.

Andy takes the mask and lies flat on the truck bed, staring up into the night sky. He breathes deep and long. Beth and Vi have lost consciousness. He isn’t far behind. It briefly dawns on him—the sheer horror of it all—and he wonders what he is becoming.

Then the last lungful of gas hits him, and the euphoria is back, thank God, and the numbness and the all-is-forgiven now and perhaps Rufus is right you are not a bad person you are not really here but now nothing matters and thank you God thank you God and the sky is throbbing again, and the stars twirling then exploding into a thousand flinders of light.

# # #

On a late afternoon toward the end of July, the screams of a woman filled the stone house. You could even hear her from the front yard, standing in the wet, mosquito-ridden heat between the two live oaks. Andy and Beth certainly heard it, locked in their cramped dark cells underneath the house. They’d heard screams down here before, but this time was different. They recognized the young woman’s voice, and even through the antipsychotic fog, both reached the same conclusion: the Kites were killing Violet.
  

In the candlelight of Vi’s cell, amniotic fluid glistened in the dirt between her legs. Her hands had been balled into fists for more than an hour. Her larynx ached with strain.

Maxine Kite knelt beside her as Rufus leaned against the doorframe smoking a pipe.

"Take me to a hospital!" Vi begged. "It’s not coming."

"It is coming," Maxine said. "This is just—"

"No it’s not! It hurts so much!"

Another vicious contraction.

She screamed again.

Rufus chuckled.

"Pretend it’s the olden times," he told Vi between groans. "Just got to tough it out there, little lady."

Luther came down the creaking steps and peered over his father’s shoulder.

"Miracle of life, son," Rufus said.

"What are you going to do with it?"

"With what?"

"
Ahhhhhgg
!"

"The baby."

"I don’t know."

"What does that feel like?" Luther asked Vi.

"Fuck you!" Vi roared.

"Boy, she’s a tad busy right now," Maxine said.

Vi looked up at the Kites, their faces eerily grotesque in the firelight.
This must be hell.

"Get out!" Vi screamed. "Get out all of you!"

No one left, and the contraction intensified. Lifting her head off the pillow, she grabbed her thighs and groaned for all she was worth.

A bloody head emerged.

When it was out up to its bellybutton, the little boy screamed "
what the fuck?
" at the world—a scared, fragile bawling that filled Vi with the purest joy she’d ever known.

She pushed the rest of the baby out.

It lay
facedown
in the dirt, crying.

"What is that?" Luther asked, pointing at the bloody mass beside the infant.

"It’s the placenta, boy. What feeds the baby."

"They eat that in some cultures," Rufus said. "It’s a delicacy. Mm, boy."

"Would somebody cut the cord?" Vi asked, crying now. "I need to hold him."

"Luther, go fetch a pair of scissors from the kitchen."

Vi sat up. She reached down, lifted the tiny, wailing creature out of the dirt, and brought him into her chest. She kissed his slimy head and whispered to him.

"What’s today?" Vi asked Maxine.