Rose Madder

"I'm going to read a book called The Manta Ray," she said in what she hoped was a normal speaking voice.

"It was published in 1951 by Lion Books, a little paperback company. Although it says on the cover that the author's name is... have you got enough?"

"I'm fine on the reel-to-reel," Curtis said, foot-powering himself from one end of his board to the other in his wheeled chair.

"Just give me a little more for the DAT. But you're sounding good."

"Yes, wonderful," Rhoda said, and Rosie didn't think she was imagining the relief in the director's voice. Feeling encouraged, Rosie addressed the mike again.

"It says on the cover that the book was written by Richard Racine, but Mr Lefferts-Rob-says it was actually written by a woman named Christina Bell. It's part of an unabridged audio series called

"Women in Disguise," and I got this job because the woman who was supposed to read the Christina Bell novels got a part in a-"

"I'm fine," Curtis Hamilton said.

"My God, she sounds like Liz Taylor in Butterfield 8," Rhoda Simons said, and actually clapped her hands. Robbie nodded. He was grinning, obviously delighted.

"Rhoda will help you along, but if you do it just like you did Dark Passage for me outside the Liberty City, we're all going to be very happy." Rosie leaned over, just avoided whamming her head on the side of the table, and got a bottle of Evian water from the cooler. When she twisted the cap, she saw that her hands were shaking.

"I'll do my best. I promise you that."

"I know you will," he said. Think of the woman on the hill, Rosie told herself. Think of how she's standing there right now, not afraid of anything coming toward her in her world or coming up behind her from mine. She doesn't have a single weapon, but she's not afraid-you don't need to see her face to know that, you can see it in the set of her back. She's..."

... ready for anything," Rosie murmured, and smiled. Robbie leaned forward on his side of the glass.

"Pardon? I didn't get that."

"I said I'm ready to go," she said.

"Level's good," Curtis said, and turned to Rhoda, who had set out her own Xeroxed copy of the novel next to her pad of paper. "ready when you are, Professor."

"Okay, Rosie, let's show "em how it's done," Rhoda said.

"This is The Manta Ray, by Christina Bell. The client is Audio Concepts, the director is Rhoda Simons, and the reader is Rose McClendon. Tape is rolling. Take one on my mark, and... mark." Oh God I can't, Rosie thought once more, and then she narrowed her mind's vision down to a single powerfully bright image: the gold circlet the woman in the picture wore on her upper right arm. As it came clear to her, this fresh cramp of panic also began to pass.

"Chapter One.

"Nella didn't realize she was being followed by the man in the ragged gray topcoat until she was between streetlights and a garbage-strewn alley yawned open on her left like the jaws of an old man who has died with food in his mouth. By then it was too late. She heard the sound of shoes with steel taps on their heels closing in behind her, and a big, dirt-grimed hand shot out of the dark..."

3

Rosie pushed her key into the lock of her second-floor room on Trenton Street that evening at quarter past seven. She was tired and hot-summer had come early to the city this year-but she was also very happy. Curled in one arm was a little bag of groceries. Poking out of the top was a sheaf of yellow fliers, announcing the Daughters and Sisters Swing into Summer Picnic and Concert. Rosie had gone by D amp; S to tell them how her first day at work had gone (she was all but bursting with it), and as she was leaving, Robin St James had asked her if she would take a handful of fliers and try to place them with the storekeepers in her neighborhood. Rosie, trying hard not to show how thrilled she was just to have a neighborhood, agreed to get as many up as she could.

"You're a lifesaver," Robin said. She was in charge of ticket sales this year, and had made no secret of the fact that so far they weren't going very well.

"And if anybody asks you, Rosie, tell them there are no teenage runaways here, and that we're not dykes. Those stories're half the problem with sales. Will you do that?" "sure," Rosie had replied, knowing she'd do no such thing. She couldn't imagine giving a storekeeper she had never met before a lecture on what Daughters and Sisters was all about... and what it wasn't all about. But I can say they're nice women, she thought, turning on the fan in the corner and then opening the fridge to put away her few things. Then, out loud:

"No, I'll say ladies. Nice ladies." Sure, that was probably a better idea. Men-especially those past forty-for some reason felt more comfortable with that word than they did with women. It was silly (and the way some women fussed and clucked over the semantics was even sillier, in Rose's opinion), but thinking about it called up a sudden memory: how Norman talked about the prostitutes he sometimes busted. He never called them ladies (that was the word he used when talking about the wives of his colleagues, as in

"Bill Jessup's wife's a real nice lady'); he never called them women, either. He called them the gals. The gals this and the gals that. She had never realized until this moment how much she had hated that hard little back-of-the-throat word. Gals. Like a sound you might make when you were trying hard not to vomit. Forget him, Rosie, he's not here. He's not going to be here. As always, this simple thought filled her with joy, amazement, and gratitude. She had been told-mostly in the Therapy Circle at D amp; S-that these euphoric feelings would pass, but she found that hard to believe. She was on her own. She had escaped the monster. She was free. Rosie closed the refrigerator door, turned around, and looked across her room. The furnishings were minimal and the decorations-except for her picture-were nonexistent, but she still saw nothing which did not make her want to crow with delight. There were pretty cream-colored walls that Norman Daniels had never seen, there was a chair from which Norman Daniels had never pushed her for "being smart," there was a TV Norman Daniels had never watched, sneering at the news or laughing along with reruns of All in the Family and Cheers. Best of all, there was not a single corner where she'd sat crying and reminding herself to vomit into her apron if she got sick to her stomach. Because he wasn't here. He wasn't going to be here.

"I'm on my own," Rosie murmured... and then actually hugged herself with joy. She walked across the room to the picture. The blonde woman's chiton seemed almost to glow in the late-spring light. And she was a woman, Rosie thought. Not a lady, and most certainly not a gal. She stood up there on her hill, looking fearlessly down at the ruined temple and the tumbled gods... Gods? But there's only one... isn't there? No, she saw, there were actually two-the one peering serenely up at the thunderheads from its place near the fallen pillar, and another one, way over to the right. This one was gazing sideways through the tall grass. You could just see the white curve of stone brow, the orbit of one eye, and the lobe of an ear; the rest was hidden. She hadn't noticed this one until now, but what of that? There were probably lots of things in the picture she hadn't noticed yet, lots of little details-it was like one of those Where's Waldo pictures, full of things you didn't see at first, and... and that was bullshit. The picture was very simple, actually.

"Well," Rosie whispered, "it was." She found herself thinking of Cynthia's story about the picture in the parsonage where she had grown up... De Soto Looks West. How she'd sat in front of it for hours, watching it like television, watching the river move.

"Pretending to watch it move," Rosie said, and ran up the window, hoping to catch a breeze and fill the room with it. The thin voices of little kids in the park playground and bigger kids playing baseball drifted in.

"Pretending, that's all. That's what kids do. I did it myself." She put a stick in the window to prop it open-it would stay where it was for a little bit, then come down with a crash if you didn't-and turned to look at the picture again. A sudden dismaying thought, an idea so strong it was almost a certainty, had come to her. The folds and creases in the rose madder gown were not the same. They had changed position. They had changed position because the woman wearing the toga, or chiton, or whatever it was, had changed position.

"You're crazy if you think that," Rosie whispered. Her heart was thumping.

"I mean totally bonkers. You know that, don't you?" She did. Nevertheless, she leaned close to the picture, peering into it. She stayed in that position, with her eyes less than two inches from the painted woman on top of the hill, for almost thirty seconds, holding her breath so as not to fog the glass which overlaid the image. At last she pulled back and let the air out of her lungs in a sigh that was mostly relief. The creases and folds in the chiton hadn't changed a bit. She was sure of it. (Well, almost sure.) It was just her imagination, playing tricks on her after her long day-a day which had been both wonderful and terribly stressful.

"Yeah, but I got through it," she told the woman in the chiton. Talking out loud to the woman in the painting already seemed perfectly okay to her. A little eccentric, maybe, but so what? Who did it hurt? Who even knew? And the fact that the blonde's back was turned somehow made it easier to believe she was really listening. Rosie went to the window, propped the heels of her hands on the sill, and looked out. Across the street, laughing children ran the bases and pumped on the swings. Directly below her, a car was pulling in at the curb. There had been a time when the sight of a car pulling in like that would have terrified her, filled her with visions of Norman's fist and Norman's ring riding on it, riding toward her, the words Service, Loyalty, and Community getting bigger and bigger until they seemed to fill the whole world... but that time had passed. Thank God.

"Actually, I think I did a little more than just get through it," she told the picture.

"I think I did a really good job. Robbie thought so, I know, but the one I really had to convince was Rhoda. I think she was prepared not to like me when I came in, because I was Robbie's find, you know?" She turned toward the picture once more, turned as a woman will turn to a friend, wanting to judge from her face how some idea or statement strikes her, but of course the woman in the picture just went on looking down the hill toward the ruined temple, giving Rosie nothing but her back to judge from.

"You know how bitchy us gals can be," Rosie said, and laughed.

"Except I really think I won her over. We only got through fifty pages, but I was a lot better toward the end, and besides, all those old paperbacks are short. I'll bet I can finish by Wednesday afternoon, and do you know the best thing? I'm making almost a hundred and twenty dollars a day-not a week, a day-and there are three more Christina Bell novels. If Robbie and Rhoda give me those, I-" She broke off, staring at the picture with wide eyes, not hearing the thin cries from the playground anymore, not even hearing the footsteps which were now climbing the stairs from the first floor. She was looking at the shape on the far right side of the picture again-curve of brow, curve of bland, pupilless eye, curve of ear. A sudden insight came to her. She had been both right and wrong-right about that second crashed statue's not being visible before, wrong in her impression that the stone head had somehow just materialized in the picture while she'd been off recording The Manta Ray. Her idea that the folds in the woman's dress had changed position might have been her subconscious mind's effort to bolster that first erroneous impression by creating a kind of hallucination. It did, after all, make slighdy more sense than what she was seeing now.

"The picture is bigger," Rosie said. No. That wasn't quite it. She lifted her hands, sizing the air in front of the hung picture and confirming the fact that it was still covering the same three-feet-by-two-feet area of wall. She was also seeing the same amount of white matting inside the frame, so what was the big deal? That second stone head wasn't there before, and that's the big deal, she thought. Maybe... Rosie suddenly felt dizzy and a little sick to her stomach. She closed her eyes tightly and began rubbing at,her temples, where a headache was trying to be born. When she opened her eyes and looked at the picture again, it burst upon her as it had the first time, not as separate elements-the temple, the fallen statues, the rose madder chiton, the raised left hand-but as an integrated whole, something which called to her in its own voice. There was more to look at now. She was nearly positive that this impression wasn't hallucination but simple fact. The picture wasn't really bigger, but she could see more on both sides... and on the top and bottom, as well. It was as if a movie projectionist had just realized he was using the wrong lens and switched, turning boxy thirty-five millimeter into wide-screen Cinerama 70. Now you could see not just Glint, but the cowboys on both sides of him, as well. You're nuts, Rosie. Pictures don't get bigger. No? Then how did you explain the second god? She was sure it had been there all the time, and she was only seeing it now because...

"Because there's more right in the picture now," she murmured. Her eyes were very wide, although it would have been difficult to say if the expression in them was dismay or wonder.

"Also more left, and more up, and more d-" There was a sudden flurry of knocks on the door behind her, so fast and light they almost seemed to collide with each other. Rosie whirled around, feeling as if she were moving in slow motion or underwater. She hadn't locked the door. The knocks came again. She remembered the car she'd seen pulling up at the curb below-a small car, the kind of car a man traveling alone would be apt to rent from Hertz or Avis-and all thoughts of her picture were overwhelmed by another thought, one edged about in dark tones of resignation and despair: Norman had found her after all. It had taken him awhile, but somehow he had done it. Part of her last conversation with Anna recurred-Anna asking what she'd do if Norman did show up. Lock the door and dial 911, she'd said, but she had forgotten to lock the door and there was no phone. That last was the most hideous irony of all, because there was a jack in the corner of the living-room area, and the jack was live-she'd gone to the phone company on her lunch hour today and paid a deposit. The woman who waited on her had given her her new telephone number on a little white card, Rosie had tucked it into her purse, and then out the door she'd marched. Right past the display of phones for sale she had marched. Thinking she could get one at least ten dollars cheaper by marching out to the Lakeview Mall when she got a chance. And now, just because she'd wanted to save a lousy ten dollars... Silence from the other side of the door, but when she dropped her eyes to the crack at the bottom, she could see the shapes of his shoes. Big black shiny shoes, they would be. He no longer wore the uniform, but he still wore those black shoes. They were hard shoes. She could testify to that, because she had worn their marks on her legs and belly and bu**ocks many times over her years with him. The knocking was repeated, three quick series of three: rapraprap pause, rapraprap pause, rapraprap. Once again, as during her terrible breathless panic that morning in the recording booth, Rosie's mind turned to the woman in the picture, standing there on top of the overgrown hill, not afraid of the coming thunderstorm, not afraid that the ruins slumped below her might be haunted by ghosts or trolls or just some wandering band of thugs, not afraid of anything. You could tell by the set of her back, by the way her hand was so nonchalantly raised, even (so Rosie really believed) by the shape of that one barely glimpsed breast. I'm not her, I am afraid-so afraid I'm almost wetting my pants-but I'm not going to let you just take me, Norman. I swear to God I won't do that. For a moment or two she tried to remember the throw Gert Kinshaw had shown her, the one where you seized the forearms of your onrushing opponent and then turned sideways. It was no good-when she tried to visualize the crucial move, all she could see was Norman coming at her, his lips drawn back to show his teeth (drawn back in what she thought of as his biting smile), wanting to talk to her up close. Right up close. Her grocery bag was still standing on the kitchen counter with the yellow picnic-announcement fliers beside it. She'd taken out the perishables and stuck them in the refrigerator, but the few canned goods she'd picked up were still in the bag. She walked across to the counter on legs which seemed as devoid of feeling as wooden planks, and reached in. Three more quick knocks: rapraprap.

"Coming," Rosie said. Her voice sounded amazingly calm to her own ears. She pulled out the biggest thing left in the bag, a two-pound can of fruit cocktail. She closed her hand around it as best she could and started toward the door on her numb woodplank legs.

"I'm coming, just a second, be right there."

4

While Rosie was marketing, Norman Daniels was lying on a White-stone Hotel bed in his underwear, smoking a cigarette and staring up at the ceiling. He had picked up the smoking habit as many boys do, hooking cigarettes from his dad's packs of Pall Malls, resigning himself to a beating if he got caught, thinking that possibility a fair trade for the status you gained by being seen downtown on the corner of State and Route 49, leaning against a phone pole outside the Aubreyville Drugstore and Post Office, perfectly at home with the collar of your jacket turned up and that cigarette dripping down from your lower lip: crazy, baby, I'm just a real cool breeze. When your friends passed in their old cars, how could they know you'd hawked the butt from the pack on your old man's dresser, or that the one time you'd gotten up courage enough to try and buy a pack of your own in the drug, old man Gregory had snorted and told you to come back when you could grow a moustache? Smoking had been a big deal at fifteen, a very big deal, something that had made up for all the stuff he hadn't been able to have (a car, for instance, even an old jalop" like the ones his friends drove-cars with primer on the rocker panels and white "plastic steel" around the headlights and bumpers held on with twists of haywire), and by the time he was sixteen he was hooked-two packs a day and a bona fide smoker's hack in the morning. Three years after he married Rose, her entire family-father, mother, sixteen-year-old brother-had been killed on that same Route 49. They had been coming back from an afternoon of swimming at Philo's Quarry when a gravel truck veered across the road and wiped them out like flies on a windowpane. Old man McClendon's severed head had been found in a ditch thirty yards from the crash, with the mouth open and a generous splash of crowshit in one eye (by then Daniels was a cop, and cops heard such things). These facts hadn't disturbed Daniels in the least; he had, in fact, been delighted by the accident. As far as he was concerned, the nosy old bastard had gotten exactly what he had coming to him. McClendon had been prone to asking his daughter questions he had no business asking. Rose wasn't McClendon's daughter anymore, after all-not in the eyes of the law, at least. In the eyes of the law she had become Norman Daniels's wife. He dragged deep on his cigarette, blew three smoke rings, and watched them float slowly toward the ceiling in a stack. Outside, traffic beeped and honked. He had only been here half a day, and already he hated this city. It was too big. It had too many hiding places. Not that it mattered. Because things were right on track, and soon a very hard and very heavy brick wall was going to drop onto Craig McClendon's wayward little daughter, Rosie. At the McClendon funeral-a tripleheader with just about everyone in Aubreyville in attendance-Daniels had started coughing and had been unable to stop. People were turning around to look at him, and he hated that kind of staring worse than practically anything. Red-faced, furious with embarrassment (but still unable to stop coughing), Daniels pushed past his sobbing young wife and hurried out of the church with one hand pressed uselessly over his mouth. He stood outside, coughing so hard at first he had to bend over and put his hands on his knees to keep from actually passing out, looking through his watery eyes at several others who had stepped out for cigarettes, three men and two women who weren't able to go cold turkey even for a lousy half-hour funeral service, and suddenly he decided he was done smoking. Just like that. He knew that the coughing-fit might have been brought on by his usual summer allergies, but that didn't matter. It was a dumb f**king habit, maybe the dumbest f**king habit on the planet, and he was damned if some County Coroner was going to write Pall Malls on the cause-of-death line of his death certificate. On the day he had come home and found Rosie gone-that night, actually, after he discovered the ATM card was missing and could no longer put off facing what had to be faced-he had gone down to the Store 24 at the bottom of the hill and bought his first pack of cigarettes in eleven years. He had gone back to his old brand like a murderer returning to the scene of his crime. In hoc signo vinces was what it said on each blood-red pack, in this sign shalt you conquer, according to his old man, who had conquered Daniels's mother in a lot of kitchen brawls but not much else, so far as Norman had ever seen. The initial drag had made him feel dizzy, and by the time he'd finished the first cigarette, smoking it all the way down to a roach, he'd been sure he was going to puke, faint, or have a heart attack. Maybe all three at once. But now here he was, back up to two packs a day and hacking out that same old way-down-in-the-bottom-of-your-lungs cough when he rolled out of bed in the morning. It was like he'd never been away. That was all right, though; he was going through a stressful life experience, as the psychology pukes liked to say, and when people went through stressful life experiences, they often went back to their old habits. Habits-especially bad ones like smoking and drinking-were crutches, people said. So what? If you had a limp, what was wrong with using a crutch? Once he'd taken care of Rosie (made sure that if there was going to be an informal divorce, it would be on his terms, you might say), he would throw all his crutches away. This time for good. Norman turned his head and looked out the window. Not dark yet, but getting there. Close enough to get going, anyway. He didn't want to be late for his appointment. He mashed out his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray on the nighttable beside the telephone, swung his feet off the bed, and began to dress. There was no hurry, that was the nicest thing; he'd had all those accumulated off-days coming, and Captain Hardaway hadn't been the slightest bit chintzy about giving them to him when he asked. There were two reasons for that, Norman reckoned. First, the newspapers and TV stations had made him the flavor of the month; second, Captain Hardaway didn't like him, had twice sicced the IA shoofiies on him because of excessive-force allegations, and had undoubtedly been glad to get rid of him for awhile.

"Tonight, bitch," Norman murmured as he rode down in the elevator, alone except for his reflection in the tired old mirror at the back of the car.

"Tonight, if I get lucky. And I feel lucky." There was a line of cabs drawn up at the curb, but Daniels bypassed them. Cab-drivers kept records, and sometimes they remembered faces. No, he would ride the bus again. A city bus, this time. He walked briskly toward the bus stop on the corner, wondering if he had been kidding himself about feeling lucky and deciding he had not been. He was close, he knew it. He knew it because he had found his way back into her head. The bus-one that ran the Green Line route-came around the comer and rolled up to where Norman was standing. He got on, paid his four bits, sat in back-he didn't have to be Rose tonight, what a relief-and looked out the window as the streets rolled by. Bar signs. Restaurant signs. DELI. BEER. PIZZA BY THE SLICE.SEXEE TOPLESS GIRLZ. You don't belong here, Rose, he thought as the bus went past the window of a restaurant named Pop's Kitchen-"strictly Kansas City Beef," said the blood-red neon sign in the window. You don't belong here, but that's all right, because I'm here now. I've come to take you home. To take you somewhere, anyway. The tangles of neon and the darkening velvet sky made him think of the good old days when life hadn't seemed so weird and somehow claustrophobic, like the walls of a room that keeps getting smaller, slowly closing in on you. When the neon came on the fun started-that was how it had been, anyway, back then in the relatively uncomplicated years of his twenties. You found a place where the neon was bright and you slipped in. Those days were gone, but most cops-most good cops-remembered how to slip around after dark. How to slip around behind the neon, and how to ride the streetgrease. A cop who couldn't do those things didn't last very long. He had been watching the signs march past and judged that he should be approaching Carolina Street now. He got to his feet, walked to the front of the bus, and stood there holding the pole. When the bus pulled up at the corner and the doors flapped open, he walked down the steps and slipped into the darkness without saying a word. He'd bought a city street-map in the hotel newsstand, six dollars and fifty cents, outrageous, but the cost of asking directions could be even higher. People had a way of remembering the people who asked them directions; sometimes they remembered even five years later, amazing but true. So it was better not to ask. In case something happened. Something bad. Probably nothing would, but TCB and CYA were always the best rules to live by. According to his map, Carolina Street connected with Beaudry Place about four blocks west of the bus stop. A nice little walk on a warm evening. Beaudry Place was where the Travelers Aid jewboy lived. Daniels walked slowly, really just sauntering, with his hands in his pockets. His expression was bemused and slightly dopey, giving no clue that all his senses were on yellow alert. He catalogued each passing car, each passing pedestrian, looking especially for anyone who appeared to be looking especially at him. To be seeing him. There was no one, and that was good. When he reached Thumper's house-and that's what it was, a house, not an apartment, another break-he walked past it twice, observing the car in the driveway and the light in the lower front window. Living-room window. The drapes were open but the sheers were drawn. Through them he could see a soft colored blur that had to be the television. Thumper was up, Thumper was home, Thumper was watching a little tube and maybe munching a carrot or two before heading down to the bus station, where he would try to help more women too stupid to deserve help. Or too bad. Thumper hadn't been wearing a wedding ring and had the look of a closet queer to Norman anyway, but better safe than sorry. He drifted up the driveway and peeked into Thumper's four- or five-year-old Ford, looking for anything that would suggest the man didn't live alone. He saw nothing that set off any warning bells. Satisfied, he looked up and down the residential street again and saw no one. You don't have a mask, he thought. You don't even have a nylon stocking you can pull over your face, Normie, do you? No, he didn't. You forgot, didn't you? Well... actually, no. He hadn't. He had an idea that when the sun came up tomorrow, there was going to be one less urban Jewboy in the world. Because sometimes bad stuff happened even in nice residential neighborhoods like this. Sometimes people broke in-jigs and junkies for the most part, of course-and there went the old ballgame. Tough but true. Shit happens, as the tee-shirts and bumperstickers said. And sometimes, hard as it was to believe, shit happened to the right people instead of the wrong ones. Pravda-reading Jewboys who helped wives get away from husbands, for instance. You couldn't just put up with stuff like that; it was no way to run a society. If everyone acted like that, there wouldn't even be a society. It was pretty much rampant behavior, though, because most of the bleeding hearts got away with it. Most of the bleeding hearts hadn't made the mistake of helping his wife, however... and this man had. Norman knew that as well as he knew his own name. This man had helped her. He mounted the steps, took one more quick look around, and rang the doorbell. He waited, then rang again. Now his ears, already attuned to catch the slightest noise, picked up the sound of approaching feet, not clack-clack-clack but hish-hish-hish, Thumper in his stocking feet, how cozy.

"Coming, coming," Thumper called. The door opened. Thumper looked out at him, big eyes swimming behind his hornrimmed glasses.

"Can I help you?" he asked. His outer shirt was unbuttoned and untucked, hanging over a strap-style tee-shirt, the same style of tee-shirt Norman himself wore, and suddenly it was too much, suddenly it was the last straw, the one that fractured the old dromedary's spinal column, and he was insane with rage. That a man like this should wear an undershirt like his! A white man's undershirt!

"I think you can," Norman said, and something in his face or his voice-perhaps it was both-must have alarmed Slowik, because his brown eyes widened and he started to draw back, his hand going to the door, probably meaning to slam it in Norman's face. If so, he was too late. Norman moved fast, seizing the sides of Slowik's outer shirt and driving him back into the house. Norman raised one foot and kicked the door shut behind him, feeling as graceful as Gene Kelly in an MGM musical.

"Yeah, I think so," he said again.

"I hope for your sake you can. I'm going to ask you some questions, Thumper, good questions, and you better pray to your bignose Jewboy God that you're able to come up with some good answers."

"Get out of here!" Slowik cried.

"Or I'll call the police!" Norman Daniels had a good chuckle at that, and then he whirled Slowik around, twisting Slowik's left fist up until it touched his scrawny right shoulderblade. Slowik began to scream. Norman reached between his legs and cupped his testicles. "stop," he said. "stop it right now or I'll pop your balls like grapes. You'll hear them go." Thumper stopped. He was gasping and letting out an occasional choked whimper, but Norman could live with that. He herded Thumper back into the living room, where he used the remote control he found sitting on an endtable to turn up the television. He frogmarched his new pal into the kitchen and let go of him. "stand against the refrigerator," he said.

"I want to see your ass and shoulderblades squashed right up against that baby, and if you move so much as an inch away from it, I'll rip your lips off. Got it?"

"Y-Y-Yes," Thumper said.

"Who-Who-Who are you?" He still looked like Bambi's friend Thumper, but now he was starting to sound like Woodsy Fucking Owl.

"Irving R. Levine, NEC News," Norman said.

"This is how I spend my day off." He began pulling open the drawers along the counter, keeping an eye on Thumper as he did so. He didn't think old Thump was going to run, but he might. Once people got beyond a certain level of fright, they became as unpredictable as tornadoes.

"What... I don't know what-"

"You don't have to know what," Norman said.

"That's the beauty of this, Thump. You don't have to know a goddam thing except the answers to a few very simple questions. Everything else can be left to me. I'm a professional. Think of me as one of the Good Hands People." He found what he was looking for in the fifth and last drawer down the line: two oven gloves with flower patterns. How cute. Just what the well-dressed Jewboy would want to wear when taking his wittle kosher cassewoles out of his wittle kosher oven. Norman pulled them on, then went quickly back down the drawerpulls, rubbing out any prints he might have left. Then he marched Thumper back into the living room, where he picked up the remote control and wiped it briskly on the front of his shirt.

"We're going to have us a little face-to-face here, Thumper," Norman said as he did this. His throat had thickened; the voice which came out of it sounded barely human, even to its owner. Norman wasn't very surprised to find he had a raging hardon. He tossed the remote control onto the sofa and turned to Slowik, who was standing there with his shoulders slumped and tears oozing out from beneath his thick hornrimmed glasses. Standing there in that white man's undershirt. Tm going to talk to you up close. Right up close. Do you believe that? You better, Thump. You just f**king better."

"Please," Slowik moaned. He held his shaking hands out to Norman.

"Please don't hurt me. You've got the wrong man-whoever you want it's not me. I can't help you." But in the end, Slowik helped quite a bit. By then they were down cellar, because Norman had begun to bite, and not even the TV turned all the way to top volume would have completely stifled the man's screams. But, screams or no screams, he helped quite a bit. When the festivities were over, Norman found the garbage bags under the kitchen sink. Into one of these he put the oven gloves and his own shirt, which could not now be worn in public. He would take the bag with him and get rid of it later. Upstairs, in Thumper's bedroom, he found only one item of clothing that would come even dose to covering his own much broader upper body: a baggy, faded Chicago Bulls sweatshirt. Norman laid this on the bed, then went into Thumper's bathroom and turned on Thumper's shower. While he waited for the water to run hot, he looked in Thumper's medicine cabinet, found a bottle of Advil, and took four. His teeth hurt and his jaws ached. The entire lower half of his face was covered with blood and hair and little tags of skin. He stepped into the shower and grabbed Thump's bar of Irish Spring, reminding himself to dump that into the bag, too. He actually didn't know how much good any of these precautions were going to be, because he had no idea how much forensic evidence he might have left downstairs in the basement. He had kind of grayed out there for awhile. As he washed his hair he began to sing:

"Raaamblin" Rose... Raamblin" Rose... where you raaamble... no one knows... wild and windblown... that's how you've grown... who can cling to... a Ramblin" Rose?" He turned off the shower, stepped out, and looked at his own faint, ghostly image in the steamy minor over the sink.

"I can," he said flatly.

"I can, that's who."

5

Bill Steiner was raising his free hand to knock yet again, mentally cursing his nervousness-he was a man who wasn't ordinarily nervous about women-when she answered.

"Coming! I'm coming, just a second, be right there." She didn't sound pissed, thank God, so maybe he hadn't rousted her out of the bathroom. What in hell am I doing here, anyway? he asked himself again as the footsteps approached the door. This is like a scene in some half-baked romantic comedy, the kind of thing not even Tom Hanks can do much with. That might be true, but it didn't change the fact that the woman who had come into the shop last week had lodged firmly in his mind. And, rather than fading as the days went by, her effect on him seemed to be cumulative. Two things were certain: this was the first time in his life he'd ever brought flowers to a woman he didn't know, and he hadn't felt this nervous about asking for a date since he'd been sixteen years old. As the footsteps reached the other side of the door, Bill saw that one of the big daisies was on the verge of doing a header out of the bouquet. He made a hurried adjustment as the door opened, and when he looked up he saw the woman who'd traded her fake diamond ring for a piece of bad art standing there with murder in her eyes and a can of what looked like fruit cocktail raised over her head. She appeared frozen between her desire to make a pre-emptive strike and her mind's struggling realization that this wasn't the person she'd expected. It was, Bill thought later, one of the most exotic moments of his life. The two of them stood looking at each other across the doorjamb of Rosie's second-floor room on Tremont Street, he with his bouquet of spring flowers from the shop two doors down on Hitchens Avenue, she with her two-pound can of fruit cocktail raised over her head, and although the pause could not have lasted more than two or three seconds, it seemed very long to him. It was certainly long enough for him to realize something that was distressing, dismaying, annoying, amazing, and rather wonderful. Seeing her did not change things, as he had rather expected it would; it made them worse, instead. She wasn't beautiful, not the media version of beauty, anyhow, but she was beautiful to him. The look of her lips and the line of her jaw for some reason just about stopped his heart, and the catlike tilt of her bluish-gray eyes made him feel weak. His blood felt too high and his cheeks too hot. He knew perfectly well what these feelings signalled, and he resented them even as they made him captive. He held out the flowers to her, smiling hopefully but keeping tabs on the upraised can.

"Truce?" he said.

6

His invitation to go out to dinner with him followed so quickly on her realization that he wasn't Norman that she was surprised into accepting. She supposed simple relief played a part, too. It wasn't until she was in the passenger seat of his car that Practical-Sensible, who had been pretty much left in the dust, caught up and asked her what she was doing, going out with a man (a much younger man) she didn't know, was she insane? There was real terror in these questions, but Rosie recognized the questions themselves for what they were-mere camouflage. The important question was so horrifying Practical-Sensible didn't dare ask it, even from her place inside Rosie's head. What if Norman catches you? That was the important question. What if Norman caught her eating dinner with another man? A younger, good-looking man? The fact that Norman was eight hundred miles east of here didn't matter to Practical-Sensible, who really wasn't Practical and Sensible at all, but only Frightened and Confused. Norman wasn't the only issue, however. She hadn't been alone with any man but her husband in her entire life as a woman, and right now her emotions were a gorgeous stew. Eat dinner with him? Oh, sure. Right. Her throat had narrowed down to a pinhole and her stomach was sudsing like a washing machine. If he had been wearing anything dressier than clean, faded jeans and an Oxford shirt, or if he'd given the faintest look of doubt to her own unpretentious skirt-and-sweater combination, she would have said no, and if the place he took her to had looked too difficult (it was the only word she could think of), she didn't believe she would have been able even to get out of his Buick. But the restaurant looked welcoming rather than threatening, a brightly lighted storefront called Pop's Kitchen, with paddle-fans overhead and red-and-white-checked tablecloths spread across butcherblock tables. According to the neon sign in the window, Pop's Kitchen served Strictly Kansas City Beef. The waiters were all older gentlemen who wore black shoes and long aprons tied up under their armpits. To Rosie they looked like white dresses with Empire waists. The people eating at the tables looked like her and Bill-well, like Bill, anyway: middle-class, middle-income folks wearing informal clothes. To Rosie the restaurant felt cheerful and open, the kind of place where you could breathe. Maybe, but they don't look like you, her mind whispered, and don't you go thinking that they do, Rosie. They look confident, they look happy, and most of all they look like they belong here. You don't and you never will. There were too many years with Norman, too many times when you sat in the corner vomiting into your apron. You've forgotten how people are, and what they talk about... if you ever knew to begin with. If you try to be like these people, if you even dream you can be like these people, you are going to earn yourself a broken heart. Was that true? It was terrifying to think it might be, because part of her was happy-happy that Bill Steiner had come to see her, happy that he had brought flowers, happy that he had asked her to dinner. She didn't have the slightest idea how she felt about him, but that she had been asked out on a date... that made her feel young and full of magic. She couldn't help it. Go on, feel happy, Norman said. He whispered the words into her ear as she and Bill stepped through the door of Pop's Kitchen, words so close and so real that it was almost as if he were passing by. Enjoy it while you can, because later on he's going to take you back out into the dark, and then he's going to want to talk to you up close. Or maybe he won't bother with the talking part. Maybe he'll just drag you into the nearest alley and do you against the wall. No, she thought. Suddenly the bright lights inside the restaurant were too bright and she could hear everything, everything, even the big sloppy gasps of the overhead paddle-fans walloping the air. No, that's a lie-he's nice and that's a lie! The answer was immediate and inexorable, the Gospel According to Norman: No one's nice, sweetheart-how many times have I told you that? Down deep, everyone's streetgrease. You, me, everyone.

"Rose?" Bill asked.

"You okay? You look pale." No, she wasn't okay. She knew the voice in her head was a lying voice, one which came from a part of her that was still blighted by Norman's poison, but what she knew and what she felt were very different things. She couldn't sit in the midst of all these people, that was all, smelling their soaps and colognes and shampoos, listening to the bright interweavings of their chatter. She couldn't deal with the waiter who would come bending into her space with a list of specials, some perhaps in a foreign language. Most of all she couldn't deal with Bill Steiner-talking to him, answering his questions, and all the time wondering how his hair would feel under her palm. She opened her mouth to tell him she wasn't okay, that she felt sick to her stomach and he'd better take her home, perhaps another time. Then, as she had in the recording studio, she thought of the woman in the rose madder chiton, standing there on top of the overgrown hill with her hand upraised and one bare shoulder gleaming in the strange, cloudy light of that place. Standing there, completely unafraid, above a ruined temple that looked more haunted than any house Rosie had ever seen in her life. As she visualized the blonde hair in its plait, the gold armlet, and the barely glimpsed upswell of breast, the flutters in Rosie's stomach quieted. I can get through this, she thought. I don't know if I can actually eat, but surely I can find enough courage to sit down with him for awhile in this well-lighted place. And am I going to worry about him raping me later on? I think rape is the last thing on this man's mind. That's just one of Norman's ideas-Norman, who believes no black man ever owned a portable radio that wasn't stolen from a white man. The simple truth of this made her sag a little with relief, and she smiled at Bill. It was weak and a little trembly at the corners, but better than no smile at all.

"I'm all right," she said.

"A tiny bit scared, that's all. You'll have to bear with me."

"Not scared of me?" Damned right scared of you, Norman said from the place in her head where he lived like a vicious tumor.

"No, not exactly." She raised her eyes to his face. It was an effort, and she could feel her cheeks flushing, but she managed.

"It's just that you're only the second guy I've ever gone out with in my whole life, and if this is a date, it's the first real one I've been on since my high-school senior prom. That was back in 1980."

"Holy God," he said. He spoke softly, and without a trace of facetiousness.

"Now I'm getting a little scared." The host-Rosie wasn't sure if you called him a maitre d" or if that was someone else-came up and asked if they wanted smoking or non-smoking. "do you smoke?" Bill asked her, and Rosie quickly shook her head. "somewhere out of the mainstream would be great," Bill said to the man in the tuxedo, and Rosie caught a gray-green flicker-she thought it was a five-dollar bill-passing from Bill's hand to the host's.

"A corner, maybe?"

"Certainly, sir." He led them through the brightly lighted room and beneath the lazily turning paddle-fans. When they were seated, Rosie asked Bill how he had found her, although she supposed she already knew. What she was really curious about was why he had found her.

"It was Robbie Lefferts," he said.

"Robbie comes in every few days to see if I've gotten any new paperbacks-well, old paperbacks, actually; you know what I mean-" She remembered David Goodis-It was a tough break, Parry was innocent-and smiled.

"I knew he hired you to read the Christina Bell novels, because he came in special to tell me. He was very excited."

"Was he really?"

"He said you were the best voice he'd heard since Kathy Bates's recording of Silence of the Lambs, and that means a lot-Robbie worships that recording, along with Robert Frost reading

"The Death of the Hired Man." He's got that on an old thirty-three-and-a-third Caedmon LP. It's scratchy, but it's amazing." Rosie was silent. She felt overwhelmed. "so I asked him for your address. Well, that's maybe a little too glossy. The ugly truth is I pestered him into it. Robbie's one of those people who happens to be very vulnerable to pestering. And to do him full credit, Rosie..." But the rest drifted away from her. Rosie, she was thinking. He called me Rosie. I didn't ask him to; he just did it.

"Would either of you folks care for a drink?" A waiter had appeared at Bill's elbow. Elderly, dignified, handsome, he looked like a college literature professor. One with a penchant for Empire-waist dresses, Rosie thought, and felt like giggling.

"I'd like iced tea," Bill said.

"How "bout you, Rosie?" And again. He did it again. How does he know I was never really a Rose, that I've always been really Rosie?

"That sounds fine."

"Two iced teas, excellent," the waiter said, and then recited a short list of specials. To Rosie's relief, all were in English, and at the words London broil, she actually felt a thin thread of hunger.

"We'll think it over, tell you in a minute," Bill said. The waiter left, and Bill turned back to Rosie.

"Two other things in Robbie's favor," he said.

"He suggested I stop by the studio... you're in the Corn Building, aren't you?"

"Yes, Tape Engine is the name of the studio."

"Uh-huh. Anyway, he suggested I stop by the studio, that all three of us could maybe go out for a drink after wrap one afternoon. Very protective, almost fatherly. When I told him I couldn't do that, he made me absolutely promise that I'd call you first. And I tried, Rosie, but I couldn't get your number from directory assistance. Are you unlisted?"

"I don't actually have a phone yet," she said, sidestepping a little. She was unlisted, of course; it had cost an extra thirty dollars, money she could ill afford, but she could afford even less to have her number pop up on a police computer back home. She knew from Norman's bitching that the police couldn't conduct random sweeps of unlisted phone numbers the way they could sweep the ones in the phone books. It was illegal, an invasion of the privacy people voluntarily gave up when they allowed the phone company to list their numbers. So the courts had ruled, and like most of the cops she had met during the course of her marriage, Norman had a virulent hatred for all courts and all their works.

"Why couldn't you come by the studio? Were you out of town?" He picked up his napkin, unfolded it, and put it carefully down on his lap. When he looked up again she saw his face had changed somehow, but it took several moments more for her to grasp the obvious-he was blushing.

"Well, I guess I didn't want to go out with you in a gang," he said.

"You don't really get to talk to a person that way. I just sort of wanted to... well... get to know you."

"And here we are," she said softly.

"Yes, that's right. Here we are."

"But why did you want to get to know me? To go out with me?" She paused for a moment, then said the rest.

"I mean, I'm sort of old for you, aren't I?" He looked incredulous for a moment, then decided it was a joke and laughed.

"Yeah," he said.

"How old are you, anyway, granny? Twenty-seven? Twenty-eight?" At first she thought he was making a joke-not a very good one, either-and then realized he was serious enough underneath the light tone. Not even trying to flatter her, only stating the obvious. What was obvious to him, anyway. The realization shocked her, and her thoughts went flying in all directions again. Only one came through with any sort of clarity: the changes in her life had not ended with finding a job and a place of her own to live; they had only begun. It was as if everything that had happened up to this point had just been a series of preshocks, and this was the onset of the actual quake. Not an earthquake but a lifequake, and suddenly she was hungry for it, and excited in a way she did not understand. Bill started to speak, and then the waiter came with their iced teas. Bill ordered a steak, and Rosie asked for the London broil. When the waiter asked her how she wanted it, she started to say medium-well-that was how she ate beef because that was how Norman ate beef-and then she took it back.

"Rare," she said.

"Very."

"Excellent!" the waiter said, speaking as if he really meant it, and as he walked away Rosie thought what a wonderful place a waiter's Utopia would be-a place where every choice was excellent, very good, marvellous. When she looked back at Bill she saw his eyes still on her-those disquieting eyes with their dim green undertint. Sexy eyes.

"How bad was it?" he asked her.

"Your marriage?"

"What do you mean?" she asked awkwardly.

"You know what. I meet this woman in my dad's Swap n Loan, I talk to her for maybe ten minutes, and the goddamnedest thing happens to me-I can't forget her. This is something I've seen in the movies and occasionally read about in the kind of magazines you always find in the doctor's waiting room, but I never really believed it. Now, boom, here it is. I see her face in the dark when I turn out the light. I think about her when I eat my lunch. I-" He paused, giving her a considering, worried look.

"I hope I'm not scaring you." He was scaring her a lot, but at the same time she thought she had never heard anything so wonderful. She was hot all over (except for her feet, which were cold as ice), and she could still hear the fans churning the air overhead. There seemed to be a thousand of them at least, a battalion of fans.

"This lady comes in to sell me her engagement ring, which she thinks is a diamond... except way down deep, where she knows better. Then, when I find out where she lives and go to see her-with a bouquet in my hand and my heart in my mouth, you might say-she comes this far from braining me with a can of fruit cocktail." He held up his right hand with the thumb and the forefinger half an inch apart. Rosie held her own hand up-the left-with the thumb and forefinger an inch apart.

"Actually, it was more like this," she said.

"And I'm like Roger Clemens-I have excellent control." He laughed hard at that. It was a good sound, honest and from the belly. After a moment, she joined him.

"In any case, the lady doesn't exactly fire the missile, just makes this scary little downward twitch with it, then hides it behind her back like a kid with a copy of Playboy he stole out of his dad's bureau drawer. She says, "Oh my God, I'm sorry," and I wonder who the enemy is, since it's not me. And then I wonder how ex the husband can be, when the lady came into my dad's pawnshop with her rings still on. You know?"

"Yes," she said.

"I suppose I do."