The Dark Country Page 7

  your husband's, your boyfriend's, your next door neighbor's husband's dinner just as soon as you get home tonight?" More laughter.

  "Just crowd in close as you can now, 'cause this is the last time I'm going to be demonstrating this amazing ..."

  "Say, does that thing really work?"

  "Three years of kitchen testing ..." C-Note saw that it was the head pitchman, watching from the aisle, a sporting smirk on his lips. "Three years of testing by the largest consumer laboratory ..."

  There was something else.

  Distracted, he let his voice roll off for a brief moment, heard the reverberation replaced by the dull din of milling shoppers, the ringing of cash registers and the sound of a piano playing on the other side of the Special Children's Easter Department. He hesitated, his teeth setting and grinding. Why wouldn't she let him stop? He hovered over the soggy cutting board, waiting for the sharp crack of the ruler on the music rest, just missing his knuckles.

  A gnarled hand reached up, grasping for a VariVeger. C-Note snapped to.

  "Just another minute, ma'am, and I'll be handing out the good-will samples. If you'll just bear with me, I'm sure you'll go away from this store feeling ..."

  And so on and on. He peeled a potato, set it on the grid of the VariVeger and slammed his hand down on the safety guard handle. Dozens of slim, pallid, finger-like segments appeared underneath. A susurrus of delight swept the crowd.

  "No need to hold back—the patented safety grip bar makes it for sure you won't be serving up finger stew tonight!"

  Then he took up the Mighty Mite, needled it into a radish and rotated the blade, holding to the protective finger guard. And a good thing, too: without that tiny ridge of aluminum the blade would continue turning right down through glove, finger and jointed bone. Five seconds later he pulled the radish apart in an accordion spiral.

  "Here's just the thing for that mother-in-law you thought you'd never impress!"

  Oohs and ahhs. Nothing worked like a non sequitur.

  He diced onions, he ripple-cut potato chips, lateral, diagonal

  and criss-cross, he sliced blood-red tomatoes into inflationary slips—

  "This is one way to stretch that food bill to cover the boss, his wife, your in-laws, your husband and all sixteen screaming kids!"

  —he squeezed gouts of juice from a plastic spout like a magician with a never-empty lotta, he slivered green beans and cross-haired a turnip into a stiff blooming white flower. He shredded lettuce head after head, he riced more potatoes, he wavy-edged a starchy-smelling mound of French fries, he chopped cabbage, he separated a cucumber into a fleshy green Mobius strip, he purled twists of lemon peel, he segmented a carrot, grated another, then finished by describing the Everlast glass knife, stacking the packages into a protective wall in front of him. You know. You know what he said. And he gave the signal and the money came forth and he moved forty-three unit combinations at a price less than one-half of the fanciful manufacturer's retail, the bills folded between his fingers like Japanese paper water flowers, blooming and growing in the juices as his gloves became green, green as Christmas trees made of dollars.

  He scraped the garbage into a hole, mopped his forehead, put away twenty unsold packages, stripped off his plastic apron, unplugged the mike and departed the platform.

  Just as he was about to peel the drenched gloves from his hands, the head pitchman appeared at the slit in the curtain.

  C-Note left his gloves on.

  The pitchman flashed his hand forward, then thought better of it.

  "Hell of a salesman," he announced. "We thank you," said C-Note. "But—" "Don't let it go to your head, though." "No, sir. I got—"

  "Hell of a salesman. But what the hell was that business with the knife?"

  "I sold the knife. 'Long with the rest of the package. Isn't that all right, sir? But if you don't mind, I got to—"

  "But you didn't demonstrate the knife. What's with that? You afraid you're gonna cut yourself or—"

  C-Note's sharp eyes nailed him where he stood.

  "If you don't mind, I got to go now." He started for the

  curtain, head down. "I mean, this gut of mine's startin' to eat itself. If you don't mind. Sir. If you think I earned my lunch."

  "Hell yes, you earned it, boy." The pitchman put a foot up on the kitchen chair. His toe brushed the carton, the one with the torn-open top. "Hey, wait a minute."

  C-Note drew back the curtain.

  "Look, you want your money or don't you?"

  C-Note turned back.

  "Ha ha." The pitchman unfolded some money. C-Note took it without counting, which made the pitchman stare. "Hell of a salesman," he muttered, smiling crookedly. He watched the heavy set man leave.

  "Kid must have to take a hell of a leak," the pitchman said to himself. It was only after he had counted and stacked the limp piles of bills in the money box, counted the units, shaken his head and paced the floor several times, lost in some ambitious vision, that he noticed the torn-top carton. "Hell of a salesman," he said again, shaking his head with pleasure. He poked around inside, counting the reserve. Cutting his finger on something, he drew it back with a grimace and stuck it in his mouth. "Well goddam," he said slowly, patiently, pulling up the crease in his trousers and seating himself before the carton from which, he now realized, unpackaged units had been inexplicably switched, "what in the name of the . . ." goddam holy hell do we have here? he might have said.

  C-Note hurried for the back stairs. On the landing he stopped and looked at his hands. They were trembling. Still moist, they resembled thick, mushy clumps of pseudopodia. Loosening the fingers one by one, he eased the gloves off at last.

  His fingers quivered, fat and fishbelly-white. The tips were disfigured by a fine, shiny line. They had healed almost perfectly, sewn back right afterwards, in the ambulance; still, the fusion was not quite perfect, the ends angled out each slightly askew from the straight thrust of the digits. No one would notice, probably, unless they studied his hands at close range. But the sight of them bothered him.

  He braced himself, his equilibrium returning. He swallowed heavily, his breath steadying, his heart leveling out to a familiar regular tattoo. There was no need to panic. They would not

  notice anything out of the ordinary, not until later. Tonight, perhaps. At home.

  He recognized the feeling now as exhilaration. He felt it every time.

  Too many steps to the ground floor. He turned back, stuffing the gloves into his coat pocket, and re-entered the store.

  He passed quickly through the boundaries of the Kitchen Appliance Department. Mixers. Teflon ware. Beaters, spoons, ladles, spatulas, hanging like gleaming doctors' tools. If one were to fall it would strike the wood, making him jump, or smack the backs of his hands, again and again. One of them always had, every day. Some days a spoon, other days something else, depending on what she had been cooking. Only one day, that last day, had she been scoring a ham; at least it had smelled like a ham, he remembered, even after so many years. That day it had been a knife.

  The Muzak was lilting, a theme from a movie? Plenty of strings to drown out the piano, if there was one. He relaxed.

  The women had somnambulated aimlessly from the demonstration platform, their new packages pressed reassuringly to their sides, moving like wheeled scarecrow mannequins about the edges of the Music Department. From here it was impossible to differentiate them from the saleswoman he had met there, by the pianos. She might have been any one of them.

  He passed the platform and jumped onto the escalator. The rubber handrail felt cool under his grip. Hastily he pulled a new pair of white gloves from his inside pocket and drew them on.

  At the first floor, on his way out to the parking lot, he decided to detour by the Candy Department.

  "May I help you, sir?"

  Her hands, full and self-indulgent, smoothed the generous waist of her taut white uniform.

  "A pound-and-a-half of the butter toffee nuts, all right, s
weets?"

  The salesgirl blushed as she funneled the fragrant candy into a paper sack. He saw her name badge: Margie. There was nothing about her that was sharp or demanding. She would be easy to please—no song and dance for her. He tipped her seventy-five cents, stroking the quarters into the deep, receptive folds of her soft palm.

  He tilted the bag to his mouth and received a jawful of the tasty sugared nuts.

  At the glass door he glanced down to see why the bag did not fit all the way into his wide trouser pocket. Then he remembered.

  He withdrew one of the parts he had removed backstage and turned it over, fingering it pleasurably as he waddled into the lot. It was a simple item, an aluminum ring snapped over a piece of injection-molded plastic. It glinted in the afternoon sunlight as he examined it. A tiny safety guard, it fit on the vegetable shredder just above the rim that supported the surgical steel blades. A small thing, really. But it was all that would prevent a thin, angular woman's fingers from plunging down along with cucumber or potato or soft, red tomato. Without it, they would be stripped into even, fresh segments, clean and swift, right to the bone. He slipped it back into his pocket, where it dropped into the reservoir of other such parts, some the little safety wheels from the vegetable garnisher, some the protective bars from the Mighty Mite rotary tool. But mostly they were pieces from the VariVeger, that delightful invention, the product of three years of kitchen testing, the razor sharp, never-fail slicer and stripper, known the world over for its swift, unhesitating one-hand operation.

  He kept the bag in his hand, feeding from it as he walked on across the parking lot and down the block, losing himself at once in the milling, mindless congestion of Easter and impatient Mother's Day shoppers.

  YOU CAN GO NOW

  1.

  The receiver purred in his hand.

  He glanced around the bedroom, feeling as if he had just awakened from a long, dreamless sleep.

  A click, then recorded music. He had been placed on hold.

  There was something he was trying to remember. Everything seemed to be ready, but—

  "Thank-you-for-waiting-good-afternoon-Pacific-Southwest-Airlines-may-I-help-you?''

  He told the voice about his reservation; he was sure he had one. Would she—

  Yes. Confirmed.

  He thanked her and hung up.

  Wait. What was the flight number? He must have written it down—yes. It was probably in his wallet.

  He bent over the coat on the bed, feeling for the slim leather billfold. There, in the breast pocket. He fumbled through business cards, odd papers, credit plates.

  No.

  But no matter. He would find out when he got there. Still, there was something.

  He pulled out the drawer in the nightstand, under the phone,

  and started poking around, not even sure of what he was looking for.

  He found a long, unmarked envelope, near the bottom. He took it and held it tightly as he slipped the coat on, then put it into the inside pocket while he felt with his other hand for the keys. He patted his outer pockets, but they were not there.

  Head down, he left the room.

  His bags were stacked neatly by the wall of the foyer, but the keys were not there. He paced through the living room, the kitchen, checking the tables.

  He went back to the bedroom, eyes down.

  There.

  By the door. The key ring was wedged by the bottom edge, between the door and the pile of the carpet, as though it had been flung or kicked there.

  He picked it up, walked to the front door, lifted his bags, and went out to the car.

  It was still early afternoon, so the freeway would be a clear shot most of the way.

  He switched off the air conditioning—who had left it on?— and rolled down the window, stretching out. The seat was adjusted wrong again, damn it, so he had to grope for the lever and push with his feet, struggling to seat the runner back another notch.

  He connected through to the San Diego Freeway, made the turn and tried to unwind the rest of the way. He sampled the radio, but it was only more of the same: back scratchings about love or the lack of it and the pleasure or the pain it brought or might bring; maybe, could be, possibly, for sure, always, never, too soon, not soon enough, in the wrong rain or the wrong style. Wrong, wrong. He flicked it off.

  The airport turnoff would be coming up.

  He flexed his arm, checking his watch. But it had stopped. The face was spattered with dry, flaking paint, so it would have been hard to read the numbers, anyway.

  He toed the accelerator until he was moving five miles over the speed limit, then ten.

  He was glad to have made such good time; a few extra minutes would mean a drink first, maybe two—

  It was funny. The car ahead, at the foot of the ramp. The

  back-up lights were on, but not the brake lights. He did not slow, because it meant that the signal at the intersection would be—

  Headlights. They were headlights.

  Headed directly at him.

  You can go now, said a voice.

  He leaned on the horn, but then there was the heavy, bonesnapping impact and everything was driven into him with such force that the hom stayed on, bleating like a siren, whether or not he would have wanted it to or would even have thought of it or of anything, of anything else at all.

  2.

  He was late getting to LAX, so he swung at once into the western parking lot, hoofed it over to the PSA building and sloughed his bags through the metal detector without stopping at the flight information desk. A couple of quick questions later, a hostess in a Halloween-colored uniform was pointing him toward the boarding tunnel, and then another was ushering him onto the plane and back to the smoking section.

  He stashed his bags and found himself in a seat on the aisle, next to a pregnant woman and two drugged-looking hyperactive children. They continued to squirm, but slowly, as though underwater, as he tugged at the seat belt, trying to dislodge the oversized buckle from beneath his buttocks.

  A double vodka and two cigarettes later, he was halfway to Oakland and swinging inland away from the silvery tilt of the sea. He drained the ice against his teeth and snared the elbow of a stewardess.

  Another?

  Well, the bottles were all put away, but—yes. Of course. Of course.

  The smaller child was busy on the floor in front of the seat, trying to tear out the pages of a washable cloth picture book about animals who wore gloves and had one-syllable names. The child had already stripped the airline coloring book, the oxygen mask instruction card and the air sickness bag into piles of ragged chits. Now, however, he dropped his work and wobbled to his feet, straining to clamber up the seat and under his mother's smock.

  But the mother was absorbed in the counting and recounting of empty punch cups—one, two, three, see? one, two three— over and over, for the older child, who was working with all his might to slide out from under his seat belt. He would flatten like a limbo dancer until his shoes touched the floor and his knees buckled; then the mother would reach down, hoist him back up and begin counting the cups for him again.

  "One, two, three, see? Why don't you try, Joshua?"

  Ignored, the smaller child twisted like a bendable rubber doll and, sucking the ink off two fingers, watched the man across from him.

  Who looked away. He was, mercifully, beginning to feel something from the double: a familiar ease, faint but unmistakable. He folded his hands, cold against each other, and tried to unwind while there was still time. He caught a glimpse out the window of farmlands sectioned like the layers of a surgical operation, beyond the flashing tip of the wing.

  The child followed his eyes. "Break-ing," the child announced.

  Idly he watched the wing swaying slowly as it knifed through the air currents. He remembered seeing the wing moving up and down like that on his first flight, how he worried that it might break off until someone had explained to him about expansion and contraction and allowances fo
r stress.

  "What's breaking?" said the mother. "Nothing's breaking, Jeremiah. Look, look what Mommy's ..."

  The stewardess reappeared. She rattled the plastic serving tray, bending over his lap with the drink.

  He reached into his back pocket for his wallet.

  "Want more punch!" said the older child.

  "More punch?" asked the stewardess.

  The wallet wasn't there. He remembered. He reached inside his coat.

  He felt a long envelope, and the billfold. He removed both, peeled off two bills and laid them on the tray.

  "Break-ing!" said the smaller child.

  At that moment a shadow passed over the tray and the stewardess's wet fingers. He glanced up.

  Outside, heavy strands of mist had begun to drift above the wings, temporarily blocking the sun. Looking down, he saw the black outline of the plane passing over the manicured rectangles of land.

  Suddenly, sharply, the plane dropped like an elevator falling between floors. Then just as suddenly it stopped.

  "Looks like we might be hitting some turbulence," he said. "Sure you've got a pilot up.there?"

  His attention returned to the window. Now darker clouds clotted the view, turning the window opaque so that he saw a reflection of his own face within the thick glass.

  He heard a voice say something he did not understand.

  "What?" he said.

  "I said, that's funny," said the stewardess, "like an open grave."

  A flash of brilliant light struck outside, penetrating the cloud bank. She stopped pouring the drink. He looked up at her, then at the tray. He noticed that her hands were shaking.

  Then a dull, muffled sound from the back of the plane. Then a series of jolts that rattled the bottle against the lip of the glass. He thought he heard a distant crackling, like ants crawling over aluminum foil. Then the quick, shocking smell of smoke wafted up the aisle.