She walked calmly to the elevator and checked out at the security post downstairs. Spector left her alone. She caught the tube, got off at Rosslyn. Walked up the hill. Got to the apartment. Closed and locked the door behind her. Put her stuff down and took a seat on the living-room sofa.
But she didn’t even think about crying. A strange kind of anesthetic calm had settled over her. She picked up the remote control, turned on CNN to watch the latest news from the Gulf, and wondered, idly, whether this was the last phase in her slow metamorphosis into an iguana.
Chapter Thirty-Two
While the disassembled corpses of ten or a dozen chickens wrestled in a turbulent pot of boiling lard on Mrs. Dhont’s smelter-grade stove, Clyde and the Dhonts and various shirttail relatives and neighbors played football in the recently harvested cornfield. The corn stubble had mostly been plowed under, but much of it still projected from the ground at crazy angles like pungi stakes. Despite these and other hazards, Clyde acquitted himself honorably, considering that several members of the opposing team had won Olympic wrestling medals. Clyde had developed survival strategies over the years: for example, rather than trying to block a Dhont, he would simply dive to the ground in the youth’s path, like an exposed farmer crouching down before the onslaught of a funnel cloud, and often as not the attacker would crash into him, jackknife forward, and plant his face securely in the earth.
Mrs. Dhont rang the dinner bell, which according to Dhont rules meant that the game had entered its last series of downs. Clyde was beginning to entertain the notion that he might escape from this game with no broken bones, just a few lacerations and widespread bruising. Then, while out on the left wing trying to block one of the older and smaller Dhonts, he heard Dan, Jr., the quarterback of his team, yelling at him, and turned around. There was the ball, no more than a yard away from him, boring in like a dirty artillery shell. He caught it on impulse. Given more time to think about the implications, he might have dropped it. A general cry of approval and bloodlust rose from the defense, which was now scattered over approximately a square mile of churned black ground. The barbed-wire fence that marked the goal line was at the other end of this expanse, though Clyde’s view of it was partly obscured by the curvature of the earth. He tucked the ball into the pit of his stomach and crossed both arms over it, which was an ungainly way to run, but de rigueur when playing against massed Dhonts. Then he began to run. One side of his pelvis had been staved in by the knee of Dylan Dhont when he’d blocked him on the previous play, and so he moved in a nearly sideways, crablike stutter.
A bulky mass materialized in his peripheral vision: Hal Dhont, one of the cousins, a three-hundred-pounder who was on Clyde’s team. Hal churned forward, tearing across the soil like a rogue combine, and they gained a quarter mile of yardage before encountering any organized opposition. Hal converged on DeWayne Dhont, who tried to evade him; but at the last moment Hal stuck one arm out sideways and clotheslined DeWayne. Hal then slammed his body into another Dhont and came almost to a stop. Clyde rear-ended him, spun around his back, and broke into the open. He was unsure of his bearings; the size of the playing field almost forced the players to carry compasses and sextants. When he finally identified the goal line, he was dismayed to see that no fewer than three Dhonts were guarding it. One of them was Desmond—currently a first-string Twisters wrestler, who, as all local police officers knew, went out with his teammates and hunted football players for sport.
It would be several minutes before he reached them, and there was no point in trying his courage with it just yet. He jogged for a while, attempting to catch his breath and to get his mind on other things. He put some more thought into the recent murder of Dr. Kevin Vandeventer.