It bounced back and landed near Raider's body. Nettle pounced upon it, picked it up, and spat on it. Then she threw it away again.
She got up and walked slowly down to the kitchen, her hands opening, snapping shut into fists, then springing open only to snap shut again.
14
Wilma jerzyck drove her little yellow Yugo into her driveway, got out, and walked briskly toward the front door, digging in her purse for her housekey. She was humming "Love Makes the World Go Round" under her breath. She found the key, put it in the lock... and then paused as some random movement caught the corner of her eye. She looked to her right, and gaped at what she saw.
The living-room curtains were fluttering in the brisk afternoon wind. They were fluttering outside the house. And the reason they were fluttering outside the house was that the big picture window, which had cost the Clooneys four hundred dollars to replace when their idiot son had broken it with a baseball three years ago, was shattered.
Long arrows of glass pointed inward from the frame toward the central hole.
"What the f**k?" Wilma cried, and turned the key in the lock so hard she almost broke it off.
She rushed indoors, grabbing the door to slam it shut behind her, and then froze in place. For the first time in her adult life, Wilma Wadlowski jerzyck was shocked to complete immobility.
The living room was a shambles. The TV-their beautiful bigscreen TV on which they still owed eleven payments-was shattered. The innards were black and smoking. The picture-tube lay in a thousand shiny fragments on the carpet. Across the room, a huge hole had been knocked in one of the living-room walls. A large package, shaped like a loaf, lay below this hole. Another lay in the doorway to the kitchen.
She closed the door and approached the object in the doorway.
One part of her mind, not quite coherent, told her to be very careful-it might be a bomb. As she passed the TV, she caught a hot, unpleasant aroma-a cross between singed insulation and burned bacon.
She squatted down by the package in the doorway and saw it wasn't a package at all-at least, not in any ordinary sense. It was a rock with a piece of lined notebook paper wrapped around it and held in place with a rubber band. She pulled the paper out and read this message: I TOLD YOU TO LEAVE ME ALONE THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING When she had read it twice, she looked at the other rock. She went over to it and pulled off the sheet of paper rubber-banded to it.
Identical paper, identical message. She stood up, holding one wrinkled sheet in each hand, looking from one to the other again and again, her eyes moving like those of a woman watching a hotly contested Ping-Pong match. Finally she spoke three words: "Nettle. That cunt."
She walked into the kitchen and drew in breath over her teeth in a harsh, whistling gasp. She cut her hand on a sliver of glass taking the rock out of the microwave and picked the splinter absently out of her palm before removing the paper banded to the rock. It bore the same message.
Wilma walked quickly through the other rooms downstairs and observed more damage. She took all the notes. They were all the same.
Then she walked back to the kitchen. She looked at the damage unbelievingly.
"Nettle," she said again.
At last the iceberg of shock around her was beginning to melt.
The first emotion to replace it was not anger but incredulity.
My, she thought, that woman really must be crazy. She really must, if she thought she could do something like this to me-to me!-and live to see the sun go down. Who did she think she was dealing with here, Rebecca of Fuckybrook Farm?
Wilma's hand closed on the notes in a spasm. She bent over and rubbed the crumpled carnation of paper sticking out of her fist briskly over her wide bottom.
"I wipe my f**king ass on your last warning!" she cried, and threw the papers away.
She looked around the kitchen again with the wondering eyes of a child. A hole in the microwave. A big dent in the Amana refrigerator.
Broken glass all over. In the other room the TV, which had cost them almost sixteen hundred dollars, smelled like a FryO-Lator full of hot dogshit. And who had done it all? Who?
Why, Nettle Cobb had done it, that was who. Miss Mental Illness of 1991.
Wilma began to smile.
A person who did not know Wilma might have mistaken it for a gentle smile, a kindly smile, a smile of love and good fellowship.
Her eyes shone with some powerful emotion; the unwary might have mistaken it for exaltation. But if Peter jerzyck, who knew her best, had seen her face at that moment, he would have run the other way as fast as his legs could carry him.
"No," Wilma said in a soft, almost caressing voice. "Oh, no, babe. You don't understand. You don't understand what it means to f**k with Wilma. You don't have the slightest idea what it means to f**k with Wilma Wadlowski jerzyck."
Her smile widened.